Hometown

How easily are we marked by the visual and cultural landscapes of the places where we come of age. Growing up, I couldn't wait to get the hell out of Atlanta. Yet in every place I lived afterward I found myself longing for the rolling hills and tall hardwood trees of the Piedmont Plateau.

I've heard it said that Atlanta's a fast buck town. You can come from nowhere and be somebody in Atlanta in no time. Maybe that's true. There's no historic district the way there is in more genteel Southern cities like Savannah and Charleston. The developers own the city and they're too busy blasting away the past to make way for progress. It's a city in love with its own mythologies--the Phoenix that rose from the ashes after Sherman's army burned it down, the "City too busy to hate," "the New South" (forward-looking, progress-oriented as opposed to the old "backward" South).

Atlanta is only the latest incarnation in the city's nomenclature. Bordering no major waterway, the city is a pure phenomenon of the mid-nineteenth century. Originally called Terminus, it was the end of the line for the railroads. For a while, it was called Marthasville after one of the governors daughters, before the city fathers decided that it had too much of a provincial ring. It's uncertain whether Atlanta is a derivation of Atalanta or a reference to the city of Atlantis. There are two axes to the city's identity. The one driving forward with irrepressible energy, the rough and ready railroad town morphed into a modern transportation hub, the indomitable spirit to rebuild itself from the ashes and bend nature to its will, sprawling outward with no natural boundaries to constrain. The other, more Southern, languorous, the part that knows what it's like to be occupied and is committed to the principle of noble failure because to have succeeded would have somehow meant compromising one's ideals, the part that looks inward and back in time to a mythological past that has to constantly re-invented to serve the needs of the present.

So, what monuments might exist in such a place as Atlanta? It is always a challenge to find some spot tourist-worthy to take out-of-town guests when they come to visit the city, which is how I one day found myself at the CocaCola museum, a most interesting tour of modern American iconography.

The visitation experience is somewhat like an interactive science museum. Lights are dimmed and there is a progression through the Coke memorabilia section. This wistfully recreates '30s and '40s soda fountains and country store Coke signs, with the unforgettable illustrated period-look in the ads, smiling, plump-faced Norman Rockwell-type American girls and boys. It harks back to a time when life was simpler and better, and to values and a way of life worth fighting for. Ten years later, in one of my favorites scenes in the cold war satire, Dr. Strangelove, Colonel Bat Guano refuses to shoot the CocaCola machine to liberate some change, even though nuclear war is at stake. The message: Commerce is sacred.

We then journey from the past into the stylized Future with robotic soda fountains dispensing improbably colored, exotic Coke-family libations from around the world, with neon laser lights and proto-techno whooshing sounds. Commerce is not only good, it is Global, messaging is picked up in the film section

Back then, Roberto Goizueta was still alive and the CEO of the CocaCola company, the scion of a Cuban sugar planting family who went on to head the world's largest sugar-water distributor. In the film short, he looked to be in his early sixties, tall, sleek and cosmopolitan in a dark suit. He spoke in a sophisticated sort of accent common to rich people from foreign parts educated in top American universities--the high priest who was going to initiate you into the mysteries of the Global Brand.

Cut to panoramic views of smiling natives from around the world happily sipping CocaCola: camel herders against the backdrop of the Egyptian Pyramids, Nepali children in the mountains, Africans, Asians, perhaps even some French staged against the Eiffel Tower. These scenes are set to the nostalgic, old-timey Coke jingles I remembered from my childhood: "I'd like to buy the world a coke," "Have a coke and a smile," "Things go better with Coke," "Coke is it," "The Real thing."

I immediately felt better. Want to feel connected? Need a socially acceptable upper? Looking for something genuine or do you just want to be happy? My answers were all there. I wasn't from some two-bit railroad town; I stood at the grand cathedral of commerce, a member of the global family of consumerism, worshipping the transubstantiation of sugar water.

I think I stopped at the gift shop on my way out the door.

On the Pull of Solar Orbit

Will Sun finally make an honest app server out of JBoss? Why does the community care?

Bona fide, certified, sanctified, washed in the blood of the lamb...whew-ee, our heads are so big already, I'm not sure we could handle that kind of validation. But seriously, how did we go from "We do not know that app server, JBoss," to possible epithalamion? We may get to join the family. And what a warm cozy group that promises to be. They could even use the tag line from the Sopranos, "J2EE, family redefined."

Well, families stick together and that's apparently what's needed in this situation. That's right. Better toe the line, children, or Bill Gates will murder us all while we sleep. The restless eye in Redmond wants fresh conquests. How convenient it is to have our common enemy to trot out, in the interests of policing the heterodoxies within.

Like the traditional institution of marriage, this certification seems to hinge more on the exchange of money than technical virtue. And what is this money needed for? Marketing, that's right. Java needs to be marketed. Individuals praising their own product: bad, duplicitous, hubris. Vast anonymous corps of corporate marketing: truthful, good. Can I have fries with that? Will we see it on the Super Bowl? Cause we all know the real reason y'all went into Java programming. That's right, because Christina Aguilera thinks it's cool.

So, in return for paying out some lucre, we get to bear the official name. And what power naming conveys. When you think that by the simple act of re-naming things (as opposed to re-engineering, which sounds like a lot of hard work) you give them a new lease on life. Renounce Satan and all his works, be christened into the Java family and all the sins of your past life will be washed away.

But we've had so much fun being bad. Can our relationship survive communal sanction and legitimacy? Where will all the love and passion go?

Introduction

Before I became a writer, I was and still am a reader. I studied the things that interested me, like the parallels between Samuel Johnson's views on the dangers of imagination and T.S. Eliot's writings on personality and tradition, Paul de Man's discussion of the difference between allegory and symbol, Jacques Derrida's treatment of harmony and melody, the Proustian involuntary memory, Roland Barthes' punctum and studium, Baudelaire's "correspondences" and Eliot's objective correlative--issues of critical and aesthetic judgment, communication and non-communication, isolation and unification, distance between signifier and signified, presence within time, submission and subversion.

In short, I enjoyed all the advantages of a perfectly self-indulgent and, in the context of the job market, perfectly useless education. The latter provided the perfect excuse to further pursue my interests with a graduate degree. However, my client status in the warm, womb-like undergraduate environment of the American liberal arts college in no way prepared me for the culture shock of a graduate degree in French academia, where my feeble murmurings about Steven Greenblatt's new historicism were categorically silenced by "Oui, mais tout ca n'a pas d'importance, car la Realite n'existe pas" (Yes, well all that's irrelevant because reality does not exist). I utterly lacked the ontological armor to effectively spar with the high priests formed by Normale Superieure Lettres. Despite my sincere efforts and their best intentions, the whole experience was doomed by miscommunication. My first "memoire" on Faulkner's Bestiary elicited some mild curiosity at cocktail conversations from those who mistook bestiary for bestiality, but was poorly received by my professors. My second memoire on 19th Century American literature and culture as reviewed by secondary literary critics in the no longer published journal, La Revue des Deux Mondes, did make the cut. By that time I had lost most the passion and conviction that inspired me to study literature in the first place.

Wanting nothing further to do with academia, I worked for some time as a writer for a financial services company and later joined my husband as Director of Communications for JBoss Group. I first came to notice blogs in the Java community when our product and the personalities associated with it started to appear in discussions there. At that point, I began to study the genre.

Some blogs seemed genuinely devoted to sharing insight about technology, however what interested me more were the language and peripheral behavioral patterns. It would appear that a significant portion of the blogverse had not left Junior High. There were some articulate and original individual voices. However, on the whole, bloggers seemed to aggregate in cliques of varying sizes in a lovefest of constant self-referencing and self-affirmation. The collective message generally reflected the following point "Me and my two best friends think I'm cool. And by the way, today, we all think X product or person is a loser." The other distasteful characteristic shared by some portion of the blogging community was the tendency to use blogs to settle scores and air petty personal grievances. "On such and such a day, X stuck out their foot and tripped me as I was sitting down at the cafeteria table, and this is why you should feel that is significant..."

I was already cataloguing the pitfalls to avoid in my own blog. My own blog, oh the horror, seduced by the meretricious allure of reality TV for would-be writers. How had I gotten to that point? In the words of A.S. Byatt, if there is one thing a background devoted to literary study is really good at, it is reinforcing the certain conviction that the practitioner is in no way worthy of writing herself. But the seeds of the fall had already been sown long before. When you study writers, you also read their biographies where you learn such contextual detail as the fact that Faulkner was rip-roaring drunk when he delivered his famous "I decline to accept the end of man" Nobel speech. And what does that really mean anyway, and isn't it a little pretentious, but who cares because the words sounded so good. Furthermore, I wasn't reading Nobel Laureates that much any more; I was reading writing that was no longer intimidating, by people who, rightfully or wrongfully so, were not intimidated at all by the idea of writing.

I decided to take the advice of Lady Miss Chablis, another Southerner, "Two peas in a bucket, f___ it," why not write after all? It's just a blog. What did I really have to lose? I could even assuage my literary conscience by familiarizing myself with the master of the genre himself, Michel de Montaigne. At the least I'd have a superior metric with which to measure my own shortcomings.

"This entirely original topic in literature, Montaigne on Montaigne, demanded for its full development a new literary form, the loose unstructured essay, replete with deliberate irrelevances, antiquarian references and classical quotations, with snippets of autobiography and fragments of philosophy...The final product, always and necessarily unfinished and open-ended, was to be the confused picture of this single confused consciousness at one passing moment in its unique history." Stuart Hampshire, Introduction to "Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works," Everyman's Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

So, without further ado...my blog. I write because it pleases me, on subjects that pique my fancy.