Benjamn’s Musngs

I have let a
spider
loose in your
house old flame

and though
she will probably
have moths
for breakfast

Believe me
she makes a venom
stronger
than she needs

Lego sculptures worthy of note typically attest—if they attest to anything at all—to the sculptor’s hypermeticulous struggle against the jagged resolution of the bricks, as though realism were the aim and the medium an inconvenience. Not so for Mark Stimpson, who has recreated more than twenty famous photographs using scarcely more than a handful of bricks for each.

With my latest patch, since starting at Mozilla, I have deleted more lines of non-testing code than I have contributed:

    ~/dev/mozilla-central % diffstat < .hg/patches/bug-448564
    src/nsHTMLContentSink.cpp |  131 ++++++++++++----------------------------------
    test/Makefile.in          |    1 
    test/test_bug448564.html  |   24 ++++++++
    3 files changed, 60 insertions(+), 96 deletions(-)

By naïve standards of programming productivity, I ought to be fired.

I spent most of today consolidating old files from the various hard drives I’ve filled up over the last five years. I’m not done yet, but when I came across a file called “eulog.txt,” dated 30 November 2003, I felt the need to stop and share. I remember writing it. I had come home for the Thanksgiving holidays, nearly finished with my first quarter at Stanford, save for dead week and exams. I was excited for so many reasons—I was making new friends; I had elaborate plans for the CS106A programming contest; from what I could tell, the writing style I’d developed in high school was serving me well in all but one of my classes; I’d just begun dating someone. But I was equally exhausted. I fell asleep almost immediately in my childhood bed.

My parents went out of their way to let me sleep. They quietly unpacked my suitcase and washed my clothes. Then they put my clean clothes back in my suitcase and packed their own suitcases. By the time I stirred the following afternoon, the family minivan was ready to leave. “We’re going to Auburn,” my mother said. “We thought you might not be able to sleep if we told you last night.”

Because I had mentioned the programming contest to my parents, they had already contacted a friend of theirs who was willing to lend me a laptop. That laptop was a luxury in several ways: it kept me distracted during the four-hour drive to my Grandparents’ house, letting me smear my freshman enthusiasm for computer science across a series of events I was not ready to comprehend, and it also gave me a means of recording, of shaping and reshaping, my impressions of those events. After more than a few hard drive migrations and reformattings, the eulogy I wrote for my grandfather on the way home is still, somehow, thankfully, intact.

When I read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Juneteenth as a sophomore in high school, I imagined I could relate with the author’s struggle to produce a second novel (Juneteenth was edited together in 1999, five years after his death). I myself was terrified of losing any words I had written, so difficult did I find it to choose them well, and so I was filled with sympathy to learn that much of the Juneteenth manuscript had been consumed by a fire in 1967. I knew nothing of how a novelist starts to work, yet I became obsessed with the question of how one recovers from such a loss.

According to Ellison’s latest biographer, Stanford professor Arnold Rampersad (by way of the Times), my curiosity gave Ellison too much credit:

Tantalizing bits and pieces of the work in progress appeared from time to time, but Ellison was stuck. At parties he drank too much. He became a ponderous bore. He began telling inquiring reporters and friends that he had lost 365 pages of his manuscript in a house fire in Connecticut, a claim that Mr. Rampersad debunks.

It is this which frightens me: who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, Rampersad speaks for me?

I encourage you to follow my travels via twitter, if schadenfreude possesses you so. See right for the latest updates.

Additionally, if you call any time between 9AM and 6PM PST, June 26th through July 15th, you’ll almost certainly catch me on the road, a mere buttonpress away from answering your call, all too eager for human conversation(, adjective clause promising gratitude)*.