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I read Ernest Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River." The last I read of Hemingway was A Farewell to Arms in high school. I think. Maybe I just heard the title somewhere. If I read it, I don't remember any of it.

I'd heard "Big Two-Hearted River" characterized as an acme of efficient prose. It is very spare, but not as much as one would gather from Hemingway's reputation. I guess that's to be expected. But I anticipated more sterile prose than was in the story. One gets the impression from characterizations of Hemingway that his writing is arid and emotionless, but I think there really is something to this Iceberg Theory. There's a great depth of feeling in the writing, without that emotion being explicitly highlighted. Overtly, the writing concerns itself with what is happening in the present. It has a documentary character. The abstract, simile and metaphor, has little place here. I'm not sure I'd characterize it as efficient, exactly. It depends on what you mean by that. The story goes on in detail about the minutae of fishing, cooking, setting up camp. As description it is exhaustive. But the lengthy examination of these tasks is meditative, just as the tasks are themselves meditative for Nick Adams, the protagonist.

I wondered if I'd have seen it as a long, boring story about fishing, if I weren't forewarned that it has a deeper meaning. I don't know that I'm a terribly perceptive reader, and quite often what I get from a story isn't what the experts say I should get. For example, the grasshoppers. Discussions of the story's symbolism point to the grasshoppers living in the burned-over patch of land, but not the ones which Nick casually uses for fishing bait. I likened them to soldiers from the Great War, from which Nick had recently returned; uprooted from their normal lives, put to a purpose whose object they cannot comprehend, and which they will almost certainly not survive. The protagonist expends insignificant lives in order to accomplish his goal; does this say something about the universality of the impulses which lead us to war? The smart people are silent on this point. Are they missing this angle, or am I reading the story incorrectly? Or is it too obvious for comment?

I've got a couple of Hemingway's books lined up at the library. I think I can learn something from his work. There's always something to learn. But mostly I'm just interested in reading more of his writing, since I enjoyed this. :)

There is a class of roughly spherical modular origami models referred to as kusudama. Kusudama were originally groupings of flower-shaped origami sewn or glued together, and are considered a precursor to modular origami. (Thanks, Wikipedia.) There are tons of kusudama designs out there; I started with this one because I liked the star shapes formed by the modules.

( Construction photos... )

Five intersecting octahedra. They aren't really intersecting, of course, but by using multiple colors of paper, you can give the impression that multiple octahedra are interpenetrating each other. (The photos aren't splendid, but you can kind of make out the effect.) I wanted to do this model with the foil wrapping paper, but the practice piece with the printer paper came out so well that I left it at that. (Maybe I'll go back and make another later.) Inserting the last module was a pain in the ass, but that's good, because that resistance keeps the model from coming apart easily.

( Construction photos... )

me: Ashy also wonders if Elvis has ever featured on Doctor Who
Sigil: I cannot recall an instance where he has n.n
me: "So lemme get this straight... Ah'm gonna take me this Sontaran Kaopectate to fake mah death on the crapper, an' then I'm gonna transmat outta the morgue and into a flyin' saucer. Sounds great, baby!"
Sigil: hook me right up, uh huh
me: Ashy snaps her fingers
Sigil: after leading the defense of Xorvid II, life back on earth just seemed to pale in comparison to the king
me: Man, them Earth cheeseburgers are so dang small

So. Interested to learn that they're doing a film version of The Dark Tower, interested that Idris Elba is playing Roland, not especially surprised that many people are going absolutely bugshit over the casting of a black man in this role.

My first thought upon learning this (via a webcomic, of all places) was "Hmm, that's interesting." (My thought 1.1 was, "Who is it? Is it Idris Elba?", believe it or not.) My second thought was, "I bet that's going to annoy a lot of people," and my third thought was, "Is there any structural reason Roland can't be black?" And I gave it very quick consideration before deciding no, there isn't any good reason. There are tiny, nitpicky backstory details which Stephen King wouldn't bat an eye at, which would be about thirty seconds' worth of edits on his part.

To my thinking, the first Dark Tower book is the purest distillation of the concept. In these early chapters, Roland is a blank wall. He is impenetrable. You learn virtually nothing about him as an individual. We are presented with events from his early life, and we are to hopefully understand how these experiences formed his personality, but Roland could really be anybody. He's the story's engine (or maybe its transmission, its components working through him), the sum of his actions more than anything. And even as one progresses through the novels and they become increasingly fluffy with backstory, there really isn't anything about Roland the character which presupposes a certain race or ethnicity. His wardrobe is more relevant than his color. He is a descendant of gunslingers from Gilead, and in his world that answers for all.

That may stand in the world of the novel, but we view this work through the lens of our own society. I want to say that this is not the work's concern, but I don't think it's that simple. The audience is always going to bring their preconceptions. A great work will find a way to render those preconceptions irrelevant, or it will incorporate those preconceptions to maintain or strengthen its integrity-- or both --but what it will not do is pander to them. A weak statement will not be respected by its witnesses.

I know that King visualized Roland as a kind of craggy, blue-eyed Clint Eastwood/Man with No Name figure, and the endless bookplates and covers associated with the novels tend to reinforce this image. I avoid manuscript illuminations like the plague, because I don't want my imagination supplanted by an artist's impression... I find that image has a tendency to override the written word. For the people who first encounter The Dark Tower by watching this film, Roland is and always will have been a black man. I don't see the problem with that. I say bring Idris on. Hell, I'm interested in variation... I get bored easily. I think Stephen King himself would tell you that the illustrated Roland is simply the image of the character he related to, and that every reader ought to replace it with one which works best for them. There is no 'correct' image of Roland.

So it was about this time that I realized I had an origami problem. Working in my favor is the fact that origami paper is absurdly expensive. However, I had my eye on a couple of multicolor printer paper packs, which then conveniently went on sale for half off, so I ended up with this:

To get a feel for the paper's workability, I made a quick stellated isocahedron out of the warm colors.

( Construction photos... )

This was a test to see if I could build a Soma cube out of Sonobe units. Building a basic cube from these components is straightforward enough, and it seemed to me that they could be used on inside edges just as readily as outside edges, but building an actual model would settle the matter.

Having built it, I found that the Sonobe units forming inside edges have a tendency to slip loose, because there's nothing for them to brace against. Think of the model as a building. There are no supporting walls inside the model to keep units from sinking inward. A Sonobe which forms an outside edge is held up by the unit it slots into, but if it forms an inside edge, it's hanging from the unit it slots into.

In conclusion, you can build the pieces of a Soma cube this way, but they won't be entirely stable. As the Soma is a tactile puzzle, this is of some concern.

( Construction photos... )

Five intersecting tetrahedra. Of the models I found when diving into modular origami, this is the one which impressed and intimidated me the most. I waited until I'd built a few things before I tried it, and I was probably right to be cautious. The individual components are very basic, and not unlike modules I made earlier, but assembly was just a bit difficult to wrap my head around; I had to watch the assembly video almost frame-by-frame to figure out the intersections. (I read an explanation of what's going on topologically, but knowing this did not result in correct assembly.) Anyway, I hope you're as impressed as I was with the design. I built a second one of these with green foil substituted for the dark blue, and gave it as a Christmas gift. n.n

( Construction photos... )

Another stellated polyhedron, made from Post-It notes... I've 'acquired' several different colors of post-its over the years, and it was thrilling to realize I finally had a use for them which realizes their full potential. (I'd been using them for notes!)

Each folded-up parallelogram is called a Sonobe unit, for reasons no one is entirely sure of. It is probably the most common module design in modular origami, and is very versatile, perhaps because it is easily subdivided into right triangles. These Sonobe units are slightly modified, with an additional long crease which makes their profile irregular in an interesting way.

( Construction photos... )

Well, I had to cut Firefox loose today. They removed the option to allow or deny individual cookies on the fly. It's just gone, both interface and backend. The 'official' explanation, if you care to dig through Mozilla's bugbase, is that such capability is 'not really nice,' which is what parents say to their four-year-olds when they act up. Coders are, in my experience, shamelessly paternalistic, so yes, no surprise whatsoever.

This is just a continuation of what Mozilla has been up to for a while now, becoming more market-conscious and shaping their applications with the 'average user' in mind. Previously they removed the 'Show images' and 'Allow Javascript' checkboxes for this reason. Mozilla has a picture of the average user which is kind of like a lobotomized Neanderthal wearing a diaper, browsing YouTube with one hand and eating Betty Crocker icing from the can with the other, and consequently we are far, far too stupid to know how to use the settings we ourselves select. Projecting forward, the ideal Firefox browser would be a single window with a set of pre-selected content sites and an on-off button. Hey, wait a minute...

Last week I read Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. I liked it; I was pretty impressed by its naturalistic approach. The book is formally a work of fiction, but the understanding is that the story is nearly autobiographical. It's been called a coming-of-age story; the protagonist, Henry Chinaski, describes his life from grade school up to the year after graduating high school. The settings are familiar to us, but the childhood which Bukowski describes is incredibly violent, even bloody, and it had me wondering if childhood was once a much nastier proposition in the United States than it is now. I certainly felt sheltered in comparison. The story takes place during the 1930s, but the novel was written around 1980. I can't imagine Bukowski remembers every schoolyard fight, but I don't imagine he's embellishing how rough it was. But maybe he is! So it made me think. Bukowski's work also tends to make me melancholy, although it's very good, because it features characters living dead-end lives, and that's a bit too close to home right now.

Also read The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. Non-fiction by the author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, which you have undoubtedly heard of. General survey of how mental illness is defined and diagnosed, specifically psychopathy, but the book is more about the author's journey of elucidation than the subject itself. (Is that Gonzo?) Lots of entertaining anecdotes about the history of mental health treatment. One thing I was fascinated to hear was how haphazard and arbitrary an affair the compilation of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) was, and I was not particularly assured that much has changed now that we're up to the DSM-5. The possibility of which, for the subject of my own writing, is gold. n.n There was also a very strong implication that the 'autism wave' which alarms anti-vaccination activists is a statistical artifact, caused by a rewritten definition of autism, rather than a real increase in the number of sufferers. Which, again, is brilliant. <3 (Thank you, ff00ff, for the recommendation.)

A stellated dodecahedron, or maybe a stellated icosahedron-- I find the distinction confusing. Pointy star thing. :) Not entirely happy with the tips of the points being white. I considered wrapping them in more paper, but this appeared unworkable; I also thought about building the model inside-out. I'm not sure it would be stable enough to hold together that way, but I have yet to experiment.

( Construction photos... )

I just read Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. I picked it up partly from watching Bright Young Things, the movie by Stephen Fry which is based upon it, and in part because I recently saw a couple of documentaries dealing with the same setting.

Well, how shall I start? Quite often I wanted to reach back through time and slap Waugh for trying to be funny, because he's not. I came with relatively high expectations, thinking the book would be something like P. G. Wodehouse's work. It's like one of Wodehouse's stories, if you made it five times as long as it needed to be, scrubbed it of any interesting wordplay, and made the plot points like skyscrapers that you could see for miles off. Nevertheless I read it through, because I wanted to see how the story came out. I think this demonstrates that a halfway interesting story can prop up a novel which otherwise isn't well-written, but I'm not sure I would give the story that much.

In general, the book is about idle rich kids in post-Great War Britain. Adam Fenwick-Symes, the protagonist, has a sort of inverse Jeeves arc; throughout the story he tries to acquire enough of a personal fortune to marry Nina Blount, his love interest, and we watch as he repeatedly manages to pull together some money, only to lose it due to various misfortunes. There is a large cast of secondary characters, and the book largely concerns itself with character-defining vignettes, some of which drag on long after making their point. I was left wondering if Waugh wrote this book simply to piss all over the social circle the book depicts. I have to give Stephen Fry credit for concocting a reasonably watchable film from very frustrating source material.

There was an interesting surprise waiting at the conclusion. Near the end of the story, war is declared, and some of the characters (including Adam) are called up to fight. The book was written in 1930, so this is not World War II, but instead a hypothesized future war, involving theoretical events, technologies and results extrapolated from the hideous circumstances of the Great War. Europe is virtually barren and depopulated, and chemical and biological warfare are the default. Britain suffers regular bombardment and is apparently under martial law. Vile Bodies becomes a speculative fiction novel at the very end, which is not something the movie suggests, the real-life Second World War standing in for the book's conclusion. We move abruptly from the glittering life of spoiled rich kids to global apocalypse. So that's something.

I have to assume Waugh's more celebrated works are better; I'm not sure what to think if this book is representative of his writing.

The name given this model by its designer was 'Star Holes,' which sounded to me like a really unfortunate porn channel program. "Hullo, I'm Robin Leach, and welcome to STAR HOLES!" But I thought it was a really beautiful model, so that was my next origami project.

As before, it's made from wrapping paper with a hologrammatic finish. Because of the folds in the middle of each module, it's also very springy; it would probably bounce if you dropped it on the floor. :) It's reminiscent of a poinsettia, now that I look at it again....

( Construction photos... )

Just after Christmas I started doing modular origami. As a kid, I saw modular origami models in a general book of origami, and while it captured my imagination, I dismissed it as beyond my capabilities. But last year I watched a video which shows you how to make a dodecahedron out of Post-it Notes, and after that I really got into it. I'm going to post some of the things I've built, more or less in the order I made them.

My first model was this icosahedral structure, using something called 'Snapology', which involves building from long paper strips. I've modified the original design so that the polyhedral structure of the model is more evident. The base structure is made from copy paper, while the visible surfaces are made from wrapping paper with a hologrammatic coating.

( Construction photos... )

A lot of metal bands put out vinyl-only EPs these days, and I'm like, c'mon, do a CD version, I can't afford a turntable! But what's amusing is that years ago I had exactly the opposite problem. I had a turntable, everybody had a turntable, and stuff is coming out on compact disc and I can't afford a CD player. Have I always been a loser?

There will be a person, maybe someone you know, who holds forth on a variety of subjects; and their talk is entertaining enough that perhaps you listen. Then, one day, they talk about a subject you actually know quite a bit about, and everything they say is utter horseshit... and you wonder if everything they've said is lies and misinformation.

I used to admire Henry Rollins a bit. I'm not really sure why; a friend of mine lent me a book of his poetry in college. He presented this image of authenticity (which I will get back to), and spoke with apparent candor, seeming to be a straightforward, down-to-earth person. And then he made the mistake of talking about Iron Maiden.

I know way too much about Iron Maiden. They are the first band I was seriously a fan of. I obsessed over every aspect of the band; I spent a sizeable chunk of my college scholarships on their records and merchandise. But you don't have to be so obsessive to know that their frontman, Bruce Dickinson, is pretty intelligent. He's been described as a polymath, in fact; highly articulate, he writes novels, music, he fences, he can fly a jumbo jet, etc etc. You can tell just by listening how sharp he is.

So yesterday I abused myself by watching a Youtube clip of Henry Rollins talking about metalheads and about his band opening for Iron Maiden. I've listened to his spoken-word stuff before, and it was enjoyable and it seemed even-handed. I suspected even before I watched the clip that he despises metalheads ('Henry Rollins jokes about metalheads' is a giveaway), but I think, Henry's an okay guy, he'll be fair. He wasn't.

The impression he did of Bruce Dickinson was utter fabrication and fantasy. Rollins was essentially doing Nigel Tufnel from Spinal Tap. It was a cartoon intended to reinforce the preconceptions of his audience, who I suppose consider themselves above the clock-punching rabble who listen to heavy metal.

I haven't had a real stake in Iron Maiden for a while, having moved on to other bands, but I will confess being protective of the group. But this wasn't about that. What Rollins said and did was completely at odds with the individual he purported to describe. It was a lie. Fabrication. I was stunned. I understood Rollins to be an individual preoccupied with authenticity, and when he performs his spoken-word material, we are to understand that he is truthfully representing his experiences. He trades upon the understanding that he is genuine. But I listened to him lie and lie.

That's when it occurred to me that Henry Rollins is all about image over substance. The muscles, the tats, the macho posturing... what do you think that is? He has carefully crafted his image as a warrior-poet, an intellectual badass, the dumb jock who's a surprise genius... he has devoted a great deal of effort into coming across in just that particular way. That is the antithesis of authenticity. It should therefore be no surprise that what he says is as suspect as what he appears to be. Consider me no longer fooled.

To Rollins' credit, I do believe he is authentically hostile, feels authentically threatened by people who are more intelligent and successful than he is, and genuinely makes snap judgments about people based on his preconceptions. Henry Rollins, you are so real.

As an aside: those journals I kept in college are simultaneously very precious and very embarrassing. I mean, what a wanker I was. I was apparently convinced every human emotion could be circumscribed by heavy metal lyrics. But at the same time, they are as detailed a picture of what I was doing from day to day during a certain period of my life as I am ever likely to have, and those times meant a lot to me, and I felt... I felt emotions I'm unsure I've felt so intensely since.

The books still had the old book smell. :) I wonder if I should take up keeping a diary again.

I was looking through the diaries I kept in my junior and senior college years (looking for the username of this person I knew). I think I've always been depressed. In one diary I talk about 'my miserable life'; well, how miserable was it, objectively? I was in college on full scholarship, and I probably had more friends and companionship and freedom than I've ever had in my life. But I was unable to appreciate it.

I think that when the depression started to manifest, friends took it as an aspect of my personality... one which they did not find particularly desirable. So I did my best to stop whining about how unhappy I was. But that didn't fix anything. I sought counseling once while at the university; and after a consultation, was told I seemed to be holding up pretty well, and that there wasn't any need for me to return for treatment. I think this diagnosis had more to do with the limited mental health resources of the university than my state of mind.

Depression wasn't commonly understood as a legitimate illness at the time. I just accepted it as how I was; after years, I didn't question it. But again, that didn't fix anything. When my life is otherwise comfortable or secure, it's something I can largely ignore. But when things get rough, they get very rough inside my head.

I'm trying to figure out how I'll do something for it. At least now I know I ought to seek treatment.

[I don't mean to suggest I concluded this on the basis of an old diary. A friend has gotten me to accept that my despair and lack of self-esteem are in fact depression... it seems obvious now.]

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Ashtoreth Hostility's Journal

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