Weather
For two days I've been scheduling to avoid forecast bad weather, and for two days the bad weather has been dodging us. Yesterday it simply passed south of us and then went up into the Sierra where it can actually do the most good. But today it parted over the city with streams of stormy weather passing both north and south at the same time. I kept playing with the radar images to see if I was missing something, but no.
We got enough rain to clean the streets -- which is really important given the state of our streets -- but not the kind of deluge we were promised. Now it's late afternoon and I'm finally out at Peet's. The silver lining here is that I got a lot of work done at home, mostly updating HOA documents and doing prep for our pro forma budget, but also doing laundry and dishes and the like. I'm in good shape for the weekend. Yea?
The Mac & me
I keep forgetting to add something to what I wrote before about getting into programming back in the 1980s, but I need to start with statistics from today. Besides all the iPhones and iPads Apple sells today, to my amazement, they also sell around 5 million Macintosh computers each quarter. Since 2006 they have not sold less than a million a quarter and have exceeded the 5 million mark five times. When I bought my first Mac, Apple had produced about 500,000 of the machines. They passed the 1 million mark in September of 1987, about three years after the launch. So in the first three years they sold as many machines as they do today every month. It was such a small community back then.
I bought my Mac in 1985. I started writing about HyperTalk in 1987. I started working for Apple at the Multimedia Lab in 1988 and by 1990 I was working for Apple in Cupertino (testing a new color version of HyperCard for the Apple IIgs). In 1987 I took a little personal pilgrimage to Cupertino just to gaze at the Mariani 1 building, that the documentation for my Macintosh informed me was the company headquarters. In 1990 I was eating lunch every day at the Mariani 1 cafeteria, and some years later I was working all-nighters in that building for a system software update.
On Market Street
Now I need to say more about the location of my new Peet's. I already said that it faces a busy stretch of Market Street, SF's main drag. The cafe is on the ground floor of the Marriott Marquis Hotel. It borders the mid-block pedestrian way that leads to the Jewish Museum and then the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts and Moscone Convention Center. On the other side of the pedestrian way is the Four Seasons Hotel & Residences. All this is setup for my next charming story.
As I was leaving Peet's after writing the text above, I was walking down the sidewalk in front of the Four Seasons when I saw a guy standing in the middle of the sidewalk with his pants down taking a dump. This time I didn't get the full defecation visual -- for which I'm grateful because I happen to know that visual sticks with you longer than you might imagine (and I've walked a lot of dogs in my life.)
Now I don't care how crazy you are, if you shit on the sidewalk in front of the Four Seasons it's less answering the call of nature and more some kind of statement. Alas, I'm sure Michel Foucault would have something interesting to say on this subject but all I can do is report the incident.
Link to Table of Contents
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.)
