Escaping the Trunk

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

I ganked this from Tavi Gevinson, who I just adore. She featured it because, well, she has fantastic taste. It’s sort of her job. More like a calling, actually. I honestly can’t wait for the moment Tavi takes control of the world, because it will be a far fairer and more beautiful place.

Kubrick said this in an interview with Eric Nordern for the September 1968 issue of Playboy, probably in promotion (or explanation) of 2001. Apparently, Playboy used to have great interviews, along with their great fiction. The moment my mother told me that all my favourite writers were once published in Playboy is etched permanently in my brain, such that when my freshman roommate received a subscription as a joke, I made her save the magazine so I could go through it.

“These women all look the same,” I remember saying.

“Are you done, yet?” she asked, looking pointedly away.

“The fiction submission guidelines aren’t listed anywhere!”

“I can’t believe ____ sent that to me. He said he would, but I didn’t believe him.”

“He likes you. Jamming a Playboy in your mailbox is like sticking gum in your hair. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

…Or something to that effect. (Pro-tip: Unless your target is kinky, don’t try communicating your affection with an issue of Playboy. And even if she is kinky, an issue of Playboy won’t do it. Do some damn shopping, first, and try to get something that doesn’t have fold-open samples of AXE.)

I make fun of the magazine, but I should also mention that Hugh Hefner is one of the most polite Tweeters I’ve ever read. For a guy who almost never changes out of his silk dressing gown, fills his home with models, and basically enjoys the kind of life we all wish we had, his tweets are surprisingly sweet and normal. He talks about his favourite classic films, watches Jon Stewart, and sends out birthday wishes to Playmates old and new. He sticks by his employees, both current and former, and is a perfectionist when it comes to both layouts and punctuation. (Seriously, I defy you to find a misplaced apostrophe on his feed. This man had a stroke years ago, but he still disciplines his thumbs to text correctly. Think of that the next time you type “imma” for “I will.”)

In my dream world, Tavi and Hef actually meet, and afterward she designs the centrefolds each month and meets the models and asks them how their day is going and is in general the complete opposite of Terry Richardson. I know that this will never happen (I suspect it might even be illegal), but, well, consider Kubrick’s words. It’s our own responsibility to make beautiful things happen, no matter how unlikely they are.

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I’ve been away from blogging recently, mostly because I was workshopping, editing, and submitting a story that had been devouring my soul for quite some time (I was in tears as I finished it, no joke). Aside from fictional efforts already submitted elsewhere, I had little of any value to share. The most important news is what’s coming out of Iran, and the most interesting developments are in the sudden surge of networked citizenship in the aftermath of that news — the crystallization of a notion most people who spend the majority of their time online have already internalized, namely that borders are fictional. The important things, the ways in which we truly define ourselves, have less to do with location than the people that we love and what we’re willing to do for them.

Case in point, the Bionic Woman. Or, more appropriately, Aeneas.

I was sitting in a waiting area at one of Toronto’s hospitals when I saw a woman in her fifties or sixties supporting an elderly woman who had already disrobed for her exam. She looked like a female Aeneas, carrying her whole heritage on her back as she stepped into a difficult future. I watched her walk into the exam room and heard her start a litany for the accompanying technician: “I’ve checked her batteries,” she said. “They were full this morning, but who knows.”

I had a sudden and wonderful thought that this elderly woman was not organic at all, that her curved spine was really the product of design, that her pained shuffle was programmed in.

Then Aeneas re-entered the waiting area with moist eyes, and the dream faded. She took a seat across from me and pretended to look at a magazine. But then, as though we had already been properly introduced (for, as the video from Iran has taught us, there is little more intimate than a glimpse of tragedy), she looked up at me and said: “She’s ninety. She has two hearing aids, and an ocular implant so she can see.” She took a deep breath. “She’s the bionic woman.”

“She’s gone full cyborg,” I said. It was easy to say, though. There were other, more difficult things I should have said instead, like: You’re being very strong or You’re a better daughter than I am. But instead I just sat there with my words, and both of us watched each other choosing not to weep.

When Aeneas’ mother returned, she walked out of the exam room and refused to sit down at first. “Mom,” Aeneas said, looking at her open gown and guiding her to a chair, “Mom, you’re getting a little bit sexy there.”

“Pfft,” her mother said, waving one gnarled hand.

“Hey, if you’ve got it, flaunt it,” I said.

Aeneas laughed. It was a nervous thing that fizzed out of her like the first hiss from a slowly-opening bottle. “Right,” she said. “Got it, flaunt it.”

Fate appeared to take me at my word later this afternoon when, as I was purchasing absurdly over-priced lemonade outdoors, the wind saw fit to play Friday Flip-Up Day with my skirt. (The wind, as we all know, is a first-grade boy.) I knew I should have bought those Batman briefs at H+M.

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Remember this?

Jon lay on a white leather divan, utterly unaware. The two girls who sat beside him every day in literature class were drawing on him with calligraphy brushes. They had duct taped tracked pens to each brush. A little remote infrared camera sat atop a humming portable projector. Another camera sat on a tripod beside it. On a monitor at their feet, Violet watched a digital iteration of Jon’s supine body slowly acquiring each mark, each brushstroke. The girls had made him into an infoboard, and seemed to be broadcasting the result. Both versions of Jon wore only swimming trunks.

That was inspired by Johnny Lee’s work on Wii-mote cameras. Check out what Mr. Lee is doing now:

This “vision video” indicates what Mr. Lee and his fellow designers would like to make possible with Project Natal, an extension of the Xbox technologies. He describes it better than I can:

The 3D sensor itself is a pretty incredible piece of equipment providing detailed 3D information about the environment similar to very expensive laser range finding systems but at a tiny fraction of the cost. Depth cameras provide you with a point cloud of the surface of objects that is fairly insensitive to various lighting conditions allowing you to do things that are simply impossible with a normal camera.

I post this because my friend Jerry told me he would be running into Mr. Lee Saturday evening (a fact that makes me positively green with envy), and I gave him explicit orders to corner the man and tell him that he had inspired a beginner science fiction writer. Given the publicity and utter coolness of Project Natal, I’m sure I won’t be the only one.

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DIY guide now available!

Mr. Ashby IM’d me frantically this afternoon to let me know about this little development, and I sent it along to BoingBoing with equal haste:

Last year, Khanna’s construction of a small supercomputer using eight Sony-donated Playstation 3 gaming consoles made headlines nationwide in the scientific community. On the consoles, he is solving complex equations designed to predict the properties of gravitational waves generated by the black holes located at the center of the galaxies.

“Science budgets have been significantly dropping over the last decade,” Khanna said. “Here’s a way that people can do science projects less expensively. This new web site will show people how to move forward.”

Typically, scientists rent supercomputer time by the hour. A single simulation can cost more than 5,000 hours at $1 per hour on the National Science Foundation’s TeraGrid computing infrastructure. “For the same cost, you can build your own supercomputer and it works just as well if not better,” Khanna said. “Plus, you can use it over and over again, indefinitely.” The cost for his initial Playstation grid was $4,000.

The guide is freely available to the public under an open source license.

Sit back and ponder this one for just a minute. It’s a supercomputer. That costs about four thousand dollars. That means that cities (and households, and farms, and convents, and schools) could each have one. It means the possibility not just of simulations being run everywhere, all the time, but of supercomputing in parallel. Further slashes to NASA’s budget? No problem — we can do the math ourselves. Problems estimating how avian flu will impact major cities? No more — we don’t even have to run it in Warcraft, any more. Want to know how smart grids would look in fifty, five hundred, five thousand years? Speculate on energy infrastructure, supply chain histories, availability of raw materials? Yeah, we can do that. Hell, throw in some variables: earthquakes, sieches, eruptions, plagues of locusts, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria. We can run that, and share the data with everyone we know — without government involvement, but with the possibility for everyday citizens to check the results against their own calculations.

This is, as Mr. Ashby said, “unconscionably cool.” Not least because right at this moment, we could afford our own supercomputer.

Update: PS3s help astrophysicists solve mystery of black hole vibration.

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The short story apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the short story, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.

From The Ambition of the Short Story, by Stephen Millhauser (thanks Dave!)

…I think I read my first Millhauser novel at fifteen, when a teacher handed me his copy of Martin Dressler and let me take it home. (That was my year of discovering literary fiction, and I have my teacher to thank for it. Years later while house-sitting for him I discovered Haruki Murakami, and my perspective changed in subtle and dangerous ways.) I remember being confused but still determined to finish the book and pry open the secret that I firmly believed awaited me at the end.

Dave and I were talking about short stories the other night, and we both concluded that despite the span of years separating us, we had basically learnt short stories from the same basic sources: Night Shift and The Illustrated Man. The only difference is that I literally cut my teeth on the former: my mother’s battered paperback features tiny teeth marks and in the upper right-hand corner. I still think that there isn’t much about the short story that can’t be grokked from those two books. Granted, I actually enjoy King’s stories in Skeleton Crew better, particularly “Paranoid: A Chant,” “The Raft,” and “The Jaunt.” But I maintain that there’s an audacious simplicity to those Night Shift stories — the whole story hangs open like a frozen carcass waiting to be butchered. You can see the bones and the meat. It’s all there, nasty but complete, naked. The Illustrated Man is, if anything, even creepier: “The Veldt” and “Zero Hour” remain the most true and most frightening stories about children that I’ve ever read.

To this list I would add Murakami’s After the Quake, which is a tiny collection of short stories inspired by the 1995 Kobe earthquake. The quake never enters the story directly. We never see it happen, but rather feel the aftershocks rippling across the consciousness of each main character. Those stories are the gold standard, as far as I’m concerned, for literary or surrealist short fiction. They’re elegant, disciplined, and powerful, like a single perfect swing of the bat. When I forget what a short story is supposed to do, I go back and read them, particularly “Honey Pie” and “Thailand.” (Then I promptly weep over my personal incompetence.)

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