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Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category

The first swim of the year

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, swimming, Uncategorized on May 21, 2007| Leave a Comment »

For me, one of the signs of late spring is my first swim of the year in our townhouse complex’s swimming pool. The pool actually opened on Saturday, but between the rain and Trish’s illness (worsened, perhaps, by our over-indulgence in piroshki, blintzes, and dumplings at the exquisite Rasputin’s on our anniversary), my first swim was delayed until today. I’m still not sure how it will fit into my summer exercise routine, though.

I came late to the enjoyment of swimming. One of the advantages of running is that, although it has been absorbed by consumerism like everything else in our culture, you can do it almost anywhere, anytime, with a minimum of equipment. Moreover, my eyes sting in chlorine, and I never cared much for the sensory deprivation of many swimming strokes that leave you deaf and unable to focus on much outside of the water. But with a pool two minutes’ walk from my computer that’s filled with a mixture of salt water and chlorine — and one that I can use for no additional cost on to our monthly strata fees — the reasons for my reluctance disappear.

As for sensory deprivation, I solve that by doing an old man’s breast-stroke, keeping my head firmly above water except when I want to cool off. The result is far from streamlined, and I could politely be called a rugged swimmer rather than a fast or an efficient one. Still, the stroke allows me to keep a steady pace throughout my workout. At times, I can even enjoy the lack of awareness, relaxing so much that, at night, I dream of flight that feels very much like swimming.

Besides, swimming has the advantage of being much less hard on my knees than running on pavement — a growing concern with me. So, over the last few years, I’ve learned to overcome my youthful distaste and enjoy swimming. If it will never be my favorite exercise, it is far, far better than no exercise, or even reduced exercise.

But those dreams of flight come later in the summer, when I get into the rhythm. Like running, like working with a strange animal — like anything, really — the secret of swimming is to discover a rhythm. And, this afternoon, I didn’t have much of one. For the first ten laps or so, my rhythm was irregular, and I couldn’t coordinate my legs and arms. When I’d done twenty-five laps, I felt a rhythm was just beyond me. At forty laps, I might have just found the beginnings of one.

By the time I finished, my chest muscles were strained, too, with the unaccustomed workout I’d given my arms (which is another reason for my modified breast-stroke).

No doubt, though, I’ll soon be used to these discomforts. Exercise, like any vice, needs to be continually practised so you can build up an immunity to the ill effects.

The only question in my mind now is what combination of running, exercise bike, and swimming I’ll take up over the summer. For now, swimming in the townhouse pool has an advantage over the exercise bike in that it’s largely private. However, that will change as soon as the good weather comes, and the neighbors sit drinking and smoking around the pool, making me feel Puritanical and, at times, too self-aware to get into the meditative state that a good workout brings.

Maybe I’ll swim and use the bike on alternate days, or make each of my forms of exercise a third of my daily workout. Not having a commute, I can easily afford the time to do both.

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Tolkien, the Children, and the critics

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, Fantasy, fiction, Personal, science fiction, Tolkien, Uncategorized, writing on May 18, 2007| Leave a Comment »

The first of Tolkien’s unfinished works to be published since Peter Jackson released his operatic version of The Lord of the Rings, The Children of Húrin has actually made several bestseller lists. I suspect that it will be a book like Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Tiime that people buy and don’t read. At the most, they may only open it to admire Alan Lee’s moody full-color illustrations — which, incidentally, have always struck me as inspired by Tolkien’s own amateurish watercolors, although rendered by an infinitely more talented artist. But, for whatever reason, people like me or the members of the Mythopoeic Society find ourselves once again in the embarrassingly unfamiliar position of having our tastes become popular. However, if the critics are any indication, it won’t last long, because most people are simply unequipped to appreciate Tolkien’s unpublished papers.

To start with, let’s dispense with the idea that the book was published to cash in on the success of the movie. The Tolkien family has already made a good thing from their ancestor’s literary works, and works like The Children of Húrin aren’t going to substantially improve the royalties.

Even more importantly, Christopher Tolkien, who edited the book, stitching different pieces together to make a coherrent whole, has been printing his father’s unpublished works for several decades, so it’s not as though he suddenly decided to cash in. Probably he can’t be completely unaware of the commercial probabilities, but in such a sustained effort over so many years, scholarship and love have to play a large role, too. To harp, as the Globe and Mail did, about the movie that could be made from the book overlooks the more basic point that this may be the last piece of his father’s works that Christopher Tolkien publishes, since he is now in his eighties. Christopher Tolkien may have wanted that last piece to win a large audience so that it becomes the crown of his editorial efforts, but probably we can exonerate him from any motives more mercenary than that.

For another thing, Tolkien’s prose model is evidently the Norse sagas, with which the average critic or reader today is unfamiliar unless they happened to grow up in Iceland and learned to read from them. This is a highly readable tradition, but it is not the modern European or North American novel tradition. In the saga tradition, speech is not naturalistic, and motives and characters are stated plainly, not revealed in action or through indirection. And, like most sagas, The Children of Húrin is about the concerns and feuds of a family. That’s why it starts with detailed explanations of who is related to whom, and ends with a family scene. What seems tedious to a modern sensibility is a necessary part of the saga form.

As well as the sagas, Tolkien is also drawing on Norse traditions of the dragon slayer, like Beowulf or Sigmund, the hero of Wagner’s Ring cycle. It is a part of this tradition that the dragon slayer himself must die, often, as here, for a wrong that he has done unknowingly. What drives the plot is not sudden twists, but a sense of fate unfolding inevitably. Here, fate is nudged more than a little by the curse of Morgoth, Sauron’s tougher former boss, but the effect is much the same as though less concrete forces are at work. The main characters struggle with their fate and in the end fall prey to it, but in their struggles they become figures of heroic grandeur. It is an existential, Germanic sense of fate at play in The Children of Húrin, and someone who only knows tragedy from the Greek version of the word is unlikely to appreciate it.

Another major misunderstanding that you encounter among critics is that The Children of Húrin is written in an archaic style. It is true that the tone of Tolkien’s work, like that of the King James Bible, has a balanced and dignified cadence, but aside from a few archaicisms such as “save” for “except for,” Tolkien is actually one of the twentieth century’s great masters of simple prose.

Should you have any doubts on the matter, read this passage (chosen at random) aloud. Húrin and his brother have just returned to their father Galdor on the backs of giant Eagles after being lost and rescued by the elves of a hidden kingdom. To keep the kingdom secret, they have promised not to reveal how they have survived so long:

Their kinfolk rejoiced to see them, for messengers from Brethil had reported they were lost; but they would not tell even to their father where they had been, save that they were rescued in the wilderness by the Eagles that brought them home. But Galdor said, “Did you then dwell a year in the wild? Or did the Eagles house you in their eyries? But you found food and raiment, and return as young princes, not as waifs of the wood.” “Be content, father, said Húrin, “that we have returned; for only under an oath of silence was this permitted. That oath is still on us.” Then Galdor questioned them no more, but he and many others guessed at the truth.

The simplicity of the language is probably due to the inspiration of the sagas, as well as Tolkien’s preference for Old English words over ones derived from French or Latin. But the overall effect is one of dignified restraint between men who share a strong sense of honor and are somewhat constrained at expressing emotion to each other. Such passages are, quite simply, beautiful, and anyone who alleges archaicisms and fails to mention the power of the language prove themselves the owners of tin ears, at least when they are reading silently.

If you don’t know the tradition that Tolkien is working in, whether you like The Children of Húrin can be predicted by what you thought of the appendices in the The Lord of the Rings. If you thought the story of Beren and Lúthien romantic, or the image of the last kings of Gondor brooding childless in their towers evocative, then chances are The Children of Húrin will be just as moving to you. But if you found the appendices a bore and skipped through them, do yourself a favor and avoid this new book. You’ll also be doing any Tolkien readers a favor by not prodding at it with your clumsy and unknowing fingers.

But for people like me, who devoured the first book of The Lord of the Rings one summer Saturday in Grade Six and spent a frantic Sunday waiting for the store to be open on Monday so I could get the next book, The Children of Húrin is a welcome return to a familiar place — especially since, to paraphrase Bilbo Baggins (that inestimable old hobbit) it may very well be the last drop of the old Smaug vintage.

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In a classical Chinese garden

Posted in British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, gardening, Personal, tourism, Uncategorized, Vancouver on May 14, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Located on the edge of the downtown eastside, the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden is one of the hidden wonders of Vancouver. Like the merchants’ gardens it is modeled after, it is meant to be an oasis in the middle of the city. Look up at some of the three or four story buildings around it (mercifully, anything taller is at least a block away), and the sloping tiles on the walls draw your eyes back down to the gardens. It is a place for strolling, of railings designed for leaning over the waters, and strategically positioned red lacquered benches. The gardens impress me on many levels, and I try to visit them several times a year.

One aspect that never ceases to occupy my mind is that the naturalness of their appearance is an illusion. In reality, they are art raised to such a height that they appear completely uncontrived. The limestone rocks, taken from a particular lake in China, are artfully heaped to appear natural, and every bush and tree is positioned for effect. Accidents happen, such as the turtles and the nesting Canada geese or the blue heron that ate the koi in the ponds one year, but very little is left to chance.

In the Imperial Gardens, I understand, every item in the pavilions had a mark on it indicating where it should go, and, while the Dr. Sun Yat-Sen gardens are not quite so rigidly controlled, I am always left smiling and dumbfounded when I consider artistry on such a scale. I have my doubts about feng shui as a form of divination or luck, but, after all my walks through the gardens, I have no doubt whatsoever about feng shui‘s power as an aesthetic theory. The paradox of appearing contrived through every possible contrivance runs through each step of the garden – and it is both absolute and utterly convincing, even with the little I know of the philosophy behind its construction.

One of the main principles, though, is contrast. Whether it’s the difference between the pebbles and the ridges of teacups that form lotuses in some of the paving, the differences between the granite bridges, the slate tiles, and the ceramic ones, the profusion of trees and plants, diversity rules the gardens. It’s a place of winding walks and suddenly changing views, whether through turning a corner, or peering through the diversely patterned frames in the leak windows that line the corridors. It’s a place that brings out new wonders in the rain as opposed to the sun, in the night with the lanterns lit as opposed to the dew of morning or the heat of afternoon.

At every season , too, one plant succeeds another, and new smells and sights are revealed. Inside and outside, too, are blurred by the pavilions whose doors can be thrown open or barred against the cold depending on the season. Look out one window, and you see a stand of plum – outside the one next to it, a pine tree or perhaps a plum.

I could walk the length of the garden in less than two minutes and not be winded, but instead I take hours, meandering in all the possible pathways and retracing my steps over and over. There’s no place you can see the whole of the garden at once, so you have no choice. You have to both slow down and keep moving if you want to see everything.

With so much contrast, choosing a favorite part of the garden is impossible. If I expressed a preference for the grotto in the main part of the garden, where small birds bathe in the waterfall, I’d be leaving out the t’ing, the spirit pavilion that sits high above the rest. If I favored the t’ing, I’d be doing an injustice to the jade waters, through which the koi glide in and out of visibility past the sublimely indifferent turtles sunning themselves on the rocks; put your fingers in the water, and the koi will nibble gently at them, seeking food.

And what about the main pavilion, where on winter days, the cold blends with the scent from the rosewood rafters? The austere tiling of the new pavilion? The round moon gate? The intricately carvings on the open pavilion where you can see the free gardens by looking to one side and the Sun Yat-Sen gardens by looking at another?

Still, if I had to choose, it would be the scholar’s courtyard. As the name implies, the scholar’s courtyard is where the owner of the garden would come to work on his writing or his calligraphy. It features a small pavilion overlooking a courtyard, with a small raised area at the end of the walkway for a musician to serenade the scholar. I always imagine myself at work there, or my late friend Paul Zimmer in a Chinese robe – and, on my visit two days ago, the fantasy became even easier to sustain, because the pavilion is now furnished with a chair, footrest, and a long narrow desk, complete with an inkwell and stand for calligraphy brushes. It’s a place where I could get some clean, honest work done in a state of utter composure.

All too often, though, this fantasy is interrupted by a well-meaning but loud tour guide, or a gaggle of tourists whose lack of appreciation shows in their fast pace or casual conversation. The garden is as much theirs as mine, of course, but I find myself resenting their apparent lack of appreciation, and, when I can, I take care to stay well away from them. If anybody cannot appreciate the gardens enough to give in their atmosphere and slow down or talk in hushed tones, then, so far as I’m concerned, that person is next door to dead. To me, it’s as simple as that.

Still, these intrusions lack power to spoil my pleasure in the gardens. After the first fifteen minutes, I am too relaxed to do more than sigh briefly over their lack of aesthetic judgment and stroll slowly to a less crowded part of the garden. Within a breath, usually, I forget all about them.

No doubt of it: When the gardens have had a chance to work their magic on me, I am calmer, less opinionated person, and nothing can really disturb me while I’m there, or for hours afterwards. The gardens do me good, and, if I lived closer, I would visit weekly or even daily. I’m sure that I’d always emerge refreshed.

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Diamond for a dime

Posted in birthdays, Bruce Byfield, Personal, Uncategorized on May 13, 2007| Leave a Comment »

“He’s a crook or he’s crazy, so the story goes,
But the diamond is real and only one man knows,
And if I say, ‘I love you,’
Do you want to buy a diamond for a dime?”
– Oysterband

Today is my birthday. It must be; the Wikipedia entry on me says so. The occasion crept up on me, but I’ve spent the day thinking back over the last year. It seems a much more appropriate time to do so than New Years, which, as often as not, I don’t observe. The question is: Am I where I want to be? I’ve been adding up both sides of the ledger, and trying to decide how to summarize the last twelve months.

On the black ink side, I got out of debt in the last year. I’ve developed a modest reputation as a journalist. More importantly, journalism engages me and brings me into contact with the brilliant and famous, many of whom remember my name and know that I can be trusted to do what I say. Despite being called a moron by one reader, I seem to be considered at least well-meaning by far more.

Also, I’ve developed my contacts to the point where I now make as much money as I ever did as a communications and marketing consultant. The risk of having to work in an office again has receded for the foreseeable future.

After months of knee injuries, I’ve found an exercise regime that lets me burn a thousand calories a day, and I’m getting fitter all the time. Spending as much time as I do in front of the computer screen, I need heavy exercise to balance my life.

On the red ink side, despite some progress, I’m still spending less time on fiction writing than I should. I don’t get out of the house as often as I should. I wasted a lot of time trying to befriend people I knew in high school.

I still have enemies (not of my making) who would do their best to harry me, if they could do so without much effort on their part. One new person this year no longer thinks of me as a friend, although I will always think of them as one. I am still distant and suspicious with people, automatically distrusting their motives after the trauma of nine years ago.

Then there are the realities for which I’m not responsible, but should go on the losses side because of their effect on me. My wife and partner is still chronically ill and getting worse, and I can’t do very much to help. My mother-in-law and her sister died.

So how do I reduce these intangibles into something I can tally? I can’t, of course. But my impression is that I’ve edged closer to my potential professionally and found a few emotional niches in the social ecosystem while still neglecting my interactions with people too much. In fact, if I believed in reincarnation, I’d say that this life is supposed to be about how I relate to people – and that, the way I’m going, I’ll be coming back for another round.

Not that being alone is completely undesirable. As Anthony Storr points out in Solitude, it is often a creative necessity. But the trick is to be in a position to pick and choose it.

All in all, I’ve had many worse years. At least I can see some movement in several directions. Yet, on the whole, I’d sum up this last year the way that George Macdonald Fraser says that his grandmother summed up a mediocre first nine holes of golf. That is (stripped of dialect): This and better will do; this and worse will never do.

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Exercise room cultures, part 2

Posted in Bruce Byfield, exercise, Personal, Uncategorized on May 11, 2007| Leave a Comment »

Last Friday, I spent all day at a funeral. To fit in my time on the exercise bike, I was at the local rec center at 6:30AM. I’m not at my most social first thing in the morning, but I couldn’t help noticing two cultures that are entirely absent from the exercise room in the late afternoon when I usually work out. Instead of the weight-lifters I disparaged in an earlier post, there was a crowd consisting of two types: senior citizens, and corporate types on their way to work.

From what I overheard, many of the senior citizens exercise at that time because they have trouble sleeping. Most of them have a slightly rumpled look, and few bother with expensive exercise fashions. Slightly stiff-kneed, often a little bent, they tend to move slowly, descending to their exercise mats for calisthenics with obvious twinges of discomfort, and bending almost double on the exercise bikes.

But, if they no longer move quickly, they have an endurance that many three decades younger lack. And many, while they walk the treadmill or pedal the bikes, are chattering away as they go on and on, obvious experts at prying the life story from any stranger on the next machine. They seem a cheery, sturdy bunch, and, watching them sweat steadily, totally unfazed by the effort, I can’t help thinking that the stereotype of the doddering old is badly obsolete.

One man, in particular, is scrawny with old age, but his legs and arms are so veined and well-defined that he must have been exercising regularly for decades. He looks good for at least a couple more.

The corporate men and women are another story. They rush in, striding briskly, eyes bright with a caffeine buzz. If their preferred machines are being used – and the early morning is a surprisingly busy time – they pace up and down impatiently, glancing constantly at their watches and bending to duck around the weight machines so that they can watch the clock on the wall. A few wait around the ever-ready TV hanging from the wall, watching a report on business. They exercise briskly and briefly, then stride off in the same way, their spandex swishing on their legs just at the edge of my hearing range.

Unlike the seniors, the corporate crowd has no interest in talking. For them, exercise is just the first item on the day’s To Do list. They have no time for anything except their agenda, although exactly what the urgency might be is something that doesn’t seem to occur to them. Instead of evaluating their approach, most of them are too busy frowning their impatience at the time this part of their daily routine is taking.

If I had to face strangers every morning, I could easily stand the seniors. But the corporate crowd is enough to remind me of why I’ve ordered my life so I can work at home. They bring an unnecessary hecticness to my exercise routine that I would just as soon avoid. If I wanted to surround myself continually with their sense of needless urgency, I’d still be commuting on the Skytrain.

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Online photos Vs. my self-image

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, Uncategorized on May 9, 2007| Leave a Comment »

“If I were your career advisor,” one of my editors said, “I’d advise you to spend $25 at the neighborhood mall or quickie photo place to get a flattering head shot.” Those wise in the ways of editors will know that the technical term for such comments is a hint. And this one was as broad as the center of the continent when you’re flying, where for hundreds of miles there’s nothing but quarter section farms punctuated by small towns build around a football stadium or hockey rink.

Besides, armed with my keen grasp of the obvious, I’d been meaning to get a decent photo for months as a business expense. So, this week, I finally got some professional shots of me. Now, I’m trying to live with the results.

It isn’t easy. Like everyone else, I’m accustomed to seeing myself mainly in the mirror, which means that portraits always look wrong unless I flip left and right on them.

Nor can I ever hope to see an unrehearsed expression on my face. No matter how hard I try, in the micro-second before I look in the mirror, my guard goes up, and unconsciously I assume a demeanor that fits my sense of self. Like everyone else, I can never have first-hand knowledge of what I really look like. I suspect that I have two main expressions – friendly and grimly serious – but I have no direct way of knowing.

Another problem is that, like many middle-aged people, my self-image has evolved more slowly than I’ve aged. I may not think of myself as 16 any more, but probably my self-image is lagging behind reality by at least a decade.

But the strongest reason for my bemusement as I’ve sorted through this week’s photos is that making a selection forces me to focus on an aspect of me to which I generally don’t pay much attention. Quite simply, I don’t spent a lot of time thinking about my face. I long ago decided that, while I wasn’t a double for the elephant man, no one would ever pressure me to sign a modeling contract, either. Since reaching that conclusion, I’ve been generally content to concentrate on more important matters.

Anyway, I’d rather use an automatic razor and read rather than stare at myself in the mirror for any length of time, especially in the morning. So much as my self-image is based on physical traits rather than mental ones, it’s mostly concerned with being in good shape and having endurance – which is why I’m more testy and irritable whenever an injury keeps me from exercising.

For all these reasons, I’m hard to satisfy when choosing shots to represent me online. It had to be done – supplying a photo gives others a handle to grasp when contacting you, just as listing interests on a resume provides talking points in a job interview – but the process is painful, and tends to be destroy all sorts of stray illusions.

In the end, I chose three main photos: two smiling ones, and one in what I call a pundit pose:

Bruce Byfield

These are not not my entire range of expressions, but they’re the ones that I choose to present to people online.

Of course, part of me is tempted to run the images through a graphics editor to clean up the crow’s feet and the neck wrinkles. In fact, having been in contact a few months ago with someone who found cosmetic surgery a positive thing, I’m tempted to take the same step in order to bring my face into sync with my self-image.

But, in the end, that’s not my style. Others may incline differently, but if there’s a discrepancy between reality and my self-image, I’m more likely to think my self-image should change rather than my face.

Also, I’m more the type to defiantly parade the signs of aging than to deny them. Why turn my back on the experiences that those signs represent? They’ll only be back in a few years, no matter what I do.

Besides, after staring at my own face off and on for a day, I’m left feeling that it could be a lot worse. With this face, I’ll never be an authority figure, but I may be someone people will ask for help.

Yeah, I can live with that.

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Marking flashbacks while editing

Posted in Books, Bruce Byfield, editing, Personal, Uncategorized, writing on May 8, 2007| Leave a Comment »

One of my current side projects is editing a manuscript for Joe Barr, one of my colleagues at the Open Source Technology Group. The experience has me remembering the thousands of papers I marked while working as an English instructor at Simon Fraser University and Kwantlen College.

On our IRC channel, Joe is best known for having inspired our own abbreviation, NOAFD (Not On A First Date, because he is always telling people what not to do; apparently, a first date with Joe consists of separate sensory deprivation chambers in separate cities), but he is also one of the best editorial writers at OSTG. For several years, he has also been writing a series called CLI Magic about using the GNU/Linux command line, and the collected columns are now being considered by Prentice Hall for OSTG’s new imprint – which is where I come in.

As practiced by me, editing a manuscript is much like marking papers. Both require close attention to structure and develop of ideas. Both, too, require a clear sense of the difference between how I would express something and when the writers haven’t expressed themselves as well as they might in their own terms. Both also require a degree of diplomacy; it would be easier just to write “This stinks on ice,” but the writers will be more likely to listen and find the comments useful if I say instead, “Will the reader be able to follow this argument? How about arranging it this way …”

The similarity is especially close because Joe’s original articles are all under 1500 words, so that editing a section of the manuscript is like marking a dozen essays.

Looking back, I estimate that I must have marked well over 12,000 papers in seven years as a university instructor. This number was dribbled out in batches of 50 to 200, but it’s still an appalling number, especially since I was a very thorough marker, commenting on everything from grammar and punctuation to structure and ideas in considerable detail.

In fact, I did so much marking that I ruined the clarity of my handwriting to such a degree that you’d never have guessed that I had won awards for it in grade school. I switched over to printing, but, in my last couple of years as a teacher, my printing deteriorated, too. Had I hung on much longer, I would have needed to start marking on line, so that students could read my comments.

I used to mark to classical music. I found that Wagner made me work quickly but not very thoroughly, so I soon settled on the Baroque composers, whose implied sense of order encouraged me to be through or careful. Vivaldi was a favorite until his music became a reminder of Fritz Leiber’s death bed, but Pachelbel and Telemann were almost as good. With a dozen Baroque albums ready, I could easily mark a paper in 20-25 minutes and keep up the pace for seven or eight hours

However, I never warmed to marking. I hated the necessity of failing the occasional student, and many were less interested in improving their writing than in getting a better grade, so many of my comments were undoubtedly wasted. If I had had my way, I wouldn’t have given a grade at all – just comments, because worry over grades obviously prevented many students from learning. Of all the parts of teaching, it was always my least favorite, and seemed the least relevant to helping students learn. The best I could muster was a feeling that I might help students survive better in other essay-based courses.

Moreover, at community colleges, the number of assignments I was required to give and the number of classes I had to teach each semester meant that I was more or less continually marking. The work load was much less at university, but, increasingly, I felt crushed by the lack of originality in most of the papers and my increasing difficulties in being impartial. In the last couple of years, I had reached the point of asking students to identify themselves only on their title page, so I could fold it back and have no idea whose paper I was marking.

By the time I realized that, in the current market, I would probably get tenure about the time I was 95, I had seriously overdosed on marking. It’s the one part of teaching I could do without, and when I’ve taught technical classes in recent years, I’ve always been careful to avoid having to mark essays.

Fortunately, none of my misgivings apply to Joe’s manuscript. I hope that I’ve made useful suggestions for improving his work, but since Joe is nothing if not literate and well-versed in his topic, being one of his first readers is much easier than marking students. Still, as I continue through his manuscript, the similarity of the two experiences sets me remembering.

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Free verse and my future life as a cockroach

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Personal, poetry, Uncategorized, writing on May 6, 2007| Leave a Comment »

In Don Marquis’ archy and mehitabel (a book I first discovered through Allan Chalmers, my most memorable high school teacher), the main character is reincarnated as a cockroach for having written free verse in his previous life. He continues to do so in his present life, unable to use upper case letters because he can’t work the shift key on the typewriter and doubtlessly generating more bad karma for himself. I wouldn’t go so far as Marquis in visiting Kafkaesque doom upon writers of free verse, but at times I can appreciate his point.

The greatest strength of free verse is its versatility. A standard verse form like a sonnet allows only minor deviations — an anapest foot instead of an iambic one, or eleven syllables instead of ten per line — even in the hands of a master like Shakespeare or Keats. By contrast, in free verse, you can alter the line length or meter any time you like. You don’t need to warp your thoughts or tap them carefully into place to fit the rhythm or verse form, and everything can be varied to fit your needs.

The trouble is, versatility is also free verse’s greatest weakness. In the hands of amateurs, the ability to change rhythm at will too easily turns into no rhythm at all. From there, it is only a small step to throwing out all poetic technique until, today, most people would probably say that the main characteristic of poetry is usually a short line length. The paradox of free verse is that, although it looks like the easiest of all verse forms, it is actually the hardest to do well. The truth, as T. S. Eliot said, is that “No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job.”

If you have the skill, free verse allows you to experiment with all sorts of different rythmns: rhythms made from parallelism in sentence structure, from a count of syllables, from the number of accents per line or the numbers of lines per verse, from alliteration, from assonance or consonance, breath groups, or practically everything else you can think of. You can combine techniques, switching between them as you like, or conduct other experiments, such as seeing what is the least amount of structure you can get away with and still produce something that can be called a poem. At this level, free verse is a playground of poetic technique.

Of course, most writers of free verse are unaware of these possibilities, as hard drives and blogs full of teenage angst will attest worldwide. I sometimes wonder whether the fact that the prevalance of free verse coincided with the rise of popular music is a coincidence, if people have not unconsciously looking for the rhythms of poetry elsewhere.

If archy is any indication, my own experiments in free verse will probably have me doing time in insect form well into the fourth millennium. I went through a long period in which I was fascinated by the alliterative lines of Old English poetry. For example, in this piece, I graft my work on to Beowulf, imagining what it must have been like in Hrothgar’s hall when everyone lived in terror of the nightly attacks from the monster Grendel:

Lament in the reign of Grendel

I’ve walked cold and wind-chewed,
doubt-fed known dark, unsleeping,
tasted hunger and been fare for horror,
gnawed away roads, nibbled by home-loss.
That passed; this perhaps, too.

To barter in butchery with bloodied men
pumped strength from my arm with each pulse in my youth.
Knees buckled with waiting, but to bolt seemed worse.
That passed; this perhaps, too.

Wrapped in ruin, I rave in song:
I’d a falter-limbed father, folded with age,
and a boy in first beard. Broken by Grendel,
they slouch in sleep, stretched under hill.
That passed; I, perhaps, too.

In another piece, I used repetition in three lines and alliteration in two more:

False knight on the road

“I’m not a good man,” he said. I said, “Did I ask?”
“I’ll blow it on beer,” he said. I said, “Have one for me.”
How tell him of the charm, my coins in his cup
purchased to make me cleaner than passers-by?
“God bless,” he said. I said, “Not likely.”

In still another, I controlled the poem by using three-line stanzas and two or three accented syllables per line:

Taking the omens

Common sense derides me,
I am reduced to omens,
and they become disparaging.

Your messages come like dispatches to an outpost,
late and never long enough
nor with reprieve from exile;

I shelter in my own words again:
a furtive comfort,
coy and abbreviated.

Now as this silence lengthens,
I turn back to cards and runes,
never drawing the future I desire.

I make no claims for any more than artisan-like competence in these examples. But I think the variety in these examples illustrates what’s fascinating about free verse: the fact that, even more than any other form of writing, when you write free verse, you are defining your artistic world afresh. And, at the risk of encouraging amateurs without any technique to keep writing, the pleasure of making that definition is enough to risk any number of years as a cockroach.

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Random notes from back-to-back funerals

Posted in Bruce Byfield, death, Personal, Uncategorized on May 5, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I’ve attended two funerals in as many days. Unsurprisingly, I can’t recommend the process to anyone.

One ceremony was Roman Catholic, and one extremely high Anglican. I have no particular preference for either one, having been raised Protestant and married in a Catholic ceremony. However, as an agnostic, one of the ways I made it through the emotionally-difficult services and their attendant teas and burials and family obligations was by observing what I saw around me and comparing what I saw with other services I’ve attended in the last few years.

At the risk of being pilloried by both denominations, here are some stray observations of how the services struck an outsider:

  • If my response is any indication, the best thing you can say to someone at a funeral that you haven’t seen for a while is that they haven’t changed in years. When you are thinking of death, you appreciate someone implying that yours is apparently not due soon. But it’s also somewhat distressing when, no matter how you look on the outside, you’re radically different mentally.
  • The modern language and hymns used by the Catholic church in Canada are both so bland that they strip the rituals of the meaning that they should have. However, that isn’t altogether a bad thing. As my adult niece-in-law said, the blandness help you keep control in public. The most meaningful ritual at the Catholic ceremony was an impromptu one by the funeral director, who dismantled a wreath so that everyone could throw a flower on the coffin. It was a very low-key, moving ritual that had many of us in tears. By contrast, the Anglican church seems to have done a better job than the Catholic of modernizing while keeping some of its tradition. It still uses hymns from the golden age of hymn-writing, such as “Morning is Broken” and “Abide with Me.” And even when it has modernized, it has kept some of the rhetorical devices like parallelism so that the language tends to sound ritualistic. The same is true for many of its prayers.
  • The aestheticism of Anglican traditional hymns helps to create a sense of spirituality in a way that the modern Catholic hymns never can. If you are going to think about religious matters, singing words to Beethoven’s Hymn to Joy puts you in the mood much better than singing mediocre words to a monotonic tune.
  • Both churches try to invoke a sense of community. The Catholic church tries by employing deacons and altar boys and girls. The high Anglican church we were in does so by having memorial plaques and stain glass windows, as well as a labyrinth and homilies that are as much philosophical as religious. None of these efforts seem altogether successful, since they create a sense of trying to hard, and lay participants seem faintly embarrassed at times.
  • In the last few years, Catholic priests have become used to the fact that many of those at ceremonies will be lapsed or non-Catholics. They now explain what each category might want to do at such key points as receiving communion. The Anglicans seem less aware of this need.
  • Despite regularly conducting services, Catholic priests apparently don’t take any training in public speaking. The Anglican ministers, however, do seem aware of the need to project their voice and vary intonation, as well as common tricks of the trade that they share with teachers, such as using parallelism to lend coherrence to their unrehearsed remarks.
  • The Catholic Woman’s League seems much larger and more efficient than their Anglican counterparts. They certainly serve a much more varied collation after a service.
  • Every funeral should have a baby less than two years old – not as a counterpoint to the death being observed (although that wouldn’t be a bad idea) so much as to give relatives who don’t have much in common something to talk about and to help everyone relax afterwards. At that age, a child won’t understand what is happening, so his or her attendance shouldn’t risk any trauma.

I know, I know: these are not the sort of things you are supposed to think about during a religious service. But what else is an agnostic supposed to do when he needs to be polite and respectful in manner for hours at a time? I suspect that both the Catholic priest and the Anglican minister would be upset if I took my laptop.

No doubt, though, I go about these things the wrong way.

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The interviewer between the mirrors and trial reporting

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Business, Free Software, freesoftware, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing on May 3, 2007| Leave a Comment »

I had a call earlier this week from ABC News. With the trial of Hans Reiser for the alleged murder of his wife scheduled to start next week, the reporter wanted background on the free software community and how Reiser is regarded. Since I wrote an article last summer about Reiser’s struggle to get his work accepted into the Linux kernel, and another one shortly after his arrest about how his company was going to carry on without him, I’m the person from whom the mainstream media is looking for answers. In the past six months, I’ve been interviewed by The Oakland Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, and People on the same subject. And, each time, it leaves me with a deep sense of ambiguity.

For one thing, I’ve never actually met Reiser. I only exchanged a few emails while doing my earlier story, and fielded some complaints from him about what I said. For the second story, I also corresponded with his father. But these contacts were brief, and hardly make me an expert. I suspect I’m being called for background mainly because these articles pop up in a Web search, but I hardly feel qualified to give the comments for which I’m asked.

For another, so far as I’m concerned, these stories were only minor parts of my working life. I had some small pride in the first story for its thoroughness and attempts at balance, but neither the Linux kernel nor Reiser’s work on his filesystem are beats that I cover regularly. The second story is especially minor, an update that helped me fill my monthly quota of articles. When I consider the comprehensive articles I’ve done that have been largely ignored, I’m irked that the second one should be the part of my output to receive so much attention.

Most importantly, I have no wish to join the chorus of speculations about the case. In the second article, I made a conscious choice to focus on the technical issues because I thought that to do otherwise would be in poor taste. I don’t even care for mysteries unless they are a facade for a historical novel, so covering or discussing a real life murder is profoundly distasteful to me.

Nor, for the record, do I have any predictions about the outcome. From what I’ve seen and heard about Reiser, I would be no more surprised to hear him declared innocent than to hear him found guilty. I simply don’t know enough about him to form a meaningful opinion. Either way, the case seems like a tragedy for everyone involved – and that’s as far as I care to go.

All the same, I found myself replying to each request for comments in some detail, and I’m still not altogether sure why.

Part of the reason, I suppose, is the implied compliment. Online journalists may have more readers than colleagues in the mainstream media, but we’re not nearly as well-regarded. So, to an extent, I feel that the requests lend legitimacy to my daily work.

Even more importantly, I feel that, if I don’t give a reply, my mainstream colleagues will simply move on to someone with less knowledge of the free and open source software community and less of a sense of responsibility. Since I have a detailed perspective of the community, I honestly feel that I can express the range of reactions better than most people. Hans Reiser is a person whose work is both admired and pilloried, and whose personality often interfers with sober judgment of his accomplishments, and I can point out this range of opinions because, unlike many people, both my job and my temperment keeps me interested yet distanced from the various issues.

But, mainly, I’m simply too damned polite to refuse despite my own ambiguity. So, I talk, but, not so deep down, I keep feeling that being party to the coverage of the case at all is enormously gauche. In fact, there are times I wish I’d never written about Reiser at all. Had I known the consequences, probably I wouldn’t have.

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