A Charlie Brown Depression

I realized a few years ago that I'm subject to wintertime seasonal depression, and when I felt it coming on this year around Thanksgiving, I decided that exercising every day would help fight it. And sure enough, it is helping.

This evening on the treadmill, though, I was flipping channels as usual and happened upon the annual broadcast of "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Several years ago I wrote about how I loved "Peanuts" when I was a kid, but later became repelled by its unrelenting pessimism, which all too well captured what life was like for me as a child. To that I can only add the opening words of the script, which echoed tonight like the prelude to a recurring bad dream:

CHARLIE BROWN: I think there must be something wrong with me, Linus. Christmas is coming, but I'm not happy. I don't feel the way I'm supposed to feel.

I just don't understand Christmas, I guess. I like getting presents, and sending Christmas cards, and decorating trees and all that, but I'm still not happy. I always end up feeling depressed.

LINUS: Charlie Brown! You're the only person I know who can take a wonderful season like Christmas, and turn it into a problem.

Breaks my heart every time.

So long, Messers Suzuki, and thanks for all the cushions

Don't you hate the way the younger generation thinks they invented something they didn't?

There was talk at the conference of the ways in which the digital revolution has helped spread the teachings of the Buddha, once accessible to Americans only through pilgrimages to Asia.

-- from an L.A. Times story on a
recent "Buddhist geeks" conference which
"brought together bloggers, tweeters, scholars,
teachers and just plain Buddhist practitioners."

So much for the 100+ year history of Zen in America.

Summer of Infinite Jest -- 4

My internet reading habits have become governed by an RSS feed, which collects a wide range of stuff from various authors or publications, or on various topics, and which I try to skim through every day. When I find something I want to read at length, I use a widget from readability.com to save it to read later. Then every couple of days I copy all the latest articles from my readability.com collection into a single MS Word document and then print that out. Then I finally read it all over the next day or two, away from the computer. It becomes a sort of self-edited magazine.

Last night in Infinite Jest I reached the chapter which opens with the fairly inane telephone conversation between Hal and Orin Incandenza and then goes on to include four "documents" such as an insurance company email about a wacky construction site accident and an essay of sorts about the introduction, wide adoption, adjustments to, and sudden consumer rejection of videophone technology. These documents are all on different subjects, written in a different style, and it struck me that reading them in succession is not unlike reading my printed-out articles from the RSS feed.

Here we see the author's playfulness, and that's the main thing I took away. The second thing was his willingness to go to exhaustive length about a subject, such as the essay about the adoption and subsequent rejection of "videophony." Its author explains at great length, employing the level of detail that only a geek, such as a "Lord of the Rings" geek, could muster about his chosen subject, while recounting something which is fairly obvious on its face (no one who is not a narcissist or an attractive teenager feels very comfortable using a webcam). Because of this, the essay could probably be cut to a third its length and lose almost nothing. So I conclude that the level of detail is the whole point. It's an exhibition of what it's like to know everything about one little corner of the universe, and happily explain it all to everyone.

That, of course, is why Wikipedia is such a success. There is someone like that for almost every subject in the world -- not just the obvious fan-focused topics such as LOTR or Star Trek. With a little study, I myself might be able to rustle up a pretty good critical essay on the early films of Wim Wenders.

But before Wikipedia, we had novels. Moby Dick, with its exhaustive description of 19th century whaling, is the obvious comparison. But the best novels always give readers a sense that they're learning a lot of important and -- this is very important -- authentic things about something. Readers of Shogun are, by the time they finish the tome, convinced they could get along pretty well in 17th century Japan. Even my mother's 85-year-old husband said to me last month: "I know some Japanese: kimasu. Because I read Shogun." I thought to myself, Hmm, to go? Probably not... Then, remembering the book and the Japanese word which is repeated over and over, I said "You mean wakarimasu -- to understand." And he agreed, yes, that was it.

Today's fakes: internet vigilantes who entrap and humiliate

This is one of those stories I learned about very late. It started when I saw a piece of news on c|net, but that's the end of the story. To start closer to the beginning, it seems there's a vigilante group called Perverted Justice. Started by a geek who wanted to act out his feelings of rage against an alcoholic father (according to this 2007 Rolling Stone article on the group), they began online flirtations with men, claiming to be underage girls, then publicized the hapless men's pictures and chat transcripts. This was so successful (successful from their point of view) that they began partnering with MSNBC on the show "To Catch a Predator," turning their online stings into a reality TV show. The show resulted in the conviction of over 200 men for attempted sex acts with underage girls, even though there never were any underage girls, just adults posing as girls for the sheer purpose of entrapping would-be molesters.

If these tactics sound dubious to you, the D.A. in a Dallas suburb would agree -- he refused to press charges against two dozen men who were netted by these antics after one of the men who was ensnared (but who didn't even show up at the house of the supposed jailbait), a prosecutor in a neighboring locality, shot himself.

Okay. So along the way, one of the people who became angry at the tactics of Perverted Justice was one Bruce Raisley. He embarked on a campaign to publicize and embarrass the organization, leading the founder of Perverted Justice to retaliate by posing as a woman -- not even underage this time, but using the same flirtation tactics which had proved so successful -- and getting Raisley to leave his wife and show up at an airport with flowers ready to meet his internet love. The P.J. founder sent a confederate to take pictures of the hapless Raisley, and then posted them on its website with the taunt: "Tonight, Bruce Raisley stood around at an airport, flowers in hand, waiting for a woman that turned out to be a man... He has no one. He has no more secrets... Perverted-Justice.com will only tolerate so much in the way of threats and attacks upon us."

Well, that would piss me off, all right. And Raisley was so angry that he downloaded some software and launched botnet attacks on several websites, such as Rolling Stone and other publications which had reported P.J.'s trick on him. And today, to bring this to a close, Raisley was convicted of computer crimes and faces ten years in prisons and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Here is a more detailed story.

The Perverted Justice group (archive of stories about them here continues its antics. As far as I can tell, they've never been accused of a crime or suffered any negative consequences as a result of their activities.

King of Hawaii (the verb)

In researching my latest novel, I hit upon a gold mine of material just published by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit whose main mission is to monitor and report on hate groups. Among the articles they published in the September issue of their publication Intelligence Report is a list of leaders of the "sovereign citizen" movement, which is a loose group of people with a magical belief in an alternate legal system. The most amusing profile contains this information:

A former tool-and-die maker, the man who writes his name as ":David-Wynn: Miller" — or, as he amusingly says it verbally, "David hyphen Wynn full colon Miller" — came up with his "truth language" scheme as a result of a frustrating court experience in 1988, when he was going through a divorce. In short, all truth language sentences used in court filings must begin with the preposition "for," contain at least 13 words, and use more nouns than verbs to be effective (he has claimed that only nouns have legal authority). David Wynn Miller considers himself a "Plenipotentiary Judge" in the Unity States of the World, and has named himself as the King of Hawaii, a feat he claims he accomplished when he converted Hawaii into a verb.

That is awesome! And this guy is not even a performance artist. God, I love this country.

Triumph of the bourgeoisie: getting rid of the dark scum on your deck

A couple days ago the NYT had an article about someone who realized a classic upper-class fantasy: buy the house behind yours, and transform it into something that shows everyone the superiority of your taste.

Just to be clear what we're talking about, here is the photograph showing an interior view of the transformed second house:

That the person in question was a celebrity author, Douglas Coupland (among other things, he is credited with creating the phrase "Generation X") adds to the cachet of the project and makes it seem like an acceptable thing for a liberal to do. To clarify his intentions, here's his description of the house in question:

"It was just a mess," he said. "There was dog effluvia, nicotine dripping down the walls, water damage...."

Nicotine "dripping down the walls"? Man, your neighbors were real trash, weren't they? You sure did the world a favor by taking their house and turning it into some kind of overblown cartoon of 20th century architectural flavors rather than, say, creating a home for for a family (or, given the apparent size of the mansion, several families). But if people lived in it, they might smoke, or have pets, or disturb the "art" that Coupland has put up, or worst of all, interrupt what he has apparently been doing ever since being the renovation, and which he must be doing over and over and over again while reading this New York Times piece and viewing its slideshow of images, namely, masturbating.

technorati: houses, Douglas Coupland, decorating

A citizen of what?

Some conversations I've had recently, along with articles and interviews I've read, as well as the upheaval in the world media industry, has made me think more about democracy lately, and the relationship between media and citizenship. By citizenship I mean not whether or not one is eligible to carry a passport from any particular country, but the role one plays as a citizen of wherever you happen to be living.

This train of thought started when I interviewed Trevor Paglen earlier this year about his work mapping secret surveillance projects, military installations, and government agencies. He talked about how valuable investigative journalists were:

Investigative journalists are becoming so scarce; there's increasingly less and less funding for people to do real time-consuming, painstaking forms of research and journalism. And let's face it, when we look at the big news stories coming out of the world of state secrets in the last eight years or so, they were pretty much all broken by people who spent years, investigative journalists who spent years working on these stories. Things like NSA wiretapping, CIA secret prisons. And people who are in a position to do that work are becoming rarer and rarer, and there's less and less funding for that kind of work.

So the endangered status of newspapers means not just that we'll have to figure out a different way to get box scores in the morning, but that we'll have fewer people holding government, business and other institutions accountable for their actions or failure to act.

Then I saw this fascinating interview with San Francisco journalist Richard Rodriguez, who says it's not so much that the San Francisco Chronicle (to take one example) is dying, it's the myth of San Francisco that the Chronicle sold all these years.

Finally, there's this annoying piece by Pico Iyer in the New York Times, in which he brags that his life is better without a car or even a bicycle, much less his own laserjet printer:

I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media -- and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can't think of a single thing I lack. I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.

Later he makes clear two things: he hasn't divested himself of electronic possessions, for he exults in new releases by his favorite bands; secondly, "when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven't missed much at all. While I've been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or 'Walden,' the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started."

Great for his peace of mind. Of course most people want a simplified life, and if it means choosing between a stereo and a printer (although printers are cheap, and it just seems silly not to have one), then you have the advantage of feeling virtuous for (in his case) having to walk an hour to print something.

But I was alarmed at the note about how he reads a newspaper only once every three months. If everyone detaches like that -- sorry if this sounds corny -- who is left to defend democracy? Who is left to notice, and to protest, when a mining company plows a mountaintop into a fragile river, or when businessmen wreck an industry and profit from it? Or when the police or government agencies overstep their bounds, as they always will when no one is looking?

technorati: Pico Iyer, voluntary simplicity, living abroad

Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories

There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness:

Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee.

I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.

Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

Indian tech employee dies in fun team-building event

In one of the idiotic team-building exercises run by Western companies to foster fun and solidarity among their workers, Nokia-Siemens ran a pie-eating contest in their office in Guragon, India, leading to the choking death of a 22-year-old employee.

Such antics, and their unintended consequences, are the subject of the novel I'm just finishing up, Bangalored.

technorati: Bangalore, India, outsourcing

Could I say 'BoingBoingitude'?

I cracked up a couple of weeks ago as I read this NYTBR review by Lance Morrow of a new book by Bill McKibben, the patron saint of middle class environmentalism, in which Morrow coined a priceless new word to apply to the greener-than-thou notions of people like McKibben:

McKibben lives and teaches in Vermont, and his vision, for better and for worse, is suffused with a certain Vermontlichkeit.

LOL!!!1!! -- that is just the best thing ever. And I found another example of it on BoingBoing today, in a tale of a hip librarian who installed "Ubuntu Linux" instead of Windows on some donated computers. Her quoted post ends:

The Calef Library has two Windows PCs already so if people need specific software that doesn't run on Ubuntu, they can use those. I'd like to get them a Mac as well and then they can be the only library (to my knowledge) that is triple platform in the entire state of Vermont.

Oh, you go, anti-corporate warrior.

Come to think of it, BoingBoing itself, especially its avatar Cory Doctorow -- science fiction writer and former Electronic Freedom Foundation issue-staker -- who is known to become exercised over issues like corporate intrusion into private lives and, well, just dumb corporate behavior. (A couple years ago there was a satirical, and completely fictional, piece on the web depicting Doctorow phoning a clueless company and browbeating the poor customer service rep about one of his hobby horse issues -- completely hilarious, but I can't find it anymore.) I think we need another neologism -- BoingBoingitude? -- for the sort of default anti-corporate stick-it-to-the-man but-in-a-way-that-everyone-would-consider-cool positions taken in many BoingBoing postings.

Rampant geekery

Min Jung Kim, one of the more luminous SF bloggers and definitely one of the most gorgeous, posted this week about having gotten engaged -- over instant messenger. While this will break the hearts of countless lurkers, stalkers, losers and twinkies, Ms. Kim has insisted for many years on her core geekery and it's only to be expected. Congrats, M.J. -- whom I've never met, but who saw me read once.

And I continue to be fascinated with the Radio Forum, an outpost of Bay Area radio geeks obsessed with format changes, announcers, programming and so on. In another life I would have been on of these guys -- and I'm sure they're all guys -- with jobs in and out of radio, and obsessing about it when I'm not working in it.

technorati: radio, Min Jung Kim, geeks