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Method
Assume that there are five structural levels in a novel:
- The whole book
- A chapter
- Distinct segments of the chapter
- Paragraphs
- Sentence
Given that structure, a top down design method can be used with certain strictures to make experiments in form.
In this experiment it was assumed that the whole text would have 3 chapters, each chapter would have 3 segments, that each segment would be made up of 3 paragraphs and that each paragraph would be made up of 3 sentences. A sentence had no fixed length. The number of items at each level was defined by a desire o keep this firs attempt short.
At each level a name of unrestricted length was picked for each of the nodes. The content was derived by a process of free association. The name of the whole text was thought of first. Then the names of the three chapters were derived from that. Then each chapters 3 segments were derived from the name of the chapter and so forth down the chain until the sentence was reached. Since the sentence is the end result it was kept as the text. The chapter titles were also kept to fit with literary convention.
The gradual negotiation of stone
Holding Branches in a stream
Slowly, by the guiding numbers, finger your feet. Tickle them until
you can't stand it. Fall onto the floor with mirth and self-love.
You might fall over and destroy the flowerpots. Clatter across them
to disastrous effect. End in a ruined heap.
Draw down your hood. Descend like ejaculate. Slap across the grey.
They have hard eyes to carve. Take out your mandolin for them. Give
them the sense of joy that evades them.
You will take out your device Make it sharp with the rubbing. Draw
the sharpness through them with grace.
The broom is long so that you can extend it far. Move it to them and
push. If the device is open they will be trapped.
Beauty is only skin deep but their skins are worth it. Holding themselves
like ballerinas. Desperation forces their emulation of calm.
It is humble but worthy. Take it out of your pocket! Their eyes are
like iron filings, your object electric.
Mouths agape for their feeding. Slapping tongues against cheeks and
lips. They swallow their feed.
Finding end places
It's in you! Make an incision and reach in! Lever out the shinny prize.
Make them regret their foolish assault. Take your coin and force it
upon them. Abrade their forehead with force.
Make a hawking noise in your throat. Bring the phlegm into your mouth.
Propel.
It was burning but now it's cold. You like the look but hate the wind
against your flesh. Hold the holes together to preserve the whole.
The noose is ready. Lasso them for fun. Find out that the reality is
far worse.
It clings and crusts. You can't swim in the deep brown murk. Its hold
would be comfort if it were not death.
Their black wings would choke you. There are too many to conquer with
mere arm movements. You'd trip on them if you could actually move.
They've been at the cadavers. Tearing, fresh. Basking in the afterglow.
The prey is wounded. So you follow until it's tired. Sit with it and
pray.
Moulding a carton
Your hands are weak from your efforts. You unwind them at your target.
Closer.
They look like thin white sticks. Part meaty, part bonny. Your presence
infused in them.
The wire mesh presents itself. An obstacle. Penetration with extremities
must follow.
Your pelvis is a separate creature. It lives between you torso and
your legs. Swaying to your internal rhythm.
Here and there are your destination. You don't even look to see where
you're being taken. When you get to the place you wanted so much you want,
even more, to back.
It's fat between your legs. You curse it's presence. If it were smaller
it would look less like a lie.
Grittyness irritates your delicate extensors. Shake it out but fail.
Accept it's presence as a sensation.
Like being placed in a vice. Your fingers feel restricted. More pain
than you can bear.
It's a huge sound for a fraction of a second. Its mental fragment is
absurd. The end is what you wanted and it has arrived.
If you would like to make your conclusions about this literary experiment known then please email me. I will put them together and post them at some later date.
posted by David Gentle 1:46 AM
I had to go.
I knew I could do it.
For several years now I've had a version of agoraphobia. I could leave the house but, initially at least, I couldn't wander around the village. Lets not go into the reasons behind it all. The most severe phobia seems to be something that goes back some way. I hate trains. the first time I went on one on my own (21 years of age) I was so scared that my teeth shook. Really. Cars were initially a problem and continued to be one for a while. StarWars Episode I: "The phantom of the film it should have been" didn't help with that. I was vaguely distraught for ages afterwards. But I got over cars. And buses were my next target.
Intellect and emotion. I have been constantly struck since the beginning of the condition by it's absurdity. Not being able to do things that I had been able to do without even thinking about them before struck me as deeply pathetic. Intellectually it was easy to say that I ought to be able to get on a bus and go to town, but my instincts and emotions disagreed. I even started having wish fulfilment dreams about going on a bus to an idealised city, where I would get to go to one of a number of idealised comic shops and then...the bus ride home would destroy me in some way. I also started to feel a certain nostalgia for the idealised city and it's good comic shops.
About a month ago I decided that I'd had enough. I would go to Southampton on the bus and that would be that. But before I left home I started to get very nervous. I decided not to go. I walked to the bus stop and looked at the post, then I walked back. As I got to the top of the hill where School Road starts I turned around and saw the bus that I knew I should have caught. I could even imagine being in it.
This morning I made a similar decision. Maybe it was sleep deprivation*. Maybe I was just sick of myself. Maybe it was the builders that my Mum has employed to do our windows. So I went to the bus stop. It was raining but I didn't care. And I waited. And looked into the distance. And the bus came and I got on it.
On the bus, amongst others, is a young looking woman. I notice her, partially because I think she is attractive, and partially because she has a pierced nose and pig tails. I'm sitting there thinking about 2 things:
- What's going on here? On the one hand we have pigtails, and on the other we have piercings and an aggressive vibe. Is this woman part of some trend? Why the mixture of overt aggressiveness and overt girliness? Have a generation of young women set out to cross the 2? Is she trying to say that you can be assertive and yet still be girlie? Various theories abound. (Girlishness implies innocence, and, therefore, ignorance. Aggressiveness implies a degree of self knowledge. I would say that you can't have both together).
- Does she think I'm attractive?
After about 5 minutes of the first set of considerations I am shocked at my arrogance. She is not part of some trend. She is an individual. Seeing her as part of some abstract group is exactly the sort of disgusting mistake that academics the world over routinely make with their shitty gender/race theories. She is an individual first and foremost and therefore she should be understood, to the extent that she can be, in terms of her individual actions. I realised at that point that I had been away from human contact for a very long time. I decided to deal with both sets of curiosity at once. I will go and ask her why she has pig tails and piercings. This will establish a:why she dresses in the way that she does and b: whether she is prepared to talk to my own lumbering, balding self. But then. Ah. The reluctance to do what my impulses tell me (that comes from my constant repression of them when I was a youngster) takes hold again. So I sit and watch and try to figure out whether she likes me.
When she gets off the bus in Totton and doesn't even look at me I conclude that I'm just an ugly lump and chicks don't like me.
I walk around town. I try and gauge what the women around me are thinking. It occurs to me that there seem to be a lot more attractive women around than there were before. I guess that in the interim either my tastes have changed or I'm noticing attractivness more now. Why won't any of the women like me in the face? Do I look like a tramp or something?
I look in Forbidden Planet and note the presence of certain comics by certain persons that I will return, later, to purchase.
At some point, I can't remember exactly when it occurred to me that I basically judged myself entirely on how much female people liked me. This had never occurred to me before. Yes, I am stupid. When I was in school I just assumed that all the women around me hated my guts, which made me hate myself. Later, as I realised that women didn't hate me as much as I thought, I started to like myself a little.
By the time I decide to return home (loaded down with an abundance of consumer merchandise) I have changed my mind about how attractive I am several times. Sitting here right now, it's pretty obvious that some women will like me and others won't, but at the time I was a little distracted. I sit in the bus shelter and wait. A woman walks in and gives me a very warm smile. I am happy. She has amazing eyes.
Home.
*:4 hours sleep from 3:00pm to 7:00pm yesterday, having woken up from 2 hours of sleep that should have helped me recover from the previous 36 hour stretch without sleep. Why so little sleep? Mostly that i don't feel like sleeping.
posted by David Gentle 4:06 AM
The picture of me on my home page was taken in 1995 when I was 22. I put it up because I liked it but it occurred to me that anyone who looked at it was seeing a lie. I don't really look like that anymore. I still have long hair and I still wear black but I've started to go bald and I'm getting a little fat. So I thought that I'd get a newer picture taken. I have no money for professional photographers or digital cameras so my mum took it for me in her garden. I smiled. I was trying to show that I have a sense of humour and a light hearted nature. I waited for the picture to come back. I was horrified when it did. It wasn't necessarily that I looked fat (though I did) or the baldness but more the expression on my face. What I thought was going to be a expression of mild amusement was a cipher. I looked at my face in the photo and what I saw was nothing.
I thought a lot after that. Immediately the shitty beard and cheek hair had to go. At least that made me look a little younger but a more profound change in attitude was needed.
Over 5 years ago I was attempting to get my HND in computing at Southampton Institute. I failed a given subject because I could not be bothered to do one of the assignments. And I walked away. I thought I'd try and get a job but that didn't happen. So I just started to think about things. I became aware of the depth of my mistakes fairly quickly, though I had no idea why I'd made them. After maybe a year of that I started to have a particular fantasy about waking up to find I was 16 again and that I had a chance to prevent the mistakes I'd made and repair my life. And to be sexy. I really wanted to be sexy.
5 years on and I know pretty much exactly what sort of mistakes I've been making and exactly why I've made them but I don't seem to be doing very much about it. So I saw the photo and cut off the hair and decided that physical activity might be a good idea. A simple mile walk a day would be a start. But I am so scared every time I go out. Will people look at me and find me ugly? Will they hate me? Will I be attacked. On the first walk I realised that a lot of the things I want to happen just aren't going to. Or at least they aren't likely. I also realised that I was going to have to do a lot of things that I hated if I was going to get even a fraction of what I wanted. I got home and started reflecting on a single line that I thought I might put into a song which I had come up with a few days before: "walk into the sun again". I have no idea where it came from. But it struck me that walking into the sun was what I had to do. And I will have to do it again and again and again. I am going to have to face whatever pathetic phobias I have developed and get some things done. And the more I think about it the more I would rather have to walk into the sun every day than spend any more time living the way I have been.
posted by David Gentle 5:09 AM
Several thousand years ago a number of people living around what is currently Salisbury built a thing called Stonehenge. A circle of huge stones dragged by some means from Wales (hundreds of miles away) and arranged in an intricate pattern. It was precise. One of the theories for it's creation was that it was a huge seasonal calculator. Other people think it was primarily a religious monument (though I'm not sure that there would have been any great distinction between the two. To those people religion would have been a precise measure of the world they lived in) and some people inevitably think it was to do with aliens. Sigh. The point is that it is a precise structure. For whatever reason the people who built it decided that it should be built to a very specific plan. They required huge skill and very specific knowledge to do their work.
To make a metal axe you have to heat your ore to a precise temperature.
To measure the height of Mount Everest without satellites takes a great deal of precision.
To build a cast iron bridge or a space rocket or practically anything else of any size and complexity requires precision. Information.
Our ancestors didn't live in any less of an information age than we do. They may have had less information to use but the information that they had would have been as critical to them as any of ours is to us.
How can we say that this is the information age?
All of our ages are information ages. In the stone age you needed to know how to knap a piece of flint and in the space age you needed to know an awful lot of information to ride a rocket into space. What has changed is the way we use information and the tools we use to get and compile information.
What differentiates any given age from another is the absence or presence of some defining technology. Bronze, flint, iron, industry. Of all the ages the space age is the best defined. It's pretty clear (at least at this point in history) that the space age started when we went into space. But, as I say, we've always been using information, so when did the change occur and what was the change?
We used to use our technology for precision. Now we use it for abstraction. Measurements turned an abstract idea ("over there") into a precise specification ("take it 28 cubits over there"). We still do that sometimes. But now we use the best of our technologies to gather statistics that allow us to have as abstract a view of a group of people as possible. If you're marketing a product then that's useful. You want to know who is going to buy your product and how to make it appealing to them. It's arguable that this process has leeched any art that may have been remaining in American TV out of it but so what? It's arguable that the industrial age caused untold grief and suffering for millions (though without it I doubt we would have seen the rise of libertarianism and the social movements that sprouted from it). From an advertisers point of view it is useful to know how many potential consumers of a certain type are watching a given thing. But. If you take a look at any given statistic and ask how you can apply it usefully in your life the only possible answer is so that you can make a generalisation.
An example. Lets try and keep gender and race differences out of this for the moment. You are a clean shaven man. You have always been clean shaven, ever since your dad bought you your first razor. Your knowledge of the bearded life is limited because you have always worked for a company, who shall remain nameless, that has a strict no beards dress code. As you walk along the street you see a man flagrantly going about his business with a full beard as though it were nothing. You are momentarily hesitant. Beards? What do you know about that? You read a study that said that something like 58% of bearded men were trying to cover their faces out of guilt. What to think of this man?
You could come to any number of conclusions about him. If those conclusions are informed primarily by his beard (it's the only thing you noticed) then you are, by definition, demonstrating prejudice.
What use is the statistic to you? What does it tell you? Nothing. Because it is taken from a poll that is inevitably a thin cross section of people who might have been badly picked. You need information about an individual to come to conclusions about an individual.
Here's how prejudice works with statistics. A statistic starts off as something relatively precise but the precision is rubbed away by the Chinese whispers of communication.
"58% of men with beards say that they are trying to hide something" becomes "the majority of bearded men" becomes "bearded men in general". It starts as a relatively meaningless statistic and ends as a prejudicial generalisation.
We seem to come from a culture that cannot abide anything other than an instant decision. "Fence sitting" is attacked outright.
A Greek philosopher who's name I cannot remember said "the first step to wisdom is 'I don't know'". You role a six sided dice. Only one of the sides is marked. Can you predict what will happen? An awful lot of people would tell you that it would end up showing an unmarked side of the dice. The correct answer is "I don't know". Because you don't.
The next time you hear a statistic mentioned somewhere it might be a good idea to ask one simple question: "what possible use could this statistic be to me?"
When you meet someone from a part of the world that your not familiar with but have heard bad things about remember that you don't know this person. A certain wariness is understandable when meeting new people (anyone can be a dangerous rapist) but more is not.
We've always had prejudice. Our tendency to represent things as abstracts (the written word "pig" is an abstract version of a set of noises that signifies a general concept of all animals of a given species) means that prejudice is something we have to fight against in ourselves before we fight it in anyone else. The defining difference between our technology now and 100 years ago is that we use it to gather information to manufacture prejudice.
I have no idea how genuine any of our previous ages have been. I'm sure there were people who used flint tools well into the bronze age (if a thing works well it works well). It all seems to me to be an exercise in academic generality. So I'm not going to dub our modern epoch "The Age of Generality". But we are in the middle of something and I hope we can find a way out.
posted by David Gentle 1:02 AM
I have made mistakes. When I was 16 I chose the wrong course educationally. Later I compounded my earlier mistakes by making the same mistakes again when I came to higher education. In terms of relationships my mistakes have been the same. I'm not at all uncomfortable admitting to being a virgin. Go ahead, have a laugh. I'll still be here waiting when you pick yourself up off the floor.
For me my mistakes have all come down to one principle:
You can't make a choice if you don't realise that you have a choice to make.
When I went to college I assumed that you had either retake your GCSE's OR do A-levels. I didn't realise that you could do both. I'm not sure I would have made the right decision (if it's possible to know what the right decision is) if I had known but I didn't. I turned away from romantic relations with women because I simply didn't realise that any woman would want me. I haven't got a job because I assumed that no one would want to employ me. I have nothing because I have been unaware of my choices.
I'm not sure why. I think that I was so emotionally and intellectually numb that I tried very hard not to think of anything. I didn't want to make choices so I limited my knowledge of what was possible to the very minimum. Always did just enough to scrape through until even that became to much.
I'm talking about myself here. My reasons for being unaware of the choices available to me are pathetic. But there are people out there who aren't aware for other reasons.
In Neal Stephenson's excellent novel "Cryptonomicon" there is a scene where one of the characters, a hacker called Randy, recalls an uncomfortable dinner party in which he attempted to defend himself and the technocracy from a snarky (non medical) doctor. The doctors argument is that the technocracy is a privileged elite who have an increasing control over the world. Randy's response is that in order to become part of the technocracy all he did was to read some books and do a little studying. Anyone who knows anything about computers knows that Randy is right. Becoming part of the aristocracy involves birth or marrying in. It is a genuinely stifling institution. But anyone can be a member of the technocracy. Unless they don't realise they can be.
For years people bemoaned the lack of women on the Internet. Various theories were put forward. To much porn. Men are nasty sexual harrasers. Glass ceiling. Right now there are more women on the Internet than men. So what changed? Is there less porn? Less sexual harassing men? What's changed is that the women who thought computing was something that men did have realised that operating computers is not a "guy thing". If you'd asked me ten years ago I would have said the same thing. Interestingly, whereas most men have never said that women aren't suited to computing there seem to be an awful lot of women out there who believe that the female is somehow more suited to working with them. I predict a great deal of sexist crowing from the vocal minority of females that want to feel as though they set an agenda now that there are more women on the Internet than men. But that's a separate topic.
Make sure you know the full range of your choices.
posted by David Gentle 10:57 PM
Offended
I'm going to make a statement. And then I'm going to justify that statement. And then I'm going to add some qualifications to it so that you understand what I'm not saying as well as what I am saying.
Statement
Being offended is an intellectual weakness.
Justification
Here's a question:
How do you feel about 2+2?
Do you feel happy or sad? Do you feel bored? Patronised? Offended that I would ask you such a basic question?
Do you feel 4?
I'm betting that there are a number of possible answers to my question that I haven't listed but I'm fairly certain that no one feels 4.
You can't solve a problem with feelings. No matter how offended or otherwise you are there is no way that the feeling you have is a solution to the problem. You do not feel 4.
So, okay, someone says something or does something you don't agree with. The first question I think you have to ask is "what is the problem?" If there is no problem then you have no reason to be offended. If there is a problem then being offended will only cloud the issue. It seems to me that in some cases taking offence is a deliberate attempt to cloud a given issue, an attempt to defend an insecurity. In this circumstance the problem is you. Solve the problem.
Qualifications
This text could be interpreted as a set of fascist instructions. A formula for life that I would require people to follow every waking moment. Let me say that it is your right as a human being to be as offended as you want. Go ahead. I think society should accord the individual the right to freedom of expression.
Some people might well assume that I would characterise women as more emotional than men. This is not the case. Firstly I don't believe in making generalisations at all and secondly even if I did my observation of humans leads me to the conclusion that men as a whole are no less emotional than women as a whole.
I am not saying that an insecurity is an easy thing to get rid of but it's a hell of a lot easier to deal with if you know that it exists in you than if you go around denying it.
posted by David Gentle 1:19 AM
Saturday, September 2, 2000
The Form of Cities
Recently I went to Southampton for the first time in some time. In the medieval era Southampton (which, for those of you who don't know, is a major southern port in the UK) had a huge wall around it with a point of entry called the Bargate. This structure, along with a certain amount of the wall, still exists and cuts the high street in half (the high street used to travel through the arch but now travels around). At a number of points there are breaks in the wall and one of these was made for a road. Over that break is a relatively recent bridge. I stood on the middle of the bridge to see what I could see.
A new shopping centre, apparently the largest in Europe (for now at least), is being built. One of a number in Southampton. Something struck me about it. It set off alarm bells. It looked as though it had grown there and, having established it's roots, was about to grow into the rest of the town. And I have a vision of the town in ten years as a one huge throbbing organism. One flesh. Monoculture.
I sound like a lunatic.
Throbbing? Why is it throbbing in my vision? Because I am paranoid and afraid of the world closing in on me like a big mechanism of meat and bone. I want things to stay as they are so that I can keep up. But they won't. I must come to terms with things as they are and the way they will be. So what is happening and why?
The change from polyculture to monoculture. A polyculture is an environment of variety. Most towns and forests are polycultures. A wide variety of experience/shops/textures/species. Polycultures are inherently more survivable in the long term but less efficient. A monoculture is a culture of similarity. Shopping centres and cornfields are monocultures. A very small variety of experience/shops/textures/species. Monocultures are not survivable in the long term because the world changes and the circumstances that brought them about disappear but they are very efficient at doing what they do.
Short term commercial goals are over riding long term sense. Keep all the people with the most money in one place and then, instead of forcing them to leave the cocoon of the mall, extend it so that they can stay inside. Snug.
Will this all work though? Can the force of commerce keep people inside? Will they want to stay? In order to answer that question I would have to conduct some sort of survey. I know that I wouldn't want to be kept inside the machine but so what?
It's easy to read Cyberpunk fiction and see the future as this gigantic thing closing in on all of us, where the individual doesn't matter and everything is run by corporations but is it realistic? The walls of the old Southampton suggest otherwise. As I understand it the original fort was a way of protecting the port. Like most other forts it would have had a shanty town around it (note: this is theoretical on my part, I don't really know). And now you can see that the shanty town has overrun what used to be the city. The high street runs right past the old gates to the city and out and beyond. People bustle through and around the walls like ants on a long dead corpse. It's part of the scenery now. The city has expanded hugely over the centuries and outgrown it's original boundaries (like all cities). So the question might be "can commerce contain that growth long enough to keep up?" can the organism grow at the same rate as the city? Or will the bustling hub move elsewhere? If the organism can't keep people inside they may well move to a completely different area. The shanty town these days is the area around St. Mary's church. It used to be the area of East street but then various people came along and cleaned it up so it moved elsewhere. Recently there have been moves to clean up St. Mary's Street. The shanty town of porn shops, comics shops, second hand bookstores and independent banks will move on. Will they take the life of the city with them? Lets wait and see.
posted by David Gentle 12:20 AM
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Gentle 2000.