desperance (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
desperance) wrote2006-05-11 05:40 pm
desperance) wrote2006-05-11 05:40 pm
On broken things
Anyone trying to e-mail me today: you might as well save your e-stamps. The server's blown up, apparently. They're (hopefully) warming up another as I type, but who knows how long that'll take?
There's been debate these last few days in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
matociquala's and truepenny's journals about what it means when a book is broken. I thought they were clear and absolute, but others disagreed, which is fine, of course, and interesting, and the stuff of life, and all of that; but one thing about computers, when they go boom, at least you know what it means, you know they're broken. It's not a matter of debate. Black smoke, sparks, like that.
As opposed to this dear computer of mine, which Alex has been wrestling with half the afternoon. I seem to have a broken installation, broken somewhere strange at the heart of things; every time I upgrade anything, important things like the internet connection and the video driver vanish and have to be dug up again like fossils from the natural. If I hadn't found Alex - just recently, just when I needed him: been using Linux for five or six years now and never had this kind of problem before - Lord alone knows what I would have done, because I simply could not do what he does. Who knows, I might even have crawled miserably back to Microsoft and be working in aaargh! (sorry - that happens every time I try to type aaaargh! [see? but you know what I mean - things you look out of, things Barry sits in to watch the birdies outside the house]) again.
But this kind of broken - where the system seems to be fine on the face of it, and you can chunter along with it day to day as long as you don't put too much strain on it, but underneath things are rattling and slamming into each other and altogether it is simply not doing those things that a smart operating system ought to do - that's the right kind of metaphor for what I mean, at least, when I say a book is broken. It has a sufficiency of words, and probably some sense of narrative, of movement, even if it clunks; and it has characters, and dialogue, and all of that; and yet, and yet, it's not doing the important stuff. It's not stirring or startling or disturbing the reader, it's nowhere near satisfying the author, it hasn't made that crucial connection [internet metaphor] to another level of perception, of understanding, of emotion. Or the reader's not there, in the heart of the book, watching [video driver metaphor] and feeling and smelling the action. Or whatever.
I love metaphors. This is one reason why I love literature, why I love being a writer: we describe things in terms of what they are not, and how cool is that?
There's been debate these last few days in
matociquala's and truepenny's journals about what it means when a book is broken. I thought they were clear and absolute, but others disagreed, which is fine, of course, and interesting, and the stuff of life, and all of that; but one thing about computers, when they go boom, at least you know what it means, you know they're broken. It's not a matter of debate. Black smoke, sparks, like that.As opposed to this dear computer of mine, which Alex has been wrestling with half the afternoon. I seem to have a broken installation, broken somewhere strange at the heart of things; every time I upgrade anything, important things like the internet connection and the video driver vanish and have to be dug up again like fossils from the natural. If I hadn't found Alex - just recently, just when I needed him: been using Linux for five or six years now and never had this kind of problem before - Lord alone knows what I would have done, because I simply could not do what he does. Who knows, I might even have crawled miserably back to Microsoft and be working in aaargh! (sorry - that happens every time I try to type aaaargh! [see? but you know what I mean - things you look out of, things Barry sits in to watch the birdies outside the house]) again.
But this kind of broken - where the system seems to be fine on the face of it, and you can chunter along with it day to day as long as you don't put too much strain on it, but underneath things are rattling and slamming into each other and altogether it is simply not doing those things that a smart operating system ought to do - that's the right kind of metaphor for what I mean, at least, when I say a book is broken. It has a sufficiency of words, and probably some sense of narrative, of movement, even if it clunks; and it has characters, and dialogue, and all of that; and yet, and yet, it's not doing the important stuff. It's not stirring or startling or disturbing the reader, it's nowhere near satisfying the author, it hasn't made that crucial connection [internet metaphor] to another level of perception, of understanding, of emotion. Or the reader's not there, in the heart of the book, watching [video driver metaphor] and feeling and smelling the action. Or whatever.
I love metaphors. This is one reason why I love literature, why I love being a writer: we describe things in terms of what they are not, and how cool is that?
e-stamps