technorati: fundamentalists, transexuals, SB200
They are exchanging e-mail with a woman who has a remote cabin available in central Vermont... (where) there is no electricity, Mr. Harris said, just propane power and a wood stove.Emphasis mine. In addition to the crypto-fascist quality of this statement, it reminded me of the dialogue in "Five Easy Pieces," where the aggro dyke hitchhiker announces she and her girlfriend are going to Alaska:
"We want to be in clean country with like-minded people with access to clean food," Mrs. Harris said.
BOBBY: Where are you going?
PALM: Alaska.
BOBBY: Alaska? Are you on vacation?
TERRY (sullenly): She wants to live there, because she thinks it's cleaner.
BOBBY: Cleaner than what?
PALM (to Terry): You don't have to tell everybody about it. Pretty soon they'll all go there and it won't be so clean.
BOBBY: How do you know it's clean?
PALM: I saw a picture of it. Alaska is very clean. It appeared to look very white to me... Don't you think?
BOBBY: Yeah. That's before the big thaw.
PALM: Before the what?
Americans can be blamed for many things, but the perpetuation of Allen's zombie-like career is one atrocity for which we refuse to be held accountable. It is Europeans who are providing much of the money for these projects, Europeans who are welcoming the director to their communities, Europeans who are marching through the turnstiles in support of Allen's interchangeably neurasthenic films.I've written before about my despair over Allen and his career. Queenan gets it about right. I couldn't last through Allen's last successful film, Match Point, and I only stayed through several others out of morbid curiosity over how bad they could be.
technorati: Woody Allen, cinema, film criticism
In a word....the Father-Daughter Purity Ball is about Daddy being his daughter's knight in shining armor until her earthly prince comes for her. Our daughters are beautiful and I suspect we may have occasion to meet many would-be princes who would sweep them off their feet. If their Daddy doesn't teach them to stay pure in mind, body, heart and soul....how will they know which one the Lord has chosen for them?Egad. And Colin Morton pointed out the poor choice of words in the NYT's tagline for their article:
At the Purity Ball, fathers and daughters unite to make public pledges of sexual abstinence until marriage.So romantic!
A twirling mass of white lace surrounded a rough wooden cross as a troupe of young women danced in a circle looking like porcelain dolls come to life.Good Christ, what are these people on? Of course, they has a website, which contains this strange passage:
Then Randy Wilson and Kevin Moore hoisted swords in the air and a ballroom full of 149 fathers and daughters walked beneath them toward the cross and laid white roses at its base. The swords symbolized the fathers' commitment to battle for their daughters and the roses symbolized the daughters' commitment to God to remain pure.
Then Wilson announced, "Let the ball begin."
The Father Daughter Purity Ball is a memorable ceremony for fathers to sign commitments to be responsible men of integrity in all areas of purity. The commitment also includes their vow to protect their daughters in their choices for purity. The daughters silently commit to live pure lives before God through the symbol of laying down a white rose at the cross.Yes... They live in a fantasy world where women are still chattel and cannot legally sign anything, so the men sign the documents and the girls "silently commit" to the deal.
(The family who started the event) say most in the mainstream media see their family as a fundamentalist freak show.You think?!
technorati: fundamentalists, Colorado Springs, celibacy
Woebegone
His voice is just a whisper, but amplified by the microphone, it rolls out over the audience, low and mellifluous. What isn't soaked up, by the sellout crowd and the velvet stage curtains, resounds warmly in the auditorium. They've been waiting for him. Standing in the wings during the early parts of the show as a klezmer-bluegrass band plays, he can feel the audience's tension. They'll smile widely at the bands, laugh generously at the skits, and give a big hand to everybody. But they don't come for the country-polka-shapenote singing Prairie Grass Girls. They will never buy an album by the delta-blues-Appalachian-jazz Hep Cat Swinging Cowboys.
They're waiting for this, his monologue. When he utters the first words -- which rarely vary, the better to signal that the waiting is over and the main attraction has begun -- "It was a quiet week in our little town..." -- half the audience applauds for nothing, as if he were Liza Minnelli and the piano player had just plinked out the introduction to "New York, New York." Then they lean back and sigh with pleasure. This is what they came for.
What's he going to talk about this week? The same thing -- loneliness, frustration, pain and death; the despair of those who long to break away, and the smug self-satisfaction of those who don't have the imagination to. But because his stories are told gently, and because they're set in a Normal Rockwell small town, people think they're just cute stories. Look at 'em -- drinking up his words like cats licking up milk. Nostalgia for a small-town past most of these folks never knew. They don't live in small towns. They live in suburbs, and they go to yoga and Pilates and shop at Whole Foods. They have double masters degrees in English and Psychology, and half of them have their own blogs. Yet they want to spend two hours pretending, pretending with him, that they all live in a fantasy world where there's one stop light, one grocery store, one bar, where they've never heard of WalMart.
Now it's time for a laugh, a sure-fire one. Since they're doing the show from home base in St. Paul, there's one sure-fire laugh. As sure as Woody Allen could get a laugh making fun of his Jewishness, as sure as Richard Pryor could get a laugh with the n-word, he can get a big belly-laugh by referring to the only thing about his audience that is remotely ethnic. It doesn't matter what it's about, or even if there's a joke at all, as long as he can work a sentence around to ending with the word "Lutherans."
Man, they love that. How long has he been standing up here? Not today -- how many years? Since the early 80s, and the show has hardly changed. He knows why they like it -- it's reassuring, like a Starbucks or a chain motel room -- the same, week after week. Take that detective skit, it hasn't changed since 1990. The story never makes sense and God knows it's not funny. The audience barely even laughs. But at the end, they applaud just as warmly as they do for anything else.
He knows -- has known for a long time -- that they're not really listening. The detective who never solves anything, who never falls for the dame, who is sidetracked as easily as a character in an Ishiguro novel -- who is doomed to repeat, week after week, the same failure with the badly-voiced femme fatale, the same confusions over small things like keys and street names. Don't they understand -- It's modernism! It's Beckett! It's the theater of the absurd! The jokes aren't supposed to be funny. They don't get it; still, they laugh politely, and then the Bulgarian tango singers file onto the stage.
Same thing with his monologue -- nobody's really listening. What's he talking about? The Lutheran pastor has to perform the farmer's funeral using hymns from the 1890s that no one knows, with the second verse in Norwegian, so he stays up half the night translating hymn verses from Victorian English to bad Norwegian and pasting the words into Photoshop. That's the thing -- it's not like the town is truly stuck in the past. People have cell phones and cable TV -- the better to make them miserable. But his audience just laughs. They know he'll never really overturn the mise-en-scene. A teenage girl might get pregnant, but it won't be because she was raped. A sensitive boy might dream of leaving town, and he might actually do it, but he won't shoot up the high school with an AK-47. There are certain boundaries, and everyone knows what they are.
He's tried making things edgier, veering into politics from time to time. Before the 2004 election he expressed outrage, attacked the Iraq war, said he was ashamed about Abu Ghraib. His audiences applauded in the same warm way, and a columnist even compared him to Walter Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War, saying "If you've lost Keillor, you've lost America." But in the end it didn't make a bit of difference; Bush was re-elected anyway.
Since then, the stories are sadder. Fans of his work notice that he's killing off some characters. The owner of the tavern, the old Catholic priest, the organist at the Lutheran Church. The Norwegian Bachelor Farmers have been dying for twenty years; he kills another one today, and soon there will be none left. The young pitcher on the town's very minor league baseball team suffers a living death by never making it to the majors. If the pastor preaches a brilliant sermon, it is drowned out by the crying baby, the sound of the agnostic across the street mowing his lawn, and the high-pitched buzz of teenagers surreptitiously listening to iPods. And if people crack, their breakdown is quiet. The name of the place alone -- doesn't anybody get it? Would it be any clearer if he'd called it the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here-ville?
Well, he's not stuck like one of his characters. He got out. Not once, but twice. First he got a job on the New Yorker. He could have become the next Thurber, if only he hadn't followed the dictum to write about what you know. A few years later he was back, doing a radio show that has turned into this monster. Then after 15 years he said the hell with it. He ran off with a Danish woman and moved to Copenhagen. But the dark, endless Scandinavian winter was like being confined in the world's largest maximum security prison -- by comparison, winter in Minnesota is like a night in the drunk tank.
He gets a signal from the stage manager -- it's time to bring the monologue to a close. Somehow he has got the Lutheran minister in a car on the melting ice in the middle of the lake with the ghost of the Norwegian Bachelor Farmer whose funeral he just conducted. Since Lutherans don't believe in exorcism, the pastor politely asks the ghost to leave, but the ghost replies, "You're cold? I'll show you cold," and clutching at the door handle, his dead, white, already translucent fingers threaten to open the door and flood the car with ice water. And the pastor begins to cry and pray to God, "Don't leave me here. Don't let me die like this," so God in the form of the monologist sends an ice boat that has gotten loose from its moorings and is spinning crazily across the lake, and the pastor manages to jump into the hull of the ice boat as the car begins to sink. The pastor is taken by the ice boat not in the direction of town but, like Jonah, far away from where he wants to be, way to the other side of the lake, where he spends the night huddled on the shore with nothing to keep him warm but a fire which he started by burning the pages from his Bible, just the Apocrypha was enough to get it started, and since Lutherans don't recognize the Apocrypha anyway, nothing was really lost. The next morning he hikes around the lake and back into town, where he sits down to write another sermon to be delivered next Sunday, and the new organist will play a hymn, and everyone will wait expectantly as he rises to deliver his sermon, and everything will be just as it was.
technorati: Garrison Keillor, Prairie Home Companion, Lutheran, Minnesota
technorati: Phyllis Schafly, Washington University
I have a few closing remarks on the third (1965) New York Film Festival. Thirteen symposiums took place as part of the festival. Now I know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies: the taste for cinema. Hollis Alpert spent much time trying to persuade us that his reviews are really too intelligent, that cinema does not deserve the intelligence he is giving it...
A curious thing: Although I haven't seen any of them at any of the avant-garde and underground film screenings, all critics participating at the symposiums kept stressing their deep concern with the young and new cinema.
technorati: film criticism, Pauline Kael, Jonas Mekas
technorati: bath products, bloggers
This is so awesome! Instead of shooting a video the old-fashioned way, a British band performed in front of their city's ubiquitous surveillance cameras, requested the footage from cops and private companies using the British equivalent of a Freedom of Information Act request, then edited the footage to produce the finished product. Courtesy BoingBoing.technorati: surveillance, music
The food across all levels is fantastic in London. There has been an enormous change. But the one highlight I remember the most is this cheese sandwich. I was walking through Borough market with my 15-year-old son Nick and we bought one from the stall.The £3 toasted cheese and onion sandwich was "the creation of Bill Oglethorpe, an expert in cheese who works for the specialist suppliers Neal's Yard Dairy." So, not just something thrown together by some slob. Still a good story. But the headline makes it sublime.
I was knocked out by it. It was so delicious that we had to have another one. It meant I was more full than I should have been for lunch but it was worth it. It was so good.
It's unreal -- the earth just wallered up.But the best quote was from a Houston Chronicle story: locals are referring to the maw as "Sinkhole de Mayo."
technorati: mothers, flying baby, Michel Houellebecq
technorati: Beatles, San Francisco cafes,
technorati: advertising
 | Hey look, it's my friend Sara on the NPR home page, doing a "This I Believe" shot to promote her book Take This Bread. |
technorati: Sara Miles
I found this job description from a job posting someone sent me a couple years ago. It provides a pretty good summary of what a technical writer at a high-tech company does. I will annotate it with numbers like this (1) and give some more details.That's what I sent the poor fellow. It might have been enough to make him run screaming from the idea of ever being a technical writer. But somebody has to do it.
Outline (1) and write (2) user guides (3) for our software products, with a focus on concise language and meeting audience needs (4). Write detailed software installation instructions (5), including hardware and software requirements (6) and impact analyses (7). Convert (8) user manuals to online help, editing content as needed (9) to meet the standards of this documentation model. Quickly (10) deliver shorter documents, such as knowledgebase articles (11) and compatibility fact sheets (12), to support internal clients (13) like the Technical Support and Sales departments. Edit and proofread material written by other Documentation team members. (14) Work with Analysis and Design team (15) to examine and understand new product features. Work with Education (16) & Services (17) in the development and production of training materials.
1. Some tech pubs managers want you to produce an outline of your manual before you write it. It can be a useful step to make sure you know what you're doing. Fortunately, the outlines of most software manuals are the same: (I.) How to install the software. (II.) How to configure the software, and how to configure your existing environment to work with it. (III.) How to use it. (IV.) Reference section.
2. Writing -- or "authoring" as people sometimes say -- is usually done in FrameMaker, though some companies use other tools. If you don't know FrameMaker going in, they'll ask if you have done complicated publishing stuff with other software, and this is where you'd mention your expertise in Quark Xpress or PageMaker or something. Writing means filling out the outline you wrote in (1).
3. User Guides. Depending on the size of the product, there are sometimes separate installation manuals, performance guides, troubleshooting guides, etc. etc. People who are just learning the tech writing trade are often given either Installation Guides or Release Notes to do before they let you dig into the other stuff. Release Notes are the "read Me" file that you're supposed to read before anything else. It often contains a lit of "known issues," i.e. bugs they couldn't fix before they ship the software.
4. Meeting audience needs is an important concept in technical writing. You always think about things from the perspective of the audience, i.e. the reader of the manual and the user of the product, and *not* from the perspective of the engineer who gave you the dope on how everything works. In fact, this is really the main thing a technical writer does: translate what the engineer said into something regular people can understand.
5. Installation instructions -- I talked about this already, but I wanted to mention that this sometimes means writing the same instructions several different ways, depending on how many "platforms" (or different combinations of hardware and software operating systems) the company says its software runs on. For example, installing the same software on a Windows system and a Unix system is almost always significantly different.
6. Requirements -- This also gets at the point I just made about platforms. Your manual might tell the customer "You must have installed the 1.5_11 JDK before installing this on your AIX system." See also no. 12 below.
7. Impact analysis -- I'm sort of guessing here -- This probably refers to the "cost," in terms of "overhead," of installing the software or various components of it. For example, let's say you installed Google Desktop on your laptop. You probably know that it uses a certain amount of processing overhead to index everything on your laptop's hard drive. Therefore it has an impact on the performance of your computer.
8. Most companies take a manual authored (there's that verb again) in FrameMaker and use another tool to convert it to another format for online help. The tool commonly used for this is something called Quadralay WebWorks, though there is another tool called RoboHelp that I've never used, but which you see a lot of companies using. The important concept here is "single sourcing," which means that the PDF of your manual and the HTML files of the online help come from the same source, your FrameMaker files. And you can see why this is important -- if you had the same thing documented in two places, that's one too many to try to keep in sync. So tech writing departments try to "single source" as much of their stuff as possible. On the other hand, this is sometimes more of an ideal than a practical goal.
9. Editing content as needed -- This might refer to copyediting, or it might refer to the fact that sometimes the automatic Frame-to-HTML conversion tool is not enough, and you need to tweak the HTML help files to make them look right.
10. Depending on how long it takes the engineers to develop a new product -- or a new version of an old product -- you might update a manual only once every 18 months. On the other hand, sometimes other departments want something lickety split, such as the two things mentioned next.
11. Knowledgebase articles. This is a generic term for "the technical information not found in a manual that is sometimes put online for everybody to read, and sometimes made available only internally, to help customers figure out how to do something." The reason a particular fact or procedure might be found in one of these articles and not in a regular manual is that these articles often document rather obscure behavior of the product that you don't want everyone who reads the manual to know about.
12. Compatibility fact sheets are the things, usually in several tables, that tell you that product A works with operating systems X, Y and Z, but only on Windows XP; and on systems X and Z if it's UNIX running a certain flavor of .... you get the idea. With large enterprise software products this gets very arcane and complex.
13. Internal clients, such as the aforementioned Customer Service, and Technical Support and Sales, mentioned here, are also readers of your work.
14. Other team members. Large companies sometimes have whole teams of writers. I work on a team of eight people plus a manager, and we're documenting the products of one division of a company that sells literally hundreds of products. There are, I think, more than 300 tech writers in the company of 35,000 people.
15. By the Analysis and Design team I suppose they mean Engineering, or maybe the people who give the requirements to Engineering -- in other words, the people who decide what the customer wants in the next version of the product.
16. Education. Large companies, and even small ones, have training classes in their products, and sometimes the tech writers contribute to the training materials -- which are totally separate from the manuals they usually work on. Only in the smallest companies -- like the one I worked at for the last two years that had just fifteen people -- are the writers expected to also write the training courses.
17. Services. Companies have "professional services" departments full of people who go to customers and install and configure the products *for* them, because no matter how simple and clear you make your manuals, the product is often too complicated to install and make work the way the customer wants it to.
Whew. If you got this far without wanting to jab pencils into your eyes, you may have the aptitude to be a technical writer. The next question is, how to get the skills. Since it's hard to gain experience doing things like converting FrameMaker books to HTML help without already being a technical writer, the main way you could make yourself interesting to a manager who might give you a shot is to gain experience doing analogous things. For example, if you've ever done a newsletter for a nonprofit group, a school, a community center or whatever, that involves several important analogous skills, even if you weren't using FrameMaker. If you've ever taught someone how to do a fairly technical thing, that counts for something. Look for opportunities to do the equivalent of creating a technical how-to manual. For example, does the school near your house need a simple how-to guide for its staff on using the email system? If you can find *anything* like this to do, it gives you a writing sample, which is probably the single most important thing you can bring to someone who wants to interview you.
OK, enough already. Best of luck.
technorati: technical writing
technorati: San Francisco, urbanism, South of Market
Make Nice
How They Scored
I Saw You, Ed. by Julia Wertz
(contributor)
Best Sex Writing 2006 (contributor)
Lesbian Camp Girls
Too Beautiful and Other Stories
How I Adore You
Sara Miles's
Jesus Freak
Bob Ostertag's
Creative Life
Liz Henry, Ed.
Wiscon Chronicles vol. 3
Andrew Zornoza's
Where I Stay
Sara Miles'
Take This Bread
A Radical Conversion
