in memorium

lacrimae rerum et mortalia mentum tangunt
the tears of things and mortality touch the mind
--Virgil

Walking with Cell Phone

The day before Thanksgiving. Amazingly warm, almost 60. Sun for awhile, but the clouds slowly grayed the afternoon. I took a long walk with my cellphone, taking pictures.

Here is a picture of the mountain as a backdrop to the town



The road into Smallwood park



The fish pond in Smallwood park


The ruins of the sawmill that was once the reason for the town's existence:

Catullus Carmina 11

A translation of Poem 11 by Catullus:

Furius and Arelius, comrades of Catullus,
whether he penetrates the extremes of India
where the shore is pounded by
the waves of dawn

whether to Hyrcanus or to the soft Arabs
or to Sacus or to the archers of Parthius
whether to where the seven-mouthed Nile
colors the sea’s surface

whether he trudges across the high alps
viewing the monuments of mighty Caesar,
the Gaullic Rhine, the turbulent waters,
the furthest outposts of Briton

or whether he attempts all these simultaneously
bearing whatever heaven wills--
speak these few words to my girl
not pleasantries

may she live & grow strong in her adulteries
may she take 300 men into her clasp at once,
not loving one in truth, but repeatedly
herniating them all

nor may she look back at my love
as before, which through her fault
has fallen like a flower at the meadow’s edge
touched by a passing plow.


In this poem Catullus exposes all his moods: the conversational, the mock heroic, the brutal invective, the delicately tender. He begins by addressing two "comrades of Catullus," opening a long rhetorical sentence that turns on the preposition "siva," "whether." Then, referring to himself in third person, he outlines an empire vast enough to get lost in. The locations he cites are not merely poetic, they map the exact delineations of the empire: India, Arabia, Egypt, the Rhine, Brittan. His hurt is as big as the empire itself. There is an ironic juxtaposition here of the personal and the politic, the intimacy of his grief vs the vastness of the Roman occupations. Concluding this sentence, he tells his comrades that he has a few words he wants them to impart to Lesbia, and he warns them they are not pleasant. Thus the invective--an art form, if you wish, for which Catullus has been remembered for 2000 years. Against the anger and brutality of his statement to Lesbia, is the the almost unbearable tenderness of the last lines, cast aside like a flower tacto arato est.

Good Books

I got a Writer's Market 2010 from the library. I must confess looking at the Writer's Market books is always a bit depressing. There are no markets for most of what I want to do, and what little market there is, pays nothing.

I have a similar feeling sometimes in libraries and bookstores, though with subtle differences. There it is the sheer volume of books that I find depressing. So many books and so few with any real value. Good work or even great work will be simply be lost, ignored on the shelves among so many other books.

Good books, great books turn us back toward ourselves (in the full sense of ourselves in the world among others). The vast majority of books are written to do the opposite, to turn us away from ourselves, to distract us with entertainments, or superficial self help.

"Distracted from distraction by distraction" wrote T. S. Eliot.

Not that I don't crave distractions too. It is just the immense store of distractions. It is quite possible to live a lifetime without confronting a single serious thought.

Is my elitism showing through? Very well, let it show.

The Seahawks lost too badly to prove a distraction and I am running out of ways to avoid work.

A few notes

The wind shook the house last night and howled past the windows. The rain sounded like pebbles thrown at the window panes. I was a little surprised this morning at how little damage was actually done. I had expected things to have blown everywhere, but there was little out of place.

I worked on rewriting chapter one this morning and then spent most of the afternoon trying to redo the index page on my school web site. It was difficult because I am not an expert at CSS, especially positioning. I am trying to avoid absolute positioning of elements and to use float instead. It takes me a great deal of trial and error to get the various sections positioned correctly. I make a change, display the page, return to the stylesheet, and then display the page again. It took me close to two hours to get it correct. But I did get it. I have a new look for the index page and posted my syllabi for winter quarter.

Documentation

I spent most of yesterday morning and this morning trying to write a section on documentation f0r chapter one. All my attempts seemed wooden and stiff. Finally I had a sort of break through. This is how the beginning of it reads now:

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Documentation is a lot like flossing: nobody likes to do it, and far more claim to do it than actually do. Developers want to develop. The last thing they want to do, generally, is to take time out and describe what they are developing and how they are going about it. And yet, like flossing, few things are as important to a healthy database enterprise.

Imagine you have been hired to work as a data administrator for some company. They have a large and complex database, but the former administrator, who was also the developer, left no documentation. In order for you to do your job you need to understand each object in the database is meant to do. You also need to know it is supposed to work, how data is processed. Managers expect you to be able to provide them with the data they need when they need it. Some pieces probably make sense right away, but several pieces remain obscure. You try to ask people about them, but managers are not database designers and, generally, they don’t have a clue. Many of the people who were involved in the creation of the database have moved on, and it is difficult to get a clear sense of the original intentions or purpose of the database. Eventually you may solve the problems, but you will have spent countless hours in investigation, hours that could have been saved by a little documentation.

Documentation is one of the most important and one of the most neglected aspects of any database project. When you look at a database built by someone else, or even one that you may have made some time ago, it is often difficult to see why certain decisions were made, why the tables are the way they are, why certain columns were included or left out. Without documentation, it can take a great deal of research and guesswork to understand the database. You may never understand all of its original logic.

So what does it mean to document a database? There are really two main aspects that need to be documented: the structure of the database itself and the process by which the database was developed.

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It is still not perfect by any means, and I don't know how the editors will react to the flossing simile, but at least it flows better than what I had before.

A brief patch of sun this morning, gold, green on the new grass of the back lawn. The mountain is clear and bright with new snow, but the weather report suggests this is a brief respit.

British Actors et al

Yesterday, I was working on a long, philosophical post about language, structure, abstraction and the particular, but I think I will spare what few, if any, readers I might have.

Last evening I watched a BBC production of Midsummer Night's Dream on DVD. The production values were low and the staging unimaginative yet sometimes strange. There was a lot of rolling around in a pond and mud that was unexpected, and puck was weirdly imagined. Yet, as the advertisement on the DVD says, "word for word as written by Shakespeare." It was a serviceable presentation of the play. Interestingly, I recognized a couple of the actors from their roles in other BBC productions in the late 70's and 80's including Doctor Who. That is not totally unexpected. British actors consist of a small pool of professionals who tend to appear over and over again in different contexts. It is still true. David Tenant, the current Doctor Who--the show has run for thirty five years or so from 1962 until sometime in the late 80's, then starting again in 2005--has just finished playing Hamlet along with, interestingly, Patrick Stewart from Star Trek the Next Generation.

Enough of my Geekdom though.

Today I am going to work on rewriting Chapter One.