Looking Out To Sea

I read Jane Eyre and now I finally understand The Eyre Affair. The “original” ending in The Eyre Affair is not the real one, and the one which gets created is the real one (to some approximation: there are no time-travelling super-villains).

I was getting worried as the book went on because it seemed so much like the rubbish ending from The Eyre Affair was going to be the real one. That Jane really was going to India to be a missionary’s wife to the detestable St John Rivers. But she pulls it back from the brink.

So now that I’ve thoroughly spoiled the book for you, what’s it actually about? Well, it’s your standard fare of feisty young lass being brought up by an aunt who hates her. She’s sent off to school to have some docility and meekness beaten into her, which thankfully doesn’t work. Then there’s stuff about growing up and falling in love. It sounds bland in these terms but it’s pretty riveting when you’re inside it.

I picked up two books at last month’s book group but it’s taken me a wee while to get through this first one. It wasn’t the rollicking read I was hoping for.

Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs is about a group of programmers in the early 90s who leave Microsoft for a Silicon Valley startup. It’s populated by the usual nerdy stereotypes — bearded millionaires, basement dweebs, greasy marketing guys and social misfits.

microserf (day 99)
© Jenny Spadafora

Tragically, none of it seems remotely interesting. All these smart people say nothing very interesting at all. The computer game which they create is not very interesting. Nothing very interesting happens to them in the creation of the game. It reaches completion without any hitches or even much in the way of work, as far as I can tell.

Along the way the characters have uninteresting conversations about… well, anything that strikes their fancy. As long as it remains uncontroversial and shallow they’ll talk about it — TV series, junk food, roads and buildings. But if there’s anything to be gleaned from these conversations it’s probably wrong. Even the one topic of conversation you would assume the techies could manage, computers, remains strangely beyond them. Who could seriously say something like “your body is your hard drive” who knew what either was?

The book is written as a diary, interspersed with pages of stream-of-consciousness word association. Nothing else irritated me quite as much as the word-association pages, because nothing else was quite so explicity saying look how goddamn deeeeeep I am.

In the last dozen pages the shallow characters of these people is thrown into stark relief, as something truly emotional and affecting happens. This really just illustrates how pointless the previous couple of hundred pages was, as we really know nothing about these people other than their ability to make dull conversation.

If you want to compare this tedious nonsense to something that is at least a real diary of a real programmer at a real startup, Jamie Zawinski has published diary excerpts from the early days of Netscape (then Mosaic). He at least mentions the programming once in a while.

So, now that this disappointment is over I’m going to start something which has been recommended by more people, Jane Eyre. This will also help me to put another recent book into its proper context.

Mac users may (not) want to try this:

• Press and hold the ctrl-alt-cmd keys (the three left-most keys on the bottom row)
• Then repeatedly tap the full stop key

You may stop when your display looks a bit stupid. To reverse the process hold down the three modifiers and tap the comma key instead.

Now, tell me how you would manage all that by accident. Twice. And not notice that you were doing it either time until it was already done.

Once you’ve managed that, try dragging Mail.app from /Applications onto your desktop and doing a system update in a multi-user system. It is possible (though how, I am still unsure) to update the copy on your desktop while leaving an old copy elsewhere which other users will still try to use. The old version will cease to work if the OS update leaves it incompatible with the rest of the system.

All this is possible! All this can be yours!