Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
"The Joy of Quiet," a story by Pico Iyer in the NY Times (29 Dec. 2011) resonates with something I proposed a week ago at a Christmas party.
.
I'd been talking about plans to go away for a few weeks to finish a novel in draft. As usual, when such an idea is broached, people were quick to say things such as, "Hey, I know a great place on the coast down south" or "My uncle has a yacht crewed entirely by world-class lady beach volleyball players winding down between tournaments." That kind of thing is all very well, but what I really need is somewhere barren of interesting people to chat to (including beach volleyball players), at least one room with a blank wall and no view of wonderful scenery and, most important of all, no Internet connection. In fact, I'd been thinking of some grubby little upcountry hotel here in Thailand.
This is not mere eccentricity. Lots of writers feel the same way, I believe. At least one successful writer (whose name escape me just now) goes so far as to say no one can write a book in the vicinity of an Internet connection. That may be no exaggeration.
At this point my Sara, as is her wont, interrupts. "All you need is self-discipline," she says.
Uh-huh. That's right. I don't even have the self-discipline to activate Freedom, a program I installed on my computers that allows you to disable your communications programs for anywhere up to eight hours at a time (see “Addictions, spinal deficiencies and disciplinary infinite regresses”).
But let's get back to my proposal, which will make both me and some obliging investor rich overnight. All I need is enough cash to buy and renovate a smallish hotel, preferably here in Bangkok.
Here's the deal. We subdivide the joint into windowless cells, each of them equipped with comfortable office chair, desk, adjustable lighting, cot, a basic toilet and washroom, coffee machine, and, by default, no Internet connection. Oh, yeah--and a solid door that unlocks only from the outside.
Just a prototype; we'd tart it up somewhat.
Whoa. We’ll have writers queuing up to pay our exorbitant rates for incarceration till they finish their book in draft or else cry uncle (for which we’ll charge them a hefty penalty). The punters can order food which, for modest charges, our staff will slip through a slot of the sort used in solitary confinement in all the best prisons. Writing supplies, computer repairs, etc. will be provided in the same way.
The real money, though—and this, I have to admit, is pure genius—will come from what we'll charge for temporary access to the Internet. Clients who just can't manage the cold-turkey route may submit a formal written request, agreeing to pay ridiculous sums by the minute for the privilege of being allowed online for a stipulated time. (Of course clients will also have to sign an initial agreement that protects us from charges of kidnapping and unlawful detention.)
So we provide a much-needed service for our age, amassing heaps of good karma at the same time we get obscenely rich.
This idea’s time has come. As I read Pico Iyer’s article, I kept feeling he was on the verge of stumbling upon it himself. I await good news from prospective investors.
Any good ideas for what to call this facility, which in my mind is already becoming an international chain? Mistress Muse's No Mercy Mansion isn't quite right, though it is pretty alliterative.
Premature evacuations offend spirits of the place
Here on my eight-floor balcony, watching the sun retire across the river to the west, I can almost hear the waters advancing from Saphan Kwai. Or is that merely the kerfuffle of conflicting rumor? For weeks, here in Phya Thai District, we’ve awaited the floods from the north as they advance with glacial alacrity. One of the many rumors, inconsistently promulgated by government officials, was that we might well be spared altogether.
Ultimately, though, it seems the hi-so spirits of the place have been insufficiently propitiated. Or perhaps too many of the locals have succumbed to premature evacution (current phrase, not my coinage), their lack of faith offending our spiritual guardians. Because last night and this morning, Twittish wisdom had the flood arriving in front of Big C at Saphan Kwai. Since, however, we’ve been given to understand that this was not the flood proper, but only prophylactic pumping of the drains, and that the area is dry again.
Nevertheless, the inexorable tide of umpteen zillion Olympic swimming pools equivalent, the standard measure du jour, continues its near-imperceptible rush towards us. As it has been doing for weeks.
I’ve decided never, for any reason, to look at the Twitter feed again. Gossip is always a powerful stimulant, but in time of crisis Twitter is crack cocaine. In the good old days, people would just get on with life and, if a giant flood appeared, they’d say, whoa, a flood, and deal with it. When it passed, they’d get back to other matters.
Of course all that’s easy enough for me to say, still safe and air-conditioned in my apartment as I make guacamole, croques monsieur and salad with which to surprise Sara when she gets home from work already heartened by thoughts of that half bottle of wine in the fridge. Only a few kilometers from us, meanwhile, large numbers of people are suffering abject misery. (I fear that us relatively privileged folk hereabouts will suffer our real crisis only after the floods have abated, and the social, political and economic fallout hits us.)
Of course there’s every reason to believe our neighborhood will finally indeed be flooded within days. Though how deeply and for how long is anybody’s guess. If you want considered opinions ranging from no flood at all to 10-12cm to 1.5m standing from a few hours to a few weeks, consult #thaifloodeng, an amazing confluence in itself of observation and information from every source imaginable. Everything you need to know from subduing feral crocodiles in black water to whether the reported invasion of green mambas is for real or a hoax, from how to safely test standing water for electric current to how to volunteer for relief efforts.
Here are more standout photos of the flooding in Thailand from The Atlantic and the Boston Globe.
A graphic representation from Japan showing, as of 27 October, the Great Flood Monster about to gobble up Phya Thai District and other parts of so-far untouchable “inner Bangkok.” (The situation has become even direr since then, of course.)
People often respond to disaster with great good spirit and imagination. Here's a motorcycle modified for underwater excursions.
For more on the respective powers of myth and science in flood control, see the latest posting on Somtow's World.
First photo (above): “A resident pulls her belongings as she wades through her flooded neighborhood in Thon Buri outside Bangkok on October 28, 2011.” (Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters) From the Boston Globe.
Second photo “Children play in a flooded street in Sena district, Ayutthaya province, about 80 km (50 miles) north of Bangkok, on September 12, 2011…” (Reuters/Sukree Sukplang) From The Atlantic.
Inverse relations and natural law (The Gospel According to Ellie)
Bangkok cinemas, some of them, have taken to offering movies in “4D.” Now the moving images are complemented with smells—certain colorful old cinemas, sadly gone now, were way ahead of them on that front. And you might get rumblings in your seat, though these are often now more in sync with events on the screen that the tremblors from street traffic outside used to be. Other effects include fog and drizzle and stuff they originally built cinemas to shield you from while you watched a movie.
So that’s one excuse for having seen the latest Transformers flick.
And today, on behalf of Leary, I promulgate the original Ellie’s Law:
The quality of a modern movie is inversely related to the quantity of money available to make it.
Two things, here. First, you’ve got the hi-tech toybox of special effects, and the idea that, if they’re there, you’ve got to use them. Then you’ve got the destruction-of-life-and-property and the special-effects indexes, and the pole is constantly being raised. Movies are rated, in Bangkok as elsewhere, by the collective weight of mashed vehicles (robots, spacecraft, whatever) and the splash radius of blood.
The upshot? You have a much better chance of seeing a good movie if the film-maker has nothing to rely on but the quality of the script, the acting and the directing -- as in low-budget films made in Ireland and Canada.
Leary tells me that Ellie, whom he likes to describe as a friggin' genius, has also applied the notion of inverse relations to natural laws of political behavior (notably in the USA and other countries she could mention at this time). Leary says I should feel free to include some of these laws in my draft of The Intelligent Politician’s Practical Handbook, and I present them here.
In so-called democracies—roughly speaking, systems of government incorporating elected representatives of the population—certain invariant laws and corollaries tend to obtain. (Leary says Ellie—did he mention she’s smart as a whip?—can talk this way at the drop of a hat, and often does.)
* The effectiveness of a political message is inversely related to the complexity of its content.
* The simplicity of a political message is inversely related to its connectedness with anything important it has to say about political, social and economic realities.
* In any so-called democracy, a political candidate's chance of success is inversely related to the complexity of his messages to the electorate, and directly related to their simplicity ( whether messages or electorate, you may be thinking).
Visitors may wish to add their own rules to this list.
Ellie is Leary’s second wife, the woman he married in 2029. She was driven to suicide by Brian Finister (a.k.a. Brian the Evil Canadian) circa 2035. Her subsequent resurrection as what was merely supposed to be a hi-rez ebee (electronic being), and Brian’s ultimate sex slave, actually heralded the next stage in evolution and helped to prove that evil genius’s undoing. (See MOM for the whole story.)
Cymbalalalazophobia: Things to worry about when the sky isn’t falling
So just the other morning I suffered something like a flash of cymbalalalazophobia, which is hardly surprising, Sara claims, given my lifestyle.
My recent “Hope in dark times” post elicited the following Facebook query: Is there an official fear of hi-hat cymbals phobia?
If there weren't, it stuck me that I had a friend who might be uniquely qualified to coin such an expression. Dr. Anthony Alcock is not only a fine classical scholar, linguist, Egyptologist, jazz & blues guitarist and trumpeter and man about town (not this one), he’s capable of spinning five neologisms from the classical Greek before breakfast. His advice:
You might try this, from I Corinthians 31,1:
Cymbalon alalazon (which may turn out to be gobbledygook in the transmission) — 'a tinkling cymbal', from which it is possible to make a word 'cymbalalalazophobia ', along the lines of 'supercalifragilisticexpialodocious', which would be an apt description of the theology of St Paul.
I’m not competent to comment on Tony's theological acumen, though I’m predisposed to believe he’s right in this matter of St. Paul. (Wait. The Inquisition is defunct, is it not?) But the new word is just what we needed. It even has a pleasingly musical quality to it, and nearly demands percussion accompaniment. As long as that doesn't involve hi-hats, of course.
So we get to see the English language evolving right before our startled eyes. And now that it has been defined, many more among us will discover in ourselves this horror of hi-hats.
More on the passage in I Corinthians. (Further testament to Tony's genius: this account suggests onomatopoeic connotations in cymbalon alalazon of approaching armies clad as for battle.)
If cymbalalalazophobia isn't enough for you, click on Chicken Little, here, for a comprehensive list of phobias to choose from.
Home-grown back therapies rool!
Caption: Our adventurer, with his new office chair, just after summiting the roof of his apartment building five times in a row without oxygen.
Breaking news on the old-crockish falling-apart front: I've just cured a rogue back, gone bad in the prime o’ me loif and all, by giving my office chair to the guard downstairs in favor of sitting on an exercise ball at my desktop computer, alternating this with standing at my filing cabinet with a laptop on a shelving plank resting across the second drawer from the top. The rest of the self-prescribed therapy has entailed running up and down the fire-escape stairs till I'm all fucked up.
And it has worked. One day last week I had trouble getting off a bed; now I appear to be fighting fit.
But the really good news is that I narrowly missed paying 45,000 baht for an Aeron ergonomic office chair instead. (Cost of alternative therapy: 450 baht for the 75cm exercise ball—that’s 100 times less than the Aeron technological miracle.) Medical note: That makes me feel good all over, not just in the back area.
By way of celebration, Sara yesterday bought a leather-upholstered lounger for the living room, which means I now have a third work station.
A link just provided by Jeff the Giant Anthopologist, the NY Times on what to do with a back.
Here's a theme song I can safely pack away for future reference, sometime way down the road, I hope:
Ain’t Gonna Need This House No Longer (Stuart Hamblen)
And an extra, added bonus, only because I like it:
Truckin' (The Grateful Dead).
Writerly occupational hazards: Ersatz creativity (boozing)
Inebriation is a false Muse. As seductive as they may be, chemical substitutes for true creative intoxication don’t work.
Maybe there are exceptions that prove this rule. Malcolm Lowry, e.g., did much field research for his brilliant novel Under the Volcano, which included a main protagonist who was drinking himself to death. (Lowry, unfortunately, perhaps in his quest for verisimilitude, was himself to go all the way at an early age.) Emulating his own hard-boiled detective protagonists, writer Micky Spillane claimed he’d go to the office, get his feet up on his desk, crack a bottle of whiskey and dictate the next book off the top of his head to his (leggy) secretary. I can almost believe him, having read a couple of his stories way back when I was a boy. Though I suspect he asked his secretary to have a quick look at his punctuation, after she washed out his shot glass and ashtray and before sending the ms. to the publisher.
Generally, though, writing and boozing don’t mix.
James Joyce had this to say about matters:
Boozing does not necessarily have to go hand in hand with being a writer, as seems to be the concept in America. I therefore solemnly declare to all young men tyring to become writers that they do not actually have to become drunkards first.
Samuel Johnson, with his usual verbal parsimony, suggested this:
One of the disadvantages of wine is that it makes a man mistake words for thoughts.
What the hell. I’m moved to coin an aphorism of my own:
Our fiction-writing faculties may also produce splendid daydreams. Especially when inflamed by alcohol, these in turn conduce to celebrating one’s literary awards before they’re awarded, not to mention counting one’s groupies before they’ve hatched.
Our friend Jack Shackaway says all that’s rubbish. He tells me that boozing provides him with much literary lumber for the building. In fact, here’s something he has just passed me:
“Doctor, doctor,” I say. “I am suffering from a chronic hangover.”
“Yes,” she tells me. “That is an occupational hazard of piss artistry, and there is no cure unless you find another line of work.”
“But all I know is writing.”
“Then we can only treat the symptoms. There is no cure, although I personally find that a Bloody Mary with double vodka and a megadose of vitamins B and C on the side can work wonders.”
At this point in my dream the doctor takes to looking much younger and shapelier and she starts to remove her clothes, and I’m wondering whether this is part of the treatment, when I’m awakened by a nurse.
I see my doctor riding shotgun in the background. Then she comes forward to say, “It’s confirmed. You have dengue fever.”
Dengue fever, eh? When you’ve had as many force-10 hangovers as I’ve come up with these past months, you laugh at dengue fever. Almost.
I make a grab for the nurse, but then I wake up again, and I’m at home.
And it’s really a hangover I’m looking at after all
QED, eh? (Referring to my earlier claim re. drinking and writing.)
A last perspective, this from Philip Larkin:
Get stewed.
Books are a load of crap.
That, and the other literary quotes, aside from my own, are from Advice to Writers: A Compendium of Quotes, Anedcotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights, by John Winokur.
The cartoon illustration is from “The Joy of Hangovers" in Bangkok Old Hand, by Collin Piprell (out of print).
Flu season in Bangkok
Jack here.
The fever’s gone. I’m still sick, though. Never mind I’m sitting here like a fool—more like a two-bit hooker, actually—editing a massive, near-sadistically impenetrable document for money, not enough of it.
But let me tell you about my blissful, antihistamine-enhanced sleep last night. A serial dream—it bridged multiple pee breaks—had me much excited at a book idea. I’d decided the combination of the world’s longest palindrome (several long paragraphs) and a brand-new concept of time I’d come up with would throw light on the whole of existence, proving a ripping good yarn to boot. The excitement had fled by the time I awoke.
Do you think the Muse might be messing with me?
Early response from Bob the Literatus:
Palindromic narratives? "T Eliot, top bard, notes putrid tang emanating, is sad. I'd assign it a name: gnat dirt upset on drab pot toilet." Might one build out from that? It was making the rounds in DC back in the 1960s.
Let me explain
There’s a new and especially antibiotic-resistant bug on the loose, threatening to spread worldwide. As though we needed another new epidemic, not to mention all the floods and earthquakes and rising seas and so on. In fact the suspense is killing me, as I await the plagues of toads and suchlike falling from the skies (Exodus 7-12).
But the near-universal spread of the consumerist virus doesn’t get enough press. (Maybe that’s because governments around the world have every interest in promoting the pandemic, for this lies at the heart of “economic recovery” plans. So team players don’t go around describing our favorite growth engine as a plague, and forget about the most recent collapse of the global financial system.)
But I was going to talk about my new computer, and why I have it.
This cultural worm (consumerism acts like a virus but it’s also a worm) has conspired with a trojan computer to warp my judgment. My new desktop is so sophisticated it has an agenda all its own, and when enough of them get networked, like in about a week and a half, probably, it’ll be Bob’s yer uncle. Humankind superseded by an intelligence of our own creation. At the end of our long history we come to know our essential nature, revealed to ourselves by our own offspring as obsolete, unpleasantly smelly wet things that shed hair and bits of dead skin all over the place, clogging up the fan vents on our successors.
I didn’t mean to buy a new computer. Especially an iMac 27” supercomputer with a 1TB HD, a shitload of RAM and some processor I can’t even talk about for fear agents of foreign powers come and take it from me. This machine has all the latest doodahs and gimcracks. I can now handle words of any length and sentences of any complexity. I can move the words this way and then back again. I can delete commas and replace them at will. I can adopt full-screen, page-width View and then stand back at duelling range to write without the use of reading glasses. I am a god among penniless scriveners.
And I didn’t really mean to switch from PC to Mac. But Mac Users I know transfixed me with steady gazes and made pronouncements in tones of profound certainty. Mac Cultists who were complete strangers gestured hypnotically in public places. Evil designers and engineers at Apple have gone around expressing the epitome of classic elegance, the quintessence of contemporary cool. And Sara, of course, tells me I should do whatever makes me feel good, never mind my Buddhistic arguments that this is all maya, eh? Attachments to transitory things that can only bring more unhappiness down the road when one’s acquisitive lusts find new focus. Etc.
But here I sit, gazing at several acres of screen space, my old 19” Dell hooked up to one side of the 27” iMac which (have I already mentioned this?) has the actual computer built into the frame of the monitor.
Mac Cultists have been sent by the Devil.
But here are some arguments that finally swung me from PC to Mac.
- The Mac looks neat.
- And… Um.
- My old PC has gone gaga. It does odd things at unpredictable intervals, except it predictably does these things at the most inconvenient times possible.
- It’s all of three years old, of course, but it takes so long to boot that I try never to have to boot up.
- Nevertheless the machine has taken to crashing so often that I spend more time booting up than I do working or having fun or sleeping.
- Even when the computer is booted up, Outlook, my mail program and contacts organizer, takes so long to download e-mail that carrier pigeons might make a speedier option.
- My PC is ugly.
- Macs are cool.
- I’m told Macs, unlike PCs, don’t progessively slow down till they’re neck and neck with a pre-global warming glacier.
- And they’re sweet. Or did I aleady mention that?
- The text is adjustable to any size and for any light, so I’ll avoid eyestrain.
- Mac hardware and Mac software, unlike their PC counterparts, are part of a unified design, so they work better. (Or so I’m told; it’s too soon to say.)
- I need to renew my sense of personal efficacy, and I don’t want to sit downstairs with my buddies in my new cabin cruiser wearing a Tilly hat and drinking beer and talking about fishing. (See my last post, if you want to know what I'm talking about here.)
- For years I’ve been reading about a database/search program for Mac called DevonThink, for which there’s no PC equivalent, and I’m dying to try it.
- I spend much of my waking life in front of computers, and this environment should be as efficient and pleasant as I can make it.
- This iMac is just too cool for words.
So here we are. Aethestics and ease of use rool, OK! Plus a consumerist virus ate my brain.
The illustration, above, is from an article, “Can Animals Predict Earthquakes?”, about a mysterious invasion of toads in Mianzhu, China in 2008.
Blacksmiths & novelists revisited: The Scott Adams Theory of Content Value
Collin's not the only one comparing professional writers to blacksmiths, these days. Scott Adams, e.g, of “Dilbert” fame, presents his Adams Theory of Content Value: "As our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero."
The fate of the author in the age of digital gizmodery (with apologies to Scott Adams):
Among other things, Adams predicts “that the profession known as 'author' will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates. People might someday write entire books - and good ones - for the benefit of their own publicity, such as to promote themselves as consultants, lecturers, or the like. But no one born today is the next multi-best-selling author. That job won't exist.”
(Just by the way, he also makes interesting comparisons of Kindle e-books and the iPad and their respective effects on developments as the value of books drops to bugger all.)
The bright side? Adams' theory affords another reason, a good one, not to work on Free Lunch, my perennially nascent novel and source of nagging guilt that I'm not working on it, something that interferes with the business of getting on with my life as a freelancing lad about town.
Some dimensions are darker than others
There are rogues, and there are rogues. There follow reports of close encounters with two very different species of actor in the current Thai political maelstrom:
Squeakish-clean candidate for office.
Useful additions to the many perspectives on the troubles? Colorful, anyway.
Man for an age
Recent Posts
- 1) Godwotterous writerly brain syndrome 2) Blaming your tools, looking for magic programs
- Some good things to do with an Internet addiction
- Mayan malarkey, reasons to relax in 2012
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