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August 12, 2005
Pixel Fire III, and a footnote
As I continue to immerse myself in the pixel-delicious world of EverQuest and EQ Widows for a class project in Cambridge, an IEEE article's heroic portrayal of Sony Online Entertainment's Network Operations Center (NOC) suddenly hurled me back into the bizarre world of Southern California.
"Three people per shift work in the NOC, and there are three shifts per day. During each shift, NOC staff monitor game activity, responding to players in remote locations and working with a custom suite of software tools to fix problems along the way.
"The center has shut down for just three days of work—all in 2003, when wildfires were closing in on the neighborhood. (Because all the tools run remotely, the staff members kept EverQuest going from their homes. A backup generator kept pumping power to the servers even as the fire threatened to black out parts of the city.)" http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/publicfeature/jul05/0705eq.html
IEEE's paranthetical note sent a shiver down my spine, and I should add a footnote to show why IEEE's paranthetical mention of the NOC staff, who make EverQuest possible for its loyal gamers, impressed me to the degree that it did.
My Footnote:
Back in October of 2003, I noticed something bizarre on the drive from my apartment in Marina Del Rey out to my family's home in Rancho Cucamonga. Oddly, there was no traffic, and the night was especially black. Even the moon was hidden.
After successfully battling the drive over the steep pass into Pomona, I squinted in disbelief through the dust-laden windshield into the darkness. In the distance, a great, bright, volcanic-orange mass blared strikingly against the stark, black backdrop of the Cucamonga Mountains. They were on fire.
Upon arriving, a thick layer of ash instantly covered my car. I walked inside my family's house, wiping my face to find black soot already sticking thick to my moist skin. My parents were stuck to the television. They had not yet been instructed to evacuate. Houses were going to burn, we just didn’t know which ones. And the Santa Ana winds were rising.
When our family first moved back to California, I was sixteen. I remember pressing my nose against the windowpane, having become accustomed to the coveted school closings for “snow days” in Colorado, and then contemplating the odd, Cucamonga equivalent: “Wind days”. Staring through the glass pane like a live television screen, I watched the invisible monster powerfully destroy electrical lines, uproot trees and smash them onto cars and homes, and steal trash cans, lawn chairs, potted flowers, loose animals, and anything that was not enclosed within four walls and a protective roof. My growing teenage breasts always hurt on those days, the days when the wind picked up like an absurd tornado that had been inverted.
Yet following my adolescent introduction to the Santa Ana’s, my parents and I now watched the televised battleground while it blazed in our backyard, fueling the gigantic Grand Prix Fire in a horrifically magnificent display, together, fire and wind, playing violent hooky from the ordained laws of man.
We watched the fire come right up to the field behind the Banyan Fire Station on the street above my parents’ house. But it did not destroy our home. Yet witnessing the ominous, 200-feet-high wall of fire moving toward me etched a deep impression into my mind.
Others were not so lucky. Ultimately, over 2500 homes were destroyed by ten fires throughout Southern California, killing 17 people and 45,000,000 acres of land. Shelters were set up throughout the sprawling cities, and the 15 million inhabitants of greater Los Angeles coughed in the ashes and wiped the black dust from their faces while the smoke trailed far out over the Pacific Ocean, eventually dispersing in defeat high into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, as the citizens of Southern California were traipsing through the smoky air and blistering red sun, the MTA buses were on strike, as well as Ralphs, Vons, Albertons, and Save-On supermarkets. Many people could not go to work, and buying groceries was a more difficult endeavor, except for those who dared to break the picket line. California Governor Un-elect Gray Davis was vying with Governor Pre-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger for front-line coverage and requests for federal funding. On October 27, 2003, President Bush declared Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and San Diego Counties in a state of emergency.
Thus, in the course of one week--between the fires, the buses and the supermarket strikes--the entire structural system of food, transportation, and shelter has been removed from the masses of Los Angeles in varying degrees. The dissonant impression of our broken city arises bright and vivid, like the 200-foot-high fire wall, for this maddening virtual chaos, this failing urban infrastructure, this unimaginable we constantly witness on our televised and digital screens has finally entered into our homes and touched our bodies in the flesh.
"All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl." (Bob Dylan)
Posted by Jennifer at 05:04 PM | Comments (0)
August 11, 2005
The Monsters of Our Minds
At least, of one dude's mind, whoever created this monster. Is the familiar green just residue from the Hulk legacy?
Posted by Jennifer at 02:40 PM | Comments (0)
August 10, 2005
Are all-nighters worth the cost?
Posted by Jennifer at 02:54 PM | Comments (0)
August 02, 2005
Making It Happen
I wanted to extend Professor Norvell's thanks in class today for all of my classmates' support during our virtual classroom experience. Honestly, I was really bummed after last Tuesday at the "promise" of technology that turned out to be not as promising (noted in my blog), followed by the exciting rush of being able to see you all on the screen from over 6000 miles away!
Yet I found myself most amazed at your efforts that went into making it
happen--of course, thank you to Professor Norvell who was open to the idea,
and the emails between all of us exchanging ideas, the phone calls, Aaron's
bringing the webcam equipment and software, Aayesha's transcribing the ENTIRE
class (wow!), Steve's offering up his laptop when two others were being
repaired, and everyone's, including Mary Francis's and Tony's encouraging
comments: "This will be fun!" "That was cool!" "I really enjoyed it!" The
larger Mac community helped me resolve the bugs on my end, but I must declare
that you guys are totally gnarly.
Posted by Jennifer at 03:02 PM | Comments (0)
August 01, 2005
The Prologue and Epilogue as Performance
Last week we discussed notions of "narrative" in class, the privileged layers and organization of texts, the eternal search for the implicit in the explicit in language. As I reflected on the discussion, my mind began to return to an increasing frustration of mine. We throw around our theories of modern and postmodern approaches to "narrative," yet we fail to hold scholars accountable for their own positioning of themselves within their writing.
While prologues and epilogues offer a formal space and place for authors' positioning of themselves within a book, the prologue and epilogue continue to be peripheral to the privileged chapters of a book and should undermine the trust of the reader when a less than worthy account of that author's positioning is offered. Roman numerals or alternative symbolic marks seem to implore with the reader that the chapters of a book are its primary text and that the prologue and epilogue are secondary, at best. A Table of Contents can further reinforce the isolation of these sections in various ways, perhaps allocating a unique font for their headings or other symbol of division such as a line, indentation, or sequence of asterisks. As a result of these visual cues, a prologue and epilogue’s peripheral status occurs on two significant physical levels—first, through the emptiness of space normally reserved on the beginning page for the prestigious stamp of a chapter marker, and second, through the prominence of place revoked during textual organization, squished almost as a nuisance at the beginning and the end of the book. On a metaphorical level, this disadvantage of physical space and place in the ultimate text implies that while the framing prologue and epilogue perhaps complement the primary chapters, they retain their limited role as a frame—a frame peripheral to the narrative core which clearly begins with the strict, ceremonial chapter count. Yet prologues and epilogues have not always been regarded as peripheral.
In the first prologue, or prologos, introduced into Greek drama by Euripides in the 400’s B.C., a deity would emerge from a machine and explain the background events leading up to the beginning of the drama. Greek theatre that followed treated the prologos as a significant, almost distinct theatrical episode prior to the acts, whose function was essential to the entire dramatic performance. But in contrast to the prologos performed over two thousand years ago, current conceptions of the prologue tend to surround the question of textual authority. Modern themes often suggest that language is objective, involving a rational and transparent process of constructed word sequences that could then be dissected and categorized. But the assumption that a text could be unquestionably objective left a bad taste in the mouth of the postmodern palate.
Recent scholars such as Jacque Derridá, Vladimir Nabokov, and Miguél de Unamuno have challenged the belief that an objective, omnipotent viewpoint of the author exists within the narrative of the prologue, approaching it instead as an apparition-like web of subjectivity. Derridá writes, “From the viewpoint of the fore-word, which recreates the intention-to-say after the fact, the text exists as something written—a past—which under the false appearance of a present, a hidden omnipotent author (in full mastery of his product) is presenting to the reader as his future” (Dissemination). Accordingly, his critique of the prologue as a convention moves past the limitations I mention of space and place. Instead, he highlights the problem that it conveys a false sense of time since it was authored after the text, but structurally situated before the text. Ultimately, through this fictional organization of a literary composition, he contends, “History itself is thus prescribed.” Derridá even contended that the prologos could be entirely dismissed as a tradition of antiquity: “The preface to a philosophical work runs out of breath on the threshold of science. It is the site of a kind of chit-chat external to the very thing it appears to be talking about, reducing the thing itself.” While the prologos’ of today rarely boast a deified author who emerges from the objective machine of knowledge, they have become a foggy arena in which the author appears as a subjective apparition in the periphery, cryptically gesturing to the audience behind a ruffled stage curtain.
If we continue to employ the prologue and epilogue as conventions, then problematizing them to the point of periphery in modern and postmodern traditions calls for a renaissance of their original function in Greek theatre as a performance essential to the story. Although the entire text is necessarily considered a performance in this argument, the prologue and epilogue, in practice, remain intimate arenas in which the author often positions him or herself within the text by using anecdotes and biographical details. By conceptualizing these arenas as performance, the prologue and epilogue thus translate into a process in which the author uniquely negotiates his or her history through selecting “acts” of remembrance and transforming into narrative—regardless of whether those “acts” are considered fiction or nonfiction, ascribed or prescribed, subjective or objective, or ancient, modern, or postmodern. This process of transformation ultimately appears as embodied history in the form of a book to be consumed and incorporated into the negotiated histories of its audiences. For a book is not just a text about an isolated author, it is a social exchange between an author and an audience through material culture across time and space.
By reinstating the value of the prologue and epilogue as a performed act, perhaps then we could gaze more closely at how the author situates his or her own nuanced and conflicted position in the intimate realm of social and political relations. Perhaps then we could more aptly critique the underperformance of authors who fail to socially position themselves within the text and scold readers who fail to recognize the absence or weakness of their positioning. Perhaps then we could peer more deeply into the visceral beliefs and dreams of the author, hidden behind this performance on the forgotten stage of our imagined histories that we create, form, perform, exchange, and extinguish in the evolution of human experience and interaction.
Posted by Jennifer at 01:29 AM | Comments (0)