Memoir

Carol and I had lunch today at the Black Bear Cafe, and while working on my canonical half Carson Club (a ham-and-swiss with bacon; I tell ’em to hold the tomatoes) the muzak played “Down Under” by Men At Work. I recalled that, back in (presumably) 1982, when the song hit #1 here, I missed an opportunity to actually try Vegemite, famously mentioned in the song. We lived in Rochester, NY at the time, where I was writing data validation software for Xerox. At one of the Rochester Science Fact and Fiction Association potlucks, somebody had brought a jar of vegemite and put it out in a bowl for us to try. I looked at it with some interest, but Alice Insley (now Bentley) leaned over and said “Don’t. It’s awful.” (At least I think it was Alice, but sheesh, that was 27 years ago!)

So I passed on Vegemite, and it and I have not crossed paths at all in the ensuing years. Reading about the famous brown beer-yeast goop on Wikipedia made me ponder what other opportunities I have missed in my life. One was Microsoft stock: I told my broker to buy some when MS went public in 1986, and she didn’t, telling me later that she “couldn’t find any.” Bummer. (I’d be worth about $20M now if she had.) I passed on a very good job right out of college, working as a tech editor for an orthopedic surgery magazine associated with the Northwestern University medical school. It involved scrubbing up and observing surgeries right there in the operating room, and then documenting the procedures that they were developing at the time. The job paid $12.5K/year, which was a fortune for a liberal arts grad during the 1974 recession. I took a job performing surgeries on Xerox machines instead, for about 35% less money. Hey, I have a touchy stomach. Nothing like explosive vomiting in the operating room, eh? But I could have gotten into publishing eleven years sooner than I eventually did.

That’s about it. Keith and I talked vaguely about starting a magazine called Digital Camera Techniques back when digital cameras were still mighty exotic (I think 1995 or 1996) and decided not to. Shame. That might have been fun, but whether I could have masterminded two magazines simultaneously was a serious question. A digital camera mag was not a sure thing, either–one can be too far ahead of the curve as easily as too far behind it.

Life did not offer me a great many interesting opportunities, and those that it did offer I mostly took: Carol, Clarion, Ziff-Davis, Borland, and Keith’s famous interjection, “Hey, we could publish our own damned magazine!” I had a chance to resurrect Carl & Jerry, and I did. Mostly I was careful, and kept a low profile compared to some of my gonzo friends.

It’s a family tradition. In late 1951, when my father was about to graduate from engineering school, he was offered a job with an oil company in downtown Caracas, Venezuela. He wanted to go, but my mother was sure that Venezuela was nothing but steaming jungle. (She was a nurse; I suspect she was worried about malaria, etc.) I was born less than a year later. What would life have been like had I spent my first ten years in South America? I’d speak fluent Spanish now. I’d have seen the Magellanic Clouds. Beyond that, who knows? There are linear lives, and fractal lives. I have instinctively chosen a linear life. I’m good with that–but sometimes it makes ya wonder…

Carol and I got up at 3:30 AM last night and found the skies crystal clear, so we hauled out onto the back deck in our fuzzy robes (along with a couple of doubtless-puzzled bichons) sat down in two of the patio chairs, and leaned back, facing generally east. The Perseids did not disappoint; in forty minutes we saw twenty or so, and most of them were quite bright. We didn't have access to the whole sky with the house behind us, so I'm sure we missed quite a few. Still, the count is about in line with what we've seen in past years, and for Carol and me (and the Perseids) there have been a lot of past years.

In fact, I'm pretty sure we watched them from her back yard two weeks after we met in 1969, though not at three in the morning. No matter. I see meteors almost any time I spend more than a minute or two scanning the skies, even from as light-befouled a place as the close-in Chicago suburbs. One reason Carol came to love as scruffy and odd a specimen as me was that I was willing to talk science with her. I pointed out the constellations to her, and dragged my junkbox telescope out into her driveway to show her the moons of Jupiter. Over the years, the Perseids have become something of a tradition for us.

I have a talent for pastiche, and when I was young it was almost a compulsion: If I read enough of something I almost always tried to imitate it, with greater or lesser success. During my sophomore year in the English Literature program at De Paul I was taking one damned poetry course after another, so it was inevitable that I would try my hand at poetry. During my Robert Frost period (which was roughly the last three weeks of April, 1972) I penned a lot of metered drivel in down-home country dialect. One effort was a sonnet, just so I could say I had written a sonnet. Even though I was a New Formalist long before there was a New Formalism, I knew the Prime Directive of modern poetry (Thou Shalt Not Rhyme) and withheld any rhyme until the final couplet. I gave the poem to Carol the night we watched the Perseids from my parents' summer home at Third Lake, Illinois:

Perseid

I saw a shooting star last night, you see.
It bothered me to think that golden streak
That split the sky half-raw and hung awhile
As though to rub the wound with pale white salt
Was washed clean-gone by night's soft-rushing flood
In just the time you'd take to poke the coals.
You know, they say it's just a grain of sand
So small you'd never see it in your cup
Once all the tea was gone. I wonder now
What made God give a speck like that such spunk
While here I balk and eye our road so roundly…

You know, I think I'd not so fear the night
If, going out, I knew I'd make such light.

Carol read it appreciatively (as she always did, irrespective of what it was I had handed her) and then, giving me a peck on the check, asked, “Don't sonnets have 14 lines?”

“Well, sure!” I said, taking the sheet back from her hands. A quick count reassured me that it had…13 lines. Damn.

Ever since then, I've been famous around the house as The Guy Who Writes 13-Line Sonnets. Clearly, rhyme was good for something—like helping numerically illiterate poets keep track of the number of lines they were producing. After that, I returned to my more freeform e. e. cummings period (which had been the first three weeks of May, 1972) until I found the wisdom to understand that I was a better astronomer than I was a poet. I've stopped writing poems, but the Perseids—heh, like Carol and me, that's forever.

We were just BSing a couple of nights ago over wine and beers at Julie's christening, and LOLCats came up. I'm not a regular reader of LOLCats, but I've seen it enough to get a sense for the genre, and the addition of a little zinfandel reminded me that this is not a new thing.

Nossir. I remember Monster Cards.

Back in 1961 or 1962, a fad was raging in my corner of the Immaculate Conception grade school playground: Monster cards. These were a little like baseball cards (and about the same size) but instead of sports heroes, they had stills from old monster movies, with a silly caption at the bottom. This was in plain English and not LOLCats-speak (which itself is a parody of IM shorthand) else the card at left would be captioned PUT ME ON UR FRENZ LIST? On the flipside was a drawing of a ghost over a joke calculated to make fourth-graders laugh. (As you might imagine, the bar was not very high.) The whole thing was wrapped up in plastic with a card-sized rectangle of some tepid and invariably stale bubble gum. My friends were all collecting them, and even though I spent my money on Hi-Flier kites and Tom Swift books rather than monster cards or comics, I flipped through my friends' stacks, grinning at some and rolling my eyes at others.

There were two types that I remember, both available from Perlen Drugs at the corner of Canfield and Talcott. The larger cards had “Spook Stories” printed on the back and were copyrighted by Universal Films. These had the most famous and recognizable monsters: Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and the Wolfman. The jokes on the back were sometimes even clever. The smaller cards had “Monster Laffs” printed on the back over the jokes (which were invariably stupid and rarely funny) and were printed in sheets of three with bad perfs between them. My duller friends who didn't catch on to folding at the perfs before separating them often had to Scotch tape their cards back together after inadvertently ripping them in half. These smaller cards (which collectors have dubbed “Monster Midgees”) were copyrighted by cheapo fright house American International Films, and apart from the several incarnations of the She Creature and the memorable Colossal Beast, showed monsters that few of us had ever seen, even with Chicago Channel 7's perpetual scraping of the bottom of the monster movie barrel. Mostly they were hokey-looking paper mache alien things or brains with eyes, over even hokier (and generally un-funny) captions.

I'm surprised at how little there is online today about monster cards, at least the ones that I recall. The genre continued long after I left grade school, mutating as it went, but I ignored them because they dropped the humor. The legendary Mars Attacks! cards were in no way funny; in fact, they were a gruesome comic book presented one frame at a time. (I wonder sometimes if they were a poke in the eye of the Comics Code Authority.) Cards from mid-60s TV series like The Outer Limits and Star Trek had stills from the shows but no funny captions and no jokes—and sheesh, guys, I had already seen the TV shows. I half-expected full indices of the cards and their captions online, but apart from a few fan pages and pictures of cards for sale on eBay, they've mostly been forgotten. “Caption humor” seemed to go into eclipse for forty years, not to emerge until the Internet Age and LOLCats. I guess everything comes back eventually. I used to wear purple bell-bottoms and worse in the late 60s and early 70s. Are they next?

To the eternal memory of Frank W. Duntemann (1922-1978), engineer, who said, “When you build 'em right, they fly.”

You did. And I do.

I know I'm older than dirt. What still boggles me a little to think on is that I'm older than…blogging. Yes indeedy: Ten years ago today, I wrote the first entry for something I called VDM Diary. (VDM, of course, being Visual Developer Magazine, which I owned and edited until we shut it down in early 2000.) I had no idea what I was doing, and certainly had no idea that what I was doing would soon become a global phenomenon that would put whole newspapers in their graves and change the shape of information dissemination.

It's amusing to go scanning around the Web to read the heated arguments about who invented blogging. I'll pull an Al Gore here and say that I did. So did a number of other people. It's not like it's rocket science to take a literary form that goes back to at least 1660 and put it…on a Web server. Oh, the genius!

Actually, I'm even more like Al Gore in that I didn't invent blogging—I just like to say that I did. In truth, Lisa Marie Hafeli did, and she simply pestered me into implementing it. Lisa was my ad sales rep at VDM, and she wanted me to figure out how to get more product mentions associated with the magazine, so that she could get a little more credit with developer tools companies. We only had so many pages for reviews and news releases, but…how about talking about products online? How about just writing a little something every day or two about a product?

I remember her bringing up the idea at the beginning of 1998, and I thought about it for months before giving it a try. I had never kept a paper diary, though I wrote a lot of email and posted on forums, so I was used to writing in short pithy snippets. I was leery of pandering to advertisers, so I tried hard to avoid the appearance of just doing VDM Diary to work in product mentions. It was by intention that I sprinkled in little weirdnesses like the FBI's database of UFO sightings (June 17, 1998) and odd observations from my own work in technology, like how Word 97 irritatingly autoconverted the sequence “:)” to a smiley icon. I did the product mentions, but they didn't seem to make much difference in our ad sales efforts. So I branched out, adding personal observations on my own life, and by the middle of 1999 I was thoroughly hooked. Alas, that was about the time that VDM began imploding, and I was depressed for a solid year after Coriolis shuttered the magazine. (Coriolis itself didn't last much longer.) But even though I no longer had a magazine, by the middle of 2000 I re-established a Web diary on my own domain (duntemann.com) and have been doing it ever since.

ContraPositive is not the oldest blog still posting regularly. I think Lileks' Daily Bleat (which goes back to early 1997) has that honor, though if you know of any older ones still posting, please send a pointer. Bob Thompson's Daynotes Journal started up less than two weeks after Contra did, and is still going strong. Jerry Pournelle has been doing something with regular postings on his Web site for a very long time, but it's not organized like a diary, and very hard to figure out where everything is and how long it's been there. (This doesn't mean it's not worth reading.)

Interestingly, I've been told by a couple of people that what I do is not really a blog, and is actually more like a daily newspaper column. There's something to that. When I was a kid, I used to admire writers like Jack Mabley and Bert Bacharach (not his composer/musician son Burt) who wrote daily columns in the local newspapers. (Jack Mabley wrote a blog for a time when he was 90, until he passed away in 2006.) The energy that sustains Contra comes from a conviction learned from far better writers than I (like Gene Wolfe) that no matter what else they might do, writers should write something coherent every day. I usually manage that, though understand that I write on a lot of different projects, of which Contra is only one. Doing it daily isn't difficult. Being coherent, now, well…

In the last year or so, I've been doing fewer Contra posts and longer ones, and gathering shorter items (usually focusing on links) up into regular Odd Lots posts. I'm trying not to split my concentration too many ways on any given day (context changes are costly!) and if I'm working intensely on something like Degunking Essentials or Old Catholics, I tend not to work on Contra that same day. I have bookmark and email folders for items to address later on, and periodically go through it, deleting or archiving items once I've covered them here. The system works, and I'll use it until I think of something better.

As I've said here in a number of contexts, writing benefits the writer as well as the reader. It's good practice, it's discipline, it dissipates tension, and it's one way to stay current in the world. Having something coherent to say requires that you live an attentive life and remain curious about many different things, and the best way to learn something yourself is to explain it to someone else. Contra works for me. I hope it works for you. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned.