Uche’s posthaven

Had a good time at FRUncon09. More notes here and see also Twitter hashtag #fruncon09.  I gave a presentation on Akara and got a lot of very good discussion.  A few pics below.  In the first you can see Boulder's winter wonderland today, and Google's front door.  In the next few, the lunch generously provided by Google.  Thanks guys for the pizza and drinks, and overall for the nice setting, hospitality and the tour.  I'll say what many people have: that is one brilliant place to work.  Last pic is the rec area.  You can see the pool table, table tennis and maybe rock band set-up (which is pretty well worn ;) ).  What you can't see is the rock climbing wall, fussball, etc.  Anyway, good day meeting local Pythoneers and discovering some of the interesting things they're up to.  The Front Range never ceases to amaze me with how much talent and quite good work goes on in these here hills.

 

 

P.S. Ctypes have always been somethign I've wanted to check out, but haven't had time.  I was very glad of Greg Holling's ctypes talk. Following from his slides works like a charm on my Mac, and is super-cool. Fun with C stdlib.

>>> from ctypes import cdll, CDLL
>>> print CDLL.__doc__
An instance of this class represents a loaded dll/shared
    library, exporting functions using the standard C calling
    convention (named 'cdecl' on Windows).

    The exported functions can be accessed as attributes, or by
    indexing with the function name.  Examples:

    <obj>.qsort -> callable object
    <obj>['qsort'] -> callable object

    Calling the functions releases the Python GIL during the call and
    reacquires it afterwards.
    
>>> clib = CDLL('libc.dylib')
>>> len = clib.printf("The answer is %d\n", 42)
The answer is 42
>>> print len
17
>>>

If you use Firefox on Mac, you should be aware of this matter.  In my case I'm on Snow Leopard, but I'm sure the same applies for older versions.

I upgraded to Snow Leopard over the weekend, and the 10.6.1 update duly popped up yesterday.  I saw the release notes bullet item:

• Includes an update to Adobe Flash Player plug-in version 10.0.32.18

And assumed this would cover me for the recently-discovered Flash vulnerability.  This morning the Firefox 3.5.3 update popped up as well, and I applied that.  When it restarted it gave a warning that I also needed to update Flash, with a link taking me to the download page for Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.32.18.  At first I was about to assume the OS upgrade took care of that, but then I thought "you know, Firefox probably manages its own Flash plug-in".  Surely enough, I went to Tools →Add-Ons->Plugins and saw that the plug-in was indeed not up to date.

So I did download and update Flash from the Adobe site, and now it shows the correct plugin:

Please do make sure you're similarly up to date, because the v10.0.22 vulnerability is a nasty bit of work (if you're still on Flash 9 you want to make sure you're up to 9.0.246).

Quoth Eliot in Helen Oyeyemi's White is for Witching (p 87):

I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of Death' and then they keep on with the screaming.

Very apt.  Now consider for a moment the reaction in much high culture to Death's inevitability.  Take, for example, Maugham's light touch upon his re-telling of "Appointment in Samarra". Puts into piebald terms Poe as an uncultured hack.

I finished WifW yesterday (UK cover above. Mine was the much less striking US ed).  I loved Icarus Girl, but in her latter two, Oyeyemi's style of approaching you with her story, then pulling coyly away, is infuriating.  But while with The Opposite House I felt put upon for the whole book, in WifW I didn't succumb to irritated restlessness until near the end.  The problem with her approach is that it interferes with good old-fashioned pity and terror; probably just my not having caught up to modernity in the sort of satisfaction I crave from a novel.  There is something about Oyeyemi, though, that compensates for my unslaked dramatic thirst.  I know exactly what it is.  It's her language.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Nnnedi Okorafor tell stories that leave me fat, full and grateful (I'm now two stories into The Thing Around Your Neck).  I look hungrily for pretty much anything they write.  My overall regard for Oyeyemi might be cooler, but boy does she ever make me write.  As I read her, words spin in my head and expand into ideas, blue-shifting into my own ideas, from which I distill my own words.  My usual bookmark for an Oyeyemi book is a sheet of paper with a poem or set of apothegms for which she provided instant inspiration.  I do enjoy her more as a poet than as a novelist, which suits me just fine.

And really, considering my appreciation for subtlety as revealed in my attitude towards Poe, I heartily recommend WifW (as well as The Icarus Girl) for the sort of writing that reveals true terrors without deafening you with artless shrieking.

I just got a missive from Tim Westergren, founder of Pandora.  It's the sort of thing that usually annoys me, but not in this case, because:

1. Pandora is a very good example of technology that has improved my life (permit me to gush a bit. Lori and I just created an Asa channel Saturday, and we're enjoying the selections immensely)
   
2. On this issue, from the limited awareness I've been able to muster, he is exactly right
   

Mr. Westergren says:

You may have recently heard that we reached a resolution to a long-standing issue around royalty rates. It is indeed true, and it’s a great relief to now have long-term rate stability that will allow Pandora to stream music for many years to come. We are very thankful.

On the heels of this resolution, there is a new effort in Congress to fix the broader issue of how musical artists are compensated across all forms of radio. The system as it stands today is fundamentally unfair both to Internet radio services like Pandora, which pay higher royalties than other forms of radio, and to musical artists, who receive no compensation at all when their music is played on AM/FM radio.

A bill has been introduced in congress to remedy this by establishing a level playing field. We, along with the artists whose music we play, strongly support this new legislation...

This issue is near and dear to me. Before founding Pandora, I spent ten years as a working musician. I’ve always believed performers should get fairly compensated for the value they provide to radio so I really appreciate your help.

Sounds good to me.

I noticed today NPR's new look.  Starting with the home page:

New NPR site design. Less busy than before. A bit more austere, but I like it.  Individual program pages got similar treatment, for example here is Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me :

This I'm not so crazy about.  The site has lost its former personality.  Unfortunately, th Wayback machine doesn't cache it, nor does Google, so I can't show what it used to look like.  If I find an old cache I'll post it, or if a reader does, I'll offer my thanks.

Another negative about the re-design is that programs have lost the old, convenient "previous show" and "next show" links.  To be fair, these are not completely lost, but are now buried in the archives section.  The biggest problem, though, is that audio links for past shows appear to be broken.  I haven't found one that works.  I get a flash error "The main audio for story (some-huge-number) could not be found".  Oh am I ever looking forward to HTML5 embedded media over the Flash crap.

I wrote a little while back about how I found Karl Shapiro's "The Tongue" a rather flaccid piece (I reproduced it in that posting). It immediately set me to thinking how I might write about cunnilingus in that approximate style. It fell upon me to give it a go today. With Shapiro's anapests in my head I couldn't help the occasional echo, but for the most part I kept it to iamb and trochee, which feel to me a better fit for the luxury of the act.
 
The Tongue
 
As the head dropping on chocolate of tape—
Magnetic terrain of rhythm and rut—
Pinch roller fingers knead eager approach
Swelling to music is progress to what.

My tongue to the who in the arc of your voice,
To the hand caressing and guiding my ear,
Loops left wet behind my ascent
Anticipate pearly syrup of where.

Song and its caesure, vox humana,
Thigh, tongue, hand in tumescent blend
As the mouth creeps upon the open petals
Nectar and fragrance annihilate when.

—Uche
18 July 2009
Superior

I was listening to my beloved Asa today (Up Nigerian soul!) "Fire on the Mountain", an incredible monument of a song:

 

So you say you have a lover and you love her like no other
So you buy her a diamond that someone has died on
Don't you think there's something wrong with this?

 
Diamonds are contemptible bits of mediocre mineral that serve testimony to the gullibility and pliability of the public. I can't wait for the advent of perfect, carats-for-pennies diamonds from the laboratory, and it won't be long (would probably have been by now if not for the invidiousness of the diamond cartels). Soon, I hope, we can finally ditch the foetid illusion that diamonds have any value.

Hey Mr. soldier man, tomorrow is the day you go to war
Boy you are fighting for another man's cause and you don't even know him

 Ooooh!

 What did they say to make you so blind to your conscience and reason?
Could it be love for your country or for the gun you use in killing?

 
Or for the diamonds that corrupt your country and purchase those very guns?
 
You've heard it before, but Asa tells it with a fierce trueness. It's time to stop giving money to the diamond cartels. You might as well spend two months' salary funding coca and poppy production.

In my poetical wandering over the weekend I ran across Karl Shapiro's "The Tongue". He starts by getting the conceit all wrong, and even though it bears the execution of a fine craft piece, the result comes off a bit of a mess.
 

 
As a slug on the flat of the sun-heated clay, 
With the spit of its track left behind it like glass, 
Imperceptibly voyages, licking its way 
In the sinuous slime of itself to the grass, 
 
So my tongue on the white-heated wall of your thigh 
Licks its belly across, and the path of my slime 
Lies in ribbons of passion, the wet and the dry 
Overlapping to mount to the leaf of its climb. 
 
And the mouth and the mouth and the tongue and the tongue 
And the fishes that feed in the joy of our oil 
And the slug of our wetness finds green food among 
The hair-forests of longing where serpents uncoil. 

 
You can see how the cleverness dampens the sense, something I often struggle with myself. This is a large part of the reason why Shapiro, despite his technical skill, has never been as celebrated as he should be. He tries to use a sprinkling of words ("passion", "longing") to mend the detachment of the conceit of the slug, which could never hope to transport the idea of a tongue inching towards cunnilingus.
 
The piece pretty much cries out for a rival metaphysical poet's response.  And it should serve as a lesson to me.