The Bug

How to describe my fascination with Ellen Ullman's 2003 novel The Bug? The scene is Silicon Valley in 1984 when the mouse as an input device is still an innovative new technology. The story is told from the perspective of software developer Ethan and a tester Berta--both doing battle (often at cross purposes) to track down an insidiously elusive bug they end up calling "The Jester." The bug takes on a personality of its own, appearing only intermittently at the worst possible times, sabotaging important demos, and ultimately becoming a haunting nemesis for both of them. In the end, Ethan's efforts to debug his code become intertwined with his efforts to debug his life, which is rapidly unravelling all around him as he loses his wife, colleague, and the manager who appreciated him and lured him into the project to begin with despite Ethan's self doubt.

Ethan's real passion is an artificial intelligence program he calls the simulation in which he tries to program his cyber creatures to socialize and thrive. Survival in the simulation depends on whether a cell is surrounded with other healthy cells, but Ethan's creations are not thriving, despite his efforts. The novel's structure is divided into four parts, each preceded with a diagram from the simulation, showing the progression as a hapless cell is deprived of each of its neighbors in turn, paralleling Ethan's own life of increasing isolation.

The author was an English major before she got into high tech (I can relate to that) and weaves a number of literary allusions into the novel including Eliot's Middlemarch, Kafka's The Metamorphosis and Shelley's Frankenstein (the tester's name is Roberta Walton and the name of the narrator in Frankenstein was Robert Walton).

Ullman's descriptions of software engineers and their quirks absolutely rang true from my own experiences in the industry of the 80's--from the relentless fascination with puns to the office collections of toys like squirt guns and boffo swords, to the hilarious description of Ethan's attempts to answer pointed questions from the bean counters about The Schedule while balanced precariously on the only seat remaining in his manager's office--a bouncy ball.

The toys and puns take on a vaguely hostile air as the intense pressure from the venture capitalists to deliver on the impossible schedule increases. Ullman vividly describes the 7x24 obsession with churning out and debugging huge quantities of code and the challenges many technically brilliant engineers have with emotional intelligence and deciphering what is really going on in their bewildering social interactions. She also does a great job of depicting the challenges of management, aka herding the cats--both what an excellent manager can mean to the productivity and sanity of technical people as well as what havoc can be wrought by a terrible manager. She shows rather than tells us these things--with dark humor and clarity. The story does take a very bleak turn at the end, but she has lined up all the events that lead to this so thoroughly that the ending is logical and inevitable.

Ullman also penned a 1997 autobiography called "Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents," about her Silicon Valley years as a software developer--she mentions that she was the first engineer to be hired at Sybase to work on the client side of groundbreaking client-server architecture. In "The Bug" the company is called "Intelligentsia" but includes an eerily accurate portrayal of one of Sybase's founders and his habit of nodding and smiling during every conversation regardless of the content.

Other novels have explored the computer world and its sometimes cutthroat ruthlessness. There aren't many novels that delve into the complexity of a coder's brain, motivations and inner life with this level of depth and empathy. To unambiguously tell the machine what it is you want it to do, you often must become part machine yourself--sometimes at great cost.

Requiem for the BookEnd Cafe

It’s like a missing tooth you keep feeling around for with a wistful tongue.  My favorite espresso joint in Boulder closed on May 1. A kindred spirit who also loved the place sent me some photos to remember it by.  I keep thinking I’ll head down there, and then realizing it is no more.  Why was it so special?

For one thing, it was attached via an inviting brick archway to the independently-owned  Boulder Bookstore, one of my favorite places in the world.  A person could sip a latte, then go next door to peruse the inviting shelves, then come back for more latte, and repeat.  BookEnd had old red brick walls, and shelves filled with ancient tea tins and pots.  There was a large ball of string on display, and a huge painted wooden frog.  The soundtrack was usually playing music I enjoyed and the overall hubbub of the place was enough to energize, but not so much that it overwhelmed.  

You could sit next to the tall windows and people watch for hours as the parade of humanity* which is Boulder’s Pearl Street ambled by.   Or you could sit outside at the stone tables next to the black iron grillwork and listen to that long-haired old guy with the beard who sings pretty well, knows the words to every folksong ever written and always seems to know which one you want to hear next.  Chess players, students, tourists, silver-haired groups in lively conversation, writers, families--all found a cozy place to hang at Bookend.  I can only hope for a swift resurrection.

*The Pearl Street parade can include the likes of a small boy balancing a luminous green-purple peacock feather on his index finger as his proud father looks on, a smiling young couple holding up a sign offering “Free Hugs,” several people in a row on mats doing yoga on their backs and offering to balance onlookers on their feet, a ragtag band with a guitar, washboard and fiddle singing fast jazzy tunes in raucous harmony, a flamethrower and juggler explaining to a member of the audience how not to toss the axe up to her  while she’s pedaling the unicycle lest bloodshed occur, a blonde belly dancer undulating to a languorous drumbeat gradually building to a fast crescendo...and so much more.

Innisfree, Part II

“But I, being poor, have only my dreams. I have spread my dreams under your feet; tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.”

William Butler Yeats 

On a cool, sunny Tuesday morning I peer through the window of the Innisfree Poetry Bookstore and Café. The windows are no longer papered over with fine poetry and are now clear and newly washed. There are people inside; the place has finally opened. I hesitate, but then a man stands up, opens the door and says, “Lynn?”

He’s recognized me from my blog picture. I’ve actually found a bookstore and café where everybody (or at least somebody) knows my name. I walk into a small but beautiful space with long narrow counters along the front windows and down the center of the cafe where a person can sit and sip coffee while perusing fine poetry. A shiny new barista’s station sits at the back with a chalkboard listing espresso options. The wooden bookcases are filled with a mouthwatering variety of poetry: Jack Kerouac, Leonard Cohen, an extensive selection of Charles Bukowski, and much, much more. I know I’ll be back again for a more in depth perusal.

The owner’s name is Brian. He’s Irish and has the Irish love of good poetry. He and his wife Kate met and fell in love at a poetry workshop and have had the dream ever since of opening a small poetry bookstore and café. The circuitous route toward this dream included a stint in the Peace Corp, working with Navajo tribes in Arizona and teaching language arts. Now he and Kate have settled in Boulder among friends to raise their two young children. And I find myself standing inside their dream.

Care has been taken with every aspect of the space: sun streams in through tall windows, all manner of good poetry is arranged invitingly on the warm wooden shelves, and they have chosen to serve fair trade coffee roasted by the local company Conscious Coffees, who have their own dream of sustainability and simplicity, delivering their coffee by bicycle in reusable steel cans.

Standing inside this Boulder dream feels good and right. I highly recommend that my vast blog readership check out this fine place on the Hill across the street from the Sink. Sample the good coffee and find some poetry that speaks to your heart—tell 'em Lynn sent you.

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily, Life is but a Dream

Ever drifting down the stream--

Lingering in the golden gleam--

Life, what is it but a dream?                    

                        Lewis Carroll

I’m plowing through Stephen King’s Dark Tower series this summer and just finished book four, “Wizards and Glass.”  A key theme and phrase in these books is “there are other worlds than these,” and there are many instances in the series where characters move in and out of worlds and times in a dreamlike fashion where death is not an absolute and people are never quite who they at first appear to be.  Also, I recently saw Christopher Nolan’s “Inception,” in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a thief who can move in and out of his own and others’ dreams—but when can he be absolutely sure he’s not dreaming?

In both of the worlds created by these fantasies a person to some degree is able to choose his dream.  In the Dark Tower, Roland the Gunslinger seizes  opportunities to move between worlds (or are they dreams after all?) in his obsessive search for the Tower.  In “Inception,” DiCaprio’s Cobb character moves between dream worlds as easily as pressing a floor button in an elevator, choosing to invade the dreams of others and even plant ideas in those dreams with dangerous and tragic results.  In the end he must choose to return from a dream he’s having trouble letting go of but which he knows is destroying him.  And in the end, is his chosen world just another dream, albeit a happier one?

It seems our experience of life is defined by our perception of it, so we can choose our dream—but it’s so damn hard to keep that in mind (as is the case when you are actually dreaming, especially during a nightmare).  It’s difficult to be mindful that we have far more space and choice than we perceive, and that we can choose to swim up through the murky water toward the surface and the light rather than succumb to the illusion we’re drowning. 

The other thing it’s hard to keep in mind is that everybody else is in their own dream, in various states of unconsciousness or wakefulness, and that their dreams are not yours, or vice versa. 

Nothing is quite what it seems on the surface.  If we’re not awake enough, we box ourselves and other people in with assumptions, “truths,” “limitations” that are not real.  If only we could have a way to jog the memory like Cobb does in “Inception”--to spin the little top to help us see what is real.  On the other hand, if we’re happy and at peace, isn’t that all the real we need?

Thank God for Books

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who read voraciously, necessarily, constantly—and those who do not. I am one of the former. Books are a huge comfort to me, a light in my life, an inspiration, and a reliable way to see the world in fresh perspective. When I am low, I can often climb back out of the sinkhole by picking up a good book.

I observed the recent gadget frenzy over the release of the iPad with curiosity. The idea of reading books via electronic medium is not new, but the iPad is said to reach a new level of elegance and ease-of-use, and to make the act of reading a book a new and better experience than the old-fashioned way with the pages that must be turned by hand, the well-worn covers from rough backpack rides, the used book experience of occasional encounters with strangers’ opinions scribbled in margins usually with no added value, the teetering piles of books on the nightstand and on the floor next to the nightstand, the Tom and Jerry battle between you and your purge-happy spouse who (although also a voracious reader) dislikes clutter and periodically spirits off boxes of what he considers to be “junk fiction.”

After the initial hubbub subsided last week I ventured into the Apple store to see the iPad. I am not an Apple user normally so it took me a little while to figure out the user interface (you press the on button to go back to the main desktop). The one I looked at did not have a book on it to “page” through, which was my primary interest. I look at computer screens all day long—do I want to associate this latest gadget with the pleasure of reading? When I read a book, I like to focus on it, and it alone.  (I know not everybody reads this way but I once almost missed a flight out of Chicago to Paris because I was so engrossed in the book I was reading.)   Do I want my book-reading experience to include the constant option for yet another distraction--the option to be instantly lured away to this or that website whenever I have the urge? My God, have I become a neo-Luddite? Nevertheless, at this point, my thinking is: “Hell no, I won’t go.” But one day, I may well feel differently.

One of my favorite writers, Anna Quindlen, had a great column in Newsweek recently called “Turning the Page,” which was in part about the question of whether iPads and other devices like it foretell the end of books as we know them. She reminds us that some said radio would end when television arrived on the scene, but NPR begs to differ. Her conclusion rings true to me:

“Reading is not simply an intellectual pursuit but an emotional and spiritual one. It lights the candle in the hurricane lamp of self; that’s why it survives. There are still millions of people who like the paper version, at least for now. And if that changes, well, what is a book really? Is it its body, or its soul? Would Dickens have recognized a paperback of “A Christmas Carol,” or, for that matter, a Braille version? Even on a cell phone screen, Tiny Tim can God-bless us, every one.”