Eccentric Flower:199905/of books and conversations
From Eccentric Flower
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may twenty-first, one am of books and conversations Brief journally metalike stuff first: Sleepwalker is disabled, but will be back soon. In case you were wondering about the somewhat mysterious message there. I've got to figure out a way that I can take infrequently updated sites off my Nibelung ring so I don't have to step past them every morning, yet still keep them near to my horrid memory so that I don't forget to check them once in a while to see if they've stopped being infrequently updated. I'd name names, but there'd be mailbombs sent my way if I did. I love Nibelung. Is it okay to say that about your own code? Bookmarks don't work for me and they're not really public enough; link pages are troublesome to maintain. I wanted something that would work like a webring and a list of bookmarks, but was also something I could share with the world. It's one of the few times I have envisioned something, designed it, and had it do exactly what I wanted it to do. (JavaScript errors caused by web stat counters notwithstanding.) My sole regret is that I still can't think of a good way to let the world know this tool exists. - - - Tonight I added Lisa to Nibelung, and this is a deft segue into what I really want to talk about ... because Lisa Reads, and Lisa is not scared to have long rambly opinionated conversations about literature and Big Ideas ... and that's important. Right now, correspondent E.H. and I are in our third round of email about Ayn Rand, utopian ideas, and the inevitability of the corruption of these ideas when put into practice. I don't remember how we detoured there. Oh, no, wait, I do. E.H. was making fun of something else and I said "That almost sounds like the same idea that people have corrupted Objectivism into," and then I somehow dragged in my idea that Atlas Shrugged is basically a utopian novel and has some really seductive ideas for a person who loves intelligence, but would be difficult/dangerous/undesirable to realize in practice. Then we got into Oath of Fealty and why I might consider it. Here's the most recent round (I haven't gotten his reply yet): E.H. Isn't that the one about a total-surveillance society in an arcology? (I don't care for Niven or Pournelle and haven't read it.) Me: That's the one. The odd thing about Oath of Fealty is that the total-surveillance society is the good one - the book is pro-arcology, and its genius is making you realize that Todos Santos is actually a nice place to live, where the level of community policing and awareness of the neighbors has created a safe, friendly habitat for all within. The book mostly describes an Us vs. Them with Todos Santos life pitted against the World Outside ... and it is very clear whose side the authors are on. Frankly, I'd live in Todos Santos, assuming they were tolerant of others' sexual habits. But it would be difficult to achieve with real humans. E.H. A friend and I tried to design an arcology once. We ended up arguing over it. I, for one, was irrationally convinced that no decent society would ever need police. Don't try and tell me how naive I am. I know intellectually that this is a totally untenable position, but emotionally I simply can't stand the idea of creating a power like that that would inevitably be abused. Me: Hmm. Well, without the police, someone else would grab some power and abuse it - i.e. the mafia tendency. All it takes is someone with low scruples and high cunning. It is always easier to skim off the top of someone else's production than to produce yourself. This is one of Rand's central points, and one I find relatively easy to agree with. Hence there will always be crime. And - assuming you don't want crime - there must always be some kind of policing mechanism. If you don't want men in blue (or men in black) then you have to have something like the Todos Santos system, which is basically the world's most well-defined Neighborhood Watch program. This innate tendency toward corrupt behavior, though, is also the primary reason I think Todos Santos wouldn't happen. - - - Now, I'm not quoting this at such length to make myself sound good or sound smart. I'm quoting it to show you that I will gladly spit out lots of at least semi-interesting words on a subject if it's a good conversation. And a "good conversation" these days is becoming really hard for me to find. It needs to be with someone intelligent. Moreover, someone who reads a lot. Books, I am coming to believe, are vital to conversation. Books encourage conversation; television discourages it. It needs to be among people who are secure enough around each other that they can fire off strong opinions and still know they'll be friends two days later. And - here's the rub - there are a lot of subjects it can't be about. It can't be about daily problems, about how scarce the money is or how bad the job is. I don't want to have a conversation about my relationship or my gender or any real issues like that. If you want to talk about something Serious, I will gladly chew over Littleton or Kosovo or the heat death of the universe with you. But we spend, I opine, too much time talking over the mundane and troubling aspects of our personal lives as is. It's not that they're not important, but once in a while I want to discuss arcologies and utopias with someone - preferably someone who doesn't need to have either term defined. When I wrote that mail to E.H. I was suddenly struck by the thought: I can't believe I'm talking about this. And it wasn't a bad feeling. It was a pleasant surprise. It seems like the longer I know someone in person, the less willing or able they are to talk about books or art or world politics or even The Phantom Menace. And I can't figure out if this is some effect I have on them. Am I somehow radiating "been there, done that," and therefore eliminating topics of conversation one by one? Am I being perfunctory at the wrong times? Am I being intimidating? (Ha! Dubious.) Am I being snide? Most (but not all) of my best conversations these days are held via printed electronic media. That seems a shame. (Nonelvis is a special case, in far too many ways to relate here.) I suppose what I want - and I wonder if I'm asking too much - is to bring back the salon. Or, in a less hifalutin' way, to simply bring back the art of shooting the breeze, but without necessarily involving the weather, sports, or monster truck rallies. (Professional wrestling's OK; you can have great discussions about that.) - - - While still thinking along these lines, I drifted into speculation about my reading habits. I was mourning the fact, the other day, that I don't read as much as I used to. I used to read three or four books a week. Now I read ... sporadically. I read some books in lumps of a few pages at a time on the subway. It takes forever to finish a book this way. With fiction, this doesn't always work, so - since I read the average-sized adult novel in a couple of hours, depending on material - I don't read some kinds of fiction, especially things with complex plots like mystery novels, unless I know I can sit down and read the whole thing in a go. This has restricted my fiction consumption, needless to say. I want to read a couple of real tomes, including Neal Stephenson's latest, but I can't read a thousand-page book in a day, and I don't want to lug it back and forth every morning. I now read more non-fiction than fiction - which frightens me - and the backlog is piling up - which frightens me even more. Nonelvis and I own some 2100 books between us - a guess I made by averaging the number of books per shelf (and not counting our five shelves of cookbooks in the kitchen). Most of those 2100 are probably mine. I've read probably more than twice that number; hard to say. I am a lifelong reader and book buyer. It scares me to think that at thirty-one, my reading could be trickling down to nil. But it keeps coming down to the idea that I can spend my leisure time either reading or writing, and frankly, reading is fun and enlightening, but writing is a necessary part of my soul. ("Swimming is not exercise. Swimming is swimming." -Lisa) Even if it's only writing postcards.
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