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March 11, 2023
I just posted at Psychology Today a brief and personal story about realizing that my relationship with a person I’ve seen only a relatively few times spread out across four decades constitutes an old and close friendship that matters a great means to me. This is a type of friendship I had not expected.
(Not a spoiler: The person is Jon Udell. He’s currently doing really interesting work at Steampipe.io.)
January 14, 2023
I typed my doctoral dissertation in 1978 on my last electric typewriter, a sturdy IBM Model B.
My soon-to-be wife was writing hers out long hand, which I was then typing up.
Then one day we took a chapter to a local typist who was using a Xerox word processor which was priced too high for grad students or for most offices. When I saw her correcting text, and cutting and pasting, my eyes bulged out like a Tex Avery wolf.
As soon as Kay-Pro II’s were available, I bought one from my cousin who had recently opened a computer store.
The moment I received it and turned it on, I got curious about how the characters made it to the screen, and became a writer about tech. In fact, I became a frequent contributor to the Pro-Files KayPro magazine, writing ‘splainers about the details of how these contraptions. worked.
I typed my wife’s dissertation on it — which was my justification for buying it — and the day when its power really hit her was when I used WordStar’s block move command to instantly swap sections 1 and 4 as her thesis advisor had suggested; she had unthinkingly assumed it meant I’d be retyping the entire chapter.
People noticed the deeper implications early on. E.g., Michael Heim, a fellow philosophy prof (which I had been, too), wrote a prescient book, Electric Language, in the early 1990s (I think) about the metaphysical implications of typing into an utterly malleable medium. David Levy wrote Scrolling Forward about the nature of documents in the Age of the PC. People like Frode Hegland are still writing about this and innovating in the text manipulation space.
A small observation I used to like to make around 1990 about the transformation that had already snuck into our culture: Before word processors, a document was a one of a kind piece of writing like a passport, a deed, or an historic map used by Napoleon; a document was tied to its material embodiment. Then the word processing folks needed a way to talk about anything you could write using bits, thus severing “documents” from their embodiment. Everything became a document as everything became a copy.
In any case, word processing profoundly changed not only how I write, but how I think, since I think by writing. Having a fluid medium lowers the cost of trying out ideas, but also makes it easy for me to change the structure of my thoughts, and since thinking is generally about connecting ideas, and those connections almost always assume a structure that changes their meaning — not just a linear scroll of one-liners — word processing is a crucial piece of “scaffolding” (in Clark and Chalmer‘s sense) for me and I suspect for most people.
In fact, I’ve come to recognize I am not a writer so much as a re-writer of my own words.
December 22, 2021
I do not like writing about the death of friends because it feels foolish to the point of arrogance to pretend to capture what we’ve lost. But I want to talk about Chris, so I will, without pretense of capturing anything at all…
I met Chris Locke, aka Rageboy (RB) aka Kat Herding, in the late 1990s. I was writing a newsletter (“Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization”). He was writing a newsletter (“Entropy Gradient Reversals”). Doc Searls was writing a newsletter (“Reality 2.0”); I can’t find the newsletter, so here’s his blog. Chris thought Doc and I would get along, so he introduced us. The three of us, along with Rick Levine, ended up co-writing The Cluetrain Manifesto, which did well enough to let me give myself permission to call myself a writer. The book changed my life, and much of its success was due to its voice which came straight from Chris.
Chris was a prodigiously talented writer. Here’s a sample of Chris flapping his wings; it may not be the best way of introducing his writing style, but I honestly don’t know what would be. Doc and I figure that he wrote the sample a few months after he was diagnosed with emphysema.
He loved the Internet deeply because it seemed to be an epochal opportunity to break the oppressiveness of industrial capitalism. This in turn mattered to him because he yearned for the release of the creativity and goodness and connection that he was sure every pair of manacled hands was reaching for. (Yes, he and the rest of the Internet hippies like me were wrong about that in important ways. Long discussion for another day.)
Chris was a complicated person. An autodidact. Publicly abrasive and fearless, and sometimes reckless. Privately and personally kind and modest. Undisciplined in some of his writing — a strength as well as a weakness — but highly disciplined in important aspects of his private life. As a self-termed gonzo writer, he likely would have liked to have been Hunter S. Thompson if Thompson hadn’t already taken the job.
Chris was wonderful to hang out with in person, but the Internet friends that gathered around him were a truly intimate social group, supporting him through his long illness, especially it seems to me the women. He and I fell out of touch, to my shame and regret. Nevertheless, his insights about the positive social nature of the Internet were not entirely wrong, at least for him. And his fierce, unrelenting yawp against the dark industrial forces that grind up so many good souls is piercing, needed, and true.
Chris was a character, fully formed yet becoming, his flaws an integral part of his being. I love him, owe him, and miss him.
Twitter: @KatHerding Facebook: @KatHerding
I just read Doc Searls’ superb post about Chris.
Please read Liz Locke’s comment below.
July 11, 2021
Although I am an agnostic, I used to think of myself as a functional atheist: I saw no compelling reason to believe in God (and thus am an agnostic), but I lived my life as if there is certainly no God.
Now I see that I got that backwards. I firmly remain an agnostic, but it turns out there are ways in which I have always experienced the world as if it were a divine creation. I don’t believe my experience is actually evidence either way, but I find it interesting that my agnostic belief has long masked my belief-like experience…
— Continued at Psychology Today
January 15, 2021
My mother, Sherry, died 29 years ago today. On this birthday she would have been 100.
Here’s what my sister-in-law, Meredith Sue Willis (“Sue” to us) posted on Facebook about her.
This would have been the 100th birthday of my mother-in-law, Sherry Weinberger, Andy and Ellen and David’s mom. She was a magnificent lady, a left-liberal activist, a folk guitarist and guitar teacher, a gifted friend. She used to put out a meal for twenty on the lake house porch, wearing hoop earrings a lavender and blue outfit, drinking a margarita and smoking a cigarette. Then the party started. She was what they call a balabusta in the home and an organizer in the neighborhood. I, like dozens of others, was fascinated and lifted up by her generosity and vivacity.
Sue captures much of my mother in those few details. You won’t be surprised to hear that Sue is a wonderful and respected novelist.
I am loathe to say more because I won’t get it right, but I’m going to anyway.
She was a wonderful mother who sacrificed much to devote herself to her children. That includes giving up on a career she had just begun at The New Republic, which was at that time the intellectual center of the Left.
She was so, so social, hospitable to all, making parties but never pushing her way to the center of them. She was happy to talk, and laugh, and wouldn’t say no to a little flirting. So many people thought they were very special to her. And they were.
And when we said she was a balabusta, I don’t think we meant it in its actual Yiddish meaning (“homemaker”) which I just learned, but rather as a ball-buster: She didn’t take shit from anyone, especially from men. In the early 1950s (I was born in 1950) she was well-aware of the inequality among the sexes (as we used to say), including in her own marriage.
As Sue notes, she taught folk guitar, and she did so in the 1950s before the big Folk Music Boom in the early ’60s when Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul, and Mary were stars, and there were actual folk singing shows like Hullabaloo and Shindig! on the national networks.
She cared about folk music because it gave literal voice to Black people and to all the workers whose lives are so hard that we avert our eyes. She cared about folk music because it brought the world’s cultures into our community and household. She cared about folk music because it gave her work while being a “homemaker” and mother. She cared about folk music because it gave her a little financial independence from Dad. She cared about folk music because she was a proficient guitarist with a beautiful voice.
She cared about many other things and people, but always with the same mix of personal connection, love of differences, and a commitment to a world in which there is more music, more love, and more justice.
PS: She hated Donald Trump from the moment he got the public’s eye. I wouldn’t know how to break it to her that the worst person in America actually became president.
September 25, 2020
When I was 10 and my next-door-neighbor, David Stolzenberg, was probably 13, we wrote a short story and submitted it to Boys’ Life, the magazine for Boy Scouts.
In an ancient box in a forgotten corner of our basement, I found the rejection letter. It is, I believe, my very first, kicking off a series of maybe a thousand. The tape marks in the corners suggest that I this pasted into a scrapbook at one point in my youth.
I don’t remember what the story was about. Maybe science fiction.
I do remember David well, though. He became a doctor, married, had children, and died in his thirties of cancer. I am still processing that.
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