I've just reinstalled Windows XP (after trying to back out from Office 2003 Beta 2, which hosed my system) and as usual have been relearning everything necessary to configure and tweak it into a satisfactory condition. This is about the fourth reinstall I've done with XP, and each time I attempt to keep a log of this stuff in order to avoid learning it again next time. Each time I learn new things anyway.
Services
I try to get rid of the annoying or piggish services but keep the ones that throw events when disabled (I hate to see red in my event logs) or allow me to network my laptop to and through my desktop
I stopped and/or disabled the following services:
Alerter
Clipbook
Distributed Link Tracking
Error Reporting Service
Help and Support
Indexing Service
Messenger (I can't believe this is auto by default)
Net Logon
Netmeeting Remote Desktop Sharing
Network DDE
Network DDE DSDM
NT LM Security Support Provider
Performance Logs and Alerts
Remote Desktop Help Session Manager
Remote Registry
Secondary Logon
Smart Card
Smart Card Helper
Upload Manager
WebClient
Windows Time (this has never seemed to work for me)
Wireless Zero Configuration
WMI Performance Adapter
I stopped and set the following services to manual:
Computer Browser
Fast User Switching (considering disabling it)
Server
SSDP Discovery Service (considering disabling it)
TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper
I'm still debating whether to disable:
QoS RSVP
Syetem Restore Service (it uses a lot resources but I've used it a lot)
This guy has a good list of services, what they do, and which are useless.
Audio / Video Codecs
I'm always trying to keep a canonical list of codecs listed for reinstalls, and right now I feel pretty good about this one:
--Divx3.11 alpha
--Divx5.05 (free version)
--XviD Koepi 05042003-1 (these are released regularly)
--AC3Filter 0.6.8b
--Morgan Stream Switcher
--Huffyuv 0.2.2.1
--ffdshow alpha 2003-04-22
--OggDS0995
--indeo511 (still pending on this one)
--Lingos MPEG2 decoder (see below)
Many of the above codecs are available from doom9 or divx.com. I can recommend the Gordian Knot Codec Pack from doom9, but I would advise skipping the Divx 5 Pro install since it infects you with addware (just go to divx.com and get the free version).
Historically I tend to have the biggest problems with MPEG2 codecs (for DVD, VCD, SVCD, etc) since there's a strong commercial interest in protecting it. The Lingos decoder has been good so far, but I've also been happy with the ones from WinDVD and PowerDVD (Cyberlink). I prefer not to install "DVD Player" software though and usually opt for just the codec. I have had problems with Elecard and Main Concept that may or may not been related to other things.
Windows Media Player replacement: This one is easy -- by far the best video player software at the moment has to be Zoom Player. The free version should be fine if you don't need to playback DVDs (although older versions of Zoom support it free).
I've been using Zoom for MP3 playback too, but I'll soon probably just go back to WinAmp 2.8 (not version 3 which has been disappointing).
I shut off some stuff in My Computer--Properties:
Under Remote, unchecked everything (how annoying would that be?)
Automatic Updates I've set to Notify (so I can research the patch for a week before deciding whether or not to install it)
System Restore I've set to monitor only the C drive (my other drives are just data -- use Windows XP Power Toys' TweakUI to remap special folders to other drives)
Windows Power Toys: I used TweakUI to set special folders to my D and E drives (makes reinstalling much easier when C only has OS and apps), including My Documents, My Pictures, My Music, and Favorites. I also used CmdHere for adding a right-click explorer option to open a dos prompt. This is just easier than editing the registry keys directly.
Other apps I'm using at present:
Outlook for email
Word for big text jobs
EmEditor for notepad replacement
Excel for spreadsheet
Trillian for instant messaging
Agent 1.93 for newsgroups
Nero 5.5.10 for general CD burning
Alcohol 120% for image burning
Paint Shop Pro 8 for image editing
WinRAR 3.0 for (de)compression
WS_FTP Pro for ftp
FSRaid for archive repair
Vcdgear for bin file to mpg conversions
Mp3DirectCut for simple mp3 editing
Wordweb dictionary utility
Other apps I will eventually install:
Java 3
Eclipse
Perl (activeperl)
Apache
Tomcat
Misc issues etc
Windows keeps some 32bit apps in memory after you close them:
Go to registry, add the key AlwaysUnloadDll under
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionExplorer
Set the Default value for the key to 1
I'm still undecided about Launch Folder Windows in a Separate Process. This seems a tradeoff between performance and stability, and I'm usually more interested in performance. I go back and forth on this one.
CPU spikes on right-clicking in Explorer (this may be related to SP1 from what I've been reading, or it could be related to my drivers): Solved in one of two ways:
Go to Tools---Folder Options, check Use Windows Classic Folders
OR
Go to My Computer---Properties---Advanced---Performance Settings---uncheck "Fade or slide menus into view"
DHCP hangs on system startup until I provide a fixed IP address for Local Area Network. Is this just me?
I disable MSN Messenger through the Group Policy Editor:
Start---Run: gpedit.msc
under "Computer Configuration/Administrative Templates/Windows Components/Windows Messenger", enable both policy settings
I also tell Outlook explicitly not to run it (or else it will try for while when it starts) by unchecking Tools---Options---Other---Instant Messaging
Lose, Empire Maker, Lose!
There, that should do it.Birds chirrup on tree branches and children shout on sliding boards, and all around is the smell of shrubbery. This is the time of year when trees drop what look like buds of marijuana all over the ground, patterning the sidewalks and roadways. My route to the liquor store is a High Times Magazine dream sequence of excess; I need to resist the impulse to pick some up, examine it, smell it -- some local hippie could have dropped it from his dime bag. But the bigger brain wins out and contents itself with the liquor store: cherry brandy and peaty scotch, Napa merlot and margarita mix, the store clerk with her sparkling eyes and hair down to her shoulders, smiling.
The children frighten me, caroming about on the asphalt path between two apartment complexes on the way to the liquor store, children sticky and full of eyes. Any one of them might arbitrarily decide to accuse me of something, and then there would be angry inquiries by their parents, examinations from the police, depositions and testimonies before grand juries and selections of those masquerading as my peers. They want something, but it's all incomprehensible, Kafka's nightmare standing between me and the liquor store. I try to avoid their greedy little eyes.
Last night the place was crawling with cops, four cruisers roving like sharks through the bloodied waters of the parking lots. Two neighbors stood beside one, explaining things, their backs straightened and committed, their hands indicating things their mouths proved unable to convey. Identifying me. "Anything I should know about?" "No, everything's fine." Double locks on the door and long anxious moments at the peephole, waiting. Watching cats on the door stoop.
The new neighbors next door, where the girl used to live, are hippies who might have spilled their dime bags all over the sidewalks and roadways between here and the liquor store. They have many cats who are inclined to explore my porch. Above the hippies is a family of five or six crammed into a two-bedroom apartment who use their balcony for storage. I found their two young sons in the woods with their father's Black and Decker drill, playing "IRA". They told me the IRA used to employ such tools for the kneecaps of informers. They frighten me.
I told them a million Irish died of disease and starvation in the Great Famine of 1845 to 1850, and that another million and a half fled the country on "coffin ships", seeking life and food elsewhere. The two boys, twins it seemed from their similar appearance, lay perched shoulder high on cantilevered tree trunks like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, beyond them a clearing in the woods where they'd moved in: a worn mattress with a single pillow, an old radio, a pair of blue jeans (their dad's from the size of them -- like the drill), a torcheire lamp, an empty bookcase, an old television set with rabbit ears antennae, an under-inflated basketball.
The girl at the liquor store has light brown hair, like the color of walnuts dried in a hot August sun. Her voice reminds me of Audrey Hepburn's when she confessed her secret origins to the commander of the A-Team, and Mr. T had to modify his van in order to take on the Colombian drug lords, but then Starbuck couldn't join them on the mission because he was off hunting The Whale with my old nemesis Ishmael, who is no longer welcomed at the liquor store. The girl there never smiled at him the way she does at me.
On Wednesdays, the Mexican gardeners come by with their leaf blowers and the apartment fills with gasoline fumes. I don't know where they find the leaves to blow, here in May, city of rains and flowers and chirruping birds in tall green trees and children up and down on sliding boards, but they are committed nonetheless.that on some days all I see inside
is a white rose on a coffin lid
under a brittle October sky
It is not and never was that I wish or ever wished to map the route from *my* residence to the liquor store. That would be callous. The ambition was, the *goal* was to map the route from the *girl's* house to the liquor store, to create and later produce, to *provide* for her a map, that she might use in need, and never have to find the way for herself. I never completed the map and so no, never provided her with it, but I came close, so damned close -- but what does that matter, especially now that she has gone and the opportunity with her?
In the early years I would return tired from surveying the passage, hot, and sit at the desk sans shirt to record my data, smoking, and drop a cigarette from my mouth to burn my chest or belly, trying to pull off the barber trick: Barbershop station number three, I'm between the ages of 6 and 12, the barber lip-gripping a cigarette while clipping the hair from me, hands-free dragging then streaming smoke slowly from his nose like steam from an over-pressured heating pipe down over my haircut, poor-man's sauna; leaving a tiny blister there where a shirt would have protected me just long enough to snatch the smoldering butt and drop it back into the ashtray, dust the desk for ash, do the keyboard salsa. There were other hidden dangers attached to smoking.
I did not allow them to deter me however, as I had set out to accomplish a thing worth doing, as the men of the Flat Earth Society had sought to prove the Earth flat by digging. But unlike those early pioneers I intended to succeed in my task.
For I would take to the tops of these mountains. And I would step like lightning from the one to the next. And the gods would cry to see it. I would lead her off to those places only I could dream of, make a ring of the storms around us, and only then, only then, reveal to her. And the gods would cheer to see it.
By the time a rudimentary treatment of the terrain had been compiled, the excitement of the project had worn off and it had become a labor, not of love or pride, but of habit. Even the purpose had begun to seem translucent to me, like a crystal mirror seen from the bottom of a running stream with rain in the air and fog in the sky and drunkenness within me, like music from the apartment next door. Yet I persevered. For it was not a clear vision of my goal nor an understanding of my purpose that would spur me on to its completion, I knew, but rather the knowledge, deep inside, of it's essential need. Such things can be far more compelling than any logical reason.People keep asking me, "President Blackface, what did you think of The Matrix Reloaded?" "Verily," I say unto to them, raising my chin aloft in the manner of Alexander while recounting his time among the Persians, "there was good in it and there was bad in it." And so I explain to them the good and the bad (and the ugly and the beautiful, all of which may be experienced at one moment in this movie, namely the bedroom scene in Zion).
Be thee warned, spoilers here await:
Firstly, the good in it:
Rogue programs. Like (pseudo)sentient viruses free inside a networked system of inconceivable complexity, these programs use the Matrix in the same manner as the hackers of Zion, bending the rules where they can be bent, moving through backdoors between regions (or zones or whatever), reproducing (in the case of Agent Smith) within the boundaries established by the system (if an individual unit of agency -- a "program" -- is granted only the space and representation of a human body and personality, it makes sense that in order for Agent Smith to expand, he must appropriate the resources of other such units).
The revelation scene with the matrix architect. While clichéd out the arse (first seen as far back as the Gilgamesh epic, the hero comes to the inner sanctum to ask the Creator the meaning of his existence, the purpose of his quest, etc), and not really foreshadowed in the first film at all (leading me to suspect it was added for this one), the scene does a surprisingly good job of compartmentalizing the plot complex of the trilogy, providing a nice reversal at its center, and taking its core ideas from actual computer science concepts (Zion as a "bit bucket" of errors that the system cannot correct in real time and so must store until scheduled resets, much like reallocating memory when leaks begin to impact performance, or rebooting an operating system for similar reasons).
The Keymaker. Both amusing and kind of cool, the keeper of passwords and directory information is sort of an LDAP for the Matrix. Again, kudos to the Comp Sci story consultants.
Harold Perrineau Jr. as Link. This dude is probably best known as the narrator on Oz, and he's an underused actor of talent (but see below in the bad section).
The special effects and choreography go without saying so I won't say it [Ed: delete this line].
Normally I detest car-chases but this one was really good.
Secondly, the bad in it:
Ghosts in the machine. Ghosts and werewolves as Matrix bugs was kind of stupid, and the French Hacker Dude's employment of two of them (and his own implied existence as a werewolf(?)) seems somewhat inconsistent with my understanding of how the rogue programs function (see above). Unless the French dude was exploiting the ghost bug?
Blending the Matrix with Reality. This stuff about Neo gaining superpowers *outside* of the Matrix was just odd. I don't get it. Is this just a fantasy element? The part where he resurrects Trinity is supportable, if you consider that he may have simply been channeling electricity through her connection to the Matrix, and serving therefore as a makeshift defibrillator, but how is he able to do the same *outside* of the Matrix in order to stop the sentinels from attacking Zion?
The BORING first half. It wouldn't have been too bad if the characters had actually developed or discussed something interesting, but as far as I can recall now, nothing happened at all. There was a scene between Neo and some religious type where they went down to look at Zion's machinery and talked about some really junior-grade free-will stuff. There was a scene where everybody danced for like 45 minutes. There was a scene where the ship captains argued. And there was a scene where Neo and Trinity got it on. Was that it?
The love-triangle between Morpheus, Niobi, and that other dude. I guess they wanted *some* character development for Morpheus, *some* inner-Zion conflict, and *some* reason for adding the Niobi character. It wasn't even compelling for the soap-opera crowd (or so I assume), and did nothing for advancing the story.
The pseudo-Christian allegory. Grow up already; that's been done more times than Madonna.
Link's (Harold Perrineau) scenes in the second half of the movie were completely limited to reaction shots, and they got old and corny real fast; and his character plot in the first half was a little lame and very trite. This is a good actor but they completely wasted him with this role.
The Matrix "Mainframe". When is Hollywood going to outgrow this buzzword, this obsessive assumption that mainframes are the ultimate computing objects? Especially for a system like the Matrix, the notion is idiotic. I have to assume that the Comp Sci consultants were overruled on this one.
The balance:
I don't think the bad outweighs the good, despite there being a lot of it. I'll give it 7 out of 10 whatevers.
"The balloon, beginning at a point on Fourteenth Street, the exact location of which I cannot reveal, expanded northward all night, while people were sleeping, until it reached the Park."
First the balloon is announced, with its definite article indicating something unique or well-known, or at least indisputably the subject of the text to follow, not unlike the manner in which Beethoven might announce the musical key for one of his opuses (in a synesthetic sense, this sentence might well be compared to the opening of Symphony 7). Next, the subject's origin is noted, coupled with a grounding element (Fourteenth Street implying a medium to large city, most likely New York) followed by another vectoring phrase: the introduction of a narrator who seems to have more information than he is at liberty to disclose ("reveal" rather than "determine" or "discover"). Until this point the reader has logically inferred the image of a small helium balloon freed from its mooring to drift up and over the city, but now a disorienting phrase occurs, triggered by the word "expanded"; the image is shattered all at once and the reader must pause in an attempt to construct a new one. He or she may even begin the sentence over in an attempt to discern an overlooked or mistaken meaning. The setting is elaborated upon, it is late at night, and the balloon's expansion is a process that takes several hours, and finally it is done: the balloon's birth, grown, and maturity is complete. But why did it stop at the Park? Why and how did it expand like this in the first place? Who is the narrator and why is he withholding information? What's special about Fourteenth Street and the balloon's origin? What effects will this giant balloon have on the city?
A primary characteristic of a vectoring sentence is its tendency to pose questions. In the case of "The Balloon", the opening sentence serves first to establish a ground and a theme, a tone and a setting, and finally to act as an agency compelling the reader to move to the next sentence and the rest of the text. It is a vector containing essential but incomplete information. A sentence like this is often effectively recursive, pushing the reader back to itself in order to better grasp its meaning. It is potentially, in a practical sense, non-linear.
At what cost to communication is such a sentence? To what degree may it sacrifice communication in order to advance theme or grounding, or for the sake of form or impression? Theme and grounding are basic expository elements and must be addressed in any case, but the question of form and impression depends upon the extent to which those elements are able to augment meaning beyond the practical considerations of communication, the extent to which they breed within the context of paragraph, passage, and work; and the degree to which such augmentation is desirable.
The dichotomy that emerges is one concerned with the degree to which a sentence straightforwardly communicates meaning. Elements extraneous to the construction of the fundamentally "communicative" sentence tend to be discarded for the sake of clarity, where those elements that do not advance a sentence's meaning are considered extraneous, although it is often the case that the apparently non- (or less-) communicative sentence is able to convey more than its counterpart. One might attempt to contrast the two as literal versus abstract, or more to the point, sentences that attempt to *represent* the world versus sentences that attempt to *reveal* it.
A recent trend in sentence construction has been a resistance toward overt (or obvious) artistry, an aim to convey meaning in a structurally simple and straightforward manner that imitates everyday language in order to coax (or fax) a sense of "realism" from the reader. The reader is coached to categorize the writer's prose in the same way he or she categorizes a newspaper article, a billboard advertisement, or a Surgeon General's Warning. Thus by adopting the mode of linear prose -- a simple structure, a reduced vocabulary, an absence of unnecessary words -- the writing imitates the purpose of everyday language.
This kind of "realistic", communicative sentence is *associative*, in that it makes an immediate association with the reader's world and expectations. The realistic, everyday associative sentence orients the reader quickly, casting itself into a position to act as a logical extension to the everyday world. Conversely, the "unrealistic" dissociative sentence is typically a *dissociative* vector of the figurative sort, resulting often in disorienting the reader by convolving its structure, relying upon contextual or mysterious apparatus, or concerning itself with stylistic and impressionistic details rather than those meant simply to aid meaning. Its association with the real world and expectations is either absent or willfully false.
At the core of the associative sentence is the assumption that the language in which it has been created is sufficiently able to communicate the extent of its meaning without resorting to abstraction or vagueness, while the dissociative sentence may employ the abstract or the vague with the purpose of conferring upon the reader *parts* (not necessarily details) of a meaning that cannot be expressed concretely. Ironically, it is the vague -- which is to say expertly vague -- sentence that may have access to the more specific meaning, just as the employment of elaborate and elevated vocabulary often serves to refine the precision of meaning rather than confuse it, as more general and simple terms might.
The realistic, associative sentence then, in attaching itself to the everyday world, offers access to exactly that everyday world, as a feedback mechanism. The purpose of and uses for such writing should be obvious. To what world then does the dissociative sentence attach itself?
The expedition of meaning may not be the first priority of the dissociative sentence; it may prefer allusion, texture, or mood, depending upon the context of the surrounding work. It is, in a sense, subservient to the artifact in which it resides, and if extracted may dissolve completely, losing all semantic coherence. On the other hand, the associative sentence may be quite atomic, easily extracted from its context and applied to some other purpose.
The dissociative sentence may propose that a given thing is not defined solely by and to the extent of its meaning, or that a thing's meaning is not merely the sum of its details. As meaning derives from context, motive, causality, and so forth, so language may be assumed to derive in part from the textures and moods of the things the words are intended to signify. By establishing a correspondence between language and the less tangible aspects of meaning, a much larger bandwidth is established for expression. (Obviously the risks of confusing readers who may have sensibilities different from those of the author can become counterproductive.) Perhaps more importantly, the dissociative sentence questions and often confounds a reader's assumptions about language.
A consideration pertaining to the construction and content of a sentence is the degree to which it takes the reader's world (i.e. the "real", objectifiable world) and the ways in which language itself works for granted in the mind of the reader. Associative prose tends to take quite a bit for granted, as this sentence illustrates:
On the way to her car, Jane reached into her purse for her keys.
There are several assumptions here of which a contemporary reader might be unaware, but which a reader from another time may find striking (and a cause of confusion). First, and unavoidably, there's the vocabulary: what is a purse, what is a car, etc. Think of a volume of Shakespeare's plays intended for a student audience; how many editorial footnotes might it contain meant to define what to Shakespeare were everyday terms? Vocabulary is a cause of diminishing the size of an audience on a timeline, a temporal narrowing that is compounded by every colloquialism ("I never liked Mom's cooking, but Dad was always like 'never bite the hand', you know?"), every unexplained reference (Amid the litter of Coke cans, Madonna Posters, and Maxim foldouts), and every assumption about how things work ("I'm enjoying Europe now, but I'll be in New York tomorrow...."). Secondly, and related to vocabulary, is the linkage of terms: Jane reaches for her "keys" -- keys for what? The sentence is not explicit, and while modern readers are able to discern the meaning by way of context, a reader from another time might not.
The associative sentence typically relies upon established forms and formulae that are often clichés. For instance, to the writer wishing to quickly orient his audience, the concept of Time may be expressed as an hourglass, while in contrast, to the dissociative writer, Time might be expressed as the tips of one's fingers running along a hanging drapery. Part of the difference is the patience the latter has to fully explore an idea, in opposition to the expediency the former feels compelled to employ in order summarize an idea at once. The former can be fairly certain that the reader understands what an hourglass typically signifies. But what cannot be controlled are the myriad of additional, often unintended references that an hourglass might summon for any given reader, for instance: food preparation, silent waterfalls, or daytime soap operas. The reader may summon an image of the Grim Reaper, which itself may trigger the memory of Bergman's Seventh Seal film, which may set the reader thinking about Max von Sydow or chess or even Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart on the airstrip in Casablanca. A cliché symbol has this tendency to set the reader off in any number of wild directions, simply because it has been used and abused so often in the past. Furthermore, the hourglass lacks the tactile sensation of the hand running across the drapery, the feeling of active movement rather than passive observation, and most importantly the allusion to something more awaiting on the next line, a something that could be anything; in a word, it lacks *possibility*.
Obviously the preceding example is a bit of a straw man, since much depends upon the intent of the work, again the *idea* that the writer is pursuing. Sometimes an hourglass is just an hourglass, and for very good reasons, and occasionally it may even be desirable to ignite an uncontrolled chain of associations to which the matter of the prose is irrelevant. But the greater versatility of indirect language allows for greater potential variations.
Associative prose has the capacity to rapidly aid the reader in their willful suspension of disbelief. The less the reader must *trust* the author, the less they must struggle to believe in his false world. On the other hand, the simple, realistic, everyday sentence is almost wholly inadequate for the provision of what Nabokov has described as "the aesthetic vibrancy of authentic literature... the telltale tingle between the shoulder-blades" (_Lectures on Literature_, p. 64). Dissociative prose is capable of this feat, at the cost of demanding more from the reader as an initial investment.
One might therefore argue that a balance must be found, a prose that is able to elevate without disorienting, a prose that, while often elaborate, is consistent in tone and style, and adheres to readily discernible conventions. Consistency of voice is often able to maintain the fragile illusion of the false -- or *artificial* -- reality in a work of fiction. A sentence may ground itself in an artificial reality by way of the stylistic authority of the author's voice, and thus a bridge between the real world and the false is constructed in a manner not dependant upon the imitation of everyday language, but rather by the author's own stubborn insistence that his false world is a reality in and of itself, in effect by way of the author's own Will.
A striking aspect of Nabokov's prose is its assurance, its capacity to immediately convince the reader of the skill and mastery of the author's authority, and in this he is able to merge elaborate prose with "realism" (real in the sense of *correlating* to the real rather than *representing* the real) . His novels never pretend to more than their status as artifacts, as created texts, and never attempt to attach themselves to the real world; in so doing they are stabilized as self-contained works of art. The false world they portray is so convincing not because of any connection to any real world, but because of the author's stylistic skill in inhabiting them. Nabokov's narrators *live* in the world they describe, they themselves unashamedly *false*, and so consistent with their *false* world.
To a certain extent it can be inferred that this quality of Nabokov's (English) writing is a reflection of his condition as an immigrant and his assumption of English as a second (or third, or arguably fourth) language. To a non-native speaker of any language, the rules and idiom of the second tongue are less likely to be adopted without reflection or consideration, and this may affect the stylistic quality of the prose they render. Above all is an awareness of language qua language, and this extends to a perspective on art as artifice: the language used is too much a tool of alien construction for it's rules not to be fully considered, and so too is the prose work too much a creation of that toolset for its relation to reality to be quickly dismissed. This is Literature as an open conceit, and it is not a new thing, and Nabokov's is not the only variant.
Other balances are struck by contemporary writers seeking to extend everyday language without exceeding the undefined threshold of what the average reader is prepared to accept. This is a common trend in contemporary American literature, where the market is saturated with genre fiction, and reader expectations tend toward entertainment over edification. Writers like David Foster Wallace or Donald Antrim often stretch or expose conventional expectations with fantastical or incongruous elements that approach but never exceed the boundaries of the text's own equilibrium, thus also not threatening too hard to disorient while not slavishly adhering to formula or accessibility.
Some writers take the opposite approach; instead of concerning themselves with ensuring the accessibility of the text and then extending both world and expectation, some works of dissociative prose instead abstract themselves from all worlds and expectations. Gene Wolf's _Book of the New Sun_ takes place a million years in the future, where the landscape, vernacular, and customs have little resemblance to our own. The story is told by a narrator living at that time to an audience assumed to be likewise, so the narrative lacks exposition on matters that would be mundane for such a reader. (Consider Shakespeare's audience reading a contemporary novel....) Certainly the reader is disoriented, but he is also intrigued, fascinated, and wholly transported to a place that he never dreamed of. Wolf has taken the authorial concern about assumptions and inverted them, effectively assuming *nothing* on the part of the reader, and thereby isolating his work from reality. The result is a fiction that operates according to its own rules and fully inhabits it's own false world, but which remains consistent to itself in the process.
Returning to Nabokov, one can find both hidden and false associations in much of his work, where what appear to be dissociative vectors on closer examination turn out to have very concrete associations, and likewise apparently straightforward associative vectors are undermined or conflicted by other vectors. This is what makes Nabokov's novels so difficult for many teachers and students; what appears to be simple and straightforward is often quite the opposite. _Pale File_ is a good example of a work of this kind of complexity, in which multiple dimensions of understanding coexist simultaneously, separated by hidden trapdoors that careful investigation will always uncover. It is effectively many books in one.
The debate raised here is perhaps the ancient one pertaining to the question of art's relation to life and the world, whether it should prefer solitude, as the esthete cloistered yet observable and content to live perfectly alone, perfectly; or as the result and action of forces present in the real world, engaging and hoping in turn to engage. In his essay "The Concept of Character in Fiction", William Gass invokes the image of a striding statue whose posture "would appear to direct us to some goal in front of it. Yet our eye travels only to the finger's end, and not beyond. Though pointing, the finger bids us stay instead, and we journey slowly back along the tension of the arm. In our hearts we know what actually surrounds the statue. The same surrounds every other work of art: empty space and silence."
Even the most gifted practitioner of the Disoriented sentence will most likely fail to explain the color blue to a blind person, but in trying they may approach something similar, something vaguely *like* blue, which is a feat all but impossible to simple communicative language of the sort found in Time Magazine. "On the other side of the novel lies the void," says Gass, but this is also the place where the reader lives, and it is ultimately up to the reader to find associations between art and life.
An interesting side-effect of dumping words into this website has been the storage of a lot of broadly themed material in compartmentalized spaces. I've found by looking at referrer logs I can get an interesting picture of the kinds of things people are searching for and clicking through to look at. The site is indexed quite thoroughly by Google (the number 1 external referrer -- and that bot is voracious!), and most requests come in the form of "http://www.google.com/search?q=" or some similar variation. According to the log analyzers, the 10 most popular search terms over the past 9 months are as follows (#reqs: search term):
26354: crack
13979: the
13277: download
13246: of
9801: pics
9527: nude
9203: wordweb
8873: ohm
8686: jeannie
8303: pictures
The most popular term "crack" is around twice as frequent as the second most popular term "the"! I don't know if that should be surprising. Certainly the term refers to software cracks (and not the drug), and there are probably a number of clandestine crawlers scouting out this term.
That "wordweb" should be 7th seems strange; I didn't realize so many people knew of this great program (I use it constantly -- get yours here).
Then another surprise: given the number of attractive women I've mentioned, it seems odd that Jeannie Ohm, not really a celebrity even, should be the most commonly sought after.
I should note that Joe Frank also made the top 30, which is sort of another surprise, but I'm happy more people are catching on to this great artist (a big stylistic influence for me).
In case you were wondering:
The stripped log of popular request strings is the most popular file request (as I knew it would be -- these things have a way of compounding); bookmarks and wacky links are the next most popular, just due to their volume and subject; Grinch is the most popular fiction (for the obvious reason -- because it's great!); Tweak is the most popular Wyrd Kyd, I assume due to all the drug references (or just the word "crack" -- rock on Tweak, you Modern Angel!), followed by Maggie; and Firefly is the most popular SF television show (which is why Fox cancelled it after 10 episodes); and finally, everyone's favorite, The Pope is the most popular non-site image (shine on Pope, you Crazy Diamond!).
For this month, the top 20 search strings were (rank hits % string):
1 8 1.73% kragsyde
2 5 1.08% ashleigh banfield nude
3 5 1.08% wordweb crack
4 5 1.08% wordweb pro crack
5 4 0.86% jeannie ohm
6 4 0.86% richard sandrak
7 4 0.86% starry night pro warez
8 4 0.86% top 5 oil producing countries
9 3 0.65% dbz in a nutshell
10 3 0.65% dbz in a nutshell flash
11 3 0.65% total recorder crack
12 3 0.65% william shatner ringtone
13 2 0.43% ashleigh banfield and naked
14 2 0.43% boy tied gagged
15 2 0.43% cnn pynchon photo
16 2 0.43% girls nude egyptian
17 2 0.43% hallucinogenic oranges
18 2 0.43% interrogating iraqi heavy metal
19 2 0.43% japanese seizure robot gif
20 2 0.43% l33t romeo and juliet slide show