Last night the moon lit up the Rhode Island moonstones that my wife keeps on our bathroom windowsill. They were like tiny little planets. I was reminded of the first page of Bruno Munari’s From Afar It Was An Island:
The bug
From a Harvard site about the Mark I, the first programmable computer in the United States:
Before 1944, electrical engineers already used the term “bug” to refer to hard-to-find physical defects that hindered the operation of an electric device… In 1947, a physical malfunction in the Mark II computer was traced back to a moth stuck in one of the relays. Grace Hopper taped it to the operations logbook with the annotation “First actual case of bug being found”.
A few other computer programming terms originated with the Mark I, including “loop” and “patch.”
PS. The Mark I was designed by Howard Aiken, whose quote you might remember from Steal Like An Artist: “Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” (Aiken also said of the computer field: “The problem in this business is not to keep people from stealing your ideas, but to make them steal them.”)
McCartney moving the microphone
Flipping through the booklet that comes with the 50th anniversary edition of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, I fell a little in love with this photo of McCartney re-positioning a microphone. I’ve cropped and zoomed him in the image above, but here he is in context:
The others are all at their posts. George at the organ. John in front of an amp. Ringo drumming. But there’s Paul, up on his feet moving a microphone. Why isn’t an engineer doing it for him?
In Geoff Emerick’s memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere, he writes about all the strict rules and restrictions of the recording studio in that era. (When the Beatles first started out, the engineers were still wearing lab coats.) They broke all sorts of rules and protocol for the albums leading up to Pepper’s, and, clearly, the rules had mostly been thrown out the window at this point. Emerick writes that Paul was the most curious of the crew about the recording process. He wanted to get hands-on, which is what he’s doing in this photo: He’s not waiting for some engineer to fix the sound.
Paul would also stay at the studio late after the other band members had gone home to overdub his bass lines one section of the time, getting them as perfect as he could. “There were nights when he would labor until dawn,” Emerick writes, “keeping at it until his fingers were literally bleeding.”
Paul was never my favorite Beatle, and Sgt. Pepper’s has never been my favorite album. (Too much of what John Lennon called “Paul’s granny music” for me.) But looking at this picture and hearing those huge, sweet bass lines on the remix, I admire him more and more. He was working. Moving his own damned microphone.
As you wish
Sometimes I think we’re all behaving as if we have a secret wish to be bored to death.
Something to look forward to
When re-reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning (after my bowl of soup), I re-underlined my favorite sentence: “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.”
I’d been struggling myself a bit with this re-read and Frankl’s emphasis on the future, how one must keep hope, keep his eye on the horizon. (Though I was particularly taken with his emphasis on imagination: how prisoners hold on by conjuring images of their loved ones, how a patient can sort out her decisions by pretending she’s lying on her death bed, looking back at her life.) I wondered how to reconcile Frank’s hopeful future-facing with my own feeling that life is more like Groundhog Day, and one should operate without hope and without despair.
Then I remembered Tamara Shopsin’s wonderful memoir, Arbitrary Stupid Goal, which ends with her father’s philosophy: That everybody needs an “ASG—Arbitrary Stupid Goal.”
A goal that isn’t too important makes you live in the moment, and still gives you a driving force. This driving force is a way to get around the fact that we will all die and there is no real point to life.
But with the ASG there is a point. It is not such an important point that you postpone joy to achieve it. It is just a decoy point that keeps you bobbing along, allowing you to find ecstacy in the small things, the unexpected, and the everyday.
What happens when you reach the stupid goal? Then what? You just find a new ASG.
Almost immediately after I put these two together, my mind brought up a third thing from the file: Matthew McConaughey’s 2014 Oscar acceptance speech, which is profound if you limit it to the beginning, in which he said he needed three things each day: “One of them is something to look up to, another is something to look forward to, and another is someone to chase.” (If only he’d ended it there! His explanation sort of ruins it.)
The second needed item on McConaughey’s list is emphasized by another thespian, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, in her episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee:
Here’s something that my mom said to me and I think it’s very true in terms of happiness: You have to always have something to look forward to. It can be a very minor thing, and it can be a major thing. But you always have to have something you’re looking forward to next.
Oh, how high and low, treasure and trash mix in my mind, forming clumps I call thoughts!
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