Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

You hearin’ me, Horton?

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Some people have told me that they like to read the blog, but they forget it exists. Fair enough. The tubes of the Internets are big.

To celebrate the New Year, by acknowledging that I need to learn something new every day, I have added new functions to the blog.

Now you can now get all this metaphorical goodness delivered right to your e-mail in-box, automatically, each time I post. [Sound of riotous applause.]

Subscribe to Metaphor by e-mail.  

Maybe you are someone, like me, who uses a feed reader to subscribe to blogs. Metaphor can do that too.

Subscribe to Metaphor using a reader.

You say you’d like to decide later? Cool. There are links to subscribe in the right column, and in the footer of the page. They look like this.

Thank you for your support. 

Christmas tradegy narrowly averted

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Well, I’m back from my 11 day trip to visit my brother, sister-in-law (SIL), and little nephew way up yonder in northern California. A fine time was had by all. Santa showed up right on schedule and, as always, brought me some wonderful gifts despite my intransigent and glaring presence on the Naughty list. Nephew T, who’s into dinosaurs these days, got enough toy ones to fill the La Brea Tar Pits. He’s on the Good list, no doubt about it.

My Bro, SIL and I rang in the new year in San Francisco, joining 8000 fellow deadheads and motley hoopleheads at a marathon show by 2 former members of the Grateful Dead – Phil Lesh and Bob Weir – and their band.

[Incidentally, for those new to Metaphor, hooplehead is a term often used in the HBO series Deadwood. Like this.

It means a member of the ignorant masses, an uneducated commoner, an idiot, riffraff, the madding crowd, the great unwashed. I’m certain no such persons would – or even could – read this noteworthy compendium.]

The show was great, and an excellent way to traverse the terminal cusp of the year. They played many of our old favorite Dead tunes, did a lot of cool psychedelic improvisational jam, and even covered Pink Floyd.

Here’s a little video I shot that night. It’s just a few seconds, shot in semi-darkness with a phone, 50 feet above the stage. But somehow, for me, it captures a moment of the energy.

There was one tragedy narrowly averted during our visit. On the afternoon of December 29, a few of us were sitting at the dining table. I was eating lunch, Mom was talking on the phone, and nephew T was doing something I don’t remember. The chandelier above the table fell; without warning, as is usually the case with such events. After all, if there had been some warning I would have moved my laptop.

That’s no flimsy fixture, kids. That’s real iron and leaded glass. And it missed the cover/monitor of the computer by an inch on 2 sides. … Wham! …  There are little ceramic animals on the other sideof the light, which T made and was showing to his Nana. And those photo coasters are made of glass. Thanks to God that it didn’t smash my machine or anything on the table. It just fell in the midst of all our stuff, hurt no one, and broke nothing. It just put a decisive dent in the hardwood table, as a reminder that life’s justice is inscrutable and sets its own terms. And as you can see, the chandelier remained lit.

Mom does the crosswords, by the way. I haven’t cared for them since high school, when some teachers used them for homework exercises. Blech.

the chapbook tradition

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“In these straitened times, how about taking a leaf out of the Victorians’ book and presenting friends and family with pamphlets of our own literary endeavours during the festive season?”

— Books | guardian.co.uk.

This article points out the long and storied tradition of giving handmade chapbooks as Christmas gifts. Is it seeing a modern resurgence? Perhaps. Part of me hopes so. What’s nicer than getting several hours of peace, alone with words and your imagination? Especially in winter. A cup of tea, a little escape from the world, a psychic connection to someone else.

But as a writer, I caution against it, unless you’re one of those rare people who can give and let go, without investment in feedback. (I’m getting there, slowly.)

Or maybe you just have to be a better writer than I am. You see, I tried this myself a couple of years ago, and never heard back – for good or ill – from anyone. I had forgotten the old maxim that a writer’s family and close friends are not necessarily his/her audience.

So if you enjoy sitting by the tree on Christmas morn and hearing loved ones exclaim, “Oh wonderful! It’s just what I wanted!” then you’re best off getting them just what they want. Or at least something that makes that coveted response a little easier to affect. … Like socks.

That being said, if you have received such a gift from a creative giver this Christmas, read it soon, for crying in the dirt. Then give them a call. Writing is a labor of love and it’s hard to do; at least as hard as shopping.

learning to count to 10

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Let’s clear something up, OK? This morning, on the radio, they were playing songs from Rolling Stone’s top songs of the decade, because the decade is supposedly coming to an end. Baloney.

When we started the new century and the new millennium , some people wanted to do that in the year 2000. Wrong-o. 

When we count things, we start with one thing, not zero things. When we count 10 things, we start with 1 things and end with 10 things.

The first century started with the year 1 and ended with the year 100. The 20th Century started with 1901 and ended with 2000. The 21st Century – and the 3rd millennium – started in 2001 and will end with a year ending with a zero.

The current decade is 2001 – 2010.  Ten years, not nine. So we have one more year to go in this decade. Do not, for the sake of sense and sanity allow anyone to tell you otherwise.

Here is a table of the centuries, going back to Christ, plus some decades.

.
 Century First Year Last year
.
 1 1 100
.
 2 101 200
.
 3 201 300
.
 4 301 400
.
 5 401 500
.
 6 501 600
.
 7 601 700
.
 8 701 800
.
 9 801 900
.
 10 901 1000
.
 11 1001 1100
.
 12 1101 1200
.
 13 1201 1300
.
 14 1301 1400
.
 15 1401 1500
.
 16 1501 1600
.
 17 1601 1700
.
 18 1701 1800
.
 19 1801 1900
.
 20 1901 2000
.
 21 2001 2100
.
.
 Decade First Year Last Year
.
 Last 1991 2000
.
 Current 2001 2010
.
 Next 2011 2020

departure

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Today’s Thought of the Day in my e-mail is a departure from the usual literary vein:

Any advertisement in public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It belongs to you. It’s yours to take, re-arrange, and re-use. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. – Banksy, street artist (b. 1974)

I like that. It’s something to think about.

Today it’s time for me to withdraw into my Christmas retreat for a few days.

God bless, breathe deep, and try not to overeat.

Office Workspace: right for a writer?

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Last week, I shared my incipient explorations of newer ways to store and access one’s writing projects. Specifically, I was looking at Microsoft’s Office Workspace. I said:

Office Live Workspace lets you keep your whole project in The Cloud, open it on any computer with Office installed, save it back to the Cloud, and go on with your happy day. No syncing needed, is my point.

I’ve been working with it more, and I’ve learned that what I said was true, but not complete information. I don’t think I’ll be using Workspace for my daily writing, and I’ll explain why.

First Some Background

If you use a single computer, you keep your documents there, work there, and hopefully you back up copies to a CD, separate drive, or online storage.

If you use two computers, as I do, you want them to have the same documents. You don’t want to open a story or something on your laptop, just to realize that the newer version is on the computer at home. So you have to keep them synced. There are ways to do that, either manually—which is difficult—or using a special program on both computers, or on a flash drive. I like Microsoft’s Windows Live Sync for this, though it does require a lot of attention.

The trend in technology now is to keep projects on neither computer, and not on a physical storage like a flash drive, but on the Internet. You keep your work out there – in The Cloud – work on it there, then leave it there.

Online applications like Google Docs are great for this, but in my opinion you can’t write a novel on Google Docs. It works well for small documents such as rough drafts, lists, spreadsheets, etc. But it’s not as robust as a full scale program like MS Word. And Office Workspace lets me save my project there, open it in Word, work using all of Word’s features, then save out there again.

This process should not be confused with online storage sites like the late Yahoo Briefcase. That required me to download the saved file, do my work on my hard drive, then upload the new version when I finished. That’s not actually working online.

So I was happy to find Workspace. And today I did my first field test – away from the stable and fast Internet and Wi-Fi in my home – as I met with a friend to discuss our projects over coffee.

My Field Test 

Having connected via customer wi-fi, I opened my documents from Workspace in MS Word and we discussed the project. Soon I saved the important changes, and we talked on. As our meeting drew near its end, I made a couple of insignificant changes and hit Save again. No dice. I was no longer connected to the Internet.

I tried to save it to my hard drive, but that didn’t work. When I lost connection, I lost access to the document that was really on a server, not on my computer. It didn’t disappear, so I could see it, but I couldn’t save it.

Sure I could have copied my text from the unsaved file, pasted it into a new text file, and saved that. But that’s not the point, is it? The point is that Cloud Computing requires a stable connection to the Internet, and the Coffeehouse assclowns had disconnected me without so much as a bronx cheer.

(A page appeared in my browser, saying the coffeehouse was thoughtfully putting me on a time-out, so I could get some more coffee, and rejoin the human race. Or something to that effect. Very cute. I think that it’s time for people who provide connectivity to take their role a little more seriously. I’m workin’ here, don’t fool with me if you want me back.)

None of this points to shortcomings of Office Workspace. It worked fine. But because the coffeehouse put me on a time out while I had documents open, I had to finish my notes of the meeting today by hand. I didn’t lose anything critical, but I easily could have.

Findings

  1. Office Workspace is very cool. I love the clean layout, the view and comments functions, etc. And the fact that it’s Microsoft means it’s compatible with the core applications I use every day.
  2. One of its main features is project sharing and collaboration, which I would rarely use.
    Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible,
    early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.*
  3. It would also be a good place to keep backup files. There’s 5GB of storage.   
  4. It would be perfect for times when I need to access my work on a client’s computer. Save it at my office, and walk into their office ready to go. Chances are, their connection to the Net is rock solid. And that would make me look cool, as I always should.
  5. I want to, love to, play with things like this, but I’m better off working from my hard drive, because
  6. If you lose your internet connect while you’ve got unsaved changes, you’re screwed.

Epilogue – The Bottom Line

Office Workspace might be ready for work, but the Internet isn’t. The lights are on, but you can’t always get there from here.

Word on the street is that Google’s Chrome OS is coming out in about a year. It will be an operating system that consists mostly of a browser. There will be no software like Word or Excel on it. Everything will be done in the Cloud.

I don’t think the Internet is ready to take on the task. They’re getting all these fancy Cloud applications set to sail, but forgetting that the Internet isn’t everywhere, and it isn’t reliable. And until it is, we just can’t move our stuff out there.

*John Updike

do not print that!

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Seems they’ve located 22,000,000 e-mails lost by George W. Bush. Well, not by him personally but by his administration. I’m glad. I’m sure that someone got a slap on the back and maybe an extra long lunch hour for finding them. But here’s the neat part: that’s from 94 days of his juntacracy.

Holy hard drives, Batman. That’s over 234,000 e-mails a day. How are they getting any work done, if they’re playing with MS Outlook that much? … Yep, that’s a rhetorical question.

How do you like the title of my post?

Think they will? Print it all out, I mean. Bet they do.

invisible ink

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The pages are still blank, but there is a miraculous feeling of the words being there, written in invisible ink and clamoring to become visible.

    -Vladimir Nabokov


So how was your weekend? Didja get your Christmas cards done? Watch some football? Watch the rain or the snow or the small animals out foraging for noms (goodies)? It’s all good.

I was just surfing around some Google results a moment ago and saw this: “Atheists who will take in your pets after The Rapture.” Wow. I didn’t follow the link, because I’d rather just ponder that for a minute.

First of all, every pet I’ve ever had was a better Christian than I am, so I’m not buying the premise of them getting left behind. Next metaphysical speedbump please.

I had a pretty good weekend I guess. Saturday was rainy, which was wonderful. I got a lot done over the 2 days. Christmas lights are up on the condo.


OK, that was last year, but not as far as you know.

I played around with some software over the weekend, which is a lot of fun. This time it was mostly MS Word. Sure I’ve been using it for years, professionally. But it’s one of those programs that’s so layered and intense that you can always learn something new, or find some things you want to tinker with.

Went to the gym twice. We have a nice gym here in Carpinteria. Just the right size for the town, and today it was practically deserted, which is always nice.

I did some writing and totally reorganized the files for my novel. Draft 5 now has 33 chapters and over 100,000 words, all nice and orderly. Then I started a story for children. First effort in that genre. It’s called Jasper’s Rainy Day, and it’s about a little dog who accidentally escapes from his yard on a blustery day, and the adventures he has. It’s pretty fun writing, because it really makes you focus on simple declarative sentences.

 Jasper doesn’t mind the rain, because he has his own little raincoat. It is blue with a white stripe down the side. His mommy puts it on Jasper before he goes outside. It keeps him dry. It keeps his fluffy fuzzy white hair clean.


See? … See ya.

office live workspace and other tools

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“So what is Office Live Workspace? Essentially, it’s a SharePoint-based online storage service designed for users of Microsoft Office that provides anywhere/anytime access to important documents and sharing and collaboration facilities that so small teams of people can work together on documents and projects.”
—Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Office Live Workspace Review.

I’m currently checking this out for myself, and thought you might like to as well. It’s pretty cool. I like the idea of being able to access my documents from anywhere, do some writing, and put them away without having to update other computers. So for the past several months, I’ve been using Windows Live Sync, which syncs files and folders between my 2 computers. It works OK.

Office Live Workspace lets you keep your whole project in The Cloud, open it on any computer with Office installed, save it back to the Cloud, and go on with your happy day. No syncing needed, is my point. 

I’ve also been test driving OpenOffice.org for a while now, with an eye toward replacing MS Office with an office suite that’s free and updates for free, automatically. It’s excellent, but not quite all that MS Office is. Essentially, it will do everything Word will do, but doesn’t exactly integrate with other programs as well. Plus, there’s nothing in the suite to replace MS Publisher, which I use to build web sites.

I really like Google Docs, for drafts, lists, spreadsheets, etc. But no way is it up to the task of handling my big projects. Here’s a word count I ran on my biggest project today:

It’s a big dude, by my standards.

So just in case you’re wondering, I’m sticking with MS Word 2003 for my word processor. I like OpenOffice.org’s Writer pretty well, and will keep using it sometimes, to keep in practice. But it’s not replacing Word yet.

got gas?

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We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
– Kenji Miyazawa, poet and story writer (1896-1933)

Personally, given this as the alternative, I’m not so much bothered by paying $3 a gallon. Yet this does remind me of a passage from Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott:

Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on. Now, if you ask me, what’s going on is that we’re all up to here in it, and probably the most important thing is that we not yell at one another. … “Ah! Stuck in the shit! And it’s your fault, you did this …” Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein. But you can’t to that if you’re not respectful.” [Bird by Bird, page 97.]

What a fine little book Bird by Bird is. I keep it handy all the time. It’s one of those books that serves as a sort of tuning fork for my creative world, and it’s in no way to blame for my stuttering, atonal FAIL. I’ve never been able to confirm the Stone quote, but it’s cool too.

In my experience, pain isn’t a good fuel. Recovery is, maybe. But pain is like a wildfire; it makes it’s own weather. It’s self-propelling, whether physical or psychic, because the stress of being in pain makes the pain worse. And the best path from pain back into recovering life is a good nights sleep, such as only comes when the pain subsides. That’s why the driving force of human advancement is as much pain relief as enlightenment, maybe more. But neither Miyazawa or Lamott are saying that pain itself is the creative groundwork. It’s the burning of it, the finding of meaning therein that serve the artist. Am I right?

Lamott goes on to call the writer, “a person who is standing apart, like the cheese in ‘The Farmer in the Dell” standing there alone but deciding to take a few notes. You’re outside, but you can see things up close through your binoculars.” Interesting. Compassionate detachment.

Blessed sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit of the garden,
Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still

– Ash Wednesday

So the poem I posted earlier this evening, Shelter, is about compassion. It’s something to hope for, standing on a high place, because I do not hope to know.

Shelter

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He wants to change the world
only because that is what art
does.  He wants to stand
in a high place and draw it all
into himself –
all the mass and movement
of it, the music and time
and bleeding, surging life –
and let it sit quietly in a space
within him – near his lungs –
where it can breathe in and out
with him, bearing away the hours
and the small, animal sounds
of pain; and near his heart,
where it can find a new rhythm.
Something less a locomotive
than the sea. 
And when it has rested
for the years it takes a tree
to stand and live and die,
he’ll take it out and set it
softly on a table in the sun.
Creative Commons License
Shelter by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed under a

Brazilian Mint Tea for Pain

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The tea doesn’t taste much like mint -­ more like sage, a plant in the mint family ­- but it seems to work as well as aspirin to relieve pain, at least when tested on mice. The mint tea has been used in Brazil for centuries to treat headaches, stomachaches and other minor complaints. To learn how it might work, a research team at England’s Newcastle University first studied the traditional method of preparing Brazilian mint (Hyptis crenata) tea for medicinal purposes. This involves boiling dried leaves for 30 minutes and allowing the concoction to cool before drinking it. When tested on mice, the tea proved as effective for treatment of pain as a synthetic aspirin, Indometacin. The investigators are now planning clinical trials to see how well the potion works for pain relief in humans.[Link]

I have questions.

Why test it on mice? It’s tea, not a cytotoxin, for crapsakes.

How do you know when a mouse has a headache, and when he feels better?

Are the human trials going to involve exposure to Sarah Palin YouTubes? You could control headaches in me with that. Turn it off, and I’ll bake cookies for the mice to go with their tea. Though I suspect they might prefer a nice chamomile, which would probably be just as good for a little headache.