A Modest Construct

¶ Soon I Will Be Invincible

Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman: Publisher: Pantheon; Year: 2007; Pages: 288

I briefly considered not even bothering with Soon I Will Be Invincible, thinking two superhero books in one summer would be overkill. Thankfully, I enjoyed this one far more than From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain.

Whereas From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain was a hodgepodge of metaphor and allegory for everything from race relations to the fall of the Eastern Bloc (at the expense of being a boring and derivative narrative), Austin Grossman’s Soon I Will Be Invincible covers a much narrower scope, but with equally far-reaching meaning (and more more original writing—Grossman invents the vast majority of his characters out of wholecloth, instead of simply renaming the existing canon).

It’s really two stories intertwined: one is told from the perspective of Fatale, a female cyborg, newly arrived into the legion of superheroes, and the other is told from Dr. Impossible, a middle-aged, recidivistic supervillain with an IQ of 300. These narratives occur on the same timeline, after the escape of Dr. Impossible from the “metahuman” wing of a federal penitentiary (for the 12^th time) and the mysterious disappearance of CoreFire, the leading superhero and perhaps the most powerful being on the planet.

There is one way that Grossman’s book is similar to …Doctor Brain, namely that the superhero mileau has become depressed in the post-boom years; one might even say “stale.” I called Dr. Impossible a recidivist, and with good reason: the mantra “Soon I will be invincible!” is repeated a number of times. One can only imagine that he said it during the events leading up to his previous twelve arrests, as well. And yet a genius of such scale as Dr. Impossible (or “Johnathon” as we learn from his backstory) fails each time to cope with the obvious: like The Matrix, this cat-and-mouse game of nemeses is destined to continue in perpetuity, with Impossible each time on the losing end.

It’s a larger critique of the absurdity of such roles, and the thin lines that divide them: if Dr. Impossible was the picked-upon nerd, and CoreFire was (and still is) an asshole jock, what does that say about our constructions of these binary roles for the superhero world? And what exactly does it mean to be human in a world full of fairy-folk, aliens, androids, cyborgs, and otherwise metahuman beings? These are the issues the heroes struggle with, and on a much more intimate and believable level than other “comic” novelizations.

§1910 · September 25, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, memes, reviews, satire, science fiction

¶ Chuck Klosterman IV

Chuck Klosterman IV by Chuck Klosterman: Publisher: Scribner; Year: 2006; Pages: 384

You may recall that I read Klosterman’s 2003 work, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, at the end of last year’s meme. At the time, my views on Klosterman’s work was about as divided as critical reception to his collected essays.

One need hardly speculate that this new book of Klosterman’s would be much the same; if anything, it’s a bit inconsistent by comparison, since it’s a collections of articles spanning a decade. Most of the first section is articles from his days at SPIN; the second is articles from Esquire; the third is a piece of short fiction that he wrote (apparently a while ago). Each story is introduced by a short blurb that gives it historical or personal context.

His pieces for SPIN go something like this: “Rockstar X or Moviestar Y have dimensions to their character around which I will formulate a fundamental theory of culture; despite this revelation, I remain socially maladroit.”

His pieces for Esquire tend to be more intellectually stimulating, usually dealing with things like legacy (e.g., why there will never be a shared cultural experience like Johnny Carson ever again) or intersections of culture.

The short fiction piece is, frankly, an unimpressive piece of thin metaphor, interesting perhaps only for the intended repugnance of the main character.

Here, I suppose, is my problem with Chuck Klosterman: he’s obviously a very smart guy, and well-educated (or at least well-read), but he’s a pop culture apologist. In Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, he explained to the world his infatuation with and the cultural importance of MTV’s The Real World. In other words, he spends most of his time telling me why he thinks shitty things aren’t all that shitty after all. Despite his posturing, I’m not convinced. Neither, it seems, is Klosterman, whose introductions to many stories seem to cast doubt on the validity of whatever premise he worked upon when originally writing the article. Some have withstood the test of time better than others: the quality of Chuck Klosterman IV is a pretty jagged line graph.

I can’t help but think that Klosterman is like a low-rent David Foster Wallace. He has the ability to draw interesting conclusions from relatively ordinary phenomena, but Wallace’s philosophical arcs are grander, his prose more eloquent, and his topics less incendiary if for no other reason than he doesn’t venture very far into the realm of pop culture. Klosterman, by contrast, is shorter, less grandiose, more centrally-defined, and infinitely more digestible: a “smart” writer for people who watch MTV a lot.

Klosterman is becoming an icon of our “postmodern culture” (Patterson’s words) for at least two reasons: He writes the way his readership speaks and thinks (or at least the way they aspire to speak and think), and he creatively examines pop iconography so as to draw from it a greater meaning about American culture. He’s the contemporary King of Pop Semiotics.

I can’t argue with Klosterman’s intelligence; nor can I argue with the assertion that he’s probably one of the most influential columnists of his generation. I do, however, have reservations about some of his methods, some of his logic, some of his conclusions, and, like Johnson, wonder “if the audience questions his assertions.” If Klosterman teaches us anything, it’s that we should, but as a cultural critic, I can imagine he seems imbued with a distant or invulnerability from the he critiques. Certainly, we know he’s not.

§1909 · September 23, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, memes, pop culture, reviews

¶ Show Stopper!

Show Stopper! by G. Pascal Zachary: Publisher: Free Press; Year: 1994; Pages: 312

While perusing the (absolutely wonderful: you should be reading it every day) blog of Jeff Atwood, I came across his review of Show Stopper!, and was intrigued enough to check it out myself.

I’m going to immediately confess my ignorance here: this heyday of Microsoft was long before I was ever interested in computers at such a level. In fact, I had no idea that NT was around so early. My thoughts while reading Show Stopper! were that Windows 95 (codenamed “Chicago” and mentioned only once in the book) made a much bigger splash than Windows NT did, at the time. Of course, Windows 95, being based on the ancient DOS kernel, eventually died out. It wasn’t until almost ten years after NT 1.0′s debut that the kernel was used in Microsoft’s latest consumer desktop offering, Windows XP.

It was difficult, too, reading something written in 1994, about 1994-era technology, as a well-informed software enthusiast in the latter half of 2007. I’m not sure whether Pascal’s writing seemed condescending because he was writing for people who might know what an operating system is, or because that’s simply the way technology books were written a decade ago. But the technical side of the book was lacking, focusing rather on the soap opera of NT’s development, headed by the notoriously gruff Dave Cutler.

If this book is about anything, it’s not so much NT, but rather a look (a) at a time in computing history where writing a new operating system from scratch was not only likely, but necessary, (b) at the group dynamics of building an extraordinarily complex piece of software with over 250 code writers, and (c) at the sort of environment that Microsoft cultivated in the mid-1990s. Now that Google is king of the world, it’s easy to forget that for a long time, Microsoft was basically The place to go if you were a bright programmer. Their salaries were below the industry standard, but their stock options made millionaires out of a goodly portion of its employees, but this came at a price. At least for those working on NT, Microsoft became their lives, and it destroyed a lot of relationships that way.

I could talk at length about the books foibles—e.g. Pascal’s insistence on giving clichéd descriptions of each character as he introduced them—but I suppose what’s really disappointing to me as a modern reader is that its scope is so limited: it’s not able to talk at all about NT’s eventual success, but merely make prescient statements about its revolutionary nature. Then, too, while the book reads like a traditional plotline, it never really climaxes: by the time NT is finished and released, everyone is exhausted (reader included) and the moment comes and goes with little fanfare. The development team sort of dissolves, and then Pascal waxes philosophical about the project for a while.

At the risk of going on a tangent, I want to make a few technical points before the feeling leaves me. It’s important to note that NT (and by extension, Windows 2000, XP, and Vista) are all essentially conceptual children of the Mach kernel, which is of the microkernel variety. Linux, by comparison, is monolithic, just like the DOS timeline of Windows systems (which ended ignobly with Windows ME). Microkernels are supposed to be safer at the expense of performance, but strangely enough, “safe” hasn’t really been the case for Windows.

Which brings me to another point that I think Show Stopper! underscores, and that is the heavy cost of legacy in the computing world, and the strain that business requirements put on technical innovation. The project scope of NT was redefined so many times that the end result was just about unrecognizable compared to the initial vision. The necessity of supporting, for instance, OS/2, Windows, and DOS code, bloated NT and significantly extended its development time. While a purely academic project may have delivered much better performance and the promised security, Microsoft’s real-world business requirements turned NT into something that, while still successful, would eventually draw as much criticism as praise.

Finally, it’s interesting to note that Dave Cutler, the computer genius, lead developer, love-to-hate-him antihero of the book, is still working at Microsoft. The 64-bit operating systems you’ve been hearing about since 2005 is largely the result of his work.

Swinging drastically back on topic, I can only recommend this book as an object lesson in real-world software development, and as a hugely interesting piece of software history. If you’re looking for technical details, stay away.

§1905 · September 20, 2007 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, Linux, reviews, software, technology, Windows

¶ Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! by Richard P. Feynman: Publisher: W.W. Norton; Year: 1997; Pages: 350

I’ve never been a follower of Feynman’s work—in fact, I was only familiar with him in passing, in a vague “famous physicist, somehow connected with The Bomb” sort of way. But his name gets dropped all the time, and so when I found this book, I thought it might be interesting to try it out.

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, it’s that literary skill does not necessarily follow genius in all things physics. This is Feynman’s autobiography, and it shows. A more seasoned chronicler would have had the good sense to keep it interesting.

The problem here is that the book consists mostly of anecdotes that don’t really have any impact on the narrative or the author, except perhaps in an abstract, mosaic kind of way. A paragraph or two about fixing radios; a paragraph about getting desserts while working at a hotel; an entire chapter about a Jewish frat. Snoooore: Feynman sounds like a senile grandfather with a capful of bourbon telling long, winding stories to his fidgety grandchildren, who are meanwhile praying for death. The awfulness of the plot (or the lack thereof) is only slightly alleviated when Feynman gets to his years with The Bomb, which is more interesting from a technical standpoint, but still reads as if written by a novice high-schooler blogging his day on MySpace.

I gave the man some latitude because he’s so widely regarded; I gave him more because I know he’s got an interesting story to tell; for the life of me, I couldn’t enjoy this book.

Perhaps that has something to do with the other, more galling, aspect of the thing: not only does Feynman consistently understate his own accomplishments, but he apparently made a decision early in the writing of the biography that it would be purely narrative, and would barely touch the interesting part of his life—that is, the science, math, and technology. All the good morsels I picked up reading his entry on Wikipedia, for instance, are nowhere to be found in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!.

I suppose if you’re man interested in the man than the work, this book will be significantly less painful for you to read than it was for me. If you’re technically inclined, however, it may behoove you to look elsewhere.

§1904 · September 19, 2007 · 2 comments · Tags: Book Reviews, books, reviews, science

¶ Using jQuery to extract blockquote metadata

5 Nov. 2007 • I’ve formatted this code as a plugin, too. Go to the project page.

Blockquotes, by definition, can and should in most cases have a title attribute and, if possible, a cite attribute. The former is the actually name of the quote’s source. The latter is the URI to the quotes location, if it was retrieved online.

For instance:

<blockquote cite="http://heliologue.com" title="A Modest Construct">
 
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Integer arcu ligula, tempus vel, dignissim at, molestie ut, leo. Etiam luctus, ipsum sit amet tincidunt malesuada, magna nisi feugiat eros, in tempus libero justo sed dui. Aliquam bibendum pulvinar turpis. Ut iaculis gravida nibh. Quisque elementum ligula vel nibh. Sed leo augue, tempor sed, nonummy in, interdum at, quam. Ut cursus tincidunt felis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Integer pharetra vulputate nunc. Cras nec felis ornare augue tempor fermentum. Nullam rutrum malesuada nunc. Aliquam vel purus. Aliquam faucibus malesuada orci. Nulla sit amet nulla sit amet tortor fermentum euismod.
 
</blockquote>

This is all well and good for search engines, but it doesn’t do much for human readers (who are arguably more important, though it depends on who you ask). A human might want to see something like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Integer arcu ligula, tempus vel, dignissim at, molestie ut, leo. Etiam luctus, ipsum sit amet tincidunt malesuada, magna nisi feugiat eros, in tempus libero justo sed dui. Aliquam bibendum pulvinar turpis. Ut iaculis gravida nibh. Quisque elementum ligula vel nibh. Sed leo augue, tempor sed, nonummy in, interdum at, quam. Ut cursus tincidunt felis. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Integer pharetra vulputate nunc. Cras nec felis ornare augue tempor fermentum. Nullam rutrum malesuada nunc. Aliquam vel purus. Aliquam faucibus malesuada orci. Nulla sit amet nulla sit amet tortor fermentum euismod.

A Modest Construct

Which I achieved by appending

<cite class="source">
     <a href="http://heliologue.com" title="A Modest Construct">A Modest Construct</a>
</cite>

to the blockquote.

But nobody wants to hard-code a citation into every blockquote, especially when it’s technically correct to attach the information to the semantic element in question (the blockquote, for those of you not following along). So, how to be structurally correct when using blockquotes, while still allowing human readers the benefit of such data?