After spending quite some time over the last weeks in looking at e-readers, and doing a lot of talking about digital publishing in general, I thought it would be amusing and relevant to reprint this article I originally wrote nearly 20 years ago, talking about my love for hardcopy books and the problems it caused me. Particularly interesting (and in the event, quite wrong) are my speculations about the likelihood of electronic books. Read more…

“Blasts from the Past” is a collection of re-published articles dating from wa-a-a-y back to the time when I was publishing sf fanzines (1970s), through to some more recent articles published on (and about) the early days of the web (1990s).

I guess things haven’t really become much worse in the 16 years since I wrote this article. But on the other hand, they haven’t improved, either, either. Nanny is still going strong.

Yes, Nanny

(First published in September 1993)

I suppose it was inevitable.

Back in the bad old days, computer software was of the “hairy-chested” variety. If you couldn’t work out how to use it, that was just too damn bad.

Computer programs had to be started up with a series of cryptic and hard-to-remember options from the “command-line prompt”. Even if you could recognise that as the set of bizarre “C:>” characters that stood blinking at you imperiously from the top left of a black computer screen — why “C” ? – why a colon? – why a funny right angle bracket? — you still had to remember and to be able to type such impossibly awkward combinations as “split -fmyfile.zip -wmyfile.000 -s720″ in order to carry out perfectly ordinary functions.

If you used the Unix operating system, it was even worse. You had to know that “cat” meant “show me the contents of”, that “grep” meant “search for this bit of text”, that “ls” meant “show me the files on the hard disk”, and that “kermit” was neither the name of Theodore Roosevelt’s son nor the name of a little green frog on television, but a modem communications program.

But as the years went by, software gradually became more “user-friendly”. Commands became less cryptic, programs started to sport “menus”.

We reached the era of the “graphical user interface”, and of control using those weird Camembert-cheese-shaped objects now known fondly as “mice”. Once you mastered the non-trivial skill of learning to move something around on the desk in order to see a little arrow moving around in sympathy on the screen, you had joined the era of “point and click”. The only trouble was, there were suddenly an awful lot of things to point and click at, and pointing at the wrong thing at the wrong time could be as embarrassing as it would be in public.

Eventually, programs started to come with “Help” systems, even — good grief — “context sensitive” help systems, which gave us advice about just what we were trying to do at that moment. Software at last became easy to use, and if only things had stopped there, all would have been well.

But now we have reached the ultimate in helpful software, and in my humble opinion we have finally gone one step too far. Now we have reached the era of what I like to call “Nanny software”.

Nanny software knows what is for your own good, and is determined to let you know about it.

Nanny software asks you “Are you sure you want to delete that file, dear?”, and when you say “Yes,” asks “Now are you really sure? You can’t get it back afterwards, you know.”.

Nanny software says “Do you really want to copy that file over there?”, and you feel like screaming “Well, why else would I ask you to do it?!”.

The ultimate point has been reached, I think, with software like Microsoft Publisher 2.0, which contains the most bossy nanny I have yet encountered. Until you find out how to shut her up (a non-trivial undertaking), the MsPub nanny will keep on interrupting you whenever you try to do something with messages like “I see you’re trying to print out this document. Now, let me just show you how to do it better, dear.” or “You’ve been working on this document for a quarter of an hour, dear, and I think it’s about time you saved it.”.

The nanny in Microsoft Word 6.0 is just as bad. This one even insists on fixing your spelling for you as you type. “Now I know you typed ‘teh’, dear, but I’m sure you really meant to type ‘the’, so I’ve just changed it for you, wasn’t that nice of me?” Or it fixes the capitalisation for you, so that you can’t work out why you can’t type names like ‘McDonald’ because Nanny keeps changing it back to ‘Mcdonald’. After all she knows, even if you don’t, that you can’t have a capital in the middle of a word, now can you?

It seems that the future holds even more of this kind of thing. People are talking about developing intelligent “agents” which do such stuff as tidying up your computer desktop for you by putting files in folders where it thinks you would like them to go. You know what the result will be, of course. It’s like when the cleaning lady clears up your real desktop. You can’t find a damn thing for weeks.

Already we have “scheduler” software which interrupts you in the middle of a perfectly entertaining computer game to remind you about something. “Don’t forget to write that article for The Age”, or “You’re supposed to be on your way to Aunt Mabel’s” or “You’ll be late for your doctor’s appointment if you don’t hurry up”.

And then there’s grammar-checking software! It’s bad enough to have spelling checkers telling us that there is no such word as “gafia” and that there are two ‘p’s in “applicable”, but now we have software to nag us about the passive and active voice, and to tell us not to make our sentences too long, like this one, because long sentences are too difficult to understand.

I tell you, things have gone too far, and it won’t be too long before we have software which tells us we ought to send a thank-you note to Aunt Jane for the lovely pair of thick socks she sent us for Christmas, or which nags us to sign up for that aerobics program to get our weight down instead of spending so much time in front of the computer screen.

Just one step further, and we’ll have robots which make us chicken soup and tuck us up in bed at the first sign of a sniffle. Shades of Jack Williamson’s horrifying story With Folded Hands.

In fact, I’m starting to realise what the word “personal” means in “personal computer”. It means “damned impudent” as in “if I may ask a personal question…”.

It’s true that I don’t want to go back to the days of “hairy-chested” computing, but I do think that we have to re-assert our dignity a little bit and get rid of software which pampers us to the point of irritation. In other words, it’s time we left the nursery for good, gave Nanny the sack and let her perambulate away into the sunset, never to be seen again.

“Blasts from the Past” is a collection of re-published articles dating from wa-a-a-y back to the time when I was publishing sf fanzines (1970s), through to some more recent articles published on (and about) the early days of the web (1990s).

The Pleasures of Poetry

(First published in February 1996)

The trouble with a lot of high school courses, I suspect, is that rather than leading you down to the pool and inviting you to drink, they drag you down screaming and try to push you in, leading to a life-long aversion to water.

At least that seems to have been the way it was when I went to school, thirty years or so ago. But I’m not confident that things have changed since.

Among the subjects that seem to have been spoiled in this way for people are most of mathematics and literature. Being forced to digest either algebra or Dickens before you have acquired a taste for them is probably the main reason that most adults appear to suffer indigestion at the very mention of either.

In particular, I fear that many people have their taste for poetry spoilt by their experiences at school. Few adults, I imagine, nowadays read or re-read poetry for pleasure. If you have any books of poetry in your house, the odds are that they are the remnants of your school or university education rather than the result of a deliberate purchase.

I have to confess that this certainly applies to me, but on the other hand every few years or so I seem to re-discover the pleasures of poetry, and I start picking up my old school volumes and begin to dip here and there, rediscovering my old favourites and from time to time discovering new ones.

What exactly is ‘poetry’? It’s a curious word, suggesting that it can only be defined as the result of what poets do – as though all furniture could only be defined as ‘carpentry’ – that is, the result of what a carpenter does.

Poetry often but not always involves some kind of rhyme – an odd convention when you think about it. And poetry often uses rhythm, with or without rhyme. But neither of these is essential to what makes something poetry. Is the following a poem? I think it is, yet it has neither rhythm nor rhyme:

You say grace before meals.
All right.
But I say grace before the play and the opera,
And grace before the concert and the pantomime,
And grace before I open a book,
And grace before sketching, painting,
Swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;
And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.
(1)

What seems to be constant, at least in the best poetry, is a heightened, almost ceremonial use of language, a precise care about how every word should sound.

More than anything poetry expresses a profound emotion, or tries to call up some deep feeling from us:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(2)

This is in danger of starting to sound like one of those English Lit classes that destroy so many people’s love of literature! That is the opposite of my intention. What I want to show you here is why some poetry appeals to me and why I am drawn back to it. Poetry which works for me calls forth some profound sympathetic feeling, as when Yeats writes out for us the city dweller’s yearning to escape to a simpler life:

…for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
(3)

“I hear it in the deep heart’s core”. That is a phrase that strikes for me a resounding chord. To analyse why that phrase works, as one would do in school, would be to destroy it.

I have a poor memory for recalling whole poems. It is individual verses or phrases of great power and beauty that stay in my mind:

But at my back I always hear
Times winged chariot hurrying near.
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
(4)

How well that expresses the urgency of time, as Marvell urges his coy mistress not to waste it, in what must surely be the most famous of all come-ons in literature.

Or, another example in the same vein, the wry humour as Shakespeare debunks the overblown romantic nonsense of some poetic lovers:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
…I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
(5)

Or poetry can inspire in us a sense of magic and mystery:

Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past hours are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot…
(6)

It can range from humorous playing with words and ideas…

O who shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In Feet, and manacled in Hands…
(7)

…to the tragedy of modern times:

…Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity….
(8)

The subject of love poetry is a large one, but this poem is dear to my heart (it formed part of our wedding ceremony):

If questioning could make us wise,
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes.
If all our tale were told in speech
no mouths would wander each to each…
(9)

And then there’s poetry which one loves just because of the wonderful sound of it:

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree
Where Alph the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to Man
Down to a sunless sea.
(10)

A great deal of the pleasure I find in reading poetry is re-discovering the context of magical fragments like these.

There is a delight in the sound and texture of this language on one’s tongue, and an upwelling of feeling that, for me, makes poetry well worth returning to again and again:

…I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

————————-
Sources:

(1) G.K.Chesterton, untitled poem
(2) Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
(3) W.B.Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree”
(4) Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”
(5) W.Shakespeare, Sonnets CXXX
(6) John Donne, “Song”
(7) Andrew Marvell, “A Dialog Between Body and Soul”
(8) W.B.Yeats, “The Second Coming”
(9) Christopher Brennan, “Because She Would Ask Me Why I Love Her”
(10) S.T.Coleridge, “Kublai Khan”

(It may be objected, and with justice, that these examples are all drawn from the now fashionably-discredited white male-dominated Anglo-Saxon culture. That’s true. But while I have no objection to others celebrating their culture in their own way, the fact is that I am a white Anglo-Saxon male – this is my culture, and I see nothing wrong with celebrating it and, indeed, rejoicing in it.)

“Blasts from the Past” is a collection of re-published articles dating from wa-a-a-y back to the time when I was publishing sf fanzines (1970s), through to some more recent articles published on (and about) the early days of the web (1990s).

I hope that things have changed a little in programming circles since I wrote this 13 years ago, particularly with regard to the gender balance… but I’m not so sure!

This Rough Magic

(First published in July 1996)

From time to time as part of training for my job I attend computer programming seminars of various kinds. The most important is the annual Microsoft Tech Ed conference.

Now, whenever I go to one of these events, it immediately strikes me what a heterogenous collection of people are in attendance.

With no exaggeration at all, the audience is always 95% to 99% male. At least 30% of the attendees have beards and are bespectacled. Well over 75% are wearing jumpers, cardigans or short sleeves (depending on the weather), and look as though wearing a suit or even a tie would be absolute anathema to them. By far the majority have a distant, dreamy look.

What is very depressing to me is that I fit this stereotype perfectly.

But I’m also very puzzled. Certainly when I did my graduate diploma in computing, the students did not fit this stereotype; indeed the gender balance was almost equal, and the dress sense of both men and women was far more formal.

It seems there’s a great difference between the students of computer science and those who end up as practictioners of programming and the more technical side of things.

As I looked over the audience at the last such conference, it slowly began to dawn on me that there was a strange and compelling similarity between this group of people and that of another such group as described in history and legends.

Computer programmers are, in fact, wizards.

Think about it.

A group of almost entirely male. usually bearded, practioners of art which is highly arcane to the general public. A group of unworldly men absorbed in their books and their learning. Men who spend most of their days staring into a glowing crystal screen, muttering and cursing at it.

These people treasure special methods of doing things written in obscure languages. These methods may have been inherited from others, or found in special texts, or may have been worked out painstakingly by themselves by trial and error. Certainly they treasure their private libraries of methods and tools which they can use to alter the way things work. What is an algorithm if not a spell? What is a spell, if not an algorithm written in a difficult to understand language?

In the world of the computer, these people have real power to affect reality, and to conjure up things that were not there before.

There are some who have sold their souls to evil, and who create spells/programs which attack and destroy the work of others. Others, more pure-minded, who have dedicated themselves to the common good.

Looked at in this light, it is no wonder that there are so few women among this group. Wizards, both in Terry Pratchett’s books and in real legend, are an exclusively masculine lot. Witches operate in a different mode and gather in different groups. Not for them the lure of obscure knowledge and power, more the practical application of skills to everyday life.

For the wizard, often the more esoteric the knowledge, the more difficult the language, the more obscure the task, the better. How else to explain the popularity of cryptic programming languages such as C++ and Lisp?

The obsession that these people have is a strange one. It is certainly the lure of power, enormous power, within a particular sphere. It is the power of creation and destruction; of life and death, if you like. But the world in which this power is wielded is not the real world. It is the universe of cyberspace.

For all the increasing dominance of computers in our workplaces and our everyday lives, it is hard to imagine that these dreamy, bearded souls who are wizards or programmers depending on how you look at it, are ever likely to control the world.

Shakespeare, as always, knew the truth of it when he has his wizard-Duke, Prospero, recall wistfully:

The government I cast upon my brother,
And to my state grew stranger, being transported,
And rapt in secret studies.

– The Tempest, Act I Scene II