You are currently browsing the monthly archive for March 2005.
OK, finally, the blog is back in shape, more or less. For the record, I am a dimwit. Prior to doing a clean install of Movable Type, I did not . . .
* . . . read any sort of help file or other guideline that might have smoothed the process.
* . . . check to see whether the export file with all my entries contained indexing information. (I just assumed that it did. It did not.)
* . . . make a mirror backup of the whole site so I could rollback if necessary.
* . . . think to re-install plugins before importing the entries.
These are all things that I would have told someone _else_ to do if they asked me for advice. Why I didn’t do them for myself I can’t adequately explain, except to fall back on the “frazzled parenthood” defense, which I hate to resort to more than I must. But there’s something to it in this case — most of the upgrade activity took place in five and ten-minute blocks of time that I was hoping wouldn’t be interrupted by having to read _Ten Apples Up On Top_ for the fourth time in one day.
Though I am obviously not very clueful, I am clueful enough to know that everything went wrong because of user stupidity, so I have reason whatsoever to be bitter at Movable Type — though I was often tempted to be, and I can now see why it is that so many users fall back on the “lousy software” excuse when they’re the ones mucking up the works. There _is_ lousy software out there, to be sure, but MT ain’t it.
Anyway. Polytropos is now sporting the updated template, and thus a new stylesheet, but I’ve managed to get things looking pretty close to what they were like before. The background shading in the text area is the big exception, because it’s not as easy to do under the new template. I’ll figure it out eventually. I cleaned up the sidebar a little bit, and added a category listing.
As a result of the ill-fated upgrade, many internal links were irrevocably broken, so I just bit the bullet and switched to the newer (and more sensible) indexing system, wherein entries are archived with text names based on their titles, in dated subdirectories, instead of just with numbers. As a result _all_ links between entries became broken by definition. I have fixed all of them from the current year and for those entries linked under Highlights in the sidebar. The rest I’ll fix someday, maybe. This also means that all external links _to_ individual Polytropos entries are now broken. I apologize for this; fortunately it’s happening at a time when not too many people are linking to me anyway.
Also, for some reason, many older entries had their dashes and quotation marks global-replaced with question marks. This may have been a problem before that I just never noticed. In any case, there, too, I only fixed the Highlighted entries, and will get to the rest -when monkeys leap out of my- someday.
Oh, and as for that trackback spam — one of the ostensible reasons for performing this upgrade in the first place — it appears to have stopped, but not because of anything to do with the new version or the clean install. I discovered that in order for MT-Blacklist to auto-update with the latest spam database, you have to tweak a couple settings and change something in (I think) mt.cfg. And how, you ask, did I figure this out? _I read the instructions_. Stunning.
. . . we’re remodelling. Things will continue to look funny for a few days whilst I tidy up in fits and starts.
Content has returned. Old familiar sidebar content and styles will come along soon. Sorry for the hiccup.
UPDATE: Hurm. Archives appear to be nonexistent. Will have to work on that.
UPDATE: Turned off dynamic publishing ’till I can get it to work. But — ugh — reimporting everything means that individual archives now all have different numbers. Apparently it’s because individual archive numbers were interspersed between here and “Cerin Amroth”:http://www.polytropos.org, but since I imported the two blogs one at a time, they all have new numbers. This sucks royally
1. Trackback spam is just killing me these days. I want to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type, and it’d be nice to have a clean, new installation to tackle the problem from.
2. I really ought to switch to dynamic page builds, and that, too, might be easier from a clean install of MT. Doing so could screw up external and internal links, but I haven’t exactly been plugged into to the linkety-linkety scene of the blogosphere lately, so that’s not that big a deal.
3. I’ve got that itch I want to scratch — I haven’t toodled with MT in a while, so it’s due for some toodling. It’s the same impulse that makes me change email programs every couple of years for no reason whatsoever.
Ergo: I’m going to re-install MT from scratch and re-import the entries at some point soon. Depending on how the import goes (and how different the 3.x templates are from the 2.x ones) things may look very different, or not. In any case, do not be alarmed.
Let’s bust out on the realpolitik for a second.
So Europe wants to sell weapons to China, and the U.S. is raising a stink about it. It struck me that this is not a case of the world’s big brother setting a couple of other kids on the playground straight, but rather a case of the old guard trying desperately to hold on to influence in the face of a couple of rising powers.
Whether you see the EU as a nightmarish instance of Big Government or harbor a fondness for ol’ Europe because they all hate Bush as much as you do, there’s no denying that a united Europe is an economic force to be reckoned with. Sure, the U.S. isn’t going to get into a military tangle with them, but the economic rivalry itself could very well make them the next big threat to American hegemony (Charles Kupchan “thinks so”:http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200211/kupchan).
But I’ve still got my money on China. One point three billion people. There is no getting around that number. We have yet to feel the full extent of it on the global stage, because China is a big-ass boulder edging slowly down a shallow slope. But at a certain point its momentum will reach a tipping point, and it will start to roll, and then there will be no stopping it.
At this critical juncture the current U.S. government is running unheard-of deficits and has its military tied up in an ill-advised foreign occupation. While our diplomats appear to have shifted to damage-control mode, there is no denying that way, way more people hate our guts than did a few years ago, an outcome that was not inevitable, but required the deliberate squandering of goodwill and sympanthy engendered by the events of 9/11.
This has “end of empire” written all over it. And I’m not saying that triumphally. I have quibbles aplenty with our current government, but taking the long view, I’d still rather have us as the bully on the block than China, or even Europe. But that’s not the way we’re heading.
So I just noticed that NBC is going to air their “own version”:http://www.nbc.com/The_Office/ of the sublime British dark comedy “The Office”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/. Since I’m hard pressed to think of a way to either improve upon the original or translate it into Americanese, I’m rating this one a Rather Bad Idea.
Two rays of hope: Steve Carrell of _The Daily Show_ heads up the cast, and Ricky Gervais (the star creator of the original) has a writing credit for the pilot, which suggests a certain amount of collaboration and/or consultation.
Shallow imitation or brilliant reimagination? If anyone happens to catch it on Thursday night, let me know . . .
Following a tangent from “the previous entry”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2005/03/the_wizard.html …
The vast majority of the books I’ve read, I’ve only read once. And I have forgotten far, far more about those books than what I remember. After a few years, I can still recall whether I liked it, a general outline maybe, and some favorite characters or scenes, but not enough to engage in any conversation or analysis of particular depth. A few years after that, there’s little left but wisps.
Of course, you can get by on wisps of book-memory at cocktail parties. Heck, wisps have served me well enough both in the classroom and in front of it. But that’s just getting by — in order to really feel like I _know_ a book, I have to have read it more than once, and even then need to revisit it every several years to keep it fresh. I know plenty of people whose retention of book-knowledge is much greater — who can read something once and still call on it, in detail, much later. They’re the lucky ones.
What about the rest of us? If you can hardly remember a thing about a book you read a few years back, what does it matter that you’ve read it at all? It’s not all lost, of course. Even if you can’t summon specific memories, whatever book you read stays with you at an unconscious level. And the experience of reading a book may have been rewarding — emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise — at the time, which feeds somehow into who you are just like any other life experience that you remember dimly or have forgotten. But a book that stays with you is clearly something much more.
What if you were given this choice: Pick thirty books to read once, and that’s all you get for the rest of your life, or, pick ten books, but you get to read them three times apiece? I’d pick the second option. It wouldn’t even take much thought.
I think about this a lot more now that my reading time is limited and I’m getting old and crotchety. Any time I’m trying to decide what to read next, I consciously consider whether to read something new or revisit something old that I know I want to keep fresh. And it occurs to me that as the years roll on, the number of great books that I’ll want to keep in mental circulation by periodically rereading them will grow, and so the room for new books will shrink. (One can see how this process leads to the ease with which older generations perennially poo-poo the current literature as inferior to what they read when they were younger. They can’t afford the time to read it; easier to dispense with it.)
The situation is accentuated by rich books like _The Knight_ and _The Wizard_ that demand a second reading just to achieve a full appreciation of the work in the first place. That’s not a bad thing, though — such books are often the ones that are most worth keeping in your mental circulation in the first place.
Another complicating factor is that if you wait too long for a second reading, it really counts more as another first reading. Sooner is better for a reread. Maybe the thing to do is reread something right after you’ve read it, or at least within six months or so. That’s a great notion in theory, but if your book backlog is like mine, and if, like me, you know of things on the horizon that you’ll want to read as soon as they come out, it’s pretty hard to pull off.
All this ramblings comes as a result of my urge to reread _The Wizard Knight_ right away. And I think I will — not because other stuff isn’t calling to me, but strictly as an experiment in bookreading. Can right away be too soon? I’ll find out.
I was a little hard on _The Knight_ in my “earlier comments”:http://www.polytropos.org/archives/2005/02/the_knight.html — and I’m not only saying that because the second volume, _The Wizard_, redeems the first so completely. I was just a little hung up on the Wolfeisms about it that annoyed me, and so didn’t dwell on the stuff that was good about it.
Somewhere in the first quarter of _The Wizard_ we actually get a fair chunk of _exposition_ (gasp!) and a plot that sticks to one event (the mission to the land of the Giants) for a good half of the book. Things splinter again after that, but come together in the end. Reading _The Knight_ you could never be quite sure if Wolfe was telling a fantasy story or was spinning some meta-tale riff on boyhood fantasies. With the second book the verdict decisively shifts toward “a good fantasy story,” and events in the first book look differently in retrospect as a result. But the whole thing is an awfully rich affair, so that’s not to say that there aren’t some meta-narrative riffs in there or other subtleties I haven’t even picked up on yet — just that that stuff doesn’t overwhelm the most important thing, a good yarn.
“Jim”:http://www.highclearing.com/ once told me that the key to understanding any Wolfe novel is figuring out the point when the narrator dies but doesn’t realize it. Things are a little clearer here: Sir Able dies and _does_ realize it, at the end of the first book when he kills the dragon. But in between the books he’s taken up into Skai (think Valhalla) and spends a good bit of time there. But his love for an Aelf drives him back down to middle earth, though he cames as a being from above forsworn not to use his full powers. In some ways he still is the boy-knight of the first book, because those years in Skai work something like a dream, and little time has passed for his friends on earth. All this makes his arc a heck of a lot more interesting. He’s still — if you set side by side all his decisions and step back and look at them — not all that bright, as he himself admits, but the twist on his fate makes his arc in the second book well worth following. I doubt I could have taken another 400 pages of Sir Able from _The Knight_.
But this is really an ensemble piece. Sir Able meets at least as many people in this book as he did in the last, and all the ones from the last one are still around, such that there are a dizzying amount of characters. And the animals are the best — Gylf, his loyal hound, Mani the talking cat, Cloud, his horse. All the way through I gave a shit about a good many of the characters, which is more than I can say about _Book of the New Sun_. They’re both the sort of works that you need to reread before you really have a handle on them. Maybe someday I’ll get around to rereading _New Sun_; _The Wizard Knight_ I’ll read again within a year, for sure.
More in-depth ramblings later, maybe, if anyone’s interested. Who else has read these books?
UPDATE: A quick peek at what the serious Wolfeheads have to say on a Gene Wolfe mailing list has me wanting to reread these books right away. The extent to which the characters and situations are tied into real-world mythologies is much greater than I at first supposed, and I have a feeling that what the books have to say about honor is probably more profound than I would have given them credit for at first.
Reread Wolfe, or start _Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell_? Decisions decisions…
I was pleasantly surprised by _The Aviator_. Sure, it was up for Best Picture, but all you’d usually hear about it is how it wasn’t Scorcese’s best, though maybe he should get Best Director anyway since he’s overdue. And sure, it’s not his best, but it’s head and shoulders above _Gangs of New York_. Certainly good enough to make me want to see it again. Movies, the cult of celebrity, aviation, technology, politics, business, mental illness: the film puts all these balls in the air and doesn’t drop a one. I was wondering what all the fuss about DiCaprio’s performance was about until the OCD started to kick in — and then I was so taken in that I forget to think about the acting while I was watching. The big crash scene was absolutely riveting, and I’m pretty sure the plane slicing through all those suburban California homes was a deft metaphor working on a number of levels that I’ll leave to the film students of the world to piece out. And since I knew precious little about Hughes’ life, I found most of the plot surprising/interesting/enlightening.
My one historical accuracy question: was the dialogue during the Senate testimony scenes taken directly from the transcript, or adapted?
