The voices blend and fuse in clouded silence

[sovay]

Happy Bloomsday! I have no computer.

There are a couple of reasons that yesterday was outright awful until the evening, when rushthatspeaks and I went to see Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961) at the Harvard Film Archive (it is one of the best black-and-white films I have ever seen, meaning that it could not have been made in color; and the ghosts are uncanny, but Deborah Kerr is terrifying), but one of them was the way my laptop failed to boot for over an hour in the morning and only came back, slowly and waveringly, sometime after dark. This morning, it wouldn't come back at all.

I do not really feel like recounting the details of a day spent at the Apple Store, except that at one point I texted derspatchel, "I am the only person with a book in this entire store. Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air. I'm reading ethnography from 1912, but I feel like I'm conducting it a hundred years later." I had thought the problem might be that one of the fans in the computer had died, leading to overheating, but when the utilikilt-wearing employee at the Genius Bar (whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics) popped the back off, it transpired that my machine only has one fan, which was not in the specs. I may have to name it either George VI or Owen Pugh. In any case, there were tests run, the hard drive appeared to be fine, it was decided that the problem was software corruption and the machine was taken off into the back room to have its operating system razed and reinstalled.

The operation was a success and the patient died: the hard drive failed during reinstallation. The good news is, a replacement is actually covered by the insurance I bought three years ago August. (For once, paranoia rewards. I cannot, cannot afford to buy a new computer. I am not sure I could have afforded a new hard drive.) The bad news is, I am unlikely to get the machine back before Monday, and until such time I have really no access to my e-mail and no ability to do my job. I guess this month is my exercise in unplugged weekends. But at least I could write about the last one without resorting to pencil and paper. I just don't write that fast by hand.

Comments

[kenjari.livejournal.com]

Poor laptop. When you are financially situated to buy a new computer, I highly recommend finding someone affiliated with an academic institution, in order to buy on discount. (I'd offer to do that for you, but my current location makes that kind of cumbersome.) There's also the possibility of getting a refurbished machine - I got one back in 2003, and it ran beautifully for years - in fact, it still runs just fine, but it's slow for up to date software and such.
At least so much else seems to be going right lately?

[sovay]

There's also the possibility of getting a refurbished machine - I got one back in 2003, and it ran beautifully for years - in fact, it still runs just fine, but it's slow for up to date software and such.

I will keep this option in mind. I don't need the latest model. I'm not even sure I want it. I want a keyboard and a screen and the ability to communicate at a reasonable speed with the outside world, especially the part that employs me. I don't care that much about making videos.

At least so much else seems to be going right lately?

On the whole, it does seem to be.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

That's a *very* lucky break that it's still under warranty (... though it's a lucky break in the larger sea of an unlucky happening...)

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Truly. Thank gods for AppleCare.

Nine

[sovay]

(... though it's a lucky break in the larger sea of an unlucky happening...)

It is true that it could have been worse. But as the folktale tells us . . .

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Margaret Zemach's illustrations are delightful! And it's a very good point :-)

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

Aaiiieeee!

Can they pull all your stuff off the old hard drive? (I have a widget that does that if you need to borrow it.)

Nine

[sovay]

Can they pull all your stuff off the old hard drive? (I have a widget that does that if you need to borrow it.)

I backed the entire drive up myself, twice, before I took it in.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

< like >

[nineweaving.livejournal.com]

I backed the entire drive up myself, twice, before I took it in.

Excellent. Sometimes computers don't give you the chance. I'm glad yours did!

Nine

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

Good thinking. Alternatively, you could always save everything in Dropbox, in which case it is constantly backing itself up.

[schreibergasse.livejournal.com]

I am sorry that your day sucked balls. But vicariously very grateful that the thing was still under warranty.

(Who was Owen Pugh? I am not inclined to look it up in my present mental state.)

[sovay]

But vicariously very grateful that the thing was still under warranty.

Thank you. I do feel I was well served by paying out money I didn't have then instead of money I don't have now.

(Who was Owen Pugh? I am not inclined to look it up in my present mental state.)

One of the characters in Ursula K. Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969):

"Think a bit, Martin bach. What's this cloning for? To repair the human race. We're in a bad way. Look at me. My IIQ and GC are half this John Chow's. Yet they wanted me so badly for the Far Out Service that when I volunteered they took me and fitted me out with an artificial lung and corrected my myopia. Now if there were enough good sound lads about would they be taking one-lunged short-sighted Welshmen?"

"Didn't know you had an artificial lung."

"I do then. Not tin, you know. Human, grown in a tank from a bit somebody; cloned, if you like. That's how they make replacement organs, the same general idea as cloning, but bits of pieces instead of whole people. It's my own lung now, whatever."

fleurdelis28 and I were also talking recently about the fact that George VI had a pneumonectomy late in life. My computer turning out to have one fan where it really should have two, it seemed that either of them would make an appropriate namesake. If I named it after Bertie, though, I'd worry that it would see me fine through some soul-trying crisis and then expire, whereas after all this hassle I'd rather it keep going for as long as I can get. Owen is probably more appropriate anyway. I've never actually named a computer of mine before.

[margavriel.livejournal.com]

I'm really sorry to hear, and I hope that your temporary lack of computer doesn't make you feel too powerless.

Incidentally, on what did you type this post?

[sovay]

and I hope that your temporary lack of computer doesn't make you feel too powerless.

No, just cut off from every single project I was working on and deprived of the ability to listen to any of my own music.

Incidentally, on what did you type this post?

My mother's computer, which has limited utility for me.

[handful-ofdust.livejournal.com]

Agh! This is a fear we all have, I'm sure; it now makes me want to rush and back up mine, just in case. But on a selfish note, I'm so glad you saw The Innocents.;)

[sovay]

But on a selfish note, I'm so glad you saw The Innocents.

It was brilliant! rushthatspeaks called the sound design diabolically clever, which is really the correct adverb—right from the opening credits, the absence-black of the screen that is not darkness but nothing and a sweet, slightly husky child's voice willow-wailing; we are never outside the haunting. The ghost of Miss Jessel only sits staring numbly at her desk, but the soundtrack is sobbing, hiccuping with tears: the uncanniness is that disjoint. I don't think there's a single special effect in the film unless you count the montages and superimpositions (which are used only to suggest mental states, never to put over the visual affect of the supernatural) and the ghosts are some of the most believable I have ever seen. They are wrong in the right ways. They stare by broad daylight. Miss Giddens is more frightening than either of them. (She becomes the vortex of possession; her clothes darken and even her hair seems to change, which is some trick even in black-and-white. She does not live in the house any longer, she haunts it. She would be less awful if she were the restless dead.) And I love that almost nothing the children do is outside the range of ordinary play, especially between two very bright, very isolated children between whom have sprung up all sorts of private games and codes and rituals; they act out, they turn inward. That's the film's only real crossover with Britten's opera, which was my first adaptation of The Turn of the Screw—it is very clear from the music of the opera that the ghosts are real, but the children's behavior is ambiguous, apparent interactions may be no more than the coincidence of separate layers of time (the ghosts play on, endlessly repeating, trapped in the twelve-note variations of the theme), and the governess goes mad on her own dime. I liked finding out that the novella was strong enough to support two separate and powerful interpretations, even if one scares me and the other doesn't. This is the one that scared me.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to hear about your laptop woes, but very glad it's still covered and that you've got backups.

I hope it's soon back in your hands and with minimal further fuss.

I'm glad that The Innocents pleased you and helped improve your day.

ETA:
I'm reading ethnography from 1912...

If you don't mind my asking, which ethnography was this? (There was a time when I read a lot of ethnography, so I'm always curious if it might be one I'm familiar with.)

My condolences...

[obzor-inolit.livejournal.com]

Yet I'm glad you are being your observant self

whose logo is a sort of stylized Bohr model of the atom; I am amused that the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics *
Well, nuclear physics managed to invent the most deadly weapon yet known... and Einstein is the Genius Incarnate in the collective mind (I wonder who was it before him, maybe Edison? And yet before - maybe Charles Watt?)

Everyone else around me waits staring into their phones or the air *

Well, that depends of the phone (and one's use for it). Some people actually read e-books on their phones (and I admire them for it, one must realyy like reading to do it on a phone on subway). And my e-reader is happily full of vintage public domain books from Gutenberg.org

Re: My condolences...

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

Einstein is the Genius Incarnate in the collective mind

Yeah, when Cap didn't recognize the name "Stephen Hawking" in the recent Avengers, Coulson really should have switched the analogy to Einstein - but I guess it was part of the buildup to:

"Monkeys?"

"I understood that reference!"

[sovay]

Yet I'm glad you are being your observant self

Thank you . . .

Well, nuclear physics managed to invent the most deadly weapon yet known... and Einstein is the Genius Incarnate in the collective mind

Christopher Frayling makes just this point (which I don't disagree with) in Mad, Bad and Dangerous? The Scientist and the Cinema (2005), which I was reading before I left for D.C.:

In the same year as Margaret Mead's pioneering survey of schoolchildren's attitudes [toward scientists, 1957], Roland Barthes noted in his collection of essays Mythologies that Einstein had already come to stand—in the public mind—for the whole of science. Barthes was writing at a time when two hospitals were fighting for possession of the late great man's brain.

"Einstein fulfills all the conditions of myth, which could not care less about contradictions so long as it establishes a euphoric security: at once magician and machine, eternal researcher and unfulfilled discoverer, unleashing the best and the worst, brain and conscience, Einstein embodies the most contradictory dreams, and mythically reconciles the infinite power of man over nature with the 'fatality' of the sacrosanct, which man cannot yet do without."

Above all, Barthes concluded, "through the mythology of Einstein, the world blissfully regained the image of knowledge reduced to a formula." The single secret to the world. The philosopher's stone. The transmutation of base metal into gold. The world in a grain of sand. The only equation from physics that lay people actually know. The simple and beautiful e=mc².

Forty-five years later, Albert Einstein still has the highest recognition factor of any scientist of the modern era . . . Einstein's public image neatly combines the two great popular stereotypes of the scientist in one: the unworldly saint and the dotty sinner. Saint in the sense of the man who selflessly gave us a completely new vision of the universe, and who when he died in 1955 was still working on unified field theory—a theory of everything that would bind together the great forces of quantum physics, relativity theory, gravitation and nuclear power; a theory that would unlock the mysteries of time, space and the universe and in the process maybe solve the mystery of existence. Sinner in the sense of the man whose ideas inspired the ultimate horror—his first Time magazine cover superimposed his mature face on a mushroom cloud, with e=mc² written on the mushroom.

I don't know who the prevailing single image of the scientist was before him—Newton?

Some people actually read e-books on their phones (and I admire them for it, one must realyy like reading to do it on a phone on subway). And my e-reader is happily full of vintage public domain books from Gutenberg.org

Understood. But I was still the only person in the store with a dead tree!

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Pants. I hope this gets resolved soon. I'm glad you managed to back up.

The Innocents sounds like a wonderful film, though; I should watch that. It sparked off a Kate Bush song ("The Infant Kiss"), which will make a lot more sense after viewing.

[sovay]

I hope this gets resolved soon. I'm glad you managed to back up.

Thanks on both fronts. I don't think I would be coherent right now if I didn't have a backup. I'm upset enough about the posts I was in the process of composing which I am fairly certain won't have survived the crash.

It sparked off a Kate Bush song ("The Infant Kiss"), which will make a lot more sense after viewing.

Yes, it will. Also, you should just see it. I know it's on DVD from the BFI.

[selidor]

Thank goodness for backups. Thank goodness for valid backups.
/me anxiously looks at digital copies of thesis, adds a couple more on various extra continents for certainty...

the universally recognized sign for genius is still something to do with nuclear physics

Which I've always found a little odd in that the Bohr model got thrown out nearly a hundred years ago. It's like so many modern symbols: steam train is a railroad crossing, telephones are comfortingly clunky Bakelite prisms. (And yet, there was never a decent symbol for 'fax').
And as you quote, Einstein as the myth-symbol of 'scientist': yet the image is the shaggy-haired dreamer, more shaman than skeptic, trying to unite quantum theory and his own gravitational descriptions of the warp and weft of the universe. Not the clear-eyed bright young thing of the 1900s' Nobel-work and teasing out time's fabric. Perhaps we can't tolerate our legends to have been young, unless they die that way.

[sovay]

Thank goodness for backups. Thank goodness for valid backups.

I haven't tested all applications yet, but it seems all my files have come back in more or less the condition I left them: I am very glad of this. If I can just fix the prohibitive internet connectivity problems that prevailed before the crash (because my job is online and so are my preferred forms of communication with some people), I'll be a very happy inhabitant of the twenty-first century, for limited values of twenty-first.

Which I've always found a little odd in that the Bohr model got thrown out nearly a hundred years ago. It's like so many modern symbols: steam train is a railroad crossing, telephones are comfortingly clunky Bakelite prisms. (And yet, there was never a decent symbol for 'fax').

Maybe it's still too recent, or it went by too quickly and without resonating enough in the culture to become anything more than a symbol of its very specific time. I was reminded of the preface to David Jones' In Parenthesis (1937):

One other thing. It is not easy in considering a trench-mortar barrage to give praise for the action proper to chemicals—full though it may be of beauty. We feel a rubicon has been passed between striking with a hand weapon as men used to do and loosing poison from the sky as we do ourselves. We doubt the decency of our own inventions, and are certainly in terror of their possibilities. That our culture has accelerated every line of advance into the territory of physical science is well appreciated—but not so well understood are the unforeseen, subsidiary effects of this achievement . . . We who are of the same world of sense with hairy ass and furry wolf and who presume to other and more radiant affinities, are finding it difficult, as yet, to recognise these creatures of chemicals as true extensions of ourselves, that we may feel for them a native affection, which alone can make them magical for us. It would be interesting to know how we shall ennoble our new media as we have already ennobled and made significant our old—candle-light, fire-light, Cups, Wands and Swords, to choose at random.

Of course, by now the trenches of World War I have become as powerfully symbolic as the Tarot; so have gas and barbed wire. The atomic bomb was instantly iconic. I don't know off the top of my head what makes the difference between universal shorthand and temporal marker, but I would like to think that wars aren't a ncessary component.

Perhaps we can't tolerate our legends to have been young, unless they die that way.

I may type out the remainder of Frayling on Einstein for you. His argument is not so much that we can't picture our legends as anything other than venerable (although Darwin got it too: my favorite photograph of him is the one with his son where he looks like Bob Cratchit, but you don't see it very often), but that youthful Einstein with the dark moustache and desk job of his breakthrough days really doesn't fit the popular idea of the scientist, whereas by the time he has that time-warping myth around him and looks as though he's taken style tips on his hair from C.A. Rotwang, he is recognizable; so the image sticks.

It's a very enjoyable and a very well-written book; I don't even disagree with most of what Frayling says about the depiction of science and scientists onscreen. I just keep thinking I should write about the factor he seems to overlook: the persistence of certain archetypes not just because they are persuasive to people who don't gravitate toward the intellectual, but because they are appealing to people who do. You may know quite well that being a scientist doesn't mean being a crazy kind of alchemist with a fifty percent chance of turning into a fly or accidentally ending the world, but that character is still the smartest person in the room and much more sympathetic than the sober handwringers who tidy everything back into the status quo, muttering about things man was not meant to meddle with—I mean, given the choice, I know which one I'd rather be.