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

[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.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

*one-lunged, short-sighted Welshmen*

I have GOT to read this.

[sovay]

I have GOT to read this.

It is a great story. I got one of my most useful metaphors from it.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link! It's a good entry. I think Martin may have that collection, I'll check tomorrow. (Unrelated, but I found a copy of Between Silk and Cyanide today. I remembered discussing it with you a while ago, so had to take it out.)

Hope you've managed to sort out your computer woes.

[sovay]

I think Martin may have that collection, I'll check tomorrow. (Unrelated, but I found a copy of Between Silk and Cyanide today. I remembered discussing it with you a while ago, so had to take it out.)

Awesome. Enjoy them both!

(My favorite Le Guin is her collection Orsinian Tales (1976), which are fantasy only because the small Central European country of the title never existed in our history, which didn't prevent it from being pulled into World War I and winding up behind the Iron Curtain, among other twentieth-century fates. "Brothers and Sisters" also has a claim to being my favorite story of hers.)