Myths for hire.

Apologies for my absence – trust me when I (and my manuscripts) say, it’s been worth it.

Steph and I were given seasons 2 and 3 of Leverage for Christmas.  Leverage is one of our favorite shows – when we sit down to watch television, we’re looking for something thrilling and fun, which celebrates the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism, as the man says.  Leverage gives us that in spades.

Also, we get to watch David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, beat the crap out of people.

Confused?

This is David Foster Wallace, author of Infinite Jest, and generally amazing writer:

This is Eliot Spencer (played by Christian Kane), a thief whose job description consists of hitting people so hard they stay hit:

To repeat — Author:

Hitter:

To Steph and me, this resemblance is so eerie that we start to confuse the two.

For example, this is David Foster Wallace beating the crap out of some meth-heads who have kidnapped an innocent woman:

And this is Eliot Spencer from Leverage on Charlie Rose:

Now you all can share my confusion.

Business language is full of dead and zombie metaphors – dead metaphors being metaphors that have been used so long that all their initial descriptive power has been lost, and zombie metaphors being metaphors that died, and were resurrected as part of other metaphors.  ’Wheelhouse’ is a great example – it used to refer to the area that holds the steering wheel of a boat or ship, but then it was used to describe any kind of expertise, and over time it has become the foundation for a whole set of business-speak divorced from nautical imagery.

I’m wondering when language from tabletop RPGs, video games, and MassMOGs will invade the business lexicon – especially MassMOG language, which is all about real-time project management.  Relatively few people in business have ever seen a wheelhouse, but as the subscriber base for games like WoW and SWTOR grows, so to will the number of young knowledge workers who are at least conversant in the language of games.

Some first steps to a lexicon, beginning with :

Tank – Team member who performs vital operational tasks that involve bearing down and grinding at an objective.  Line of business.  Product development.  Design.

DPS – Team member who strikes-to-win; without Tanks they can’t even attempt many tasks, but without DPS, Tanks will grind through a lot of pain and without winning anything.  Sales is the most obvious example of this role.

Healer – Support.  Without them, Tanks and DPS spend a lot of time dying or gasping for breath.  Also serve as force multipliers.  Sales support.  Marketing.  IT.

Standing in the fire – An undesirable situation that has come about as a result of pursuing business goals.  If you’re trying to kill a dragon, you’ll sometimes find yourselves standing in the fire, and the goal is to minimize ‘time in the fire’ as much as possible.  Crunchtime is a good example.  Situations where the ROI of success has become too low, but the risks of failure have grown too high.

Training aggro – Working as primary tank on a project.

I’m sure I could think up more, but I need to apply a nose to a grindstone, and I’m afraid the nose in question belongs to me.  So – what language from games would *you* want to see in the workplace?

As often happens when I’m busy, video games have taken on a strange golden almost apocalyptic sheen: at some point in the indefinite future, most likely after the Revolution, I will have so much time on my hands that I will be able to spend 50 hours with a Playstation controller in hand, stabbing dragons with a sword.  Like most apocalypses, I don’t expect this will be anywhere near as enjoyable when it happens (if it happens) as it is in my imagination.  All those folks Raptured up to heaven will be in for an awful surprise when they look about and discover Rilke was right about angels: they’re terrifying.

Anyway, part of this gleaming future is the new Elder Scrolls game, about which I know nothing save that it’s provided the fuel for a nicely flowed rap tribute by Dan Bull.

I don’t have any real attachment to the subject matter, outside of this vaguely escahtological interest, but if you don’t see the appeal in a line like “I am the Dragonborn / Wearing a hat with badass horns,” then you may need a vacation.

I’ve recently ascended (temporarily) to the role of Editor-in-Chief at my Day Job, which means mostly that I spend a lot of time wading through business language and trying to hammer it into something like comprehensible English.  To encourage my edit-ees, I’ve been assembling a list of famous and helpful essays about good prose style.  Politics and the English Language is a good example.  One of my favorites in this genre for sheer snark and hilarity is Twain’s essay, Cooper’s Prose Style, on faults in the fiction of James Fenimore Cooper (the guy who wrote Last of the Mohicans), so, after re-reading it a couple times, I put it on the list.

Last night, though, as I edited my manuscript, at every other sentence I heard the mocking drawl of  Mark Twain’s ghost: “It is truly remarkable that Mister Gladstone’s characters can make such a deduction without any basis in logic or human reason.”   And so forth.  At least he was called me Mister Gladstone – a little respect from a restless spirit always makes one’s evening sweeter.

Vita may be brevis, but sometimes Ars feels especially Longa.

Change begins from the feet – give a dancer new shoes, and build a style of dancing around those shoes, and she develops muscles and new habits of motion.  So, a technical innovation like a pointe shoe can transform the world of dance – and create generations of dancers with similar bodies, musculature, and style.  This Atlantic piece, based on a presentation by a grad student at the University of Pennsylvania, has me spinning on the consequences of small changes.  How often do our little decisions, our simple inventions, give rise to structures the final impact of which we don’t remotely understand?

Pointed in this direction, as usual, by boingboing.

Last week, around Halloween, some of the Occupy Boston brigade stormed the state house in corpse makeup and torn clothes.  The next morning, walking to the subway, I saw the headline on the Metro: Zombies Storm State House.

Reality beggars fiction by transforming itself into fiction.  Someday the end of the world is going to arrive and everybody will believe it’s a marketing gimmick for the next Christopher Nolan movie.

William Gibson’s interview with the Paris Review is just about as thoughtful and complex a piece of work about writing novels – especially science fiction novels – as I’ve read.  I love his thoughts on tradecraft, and the following spot of self-awareness made me laugh out loud in the middle of my office:

GIBSON

Of course, for the characters themselves, cyberspace is nothing special—they use it for everything. But you don’t hear them say, Well, I’ve got to go into cyberspace to speak to my mother, or I’ve got to go to cyberspace to get the blueberry-pie recipe. That’s what it really is today—there are vicious thieves and artificial intelligence sharks and everything else out there, swimming in it, but we’re still talking to our mothers and exchanging blueberry-pie recipes and looking at porn and tweeting all the stuff we’re doing. Today I could write a version of Neuromancer where you’d see the quotidian naturalistic side, but it wouldn’t be science fiction. With the fairly limited tool kit I had in 1981, I wouldn’t have been able to do that, and, of course, I didn’t know what it would be like.

INTERVIEWER

What was needed that you were missing?

GIBSON

I didn’t have the emotional range. I could only create characters who have ­really, really super highs and super lows—no middle. It’s taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Let’s go rob a Chinese corporation—cool!

To all who sat down at midnight this morning and slammed out a couple thousand words of they-don’t-know-what: hail!

To all who have never written fiction before, for whom the community is a font of courage and strength: hail!

To all who return, year after year, with new projects and new dreams: hail!

To all who persevere to the end, and build something that makes them proud: hail!

And to all who, finishing, stick their project in the drawer for a few months and come back to it with clear mind and sober heart, to refine words into something grand: doubly hail!

–

As I mentioned last year around this time, I’ve never participated in National Novel Writing Month, because I’ve always had a project or two on the stove – generally a book half-finished I didn’t want to abandon.  This year, I have a new novel in halting progress, and a finished novel on deadline.  I’ll spend the month carving the latter into shape, which makes this more of an editing month than a writing month for me.  But I love the idea behind NaNoWriMo, and it’s been wonderful to watch it grow into a national (and even international) movement.  So, some words of encouragement and common cause.

Good luck to everyone this month!  May your hands and minds be nimble and quick.

No posts recently – I’ve been editing, which, combined with an intense work cycle and more fencing and a general feeling of burnout, has made it harder to press non-work-or-Work-related keys than usual.  But life’s good.  I read a fascinating book on the destruction of Bear Sterns, and now I’m working through a number of shorter books before I start Reamde – The Hunger Games at the moment, and I think Orxy and Crake and Stations of the Tide are up next.

Also, the title of the post?  That happened to me on the way to work.  I’ll let you know if this marks my entrance into a sinister world of magic and adventure where nothing is what it seems!

I’ve always been fascinated by connections between corporations.  They’re immaterial entities with a material footprint, and they wear many faces – it’s as if we live in a world populated by mythical monsters, only we’ve become so inured to them that we don’t notice any more.  A mystery novel I wrote a few years back had, as a major sub-theme, a visualization one character had built to model connections between a large number of corporations.

Turns out that a group of complexity theorists is due to publish a paper announcing that they’ve done the same for the transnational economy.  Their motivation – figure out how connected the world financial system really was.  Turns out, it’s very connected.

This story will be neat to watch…