That simple loop

Richard Powers, The Echo Maker:

To be awake and know: already awful. To be awake, know, and remember: unbearable. Against the triple curse, Weber could make out only one consolation. Some part of us could model some other modeler. And out of that simple loop came all love and culture, the ridiculous overflow of gifts, each one a frantic proof that I was not it... We had no home, no whole to come back to. The self spread thin on everything it looked at, changed by every ray of the changing light. But if nothing inside was ever fully us, at least some part of us was loose, in the run of others, trading in all else. Someone else's circuits circled through ours.

I finished this one today and now look forward to reading all of the posts and roundtable discussions that followed on the heels of its release. (Another thing I love about litblogs--the discussion is never over.)

Turning the last page on a Powers novel is an immensely satisfying feeling--as if the experience has left the soul searched, acknowledged, and accepted in some indefinable (yet wholly necessary) way. I've only read three of his novels--wonderful to know that there is still so much of his work left to discover.

Beautiful code

I've been interested in flipping (or should I say clicking?) through this book and have enjoyed reading its companion website. Most of it is completely foreign to me, but I am fascinated by the theory behind it (which is actually one of the reasons I love reading Richard Powers).

Has anyone read it? What did you think?

Wonderful

Scott Esposito on Richard Powers:

But if in Powers we lose a sense of mystery, we gain a sense of wonder. One of the most striking aspects of a Powers novel is the sense of genuine amazement at the natural world that the reader is left with. This is no small achievement tn an era in which it is often remarked that space shuttle flights are no longer televised because they have become so commonplace, so banal. Powers reveals a very real, very necessary awe at science and nature. This is no preachy exercise, no citing of facts and figures; it is something that is communicated through the stories and metaphors, something that takes hold of you as you read without Powers needing to lay it out for you. It is humbling, which I believe is exactly Powers's point, to re-instill a needed sense of humility as humans gain truly God-like powers over their environment. This is something that neither Pynchon nor DeLillo does, something I think only a Richard Powers could do.

Excellent observation. I think this is one of the reasons I enjoy his novels so much--I come away with a very Chestertonian sense of wonder.

Green

My last post was about Jealousy, but this one is about envy.

Today marks the beginning of the Echo Maker Roundtable #1 over at Ed's. Looks like it's going to turn out to be an incredible discussion, with Powers himself joining in on Friday.

Also, the Litblog Co-op has chosen their Autumn selection (which looks fascinating, as ever).

I'm going to do my best to bury myself in what I still have to read here rather than complaining about what I'm missing... At least I'll have a chance to read these when I fly north for a visit in December!

Description over object?

More from Plowing the Dark on programming and language:

Software is the final victory of description over thing.

He held her declaration in midair, turning it over. With software, the thing and its description are one and the same. Any item that you can learn how to say, you can make, pretty much out of raw syntax.

Saying and making...

...are one another's night jobs.

Wonder and disgust vied for control of her voice. So that's why we want to do everything over again in software. Why we all want to move there.

Well, it's no worse than words, really.

What are you talking about? It's a lot worse than words. It's words on steroids. Words are safe exactly because they're so fuzzy. Deniable near-misses. Give them teeth, and every teenaged thing that you ever regretted saying is out there drunk behind the wheel of the Chevy.

Word made flesh?

Fellow blogger Robert wonders about the similarities between poetry and programming languages:

Both require precision, and poetry usually also involves some degree of linguistic compactness. Also, just as software executes within the context of an operating system, poetry likewise "executes" within the psyche of the reader. A few lines in either form can have a profound impact, sending memory pointers in myriad directions.

This immediately jumped out at me because today I read a conversation between Steve and Adie in Powers' Plowing the Dark that went something like this:

I'm telling you, writing my first subroutine was...like causing huge chunks of unravished bride to rise up, just by singing to her. A good, polished program was everything I thought poetry was supposed to be.

Stevie. You must have had a very peculiar idea of what poetry was supposed to be.

No different than any person who ever wrote it. I was going to get inside of reality and extract its essence, write down on paper the magic metrical words that, read aloud, would do their open sesame.

She looked at the screen, ready to deny everything. But she nodded. The vital formula. Sympathetic spells. Life's nail clippings. The impression of a body in bed.

He raced on, not hearing her. There was this kid poet, and he wrote and wrote. He rubbed the magic lamp until the poetic self-abuse police threatened to come impound him. And still nothing happened. The incantation seemed to be defective. Then they put the kid in front of this terminal and initiated him into the secret syntax. A few simple rules, combined in a few elegant ways, and blamm-o. The thing works. It runs. The world does move. The rules churn. The descriptions step their way through their own internal logic. The lines of code set more switches, change more states. Commands produce results.

The word made flesh.

Spiegel flinched. Don't mock me.

I'm not mocking.

Because that's exactly what it is. It doesn't matter if you're only talking about a formula for compound interest plugged into a general ledger program. Change any variable and the executing universe alters. Move it to the left, increment it by a quarter precent, and the new result gets spit out whole. It gives one a tremendous feeling of--

Power?

Perfectibility. Coding possessed a kind of reality check that sestinas never had. A program either worked or it didn't, and if it didn't work, it was wrong. Period. Something magnificent to that.

I made a lot of wrong paintings in my life. Believe me. And I didn't need any machine to tell me they were wrong.

But you never knew, completely, when you made a right one.

Adie wrapped her self-indicting silence around her like a shawl.

It's...funny, Spiegel went on. Art made all this happen, you know. The whole digital age. Music did it. Hollerith got his idea for the punched data card from the player piano. From the Jacquard tapestry loom. [...] The rules, the operators? They're completely open-ended. Extensible. Whatever you can imagine, they can build. Think of it: the universal behavior machine, able to build any gadget that crossed the human mind. Not a tool. The ultimate medium.

Although I agree with Adie (and sestinas were never meant to offer "reality check"s), I admit that it's an interesting idea...albeit a potentially dangerous one.

Back to life

Amid the flurry of visits of the past month, my sister brought books (!), including the one I hated to leave behind, Plowing the Dark. After what feels like years, I was able to do nothing but sit in a café tonight and lose myself in words...

"You see? You see? If we can make these...scratch lines come to life, then life is not just some outside thing that happens to us. It's something we come into and make."

(Read about Powers' recent novel in Bookforum.)