I’ll make a research-​​oriented entry before long; I prom­ise. I’m start­ing to get towards writ­ing up some of the cool stuff in my thesis.

I’ve star­ted writ­ing an Itanium tutorial. That doc­u­ment will magic­ally update every now and then as I write more. On the one hand it’s slightly embar­rass­ing how much I’ve writ­ten — it’s almost half as much as I’ve writ­ten for my thesis so far — but it’s an entirely dif­fer­ent kind of writ­ing. There’s really no rigour at all to it. I don’t have to worry about prov­ing things or cit­ing things; I’ve never proofread any of it. I just write whatever pops into my head, which makes it very quick and easy. Primar­ily it’s for my bene­fit, so I don’t for­get any­thing and so that it forces me to fig­ure things out more con­cretely than I would otherwise.

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I think I’ll work a bit more on the novel today, some­thing I haven’t done in prob­ably a couple months. I always kind of knew, but it’s become increas­ingly obvi­ous that the core of the novel isn’t so much a story as an explor­a­tion of human­ity, the defin­i­tion of human­ity and espe­cially the rela­tion­ship between human­ity and lan­guage. In a nut­shell, it’s a story thread­ing a col­lec­tion of things humans do. I hope it works.

One thing that’s always bothered me about human­ity, and in par­tic­u­lar lan­guage, is the nature of love. Poetry, and art in gen­eral, deal­ing with love tends to be pretty unin­ter­est­ing in my view, more an exer­cise in one-​​upmanship to describe the intens­it­ies of love, focus­ing more on the effects of love than the bare mech­an­isms. There are excep­tions, of course, but rare. We have an embar­rass­ment of words avail­able to use to describe shades of the col­our red but have an awk­ward strait­jacket when it comes to some­thing more com­plex and import­ant, like love. It’s not just Eng­lish that’s the prob­lem, either.

Enter Alizée. She’s not a fant­astic musi­cian and, as one red­dit com­menter so elo­quently put it: “I wish my teeth were as white as her dance moves.” The lyr­ics are fairly asin­ine and for once I’m grate­ful that my French is bad enough that I can only pick out a few bits and pieces of it. For those who are curi­ous, as best I’ve been able to garner, the entirety of the song is about tak­ing a bubble­bath, describ­ing the bubble­bath and how it relates to the exper­i­ence of tak­ing bubble­baths and being lazy.

None of that really mat­ters, though. It’s some­what fit­ting that she’s French as she strikes me as a modern-​​day Nana come to life. Well, except­ing that Alizée’s not a whore. Another extremely, in my opin­ion, insight­ful red­dit com­ment on the topic of how hot Alizée is:

Not just fap hot either. This is exactly what would make me lose in /b/‘s “You fall in love you lose” threads.

That pretty much sums her up. It doesn’t mat­ter what she’s doing oth­er­wise or what she’s singing. Once the spot­light is on her, all it takes is one know­ing smile and a cock of her head and before you’ve even regained cog­niz­ance you’ve fallen in love with her.

It’s not love, of course; I don’t know what it is. I can’t bring myself to call it “love at first sight” since that describes some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent to me. The effect doesn’t dimin­ish know­ing it’s just a per­form­ance, but it’s not lust either. But it’s a real exper­i­ence; it’s a spell in a very real sense. The last time I watched one of Alizée’s songs — she’s def­in­itely the sort of musi­cian you watch, not listen to — I think she was all of about fif­teen years old and even at that young age she had the abil­ity to com­mand an entire audi­ence. It seems she’s only become more power­ful since then.

The crown jewel of Nana, in my opin­ion, is the open­ing chapter where she’s first per­form­ing in the opera and where she first wins her ador­a­tion. Even when I was first read­ing it I wished the entire novel could have been the first chapter or two. The destruc­tion of the men around her dom­in­ated the rest of the novel, but the secret of her magic was never really revealed in any sub­stan­tial detail.

The spells of Nana and Alizée are cast every day and I sup­pose it can be taken as noth­ing spe­cial, but that doesn’t sat­isfy me. I’ve never found a nice reduc­tion­ist explor­a­tion of the phenomenon.

I’ve got a bit of a back­log of oddit­ies to write about so I don’t know if I’ll get to it today, but there’ll prob­ably end up being at least a chapter about this.

My novel is still going. I’m still only at about 7000 words — over 10% of the way there! — but I think it’s going pretty well. No mat­ter how stressed I am or how much work piles up I find it pretty relax­ing to go back to the novel, even if it’s only for half an hour a week or some­thing like that.

Also I hit a very major mile­stone today: my novel’s first inter­ro­b­ang. The premise of the novel, again, is that it’s an altern­ate real­ity where another spe­cies of homo has sur­vived, in addi­tion to humans. They’re incap­able of verbal speech, though, which makes oppor­tun­it­ies for inter­ro­b­angs a little less plen­ti­ful than you’d get oth­er­wise. Oh well.

I’ve real­ized I don’t really care for drama that much. I tend to favour non-​​fiction over fic­tion and even the fic­tion I do like I gen­er­ally tend to like for the descrip­tion of the world itself. Any plot hap­pen­ings should be dir­ectly attrib­uted and in enhance­ment of the descrip­tion of the world itself and not just for drama’s sake, or so it seems. Well I threw in a bit of a plot twist today, so we’ll see how it goes.

At this rate I may even fin­ish in time for the next NaNoWriMo!

I still have a few minutes before 2010 so I thought I’d write a little some­thing while Jasna and I are sit­ting on the couch watch­ing cel­eb­ra­tions on TV with her parents.

Well, first off I think I need to take more pic­tures, the evid­ence for that being that the above is my favour­ite pic­ture I took this year. It’s our fat­test cat, Pin­cho.
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In my pos­i­tion as chair of SOGS’ Bylaws and Con­sti­tu­tion Com­mit­tee, I was just given an archival pack­age of old doc­u­ments, mostly bylaws, by our old chair, Rebecca Feld­man. In that pack­age was a rather lovely essay on the early his­tory of SOGS. I had it scanned and ran it through an OCR sys­tem and cleaned up a couple OCR mis­takes so that I can put it online for every­one to see.

We were talk­ing about it and it would be really nice to extend this essay. I don’t know what the going rate for his­tory stu­dents in these days, but it would be awe­some to com­mis­sion another essay on SOGS’ his­tory from, say, 1980 to 1995.

Without fur­ther ado, here is the essay. It is entitled “The Soci­able Years: The Soci­ety of Gradu­ate Stu­dents, 1964 – 1979″ and is writ­ten by Daryl White. Daryl White is our former VP Fin­ance and unsur­pris­ingly was a his­tory major. It was obvi­ously writ­ten in Microsoft Word and I’ve done my best to clean up some of Word’s eye-​​bleedingly bad typo­graphy (okay, I’m just a snob).

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I finally got per­suaded into doing a NaNoWriMo. For those who don’t speak Inter­net hip­ster, this is just a fancy way of say­ing I got per­suaded into writ­ing my own novel, spe­cific­ally a 50000-​​word novel within the month of November.

It may seem like a silly idea con­sid­er­ing I have a lot of work to do, not to men­tion a con­fer­ence to go to at the end of this week. Doing 1667 words a day isn’t really that bad, though, con­sid­er­ing writ­ing comes pretty eas­ily for me. I prob­ably write more than that each day just in emails. Whether I can write any­thing good seems to be entirely beside the point: NaNoWriMo is about noth­ing if not quant­ity over quality.

Any­way I’m sud­denly real­iz­ing how ser­i­ously people take this NaNoWriMo busi­ness. (more…)