Relocating

I got back home from a week in Berlin and discovered that in order to keep this blog, Google wanted me to do something I don't really understand for reasons I find rather fuzzy. Something about moving data hither and thither, and someting else about this not being automatic for Blogger and a convoluted "manual" way of doing it that doesn't seem to work for me. On the whole, I get the impression that Google wants me to use my Google account to do everything, and I don't like it. I disliked it already when I tried to log onto Youtube and found that I suddenly had to use my Google account for that. I use Youtube for silliness. I want to be anonymous doing that. When I tried moving my data, as mentioned above, a list came up of things like the subjects of the latest e-mails in my e-mail account and the titles of the videos I'd watched last time I was on Youtube and logged in. I'm no fan of conspiracy theories, and the parallel I'm going to make now isn't entirely serious, but the day before, I'd been to the Stasi museum.
(Stasi = the East German Ministry for State Security, a truly terrifying intelligence organization.)

So, a feeling of gradually being monitored more and more closely and a more pragmatic insight that I'm not sure for how long I'll be able to post to this blog without doing the moving of data that doesn't seem to work for me. Result: new blog! I briefly contemplated getting another Livejournal account. (I used to have one, but felt awkward posting serious stuff on it and wanted to be more mature. Then it turned out that I'm feeling a little awkward posting funny stuff on here, because of that idea I had of this blog being more thoughtful and less fangirly.) However, this winter I stumbled over a post on the LJ-like Dreamwidth that gave me a positive image of that site, and I think I might feel at home there.

It's getting too late in the evening for me to make my first post there today, but I certainly will tomorrow. I've a couple of almost finished things sitting on the laptop.

http://bride-of-the-atom.dreamwidth.org/

Story: A Study in Emerald

Prompted by recommendations from my good friend, Lt. Whistleblower, I've been looking into the Sherlock Holmes stories in their various incarnations. Starting with last year's BBC series in three parts (Sherlock), which I loved and still try to rewatch whenever I have the flat to myself, I moved on to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories. I've also seen the 2009 movie with Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law. I'd been curious about it since it first came out, but that only goes to show that I should be more careful about letting my curiosity lead. I was so confused each time any of the main characters was referred to as "Holmes" or "Watson", because I couldn't see any connection with the characters I'm used to associating with those names, that it jolted me out of the plot. As the plot wasn't very engaging anyway, and I always lose track during action scenes, I never really got caught up in it, and I was left wondering about the sizeable fandom around this movie. I suppose that the inflow comes from a certain subset of Law's and Downey Jr.'s respective fan bases (a subset that likes slash and isn't familiar with Conan Doyle's stories).

The original Sherlock Holmes stories turned out not to be my kind of thing, either, but I'm glad that I gave them a chance. As with every book, film, TV series, or song whose presence towers over the rest of pop culture, going to the source and finding out what it's really about feels enlightening. You start getting the jokes rather than smiling politely at the explanation of them, and it's good to see that the familiar stereotypes haven't always been stereotypes, but were once fresh and new and unheard of. Conan Doyle's stories also made me think about thinking and reasoning, about the dichotomy between engineering and medicine, among other things, and about cultural influence on science. I'm trying to put those ideas into writing, but as yet it's just another incoherent list of thoughts in my folder of uncompleted blog posts.

Most of all, however, I'm glad I read A Study in Scarlet because it allows me to appreciate A Study in Emerald, by Neil Gaiman, even more than I would otherwise. This is a short and brilliant Sherlock Holmes - H. P. Lovecraft crossover, and I don't think any previous knowledge of Lovecraft is needed in order to appreciate it. Possibly it's just more unsettling to a reader who isn't familiar with Lovecraft's Old Ones. It has the economic wording of Conan Doyle's stories, the bottomless darkness of Lovecraft's, and the twists and the sharp sense of humour of Gaiman's works. Read it! Or, at least, follow the link and chuckle at the alternate-Victorian ads in the paper. 

Passover

A company that offers TV, internet and telephone deals, and that frequently spams us through the physical letter box, has put a note on the stairs, cheerfully announcing that their representatives will soon grace the inhabitants of our building with a visit. I.e., somebody will ring the doorbell, most probably at a really bad time (since every time is a bad time for door-to-door sellers, if you ask me), and be chummy with us against our will, trying to coax us into signing a new telephone deal. I wonder if something can be done to make them pass us over (a lamb's blood on the door post?).

I've been thinking of putting a no-thanks-in-advance note on our door, but it's hard to word it without seeming unfriendly. It's not the person who rings the bell with a forced smile (probably a temporary hired student who doesn't know better) I mind, it's the principle; how doorstep sales work because people are more reluctant to refuse a suggestion from a flesh-and-blood person than a voice on the phone or a note in the mail. It's such a repugnantly manipulative method, and I hate that the people who will really be the ones disturbing my evening, the people who are actually responsible, are anonymous and out of reach.

Solution, partially suggested by a friend: succinctly worded note on the door with a bribe of candy attached. That must be the way ahead.

People: Bored and Respectless Since Time Immemorial

I spent the best part of last week out of town. Questions put to the few residents I met about what to do in the evenings, and how they liked living there, elicited a kind of hopeless stare followed by a diplomatic but tepid reply, and I spent most of the evenings reading fanfic in my hotel room.

The hotel was a mixture of shabby and cosy and of humour intended and unintended. The owners ostentatiously aimed for a British flavour, with stuffed chairs, rickety little tables and flower-patterned crockery in the breakfast restaurant, and the napkins had "Fawlty Towers" printed on them. They also liked to use Fawlty Towers as the informal name of the hotel, and I wondered whether they had some kind of agreement with the copyright owner/s, or if John Cleese would sue them if he got wind of it.

Unfortunately, the "British" influences spilled over into a general overabundance of flowers, angels, and words of wisdom printed in frilly fonts. The tiny, rickety bedside table in my room was unusable, since the surface was taken up by a framed text on seizing the day, printed on pink paper. Fortunately, this was balanced by an ambition to preserve the original appearance of the hotel, which was built in the 1880s. The rooms had been refurbished, but in the corridors the carpets were threadbare, the stairs creaked, and the gold paint peeled.

It was actually very nice.

On my last evening I found my way to the cathedral. Old churches are always interesting; layer upon layer of architecture, local culture, art, and history. There was a little exhibition of different variations of the cross symbol, several tombstones, and a malicious-looking Green Man looking down from one of the highest vaults, but my favourite part of any church is the graffiti. There tends to be some, unless the interior has been cruelly touched up in the latest two centuries or so. 

So many people have been so bored here. People just like us, finding something to do in carving their name into the stone. Probably teenagers, not really reflecting on the fact that they were leaving a message to coming generations.

L.A.S., 1631. I imagine a boy in a lace collar and a heavy, square coat, abstractedly carving and carving, deeper and broader. He really took his time. Didn't anybody notice?

A last one that must have taken some time, dated April 1, 1645. Somehow, I always feel that exact dates give an additional feeling of reality to history, a connection to the people of the time. This person knew what day it was, and what year. Maybe he, too, kept writing the wrong year through the first weeks of each January.

Thoughts on Spock

From an early point in my Star Trek obsession, I identified with Spock. Exactly why and how is a topic best treated as an underlying theme in this blog, because whenever I try to address the subject as the main theme of a single text, it goes out of hand. This influence is such a vast one that it seems to have bearing on every single aspect of my life, and an analysis of my identification with Spock would in effect end up as an exhaustive autobiography.

This identification was, and is, important to my love for Star Trek. There are many other things I love about TOS: what it reveals about its own time, the visual appearance, the drama, the humour both intended and unintended, Captain Kirk. I don't think the show would have sparked so much thought and self-reflection in me without Spock, though.

With identification, or any other kind of strong feelings for a character, comes projection. The way I see everything Spock says or does depends on my own experiences and reactions. This obviously means that I'll probably dislike the majority of other people who identify with Spock, because they are different people with different personalities and histories and understand the character in different ways.

In keeping with this, the person who annoyed me the most in the Star Trek club I joined, and promptly left, a couple of years ago was a man who identified with Spock. Sure, he was tall with an impassive, unsmiling face and prided himself on not being emotional, but from my point of view, the similarities ended there. I smile a lot and believe in being friendly, and I don't think I'm an obvious Spock to most people I meet. I don't want to be, either. What I connect with in the character is his general mentality and his experience of being different, not fitting in anywhere. It annoys me when Spock is seen or represented as being all about an impassive, unsmiling face and pointing out when things aren't "logical", and it infuriates me when fans of his do that to make other people seem stupid.

This man - I'm going to call him Al, because I've completely forgotten his name - committed that unforgivable sin, in my book of Spock identification, of assuming that everything he himself said and did was "logical", while whatever other people said and did that bothered him or he didn't agree with was "illogical". Now, logic is actually a formal science, a branch of mathematics, and the term is used quite loosely in Star Trek, since neither the script writers nor the actors were mathematicians. In many cases, Mr Spock's "logic" has nothing to do with actual logic - it's actually rational thought, or common sense, or practical-mindedness - and logic doesn't apply to most aspects of human daily life. When it comes to functioning in that context, being logical, in the true sense of the word, equals being dumb, in the same way that a computer is dumb.

Al worked as a conductor on the local commuter trains, probably not a very stimulating job, or one that boosts your self-confidence, and he liked to point out how stupid (or, in his words, "illogical") the passengers were. For example, he could loom silently over some passenger in his uniform for an arbitrarily long time before she realised that she wanted to see her ticket. Proof of human stupidity, in his opinion, that he had to ask to see people’s tickets. Here’s one of the basic traits of logic, though: it’s objective, not based on your knowledge, what goes on in your head and the view from where you happen to be. Useful logic must be based on the right assumptions, in this case the assumption that the passengers on a train are reading, listening to music, talking, or lost in thought. Expecting every single one of them to be constantly vigilant and prepared for the conductor’s round isn’t logical, it’s wishful thinking. If this behaviour is repeated, it also signifies a lack of ability to learn from experience and adapt to a recurring situation. Those aren't obvious Spock traits, if you ask me.

I’m not a natural people person, and that’s probably the common denominator for all of us self-proclaimed Spockoids. Instead of providing me with an alibi for interacting with other people as little as possible, though, the character inspires me to make an effort. Addressing somebody or making a phone call, especially to a stranger, is associated with a mental threshold, it takes some effort. However, Spock would never hesitate to approach somebody because he felt lazy (or awkward, or nervous, or what the case might be); if something needs to be communicated, Spock communicates it, regardless of personal feelings, and he makes sure the receiving party understands what he's saying. Anything else would be - irrational, impractical, and opposed to common sense.

Fandom and the Borders of Reality

During my obsession with Star Trek, I cultivated an interest in astronomy and space travel, but it was frustrating. Here and now, launching a space shuttle is a huge and slow affair, with a train of cars following the shuttle as it creeps out to the launch pad, and the cloud of fire at liftoff shows how exasperatingly wasteful the propulsion is. The interior of a space station is cramped and confusing, like a submarine without floors. The astrophysics course I took was almost solely about nuclear reactions in stars, not really about the universe, nebulae, quasars, exoplanets. The only part of it that involved anything even remotely reminiscent of Star Trek was a lecture about supernovas by a postgraduate whose e-mail address started with "jim@astro". I was quite disappointed, my love for nuclear reactions notwithstanding.

Approaching from the other direction, Star Trek's science and technology are cardboard. Attempts at finding out more about warp drive or tachyon particles slam you up against that patchily camouflaged brick wall of reality. I find this less disturbing in TOS, because it's not trying as hard as TNG to construct a coherent, believable world - something that might well be impossible.

One of the lovely things about Age of Sail fandoms, therefore, is their smooth borders to reality. The characters in the novels of C S Forester and Patrick O'Brian are fictional, but their world is real and continues outside those pages: in other books, in museums, and in the world as we know it, since it's the product of its history. There's technobabble in Master & Commander and Hornblower just as there is in Star Trek, but on sailing ships, the technobabble makes sense; it's not smoke and mirrors. The ropes and pulleys each do something very specific and instrumental rather than being there for atmosphere like the buttons, lights, and levers aboard the Enterprise. I'm surprised by how much that means to me. I can go to the library and find books on masts and rigging, or crucial naval actions in the early 19th century, or the social situation aboard the ships of the Royal Navy around the year 1800, and it's ALL REAL. Or rather, was all real (because thankfully, times have changed). O'Brian sometimes retells historical events in his novels, with his characters playing minor parts, and both O'Brian and Forester let their characters come aboard ships that actually existed; there really was a Captain Edward Pellew in command of the Indefatigable, although there was never a Mr. Midshipman Hornblower under him, and the Shannon really did challenge the Chesapeake in the year 1813 (the event has its own Wikipedia entry), but without Jack Aubrey aboard. Sometimes I come across contemporary portraits of people I had thought of as fictional. It's great.

I was thinking of this as I walked along the row of wet thirty-pound cannon on the upper deck of the Jylland the other week. To some extent it was like visiting a reconstruction of the bridge of the Enterprise: the ship is in dry dock and various steel-mesh staircases and even a lift have been installed to facilitate for visitors, there was scaffolding up the foremast and green exit signs glowing on the dimly lit gun deck. The masts were bare; they probably store the sails somewhere dry in winter. In the waist, the sides were some six feet high, but through the gunports I could see the gift shop and the café; from the quarterdeck, the parking space and the surrounding town. The ship is little more than a backdrop, in some ways, and much of it is reconstructed rather than preserved - the Jylland spent decades as a decaying hull under a tarpaulin. Still, what is there is real in the sense that it's historically accurate and would work if you tried it. There's no styrofoam or balsa wood or plastic; everything you touch is hemp and iron, oak and tar, and it all fits together and makes sense. It's a very special kind of fandom-related joy.

The Thing About Sailing Ships, pt. I

One of the cool things about my job is that it takes me to places I'd never have expected a couple of years ago. Next week I'll be haunting some godforsaken backwaters in Jutland and am looking forward to it, not only because I appreciate change, but also because I've planned my route so that I can visit the frigate Jylland. Strictly speaking, that ship is at least fifty years too young for me, but it is a wooden sailing ship, a warship, and I believe it's similar enough to wooden frigates of the early 19th century to be interesting.

Last year, Patrick O'Brians Aubrey/Maturin novels and C S Forester's Hornblower books sparked a deep and unexpected interest in sailing warships, particularly of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in me. While reading the first part of O'Brian's series, I started looking all the naval terms up on Wikipedia, and it turned out that clicking around there was even more engrossing than the novel. The ingenuity of a sailing ship, the myriad details, the masses of ropes and little wooden objects, each handmade to fit exactly into its place and do what it's supposed to do, each one with its own name. Before that revelation, I'd never thought of a sail as very different from a bedsheet on a stick. Now I'm deeply in awe of the incredibly complicated, and yet perfectly optimized, system that is the rigging of a sailing ship. An immensely complex machine operated by muscle power and the forces of nature, how could that be anything but fascinating?

However, technology isn't the only reason for my interest in - whatever term I should use for the combination of naval fiction and naval history of the era around 1793-1815. "Age of Sail fandom" is mostly an umbrella term for O'Brian's and Forester's works with appendages (the Master & Commander and Hornblower movies, respectively) and doesn't necessarily cover historical fact, while "naval history 1793-1815" is quite a narrow definition that also makes it sound like I'm building dioramas where I reenact important naval actions and build models of HMS Victory in my spare time. Whatever; I'm also fascinated by life aboard ships, the unimaginable situation of being aboard a wooden vessel that's being shattered by cannon shot, the human aspect. I won't even start developing that theme here, but might write more about it some other time.

This interest in, let's just call it sailing ships for now, is actually quite comical. You see, I hate boats and all kinds of floating vessels. I'm afraid of water and even more of heights; one of the Hornblower TV movies ends with the main characters standing on what I think is the topgallant yard, and the mere thought of that makes my palms sweat. People like to hear and read about the things that frighten them the most, and I suppose that my interest is partly inspired by that impulse.

A couple of months ago, I was crossing the Sound from Elsinore to Helsingborg, a 20-minute trip on broad, heavy, perfectly safe car ferries where you have to look out a window to confirm that you're not on land anymore. During my childhood and teens, I went on those ferries a couple of times a year, but it had been almost fifteen years since the last time, and I was interested to see how I would feel about the journey now. It turned out that nothing had changed: as I stepped aboard, the old familiar conviction that the thing was going to sink welled over me for a moment. As soon as we were out of the harbour, I went out on deck to face my old fears and leaning against the railing, I thought of one of my earliest memories: being lifted up by one of my well-meaning parents so I could look over the side and panicking at the sight of the long drop and the green, frothy water at the end of it. It's not quite as scary when you're standing on your own feet, but deep down I still felt a stirring of that old fear. So, still a confirmed landlubber.

My excitement about visiting the Jylland is mostly about getting a feel for the physical space of a wooden frigate, what it's like standing on the gun deck, how long it takes to walk from the quarterdeck to the forecastle or from the orlop to the waist, being surrounded by ropes, touching and feeling the ship to get a better understanding of the novels I read. But there's also a curiosity as to my own reactions, how scary it will be to look up into the rigging and imagine being forced to go up into the top or to look over the side and imagine the ship heeling in a strong wind.

A Complaint About the State of Things

My Zen practice is another thing that has suffered from my transition from student to ordinary office worker. I try to hang on to my morning meditation, rising half an hour early for it, but I more or less never go to my meditation group anymore. I've never really got along with the teacher, but I used to be able not to care. It's about personal chemistry; we're not on the same wavelength, communication is kind of halting and he's not a person I feel like opening up to (which doesn't say anything about him, actually. There are very, very few people I do feel like opening up to).

At retreats, there are mandatory face-to-face talks with the teacher about how things are going, and I actually gave up going to retreats because those talks were so uncomfortable. Still, being enormously stressed out and overworked last winter, I started to think about my relationship to my father (a classic, reruns about once a year) and decided to try talking to my Zen teacher about it. The conversation was, as per usual, uncomfortable and afterwards I haven't been feeling in the mood for going back to the group at all. It's like any other ill-advised show of privacy, the reluctance to look somebody in the eyes on Monday morning after drunken revelations on Saturday night.

There are other things about my Zen group that have started to irk me too. A community depends entirely on its members, and small changes can alter the whole feel of it considerably. There's a slow but constant flow of people in and out, and I really don't know if the fact that I feel alien in the group now is because of it or me. I'm also not sure whether the teacher has become less accepting, or if it's me who have become less patient with his factoids and assumptions, and opinions voiced as fact.

One thing I do know is this: when I first ventured to go to an introduction to Zen held by this teacher, one of the things that definitely won me over was the story of his own primary teacher, Ming Qi. The fact that the Chinese monastery where he was presented to Ming Qi apparently didn't think that her being American, female and gay made her a worse monk, and the note of pride in my teacher's voice as he told us aspiring practitioners about her made me feel that I'd found a place where sex genuinelly was not an issue. I've heard from other sources that Zen monasteries generally don't take nuns, but they don't care about the gender of the monks, and I love that.

The more disturbing it was when the discussion over tea after a meditation session about a year ago turned to gender differences and the teacher agreed with the other men present in that women were like this and that and so very nurturing and compassionate, etc. The women present made objections, but were completely run over by well-intended sexism and fell silent. Awfully enough, it didn't stop there: after a journey to China last summer, where the only female group member present was treated like a badly behaved child by one head monk in one monastery, the teacher keeps including women's mysterious superiority in his talks after meditation. And, you know, I can't get behind that.
(NB: Shatner Reference: http://www.uulyrics.com/music/william-shatner/song-i-cant-get-behind-that-featuring-henry-rollins/)

There's also the question of science vs. beliefs. I've never felt that Zen practice and science tread on each other's toes, but people in the meditation group tend to come from the humanities/arts direction and have less clear-cut notions about the the physical world. I feel that my occasional corrections to false assumptions might come across as unimaginative and pig-headed, my scepticism as petulance. Let me add that I've never made any objections based in science to any statements that were part of a teaching about Zen, or something that the Buddha allegedly said; I do realize that would be disrespectful. What I might do is comment on blatantly false statements like "you know, the lungs are the biggest organs in the body, they fill your whole ribcage"or "light is the purest form of energy". I also consider myself non-Aspergers enough to realize when something is meant symbolically or as a parable (the "purest form of energy" comment was not, in that particular case; the teacher actually turned to me, as a phycisist, for support of this statement). I'm probably seen as having trouble reconciling a Zen outlook with a scientific one, but what I'm annoyed about is the tendency to jump to conclusions about science and technology based on own expectations and opinions rather than fact. It used to be fine, but lately the teacher has seemed more disturbed by my pointing things out, simply turning on his heel before I get past the "No, there's...".

Wanting a different Zen teacher because the one I have doesn't agree with me doesn't come across as productive. Still, holding on to the fiction of belonging to a meditation group that I never actually go to because I dislike it so much won't get me anywhere, either.

Getting over the blank page

The fact that I'm up late on a weekday makes me feel more like my old, creative, introspective self, the twenty-year-old who could spend a whole afternoon sipping tea and writing colossal diary entries. Egocentric and lazy, but with some sort of inner life. The transition from studying to full-time working has taken that inner life away. Traces of it remain, though; I haven't stopped spending time composing snippets of text, putting everyday impressions into words, even though they never get written down any more.

For example, on the long train ride back home tonight, I felt inspired to write about my evening. I'm just home from dinner at a colleague's, which is no frequent occurrence, and the colleague in question is a person I'm strangely in awe of. Getting to see her home was a thrill, and I wanted to tell the story, but now I can't muster the energy to construct something coherent. Something about how we made our way to the front door past a heap of bicycles of different colours and sizes, the remains of a molten igloo, and a couple of empty rabbit-cages covered with a mangy bedspread; how the interior of the house was minimalist and yet haphazard, with a few lopsided Christmas ornaments (some clearly made my family members, others not) still up; how the one ordered section of the bookshelf paraded the Harry Potter series, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Jean M. Auel's books, while the rest was peopled with crime, non-fiction, ugly objects probably intended as ornaments, and a toolbox.
Two of the children of the house were teenagers, the third quite a bit younger (powder boy, I thought, and reflected that perhaps I should try and read something else than naval fiction for a while). They were completely undisturbed by the presence of a bunch of strangers in the combined sitting and dining room and talked freely to us, so different from my siblings and me when we were young.
I sidled up to the stereo to look at the CD that lay on top of it; it was software, not music.
The food was an oven-baked mash of pumpkin with crispy little pieces of bell peppers in it and sprinkled with sesame seeds, accompanied by an unrelated dish consisting of meat wrapped in bacon and a random, very robust wine. It was served on a tablecloth of purple, crushed velour and the napkins had Disney figures on them.

Lately I've realized that my life is too ordered for my own good nowadays. Especially since I started working, I've grown used to eating professionally prepared food and ask the waiter for drink recommendations, of listening to in-laws discussing very fine points of interior decoration and praising the perfection of a holiday in Dubai, of spending nights in newly furnished hotel rooms. It turns out that I desperately need a bit of disorder and imperfection now and then, that it makes me feel revived and happy.