Churcharama, and digressions

Sarah and I have been attending metro Denver churches, hoping to find a new home where we can meet other young parents and grow up for a while. We've been sort of careful about it. We've used a list from Denver Theological Seminary, checked out churches online, tried to check for small groups and family ministries like women's studies and Mothers of Preschoolers. We are trying to avoid churches that are loosey goosey on the Bible, but also trying to avoid extra-denominational places, along with fire and brimstone kinds of places. It's time to grow. Two, three hundred people in the Sunday service seems about right.

Two weeks ago we screwed the whole thing up.

We drove the back way to Cherry Hills Community Church. We took a road called Wildcat Reserve Parkway. I believe it does actually pass by a wildcat reserve, but we haven't explored all the parks (of which there are many) in the area. I knew the way, because the day before we had gone swimming at one of the Highlands Ranch Rec Centers. These are free to residents of Highlands Ranch, and we had heard that this one had an indoor pool for kids. The pool was very cool, with all kinds of fountains and slides, wading, a spa, and one wavy loop with a slow current that tugs you around. The loop was also the only place I came close to putting Alex underwater. I was holding him up, as was his flotation vest, in the little river. Going around a curve, the undertow pulled my feet off the bottom and I got dunked. As I fell, I pushed Alex's butt up with my hand, trying to keep him up for Sarah, who was behind us. I lost him for a second, got my balance and spun around to look. Sarah had him ok. She told me that when I pushed him up and let go, he looked surprised, but he started kicking and kept himself afloat for a second. To me, this bodes well for his future, both in the water and in overall survival. Anyhow, this pool was a little way down the right hand of an intersection on Wildcat Reserve, and this church was a little way down the left.

We turned onto Fairview and saw traffic cones taking out a lane, and a cop parked in the middle of the road. We wondered what was going on until we got to the cop, who... waved us in to the church parking lot. Oh. We got a sinking feeling. They have to control the traffic for the Sunday service? And there they were, hundreds of cars driving around. I can't say they were driving around a church building. Instead, they were crossing over into the embassy of what was, and still remains, a foreign country to me.

The complex, campus, whatever term you prefer, sprawled out on a hillside. At first, we didn't know which door to enter because crowds were going towards a few different entrances. We lucked out and found a sort of atrium that the church used as a greeting area. To the left was a concierge with information. To the right was the child check-in area.

We went to get Alex signed up for the nursery. As a first-time child, we had to give up some personal information to get registered. It didn't help that the man attending us said, we'll get him right in the database, so he'll be good to go next week. I have been a little more wary of this lately. I mean, the weekend before I started work I went to our local haircut place to get spruced up for my first day. They asked for my name, then they asked me for my phone number. For some reason, this brought me up short. I had never been to a barber shop that needed my phone number. My name, yes, my money, yes, my repeat customer punch-card, sure. But my phone number? So I said, "I would prefer not to." This completely flustered the receptionist. She literally did not know what to do next. She had to ask one of the stylists, who said, use the phone number for the house. Even so, the stylist had to come over and help the receptionist click through her menus. Finally, I was all set, and the receptionist told me the wait would be fifteen minutes. Just enough time to get groceries, I thought, so I told her I'd be right back.

Half an hour later or so, I walked back in, ready for my haircut, and sat down. The receptionist chose that moment to vacuum up nothing from the floor right in front me. Then the stylist, busy with another customer, said, you were already on the list, right? I said, that's right, ready to wait. When it was my turn for a haircut, the stylist asked me what I wanted. I said that I just wanted it nice for my new job, and I hadn't been in a while, so I'd like it shorter. For the rest of the haircut, the stylist didn't say one word. She sprayed my hair with the water bottle for so long that my head was freezing, then she cut my hair practically without using her comb. I didn't figure it out till later, but she left a wing on one of my sideburns, and barely touched the sides, which have since begun to poof out. Needless to say, they've lost my business, but the more interesting point is that they were willing act affronted and mess with me because I wouldn't give them my personal information. There is such a thing as privacy, and you've got to start somewhere.

So I was really stuck, checking Alex into the nursery. I already knew, without even seeing the service or the nursery or much but the parking lot that we would never be back, yet I had to give out my information again. This was a situation that called for a little protest, but what? On the form I found it, two lines not marked "Parent A" and "Parent B", but instead, "Head of household" and "Spouse". For me, that little line created all kinds of feelings, basically a heated theological debate, which I proceeded to win with permanent ink: I marked Sarah as head of household, and myself as spouse. Alex was tagged with a serial number and the last four digits of our phone number were marked on his tag. During the service, the man said, if we were needed in the nursery our digits would be flashed under the screens. Screens? but we had no time to think about it then. We took Alex off to the nurseries.

The nurseries were divided by age, as in all the churches we've visited. Here the difference was that there were maybe eight, maybe a dozen nurseries, divided up by age groups of two or three months each. That is, Alex was placed in a nursery for children born in September and October 2004 only. Think a little about how many staff and children this implies (a hundred kids? more? under three or four), and you'll get an idea of the scale of the thing. I glanced out the sliding door of the nursery as we handed Alex off to the nice young man, who was explaining about the emergency paging system again. There was a Big Toy, a little playground out back of this (and presumably, every) nursery. We dropped him off and headed for the service itself.

We got lost on the way to the service and had to consult a map. Again, the traffic was no help because people were going about equally both up and down the hall. Finally, we arrived in the worship center, which again was enormous. It reminded me of a theater. It had a balcony, of course. Greeters were stationed across the expanse as you walked in, impossible to avoid. Ushers at the door handed out full-color brochures. Later, they would guide people into open seats. Sarah and I sat on the end of the next-to-last row, in the middle, by the door.

The theater atmosphere continued inside. The band was already singing as we found our seats. Where to start? The room is perhaps best thought of as a quarter of pie, with the stage at the point. We were seated at the bottom edge of the crust, near the tin... The stage was enormous, like the stage on Austin City Limits, or any other theater you care to imagine. There were two enormous big screens to either side of the stage, and five slightly smaller big screens arrayed around at balcony height. These screens displayed various members of the band as they sang and played, panning, fading, and zooming in a manner reminiscent, for me, of PBS concerts. The lyrics to the songs we sang (all of them Christian praise choruses that we all knew quite well) were displayed, not on an overhead, but as subtitles placed gracefully on the screens without obscuring the musicians.

There were thirteen people in the band: five singers, a pianist on a grand, a drummer, a bassist, a lead guitarist on a flying V, a saxophonist, a guy on acoustic, a guy on a synthesizer, and a guy on the violin. They sang with palpable emotion. On the stage itself were two columns, where the lights and shadows of concert lighting played, and a gigantic screen in the center, behind it all, made screen-saverish patterns like the ones that play behind the singers on American Idol. And I started thinking the word "staged", a word which still captures almost everything I took away from the production. A few other things stood out to me about the music. The guy on lead guitar had these amazing solos, which were technically breathtaking, but not, perhaps, setting the mood. On the song "You're All I Want", the lead singer started singing the lines of the verses before us, while we sang the regular tune behind her. The effect was not unlike the echoes of a gospel chorus, which again was technically cool, but it occurred to me later that we the church, like the other four singers on stage, had metamorphosed into her backups. Of course, no matter what the song, the band was turned up so high that it was not possible to hear yourself or the congregation singing. And perhaps most important, everyone clapped after every song, and it felt like a rock show.

The sermon was not much better. For some reason, there was a rug onstage for the pastor to pace on as he delivered his talk. It was about the apostle Paul seizing his moment. I was hoping for great things, I guess, as this was the most Christian part of the show, but here, as exemplar, was the takeaway point, in gigantic words on the big screens: "Jesus calls us from something, for something." This, I thought to myself, was the problem with preaching to such a wide audience: the lowest common denominator. And after the sermon, the people all clapped. And at the end of the service, it was the biggest ovation of all.

Sarah told everyone afterwards what I said to her as we hurried past the luxury cars to our little Corolla and got out of there: "I don't know about you, but we're not going back." We talked about it for most of the rest of the day, but we already agreed about that.

We've had better luck our other weeks, with two fine churches in Bethany Evangelical Free Church, and Valley View Christian Church. We are hoping that we have many to choose from; time will tell.

In other news, I've also started work in what is basically a locked-down facility. I've been enjoying work, but there are aspects of it that are a little surreal. And I almost forgot, but Sarah and I finished the Harry Potter saga. Without spoilers, let me just say that JK Rowling deserves your money and your eyeballs glued to her pages, and I'll leave it at that. Buy them, read them, give them out. We now need something new to read together, so feel free to suggest something.

I miss you, friends, and I hope you're having a happy, fulfilling time wherever you are.

First week

Hi everyone. As you may know, I've been almost completely off the map. It was my first week of work. I thought it was fun, but exhausting. I am happy to be working a 9-80, which means I get every other Friday off. Getting up at 6:00 to make it has not been easy, but I've rolled with it.

Sarah and I visited a nice evangelical free church two Sundays ago, and our visit to a megachurch yesterday was a real doozy, basically a first for both of us. I eventually just started taking notes, because the whole experience was just too much. I'll fill you in as I get time. Sarah and I went to Sam's Club on Saturday morning, and bought Harry Potter VII for half price off a pallet stacked with them. We went to the Tattered Cover first, but they weren't discounting the fastest-selling book ever (or if they were, we didn't see the sign), which was the kiss of death.

I finished What's So Amazing About Grace? again. It's a book about the Christian distinctive that means something: real unconditional love towards the unlovable. That is one definition of grace; another might be "treating people better than fairness and justice demand", or "do better to others than you would ever expect them to do to you", or "the stairway off the karmic wheel of reward and retribution", or "living beyond inertia", or "making the first move". It's a good book and it always makes me think. Spurred by Vince, I visited the USU philosophy blog, so I was thinking about ethics as I read this book. Grace is meant to be beyond ethics, I think. Ethics is about the right thing, and the fair things, and values of obligations and weighing the matter, and determining consequences. Grace is not beyond good and evil, but it lies past them; the Boy Scout's good deed for the day is what ethics means to me. Boy Scouts finish, they arrive, check it off their lists. Grace never arrives. On the bright side, grace never ends.

I got my library card, so I'm in the middle of Firestarter (Stephen King), Don't Know Much About History (a primer for those with an American History hole in their education, which somehow I got), and Come To The Quiet: Principles of Christian Meditation by John Michael Talbot. I am reading that last slowly and carefully. Talbot (a famous singer-songwriter in Catholic and, broadly, Christian circles) has written a very deep book here about quiet time with God, trying to draw out the meaning of meditation in Christianity and also meaningful parallels within other world religions. I've also got a John Scalzi space war novel, an Alice Miller book, and Einstein's biography to get to.

Stay sane, and I'll try to be back soon.

Colorado

Hi people. The Lewis family has successfully arrived in Highlands Ranch, just south of Denver. Our house is quite nice. I even mowed the lawn for the first time in about ten years yesterday. We have approximately one extra bedroom and one extra living room. If you have any suggestions about what to do about this, let me know.

Also, if you're from Colorado and know some things we should do on my last week of vacation for a while, let me know.

The weather is very nice and so is the library and everything else. We'll have pictures sooner or later at Sarah's blog, lewislife.typepad.com. Thursday our home internet gets hooked up, so transmission will be spotty until then.

Independence Day

Tomorrow, I'll be homeless for the last time in a while. Sarah and I are packing up and moving to Highlands Ranch, CO (think the last homely suburb in southern Denver). Maybe we'll see fireworks in Denver, I don't know. Sarah's mom and stepfather are also coming, and maybe her brother.

I finished The Once and Future King. I thought it was very episodic and disjointed. Like Vince told me, the first part was definitely the best.

I also picked up and read The Stand for the first time. It's Stephen King's classic, apocalyptic tale of the near-destruction of the human race by a military super-virus. This is a novel par excellence, with many stories that intertwine and reinforce each other, with some unforgettable imagery, and a backbone of dangerous Christianity, in the sense of "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things". It's graphic and horrific in spots. It would be an easy R, shades of NC-17 if it were a movie. Sex, swearing, drugs, violence, Satan, and rock and roll. I can't do it justice, but I'm definitely reading it again sooner or later.

I guess I'll be going even darker now than lately. I don't know when we'll hook up the Internet. My love to you all, as appropriate.

Oh, our new address. Email me if you want our Colorado address. We'll be changing the phone soon too.

Strange few weeks

Hi everyone. It's been a strange few weeks, with a trip to Denver for house hunting, security clearance procedures, and I still haven't finished The Once and Future King. This book is breaking all my records for slowness in reading. I can't remember the last time I took 3 weeks to read a novel.

Sarah and I are anxious for our new situation. We found a nice house to rent, close to work, groceries, parks, and schools. The movers are packing our things a week from yesterday and hauling them off a week from tomorrow. We've decided to drive to Denver in one fabulous day, by way of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Sarah and I liked the area a lot on our trip. I diaried the first 3 days, so maybe I can tell a few stories about it later. Our friend Karen even got to show us around downtown Denver. It's a cool city. I will be back for the US Mint and the art museums for sure, and for the baseball game.

I've been worrying that the time is making me dopey. I haven't been this long without my PC ever, and my programming skills are, no doubt, slipping. I've been reading Effective C++ to try to keep a hand in.

It looks like our Las Vegas trip is going to fall through. Basically, it is happening because we lent a massive corporation our money to search for a house, and they are reimbursing us too late for me to go; also, the movers are coming during the trip. I am disappointed, but there's nothing else we could do.

I've also felt at loose ends because of our homelessness. Our relatives have been really great about the whole thing, but I have settled into an uncreative routine. I don't feel like myself. I'm just doing lots of crosswords and logic problems and watching Mythbusters all day, with an occasional walk around Brigham City. I feel like I'm just surviving. Thank goodness this is all ending soon.

Interesting news

Viva Las Vegas! Sarah, Alex, and I are heading to the City of Sin for my first professional conference, Worldcomp '07. A short version of my thesis was accepted as a conference paper, so I am going to present it at one of the couple dozen simultaneous conferences, CVIP '07 (which stands for computer vision and image processing). I'm also on a mission to see other interesting papers and tutorials, and to network. Unfortunately, we won't be there in time for John Holland's keynote the first morning, unless they schedule me for Monday and we have to change our plans. I'm interested in some of the other conferences too. There is one dedicated to AI, another one for machine learning, another one for data mining... parallel processing, software engineering, knowledge engineering, semantic web... it's all there.

We will have 3 luxurious nights to live it up. If I have my druthers, the poker room at the Rio and the World Series of Poker bracelet events will be on the itinerary. We're staying at the Tropicana, so if you aren't doing anything June 25-28 and would love to vacation (hotels.com + southwest.com) among the pimps, high rollers, snakes, and sleaze of it all, come on down.

I got sucked into The Once and Future King, which is, so far, a funny sort of book, so I am reading it back and forth with Sons and Lovers, a tragic sort of book. I feel like Homer in the one where he's a truck driver and he takes big handfuls of uppers and downers in combination so he can drive across the country without sleeping.

Heroes Season 1 is over

I'm going to call it PG-13 for those who care. Mature themes, violence including murder, sometimes disturbing images. And then there's all the good stuff. About fate, destiny, heroism, racism, identity, it is the most perfect 10 on network TV right now (I haven't seen Lost or spent the time on 24, but whatever). Heroes. You can watch every episode online (interlaced with commercials). Or you can wait for the DVDs. I've said it before, but run, don't walk. Make haste to see them.

In other awesome TV show news, I picked up my first issue of Buffy Season 8 (The Comic Book), and it was totally rad.

Furthermore, I saw two good episodes of The Simpsons on Sunday. It's hard to believe they've still got it.

Also, two good episodes of Futurama, which I sadly neglected while it was on air. The one with a universe in a box was hilarious. I howled with laughter.

Sarah and I saw Shrek 3 last night. It's hard to believe any movie ending in a 3 can be good, but they did it well, if a bit predictably. It had its moments. Also, a nice date, which Sarah and I haven't had for a while.

Why am I talking about nothing but TV? It's because I'm on vacation. While I wait on the intentions of Lockheed Martin (really, it's simple: tell me how to get to Colorado and start to work), I've been TVing it up and reading it up.

I recently finished Graham Greene's ultra-personal autobiography, A Sort of Life. Some of the reviewers called it, basically, bloodless. I didn't find it ironic, exactly. Obviously Greene was not able to write as if he had not lived for six decades, and be the awkward teenager he was, but he did try to get at the kinds of things that he had felt and struggled through. In a way, I felt like he was almost writing in what's called the objective voice, or the camera view. In that voice, you don't judge, you don't feel your material... you look, and pass, look and pass. The mask of neutrality said volumes to me, and I found many threads common to my own life. Perhaps you wouldn't find similar points of contact.

Up next, a book that has been sitting on my shelf for several years: Sons and Lovers, by DH Lawrence. It's a weird reason to read a book, but I heard about a friend doing a paper on it once. I tried to get into it a while back, so I hope that my recent jaunt through the British consciousness has prepared me mentally.

I recently received a graduation book, the daunting biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. I am fascinated by genius scientists and their biographies, like Tesla and Feynman, so I am looking forward to this one.

Also in the backpack, The Once and Future King, which another friend of mine was reading in college, and which I picked up at the USU book sale for $.50, The Name of the Rose, another incredible USU book sale find (in hardback), The Stand, a fantasy by Guy Gavriel Kay, and, as filler, the complete Sherlock Holmes.

My summer reading list is filling up, but if you have a good one for me to read, let me know.

We miss you friends in Logan already...

The best defense

is the soul of wit. It turns out my thesis defense today went a wee bit long. I presumed on my committee's indulgence. But it doesn't matter, because I passed. Our long educational nightmare is over.

Our long national nightmare continues apace... if you didn't catch a story about the Iraqi parliament,

Supporters of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said Thursday that they'd gathered enough support in Iraq's parliament to pass a bill requiring a timetable for U.S. forces to pull out.

The legal or practical implications of an Iraqi law that would attempt to require a timetable for U.S. troops to leave the country were unclear. Even those circulating the legislation said they expected to sort out particulars in parliamentary debate.

But the announcement, on the anniversary of the parliament's swearing-in last year, underscores the difficulty of the American position in Iraq.

...

Word of the Iraqi pullout legislation came amid growing signs of dissatisfaction in parliament over the inability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government and U.S. officials to curb violence in neighboring Diyala province. Sunni insurgents tied to the group al-Qaida in Iraq have undertaken a campaign there against Shiite residents.

A parliamentary committee reported Thursday that 11,200 people have been killed in Diyala since 2004. Its report says 9,500 families have been displaced, 8,250 women have been widowed, 16,500 children orphaned and 66 mosques or shrines destroyed in the same period.

When some lawmakers appeared preoccupied as the report on Diyala was being read, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, which represents the parliament's narrow Shiite majority, chastised them.

"You received the report as if it's about the sewage flowing," Shatha al-Mosawi said. "We heard about kids who are given to their families fried after being kidnapped."

And it's got a great clincher:

In a meeting with Maliki on Wednesday, Cheney repeated U.S. officials' warnings that the Iraqi parliament should cancel its two-month summer break to deal with the country's political issues.

I told my dad when he visited last week that I am not optimistic about the situation in Iraq because I see the pogrom has already begun.

For more on these issues and daily translation and interpretation of news from Iraq (I find it hard to read most days), visit Juan Cole. He's sometimes polemical (I ignore those), but mostly the news just forms his argument for him.

And like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Somebody gave me a job today, quite officially. So it's on to the next dream.

I'll be working in defense for Lockheed Martin, in the Littleton, CO area. Graduate school has been good to me, and I'm essentially starting up a level on the career ladder because of it. Down the road, the door is open to a PhD because of my thesis, which I'm defending next Friday. And best of all, it taught me a lot about computers and about science.

It will be nice to get off the school and work grind, and just learn and grow in my profession. It will be nice to pay off some school loans, live in a house. It will be nice to be out on our new grand adventure.

I'll write some contact information here in due course. The Internet, insubstantial as it is, can keep us all on one stage, and that's how it should be.

More reviews

While I try to take violence to the next level, a few good books and movies.

I recently finished EM Forster's classic lecture series Aspects of the Novel. While the first sections on plot and character are quite interesting, apart from the references to books solidly in the British tradition that I haven't read, like Tom Jones and Portrait of a Lady, the later sections suffer from some concerns peculiar to his era. The section on fantasy, in particular, was written to explain to people that they could suspend their disbelief and let fantastic things become a part of their stories. Our hindsight, with the benefit of Tolkien and all his progeny, need not be told. The comparison of (I think it was George Eliot) with Dostoyevsky was instructive, though. Both depict scenes of conversion, but Eliot goes with a voice of preaching, while Dostoyevsky takes the strange, sacred voice of the prophet (in a scene from The Brothers Karamazov). What he was trying to get at was that Dostoyevsky was writing deeper than Eliot.

I've come across the same theme in a great book by the lady who wrote A Wrinkle in Time. It's called Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle. I would buy this book. It is a third, say, a reflection on art, a third theological, and a third devotional. I could read books like this all day and all night. In some ways it reminds me of The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy L. Sayers, but it's more personal and magical. I haven't finished it yet.

I also finished a great memoir. I don't read too many of these, but a friend recommended it way back when. It's called Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life, by Lauren Winner. It's the odd but true story of a girl born to interfaith parents, who first decided to become an Orthodox Jew, then slowly came around to Christianity. She never writes exactly why she became a Christian; there is no conversion moment. Instead, there is a loving description of both her Judaism and her Christianity, of life lived through those prisms and what faith does in an ordinary life.

I saw the new James Bond movie the other day. It was action violence as you might expect, but it had heart and character too. It was a very interesting, throwback James Bond, in the Sean Connery mold, certainly better than the Pierce Brosnan fare we've had to swallow for the past few years, but nothing so spectacular as I had been led to believe. Solid, meaty, but not world-beating.

If I object to anything, it's the depiction of poker. Yes, big pots are won and lost by a great hand losing to a phenomenal hand, but it's more often like two pair losing to three of a kind, or just maybe a full house losing to a higher full house. But even more often, tournaments end with the escalation of the blinds, as more and more players are forced to protect their stacks by moving all-in with subpar hands.

For that reason, I found the scene where a four-of-a-kind loses to the straight flush to be a pretty hack move. I just read a great Aristotle line about the audience in Walking on Water (paraphrase): People will believe the probable impossible more than the possible improbable. In other words, presentation is everything; dragons can be more convincing than this kind of poker hand. Truth may be stranger than fiction; there is a story in The Biggest Game in Town where Johnny Moss recounts a hand where he won a boatload of money. His opponent turned over the 6 of spades with the 7 through 10 on the board for the straight flush, but Johnny had the jack of spades, the higher straight flush. The fact that it really happens is no excuse for putting it into a story, though.

I also saw The Prestige the other day. It's one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, perfect at what it does. It's the story of a sometimes nasty rivalry between two magicians at the turn of the century. Magician A is suave, debonair, with a flair for the dramatic. Magician B is more rough and homely, but he does a fantastic trick that Magician A can't match. Magician A becomes obsessed with beating Magician A, learning his secret, and topping his trick. The characters are pretty cruel to one another. When they get violent, it's realistic and raw. The cruelty is probably worse than the violence itself. But the plot is so good, and every note is so right, it's yet another strong recommendation for an adult-content, violent movie.

Happy birthday!

My lovely wife Sarah is 26 today! You could stroll over to her blog and send her a birthday wish...



I love you, sweetheart!

Would the whole world pass him by?

Read this article. Watch the videos. It's awesome.

Christos anesti!

And now for something completely different

I'm writing a post about violence in movies and literature in response to some of Vince's comments, but this popped through my reader and I just can't resist. From Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, comes this editorial on the mistreatment of British prisoners in Iran. Here's the first paragraph:

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

Violence

After my last post, I got a comment from Vince, a friend from church, who writes, among other things,

A couple of very mature Christians that I respect were discussing and laughing about "Kill Bill". With some trepidation I decided to see what they were raving about. I was appalled and never got beyond the kitchen scene. The beauty of humans should remain so.

Certainly there is a place for graphic violence, but only in the despising of graphic violence ... "Schindler's List" for instance.

Just a bit of elderly exhortation.

Your character and kindness seem to bear the violence well, but only in spite of these gruesome selections.

Where to start? Maybe with kung fu movies. As long-time observers of my life will know, I have been a Jackie Chan fan since I first saw Rumble in the Bronx at Mike Tosch's house way back when. I find the cartoony violence of Who Am I? and Drunken Master II (in the US, dubbed and retitled Legend of Drunken Master) delightful, more people dancing and pretending to hit each other than actually violent. (Chan's taken a real downturn of late in the very soggy Around the World in Eighty Days and The Tuxedo, but I'm sure he'll be on top again any month now.)

Some of his grittier outings like Police Story appeal to me less, and I prefer to go without the gory stuff you could see in a lot of Jet Li's wire-fu and gangster movies. And then there is the really beautiful stuff in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. We could go on, but I think these three broad categories of kung-fu violence are a good place to start: cartoony up to delightful, realistic up to gory, and fantastic up to beautiful.

The first and third cases are not exactly graphic. Maybe they desensitize people to violence in the long run, slowly wearing down one's defenses, like gateway drugs. Start with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or GI Joe, or The Lone Ranger?), end with Kill Bill. I won't focus on this slippery slope. Some people really do stop at social drinking and other people stop at Jackie Chan. I'll also include Buffy and Angel somewhere on the slippery slope, because violence is certainly a theme, but it's just not that realistic. Or, you might say, the violence is less realistic than the characters and their stories and relationships.

I am more inclined to think of realistic, gory violence like one might see in a horror film, an action movie, a crime drama, a war movie, a historical or similar depictions as the broad class of graphic violence that Vince is advising against. So let's try to make a case against gratuitous graphic violence. One film that pops to mind is Bad Taste, a zombie movie featuring a dude with his braincase falling open, said brains being munched on by scavenger birds and zombies, ripping apart said zombies with a chainsaw. Ad nauseam. (Incidentally, the director/actor of this movie is Peter Jackson, the same guy who made that Lord of the Rings trilogy and got that Oscar sweep. True story.) And the argument would go, whatever redeeming content this movie has, the violence is essentially at right angles to it, and overwhelms, say, the story, script, direction, cinematography, costuming, and such.

By changing the example movie and exchanging the word "sex" for "violence", we will essentially arrive at the Supreme Court's argument about distinguishing obscenity from art, or more specifically, pornography from erotica. And the infamous line from that argument is "I'll know it when I see it", which is really no argument at all. The reason they had to say that was the definition of obscenity that they used: "prurient, patently offensive expression, lacking serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." The Supreme Court couldn't define most of those words, so they had to substitute human instincts, or community standards, or an appeal to obviousness to make these judgments. If our goal were to judge violence in movies by this legal standard, we would have similar problems.

Here's that list of genres again: horror, action, crime, war, historical/realistic. Here is an example each from these genres, so you know what I'm thinking of as I write: Nightmare on Elm Street, True Lies, Law and Order (a TV show, not a movie), Saving Private Ryan, Black Robe. Looking at it again, I suppose this is a rough order of how high the bar should be to consider violence as having serious artistic or literary value. The case is hardest to make for horror, with its splatter and torment of innocents, playing the notes of fear and disgust in relentless, dissonant jangles. Action movies at least excuse their killings by portraying the victims as evil and concentrating on killing as heroics. Which of these two last is more pernicious is an exercise for the viewer. Crime dramas, though, have the potential to tell us about human psychology and engage our minds in a mystery. Depending on how dark the psychology, we may encounter more graphic violence. In war movies, violence is still more germane to the action. Historical or realistic portrayals of human behavior, and the capacity of humans to do violence to one another, are extremely important too, even as Vince mentioned.

But if that's so, where do you draw the line on violence? Can extremely graphic violence be excused by extremely artistic content? Or by extremely probing, meaningful human stories? Or by meditating on violence? Vince says no to the first. However amazing Kill Bill is as film-making art (I haven't seen it), that doesn't excuse the wanton, graphic violence, which Tarentino could have omitted, if he wanted to, just by making a different sort of movie. When violence is entwined inextricably with the story, though, or when violence is the story, what then?

For instance, was the violence in The Passion of the Christ gratuitous? I read some reviews saying it was overdone. I could see that. I cringed as I watched it, I felt numbed by it all. I found myself translating Latin numbers as the soldiers counted out the strokes of Jesus' flogging. (As an aside, I also do prime factorizations of the timestamp on the DVD player when I find myself looking away from a movie.)

On the other hand, although some of the incidents in the movie came from extra-biblical sources (such as the face of the Messiah on St. Veronica's handkerchief, or the sopping up of the blood by Mary and the other women), most if not all of the violence is right out of the Gospel narratives, and it's probably never been as completely depicted on film as it was there. Was there value in seeing that, value that I couldn't have gained by just watching the Jesus film (mostly Luke's gospel; this is the one that has been translated into almost a thousand languages) and letting my imagination do the work?

Just before Vince wrote, by chance, I saw another movie that put these issues in perspective for me. When I told Sarah about it, I said, "Well, it was really violent, but..." It's called Children of Men, and it just came out on DVD. It's the year 2027, and women mysteriously ceased to have children eighteen years previously, and the youngest people are now 18. So long without a cure for infertility, without children, and the world has descended into madness, despair, loss. It is a harsh, violent world. England is cracking down on illegal immigrants, sending them to camps. Revolutionaries rebel against the totalitarian government by blowing things up. A man makes his way through this world and kills when he thinks he must. The violence is very realistic, although it's more realistic as in war than as in gruesome gory details.

The movie is amazing. I can't help but highly recommend it. It's deep, it's poignant, it made me cry huge sobs near the end. It has a lot to say about children, and violence, and hope, and it's very well made. Of course, if you are deeply offended by realistic violent content, you'll have to steer clear. And that's the crux of the thing right there: how much violence are you willing to watch in the pursuit of these human moments, or otherwise redeeming content?

When I talked about obscenity, I mentioned that we'd run into major quandaries trying to judge the artistic value of movies to the precision of a legal standard. In America, we tend to rate more heavily against sexual content than violent content, or at least the ratings board of the Motion Picture Association of America does for us, but this is all very ad hoc and informal.

Suppose we want a higher standard than just legalities and broad cultural opinions. How does being a Christian play into these issues of adult content? I am no expert, so what follows is all me. The verse that comes to mind is Paul's "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." There's an obvious interpretation of this verse (no doubt similar verses could be discovered) that suggest that Christians are to confine themselves to milquetoast art. All I can say about that particular interpretation is that I've tested it with my own life and found it wanting.

Vince's comment hints at the idea that there is such great non-violent art out there that I could spend a lifetime on the excellent and praiseworthy, without getting around to the violent and disgusting. And the work he points to, while excellent, is not just naive about human behavior. Silence, one of my favorite books, depicts the torture and martyrdom of Christians in feudal Japan, and tells the story of a priest's loss of faith and renunciation of Christ. The first time I read this book, it was like a bombshell going off in my newly-minted fundamentalism. I was drawn afterward, like the author, Shusaku Endo, to the worrisome cases, to depictions of sinners more than saints. Lurking underneath this is probably a connection to my relative tolerance of violence and inhumanity in literature and on the screen.

I find that it's hard to compromise on excellence in art, to censor that great emotional connection I make as a reader and viewer with the artist who created the work. Sometimes they will show me, horrified, things I might prefer not to see, but things they think are important for me to see. Shusaku Endo certainly goes that route in one of my other favorites, Scandal, probably the most affecting portrayal of evil I have ever read. I would certainly call it excellent and praiseworthy, but co-mingled with the story's beauty is a very real heart of darkness. Did God want me to go there? I say yes.

None of that is to say that I'm ignoring Vince's lists of great works (on the books, I actually have a generous head start). I want to see great stuff that's not also rated R. And I do avoid gratuitous violence on principle, as an offense to human dignity. But there's a big grey area in between that I haven't sussed out yet.

I guess I'll mention, last, that I too am a non-violent sort of person and I haven't had any need to create graphic violence in my little world. I imagine myself as a conscientious objector and hope I'd be brave enough to say no in the event that someone asked me to pick up a gun for my country, or design a better nuclear bomb.

Busy busy

Hi everyone. In the last couple of weeks, I've been to Silicon Valley and Austin. Now I'm off to Denver on Friday. Get your all-expenses-paid recruiting trips in while you can, space is limited. They all seem like great offers.

I read a cute little book called Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. It's a deceptively simple book that's a comic about comics; their semantics, their special idioms, their potential, their uniqueness. I loved every minute of it, and even though I can't draw worth beans, it inspired me to put pencil to paper and do a couple of strips. I am certainly fascinated by comics, as my reading list shows, if not enough to become a starving comics artist.

I read a graphic novel (emphasis on graphic) called From Hell on the plane, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. It's a sprawling black and white about the Jack the Ripper murders, poverty, violence, freemasonry, Victorian England. It's one of the best and one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen and read. Rated a very strong R, if not worse. I don't see how they could make it a movie. Whether it's true or not, who could say.

I also finally finished a book I've been chewing on for months: Database in Depth, by CJ Date. It's a look at the relational model that underlies (or, rather, should underly) virtually all modern databases, and has for decades. My particular background with logic made some of the material more obvious to me. I am in a peculiar position, because I probably have more experience with relational theory than I do with actual database products like Postgres or MySQL, which basically turns the usual order of education inside out and backwards. If you're a computer science dude or a programmer and you've never thought much about data management or relations, I highly recommend it. It is concise, readable, occasionally crotchety and opinionated, and highly illuminating. I was surprised at how interested I became in the topic as time went on.

Yet another couple of plane books. I read Freakonomics, a bestseller about microeconomics with interesting applications, by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It showcases datasets that are more interesting than the run-of-the-mill demand curves, and draws out some classic results from economics, with somewhat bizarre human results. For instance, sumo wrestlers have, at times, strong incentives to take a dive on the last match of a tournament, and drug-dealing operations have an org chart not unlike your neighborhood McDonald's.

I also read a cool book on the origins, motivations, and contents of the Microsoft puzzle interview. It's called How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle -- How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers by William Poundstone. Don't let the title scare you. It's a mind-bending trip through the history of IQ, the trouble with one-hour interviews, and Microsoft, along with answers to some of the worst puzzles. Entertaining even if you are not interested in interviewing at Microsoft. And then there's me, who will interview with just about anyone these days. Mom recommended this one to me. Thanks Mom.

I totally forgot, but I still have Cujo and The Stand to read, so maybe I'll take those on the plane. I also picked up Thomas Pynchon's V on a whim, and Lauren Winner's memoir Girl Meets God. And as for the computer textbooks I've been reviewing with for my interviews... well, the less you know about those the better. If I actually finish one, which is a distinct possibility, I'll let you know.

By the way, have you been watching this US attorney thing blow open? My feed reader is overflowing from all the travel, to the point where I'm thinking about renting a laptop at the hotel just to read for a few hours. People deserve to go to jail for that one. Letting smart, competent attorneys go because they're investigating your corrupt buddies is out of the frying pan, into the firing. I'd be more indignant about it, but I guess the Bush people have managed to saturate my scandal circuits. I mean, screwing with corruption investigations is one thing, but then lying to Congress about it? And they still don't have their stories straight weeks later? If the medium is the message, the history of this administration will be written in feces.

It's a long way to the top

if you want to get a job.

I'm flying out to Mecca... uh, that is, the Silicon Valley, for the first time today. The company is good. Other interviews and fly-outs are pending.

Sarah is disappointed because it doesn't look like she'll get to fly out with me to Austin in a couple of weeks.

I am still hoping for something in Seattle, and so are my parents, and some of my friends are hoping I can find something here in Utah, but time's a-wasting.

Happy 10th

Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired ten years ago today. Sarah and I bought seasons 2 and 3 of Angel (the interleaved spin-off) and we've been chain-smoking them for the past few weeks. These are what great television can be: deep, witty, exciting, moving, and character arcs fifty episodes long.

I read the V for Vendetta comics in one sitting yesterday. Excellent. They were different from the movie in some ways, of course, but I think Alan Moore's beef with the remake was really overblown. A lot of the movie was word for word, shot for panel. If anything, some of the cruft was edited out for the movie, like the computer and the LSD trip. The strongest part of the comic, about the twin, entwined nature of democracy and destruction, came through very strongly in the movie too. I was also surprised to find that all of the great stuff with Stephen Fry was only hinted at in the comics, but it was fleshed out really well in the movie.

Inspired by my encounter with Positively Fifth Street, I finished the original great poker memoir, The Biggest Game in Town, by A. Alvarez, a writer for the New Yorker. He wrote this in 1982, chronicling Stu Ungar's second straight win of the World Series of Poker main event.

Like Positively Fifth Street, it went beyond poker into accounts of Las Vegas and the gambling life, and it managed to capture something that I think went missing from the later book. To be a gambler, you have to stop caring about being broke. Being broke happens. You have to risk it all and lose it all to win it all. This means the gambler requires a remarkable resiliency and freedom to fail, and it's one of the many reasons I can't do this for a living. On the other hand, though, David Sklansky, game theorist and gambler extraordinaire, has never been broke...

Set forward your clocks.

Craziest week in a long time

Last Friday, my friends' baby Olivia died. She had congenital heart defects and it finally got to the point where she couldn't recover from either her defects or the operations to fix them. She was four and a half months old. Sarah and I visited her a few weeks ago when she had come home (still on oxygen) and Sarah took some lovely pictures of her.

On Monday, we went to the private viewing for Olivia in a mortuary in Ogden. We saw some friends, which is a strange thing about funerals. For Sarah's father's parents' funerals, there was an air of happiness and togetherness that would have been altogether out of place at Olivia's. I talked to Aaron, her father, and he was taking it about as well as anyone could.

On Tuesday, we went to the funeral and saw more friends. The coffin was tiny and white, with fake handles. The pallbearers wheeled it on a little cart like you might use for an overhead projector. Aaron gave a very moving tribute to her life.

At times like these, I think you wonder, "Where is God?" The platitudes that we share at funerals are unconvincing. It reminds me of The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan says, suppose we could build heaven on earth, and all we required was the unredeemed suffering of an innocent child. We were with the family at the gravesite too.

On Wednesday, there was a career fair. I dropped off about 15 resumes. The employers seemed impressed with my record. On Thursday I had an interview for a tax software place and on Friday I had an interview with National Instruments. They both seemed like good companies. On Thursday, the HR lady said they'd probably be flying me to Denver for a last interview.

On Friday they said less, but it was still interesting. I did some Electrical Engineering 101 in a question on hardware. What devices would be necessary to measure the temperature of a room? I said you could train a camera on a mercury thermometer, then use image processing techniques to find out where the break is between the mercury and the empty glass. My interviewer said later that no one had ever done it that way before. That's because it would be stupid, he didn't say. But I learned a little bit about how an electrical engineer would think through the problem, measuring voltage and converting the analog signal to digital. It all felt very familiar, object-oriented design like data flow diagrams in UML, just with physical devices I hadn't used before. Even though I sucked at it for my first time, it was actually kind of fun. They also gave me a copy of their flagship software, LabView, and that was fun to mess around with too.

I have a lot of job stuff to do, but mostly I am just tired, tired, tired.

Lost time

I looked up and said to myself, hmmm, I haven't posted for a week. That was a moment ago. Then I looked up and said, wow, what happened to that other week.

We have been a little exhausted. I had a throat thing and lost my voice for a little while. I've needed cough drops to fall asleep, and I've woken up in the middle of the night coughing too.

I got a haircut and gave myself my first structured facial hair (by structured, I mean hair that I have left on my face deliberately rather than negligently). It's a goatee. I'm sure it will show up on Sarah's blog sooner or later. I like it ok, but some of the hair seems to be attacking my upper lip. As so much else about my appearance, I'll probably get back to ignoring it soon. We are considering a nice clipper/trimmer so that I can ignore it slightly less before interview time.

We have lacked sleep, we have lacked time. My father gave up sugar for two weeks worth of Lent (that is all refined sugar, even as an ingredient in something) on the condition that his children would give up sugar with him. It has been wild, but I've made it through the first six days all right. Naturally, I bought two ice cream just before I heard about the challenge, so they have been sitting, waiting, whispering. Peanut Butter Cup. Peach.

I've been reading this Gene Wolfe epic for a long time, but it's almost done.

I am consulting at WestWords to train someone to take over one of my old jobs. A year later, and my replacement left without really training his replacement. The orderly transition of power is important. Fortunately, when I arrived at the office, I found all the documents I wrote to train the last guy still intact on the servers, so the orderly transition was from myself (then) to my future (present) self.

I am finishing experiments for my thesis. I should defend on time.

My dad cheerfully offered to move us to Seattle if I don't have a job by graduation time. This actually relaxes me. My parents redid the basement when it flooded, and it's turned into a massive, much-needed renovation. There will be plenty of space down there. I can't wait to see it, and, if necessary, live in it.

Alex is still not talking much, but he is making letter sounds and experimenting with vowels. Ooo eee, he might say. Ahhh yuh. One doctor says that intense daily speech therapy would be helpful, but we are having trouble signing him up for the next couple of months before everything is up in the air.

We got the second season of Angel on DVD. It is way better than Season 1 so far. It's a sort of strange situation because Sarah and I have watched all of Buffy, but the Angel seasons happened concurrently: Buffy 4-7 happened at the same time as Angel 1-4 and sometimes the storylines crossed each other. On a typical week, back then, you would see Buffy Season 5 episode 6 back-to-back on TV with Angel Season 2 episode 6. It would take a lot of energy to simulate this experience, swapping out the discs one episode at a time, watching about 50 episodes to get to the ends of the two simultaneous seasons. We might get to it one of these years.

We also saw Man of the Year, the Robin Williams film about a sassy Jon Stewart type who runs an upstart independent campaign for President, only to be elected by a voting machine company without a paper trail. It was a little preachy, rejecting the partisanship of Washington in favor of government that actually works, I think. The last time we had a government that worked, of course, it was divided government by a man who governed from the center. Then he got impeached on partisan lines and acquitted on partisan lines.

This is not a movie for our time. This partisanship in Washington did not spring fully formed from the inscrutable mind of Zeus. It was pushed and promoted by our radical president and his minions, by their propaganda machine and the leadership of the Republican party. They did it because they sensed an opportunity to destroy bipartisan comity and still hold onto the reins of power. They did it for six long years. They're still doing it even though we have divided government again. They've forgotten how to do anything else.

In the current political climate, "bipartisanship" is a code word that means "everybody get together right now... and support the President's open-ended occupation of Iraq." This is obvious if you read editorials by Joe Lieberman, or listen to interviews of Dick Cheney, or watch the President say "support the troops" dully and repeatedly.

On this definition, it is time now for partisanship. It's not just a coincidence that the public elected Democrats in the fall and that the vast majority of the public favors retreat from Iraq. The Republican party favors staying in Iraq, the Democratic party favors leaving Iraq, and it's that simple. For evidence, see, among other things, this handy table of the declared 2008 presidential candidates' positions on Iraq. All 8 of the Democrats are opposed to President Bush's plan to escalate the Iraq occupation by sending tens of thousands of troops. 7 of the 9 Republicans are in favor of the increase. 6 of the 8 Democrats favor explicit deadlines to end the Iraq occupation. 1 of the 9 Republicans favors an explicit deadline.

If you oppose the senseless waste of life that the Iraq occupation has deteriorated into and favor a foreseeable end to it, bipartisanship is not actually an option. The debate for you begins and ends under the big tent of the Democrats.

Bush Goes to YMCA:

Kids Protest War

Funner things

About 10 years ago, Mr. Willems showed us all something very funny. IB Theory of Knowledge kids, you know what I'm talking about. Or you will. I've been looking for this clip for quite a while, which was difficult until I finally, today, remembered part of the name.

All the Great Operas in Ten Minutes

Coincidentally, one of the comments on Youtube says, "I've been looking for this video for over 10 years! Thanks for putting this out there!!"

Another one of the comments says, "Hey! That's my film! I made the film when I was in film school way back in '92... I'm glad people are still enjoying it! I have DVD copies of this film for sale, if anyone is interested."

In between the saga of my friends and a paper submission deadline, I have been trying to keep a cool head. So, naturally, I read The Shining. It's the story of a man who is stressed out and tired and shut up with his family, snowbound for the winter, in a remote mountain hotel. I never saw the movie, but I saw the Simpsons parody, so I know the guy goes crazy and tries to kill his family. It turns out that the book feels very different from the 8-minute Simpsons rendition. I thought it was a real winner, again, just a really well-executed and deeply felt Stephen King book. Up next, The Stand, Cujo, and Christine. He wrote in On Writing that he was totally high when he wrote Cujo, so I'm not expecting monumental things from it, but The Stand is supposed to be one of his best.

[Stephen King digression: I am going more or less chronologically; I started with The Eyes of the Dragon, then On Writing and The Dead Zone. After that, Misery, I think, then I went back to the beginning, starting with Carrie.]

I also read How Much for Just the Planet? by John M. (Mike) Ford, an amazing writer who passed away last autumn. It is a Star Trek (Original Series) tie-in novel. It is the only Star Trek musical. I laughed and laughed.

I'm almost done with The Knight (the first part of a two-parter) by Gene Wolfe. I was just about done with high fantasy several years ago, when The Wheel of Time, a colossal 12-book epic sort of ran aground as its author, James Rigney (aka Robert Jordan) developed a rare disease and started to fight for his life. It wasn't all bad, but I had the feeling like it was pulling out all the stops and just not making it for me. Except for Bujold, who has five or so fantasies out now, I stayed away.

Gene Wolfe really changed that for me. It is a stupendous story about a boy who slips sort of sideways into another world, falls for a faerie queen, and longs to be a great knight to deserve her love. I really can't do it justice. This is the most perfect straight fantasy novel I have read in a long time. It looks like I'll have to look up the rest of his oeuvre, which is extensive. (Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is another great one, but it's really an alternate-history fantasy set during the Napoleonic Wars.)

Another exhausting week

Hi friends. For those hanging on for news of my friends' baby, she's had open heart surgery for her narrowing arteries, caught a fever, and is recovering. I don't know her long term prognosis, but I am told my friends are in somewhat better spirits.

I've been physically, emotionally, mentally overwhelmed this past week. I hope your time is going a bit better.

I keep coming back to my friends

I tried to pay attention in church on Sunday, but this was all I had.

Having a Terminal Child

I woke up again today
But as for why, I couldn't say
And when they ask me how I feel
I just have to lie

None of this is real to me
It never was, I'll never see
And when they ask me why it's so
I just say "because"

Yes, my child, you go to die
So I must fear each lullaby
As if each word might be the last
I sing in your ear

Still I sing, the past is long
There is still time for one more song
And if you lack for anything
I will stroke your hair

I will kiss your cheek
I will hold you close
I will keep you warm
I will breathe you in

I will give you strength
I will hear your sigh
I will love your life
I will close your eyes

Never heard this before tonight

Annabelle

I don't know what to say to my friends. They heard from the doctor. The word unfixable was used.

This song is about a woman who lost a daughter. I guess sometimes emotions just need to be felt and said and not explained or answered away.

I continue to pray for my friends and I hope you would too.

Pray for my friends

Although I don't have many readers, I hope they can take this in the spirit in which I intend it.

Two of my friends, Aaron and Tori Swank, had a baby girl recently, Olivia. They have three young children already. Olivia was born with health problems and is back in the hospital for heart failure. At this point the grapevine has not passed along whether it is operable or not.

This is about as bad as nightmares get. Please pray for Olivia and my friends, if you swing that way. Pray that she will be healthy, pray that they will be brave and loving toward one another and their children.

Does prayer "work"? According to my religion, yes and no. Yes, in that prayer is participation in the life of God (it always works on the pray-er). No, in that prayers do not necessarily give us magical control over the course of events. All things are in the hands of God, even us. But you can fight the crush of history, and you can even talk back to God; you just have to be prepared when God and history answer you in their native language.

For aspiring authors

If you want to learn how to write the beginning of a novel, do yourself a favor and read the first two chapters of The Shining by Stephen King. They're done from the Jack Nicholson character's (the psycho, we all know that from the trailers) point of view and his wife's point of view.

In two short chapters, we learn that Jack is going to be managing a hotel for the winter, that it is often snowed in for weeks at a time, that the last guy who did the job got stir crazy and blew away his whole family, then killed himself, Jack has an anger problem but conceals it beneath a glad-handing exterior, he hurt a student, abused his 3-year old son (now 5), is a dry drunk, his wife almost left him, his wife is afraid of going to the hotel with him, and their son is curiously insightful.

At the beginning of Chapter 3, we learn that there is a boiler in the basement that must be monitored constantly to prevent a massive explosion.

And yet another

So, I just had a very busy week trying to get a conference paper ready for ICIP (IEEE's image processing conference). We submitted on time, but I still have to go back and check my program for errors due to our weird data.

Even so, I still managed to squeeze in another Miles Vorkosigan book: Memory. So if you didn't hear me the first time or the second time, hear me now. Make haste to read this series. Haste!

Start with Cordelia's Honor, which is two novels (Shards of Honor and Barrayar) about his mom and dad, and then The Warrior's Apprentice (or the omnibus edition which contains it and the next in the series, Young Miles).

Haste!

Job search creaks to life; villagers dismayed

I never thought I would get it right, but I now have a resume, an easily modifiable cover letter, and a reasonably small, organized web site highlighting a few of my projects. And I've started sending it out.

I don't know exactly how to do this. I've got an MS in CS so close I can taste it, but every time I look at a great company's job descriptions, I gulp and go, "I know nothing." And do I stick to the great companies only, or go to work for some e-business consulting firm? And how would I find them if I did? Would I even want to?

Anyhow, I've sent resumes and electronically applied so far to Google, Amazon, and Adobe. I figure if I start at the top and work my way down, everyone will be happier. That, and I'm trying to pick places with a vision for research, for the future of computing, and for the Internet, with interesting problems to work on, and with appropriate compensation for a father and husband.

I have been thinking about Microsoft, which is kind of a special case. Yes, they do some amazing stuff. On the other hand, laugh at Google's "Don't be evil" if you want, but I am attracted to a company that has tried to stay true to a positive moral vision. MS's business practices, on the other hand, have been positively criminal. Embrace, extend, extinguish is holding back the whole computing world. After reading the anonymous, insider Mini-Microsoft blog, I feel better-informed about MS, but also concerned about MS's Machiavellian bureaucracy. I don't know if I want to swim in those waters with the sharks, or worse, become a shark, or worse, be a goldfish, drink the Kool-aid, and get eaten by the shark.

Anyway, I'm throwing this whole thing open for suggestions. If anyone has a good lead or company for me to try, some good advice, or anything you can think of, please let me know.

Mirror Dance

The other day, I finished the next Miles Vorkosigan novel after Brothers in Arms. It's called Mirror Dance. It's a 500+ page paperback. I ripped through the last 300+ in a day. It was riveting, even as a reread. Like I said earlier, read these books by Lois McMaster Bujold early and often.

Just wars

In response to this question on the Washington Post site:

President Bush is preparing this week to send more troops to Baghdad. Do you believe there is such a thing as a "just war"? Is the Iraq war "just"?

Just wars are possible. As a Christian, I believe that war is about defending the poor and defenseless rather than "the national interest", which is the root of all kinds of evil. At times, our national interest has intersected the moral mission. That's about as good as any war is ever going to get, from my point of view. Just war theory was created to address what kinds of moral missions can justify wars, and thus to focus on the means and intentions of wars as opposed to the consequences, and especially as opposed to the potential realpolitik gains of a war.

If you only see war as a means to preserve the national interest rather than a moral question, there are no just or unjust wars. There are only wars that work and wars that don't work. That's why we hear so much about incompetence when pundits discuss the failed Iraq war. I feel the need to get a bit deeper than this.

I don't believe war is a righteous tool for the apocalyptic defeat of "evil". It's too easy to throw around the label for political purposes, and it's too easy to demonize rather than empathize. In other words, I don't think that the titanic struggle against world terrorism can justify the war in Iraq at all, even in the alternate universe where al Qaeda was in cahoots with Saddam (the same universe where Dick Cheney has taken up residence).

The invasion and occupation of Iraq is not a just war. We bombed Saddam heavily before the war declaration. Blair and Bush discussed ways to goad Saddam into taking the first shot, provoking the invasion. There were no WMDs, but Bush and his advisors were willing to lie about that to the American people. We fixed the intelligence to fit the predetermined policy. We even invaded without a compelling national interest, for the amoral policy wonks out there, much less a compelling moral interest. In short, the casus belli was either a lie, or as nonexistent as the weapons.

All the other post-facto rationalizations for the war pale in comparison. All the post-facto "oops, did I just disband the army" "mistakes were made" talk is a red herring; how we went to war does not change the overwhelming failure to explain why we went to war.

We had an unjust, immoral war. Besides that, now we have consequences: genocide, mutilated bodies in the streets of Baghdad, morgues full to overflowing, religious strife, death, shattered lives. Wars always have these things, which is why we try to avoid them: in an immoral war, there is no upside justification for them. Now we have a failed state on our hands, one that is splintering along religious lines. The failure of Iraq has consequences for regional stability as well.

Leaving troops in Iraq is doing nothing but providing Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias alike thousands of targets. We are occupying their country. We are infidels. We can do better than leave our soldiers holding the bag on our leader's profound failure. We don't just have an unjust war. Now we have an unjust occupation, one that has cost more American soldiers their lives than American civilians in 9/11. It's time to say enough to the war and enough to the occupation.