Bab-el Redux

In the process of nursing my wounded pride after previously mentioned encounter with the Teutonic Carpool Enforcer and feeling churlish, I looked up one of my favorite quotes attributed in various versions to a polyglot Carlos, that is Carlos V, Holy Roman Emperor (1500-1558). It wouldn't make it into any United Nations Day pageant, but Carlos V can get away with it because he is, well, dead and he did belong in some part to all the cultures enumerated.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse.

Being a non-Italian-speaking woman, Carlos V wouldn't have been too successful communicating with me. However, with the ability to speak French and Spanish, I might possess the ability to communicate with men and God, but not, alas, with horses.

Apparently, even the most ignoble motives can come to some ironic fruition because in the process of looking up my Carlos V quote, I found these choice words.

Pedantry consists in the use of words unsuitable to the time, place, and company.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ch. X

I'd have to agree with him on that one, although it does bring up the problematic nature of the Internet. There is no time, no place and I have absolutely no idea who my readers, if any, are. There's a French expression that translates to "Well known in one's own household--at meal times," but even my mother doesn't read me (she checked out the blog once, but got bored). So I don't so much as have that information to go on. At any rate, I hold my family entirely responsible for the fact that I write the way I do, having grown up in households and among people who existed in a sort of nowhere time and nowhere place somewhere between France, Colombia, and the American South, the eighteenth, nineteenth and earlier decades of the twentieth century, for whom the present reality was a relative distraction, a minor ripple, in the more powerful tides of their dreamy self-preoccupation and tendencies to float off on entirely satisfying and tangential currents...Lastly, if I do, in fact, have readers and, among them, word and language lovers, I offer them this and this link. I especially enjoyed the Lewis Carroll and Mark Twain citations from the first link.

Ride of the Valkyries

My daughter goes to a school that is quite successful when it comes to putting on United Nations day pageants emphasizing solidarity and diversity: "We are all one, we are all different, different is good." It even seems to do a good job at providing the children with an education, as far as I can tell--we are, after all, talking about a four year old. However, its one major failing and my own personal calvary is the car pool line. The first thing I have noticed about car pool, and perhaps this is not unique to my daughter's school, is that it makes practically no difference whether you arrive when school gets out or if you arrive fifteen minutes later. To get a good place, you have to get there at least fifteen minutes early and then it still seems to take forever.

To be fair they have a logistical challenge, given that the upper and lower school share the same car pool lane. On the one hand, you have a bunch of lollygagging adolescents who aren't exactly in a hurry to take a nose-dive down their coolness rating by hopping into the minivan or SUV with Mom. On the other, you have the lower school children who all have numbers and who are more or less efficiently shepherded into their parents' cars by attending teachers. As far as I could observe and this had been corroborated by another mother, cutting in line by lower school parents was permissible. Maybe I missed an important school communique on the matter; it's entirely possible.

Nevertheless, I was absolutely unprepared to be startled out of my radio-listening carpool stupor by the wrath of Brunhild, the German hausfrau Valkyrie this afternoon. She flew out of her car, shook her fist and shouted at me "You haff cut in line. This is not good. You haff cut in line. Now they will not have your child's number. You are slowing down the process."

It was the un-Americaness of her reaction that took me off guard. I have had plenty of people cut in line or do those sort of little annoying things to me, but I think the typical American way of dealing with it is to just steam about it internally and maybe one day get an ulcer or something. Of course, some Americans eventually do blow a gasket when it comes to driving etiquette issues and then they pop off the offending individual with a gun. But that's an extreme. Regardless of what they do about it, for an American, that sort of offense is almost always personal and has little to do with society at large. We care about when people are f*cking with Number One, not so much when they are f*cking with "the process." And back to Number One, how did it make me feel? Well, confused actually. I hadn't meant to be rude. I simply didn't know she was a lower school parent and that apparently, even if she hadn't been, that cutting in line was not allowed in the afternoon. And then I felt extremely sheepish to have somebody so blatantly point out that I was in the wrong. In fact I was starting to strongly identify with those lollygagging adolescents on the curb. I felt fifteen again, hearing some voice of authority query "Do you know what you did?" which is exactly the sort of unfair question that puts you off guard, when you are fifteen and may be f*cking up on a fairly regular basis. You aren't exactly sure "what you did" refers to and you sure as heck don't want to admit to the stuff they haven't gotten around to finding out.

My first reaction was to be rather defensive and snappish with her. Maybe I had been been in the wrong, but there was no need for her get so worked up about it. Get a life, lady. But I had to be fair, seeing the situation from her perspective I would have been irritated too. Of course, if I was going to have a confrontation I might not have made the assumption that the other person knew the rules that they were breaking or, even if I did, I might have tried to shame them into good behavior with a line like "Excuse me, you may not have realized, but you just cut in line..." or maybe that's just wimpy. I decided that I was going to try and disarm the Valkyrie. How long would she be able to sustain her anger against an unsatisfying target? I simply admitted "I'm sorry. I didn't realize that what I did was against the rules. In fact I'm not sure I understand the rules here. Thank you for pointing it out. I won't do it again." This seemed to work because she huffed and puffed a little, then threw her hands in the air and got back into the car.

Of course she was right. They had been able to read her carpool number so her child was quickly brought to her; whereas they completely overlooked me for a while. As she pulled away long before before I did, she couldn't resist one last parting shot "You see. They could not read your child's number." Poetic justice had been served. The rogue element slowing down the process had been brought back into the fold. She who had broken the rules had received her just due.

Bab-el

The nice thing about the occasional interactive nature of blogging is its tempering influence on egos. In that vein, I received the following communication from Carlos Villela, as a comment in Cameron's blog. "To Nathalie: will I ever read something you write, be it a comment or blog entry, without a single word in French mixed in, kinda like thrown in there just to piss off some of those who don't understand it? It seems like you're just trying to sound smarter/cultured, and, sincerely, it's not working."

Note to self: Carlos Villela is not impressed by me. And who is Carlos Villela?
Note to Carlos, if he does in fact read my blog: I hate to break it to you, but you're not the first. In my life so far, I have failed to impress many people. However, most of them don't write me petulant little notes about it. That was kind of special.

Some boys don't like being tied up in words by bluestocking girls. Some boys slip easily out of those words and use them to tie you up. And bluestocking might not be the kind of word the former would use anyway, which is a shame because they might enjoy it.

Mathematics might be sort of universal, but spoken languages most certainly are not. To study literature and writing is to be confronted with the knowledge that communication is an ultimately doomed enterprise. At the base level of linguistics, the signified (the idea which we are trying to express) never equals the signifier (the word or words with which we choose to express this idea). I was confronted with this issue at the hairdresser's today. The hairdresser was explaining to his assistant the intricate color combinations needed to blend a special shade of red for another client. She and the assistant were looking through magazine pictures and the hairdresser was enumerating--"a little light here, a little neutral base here, a little blue here..." At the same time, he appeared to be a little hard on his assistant. I asked him what seemed to be the problem, to which he explained "Oh no, he's been doing this for three years. He knows how to blend color. The only problem is I don't know if he sees her shade of red." And that is the root of the problem, isn't it? "Seeing red" is not as simple as one would think. There are infinite combinations that yield different tones and shades that fall under the category "red." Are you ever going to see "her shade of red"? And even if she knew what it was, would she be able to explain it to you?

The Biblical story of "The Tower of Babel" tells of a time when the whole earth was of one language, and one speech.

The people decided "...let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered upon the face of the whole earth...

And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do; and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth; and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Ba-bel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth. (Genesis, Ch. 11, King James Bible)

Apparently "The Tower of Babel" is one of those things like the story of Noah and the flood: a myth that seems to recur in many unrelated cultures. The Hebrew name corresponds to "the gate to God," but the myth itself is a little ironic since, in Genesis, the tower did not receive its name until after the languages had been scrambled. United, they were finding their way "up to God," a curious anthropomorphism that eventually disappeared from the theology. When their speech was scrambled and they couldn't understand each other, the gate to God was closed. Who says the authors of the Bible didn't have a sense of humour? (these insights provided courtesy of Joe Ottinger)

To include bits of other languages in writing is about the failure of communication and a desire to piece together ideas, which cannot be expressed within the constraints of a single language or culture. And even within one language, there is the possibility of a degenerative/inventive quality that takes place at an individual or family level. A friend of mine told me how her family had a tendency to make up words, to the point that even today she says she is shy about using certain colorful words for fear of discovering that they're not really in the dictionary. In her case, her moment of mortification came during a Scrabble game with some aquaintances. I had a similar experience, but for a different reason. My story involved the fact that since I enjoy reading I occasionally start to assimilate words that I have never heard pronounced. If those words come from a language you don't speak, your odds of mis-pronouncing them are even higher. In my case, I can't remember the exact context, but it involved more learned people than myself and the intent to be witty and impress and some interjection of a reference to the muse Terpsichore. Only I pronounced it "Terp si-core." There was silence and then one of the gentlemen said "I think you mean "Terpsichore," prounounced "Terp-sickory" (as in rhymes with chicory). I turned very white and was subsequently silent.

In his introduction to the The Dictionary of the English Language, Samuel Johnson describes sound as too volatile and subtle for restraints. He equates "enchaining syllables" to "lashing the wind."

...no dictionary of a living tongue can ever be perfect, since while it is hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some falling away; that a whole life can be spent on syntax and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be sufficient; that he whose design includes whatever language can express must often speak of what he does notunderstand...

Love, Actually

No, not the holiday movie starring Hugh Grant, which looks to be one of those feel-good pictures serving up stereotypes of upper-class English sensibility for consumption in the American market (maybe British people actually watch that stuff too, I wouldn't know). My husband couldn't be dragged to such a picture. However, being American to the core, I have a weakness for entertainment, even unencumbered by standards of good taste or authenticity. Naturally, I'll be going to see it with my girlfriends.

This had to do with one of the more unusual assignments of my writing career. My four-year old daughter had drawn a picture that she wished to offer as a birthday card, to one of the boys at her school. The picture appeared to be a flower with a sort of detached heart-shaped petal. However, I've learned not go there when it comes to interpreting childrens' art. One's protestations of "What a lovely goldfish bowl" are likely to be silenced by "Actually, it's Jupiter." At any rate, these are the words she dictated to me

Dear Justin "His Surname"
Happy Birthday to you.
Love,
"Her Name" Fleury
The Artist

The first thing that intrigued me was the naming issue: the fact that this wasn't just any Justin, it was Justin with a certain surname. Presumably, names go through waves of popularity and you want to make sure you are addressing the right Justin. Then there was her name. She has a Spanish name, but not a very common one. If you lived in Spain or South America it might have been the sort of name your grandmother or great aunt had. It's not as though she needed to worry about confusion, living in the US with a retro Spanish first name and French last name. But that's not the way a four year old would think. I think it must have had to do with establishing her unique identity, as given to her by others (her name), and as defined by herself (the Artist).

I had absentmindedly signed the "love" in the closing. Big mistake. When I read it back to her, she pitched a fit. "No you can't use that word. That wasn't the word I wanted." So I crayoned over it and wrote "from" in front. Well, children can be pretty perverse because then she decided "love" was what she did want to say, but this was beginning to look messy on the card. Adults like to think of childhood as a simpler time, but apparently semantics are very important to four year olds.

The first time I heard my daughter talking about this boy was in the context of "Justin is chasing the girls. Justin shouldn't be chasing the girls. Justin is now five, shouldn't he know better than to be chasing girls?" I explained that it takes boys a little longer to mature, which she accepted rather matter of factly. But the fact was that this Justin fellow had figured out how to get himself noticed. He had made it into the pantheon of boys that interest my daughter, featuring her "best boy," her "backup boy," "the boy from her new school", "the boy from Sunday School"...and "his brother!" Yes, my daughter has reconciled herself to religion now that she is picking up boys in Sunday School--how my husband smirked at that one.

It would also appear that life is, at the same time, simpler and more complicated at four. Or, maybe it's just more literal. Recently, my daughter told the babysitter "I've just been falling in love so much these days." The sitter, a little amazed, asked "Well, how have you been doing that?" to which, my daugther replied "Well, you know, first you fall...and then--you're in love." The sitter observed "Well, you must have a lot of bruises, then?" to which my daughter replied very matter-of-factly "Surprisingly, no."

Name Your Poison

Tea and colonialism do have a colorful history, but who would think that there could be anything controversial about tea drinking habits these days. Apparently there is.

You see, Earl Grey was a bigot. At least this was the argument put forth in my college dorm committee for ceremoniously removing that beverage choice from our cafeteria. In the early nineties, the popular libation to target for boycot by those with liberal leanings was Coca-Cola, due to their investments in South Africa. But Earl Grey? Frankly, given the fact that he was an eighteenth century British aristocrat, what would have been more surprising would have been the off-chance that he wasn't a bigot. From my brief Google search, he apparently was a poltical reformer, but that's not the point.

The point is that, at the end of the day, sometimes it's just bergamot-flavored tea.

I have to give certain people credit for sexing up the debate on open source because orgies and acid kool-aid sound far more intriguing.
Hmm, if you went as far as the electric kool-aid acid test, you'd even get a Tom Wolfe-y sort of flair.

Ironically, propaganda hack that I am, I personally can't seem to conjure up much enthusiasm for the topic. The debate generally falls into two categories. The first is overgeneralizing open source, which is generally recognized to be software released under an open source license. The problem there is that there are far too many permutations involving licenses, software to which the model is applied, associated business model and people involved in the various projects to say much of interest here. The second pitfall is the beauty pageant approach, which amounts to a listing of "people and projects I generally fancy" or, conversely, "people and projects that I feel deserve to rot." The latter offers some insight into the "I" in question and can be helpful depending on how one values the author's judgment, but it still fails to abstract out the issue of open source.

There are some arguments against Open Source that one sees time and again.

Not all talented engineers work in open source.
Well, there's no sport in arguing that one. True, especially considering the majority of open source projects don't pay and most of us have the burden of earning a living.

This second point is really a sub-point of the first. Loud mouthed, egotistical people are more likely to be idiots. There a lots of loud-mouthed, egotistical people in open source, therefore it must be populated by idiots.

Well I've got to hand it to the critics there--they've got a rich target. The truth is that the open source community does a great job of portraying itself as a bunch of whiny, immature kids and adults, consumed by their own self-importance. The only thing that would appear to exceed their own estimation of their self-worth and disdain for the outside community, would be the disdain the various members of the open source community express for each other. However, regardless of what the statistics say, and despite the fact that it might be a desirable thing, I have a hard time believing that the absence of natural modesty is the unique province of the untalented. I, myself, consider modesty an admirable virtue. Like so many in whom virtue is largely lacking, I absolutely do recognize and appreciate it in others. I love the virtuous. They are delightful people. They never trumpet their own horn, nor are they judgemental. Their very existence is an inspiration. Just being around them makes me want to go out and be a better person. It's a pity there aren't more of them.

There is no barrier to entry for open source: any hack can give it a shot.

Yes, that's pretty self-evident. But how many of the projects do you really need to succeed? The market eventually determines success. The project either gains market share or it doesn't. I am no expert in all the open source projects but I have a hard time believing that the project could be successful and be awful at the same time. And what if the code did suck? Did you pay any money for it? The worst you could claim is that you wasted your time. That's not going to get you too much sympathy. I'm sure more people waste time on IRC chats, forums and reading and writing blogs than they do fiddling around with Open Source. What really intrigues me is when people make comparisons between the source code in an open source project and a proprietary project--like JBoss and BEA. The only people who can make that claim are the developers who write the code for our proprietary competitors, and they're hardly going to be any less biased than we are.

People (especially the better developers) go to Open Source to learn. If you're using open source, you're a guinea pig for developers who are learning to get it right.

Geez, that wouldn't be something proprietary software companies do to their customers, would it? At any rate, in our field there weren't any veteran J2EE app server container designers when JBoss started out. Everybody was learning at the same time.

Anybody can commit code to an open source project. That is scary.

It is absolutely scary. I wouldn't trust an open source project that didn't tightly control its commits.

The pressures under which corporate developers work (read: if it don't work, your company and, eventually you, don't get paid) make them more likely to write quality software.

I agree there, unless the open source project has a tightly integrated, for-profit business model that pays the developers (not just third party investors) and effectively puts the same pressure on them that proprietary software developers experience.

Corporations are natural meritocracies. Thus, wanting to experience the rewards of their merit, the best developers tend to work for for-profit, proprietary software companies.

Well, I have to thank my critic friends for that one because it's every bit as laughable as me entering JBoss in some sort of Open Source "Miss Congeniality" contest. Yes, some corporations are meritocracies, but if there were so many of them I wonder why the movie Office Space was so popular?

Open Source borrows and builds on a lot of stuff. You don't know where it came from.

Well, isn't that the nature of modern software development, to build on the work of others? It's called not re-inventing the wheel. JBoss stands behind its software. Like HP for Linux, we will be offering an indemnification clause as part of our paying production support contracts.

Since most of us stand on the shoulders of giants and creatively appropriate and build on pre-existing traditions, what differentiates the successful from the clueless is what they appropriate--you want to make sure and take the sterling silver and the crown jewels, not the plate junk and the imitation paste baubles.

This final point brings me to my conclusion. The outside critics of open source falsely see it as being more exotic than it really is. Open Source did not appear out of thin air. Where do you think we got our good inspirations and bad habits from in the first place? In the business of profitable romance, the only differentiator is how high the stakes are that you play for and the sophistication with which you play. We're almost honest in our petty venality compared to the corporate masters of the game. One executive talks about "open source software crap." Well, I guess it's because we couldn't get away with selling certified, bona fide virtue or six figure proprietary software crap now, could we? And let's talk about the services business. We're just streetwalkers. It's the analysts who really inspire me. It's not even as honest as pay me and I'll say nice things about you; don't pay me and I'll trash you. Unless you're Sun or IBM, dealing with them is to realize what a provincial peasant might feel like when he visits the most expensive brothels in the capital. All that hard-earned money? Well, that just buys you a peck on the cheek and a squeal of self-righteous indignation about compromising certain ideals. You want love, wanna be "enterprise-ready," well sugar pie honey bunch that costs mucho money. Then you get dissed just the same; thrown out the door with insults from those "ladies". Wanna be my sugar daddy, get your sorry ass out of here and come back when you got lotsa cold hard cash to put on the table...There's a reason they call it the oldest profession.

The Opt-Out Revolution

This article from the New York Times, from which I excerpt the passage below, recently came to my attention.

Wander into any Starbucks in any Starbucks kind of
neighborhood in the hours after the commuters are gone. See
all those mothers drinking coffee and watching over
toddlers at play? If you look past the Lycra gym clothes
and the Internet-access cellphones, the scene could be the
50's, but for the fact that the coffee is more expensive
and the mothers have M.B.A.'s.

The article seems to ask two questions. First, why would educated women with promising careers leave the job force (actually the article is really talking about the corporate fast track)? Are they doing so to have children? Or, are they just using children as an excuse? Second, have these women somehow let down the cause of feminism?

The issues broached far exceed the scope of that one article. An interesting counterpoint might have been provided by examining the lives of women who persevered on in exactly the same careers these women left. What sacrifices did those women make, did they also have ambivalent feelings? Such an investigation might have pointed out what many of us instinctively know: raising children isn't exactly compatible with a sixty-plus-hour, scramble-to-the-top corporate workweek. If you wanted to have some presence in your children's lives and not outsource them to a nanny, are you realistically going to make partner in a top law firm? Equity partner? If you're a producer at a top network and escape each round of firing with your job intact, how secure's that job going to look after a few months off and a request for reduced travel and work hours?

The first inkling you get that it might be convenient to have a wife is in reading the different approaches to childbirth in women and men's blogs. The men tend to write the following sort of excerpt: "The young prince/princess and inheritor was born on such and such day," obligatory photo of the little cherub in a moment of angelic repose...and now back to grid computing or torts or whatever it is they blog about. The woman, however, never quite gets back to grid computing or torts or whatever it is she blogs about. Her accomplishments seem to take a landslide down Mazlow's hierarchy of needs and center on things like getting a shower before 4pm or tidying up the breakfast dishes or getting out of the house with the children. Men seem to be impressed by the event of childbirth, the pain and endurance; whereas, women soon learn that the real endurance event is the next eighteen years of their life, or maybe more, if you have a Latin sensibility. My husband tells me of a comic by the well-known Spanish cartoonist, Forges, with a man and woman lying in bed. The woman turns to the man and says "The child is crying. Why don't you go see about him." The man replies "El nino tiene quarenta anos" (the "child" is forty years old). To which the woman responds "Y tu no tienes corazon" (And you have no heart).

It's a wonder anybody who takes an active role in raising children or keeping up a house can put two thoughts together before the child gets sick, or the woman who looks after them is calling you because the evil spirit that inhabits the kitchen plumbing has finally had enough of the lint from the 1970s washing machine and backs up and floods every water-related kitchen appliance in the deluge from hell, or your child comes home with a note that she has been given a charity lunch because you forgot to turn in the form for that quarter's meal plan.

Issues of raising children aside, are women the only ones who might feel the corporate world is a little overrated? Or does the minority discussed in this article, upper middle class women with husbands who can and will support them, simply enjoy a lifestyle that many men secretly envy and would choose if dropping out of the corporate rat race were considered as socially acceptable for men as it is for women, and if they had the financial wherewithal and wives/partners who would support them? "Oh no dear, you don't need to go to work today...why don't you just go to the gym for a little, work on that tummy, relax in the sauna after your work out, meet your friends for coffee at Starbucks, play some video games, smoke a doobie, read something mentally enriching or maybe just rent some porn..." I guess you could even get used to the keeping up your personal appearance is part of your job thing--regular workouts, salon visits, manicures, pedicures, taking care of your skin, shopping. Oh wait, that's only the upper part of middle class. Is the middle class lot then suburban, minivan-driving, coupon-clipping hell? Or are we just talking caricatures and there are plenty of us who prefer to reduce our standard of living rather than do work we don't enjoy or allow work to take over the major part of our lives.

I remember my last year of college when I was going through the whole recruiting thing basically because I had no idea what to do with myself and I asked a good friend what her ambitions were. She replied, "Oh no, none of that's for me, I think I shall be content to continue my creative writing and subsist on academic grants." While the ghost of Cotton Mather might have been rattling around in some vestigial Protestant part of my psyche whispering vague sermons of how the wrath of God might smite those unencumbered by financial ambitions, I was secretly smitten with admiration at such audacity.

In English, for instance, the word retirement sounds extremely negative. Like something that no longer serves a useful function and has been "retired." In Spanish, in contrast, the word is "jubilado" or the overjoyed. I know of no English equivalents for the French "flaner," which always conjures up Baudelairian images for me--not just to stroll, but to amble along, with no purpose, no destination, lost in daydreams and the pleasurable passtime of detached observation. Of course, it helps if you have intriguing things to look at it. When I lived in the older part of Paris known as the Marais, I had a particular fascination with the blue glass bottles in an antique apothecary shop. What wondrous lotions, unguents, perfumes might they hold? Each bottle seemed to contain some sort of mysterious possibility, lost secrets from another time, all the more intriguing because unknowable. And the rhythm of the walk is punctuated by the sights and geography and other people you pass on a city street. From there it is easy to fall in love with rhythm and meter, to revisit imagery through the tumbling syllables in lines of verse.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those were pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding Dong
Hark now I hear them -- Ding dong bell.
(Shakespeare, The Tempest)

So when I see that "sea change" is one of those expressions that has gone and gotten popular for writing about technology, I immediately am skeptical. So, that old rotten idea will now undergo a "sea change" into a promising, high-potential, with-it kind of concept. And it's all good alchemy, but somehow it won't communicate my idea of "something rich and strange." Dammit where's the poetry? Where are the pearls, the bells, the sea nymphs?

There I've gone and done it...started one place, gotten to another, come to no real conclusion in between. And I had things to say about Bertrand Russell and Dr. Johnson, Virginia Woolf and feminism. More on them later. I have kids. And a job.