Biology of the Worst Kind

Playtime

The truth is I'm besotted by technology.  Actually, the truth is I love toys.  I like diminutive objects that do clever things.  Computer software has all the nooks and crevices of a dolls' house, tiny drawers that slide in and out and have minute working models of kitchen implements inside.  I only liked toy cars that had doors that opened and steering wheels that turned.  I adored a doll that pee'ed into a nappy after being given a bottle, not for any innate maternal pleasure it gave me, not so I could nurture my faux baby, but because of the one thing one thing following another, and the fact that I could set it in motion.  It worked like a real life object, but wasn't.  It was a trick.  A delight.

So I finished the novel and celebrated by giving up on the horrors of Windows Vista and migrated to an Mac.  A thing of beauty, and best of all it's toytown, though a bit dinky, even for me.  I hate the dock and its little bouncing icons - but I've discovered Quicksilver and my fingers are beginning to flick my applications into life.  What it means is that I've had to spend days learning a completely new system and discover all kinds of new software.  My happiness/craziness quotient runneth over.   I've got no knowhow, you understand, everything about software is just beyond my comprehension, except that bit by bit I begin to see what it does, and  just glimpse slightly how it works, how it's organised and what I can make it do. 

Databases thrill me, but are so fathomless I feel like I've been shipwrecked in a wilderness.  The fantasy is that I can put all information into my machine and it will link together to surprise me with the oddest connections.  That's a toy brain, really.  I can't get my head around the multiplicity of Tinderbox , though I think it's probably just what I want.  DevonThink  is remote and massive.  VoodooPad is wonderful and magically wiki and Journler looks to me almost just right, like the baby bear's porridge, though I have to make the magical connections myself. 

I want a word processor that pulls together notes, research, lets me play around with text and makes patterns.  Scrivener does all that with knobs on, and opens two different windows at the same time.  But Jer's Novel Writer (call it like it is) lets you make marginal notes, though you can't have a notecard view.  So much to play with.  Though the truth is that I know Word so inside and out it's virtually invisible and exactly what's required to writing.  But I want something new, that does things that make me go 'Oh' and 'Ah'.

I don't seem to get bored with looking at software.  I haven't done a stroke of work, just buried myself in methods and organisation on the optimistic assumption that I will actually get round again to doing some writing with these tools.  In fact, it's like my mobile phone, I'm not really interested in getting phone calls, I want to set it up and play with the options.

Does this mean I should have been a software designer?  Maybe.  I could just sit around and doodle patterns that make things happen, or seem to happen.  But I haven't got the math, or the logic, to put it very mildly.  Yet there's a hankering for investigating structure, for playing with things that appear to perform a clear task when really it's all done with smoke and mirrors.  Actually, that's quite like human beings and all that overt social and mental  existence which turns out to be the result of an underlying system of proteins.  It's also quite like being a writer.  Or a writer like me, at any rate.  I've never been terribly interested in telling stories or inventing what they call rounded characters.  For me, writing is much more about making shapes, fitting disparate things together, finding out about the workings of seemingly inevitable behaviours.  Or perhaps, I just should have been a geek.

It also means that I've got two redundant Window's Vista laptops.  I could flog them on ebay to defray all this expenditure on new software, but I'm rubbish at packing parcels.  Any suggestions?

The Other Elizabeth Taylor

Reading The Wedding Group by excellent Elizabeth Taylor, and came across this chapter opener, below.  I'm not the only one who worries about birds :

"'I can't think why birds don't get duodenal ulcers,' Midge said to Mrs Brindle. She was standing at one of the drawing-room windows, watching them, her birds, swooping into and away from the ham-bone on the lawn. 'It's terrible the way they have to eat their food, so full of anxiety all the time.'

'Perhaps they do get them, ulcers,' Mrs Brindle said, flicking her duster along bookshelves. 'We're hardly to know.'"

Falling Girl Part Two

As I've said before in this blog, reading and writing don't always coincide.  Some surprising comments on the previous post.  I have to say I wasn't making a connection particularly to the 9/11 man falling from the WTC, even though I called her Falling Girl rather than Boneless.  She isn't boneless, exactly, or she wouldn't maintain her shape, I think.  What I had in mind, whatever may lurk at the back of it, was a much more interior abyss, and the horror wasn't the end of the fall, but the lack of an end.  Despair, and, of course, death is a kind of endless falling - or seems so to us who haven't died yet.  That's not irrelevent to the man someone photographed in mid-fall on 9/11, but then it's not irrelevent to anyone else.

Falling Girl (for S.)

Abysses have been big this festive season.  Big and little, global and personal, though in my view they must all resolve into the ineluctable, singular Abyss we're all stuck with.  On the way, however, they seem to take many forms.  Such as: Saddam's seasonal judicial murder, brilliantly coinciding with the first day of Eid (see Riverbend Blog ); the absence of any government spokesperson on the Channel 4 News to discuss the matter; the NHS abyss where doctors can't get work or patients get treated properly; the Tony Blair Bee Gee Holiday abyss.  Not forgetting The Poet's hideous abyss moment when just before the midnight hour he was suddenly overcome with anxiety in case another year wasn't ready to step into the breach, and whether as the last bong of 2006 struck we would fall off the end of time. 

And no end of personal abysses.  Pre-Christmas, pre-New Year black spots that wrong foot you just when you thought you had stuffed your greatest fear down behind the sofa.  New Year's day is for sharing the horror, the horror.

I've had my actual abyss up and running for a couple of weeks now.  It's called Falling Girl and it's attached to my Google homepage (along with a sparky spider who reminds me of how I am no longer frightened of them).  I keep intending to remove it, but each time I move my cursor towards the delete, I find myself staring at it in grim and terrifying fascination. 

I came across the animation a few years back when the girl was transformed into George Bush dressed in a suit, and simply getting his virtual just desserts, a premature hell.  But now it's a young woman dressed in a bra and pants, not I think just for sexist reasons but because her body structure behaves exactly as you would imagine a slack-muscled falling body to behave in free fall and when meeting obstacles.  She falls against a blue backdrop (sky, clear blue yonder) hampered by variously sized opaque white balls which knock her off her course or trap her in some grotesque limp contortion. 

The point is that there is no end to the fall.  She goes on down and down, banging and bouncing on the balls but never arriving at the bottom.  Unlike Bush, she is young, vulnerable, dreadfully solitary and hopeless.  She is the embodiment of the terror you can't describe when you are in deep depression.  She's the worst dream.  The blackest fear.  The abyss.  When she gets stuck  between two balls you can click on her and drag her back into empty space to continue her endless journey.  Occasionally, when she's marooned, I've found myself settling her in a more humanly comfortable position on the balls to give her a rest.  But at other times I set her off again falling and falling and watch, unblinking, appalled, because every now and then or eventually you have to watch the truth of a thing rather than wait for Christmas.

It looks remarkably like the real world to me.  Happy New Year.

Her Tornado Hell

For anyone who hasn't seen this:  My Tornado Hell 

I think this may be the whole story of the way of the world.  No more need be said.