Fiona Apple is

f*cking annoying.

I wouldn't be this disappointed if I hadn't been hoping she'd be so cool. I had recently been thinking about what cultural and literary references I would pick as reflecting a strong female voice. Wanting to branch out beyond my own eclectic taste and random acquaintances in this domain, I asked the college girl who helps me out with my twins on the weekends who she really thought men should listen to if they wanted to get a clue. She said "Fiona Apple, definitely Fiona Apple."

On a Saturday morning not so long ago, yours truly is hanging out with the babysitter, while the children nap, singing along to Lady Marmalade, "go sister, soul sister, let it flow sister" as we suds off the outgrown car seats and baby stroller with bleach water and some mysterious solution I picked up at the hardware store that promises to remove every stain known to man from every surface known to man, based on a complicated system of ratios to the other two liquids. Now, only other parents can appreciate the value of a responsible babysitter. All the teenagers you would entrust your children to these days have really busy lives with athletics and extra-curriculars or their parents must give them more generous allowances, compared to the days I remember putting in hard work for $2 an hour, would do the dishes, and the $50 or so you could save up meant the difference between Guess jeans and whatever your mother might pick up at Sears. So I do feel lucky to have sitters that are hard-working, actually like my children and are personable to boot.

So my children's sitter tells me her story of the weekend. She was browsing through the poster section of the University of Georgia campus when whom should she see a poster of, but her first boyfriend. Apparently they met when she lived in New York and was going to the Lycee Francais. He went to the nearby Italian high school. He and his friends had a band and he asked her to sing with them, but she was too shy. Her family moved to Georgia and she lost touch with him until recently she realizes that he's the drummer with the Strokes (who frankly I had never heard of, but then I'm not a reference because I don't follow contemporary music that closely). Any way, I thought to myself, that is a good Almost Famous story because your ex-boyfriend could move on to Drew Barrymore and if you had joined his band you could be "On the cover of Rolling Stone." And I'm ten years older and the might-have-beens in my life don't even remotely come close to anything famous...which brings me back to Fiona Apple.

I decided to check out her two CDs. I have to say her voice was actually a nice surprise. It was stronger than I expected. Given the fact that she looks a little waifish, I was expecting less. In her lyrics as well, she could be said to represent a strong female voice. After all, some girls do go looking for wolves on the way to their grandmothers' houses...and are usually disappointed not to find them, because bad boys tend to run the hell away from girls like that. Alas, the criminal, damned and insane generally avoid those who are more demented than they are. So, ok, she's the bad girl "who's been careless with a delicate man"..."because she can" but now she regrets this, because he was "all I ever knew of love." Well, it was time for some revenge for all those "I done a good woman wrong" songs written by self-indulgent teenage boys and men.

I liked the image of the incomplete seduction in "The First Taste," and she has some nice rhymes, in the "The Child is Gone," for example

Cuz I suddenly feel like a different person
From the roots of my sould came a different coercion
And I ran my hand o'er a strange inversion
A vacancy that just did not belong
The child is gone

Still, something was really bothering me about her music. "The child is gone?" I wouldn't bet on it, not with cliches such as "armour falling down" and "he finds a home in me" or the fact that in two albums, her songs all sound rather similar. That was it, it was the lack of thematic range that disturbed me. With one exception, all Fiona's songs are about angst. And that is where I smell a rat. Eminem? You're white trash, your mother's a crackhead, your girlfriend's a known slut and you live in a trailer? Yeah, I'll give you angst. But, seriously, how much angst can some pretty blond girl who grew up on the Upper West Side and had her first multi-platinum album release at eighteen really have experienced? Sure, the rich and beautiful have their problems too, but she doesn't sing about drug addiction, depression or psychotic families, the usual suspects there. She sings about unhappy love, the failure of communication and the fact that no man will understand what she's truly thinking. Well that might feel really compelling to Fiona, but I'm snoozing at this point. I'd give her two or three songs on those themes, but close to twenty? Oh, and this is too rich for words, I looked up the dedications on the back of her CD cover and lo and behold, there's "The Man--Andy, my Andy--thank you for you." What a poseur! What nerve, she's actually in some sort of seemingly good relationship. I bet she made all that tormented love sh*t up.

Granted, compared to a contemporary like Paris Hilton, Fiona's got some depth, but you still gotta wonder what happens to these kids who are so sophisticated, blase, world-weary and seen-it-all at eighteen. What will they have to say when they're in their thirties?

Writing and Seduction

Is writing about seduction? I think good writing almost certainly is. While the word seduce is most frequently attributed a sexual connotation in English, there are two other definitions: 1) to lead astray, as from the right action 2) to win over, attract, allure. The word is derived from the Latin "seducere," to lead apart, from "se," away, and "ducere," to lead (Collins English Dictionary, 1979).

The first seduction and, many would argue, one of the most compelling seduction references in Western literary tradition is none other than the Serpent's Tempatation of Eve in Chapter 3 of Genesis.

Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?
And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:
But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:
For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.
And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.
And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked: and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons (King James Bible).

Michel Gresset examines the role of christian theology in founding a "psychologie du regard" (the French word "regard" as both a verb meaning "to look" and a noun meaning "glance" or "gaze" is problematic to translate into English as it tends to be more comprehensive than any English equivalent I can think of) in his book Faulkner ou la Fascination. According to Gresset, if the Fall has for theological cause temptation, it derives its phenomenological cause from the act of looking. "Before the fall, Adam is innocent; Eve is naked but she doesn't know it. Paradise is beautiful, but it isn't seductive." Before man gained the faculty of sight, there is only the world as God created it, and no staging is possible beyond that which God wishes to see. The demon uses the eye of the serpent as an instrument of seduction, of leading away, because he knows that nudity signifies nothing if it is not looked upon. The serpent diverts Eve's gaze, turns it upon the apple, and awakens in her a desire for the forbidden fruit. The eye is the organ of substitution, not of satisfaction. When Eve eats of the fruit and shares it with Adam, the arc of desire is completed as they move from gaze to consommation, in the shared act of transgression (Gresset, Faulkner ou la Fascination, 1982).

Milton's serpent is one of my favorite literary seducers. He comes to Eve in a dream and calls into question the beauty of a Creation that none can "see." He awakens in the woman the desire to truly see the world around her, "to have her eyes opened," by first leading her to believe that she, herself, is seen and desired.

Thy face, and morn returned; for I this night
(Such night till this I never passed) have dreamed,
If dreamed, not, as I oft am wont, of thee,
Works of day past, or morrow's next design,
But of offence and trouble, which my mind
Knew never till this irksome night: Methought,
Close at mine ear one called me forth to walk

With gentle voice; I thought it thine: It said,
'Why sleepest thou, Eve? now is the pleasant time,
The cool, the silent, save where silence yields
To the night-warbling bird, that now awake
Tunes sweetest his love-laboured song; now reigns
Full-orbed the moon, and with more pleasing light
Shadowy sets off the face of things; in vain,
If none regard; Heaven wakes with all his eyes,
Whom to behold but thee, Nature's desire?

In whose sight all things joy, with ravishment
Attracted by thy beauty still to gaze.'
(John Milton, Paradise Lost)

But I have let myself become distracted, seduced perhaps by phenomenology and poetry and my readers are possibly practical people, with little time for either, so back to the point. If we take Genesis as literary reference, the first seduction had to do with with man wanting to comprehend his place in Divine creation and wanting to rival the Creator; it had to do with "opening of eyes" and knowledge that would allow one to "be as gods." One might suppose that Paradise was rather chaste (if we ignore what the beasts might have been doing) because the serpent's seduction and the Fall preceed the passage "And Adam knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bare Cain..." which denotes, not the creation of the world, but the creation of the human race and the beginning of history.

When we write, we create worlds or amplify and share worlds created by others. If we exclude the moral or value judgment implicit in a supposed separation from Good and a venturing towards Evil, seduction is simply a leading apart, a diversion from ordinary perceptions. It is an attempt to make others "see" what we see: places, states of mind, ideas, connections between things they might otherwise have ignored. Effective writing communicates and transmits the pleasure of images and sounds, hints at knowledge, leads us, makes us want to think or to see things in a different way.

School Daze/Interview Story

Kindness From Strangers

Thank you, Chiara. I like her best when she communicates her enthusiasm for the things about which she is passionate, when she tells stories, shares her quirky sense of humor or shows the courage to talk about non-mainstream subjects. I like to see debates on ideas. I can appreciate criticism of people's words and actions; I don't like to see personal attacks.

I can understand Chiara's feelings about the French educational system. Like so many would-be utopias, it often fails. Is it an attempt to correct the flaws of some other system, to replace a hereditary aristocracy with a technocracy selected through a brutally competitive and often mean vetting process, whose selection criteria changes over time? I don't know. As an
American, I escaped being categorized by a system to which I didn't belong.

On the other hand, in the US, I wouldn't have been able to get a Masters degree for $600 a year and I wouldn't have gotten to spend hours in the Bibliotheque Nationale. I did get to know some of the Normale graudates (not the professors who are more distant than their American counterparts), but the other grad students and the participants in the conferences. They were wacky in their own sort of passionate way. They challenged me and I couldn't help but respect the fact that here were people who'd never spent any prolonged time in an English-speaking country, who were interested in my culture, and who could write impressive papers on Faulkner in flawless English.

School Daze/An Interview Story

The teachers who most inspired me were those who were passionate about what they taught, who encouraged and who taught by example. "No, you ignorant little snot, U2's 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For' is not an appropriate choice for an essay; try John Donne" never inspired me to read John Donne. It would be years after that before I'd pick up John Donne, which was a shame because I like John Donne.

Apparently, some engineering schools have some non-sciences requirements similar to the ones that sent innumerate people like me to classes informally referred to as "physics for poets" to graduate from a liberal arts college. My husband told me about one such class "X,Y" by Elisabeth Badinter, which probably attracted the minority of students seriously interested in gender issues and, let's face it, the larger contingent of mostly male engineering students looking for a nice vacation from "calcul variationnel" and a chance to fantasize about Mme. Badinter (as she might have looked over 10 years ago). Well, whatever the motives may be, we can always learn something.

I haven't read her book , but as explained to me, it had to do with the cultural definition of masculinity" Examining the changing role models for masculine identity--from cowboy in the 1950s to Terminator in the 1990s, from flesh-and-blood man to machine." Apparently, masculinity might be something that had to be proven. I had never really thought two seconds about common expressions like "Be a man" or "Boys don't cry" since they didn't strictly involve me. On the other hand, apparently, femininity might be a given. As a girl, I had occasionally been told "Be a lady." However, this had to do with conforming to certain social niceties--like don't rip a whole in that nice lace dress we've starched up for you to wear to your uncle's wedding because you're playing tag with your sibling and cousins. No one ever tells you "Be a woman". Melanie from Gone With Wind might have been a lady, but Scarlet most definitely was a woman.

Might it be a vacation to be a woman? Can you get away with more things as a woman? What might it be like to be a smart woman, as I saw in one comment on this blog. I can't answer the question of what it might be like to be a woman, smart or otherwise. I only know what it might be like to be myself.

I was once asked that question, not the woman part, but the smart part, in a job interview my last year of college. This came from the gentleman, who was then head of Citibank's Global Derivatives. He said "So tell me Miss Mason, are you smart?" He said this in an accent reminiscent of Mr. Kobayashi in film, The Usual Suspects.

Why a person, whose unique experience with derivatives involved one semester of college calculus and not the financial instrument, would be at this interview takes some explaining. It had something to do with not knowing what I wanted to do, the rather limited recruiting offerings at my college, usually involving insurance company training programs, investment banking and management consulting, and some vague feeling that I should justify the cost of my education and find gainful employment (a subsequent brief experience there would send me rushing back into the warm embrace of academia). If I hadn't f**ked up the first part of the process--missing the on-campus interview because I didn't pay attention to the rescheduling, I would not have pursued this job any further. However, there's some perverse instinct in situations where I've failed something or not made the cut, where I find surprising motivation to prove that I was, in fact, worthy.

How to overcome such an unpromising start? Did Mr. R give me an hour of his time because I was a woman? Unlikely. No, he gave me an hour of us time because I told a lie. Did I lie about my background? That could have been easily verified. No, I lied about my desire for the job, in a masterpiece of falsehood, dripping with cliches. I was a bit ashamed, but I was also unemployed. Surprisingly (or not), it worked. His office never called me back, but I was going to be in New York anyway for another company's interview, once again involving no direction on my part, beyond the fact that the campus recruiting meeting offered some more tasty looking hors d'oeuvres than the usual fare at our cafeteria. So, I informed Mr. R's secretary that I would be in the city at such and such date and looked forward to talking to him. A day later she called me back with a scheduled time.

Now, there's a world of difference between being a writer and being an actor. If there's one thing I am not, it is an actor. Once I was in that office with Mr. R, I felt very small and out of place. His question took me aback. Yes, I was smart about certain things, usually involving arcane bits of knowledge in which few people are interested and for which fewer are willing to pay. Then, there are plenty of things about which I am not smart. I knew enough to know that when you don't know the answer, always ask a question. "Well, Mr. R, how do you define smart?" I got some more information there, "Street smart. Tell me a story that proves you're street smart" he said. Even then, I knew that most interviewing isn't about truth. It's about giving them the answer they want to hear. With the perspective of time and experience, the answer there would have been to assume the Cowboy persona: "Damn straight, I am. It's not about the money. I absolutely live to kick *ss in the financial markets," and then I should have added some hastily improvised story, borrowed from a newspaper article no doubt, about how I might have almost been mugged in the South Bronx, but got the best of my would-be muggers and we all wound up drinking a toast at the local saloon. It only occurred to me, a good ten years later, that a dapper Indian gentleman working in the financial markets might not be any better off on the streets of the South Bronx than I would have been.

At the time, however, I was absolutely at a loss for words and no good street smart stories, real or imaginary, were coming to mind. Since the silence would have been even more awkward, I talked about the one thing I did know something about. My undergraduate thesis (now mouldering in some forgotten corner of my college library) had to do with issues regarding personality and artistic theory. One piece of writing that had always interested me was Samuel Johnson's treatment of "The Dangerous Prevalence of Imagination" in a chapter of Rasselas. For Johnson, imagination springs from discontent with the world as it is and he equates the predominance of imagination over reason with insanity. He believed that most of us spend our time reminiscing about the past or daydreaming about the future, so that the present is almost always lost. He envisioned both a positive imagination, which robs people of the ability to enjoy a reality that can never correspond to the magnificence of their daydreams and a negative imagination (as demonstrated by fear), which destroys the peace of the present by causing individuals to focus on "evils recollected" and "evils anticipated." (Disclaimer: these brief notes hardly do justice to Johnson or Rasselas, if you are interested in this topic and the remedies he proposes, by all means read him ).

Well, talking about imagination and its relation to time and the inability to live in the present is one thing guaranteed not to get you a job in global derivatives. At this point I had blown it and I knew it. Since my future employment was no longer at stake, I relaxed and decided to make the most of this hour Mr. R and I had to spend together. What might it be like to be a Head of Global Derivatives? Well Mr. R told me his story and it was interesting. I asked him what was the one thing he would do differently if he had more time in his life. He told me that that would be to study philosophy. We left on good terms and never saw each other again.

Cherchez la femme...

***Warning*** You did not come here through javablogs. You will find no insights about java, or about technology at all for that matter. I am not an open source diva. The views I advocate are purely my own and those of the shop around the corner that I work for. I'm not a diva at all. I can't sing. I have occasionally been called a brat. You will not find truth or beauty here. If you are still reading at this point, you can only blame your idle curiosity, and we all know where that leads...

Some one actually accused me of writing this blog to promote my husband. I assure you (as will she) that I'm not that clever. Veramente Chiara, si non e vero, e ben trovato.

On m'accuse?...I wonder if the Valerie Plame thing is a reference to me. Of course you can never be sure, it would be a little self-absorbed to think so (people always make that mistake when JBoss people communicate--take things personally that have nothing to do with them), although I do have twins. Well that Valerie Plame reference actually seems rather nice. I guess 31 is a bit long in the tooth to play the chick from Alias. Of course, if I was going to do a jibe at me, I would have come up with some far more disturbing mothers of twins like her or her. And then, if I were married to a French ambassador, he might have had to have attended this school. I'm an American, so I just thought I married a boy from a polytechnic.

I also thought my better half was out running terrorist training camps, but it would appear that we've joined the Establishment. And then, it would appear that afer a raucous night in the dissolute life of a mostly single mother involving being woken up at multiple hours by barking dog and twin A and then twin B (being such clever, cutting edge technology people, we produced a high availability, failover configuration) until about 5:30 at which point the four year old crawls into bed and then the night is over...in my spare time I may have contributed to a war. In this sorry situation, do I have any advice to offer?

Yes I do. In the spirit of Chicago, to all you men out there, if you see domesticity on the horizon, run from it..."Stay away from dogs and children and girls who play for keeps."

JBoss PR, redux

Joe Ottinger writes that a more fitting end to my last piece might feature the Jeff Beck quote: "You'll get yo ass bit."

Since I'm not very musically sophisticated, Joe provides the following background information. "He recently put out an album (called "Jeff!") that has a cover that looks like this: a stick, with a single string (of twine!), and the "body" of the "guitar" has a note, and I'm paraphrasing: "This gitar belong to a hilbily named jeff an if you fine it you better give it back or u will get yo ass bit."

I most definitely will have to familiarize myself with the Jeff Beck oeuvre. However, Joe, I think you're missing the point. Are you confusing style with intent? If you want masochism for the masses, go read Hani. What part of our business model don't you understand? We're not about giving it away now. "Customers pay."

...and I'm not sure that kind of service is in our published pricing scheme, but if it was, it would be very expensive...people always seem to be confusing Professional Open Source with the human fulfillment business. That must be why they're so disappointed when they get to know us.

JBoss Group, could we be any worse at PR?

The answer is a resounding no, absolutely not. We work hard to be this bad. Most people don't understand what a full time job that is. It's a competitive landscape out there. You've got terrorism, crooked politicians, corporate greed, genocide, environmental pillage...it was a close contest, but apparently we did make it into the Pantheon of all Evil, along with George W. Bush and Microsoft. Take that, all you luke-warm, half-hearted weenies out there. You'll have to go to therapy now, because the rest of you are just "Not quite evil enough." Our only regret is that we are only infamous in the J2EE geek ghetto. We'll be talking to our new friends Dubya and Bill Gates about that.

Take insulting people, for example. Why is that hard work? I'll tell you why. It takes a politician's sensibility to remember all those names and situations. People want to feel special, singled out. You can tell them right away, that dazed and confused look on their face, the story they've rehearsed to themselves several times over, the fact that they're still pinching themselves to make sure it really happened. They just can't wait to spit it out. "So and so [member of or affiliated with JBoss Group] was rude to me."

I want to help them, I really do. I hate to be insensitive here, but how can I say it. We're rude to a lot of people, preferably those that could be useful in promoting our product or services. I have a hard time keeping track of what we do. It really pains me to watch people be disabused of their illusions, see them realize that there is no memory of the name, time, context or what was said. It ultimately dawns on them; there wasn't anything special or unique about their outrage, about what took place. Worse yet, there wasn't anything Personal...we just talk a lot of trash.

This is even more perverse, but you can get a reputation. People read about us and they're expecting to be insulted, they're just waiting for it to happen. It's the P.T. Barnum phenomenon. They want to pay their dollar and confirm the full horror of everything they've read. And then if we don't insult them, they can get extremely offended...like they weren't even worth telling off or something. You just can't win in this business.

How do you spin such unpromising material? Well, even we can't be all things to all people. Any vice taken to its logical extreme, excludes others, which leaves us with "JBoss Group: Obnoxious, but not ass-kissers."

Disclaimer: We have a real PR agency, Schwartz Communications. They are a pleasure to work with and very professional. They are often shocked by a lot of what we do. Anything good you read about us is due to them.

Note: To all would-be bilers. You're going to have to work harder to impress me. I'm a Southern girl, born and bred in the briar patch, a mother of twins, in which domestic bliss, I've seen horrors from which the intrepid would shrink and been biled on more times than you can count. Some of you will be bemoaning the good ole days of Sys-con spam, when you find yourselves on our annual JBoss Group Holiday card distribution, featuring a group glamour shot of all our ugly faces, and updates on our children.

JBoss, In the Porn Business?

Once upon a time on an online forum, there was an interchange between an open source developer and a "user" of the product on which he worked, the distinction between user and customer being of some importance in this interchange. When the free help the user wanted was not forthcoming, he proceeded to insult the developer and the product. At this point the developer insulted him back using some choice, off-color words. The episode is certainly in bad taste. However, more interesting than the incident itself is the fascination it seems to hold for those not directly involved.

Are we in the porn business? One would wonder, judging by the number of times that particular incident gets referenced in JBoss threads in public forums and by the fact that even some of the more jaded members of the Java blogging community seem to get hot and bothered about it.

You see, your normal problem in the open source business is not people thinking you're degenerate; it's that people think you're stupid. These would be Sherlock Holmes love to point out the fact that "Ah hah they're not really in this just for peace and love, they have the audacity to want to make a profit"--as if this was some great secret and not something amply referenced in our website and official communication. Then there are the people who equate Open Source with open business. These are the people who write asking for free unlimited licenses to our training material or tell us "You give your software away, where's my free service?"

Nonetheless, if you were in the porn business, against whom would you measure your success? Well, since gonzo "Girls Gone Wild" soft-core porn mogul Joe Francis has been in the news lately, why not compare his business model to that of gonzo JBoss Group Open Source entrepreneur, Marc Fleury.

Business Premise
Joe F: Open Blouses, business based on getting all-American girls to take their shirts off.
Marc F: Open Source, business based on getting top-tier developers to open source their code.

Profit Margins
Joe F: $1000 a day for camera crew, pays girls up to $100; most are apparently just happy to get a free t-shirt. Tapes retail for around $20.
Marc F: Service industry profit margins that subsidize a free product.

Net Worth
Joe F: Upwards of $100 million.
Marc F: Nowhere near $100 million.

Possible pick up lines
Joe F: Want to see my Gulfstream jet?
Marc F: Want to talk about AOP?

Hangs out with
Joe F: rappers, Ashton Kutcher, Tara Reid.
Marc F: wife, children and other developers.

In terms of revenue and lifestyle, professional open source clearly has quite a ways to go before catching up with the adult entertainment industry.

So what does telling someone who insults you to get lost, in no uncertain terms, really signify in a world where, as Bob Dylan says, "You gotta serve somebody"? Maybe it does have something to do with power and self-determination, setting your own rules and boundaries, deciding whom you'll work with and what you'll do. And when you do it, maybe it's about making sure you get paid.

The gentleman to whom the post was originally addressed, in a context that is almost always removed from the reference by subsequent posters, did not take this interchange literally or particularly seriously. Marc and Ben from JBoss met him a year ago. He works for Nielsen Media Research. We are grateful to him for his role in successfully introducing JBoss to Nielsen, who are now happy users of JBoss and customers of JBoss Group.

As for those people to whom this post was not addressed, who are yet fixated on it...they have received their free service. Oh virtue, how dull, perhaps unremarked? would you be were there no somber foil to set off your bright sheen. In a world of crass vulgarity, how much nobler it would be to luxuriate in the onanistic concupiscent bliss of moral superiority.