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Silicon chips make choices with stolen voices
My poem "The Gambler" is now online at Strange Horizons. It was written in November; its dedicatees are its inspirations and it is close to my favorite of the poems I wrote last fall. Certainly it's dark and icy enough outside still to feel germane.
I watched WarGames (1983) tonight for the first time since middle school; I don't care that it counts DEFCON in the wrong direction or if the real-life command center for NORAD does not so much resemble the bridge of the starship Enterprise, I never cease to be amazed at the fondness for a movie that childhood can hardwire in. It must have been one of my earliest exposures to science onscreen and furnished me with another offbeat archetype, John Wood's Stephen Falken. (Who I thought I was looking at, the first time I met George Dyson. The Pacific Northwest setting didn't help.) What strikes me now as strangest is the possibility that I may belong to the last generation that easily recognizes the technology on which the film runs—the alien hardware of acoustically-coupled modems and rotary payphones, never mind the rooms full of whirring supercomputers. When my father worked at Mass. General Hospital, one of the treats I was rarely allowed was to play in the computer room that belonged to the radiology department, which was chill and slightly dusty, loud with fans, and had panels in the floor, so that I could climb down underneath the banks of machines. He built the computer I learned to type on: black screen, green lettering; a dot-matrix printer with fan-folded paper, perforated and striped in pale green. This is early memory, but accessible to me. I know for a fact my brother remembers nothing before the toaster Mac. Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, they fought, and they flew, until suddenly—quite recently—they disappeared. I am not sure this theme of obsolescence and extinction was meant to turn quite so personal.
Which is where my final link comes in. Courtesy of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nineweaving: twenty history comics. You may never be able to forget Sylvanus Morley or Benedict Arnold again.
"It looks like someone has thrown a pair of bloomers into the machine."
I watched WarGames (1983) tonight for the first time since middle school; I don't care that it counts DEFCON in the wrong direction or if the real-life command center for NORAD does not so much resemble the bridge of the starship Enterprise, I never cease to be amazed at the fondness for a movie that childhood can hardwire in. It must have been one of my earliest exposures to science onscreen and furnished me with another offbeat archetype, John Wood's Stephen Falken. (Who I thought I was looking at, the first time I met George Dyson. The Pacific Northwest setting didn't help.) What strikes me now as strangest is the possibility that I may belong to the last generation that easily recognizes the technology on which the film runs—the alien hardware of acoustically-coupled modems and rotary payphones, never mind the rooms full of whirring supercomputers. When my father worked at Mass. General Hospital, one of the treats I was rarely allowed was to play in the computer room that belonged to the radiology department, which was chill and slightly dusty, loud with fans, and had panels in the floor, so that I could climb down underneath the banks of machines. He built the computer I learned to type on: black screen, green lettering; a dot-matrix printer with fan-folded paper, perforated and striped in pale green. This is early memory, but accessible to me. I know for a fact my brother remembers nothing before the toaster Mac. Once upon a time, there lived a magnificent race of animals that dominated the world through age after age. They ran, they swam, they fought, and they flew, until suddenly—quite recently—they disappeared. I am not sure this theme of obsolescence and extinction was meant to turn quite so personal.
Which is where my final link comes in. Courtesy of
nineweaving: twenty history comics. You may never be able to forget Sylvanus Morley or Benedict Arnold again."It looks like someone has thrown a pair of bloomers into the machine."
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Glad that poem's gone up there--it's a good one. I hope it's not too dark and icy in your vicinity. (We've still got power, here, but there's a tree down near our lines, as per my most recent post. Hopefully it'll get cleared before it becomes an issue.)
And thanks for the twenty history comics. You're the second who's linked me to them, proving that my friends list has taste. Odd taste, maybe, but taste. ;-)
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Makes you wonder what will be outcompeted next . . .
Glad that poem's gone up there--it's a good one. I hope it's not too dark and icy in your vicinity.
Thanks! At the moment it's blindingly cloudless; there's just enough snow on the ground to create the kind of mirror-white arctic wasteland that makes it hard to see. I still prefer it to yesterday, however, when the fifteen minutes it took me to walk to Wilson Farms were a miniature nor'easter—spits of rain, firework lightning, stinging gales of snow that blew down a freestanding stop sign—that ceased as soon as I got inside and had mellowed into balmy afternoon by the time I came out with my groceries. There were several seagulls wheeling overhead, crying. I would not have been surprised to learn that they had blown there from Boston Harbor.
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the fifteen minutes it took me to walk to Wilson Farms were a miniature nor'easter—spits of rain, firework lightning, stinging gales of snow that blew down a freestanding stop sign
Heavens. Well, I'm glad it mellowed in time for you to walk home. Tuesday night was middling nasty here--took rather longer to get home from the train station than usual.
I would not have been surprised to learn that they had blown there from Boston Harbor.
How many miles is that, if I might ask?
I'm surprised sometimes at how far inland seagulls will come.
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I certainly don't miss dot-matrix printers. And ah, I remember composing entire novels on a typewriter...
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Thank you!
And ah, I remember composing entire novels on a typewriter...
I used to write short stories and poetry on the Selectric that belonged to my grandparents. For me it was a novelty; my mother, however, remembers typing and retyping portions of her dissertation until she began to wonder if writing it out longhand in pencil might not be simpler.
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Nine
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I remember marking paper with a ruler to get the top and bottom margins because I didn't know how to do it on the typewriter.
I got my first computer when I entered grad school.
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And still I decided to see The Prestige the moment I read he was a supporting character in it . . .
(. . . and he turns up in at least one Callahan's novel, yes?)
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I'm amazed that you remember those bits of technology you do! You remember dot matrix printers and green-and-white perforated printer paper? You have a great memory :-)
In the late 1970s, we used to visit my grandmother in Lexington, Massachusetts, and we were friends with some kids whose dad worked at MIT. I remember seeing my first modem then--yeah, a rotary-dial phone, and you set the headset in a little cradle. Our friends showed us how they could talk with students at MIT on their dad's computer that way. It must have been like, oh 1978 or 1979. Amazing.
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No; I think the ending still holds. It's not only the computer, but all the people watching who begin to understand. And I wish there were members of my own species who had learned game theory as well as Joshua.
I'm amazed that you remember those bits of technology you do! You remember dot matrix printers and green-and-white perforated printer paper? You have a great memory
I remember the printer paper vividly, and the noise the print head made as it screeked across each line. My father was a mad scientist. There were bits of technology all over the house.
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Did your mother study literature--specifically, Eastern European or Russian literature? I imagine she did. Or the poetry of mystical experience, like say Rumi or something (am I right about Rumi? I'm wandering out of my depth...)
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She's a clinical psychologist, actually. It used to be when someone asked what my parents did for a living and I told them, there was a decent chance the reply would be, "So that explains it . . ."
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...come to think of it, it's my mother who studied Russian literature. But my dad is not a mad scientist
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"It's the one with the book of mica!" I didn't quite say it out loud, but then, no one would have heard me but the cats and the pigs.
One of my favorite places to go, these days, where I work, is the server room, big banks of black machines, sleek boxes stacked to above my head, showing red and blue lights. It's best in the dark, where the air conditioners, on full blast, even in the winter, keep it chill. There are white tiles on the floor, set a little above, the anti-static kind that I imagine must be the same as the Mass General floor.
I remember, now, the time we had a primitive IM conversation (the messages were more 2 minute delay than instant, then) with some kids from another school in the G/T program ... I think it would have been 1988. Wow. 20 years ago. I was in 8th grade... it feels both longer and shorter.
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"I'd be a mineral deposit, a ball of mica inside a rock . . ."
One of my favorite places to go, these days, where I work, is the server room, big banks of black machines, sleek boxes stacked to above my head, showing red and blue lights. It's best in the dark, where the air conditioners, on full blast, even in the winter, keep it chill. There are white tiles on the floor, set a little above, the anti-static kind that I imagine must be the same as the Mass General floor.
You are making me oddly homesick. I want to see that room again, if in any form it still exists.
Fathers and weird nostalgic places.
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And I've retained my fondness for War Games too (and when I first saw it I developed a crush on Matthew Broderick--he still makes me smile). Hope to get back to reading good poetry soon! For now, it's back to high school textbooks...
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Thank you! Whenever you surface from the textbooks, enjoy!
And I've retained my fondness for War Games too (and when I first saw it I developed a crush on Matthew Broderick--he still makes me smile).
I was fortunate enough to see him and Nathan Lane in the original Broadway run of The Producers (before it won its dozen or whatever Tonys, otherwise we'd never have been able to afford tickets). They were perfect.
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Thank you!