An interesting linguistic note

I was reading Neil a funny article at work today, and while I was only lightly paraphrasing it, without even really meaning to I transformed "it's trivially easy to wire up one of these yourself" to "it's trivially easy to wire one of these up yourself". It wasn't that I misread it, I was just rephrasing it in the most natural way to say it, but it was a striking difference even as I said it. Logically, I think the way jwz wrote it ("wire up one of these") makes more sense than "wire one of these up", but I wonder whether it's a regional usage difference or what. It reminds me of this, where asking Australian shopkeepers "how late are you open until?" drew blank looks, but "when do you close" worked just fine. In both cases it seems to have to do with the preposition wandering off by itself.

A linocut at last

I've finally got a concept I'm fairly happy with for my broadside. I found a great design, basically a silhouette of two men, one pointing up at the sky (implicitly, an airplane overhead) and one looking up at it with binoculars. Even though they are shown in silhouette, the figures are clear enough, their poses are striking, and the vertical focus of it is just wonderful. It sort of squares with the "dream in color, dream in volume" thing... sort of... I'm calling it close enough.

The obvious aviation angle makes me want to dig through Wind, Sand, and Stars again, but when I picked it up a week or two ago I was really surprised how bombastic it seemed. Perhaps bombastic is not quite the word, but unsubtle? Direct? Certainly not the captivating and romantic impression I remember from the first umpteen times I read and reread it. Maybe I need to just sit down and read it properly, not skim it in a tearing hurry. But that worries me, all the same. Maybe it's the first stage of Postmodern Disease.

That aside, I think I have a good enough concept to move forward and start pulling proofs of various bits of text in different fonts and experimenting with layout, font combinations, and all that. The "words like gods" broadside hanging up in the print shop is still inspiring; I especially like how the lines in large type form are reasonably coherent all by themselves, even though they are just isolated bits of what Shakespeare wrote. I wonder if there isn't some potential with that, perhaps "all of us... dream in color... dream in volume... fabricate" or something. The shop is open in the evening tomorrow, and I intend to get down there as early as I can and start experimenting.

Finally some headway

I've been treading water horribly on my project, which is to make a broadside for my letterpress class. I think, though, that I'm starting to make a little progress. I'm pretty sure I'm going with the middle Coupland quote there (didn't find any more in Microserfs, on which more later):

I get this little feeling that we can all of us speed up the dream, dream in color, dream in volume, and dream together down south. We can, and will, fabricate the waking dream.

Which is certainly the most poetic thing anyone has said about software. The wrinkle here is that I need to put in some kind of linocut. My current thoughts are to find perhaps some kind of Socialist Realist hammering-man type of thing for the "fabricate" concept, or perhaps Athena. I like the Athena concept more and more as I think about it. Easier to find material, for sure--apparently Socialist Realism isn't considered to rate the same representation in the library as, say, Constructivism or any other ism you might name. Which is about right in my opinion, except it would be convenient right now.

Pynchon

In a moment of weakness, when I had to buy a copy of Gravity's Rainbow for reasons of Art, I was unable to resist taking V. off the shelf too. (A brand-new edition, even!) I don't know how long my self-control will hold out against subterranean alligator hunts or checking whether Seaman Bodine shows up in there also.

I was contemplating using the Kenosha Kid sequence from Gravity's Rainbow for my letterpress project, but once I counted the words even for a minimal presentation of it, just three or four construals, it was pretty clear that it wasn't going to work. I'm not sure it would have the desired impact anyway without at least most of the construals. Besides, I definitely need something about an order of magnitude shorter and less subtle for a broadside.

Microserfs quotes, part 1

I've discovered a few remarkable quotes from Microserfs, along with the "SF coffee bar circa the Dawn of Multimedia" one. (And doesn't that just pin down its time period? A couple of years later and we forgot all about multimedia...)

pp. 28

On the Campus today at sunset, people were stopping on the grass watching the sun turn stove-filament orange through the rain clouds.
It's just something I noticed. It made me realize that the sun is really built of fire. It made me feel like an animal, not a human.

pp. 89

I get this little feeling that we can all of us speed up the dream, dream in color, dream in volume, and dream together down south. We can, and will, fabricate the waking dream.

pp. 115

Should some future historian ever feel the need to duplicate an SF
coffee bar circa the Dawn of Multimedia, they will require the following:

• thrashed PowerBooks covered with snowboarding and Chiquita banana stickers
  
• a bad early 1980s stereo (the owner's old system, after he upgraded his own personal system)
  
• used mismatched furniture
  
• bad oil paintings (vaginal imagery/exploding eyes/nails protruding from raw paint)
  
• a cork bulletin board (paper messages!)
  
• sullen, most likely stoned, undergrads
  
• multi-pierced bodies
  
• a few weird, leftover 1980s people in black leather coats and black-dyed hair
  
• nightclub flyers
  

[come on, this is 2005 and I have to leave off the closing tags on my list items? - Ed.]

Microserfs

Last night I started reading Microserfs again. The first couple of times I read it, I enjoyed it enormously. This time, I picked it up and started leafing through randomly, and I had to put it down several times, saying "oh God, I can't read this." It is frighteningly precise, like a prophecy of my own life. A terrifying thing to hold in one's hand.

At least it gives me hope and inspiration too. And to think I only picked it up in the first place to mine it for quotes for a letterpress project. (Coupland is as quotable as anyone, that's for sure. On which more later.)

Hello World!

I think this will make me the last Internet person to enter the blogosphere. To begin with, I'm going to write about interesting things I am reading. I'll probably throw in the odd piece about letterpress or Seattle or tech stuff or something, but I think I'll mostly let other people handle the tech blogging.