Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Archive for April, 2007

CEOs don’t feed families

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, Uncategorized on April 12, 2007| 1 Comment »

“The rich are different from you and me,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote (to which Ernest Hemingway is said to have responded, “Yes, they have more money”). I don’t know about the rich, but as a consultant and a manager, I’ve worked closely with at least twenty Chief Executive Officers, mostly of small to medium sized companies in high-tech. And yes, they are different the rest of us. They have to be, for each of them to solder his or her sense of self to the fortunes of a company instead of just looking to get by or hoping for a pleasurable or meaningful way to survive. But sooner or later, virtually every CEO I’ve known well has said in a self-congratulatory tone to me, “I feed X number of families” — “X” being the number of employees in the CEO’s company.

I’ve heard this phrase over drinks at a bar. I’ve heard it in a board room scrambling to put together a presentation, and several times sitting around with my feet on the desk on a Friday afternoon. But, no matter where I hear it, I never fail to be annoyed by its smug assumptions. Probably, I’ve never left behind my days as Chief Steward of my union at my university — or maybe I’m just an anarchist at heart. But I like to think that it’s my love of logic that always makes me want to denounce this claim.

No, I always think, you do not feed any family except your own. To congratulate yourself on that, you would have to be giving charity, and you’re not. Each of your employees feed his or her families. The fact that they do so by signing a contract with you, exchanging their labor for cash is incidental, and gives you no right to feel self-congratulatory. The exchange of labor and cash cancels any right you have for self-satisfaction. If you and your company didn’t exist, your employees would be making the same exchange with some else. Most of them, chances are, wouldn’t be on the street.

Of course, the subtext to this comment is the CEO’s satisfaction with the size of the company and their own alleged accomplishment. But why they regard the company in this way, I don’t know. Is it something they learn in MBA programs? But, then, anyone who can believe that chairing a meeting or negotiating a deal has any relation to samurais, Henry V or Antarctic explorers can probably believe anything.

Read Full Post »

The secret world of the early morning jogger

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, running, Uncategorized on April 9, 2007| 2 Comments »

When people ask why I run first thing in the morning, I like to say, “So nothing worse can happen to me the rest of the day.” The reply usually gets a smile, but really it’s an effort to avoid a more complicated explanation. Unlike many people, my circadian rhythms are not set to any particular time of day; I adjust easily to functioning whenever I need to. But explaining my pleasure at the hidden world of early morning takes time, especially since my reaction is probably colored by the adrenalin and endorphins pumping through my system.

I admit that in the winter months, when my morning run begins and ends in the dark and often takes place in the rain, I sometimes mutter self-dramatically about “the courage of the early morning,” borrowing the title of the biography of Billy Bishop, the World War One flying ace. For me, the title expresses perfectly the dogged sense of duty with which I drag myself out the door. Yet those days are relatively few, and even that feeling of being active when most people would choose to stay in their beds can feel perversely individualistic.

For most of the year, though, the early morning is a special time regardless of the weather. The relative coolness of the morning is stimulating from the spring to early fall. In the late fall, it stirs the leaves at my feet until I could be running in the middle of a legion of ghosts. In winter, the briskness raises the hairs on my arms, and adds the mild danger of black ice that I have to tiptoe across. And for a few weeks each spring and fall, I can time my runs so I’m at the top of a hill just in time for sunrise.

We live close to the green belt around Burnaby Mountain, and often I share my morning run with the wildlife. Over the years, I’ve seen skunks, eagles, crows mobbing a raven, and who knows what else. Once, I heard what was probably a cougar in a bush nearby (I took good care not to confirm my suspicions, and hastily revised my route). Several times a week, I see coyotes loping along on their business, doing an almost perfect mimicry of domestic dogs. Once, I even saw a coyote sitting waiting at a light – although I’m sure it was watching the traffic flow, not the change of signal. Drivers are on the road by the time I start running, but, half-asleep and sealed in their cars, I doubt they see even the animals who are near the roads – let alone on the trails I sometimes take. At times, I could almost be the only human in an alternate universe.

At other times, it’s the people I notice, stumbling through their morning routines, surrounded by an invisible sphere of privacy, stumbling to the bus stop, or blearily scraping ice off their wind shields. By the coffee shops, I see people staggering in like zombies for their morning fix and emerging with their smiles of relief as they take their first tentative sips. In the light industrial area I sometimes run through, a cloud of pot smoke often lingers here and there, proof (if any was needed) how minimum wage warehouse clerks survive their day. At the Skytrain station, tech-workers march grimly single-file along the side of the road on their way to work.

On weekends, I also see the remnants of the previous night: the road-kill red and raw, the pairs of shoes tied together and flung across a telephone wire, and the smashed bottles of beer at the side of the road. On Sunday mornings, when I’m not sleeping in myself, I see the shift workers and the survivors of one-night stands coming home. Once, I saw a woman in a pink bathrobe and curlers, coffee cup in hand, headed singlemindedly for the nearest coffee shop, careless of the fact that she was on the main commercial street of the neighborhood.

Other times, the appeal of the early morning is the isolation of feeling that nobody else is alive, much less stirring, and I’m the initiate of some private lore denied to everyone else. These days come when the streets are so empty of cars that I could run safely down the middle of the road, and not a light is to be seen in the apartments and houses that I pass. The best day of the year for this feeling is New Years’ Day, when everyone is still sleeping, and these feelings are enhanced by the rosy glow of Puritanical virtue.

For much of last year, I couldn’t run because of reoccurring knee injuries, and I found myself growing restless about mid-morning. Part of the problem was lack of exercise, but an even greater part was the chance to start the day with the time for private reflection that a morning run provides. When I re-started my morning runs about three weeks ago, my main reaction was a sense of relief – as though I had restored pattern and meaning to my daily routine.

Read Full Post »

Backstage at Imperial Realms

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, imperial realms, Personal, science fiction, Uncategorized on April 5, 2007| 7 Comments »

When I was involved with Dungeons and Dragons back in my university days, I always preferred being Dungeon Master to playing. It wasn’t so much that I enjoyed masterminding psycho-drama – although I admit that I cackled at the look on a male player’s face when his female character seduced someone and he found out that I was rolling for pregnancy. But what really interested me was the creative possibilities. That’s probably why I’m so fascinated now with my recent side project of creating the backstory for Imperial Realms, an online strategy game currently in development.

The basic story is already sketched out. It’s standard space opera: thousands of years in the future, in the ruins of a galactic empire, humanity is divided into numerous clans, all of whom compete against each other as well as a cast of alien species. My job is to paint in the details and help the game rise above the standard cliches.

For instance, it would be easy to turn the war-like Spartan clan into a neocon’s delight. Instead, I tried to give them more complexity by dividing them into political factions, each with its own ideas of how war should be carried out. Then, just to shake up the stereotypes, I’ve included mention of a radical team of mercenaries led by a husband and wife who specialize in overthrowing repressive regimes.

Similarly, I made the autistic Inlookers both brilliant and unstable, with a culture dominated by their eugenics program, adding a little detail of how one killed an emperor because he was blocking her sunlight.

For the Clones, I created a half dozen bloodlines and made them victims of persecution until they started a Zionist-like movement to settle their own planet. They are now divided by different traditions of reproduction and by the question of whether they should practice exogamy (breeding outside their bloodlines) or endogamy (breeding inside their bloodlines).

For the Aristocracy, the remnants of the ruling class, I imagined a sub-culture shattered by the disaster that toppled the empire. From the Aristocracy’s formerly exalted position, its members have been reduced to a constant competition for all the titles and offices that no longer have a clear line of inheritance. This competition leads them to displays of extravagant waste, such as destroying their estates in planned meteor showers — excesses that sometimes cause their own deaths.

This week, I’ve been taking notes for alien species. I’ve already written about the Tsihor, pack hunters who cannot meet face to face with humans without instincts taking over and causing an inevitable bloodbath. However, the Tsihor need humans, so both sides have to work around this problem.

Originally, I envisioned the Tsihor as small velocioraptors, but Steve Bougerolle, who master-minds the project, thought they didn’t seem alien enough. They were like fighting cocks, he said. “What does he know?” I asked myself, then, answering, “Enough to sign the cheques,” I redesigned them to make them Lovecraftian horrors.

Other aliens are in the works, and I hope that they will be eeriely strange and, in the cases where they are based on science-fiction standbys, sufficiently original to be interesting in their own right.

In all these cases, part of the challenges is to put as many hooks for plot development as possible into the accounts. These hooks take the form of rumors, which may or may not be true. Freed from the need to be strictly rational, I’ve injected each account with all sorts of gossip and speculation that can be picked up on – or not – once the game is launched.

The game is probably a couple of years from release, and a lot of what I know about it I can’t say. However, my Imperial Encylopedia entries will be posted to the web page soon, so I feel relatively free to talk about them. I’m hugely enjoying the chance to putter around backstage, and I’m looking forward to doing more.

Read Full Post »

Love and the uncanny

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, poetry, Uncategorized on April 4, 2007| 2 Comments »

Formal verse has been out of fashion since before I was born. There are strong reasons for this trend, but I think that anyone with an ear for language has to regret it at times. For all its limitations, there’s no genre like formal verse for teaching you about writing.

The switch to free verse was part of the modernist movement in the arts. However, in English poetry, the switch to modernism was even more urgent than in most of the arts. English is just not a very good language for rhymes. For instance, when you think of it, centuries of English verse have been shaped by the lack of good rhymes for “love.” If you eliminate false rhymes like “cove” and “prove,” and ones of limited use like “gov,” all you are with are “above,” “dove,” “glove” and “of” — hardly a vocabulary to inspire. Yet the same is true of dozens of other common rhymes.

Some early twentieth century poets did their best by using more enjambment (letting the sense spill over the end of the line) and half rhymes like “lave” and “love,” but you can’t blame poets for finally losing their patience and giving up the whole idea of rhyme. It was a reaction like that of the German designers who gave up black letter and upper case alphabets in favor of using entirely lower case letters.

And, just as with the designers, you can’t hold poets responsible for the abuses of their revolutionary ideas in later generations. It’s not the modernists’ fault that anyone who writes in short lines can call themselves a poet today, any more than designers are at fault because trendoids today write their names in lower case without understanding why.

Paul Zimmer, the fantasy writer and Bay Area poet, used to suggest that another reason for the change was that, around the turn of the twentieth century, people stopped listening to poetry. The rhythms and rhyme of formal poetry work best when spoken, and hearing them when you read is a skill that you have to develop. So if most of your audience are going to read your verse, not hear it, why bother with what they aren’t going to notice anyway?

Paul’s answer was to read his work at every opportunity, so that his audience would notice. And I, for one, am grateful that he did, because listening to a expert poetry reader like Paul was not only a pleasure but a a lesson in how powerfully regularly structured language can play on your emotions.

However, I think there’s an even more basic reason: writing thrives on the challenge of technical restrictions. Faced with the problems like the lack of rhymes for “love” poets have two choices. One is to stretch themselves to work with the limitations, by making the standard set of rhymes unobtrusive. The second is to strain to find ways around the narrowness of choice — for instance, by using multi-syllable rhymes like “get rid of” and “mid-love.” Either way, it’s good artistic discipline.

I have nothing against free verse, especially when it becomes a way to explore an alternate rhythm like the alliteration of Old English poems or the structural repetition of the psalms. I’ve written more than my share of it, too. Still, every now and then I like to try my hand at formal verse, just for the discipline.

For instance, here is a sonnet I wrote many years ago, trying to recapture and express the emotions of a crush I had in elementary school. I call it “Love and the Uncanny”:

You trouble me with hints of the uncanny —
Like depths of silence where somebody waits,
Like houses flexing every beam and cranny,
Perturbing me with omens and strange fates.
I sense you now, just at the edge of eyes,
Like scurryings through leaves beneath my feet,
Like hunts that bay above me in the skies,
Like lightning just before it unrolls in a sheet.
Like wolves’ wild wailing, drawing down the moon,
Like presences that walk behind the trees —
Around midnight half-seen, half-guessed by noon,
You trail the hush and grace of mysteries,
And all that thrills with awe, awaking fear,
Must pale and fade when ghosts of you appear.

I’ll leave it as an exercise for the readers to decide whether in the end I am expressing an emotion about a person or talking about the effect of poetry. Really, poetry is an example of the uncanny, although generally a benign one. And that’s an effect that formal verse generally achieves more easily than free verse.

As for my exercise, I admit that some parts of it have a Shakespearean echo, especially the last two lines. But no one in the last four centuries has written a sonnet in English without thinking of Shakespeare in some way.

Anyway, I’m not writing to claim original artistic merit, but to sharpen my writing skills. A sonnet is one of the most challenging forms in English, and if I can write a sonnet that is even borderline respectable, I’m convinced, then all my writing will be better for the practice — even writing in forms as far away from poetry as an online article.

Read Full Post »

From the script for my life: Innocents learn about ethnic tensions

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, tourism on April 3, 2007| 1 Comment »

Setting: The Embarcadero station of the BART system in San Francisco, just after the verdict in the Rodney King case. We have just got off the train. You can tell that we’re tourists, because the weather is warm enough for us to be in shorts while everyone else is wearing coats.

An African American WOMAN is standing to one side. She is very tall, and heavyset, and has a new scar on her right cheek held together by some amateur stitches.

ME(nervously): Can you tell us how to get to the Ferry Building?

WOMAN (putting hands on her hips and speaking in a very deep accent): Honey, you ain’t from these parts, is you?

WOMAN takes us aside and explains that, with the tensions surrounding the verdict, it’s currently inadvisable in California for European ethnics and African Americans to talk to each other casually in public unless they know each other. Looking at her scar, we wonder but don’t dare to ask if she is speaking from personal experience. Eventually, we slink off, murmuring nervous thanks.

Read Full Post »

Time-travel by paddlewheeler

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, history, Personal, Uncategorized on April 1, 2007| Leave a Comment »

On Saturday evening, I went time-travelling. Not through Dungeons and Dragons or the Society for Creative Anachronism, although I’ve done both in my time. Nor did I get a temporal lift, which, despite its name, is not a form of chronic hitchhiking, but a form of cosmetic surgery for those who want to revisit their starry-eyed youth. Instead, this jaunt was up the Fraser River by paddlewheeler to the annual Candlelight Tour of Fort Langley, where historical re-enactors create an illusion of time-travelling to 1858 and the night before the declaration of the Crown Colony of British Columbia through series of vignettes around the fort.

In keeping with the illusion, we took the paddlewheeler The Native upriver from New Westminster. In the days that we were travelling to, paddlewheelers were the main form of transport through the largely roadless interior. These paddlewheelers were not the grandly appointed queens of the Mississippi, but smaller, shallower-draft vessels built for work, with few cabins and a mixture of passengers and livestock as often as not. Originally built as a yacht and just refurbished, The Native is more luxurious than the boats it is modelled on, with amenities that include a kitchen and washroom and comfortable seating for maybe fifty passengers.

Tens of thousands pass over the Fraser River everyday. Thousands more drive along each bank. However, if they haven’t been on the river, they probably don’t know how much of a working river it is. The Fraser is not one of those picturesque rivers surrounded by cobblestoned walks and dockside patios where you can sit under an umbrella and watch recreational boaters zoom by. Recreational boaters do use the Fraser, but they are outnumbered by the tugs and the barges pulling containers. Many channels and shores are floating banks for the forest companies, and the shore is crammed with heavy industry. The canneries that lined its shores for much of the last century are long gone, but in the rotting pylons and shorings that litter the shore, you could still read their history.

Hearing that history, and watching the industry gradually recede as we passed upriver, I could almost believe that we were moving back through time, safely ensonced in a cabin where we could eat and drink the afternoon away while looking for herons and eagles out the window.

Arriving at Fort Langley, we found the gateway to the dock locked, so the paddlewheeler reversed itself for a hundred yards and tied up at the rowing club dock – a flimsy ramshackled built on two logs that was probably much closer to the spirit of 1858 than our original mooring.

In previous years, the tour started at sunset. The conceit was that visitors could go back in time to watch, but could not interact with the inhabitants of 1858 in any way. Both the dark and the conceit added greatly to the atmosphere, but this year both were gone. Daylight saving time came earlier this year, and, to compensate, the tour was more interactive, with the re-enactors talking to the guests and even dragging them into a barn dance led by a half dozen fiddlers.

Yet even these handicaps could not destroy the gentle fantasy of the evening. Travelling in groups of fifteen with a couple of guides, visitors were met at the entrance to the fort by members of the Royal Engineers, the regiment sent out to construct an infrastructure in the new colony. In 1858, they were the only group capable of keeping order as the Barkerville Gold Rush brought a flood of miners and hangers-on – mostly Americans, who were darkly regarded as the forerunners of an attempt by the United States to take over the territory.

Assured that we were neither unregistered gold miners nor Americans, the Royal Engineers let us in. Inside the fort, we passed from building to building, witnessing such vignettes as a cooper’s apprentice arguing with his mother about travelling to the gold fields, and a blacksmith teaching an apprentice to make nails. We heard a boat-builder who doubled as the fort’s schoolmaster talking about tomorrow’s proclamation of the new colony, and, at The Big House, the Chief Factor for the Hudson’s Bay Company – formerly the chief official in the region – announce his resignation and express his appreciation of our work as his underlings. In a warehouse, we heard pre-adolescent girls of the period talking about the men they admired and their prospects for husbands, while nearby in a parlor, whose out-of-tune piano had been carried upriver by canoe, mothers talked about the lack of cultural prospects at the fort. In the center of the fort, newly arrived voyageurs gossiped and grumbled, while, outside the fort, good time girls from San Francisco and a disreputable miner in a slouched hat talked about their plans.

The tour took an hour and a half, but all too soon we were back in the world of flash cameras and cell phones (both had been banned on the tour). We descended the rickety – and railess – gangway to the yacht club dock, and boarded the paddle-wheeler for desert, more wine, and the trip back to New Westminster.

Despite the lights on either side of the river, the return trip was dark. The stark ugliness of the industrial sites was made mysterious, and around us the river swirled like black oil. Inside the main cabin, pop hits of the last forty years were playing, and a few people were dancing.

Most of us were content to watch and talk, but one couple in their sixties danced to almost every tune. They would have been young in the 1960s when the earliest of the tunes first came out, and every now and then you could see from a smile or a dance move how they must have looked forty years ago when they first danced to them. I suppose, in their way, they were time-travelling, too.

Read Full Post »

« Newer Posts