Periodically I check to see if the Mazemod internet radio site is still up -- it is.
The selection there of mod tracker tunes, especially in the "acid" category, is some of my favorite music in the world. These low-res samples triggered from a spreadsheet-like list of commands have a beguiling lighter-than-air speed and guileless one-thing-after-another specificity, if that makes any sense.
Today I enjoyed the following tracks: "Luminessi" by Vesuri, "Fast 96" and "Empathy, State of Mind" by LFO, "Morning After" by Raina, and "Underneathourhome" by Spot. Once something plays in the radio interface, though, it's hard to find it again. You can click back and forth through a sequence but once you reload it's a new sequence, and the selection seems bottomless.
I think most of these were done in the '90s but don't know for sure.
January 2013
portrait of Lena
The source photo is a webcam posted to dump.fm by Lena; this drawing was done in Paint (as in Microsoft). Am interested in the point where the self-portrait becomes a portrait and some third, fictional being comes into existence.
And no, this is not supposed to be Lena D*nham, the celebrity artist offspring of the moment. This is the interesting Lena.
my obligations to harvard
Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig's Tumblr post about the Aaron Swartz suicide, written several days before the Atlantic article I linked to (and read first) dances around the roles of our top academic institutions in the tragedy and makes me less certain now about what Lessig wrote in Atlantic. His advocacy for the scaling back brutal tech laws is appreciated but would love to know what he's not telling us about this case. From the Tumblr post:
Since his arrest in January, 2011, I have known more about the events that began this spiral than I have wanted to know. Aaron consulted me as a friend and lawyer. He shared with me what went down and why, and I worked with him to get help. When my obligations to Harvard created a conflict that made it impossible for me to continue as a lawyer, I continued as a friend. Not a good enough friend, no doubt, but nothing was going to draw that friendship into doubt.
I guess it's inconceivable that a good friend might tell Harvard to stick it. Possibly Lessig's contract as a law professor prohibits him from practicing in Massachusetts or elsewhere. But the Tumblr post raises an interesting issue about a statement in Lessig's later article for Atlantic: "We will never know for sure why Aaron did what he did. Any motives disclosed to his attorneys must remain secret." This is a little disingenuous since from the Tumblr post and the statements linked to therein, Lessig knows what Swartz's motives were, possibly as his one-time attorney. In the Atlantic article he argues in lawyer-like fashion that the motives don't matter (because it's just a contract dispute supersized into a crime) but they actually probably do because they were an element of the government's case. In a published response to the Media Freedom blog last year Lessig says that "if the facts are true, even if the law is not clear, I, of course, believe the behavior is ethically wrong."
As Swartz's lawyer Lessig would have to put the best possible construction on the facts (however unpleasant or reprehensible) in order to beat the government's case. That's what he's doing now, in the Atlantic essay, even though the case has gone away. The Atlantic essay also doesn't mention MIT's involvement with the government's pursuit of Swartz (only JSTOR's declaration of "no harm no foul"). In the Tumblr post Lessig says MIT should be ashamed of its role but apparently the subsequent announcement of a whitewash, er, investigation, by that university took them off Lessig's blame radar.
Donald Wandrei's novels
Here's a puzzler: you have Centipede Press, a maker of collectible fantasy and SF books, retailing for $100 and up.
Four of their titles have been reviewed in depth on Amazon by Nguyên, who has written no other reviews except these.
Nguyên clearly isn't the publisher's nephew because the reviews are frank and mostly not too kind: Nguyên complains about typos, image quality, and even the press's choice of authors.
I was planning to write about the book above, containing the two novels written by Donald Wandrei -- a pulp writer of the 1930s, friend and correspondent of H.P. Lovecraft, and co-founder of the publisher Arkham House -- and discovered Nguyên's review, which I mostly agree with. Instead of a review, here are some sticky-notes to Nguyên's takedowns of Wandrei's novels (both written by Wandrei in the early 1930s, when he was in his early 20s):
Dead Titans, Waken! Parts of this resemble Lovecraft's classic tale "The Call of Cthulhu" but it's not fair to call it a knock-off. The first half presents a detective story (I liked these chapters best) centered on the finding of a mysterious green stone in an English cemetery and the calamities it causes, a middle section has a "Cthulhu"-esque news clipping montage describing the increasing agitation of savages and psychopaths the world over as they anticipate the return of monstrous stellar beings to Earth, and then the tone abruptly shifts to a rhapsodic diary where the previously clinical professor-protagonist talks about his deceased wife (for no apparent reason), his dreams, and his eventual sorcerous showdown with those astral Titans on Easter Island. The narrator is then flung 500,000 years into the future into a heavily-populated, urban, barely recognizable Earth, just in time for the Titans to return again.
Invisible Sun. Nguyên nails one problem with this well-written, never-before-published book, which is that its main character (clearly modeled on the author) is very unlikable. For a couple of hundred pages we share the childhood memories and late adolescent thoughts of this brilliant, poetic, obsessive, self-absorbed young jerk who, the first time he falls in love and is rejected, must [SPOILERS} kill the girl and himself, bringing his (and the reader's) agony to a merciful end. The book intriguingly chronicles the bohemian smart set in the US upper midwest during the Jazz Age. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Paris debaucheries have nothing on Wandrei's description of the "pyjama party" that unravels our narrator's life. This is real '60s swinger stuff, taking place in the 1920s. Wandrei's friends in the fantasy community (particularly August Derleth) were so critical of this book that Wandrei permanently shelved it. Structure-wise, it could use some tightening but for present-day readers, it is an intense document of a recluse-in-the-making who didn't kill himself, a man clearly aware of Modern literature but lacking a "circle" that could nurture this kind of writing.
Wandrei wrote Invisible Sun while living in New York City, and he worked for Dutton and other publishers, but he cites as literary inspirations Arthur Machen's The Hill of Dreams and the poetry of fellow fantasist Clark Ashton Smith, as opposed to Hemingway, Faulkner, et al. Wandrei also mentions Swinburne in the book and seems more generally drawn to the Romantic tradition than the strain of factual, existentialist-style writing emerging in the '20s, yet his book has changes of tone and narrative voice as self-conscious as some of Faulkner's experiments. Invisible Sun is modernist in its fragmented, kaleidoscopic style and intermittent use of stream of consciousness but outsider-ish in its lack of participation in a critical tradition where those disjunctions could be understood and evaluated. They seem to be ideas Wandrei plucked out of the air.
We read the fantasy pulps today for their flights of wild poetic description and links to the Gothic tradition and those are Wandrei's strong suits as a writer, with added increments of science-fiction rationalism making the narratives more plausible, a la Lovecraft. A memorable passage in Dead Titans describes a vault deep under that British cemetery where the narrator discovers an enormous heap of human bones. For close to a page, his scientist's eye keeps spotting older and older specimens of skeletons in the pile, and he takes us on a tour of superhuman observation going back hundreds of thousands of years before recorded time into the realms of various ape-like proto-humans, presumably all victims of sacrifice or self-sacrifice. This is a marvelously creepy way to depict ancient evils, dwarfing literate humanity's pitiful, striving seconds on the geological clock.
See also: earlier post on Wandrei and the Lovecraft copyrights.
lessig on swartz
Lawrence Lessig has a good rundown of the Aaron Swartz death-by-prosecutor case.
First, there are theories about what Swartz planned to do with the scholarly articles he downloaded from JSTOR but we don't really know.
Second, his motives don't ultimately matter because it was a civil contract case -- for breach of JSTOR's terms-of-service -- and JSTOR said it had no intention of suing him.
So how did federal prosecutors get involved, hounding this poor guy to death?
Lessig explains:
...American law does not typically make the breach of a contract a felony. Instead, contract law typically requires the complaining party to prove that it was actually harmed. No harm, no foul. And in this case, JSTOR -- the only plausible entity "harmed" by Aaron's acts -- pled "no foul." JSTOR did not want Swartz prosecuted. It settled any possible civil claims against Swartz with the simple promise that he return what he had downloaded. Swartz did. JSTOR went away.
But the government did not. In the weeks before his death, the government reaffirmed what they had been insisting upon for the 18 months before: jail, a felony conviction, and a bankrupting fine, or else Swartz was going to face a bankrupting trial.
This rule of American law is absurd -- especially in a world where prosecutors can't be trusted to make reasoned and proportionate judgments about who should be labeled a felon and who should not. A breach of contract is a breach of contract. It is not an act of treason. It is not a threat to the realm. [...]
Computer law is different, however, because Congress didn't really understand this "wild west" (as the network was called when Congress passed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in 1986), and because geeks make them uncomfortable. For 25 years, the CFAA has given federal prosecutors almost unbridled discretion to bully practically anyone using a computer network in ways the government doesn't like. It does that by essentially criminalizing the violations of a site's "terms of service" in combination with "obtain[ing] anything of" at least $5,000 in value. And even if in the vast majority of cases prosecutors exercised that discretion, well, in this case the abuse of that discretion has ended in tragedy. [...]
Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren has introduced a bill that would de-criminalize contract breaches under the CFAA. Likely it won't pass because the movie and music monopolists need their prosecutors to scare people away from downloading, sharing, and other non-criminal activities.