Andy H.

I wanted to write a big post about IDEC, but apparently I didn't get around to it before school started so who knows whether I'm going to. It was awesome, though! I met and hung out with a bunch of the current generation of WH teenagers, who turn out to be pretty cool, and went to several workshops that challenged me usefully, and stayed up late vocally jamming with musicians from around the world (!), was made to cry by Yaacov Hecht and got very grumpy at Dr. Gabor Mate. Helen is starting a new school, and I am seriously considering trying to be on its staff once my fourth year of university is done.

This past month's fiction:

Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
Charles Stross, Halting State

This concludes my second year of keeping track of novels read; I'll figure out the stats later. I definitely read fewer things than I did during the first one.

Rachel wanted my school schedule, so here it comes, from memory because the UBC website doesn't want to let me log in to look at my timetable for some reason. It's kind of a ridiculous schedule.

On Monday Tuesday Thursday Friday I have Japanese 102 at 9 AM, which means I have to be up before 7 to get to school on time. Also I haven't really practised Japanese since the last course I took in late 2006, so basically I am insane. Today is the first day of school and I got here on time to find that it was cancelled. Well, nevermind.

On Thursdays I have Philosophy of Law at 11:00 (it is a three hour class). The textbooks include a book co-edited by John Russell, whom I used to take classes from at Langara. Then I get a half-hour break and at 2:30 I have Philosophy of Language, which has a very good reputation here.

On Fridays there is the Honours Seminar at 10. They alternate each year between focussing on ethics and focussing on metaphysics; this is an ethics year, which I'm rather looking forward to because last year was pretty metaphysics-heavy, except that it's being taught by the other Dr. Russell so we'll probably be spending a certain amount of time on the metaphysics of free will.

And I'll be working MWF, 12-6, 12-6, and 2-6, respectively, unless I get a better job.

Some other pretty awesome things have been going on, but they're probably not suitable for talking about in a public livejournal entry. Sorry, public.

Tuesday was Canada Day (Canada!), and Monday was the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event. Friday is my mother's birthday (also, America Day). Today is the day on which I tell you guys what I've been reading.

Diana Wynne Jones, Howl's Moving Castle (reread)
Sean Stewart, Firecracker (American Title: Perfect Circle)
M. T. Anderson, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume 1: The Pox Party

I wonder if telling Facebook that I was attracted to men would get it to stop putting scantily clad women all over everything? I wonder if that would be worth confusing everyone I know?

Today I noticed that I have had a more-or-less steady weblog, in some form or another, for six years now. (I installed my copy of NewsBruiser on dear absent wifl either at the beginning of or just before June 2002.) Some of the exchanges I remember having on this livejournal, with people who still read and comment, happened in 2004! It doesn't feel that long ago, unless I think of it relative to other landmarks -- e.g., that it was before I took any college courses -- at which point it feels much longer.

When I was 16, my dad lost his apartment, and so I started living with my mother full-time, after spending most of my life beforehand moving from one house to the other every two weeks. One of the stranger side-effects of this new inertia was that it was like a metronome had been turned off, and suddenly I had no sense of time; for that first year or two some part of me was convinced that it had just been one long two weeks, and anything more than a couple of days old was all jumbled together in such a way that I might go for several months without realizing my position relative to any of it had changed. (That I was, for unrelated reasons, pretty severely depressed during this period surely didn't help matters.)

This reminded me of that phenomenon, but it isn't still the same thing; eventually I broke out of my depression, and, for that reason or just because my brain taught itself new metrics (I think I pay more attention to the calendar and seasons than I used to), my sense of relative time became stronger again. For several years now, I've not had that trouble; to the extent that I'm temporally disoriented, it's for the much more common and traditional reason that time seems to accrete much more quickly now. This weblog thing is really a reflection of that; at some point I was accustomed to think of it as something I'd really just started, and now, some hurrying later, I notice that I forgot to take that label off.

Like most people, I am made somewhat anxious by the quasi-Buddhist observation that things change and decay, and I can't hold on to them. But for my weblog to have turned at some point into a moderately old and well-established Andy's-life institution is a pretty positive change, I think.

Today I told somebody I had a livejournal, and then I felt slightly guilty for the usual reasons. Here's what I've been reading, at least.

Emma Bull, Bone Dance
Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke (reread)
Liz Williams, Banner of Souls
Maureen Johnson, The Bermudez Triangle
Charles Stross, Glasshouse

I'd thought that I was going to have at least a two week break between the end of my spring courses and the advent of the summer, but that is an example of a time that I was wrong, and so today, the Monday after the Monday after the Friday I took my last final, I was already back. Do you want to hear about the courses I am taking? Internet, I will tell you.

On Mondays and Wednesdays from six until nine o'clock I'm taking WMST 224C: Women in Literature, so that was what I was at today. The professor has tattoos on her arms, and a demeanor that is slightly nervous but sensible, and a British accent -- not BBC received English, but some regional variant such that that rather than simply getting rid of the 'r's she leaves out of words like 'are' and 'certain' she recycles them to the end of other words like 'idea'. I am pretty excited about my sense of her and of the general atmosphere of the course. (That I've already had two separate nerdy and stimulating conversations with various of my classmates also seems to bode pretty well.)

Unlike my last summer's literature course, this one probably won't be reflected in my novel-reading entries, since the syllabus seems to comprise entirely short stories. But we are reading selections from Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (which I've heard of), Nancy Lee's Dead Girls (which I haven't), and an anthology and a reading packet neither of which have morbidly evocative names. There will apparently be at least one session where we watch and talk about scenes from Buffy, for which I feel a little overqualified.

Secondly, I'm in PHIL 435: Environmental Ethics on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1 'til 4. This was the philosophy course I haven't taken that fit in with my schedule (the other candidates were in the second summer term, and might have had finals that conflicted with IDEC), and so the fact that this is such an activist summer is pretty coincidental. I don't know much about how it will go yet; I've actually been hanging on to the possibility of dropping it, in case the two intensive summer courses are too much for me, but having learned that the women's studies course extends into July, and not merely to mid-June like I thought, I feel cautiously hopeful that that won't be necessary.

(And I'm working 16 hours a week as before, Monday and Wednesdays before school and Friday afternoons.)

P.S. to cola: I got three A minuses and an A+ last term, so I guess you "already got" those "books", too!

Look out! It's April. I always forget which trees are cherry blossom trees, and then when each of them bloom I am surprised.

Through March, apace:

Liz Williams, Snake Agent
Diana Wynne Jones, The Game
Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist
C.J. Cherryh, The Paladin

I liked them.

In Charles Stross' Accelerando (which I read the very first month I kept track), there's a scene where one of the protagonists is walking through an airport that's been decorated with an unsettling motif of Santa Claus-es hung in effigy. The artificially intelligent corporations, the reader is told, are doing their best to appeal to human consumers; they understand that we like Christmas and that we're obsessed with our mortality, but they haven't quite figured out how those preoccupations behave in practise.I think of this throwaway paragraph probably more often than anything else in that book, because a lot of advertising makes me feel like this sort of thing is, on some less dramatic scale, already happening: whomever is writing these things has cobbled together a syntax -- mostly from pop culture catchphrases, and recognizable deliveries for jokes, and, especially, other advertisements -- but they don't have a semantics.

I suppose what's actually going on is that they're not trying to use language to communicate meaning. Some advertising (mostly on the amateur small business end of the scale) is trying to do that, to make a persuasive argument to a skeptical audience, and some (mostly on the more professional and corporate) is using language, if it uses it at all, in service of some less direct or more visceral appeal, some attempted colonization of the backbrain, but executes it well enough that it still sounds smooth. In the middle are these confused AI ads, which are trying to accomplish something like what the latter group does, but aren't deft enough to get the surface to make sense, and end up coming across as a complete and distracting misunderstanding of what sort of things it is that real people say when they talk.

My favourite example of this, because it's such a specialized case, is the Telus ad on the wall near Granville and Georgia, about the fish who is friends with a sea horse. It's written in rhyming couplets, but they rhyme badly, have no consistent line-length or metre, and provide information that is not anywhere near charming enough to make up for this. Telus, or whomever is comprised by its human-populated advertising department, wanted to get people's attention with poetry, without having to really care about poetry; but because they had no understanding of what sort of thing a rhyming poem actually is, and how it functions when it does, the ad doesn't work.

Every time I find a particularly intractable knot in my shoelaces or something, I'm reminded again of how completely impractical Alexander the Great's solution really is.

I leave for Oregon ridiculously early tomorrow morning, so if you see me around Vancouver before Thursday or so, it is probably an impostor.

In the 'things on the internet' portion of last post, I forgot to mention Kate Beaton's comics. She's getting kind of famous now, at least if Shaenon Garrity and Ryan North linking to her is any indication, but maybe you haven't seen them yet, and you really should. (I think I found them through angrylemur.)

Speaking of angrylemur and stuff inspired in this entry by same, a while ago she posted that song lyric guessing game I like, and it made me notice that it's been almost two years since the last time I did it myself, which naturally awakened a resolve to do it again. I was going to wait until after I'd posted more of the things of actual substance I've been intending to write for this journal, but it's occurred to me that this actually takes way less time than those things, so it's not like it's delaying them significantly to do it now. I am going for it.

Here follows the list. It's 20 first lines again (even though Ms. Lemur did 16), and I'm not going to make it zero-sum, so I encourage people to guess before looking at anyone else's answers.
( Songs for uncertainty. )

Attention popular culture and occasional human beings: actually, I understand women just fine, at least in numerous individual cases. I am not bragging here, because it is really not that hard. Their personhood is of the usual variety. Please stop exoticizing, 'kay thanks.

I voted (via the handy web service) in the UBC AMS elections yesterday; I might probably have not organized myself to do so, except that an acquaintance of mine is running to be a senator, so I had to actively decide whether or not to vote for him, which required looking up his platform and his online rhetoric and those of his opponents, and once I'd done that, I was interested, and there are online profiles with links to campaign sites for all the races right there by the place where you vote, so it wasn't at all out of my way to vote for the other offices, too. Since doing that, I've been wondering about the campaign posters up on bulletin boards all around the school. Mostly they all say, "Vote for Tony Glunton!" or what-have-you, without any reference to Mr. Glunton's positions on the issues*, so I'm not sure what good they're supposed to be doing. The candidates may have the idea of making their names stick in our heads when we come to the polls, but I keep hearing reports to the effect that there's woefully little participation in the elections, and so I rather suspect that most people who vote are either doing so because they're already affiliated with one of the candidates or else because they are a nerd about democratic participation (or in my case, both) -- and under the first circumstance, they're already decided, and under the second, they'll poke around enough for those subliminal impressions to be swamped by others more relevant.

(* With the exception, I should acknowledge, of the girl whose campaign for student president is based around the argument that students should stand up for ourselves against the deplorable "war on fun" being conducted by the university, where 'fun' is apparently synonymous with 'alcohol'.)

Another possibility, since it's a first-past-the-post election, is that they want to be seen to be advertising because then those of us who might be inclined to vote for them will feel as though they stand a chance of having sufficiently many other people vote for them as well. But this seems to fall over for similar reasons: since just about everybody running has information right there on the voting site, it's not like being low profile elsewhere means that nobody will consider you, and -- perhaps again because so many people apparently don't vote -- I certainly haven't got any sense of the zeitgeist favouring or ignoring any particular candidate so as to influence me tactically either way. So I guess that either I or they must be confused about the realities of this election; since I only just started paying attention, I admit that it's probably me.

Meanwhile, I want to complain about the candidate (for 'VP External') who has the phrase "Put A Free Man In Office" all over all his promotional materials, because I think that that slogan is really stupid. It doesn't mean anything. I mean, okay, it's a play on his given name -- 'Freeman' -- but it seems to me that a pun really ought to have at least two meanings, at least if it's going to be released repeatedly into the public with a job in marketing, and actually there are no slaves running this year that I'm aware of. (His opponent, whom I voted for based on her interesting pitch rather than on the fact that this dude annoys me, is not a 'free man' only by an accident of modern english grammar.)

I've been seeing some people do that thing where one reposts the first sentences from the first entry of each month. It occurs to me that if I did that, every single one would be a variation on 'here are some books I've read'; there is something kind of heartening in that. I didn't know if I was going to stick to this book-tracking thing, when I started. (Of course, there has been that paucity of other content to moderate my sense of achievement.)

Which reminds me, somewhat belatedly: Brendan asked me about Bull's Territory and Vernor Vinge in general. I spoke in carefully vague terms about the former, but the first paragraph of my response does contain a spoiler about the general direction of the plot in A Deepness in the Sky.

As many Bobs already know, IDEC is going to be in Vancouver this summer. David, who is (surprising no one) one of the major people taking charge of the organization, has asked me to write a short page for the rather inchoate website, explaining the notion of a democratic school; I'm having some trouble working out the phrasing. The effort has me thinking about my tendency to habitually underestimate just how radical a notion this actually is.

( It's been a long time since I talked about Windsor House in my weblog. )