There are various legends about drinking with the Immortals.  They typically involve a wanderer lost in the wilderness who is offered shelter by strange people.  He is brought close to the fire and given beer, or wine, or mead, depending on the provenance of the folktale.  As his clothes dry out, he is regaled by tales of ancient times and slowly comes to realize that his companions are not typical folk, but rather denizens from behind the veil.  He has fallen, through no merit of his own, into the midst of an enchanted world, and his deepest fear is not of the danger that is all around him, but rather that once the enchantment is disspelled, he will never be able to recover it again.

It occurred to me recently that I had such an experience about a year ago.  I was sent by my company to the Microsoft campus in Redmond to spend several days with the ASP.NET Team and other luminaries of the .NET world.

The names will mean nothing to most readers, but I had the opportunity to meet Bertrand LeRoy, Scott Guthrie, Eilon Lipton, and others to discuss the (then new) ASP.NET Ajax.  I had been painfully working through the technology for several months, and so found myself able to almost hold a conversation with these designers and developers.

On the final night of the event all the seminar attendees were taken to a local wine bar and had dinner.  As is my wont, I drank as much free wine as was poured into my glass, and began spinning computer yarns that became more and more disassociated from reality as the night wore on.  I'm sure I became rather boorish at some point, but the Microsoft developers listened politely, and in my own mind, of course, I was making brilliant conversation.

Even to those who know something of the people I was talking to, this might seem like no big deal.  I went drinking with colleagues in the same industry I am in -- so what.  But for me, it was as if I were suddenly introduced to the people who make the rain that nourishes my fields and the sunlight that warms my days.  Microsoft software simply appears as if by magic out of Redmond, and like millions of others, day in and day out, I dutifully learn and use the new technologies that come out of the software giant.  To find out that there are actually people who design the various tools I use, and build them, and debug them -- this is a bit difficult to conceive.

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf reflects on Charles Lamb's encounter with a dog-eared manuscript of one of Milton's poems, filled with lines scratched out and re-written, words selected and words discarded:

"Lamb then came to Oxbridge perhaps a hundred years ago. Certainly he wrote an essay-the name escapes me-about the manuscript of one of Milton's poems which he saw here. It was LYCIDAS perhaps, and Lamb wrote how it shocked him to think it possible that any word in LYCIDAS could have been different from what it is. To think of Milton changing the words in that poem seemed to him a sort of sacrilege."

My own discovery that the things of this world which I consider most solid and most real -- because they are so essential to my daily life -- could have been otherwise than they are, was a similar moment of shock, tinged with fear. 

In a moment of anxiety during this sweet symposium, I leaned over to the person immediately to my right and confided in him my strange reflections.  He laughed gently, and dismissed my drunken observations about the contingent nature of reality.  I later found out he was the twenty-three year old developer of the ASP.NET login control, used daily in web applications around the world, when he inquired of me whether I had ever used his control, and what I thought of it.

dasBlog is the engine I have been using over the past year on my web site.  Besides its low cost (free as beer), and a tendency to be a reliable blog engine, I also like it because it uses XML files rather than a database to persist information.  The release version has been running on the .NET 1.1 Framework for quite a long while, and despite a teaser tag on their home site insisting that the new 2.0 version would be released in a matter of weeks, dasBlog 2.0 has actually taken a much, much, longer time to come out.

But now the wait is over, and I plan to upgrade to the newest version sometime later tonight.  As sometimes happens, this may entail the complete collapse of the site and the loss of all prior blog posts -- but I'm keeping my fingers crossed and maintaining a positive attitude about it, for such is the price of progress.

Supposing that I am successful in migrating to the newest version, I don't plan to post a review of the qualities of the new platform since, in this case, the medium is very much the message.

Pronunciation: mäⁿ-'kA
Function: adjective
Etymology: French, from past participle of manquer to lack, fail, from Italian mancare, from manco lacking, left-handed, from Latin, having a crippled hand, probably from manus
: short of or frustrated in the fulfillment of one's aspirations or talents -- used postpositively <a poet manqué>

-- Merriam-Webster Online

During my perusal of the August 27th New Yorker, I came across the word manqué in two different articles, which struck me as noteworthy as I don't think I have come across this word in several years.  A quick search of the New Yorker archives indicates that besides these two recent uses,  one in a snarky article about Nicolas Sarkozy by Adam Gopnik:

"People close to Sarkozy like to say that he is an American manqué...."

 and the other in a fawning review of Michelangelo Antonioni's film opus by Anthony Lane:

"This is not to say that the Italian was a novelist manqué."

the word had been used in an April review of a Richard Gere film, and prior to that had not appeared in the pages of The New Yorker since September of last year, in a short story by Henry Roth.

Occasionally an unusual word achieves a brief period of fashionability due to its rarity, such as was the case with the term disestablishmentarianism, and its dopplegänger anti-disestablishmentarianism, a few years back.  Once it is recognized that such a word has become le mot juste in just too many instances, however, it quickly recedes back into obscurity, like boy bands and one hit wonders. 

Playing with The New Yorker archives reveals similarly suggestive, if not definitive, phenomenological gold about the way rare words become popular for a brief time, and then go underground for a year or more.  Try, for instance, a search on sartorial, zeitgeist, or pusillanimous.  A more interesting project, of course, would involve sifting through the archives of several high-brow publications and graphing the frequency of rare words.  What a memetic field day that would be.

Perhaps this is peculiar to me, but I feel sometimes that using a given word more than once in a blue moon is already an overuse.  Such is my feeling about swearing, which should be used judiciously in order to achieve maximum impact, as well as my feeling about obscure words.  Obscure words, used judiciously, demonstrate erudition and good taste.  Rare words, when abused, simply demonstrate boorishness, false eloquence, and a supercilious character, as well as a proclivity toward intellectual bullying.  That's fucked up.

My sense that the obscure should be kept obscure does not pertain to words alone.  In the early 90's I came across an anecdote while watching Star Trek: Next Generation called the frog and the scorpion, which was ascribed to Aesop.  In the version I heard, a scorpion asks a frog to take him across a river and after much deliberation and rationalization, the frog finally agrees.  Unfortunately, the scorpion does decide to sting the frog midstream, after all, and when the frog asks why, the scorpion replies, "It is my nature."  The punchline is that they both drown.

Oddly I came across the same anecdote again, a few weeks later while watching Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia deliver a speech on the Senate floor.  It probably was over an important international event, but I only remember the anecdote and no longer recall what the anecdote was meant to illustrate.  What was interesting about Senator Byrd's version is that he ascribed the story to Chaucer, rather than Aesop.

A while after that (was it months or years?) the anecdote came before me once again in another Star Trek franchise, Voyager, except this time it was described as a Native American myth and was told by the space-faring Indian Commander Chokote, and the protagonists were now a coyote and a scorpion rather than a frog and a scorpion.

A little research indicates that this particular anecdote may have originally been revived from its antique sleep in the movie The Crying Game, before it made its way through public policy papers, senate speeches, and finally into televised science fiction, where I came across it.

The first time I heard it, I found it charming. The second time, I thought it platitudinous.  The third time, I thought it was idiotic and vowed to boycott the next show, politician or foreign policy that attempted to leverage it in order to make a point.  Such is my nature.

Then again, I recall Benjamin Franklin's prescription that once one has found a word that works, it is unnecessary to go out of one's way to find synonyms in order simply to avoid overusing the word in a given piece of journalism or essay.  One should just reuse the word as often as one requires it -- which is common-sensical advice, I must admit.

I've been stuck in a dilemma that many bloggers find themselves in.  I have been busy at work and can't find the time to write anything.  And I'm not the only one.  Look at Steve Yegge's blog.  He hasn't written anything in about a year.  Of course he has a huge readership and I have almost none -- which tempts me to just leave the blog fallow for a while. 

At the same time, what's the point of paying ten dollars a month if I don't say something?  As this thought occurs to me every few days, I start on the five or six ideas I have for a blog entry, but typically these ideas grow out of my control, and I find that I can't start talking about a movie I like without at least discussing Aristotle's Prime Mover, and I don't want to do that without mentioning Heiddeger's analysis of final and efficient causes in the Essay Concerning Technology, and so on and so forth...  Clearly, pretension is my Achilles heel.

Nevertheless, I need to write something, if only to get those fornicating monkeys off the top of my main page.

I considered posting an observational post, as many people do.  Just a few words about how I have been listening to such and such a song so what do you think about it please comment? -- but this seemed a bit too pathetic.

Next, I thought of resorting to what many bloggers do when they run out of ideas.  They post about how they aren't going to write anything for a while, which both informs readers of the situation and furtively counts as an actual post.

And then I came across this surfing blog, of which I am very fond for sundry reasons.  At this blog, the authors occasionally post about something they plan to write about but haven't yet found the gumption to actually pen.  Perhaps the convention has been around for a while, but I have not come across it before.  It's a brilliant notion.  So here goes ... my first "trailers" post.

Aristotle In Love -- in which the author contrasts the notion of efficient causes in ancient and modern times, as well as the way in which the ancient notion still exists in the attempt to find the cause of public works in private inspiration, and how this reveals an on-going concern with teleology and the metaphysics of essences -- with a side-discussion of contemporary cinema.

Zombies III -- in which the author attempts to extend his exploration of this cultural phenomenon from the perspective of privacy, with a further discussion of different notions of privacy over the centuries, revolving primarily around Kant's treatment of the subject in his political essay What is the Enlightenment?

Hillary's Knee -- in which the author discusses the films of Eric Rohmer and his own fascination with the inner life of one of the most public figures in American culture.

Catch Twenty-Two -- in which the author interweaves a discussion of war novels with the problem of threading deadlocks in software programming.  Hilarity ensues.

Why the Phantom of the Opera Is So Cool and The Cure is are Overrated -- in which the author writes about some of the music he has recently been listening to.

Beth at Cup-Of-Coffey has a new entry about why she loves the Internet involving a video of hundreds of inmates at a filipino prison performing Michael Jackson's Thriller.  It's a testament to the human spirit, sort of, but more importantly it is a testament to the peculiar character of our modern world in which wonder can be inspired simply by clicking a link.

The New Yorker has an article about Bonobo apes -- also known as hippie apes due to their gentle natures, compared to humans and chimps, as well as their sexual promiscuity -- in which one of the leading researchers in the field comments, regarding field work:

“You always think there’s going to be something round the next bend, but there never is.”

My experience this week on the web has been quite the opposite.  The Internet is much better than I have been led to believe, and here are a few reasons why.

Conrad H. Roth, over at Varieties of Unreligious Experience, has a film-review of the 1966 documentary Africa Addio unlike any film review I have ever read.  The film itself is a disturbing and violent portrayal of the chaos of post-colonial Africa, but Conrad's explanation and recommendation of the film raises it to the level of a dark portrayal of the human condition.  Conrad brings up the petite-tyrant Roger Ebert's review, summed up in the words 'brutal, dishonest, racist', only to convince us not only of Ebert's smallness of character but also how this basically accurate description of Africa Addio is part of what makes the movie great.  It is all this and more.

The Polyglot Vegetarian, who hadn't posted anything since April, has finally blogged about the Potato.  PV has picked out a special niche in the blogosphere -- he blogs eruditely about veggies, giving their linguistic and social history.  He makes the lowly noble.

If you liked The Da Vinci Code, or if you happened to prefer the original version by Baigent and Leigh, then you will certainly enjoy Raminagrobis's explanation of "the much and justly maligned" Claude-Sosthène Grasset d'Orcet's theories about how to decode Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel through the discovery of the proper uses of punning.

Finally, the Beta 2 of Visual Studio 2008 has just be released for download, as explained on Scott Guthrie's blog.  In certain corners of the world, this is a fairly momentous event, but falling in such an interesting week, it is a bit underwhelming for me against the backdrop of dancing prisoners, darkest Africa, the bonobo, the potato, and the giant.