Lapses

Haven't been posting much. Partly because I've been busy after the Boston trip. Not only with catching up on the work I didn't get done while gone but with trying to respond to all the great feedback I got on the work I presented while there. So posts have been sparse. I won't promise there'll be more in the next while, but I am aware I've been a mostly-absent blogger.

Translating life into celluloid

Spent most of yesterday shooting interview segments for a project we're working on (furiously, since it's due to be finished ASAP!)

I played the part of interviewer, which was a lot more fun and interesting than I thought it would be. Waking up Friday morning, I wasn't really looking forward to the day. I was a bit nervous about the interviewees - both of whom I'd never met, only chatted to via email - and I was really hoping we would get the footage we wanted out of the session.

I was also nervous because the last time we taped a segment for this project, there were several logistical hiccouphs, and I didn't want to go through those hassles again.

It certainly didn't help that the first thing my boss says to me when we get there is that one of the interviewees called another project member (who isn't even closely involved in the project anymore) to say that he wasn't coming. I was a bit annoyed, since I'd sent the guy an email at the beginning of the week, and called the day before to confirm, only to have to leave a message saying call me if there are any concerns. But he didn't call me - he called this other guy who wasn't even going to be there for the shoot!

And finding out I was down to two interviewees instead of three made me even more nervous that I wasn't going to get all the footage I wanted.

I'm really glad the cameraman we regularly use is well experienced, because he often has some really good ideas for getting what we want out of any taping. Yesterday was no exception. In fact, at one point I had to laugh because he threw out this great question, which yielded a really good answer from the interviewee that will be perfect for the project!

When I complimented him on the question, he looked a bit puzzled then told me he hadn't made that question up - it had been on my question list all along! Sure enough, I looked through the list again and realized I had indeed written that question. And it was a damn good one. Fancy that! Guess that's what happens when you write the questions months in advance of the actual taping...

Now I just had to wait for our camera guy to sort through the footage, clean it up a bit, and then we'll select the parts we really want to use.

Disappointed but not surprised

Disappointed at the Flames loss in double overtime of game 6 to be eliminated from the playoff race. Not surprised. They've been playing hot and cold all year and really need to get their away game under control. But there's always next year...

Maybe now I'll get more work done... though this elimination comes just before soccer season starts, which means weekends full of games...

Hot Fuzz

My daughter tells me this sounds like the name of a Killers album, so she got confused when I first told her we'd gone to see it.

Since I loved Shaun of the Dead (I still need to figure out a way to write a paper on it... maybe next year's PCA...), I figured this movie might also amuse.

It certainly isn't the same movie, but there's enough shared talent between the two that if you like Shaun of the Dead, you're bound to like Hot Fuzz. But if you found the dark humour of Shaun of the Dead too much, or even bordering on too much, then you might not like Hot Fuzz.

The movie is darkly humorous. There were several times that I found myself laughing while thinking "I really shouldn't be laughing at this" but the humour was enough to overcome the internal censor and we laughed through the movie. But like I said, you gotta have a dark sense of humour. Take the movie too seriously, and it crosses over from funny to horrifying.

Learning curve...

I'm sitting here utterly puzzled by an email that my boss just sent me. He and our communications guy are talking about the webpage where all the stuff I'm creating will be hosted. That's fine. And as far as I'm concerned, they can chat all they want. I don't really care about the details of the web design. I just create and "manage" the content.

BUT, they're asking for my input. And I've never put together a webpage before (I really don't think playing with Blogger's templates counts) so I really don't feel like I'm qualifited to say anything. If I'd actually made a webpage, I'd jump in with my opinion, but I don't really have the time to learn that skill right now.

I've already learnt four new software programs for this job - all cool, and I'm glad I know how to use them, but still time consuming - and I don't think I have time to learn web page design... even by template.

We're already on a time crunch with this project because it got delayed and we had to ask for an extension from the funder just to try to scramble to finish it.

And because we're in a time crunch situation, I've been asked to convert some art work to flash for the web page. How'd I get myself roped into this, you ask? Well, in the past we've used another guy to do it, but he's backed up, and since I have the software that can (should?) be able to do this (it was part of a package that I haven't yet used), I'm going to give it a try once I get the artwork. But that will make software package #5 to learn.

Now, of all the people out there, I'm the last person to balk at learning something, but I'm starting to get some kind of strange ennui, a kind of software-learning fatigue... Wish me luck figuring out an answer to this email...

LETS GO FLAMES!

Probably the best compilation video I've seen to date.

Travel Notes

Back home. Nice to sleep in my own bed. As wonderful as the best host can be, it's always better to be home.

My friend AK writes these wonderful travelogues anytime she goes somewhere. I can't say I have the same gift. (Perhaps she'll write one when she moves to her new fabulous job?) But there were a few moments to ponder.

While waiting by the baggage carousel - between Immigration, which we'd just passed through, and Customs, which we had yet to clear - we had the following conversation:

Daughter one: "Okay, I just heard someone say the word 'purgatory'"
Me: *laugh*
Daughter two: "What's purgatory?"
Me: "It's the place where you wait to go to heaven or hell."
Daughter two: nods in understanding

At one point in a very long security line, I distinctly heard someone whistling the circus tune, you know the one, the calliope speciality... made me giggle.

Pop quiz: What's worse?

A little kid who kicks the back of your seat for the entire flight because they don't know any better?
Or a really tall man who constantly kicks the back of your seat because he can't comfortably fit in coach?

Whew!

So the grad conference is over!

For the most part, I'd say it was a success. There are always things that you wish had gone better, but most of the things that I wasn't happy with were the kinds of things that you can't do differently because they depended on the people-factor that you don't have control over.

Looks like we'll probably do this again next year... though I'm not sure if I'll be of use to them or not.

I thought tomorrow was going to be the hard one...

Today was one of those days that you can't wait to have end. It feels like nothing has gone right, which is frustrating in itself, but when you're not on home turf, there's no place to really retreat to so it's hard to recuperate.

It's been a combination of illness, bad transit connections, bad phone connections, technology that's not working, and a sense that I'm just all alone in all of it.

At times like these, all you can do is duck your head, keep going, and pray for sundown... Let's hope the conference tomorrow goes smoother than today!

This is the best part of it all

“It’s interesting that science fiction emerges right at the time when science and literature are diverging”

Yes. Certainly. This is an interesting observation. But aside from an interesting throw-away kind of comment that one might insert into some kind of literary cocktail party chatter, what are the implications of this observation?

And more importantly, WHY did science fiction emerge right at the time when science and literature diverged? I hadn’t really thought about the why of this question till tonight, when I had a couple of 18th century specialists point out that literature and science was certainly alive and well in the 18th century, long before the end of the 19th when science fiction is supposed to have emerged.

Now it’s true that Frankenstein and The Last Man might be legitimately called science fiction, but it strikes me that there is a difference between those novels and the ones of say H.G. Wells and his followers. I’ll try to describe some of those differences in what follows.

I don’t want to get into a discussion of genre, but I did spend much of the bus ride back to the hotel after this question came up over pizza pondering why science fiction did emerge right about when science was trying to distinguish itself from literature. (I think it’s safe to propose that it was science that did the leaving in this relationship, even if both agreed that it was time for it to go.) In the late nineteenth century, science certainly was trying to distinguish itself from literature, mostly because it saw the activities of literature as being too close to its own 18th century roots, where scientific arguments were often based on metaphysical arguments. In the 19th century, there’s a return, or a real embracing, of Baconian principles of empiricism and proof as the bedrock of scientific advancement. (I’ll leave aside Popper’s complication of empiricism and hypothesis for now since I don’t want to tangle with the philosophers and he comes along later anyway…)

So one of the things that scientists in the 19th century are trying to do is to distance themselves from metaphysics and philosophy and create disciplines that can stand rigorous experimentation. (Not that many of the nineteenth century scientists were rigorous – just look at scientific race theory of the period!) But that doesn’t seem to me to offer an explanation of why science fiction arises during this period.

One possibility that occurs to me is that science fiction was a kind of apologia for science, a way of explaining it to the layman, now that it was becoming a specialized set of disciplines that no longer catered to the everyday person in plain language. The generation of jargon, and emergence of specialized scientific societies that spent more time conducting internal meetings than publishing their results for a lay audience tended to give science the appearance of secrecy. Some 19th century scientists like Sir Francis Galton even encouraged such secrecy and imagined scientists as a superior category of social being, almost priest-like in their power to explain the world.

I suppose science fiction is in some way an apologia for science, but so often in the science you find in say Wells, there’s less cheerleading and more cautionary tale, with narrators who stand outside the scientific establishment trying to understand it. I’m particularly thinking of the Island of Dr. Moreau here, but even something like The Time Machine or some of his short stories like The Star might even be appropriate texts for this purpose.

In the case of these kinds of texts, the engagement with science presents the reader with a set of consequences if a particular scientific discovery or trend is followed through to one conclusion, and it leaves the reader to decide whether or not this would be a good thing to happen in the future or not. There’s lots of science fiction that does this, particularly in the subgenres of dystopia/utopias – think 1984 or even Brave New World for particularly potent examples.

But even so, why is the science still a big part of these texts? In The Time Machine for example, the whole difference between Eloi and Morlocks is a comment on a growing division between leisure and working classes. But then why is there so much more to the text? Why the descriptions of the other trips? Why the fairly involved description of the far future in which the sun is dying? If the text is supposed to just be a criticism of contemporary (19th century) social dynamics, why the rest of the physics? I think part of the answer lies in a similar text – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – and how it visualizes the same situation of workers below and leisure class above.

But I’m still left asking the question, why now? Why does science fiction emerge just as science and fiction begin to diverge as categories?

It may just be that I’m partial to “technology” as an answer because my work is so involved with technology, but I’ve gotta wonder if it’s more than just science that’s at work in the emergence of science fiction. Perhaps it should be called “techno-fiction” or something like that, since it strikes me that there’s a different set of technologies at work in 18th century science than there is in 19th century science, and perhaps it’s the technology that’s at the heart of the difference between literature and science in the 18th and 19th centuries. After all, when Lang imagines this divide between working and leisure classes, he does it specifically through the context of machinery and a robot.

But to get back to the distinction between the centuries, I’m not saying there’s no technology in the 18th century – of course not! Shelley’s creature couldn’t come to life without the practical apparatus that puts the science of electricity into a format that can be exploited to make people’s lives easier. (I realize this is a pretty bare bones definition of technology, but I’m more interested in technology’s proximity to techne than to machines)

Technology certainly grows during the nineteenth century, but the way that it grows isn’t particularly spectacular. I’ve read theorists who have wondered at the relative lack of scientific fervor surrounding the Crystal Palace exhibition in the middle of the century, but I think what might be missing in such an argument might be the global implications of technology development that go beyond the boundaries of the center of the British empire. At home, technology perhaps wasn’t very spectacular. But reading through a list of inventions of the nineteenth century, I’m struck by how many of them could fall into the categories of transportation and telecommunications. Both are kinds of technologies that make the world a smaller place and bring us in close proximity with people who are very different from ourselves.

Now this is nothing new for the British; they’d been running roughshod over the rest of the world for a long time already, taking over large sections of land inhabited by other peoples. But when you’ve got a far flung empire that takes months to traverse, very few ordinary individuals come in contact with that far flung world. The empire is all just very theoretical – an “out there” that has no relevance for everyday life. But with the perfection of steam locomotives or the invention of the telegraph, it becomes much easier to connect to far away places. It’s no coincidence that Around the World in 80 Days is produced at the end of the nineteenth century!

I also think it’s no coincidence that the “invasion” narrative becomes popular shortly after the emergence of science fiction as a clearly identifiable genre. Technology is able to present science through a visual representation of the object – the machine, the gadget, the marvel – while the technologies that are being produced provide more and more people with encounters with strange and unfamiliar objects, people and places. Remember, although photography has its roots at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it’s only in the final decades with Eastman’s development of film to replace the photographic plate, that the medium really takes off and becomes a practical method for recording, including travel records and its use by ethnographers and anthropologists.

So I’m thinking that science fiction emerges just when science and literature begin to diverge because the professionalization of science presents itself in part through the marvels of technology. Scientists are able to secure their position as arbiters of a new form of knowledge – distinct from literature, history, philosophy, or other disciplines they may have associated with in the past – because they were able to embody that science in technology. In the period, the technologies that were most prominent were those that helped the expanding empire attain its goals of increasing its reach. But these also brought the English into closer proximity with the non-English occupants of those colonies. So there’s a general anxiety about the shrinking of the world that these technologies are bringing into being.

We thus end up with the “science and technology” phrase that seems so prevalent. When was the last time you heard someone talk just about science after all? It seems more and more that technology – the practical application of science – is inseparable from that science. When we want to distinguish between science-technology and science that is free from practical application we call the latter “pure science” as if technology adds a taint that science needs to free itself from. But no one does talk about “science” as a stand alone term. It is either science-technology or pure science, but no longer just science.

That’s one of the reasons why I think technology is actually the thing that drives the development of science fiction in the nineteenth century. There is something about the practical application of science (embodied in technology) that ignores the softer side of it, the social implications of those developments, and it is those social applications that science fiction seems to want to engage with. Through literature, the ethical and social implications of science, and its technologies, can be communicated with the general public, presented to them to debate their relative merits and to perhaps even though such contemplations, form the future trajectory of further scientific developments. Maybe that’s why science fiction emerges just when science and literature are diverging. Because what’s going on as science diverges from literature is that it is becoming embodied in technology, and maybe this embodiment means that there’s a lost opportunity to think about science as before, in a metaphysical way. Maybe science fiction offers the opportunity to look beyond the technology that science produces to examine some of the larger problems surrounding it. Maybe it’s not the very best answer, but maybe, just maybe, it’s a start.

Sometimes the technology ain't so hot

So as you might have figured out by now, I'm not at home. I've returned to Boston for a whirlwind of conferences, meetings, and other bureaucratic bits and pieces.

In the six months I've been gone, the MBTA has managed to make bus riding an even more unbearable experience than it used to be. How? By incorporating new technology.

They've produced a new "charlie" card that you pretty much need for any kind of getting around the city. They used to just have them for the T, but now the buses are all converted. You can still pay cash, but you can't transfer, so if you're going any distance, you need one of these cards. Problem is, buses are built different than subway stations.

At a subway station, if you're behind somebody whose card isn't scanning, you go to the next turnstile and presto! you're in. In a bus, there's only one entrance.

Yeah, you see where I'm going here... so some guys pass won't swipe means the rest of us are still standing outside the stupid bus waiting to get on. On top of that, the card swipe is also slower than the old bus pass swipe, or the passing over of a transfer.

Before, at some of the busier centralized stops, they would open both front and back doors, and you could show a pass or transfer to get on through the back doors. That way you load passengers twice as fast. That's not possible now, and even through the one door, things are slower because the cards don't scan well. I've seen it happen a handful of times in four bus rides, so you know it's happening all over.

When it gets bad enough the driver just waves the person through. I wonder how much money the MBTA is losing in equipment malfunction after they obviously spent a significant chunk of change converting the whole thing over?

Dilemma

I like visiting other places, and I like seeing people I like, but I hate the process of travelling. What's a girl to do?

Mostly I dislike air travel. I like it for the same reason as everyone else - the speed - but I dislike the lines, I dislike the strict requirements to have all my necessary paperwork all lined up, and I don't like the time in the aircraft. Too much close comfort with strangers. Even when travelling with family, there's just still too many strangers intruding into my space with their noise, their kicking the seat (how can you tell there were kids on the last flight) and yes, even their smells.

But I like attending conferences. And I like the fact that I'll get to see friends. But the process of getting here always makes me nervous, annoyed, and usually leaves me feeling ill.

It doesn't help that Boston is uncharacteristically cold for April and will remain so the entire time we're here.

So it's a dilemma for me. I hate travelling, but generally like being other places. Unfortunately, to get to other places, you gotta travel...

Patience is a virtue

So about three weeks ago, we started seriously shopping for a second vehicle (we'll have to return the truck we borrowed soon). We went down to the dealership, saw the model we liked in the actual showroom, and put a deposit on it.

Then we went home to decide if we were going to buy or lease it. Both options offered the same interest rate, so it was a matter of figuring out what was the best taxation scenario for us - it will be a work vehicle some of the time.

The salesman called us every day, and I told him the same thing every day for several days "we're still thinking about it".

When we finally decided, I called him. Turns out patience in making this decision was a good thing. In the time while we were thinking, the manufacturer dropped the lease rate by 2% and the federal government announced a $1000-2000 rebate on all energy efficient vehicles sold, starting that day.

Nice, eh?

So we're paying much less for the lease as well as getting a rebate from the government to encourage us to buy this car. How cool is that?!

And the car? One of these


(no, that's not my house - it's a stock photo, but it is the same model and colour as the one we bought)