65. Confusion

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30 year anniversaries

The other day it occurred to me that a bunch of important anniversaries are coming up for me, in fact I've already missed a few. I started teaching myself BASIC in the mid 1980s. I switched from my cheap Timex-Sinclair ZX81 to a first generation Macintosh in 1985. But that was just setting the table. The big anniversaries start next year.

I switched from BASIC to HyperTalk (part of HyperCard, also HERE) in 1987 and this is where it gets confusing. I was trying to remember when I started writing technical books about HyperCard and HyperTalk. I'm pretty sure it was 1987, the same year the software was released and before much was published about it -- the documentation was not very good. But I figured all I had to do was go home and look at the publication date in my copies of these books, only the date given is 1989, which can't be right. 

I started working at the Apple Multimedia Lab in 1988 and my job there ended in 1989. I only got the job as a result of the work I had done on those books. There's no way the books came out after 1988 and I would still bet on 1987 since that's when I started meeting people in Silicon Valley, also as a result of the books. 

Toryism

At the gym this morning I was thinking again about toryism and what it means. This after thinking about how reading The Magic Mountain had lead to everything from Goethe's Faust to The Brothers Karamozov, The Birth of Tragedy, and The Passion of Michel Foucault, while then looping back to Mann's Doctor Faustus. But the separate (though intertwining) examination of classes and the nafarious role of the bourgeoisie, started not with Mann but with Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End. Proust has an interest in the pre-bourgeois world he personifies in name De Guermantes, but he is merely looking on voyeristically from the peanut gallery of his solidly bourgeois family. 

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are more in line with Ford's concerns. The Brothers Karamazov is really where the two lines of inquiry (from both The Magic Mountain and Parade's End) come together and merge. But it is curious how little Mann seems to be interested in the bourgeois aspect of all this. Perhaps because he himself was so thoroughly bourgeois -- though that was true of Foucault as well. 

The only time Mann shows us the pre-bourgeois world order is in that odd passage in Doctor Faustus when we see the very worst of it, a wealthy noble woman who constantly travels, at least in part, so that she doesn't have to witness the villages that are the source of her wealth -- where the peasants are too poor to even have candles.

Naphtha mimics some of the hyper-Christian aspects of Dostoevsky's monks, but shows us nothing of the relationship between the religious (or gentry) and the common man. I think Dostoevsky would find The Magic Mountain encouraging at first but ultimately disheartening.

What is unexpected is how what starts with Ford not being clear what he means by "Tory" leads me to The Periodic Table by Primo Levi and Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks -- thanks in part to Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life which traces the origin and ebb and flow of European capitalism to the movement of the Jews following their expulsion from Iberia. Which also explains the less than friendly attitude toward the Jews we see in both The Brothers Karamazov and Parade's End. The Jews are the anti-Tories. Can you even separate anti-bourgeois attitudes from antisemitism? And what does that say about Marx. (Whoops. I see Karl Marx's family situation is remarkably like Marcel Proust's. He was Christian, though Christianity did not go very far back in his family. interesting.)

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4. tl; dr

Previous - 3. Change

Dream

I don't usually feel old. But I just woke up from a dream that makes me feel really old.

In the dream I was riding around in a car with a bunch of people (after a storm?) and idly writing computer programs (?!). At the very end I was getting kind of excited about rediscovering clever things you could do in the second language I learned -- which was natural language so you could guess the syntax, for the most part. Just as I was waking up I thought, "Wait. I can use copies of the technical books I wrote about that language to remind myself of exactly what you can do."

But then I realized HyperCard wouldn't run on any of my current machines... then I remembered the Mac from the late '90s I have in storage, but that's doubtful, too. And I don't have a monitor for that machine (not really sure about this). I have one of the early Mac laptops from the early '90s, but the hard drive died on that machine years ago. I was regretting (again) not saving my original Mac, but even if I had, that wouldn't help unless I also had a hard drive to go with it. This got me thinking about just how primitive that first wonderful Macintosh computer really was and about Bill Atkinson -- one of the original Mac team who was also one of the co-creators of HyperCard. (See also HERE ) I met Atkinson and his wife, Sioux, at a Mac software event (at Cañada College) in (probably) 1987-8. He was really interesting to talk to and I had an immediate crush on her. I always hoped I'd run into them again but never did.

Then I remembered that she died recently.  Someone I only remember as a young woman from 30 years ago.

Music, old

In today's paper there was a column by a writer who is probably around my age (I'm guessing) about not knowing -- or putting on his iPod -- any music since 1980. I'm guessing he was exaggerating (writers do that) but this is something that bugs the hell out of me. I mean people my age who don't know more recent music. I've even written about this before in my other blogs.

But tonight I clicked on one of those playlists YouTube assembles for you based on things you've listened to in the past, and I couldn't help noticing that much of the music collected there was in fact old -- but covered, either by Glee or Sid & Susie. (Not sure where the Aurora songs came from, but I'm sure YouTube had its reasons.) Why is it better (in my eyes) when old music is covered than when you simply hear the original 40 or 50 year old versions? (There's another factor that I won't go into that could also explain this, having to do with something Glee -- or Santana -- and Sid & Susie -- well, Susie -- have in common, but that would be beneath me.) And this leads us to a discussion of...

Covers

Covers are recordings of previously recorded music. "Cover Girl" by Shawn Colvin is a wonderful example of covers and the three "Under the Covers" albums by Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs are my favorite examples of covers, though Glee takes the cake (odd term). 

Here's something I think a lot about but don't know what to think about: Are close covers (this is my terminology for covers that are very close to the original -- Naya Rivera excels at close covers) better than covers that emphasis the vocal characteristics of the cover-er -- Susanna Hoffs is the queen of this, in my biased view. Naya's version (or parts) of "We Found Love in a Hopeless Place" by Rihanna and Susanna's "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" are good examples of what I mean.

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