HSU IT Department

This is a project on Kickstarter, which I thought was so neat I had to share it. So much of the news we see is at the macro level; I love the idea of exploring the world one person and one conversation at a time. Check it out here.


"It’s been four years since Paul Salopek, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, set out on foot from a campsite in Ethiopia on the Out of Eden Walk - a 21,000-mile, decade-long experiment in slow journalism. Through words and pictures, audio and video, Paul is creating an unprecedented record of human life on a global scale at the start of a new millennium, through the eyes of the villagers, nomads, traders, farmers, soldiers, and artists who rarely show up in headlines but whose lives illuminate the contours of the modern world..."


Also no, I will not be watching the inauguration tomorrow.

I know, a weird combination of subjects, right? And yet here they are, together on this very page!

First, the man who saved the bunnies: A Marine corpsman stationed at Camp Pendleton found a dead rabbit while out and about on the base, and after exploring nearby he discovered four baby bunnies, which he took home and fed and raised until they were old enough to survive on their own (more pics). This man is my hero :) He apparently also rescued kittens in Iraq, and he also mentions finding a tiny tiny frog which he named Crouton. I don't know why, but that made me laugh hysterically for quite some time.

On another note, I'm re-reading Stephen King's On Writing and very much enjoying it. He's straightforward and blunt and some of his observations are remarkably perceptive. "The road to hell is paved with adverbs," he says, comparing them to dandelions (one is pretty, but next thing you know they've invaded everywhere) and advising you to avoid them like the plague. Then he goes on to theorize that writers tend to use adverbs when they are less-confident -- they aren't sure that they've shown what's happening and therefore feel the need to also tell:

Consider the sentence He closed the door firmly. It's by no means a terrible sentence (at least it's got an active verb going for it) but ask yourself if firmly really needs to be there. You can argue that it expresses a degree of difference between He closed the door and He slammed the door, and you'll get no argument from me...but what about the context? What about all the enlightening (not to say emotionally moving) prose which came before He closed the door firmly? Shouldn't this tell us how he closed the door? And if the foregoing prose does tell us, isn't firmly an extra word? Isn't it redundant?

Then he goes on to talk about Tom Swifties and the popular game of making up punny ones (You've got a nice butt lady," he said cheekily.) and closes by saying, "When debating whether or not to make some pernicious dandelion of an adverb part of your [writing], I suggest you ask yourself if you really want to write the sort of prose that might wind up in a party game."

Here is where he talks about his idea of the Muse; it's quite a bit different in detail from what most people might think, but he's got the essence of it correct: that the muse is capricious and you've got to work to catch/deserve their attention.

...if you don't want to work your ass off, you have no business trying to write well...There is a muse,* but he's not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer. He lives in the ground. He's a basement guy. You have to descend to his level, and once you get down there you have to furnish an apartment for him to live in. You have to do all the grunt labor, in other words, while the muse sits and smokes cigars and admires his bowling trophies and pretends to ignore you. Do you think this is fair? I think it's fair. He may not be much to look at, that muse-guy, and he may not be much of a conversationalist (what I get out of mine is mostly surly grunts, unless he's on duty), but he's got the inspiration. It's right that you should do all the work and burn the midnight oil, because the guy with the cigar and the little wings has got a bag of magic. There's stuff in there that can change your life. Believe me, I know. (pp. 138-39)

*Traditionally the muses were women, but mine's a guy; I'm afraid we'll all just have to live with that.

A few pages later, after he's talked about how it helps to have a place you can go (and if you're starting out, it's especially important that that place have as few distractions as possible!), he says this:

But you need the room, you need the door, and you need the determination to shut the door. You need a concrete goal, as well. The longer you keep to these basics, the easier the act of writing will become. Don't wait for the muse. As I've said, he's a hard-headed guy who's not susceptible to a lot of creative fluttering. This isn't the Ouija board or the spirit-world we're talking about here, but just another job like laying pipe or driving long-haul trucks. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you're going to be every day from nine til noon or seven til three. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later he'll start showing up, chomping his cigar and making his magic.

Like I said, the details aren't what I imagine (I can't picture a cigar-smoking muse, but Damon Runyon and Ed McBain probably could!), but I agree with the core principles: work hard and make the muse feel welcome

What a great combination of subjects, eh?

hp_holidaygen is now open for signups, yay! I had great fun writing mine for last year, because I was assigned characters I don't usually write and thus given a chance to stretch myself a bit. Signup post is here, so go forth and put your name down!

On a totally 'nother note, Mr Psmith has gotten me hooked on Sons of Anarchy. Initially I thought it was pretty awful, like a soap opera only with more guns and a much higher body count, but as I've been drawn in I'm starting to see a sort of epic-ness to it. Some of the episodes, admittedly, are just epic train wrecks that you can't look away from: anything these guys touch seems to disintegrate into a bloody fiasco and nobody tells anybody the truth, ever, under any circumstances. But the last two episodes from Season 4 were classic Greek tragedy.

( More here, but spoilery )

I'm sure there are more analogies that can be made (Piney, for example, nags at me as being an archetypal figure but I can't put my finger on it), and I'd be interested to hear any that others have spotted or conjectured.

So it's turned out to be an interesting ride (no pun intended!), and I'm looking forward to next weekend when Season 5 starts with a whole new set of episodes to probe for classical/mythical allusions :)

...or so Ben Macintrye says in this article in The Guardian. This decline is, he charges, due to our inability to either produce or consume sustained narratives longer than 140 characters, or at best a blog post.

"If the culprit is obvious, so is the primary victim of this radically reduced attention span: the narrative, the long-form story, the tale. Like some endangered species, the story now needs defending from the threat of extinction in a radically changed and inhospitable digital environment."

I'm not sure I agree with all of what he says -- other studies counter this by claiming to demonstrate that, for example, online searching improves certain higher brain functions like decision-making and even staves off dementia -- but his point that it's stories that fascinate us, teach us, make us human is a good one. He says, for example, that Obama won the election in no small part because of his story: the poor upbringing, the struggle for identity, etc. And clearly we're fascinated with all kinds of people's stories, as witness by the plethora of reality television. But I'm not sure that qualifies as a "sustained narrative" since we consume it in dribs and drabs.

And besides it's such a fake narrative. Now a novel is a completely fake narrative in that it's made up, but somehow it seems more real than reality shows (and how weird is THAT?). I mean, how much do I really have in common with the Bridezillas or those strange sad people on Hoarders? I have a lot more in common with Bridget Jones or Elizabeth Bennet, or even Scarlett O'Hara, for that matter.

The attention span criticism may be a valid one; I know from personal time-wasting experience how easy it is to flit from one article to another, from blog entry to news article to photo collection to funny-animal-video to LJ to email and then back around again; in twenty minutes I can end up with as many tabs open in Firefox and no idea how I got to any of them (now there's a missing narrative for you: how do you get from the tragedy in Haiti to "Oh hai -- I can haz cookie?" in six clicks or less?). Maybe it's a sign of my own lack of self-control but I have a very tough time reading a lengthy article online.

Stories give us context, history, a knowledge of where we came from and perhaps where we might choose to go (or serve as cautionary tales about where not to go!). Without them, he seems to suggest, we are at risk of becoming indifferent and ignorant little mayflies that flutter about happily and indiscriminately in the ever-changing Now of cyberspace while Santayana weeps into his Rioja.

And yet Stephen King still publishes behemoths like Under the Dome and thousands of people buy it! So it seems we're not in imminent danger just yet. Rest easy, Ben.