Publishers, writers, keep those stories coming: share links to essays and interviews (over 1,500 words) on Twitter (#longreads) and WordPress.com by tagging your posts longreads.

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1. What We Talk About When We Talk About What We Talk About When We Talk About Making (Tim Maly, Quiet Babylon)

After a successful “creators’ conference” in Portland, Maly asks some tough questions about whether the creators are taking into account the factories and anonymous services that help them succeed in the first place.

2. The Secret Life of Max Stern (Sara Angel, The Walrus)

The Nazis stole his family’s paintings. He emigrated to Canada and became one of the country’s foremost gallery owners. And now, twenty years after his death, he is changing the rules of restitution.

3. Interview: Vanessa Grigoriadis on Writing Fast, Putting Stories Away, and Documentary-Style Writing (Meagan Flynn, Beyond the New Yorker)

Journalist Meagan Flynn chats with New York Magazine and Rolling Stone writer Vanessa Grigoriadis:

I just really try to write fast. And I think it’s so much better for my writing. When I used to agonize over every sentence and every section, the stories were so much worse. My problem is, if the content is not interesting to me, I don’t want to go back and revise it.

4. Wasting Our Time (Jenny Diski)

The London Review of Books writer reflects on childhood diversion:

In spite of The Poet and me being pretty old, we’re still young enough to remember from our childhood being told off for watching too much television and not, like the parents, making our own entertainment.

5. Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Make Me a Spreadsheet (Chadwick Matlin, FiveThirtyEight)

How Christian Rudder, the 39-year-old president and co-founder of the online dating site OKCupid, found himself at the intersection of dating and Big Data.

6. The Last Amazon (Jill Lepore, The New Yorker)

The little-known story behind Wonder Woman’s origins:

Wonder Woman’s debt is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman-suffrage campaigns of the nineteen-tens and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly.

7. Blind Curve (Debbie Hagan, Brain, Child)

A mother visits her young son in a psychiatric ward:

Kids with mental illness stand out profoundly, and, thus, become bullying targets. That’s why Connor is a victim no matter where he goes—even here.

8. The Lightning Rod (Molly Petrilla, The Pennsylvania Gazette)

Dr. Robert Lanza has racked up a slew of scientific accolades—and generated an equal amount of controversy—for his pioneering work on cloning and stem cells. He also lives alone on his own island, collects dinosaur bones, and is often the subject of Good Will Hunting comparisons.

9. How to Teach a Young Introvert (Kate Torgovnick May, TED)

A conversation with Susan Cain, who speaks out about what we need to do to make classrooms more accommodating for introverted students.

10. The Women of ENIAC (Walter Isaacson, Fortune)

A look back at the pioneering group of women who worked on one of the earliest computers:

Shortly before she died in 2011, Jean Jennings Bartik reflected proudly on the fact that all the programmers who created the first general-purpose computer were women: “Despite our coming of age in an era when women’s career opportunities were generally quite confined, we helped initiate the era of the computer.”

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Photo: dennissylvesterhurd, Flickr

(From Carl Lacey’s Flickr.)

I used to wonder why people do engagement photo shoots. What are they… for? Do you not have enough pictures of the two of you together from your relationship, so you feel like you need to reach some sort of quota? Do you think that all the other photos of you that you’ve accumulated over the years look too natural? Too un-staged? Too comfortable? You suddenly realized you forgot to do a prom pose under a gentle cascade of cherry blossoms – and once you’re married it will simply be too late?

Then my friend Jessica, who was one of the most sane and elegant brides I know, told me that her wedding photographer made them do an engagement shoot. As in, it was included as a non-negotiable part of the bridal package — and if they didn’t do it, they’d essentially be wasting a paid-for hours of work. So Jessica and her husband Ben spent an afternoon jumping around in fields of wildflowers, and chose the funniest products of the shoot to use as images on their Save The Date. It was tongue-in-cheek, and cute. 

So I no longer judge people’s engagement photo shoots. Who knows why anyone does them? Maybe your parents insisted upon it, because Aunt Judith didn’t actually believe your “long distance boyfriend” was real and Mom was tired of hearing about it during lunch bunch. Or maybe you want to show off your hot future wife to all the kids from high school who only remember you as the fat kid from English class who farted while reciting “The Road Less Traveled.” Or maybe, one of you has a withering disease that will one day rob you of the ability to laugh, and you want to document as many giant, hearty chortles on camera as possible while you still can. 

Anyway, for whatever reason you do it, there are enough of them out there that I can confidently categorize all of the most clichéd kinds of pre-wedding portraits. Below, a complete taxonomy of engagement photo poses.

The “Careless Whisper”

“I have $430,000 in gambling debts.” (From @andy’s Flickr.)

The “Two People Doing Different Things In A Field”

This is like that scene in “Never Let Me Go” where they realize they are all clones. (From Yuliya Bahr’s Flickr.)

The “Kiss in an Awkward Place”

Like the back of a Volkswagon. (From Brent Payne’s Flickr.)

The “We’re About To Kiss Even Though We Just Had Taco Bell”

“No seriously, we’re going to kiss. We’re about to. In one second. Our mouths are going to touch. While open.” (From Matt Osborne’s Flickr.)

 The “Potentially Life-Threatening Pose” 

Train tracks are a very popular motif in engagement portraits. Life is a long trip, these images want you to know. And marriage is a slow, outmoded method of transportation. (From Avangard’s Flickr.)

 The “CPR”

Maybe he is sucking those laughs right out of her. It’s not a laugh-loss disease, after all. He just has Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome. (From Shawn Brandow’s Flickr.)

 The “Someone Is On a Swing. Not Swinging.”

This is a very common practice among adults. (From Scott Koons’ Flickr.)

The “Stalker”

“Honey, what’s that little red light on your chest?” (From Rebecca Schley’s Flickr.)

The “Someone Is Holding Balloons”

Someone else is about to accidentally drop $13,000 in a creek. (From Chenyu Bell’s Flickr.)

The “Dog Farted”

Time to re-think the ring bearer. (From Nicole Hanusek’s Flickr.)

The “Are You Sure It’s Not Too Windy?”

I’m sure it’s not too late to get a new photographer for the wedding. (From Katie B’s Flickr)

The “Back Injury Waiting to Happen”

Also known as the “Horseplay by Couples Who Only Do Missionary.” (From Max Norskog’s Flickr.)

The “Marriage Is A Prison. Wait, What?”

Do bars really belong anywhere in this scenario? (From Liana Photography’s Flickr.)

The “Somebody’s Getting Carried”

Somebody else is about to make a very tactically erroneous joke about a bride diet in 5… 4… 3… 2… (From Christine Szeto’s Flickr.)

The “Photobomb”

Props to this photographer. (From James Rubio’s Flickr.)

The “Haunted Backdrop”

Also known as the “Trespassing at Helena Bonham Carter’s” (From Becki M. Gangi’s Flickr.)

The “Someone Is In The Background, Out Of Focus

This is where they got the idea for the “Ring” movies. (From cariberry’s Flickr.)

The “Standing At A Distance Against Exposed Brick”

This would be such a great apartment. (From Avangard Photography’s Flickr.)

The “Standing Near Rusticated Wood”

Very popular with men who wear newsboy caps and women wearing long sleeves to cover their giant tattoo of Win Butler’s face. (From chenyu-bell’s Flickr.)

The “We Have An Umbrella Even Though It Is Not Raining”

Would you sit by a fire even though it wasn’t cold? Don’t answer that. (From Brian Wolfe’s Flickr.)

The “We Aren’t Laughing The Same Amount, I’m Worried This Marriage Won’t Work”

“Also, I am marrying a character from Adult Swim.” (From Janelle’s Flickr.)

The “Ruining Formal Wear”

Anybody remember how in prom catalogs everyone was always running through waves in their tuxedos? You are never getting that deposit back from Mr. Tux. (From Claudia C’s Flickr.)

The “Taking It Too Far”

“It’s a rip tide!” (From Ryan Merrill’s Flickr.)

The “Holding Hands At An Awkward Distance”

“Should we have worn shoes for this, maybe? I mean, you did put on your dressy cargo shorts.” (From Rhonda’s Flickr.)

The “Laughing In Front Of Graffiti”

A common derivation of this one is the “Stumbling Around The Meatpacking District In Heels” (From bright fizz’s Flickr.)

The “Cry For Help”

(From Whitney Lee’s Photostream.)

The “Are We Dead Now?”

This is like a Guillermo Del Toro version of a Snuggle commercial, where the people collapse giggling onto the giant body of the beloved teddy bear. Ony to find it has been dead for three weeks. (From Angela Butler’s Flickr.)

The “Prom Pose Or Pregnant?”

This is a shotgun marriage. Have a coke. (From Stacy’s Flickr.)

The “Dancing In A Field Like Crazy People”

I like to imagine that here, there is a man behind the camera, holding a gun. (From Samantha Turchin’s Flickr).

The “We Are Lost In The Wilderness And We Will Likely Die Here”

Might as well laugh. (From Madumi’s Flickr.)

The “One Pigeon”

(From Clayton Stewart’s Flickr.)

The “Multiple Pigeons”

“INFINITE PIGEONS”

I examine Tolkien’s 1914 creative breakthrough closely in the forthcoming Tolkien Studies 11, I give a brief account of those findings in a centenary article for the Guardian, and I star in a Tolkien Society video speaking about it all to at the annual Oxonmoot gathering. What follows here is a further insight which didn’t make it into those pieces.

A century on, it’s worth probing whether this poem really counts as the first poem of Tolkien’s legendarium. Though Humphrey Carpenter identifies ‘The Voyage of Éarendel’ as ‘the beginning of Tolkien’s own mythology’ (Biography 79), Tolkien himself did not do so explicitly. And there are still vital ingredients missing from it. ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ has a basic connection with the later story of Eärendil – the idea of a mariner who sails over the brink of the world and becomes the Evening Star Venus. But the September 1914 Éarendel lacks all clear motive for his voyage, lacks a history of any sort, lacks a Silmaril, and even lacks an Elvish name – the name Éarendel is straight out of Anglo-Saxon.

And Tolkien actually gave the label ‘the first poem of the mythology’ to one written ten months later, July 1915’s ‘The Shores of Faery’ (The Book of Lost Tales, part two, 271), which has enduring Middle-earth elements such as the Two Trees, but also has names such as Valinor and Taniquetil in his invented languages – the genuine hallmark of his legendarium.

However, there is evidence that he did indeed see the writing of ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’ as the breakthrough moment. I’d like to claim credit for detective work here – but in fact it was all down to my mother, though she has never read Tolkien.

In ‘The Notion Club Papers’, Tolkien’s 1945–46 story of Inklings-like figures in Oxford getting drawn into the lost Númenorean past , one Club member, Lowdham, quotes lines from the Anglo-Saxon poem Crist:

‘Éalá Éarendel engla beorhtost
ofer middangeard monnum sended!

— and adds: ‘“Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, above the middle-earth sent unto men!” When I came across that citation in the dictionary I felt a curious thrill, as if something had stirred in me half wakened from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English….’ (Sauron Defeated 236)

In his 1977 J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography (72), Carpenter puts these fictional words in Tolkien’s own mouth – a sleight of hand, but not an outrageous one. After all, Tolkien is plainly putting his own memory into the head of Alwin Arundel Lowdham.

He’s also doing some pretty obvious signposting with those names. I don’t need to explain Arundel – it’s the name of a real town in Sussex, but its purpose in ‘The Notion Club Papers’ is to remind us of the names Éarendel and Eärendil. Alwin is a version of Old English Ælfwine, which means ‘elf-friend’ and therefore connects this character with the elf-friends in Tolkien’s legendarium – notably the mariner Ælfwine who hears and records the Lost Tales of the Elves.

But what about the surname Lowdham?

Christopher Tolkien notes (Sauron Defeated 151) that ‘The fact that Lowdham is “loud” and makes jokes often at inappropriate moments derives from [Hugo] Dyson’ – the Inkling who famously kiboshed readings of The Lord of the Rings by complaining ‘Oh God, not another Elf!’ And indeed one manuscript has Dyson’s initials next to the name. But as Christopher observes: ‘Lowdham is the very antithesis of Dyson in his learning and interests.’ In fact, the character voicing J.R.R. Tolkien’s memory of discovering the name Éarendel is more like an alter ego of the author himself.

Here my mother comes in. I happened to be showing her a map of the area just east of Nottingham. This is the location of the village of Gedling where Tolkien was staying when he wrote ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’. Rather randomly, my mother read out the name of a neighbouring village, Lowdham. L-O-W-D-H-A-M: the distinctive spelling matches the character’s surname, though no one seems to have made the connection between the two until now. I’m told by Andrew H. Morton, author of the excellent focused study Tolkien’s Gedling 1914, that the village of Lowdham would have been a pleasant spot, just the right distance for a Sunday walk from Gedling.

‘Not very long ago for those with long memories, nor very far away for those with long legs’: Lowdham and Gedling mapped shortly after the First World War

So Lowdham of the Notion Club not only speaks Tolkien’s memory of the 1914 Éarendel discovery, but is named for the immediate area of the poem’s composition. It’s also worth noting that on the fake title page Tolkien drew for ‘The Notion Club Papers’ (Sauron Defeated 154), the date of publication is 2014.

Surely here he was thinking consciously, as we are now, of the centenary of Middle-earth, and identifying its beginning as the poem he wrote on 24 September 1914. The light of Éarendel shines throughout the external history of Middle-earth as surely as it shines through the internal history, going from the Two Trees all the way to Frodo’s star glass.

• My new booklet Tolkien at Exeter College: How an Oxford undergraduate invented Middle-earth is now available via my website. With 64 pages and more than 40 images, including previously unseen original sketches by and photographs of Tolkien, it incorporates extensive new research to add significantly to the account I give in Tolkien and the Great War.
• I write much more about Tolkien’s 1914 creative breakthrough in my article ‘“The road from adaptation to invention”: How Tolkien came to the brink of Middle-earth in 1914’, due out imminently in Tolkien Studies 11.

Image: Diamond in the Sky, by Dr Wendy Longo via Flickr. Map: Ordnance Survey Popular One-inch Series, via Sabre.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/511579/Beard-fashion-shaving-products-sales-drop

Nobody can have failed to notice in recent months the ubiquity of facial hair. Keep your eyes open as you walk down your local high street and you will probably notice a variety of styles, with the ‘Amish’ style seemingly especially popular. It is also interesting how newsworthy beards are. Just look at how often they have appeared as a topic for discussion in recent months. The furore caused by Jeremy Paxman’s beard for example. There were lengthy discussions about celebrity beards at the Baftas in 2013, and now the economic revelations about how much the beard is costing.

This current beard trend is actually very interesting. Over the past 10 years or so beards have been less in vogue. There have been ‘spikes’ of beardedness but these have tended to be of short duration – sometimes only a matter of months.
But this latest outcrop of beards has already lasted the better part of eighteen months. By early summer 2013 the idea of ‘peak beard’ was already being put forward. Quoting the head of a major British barbering company, the Guardian suggested that “beards are more popular than ever…there’s a beard culture – people like talking about their beards, feeling their beards’. Now, in September 2014, passion for beards shows little sign of abating and, in many ways, appears to be going from strength to strength.

It is also interesting to note how economics have begun to intrude into the argument. By anyone’s yardstick £72 million is a large chunk of revenue to be lost to what some people see as an irrelevance – something everyday, quirky…even repulsive. In reality though beards have never been anything less than central to men’s conceptions of themselves. Faces, after all, are the most public part of us. The way we present ourselves to others involves all manner of things, from clothing to cosmetics, but the face is the ultimate index of character. The decision to shave, cover or adorn the face has implications for how we see ourselves and wish to be seen by others. Beards actually matter. Quite a lot. And they always have done.

Over the centuries beard trends tended to last for decades. It’s perfectly possible to identify an historical period by its beard hair. Think of sixteenth-century England. The Tudor ‘Spade beard’ was the order of the day. This was the long, oblong outgrowth of facial topiary sported by kings, princes and elites. Doubtless it made its way a lot further down the social scale too. This type of beard is evident in Holbein’s paintings. Not all Tudor men embraced the beard though. Men like Thomas More was a clean-shaven, perhaps in line with his austere lifestyle. Thomas Cranmer was clean-shaven but, it is said, grew a beard as a symbol of his grief upon the death of Henry and of his break with the past. In this sense the beard was a turning point in his life.

In the seventeenth century Stuart monarchs preferred small, pointed ‘Van Dyke’ beards. Charles I and Royalist ‘Cavaliers’ often sported this type of facial hair together with flowing locks. Masculinity here was remarkably feminine, with flowing, diaphanous gowns and silk breeches the order of the day. Contrast this with Puritans who generally went clean-shaven, believing beards to be a mere bauble. One argument about the origins of the term ‘roundhead’ is that it referred to the shape of the head after the beard and hair had been shaved – a popular parliamentarian style – rather than the shape of helmets.

Victorian men, after 1850, were characterised by their huge bushy beards. After nearly a century of being clean shaven British men were exalted by a range of new publications with names like Why Shave? which sought to convince them that shaving was little less than a crime against God and nature. The beard was the ultimate symbol of masculinity, and something used as a tool to prove to men that their position of superiority over women was justified. More than this, it was argued, beards had health benefits that simply couldn’t be ignored. They acted as filters to keep germs away from the nose and throat. (See my other post on Victorian beard health).

In the twentieth century, at least up until around 1950, moustaches were much more in vogue. Charlie Chaplin’s ‘toothbrush’ moustache was a cultural icon. Whether or not (as is sometimes suggested) Adolf Hitler grew his because of Chaplin, whose work he admired, is another matter, but the military moustache was a staple of the first decades of the century, from British Tommies to the emblematic RAF pilot’s moustache.

There are many other important aspects to beards. Growing a beard has been an important marker of life stage; the transition from adolescence to adulthood. The first shave is a virtual rite of passage for a teenage boy. On the other hand, in the past, the ‘beardless boy’ has been a symbol of immaturity or even of a lack of sexual prowess.

Indeed the ability to grow a beard has been central to conceptions of masculinity through time. In the early modern period the lack of a beard was viewed in humoural medical terms as the result of a lack of heat in the ‘reins’ and therefore a lack of sexual potency. Men who had a thin, scanty beard were open to suspicion of effeminacy (in the early modern sense literally meaning that they had feminine characteristics). In the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries, so central was the moustache to military regiments that men unable to grow one were expected to wear a false moustache made of goats hair.

The management of facial hair says much about how men view themselves. During the enlightenment the mark of a civilized man was a clean-shaven face. To be bearded signified loss of control over the self and a rugged masculinity that was not elegant or refined. After 1850, however, as I have noted, the fashion was for huge beards, which were seen then as the ultimate symbol of God-given male authority. In this sense it was the emblem of the Victorian man.

After 1900 with the burgeoning market for shaving apparel and cosmetics the situation became even more complex. It is also noteworthy that the pace of change has quickened. Where beard trends used to last decades, since the 80s they have become more fleeting – probably a result of internet-driven celebrity culture.

If all this is true, what does the current vogue for facial hair tell us about men today? What ideal of masculinity are men in 2014 aspiring to? It is difficult to say. Unlike in the past it is harder to track changes in masculine ideal as they are now much more transitory. Nonetheless, one of the constants has been emulation. In the early modern period monarchs provided a bearded (or indeed clean-shaven) ideal. By the Victorian period powerful and fashionable figures, and new types of industrial and military heroes, offered men something to aspire to. Now, with almost unlimited access to the lives of celebrities through the voracious media and internet, the opportunities to find fashion ‘heroes’ to emulate are almost limitless. The question now is how long this trend will last and, perhaps more interesting, will there be a backlash against the beard? History suggests so.

Pictured: Something difficult to find Libya (the book, not chewing gum)

What really pushed me to write about it again was a book, namely Chewing Gum, by Mansour Bushnaf. I stumbled on this book almost by accident. There was a BBC report called “killing books in Libya” in which the author himself describes the dismal state of publishing in the country. My compulsive googling habits led me to discover his recently published book, and my rage at being unable to attain a copy led naturally to a prolonged Twitter rant at the injustice of not being able to buy books written by people in the same country they come from. 

But a good samaritan noticed my twitter tirade and compassionately bought me the Kindle version of the book, which you can get here by the way. I won’t review the book here since I’ve already done so on Goodreads, but I do want to highlight my reaction upon reading and finishing it.

First off, since I have the unfortunate habit of underestimating Libyan talent, I was taken aback at the literary prose of the book. This is a translated book by the way, a fate that leaves many a written word stripped of the beauty and context of the original language. But the English prose here is even superior to many native English novels I’ve read. Picking my jaw up off the floor, I continued.

The subject matter, whoa. Prostitution, alcohol, love affairs, class division. Libyans like to pretend that this dark underbelly of society doesn’t exist, despite the overwhelming majority of society having some connection to it. But for someone to write about it, and sympathetically no less, was akin to revelation. Why don’t we talk about it? Why are Libyans so afraid of admitting that our social structure is unhealthy and unjust? If you thought ‘systematic repression that has become too ingrained into our subconscious’, then we’re on the same wavelength.

The novel was also, surprisingly, feminist. The repeated symbol of a woman whose intense passions have broken her down because of society’s inability to support her, was refreshing without being too preachy. And the heroine, Fatma, is a symbol of sacrifice for higher aspirations. Relatability, man.

An aged Libyan man wrote a strong female lead. Take a moment to let that sink in.

Libyan horse-riders. Horse riding is a popular sport in Libya. Painting by Libyan artist Ramadan Bakshishi

The story is actually a novelette, and left me with a thirst for more Libyan storytelling. The raw emotion and honesty in Chewing Gum presents a strong impression of one of the many facets of Libyan identity. Our identity is shaped by our surroundings, which is in turn formed from history. We don’t know much about our history because half of it is buried and the other half is being manipulated for political leverage.

King Idris, a much beloved figure symbolizing a more prosperous time for Libya. (Painting by Tariq Al-Shebli)

Never mind history books, Libya has virtually no books, let alone some kind of widely available, neutral source of history where we can all read up on the path that led us to this crumbling wasteland of a country. “Those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it.” I know it’s a trite, overused cliche, but it’s also true.

Libyans wouldn’t be apathetic (I hope) towards these new entities insistent on forcing an Islamist or Western identity if they had read Libya’s history and realized that we’re not insane fundamentalists who obsessively segregate genders or openly engage in debauchery. But the truth is painfully obvious when someone posts a picture of a younger Libya, where, for example, women and men both engage in social activities together, and people quote “Wow, I can’t believe this used to be Libya.”

A Libyan Mona Lisa. Western and Eastern themes often overlap in the art and literature of Libyans. Painting by Libyan artist Khalid (last name unknown)

We can’t believe it because we don’t know anything about it apart from aged photographs and our grandparent’s vague recollections. Without books, without history, Libyans will be mired in this identity crisis, trying on different cultural standards and discovering that none of them fit just right. We need to know who we are as a people and not wait for someone to tell us, because, news flash, Libya is a tempting place for several countries to manipulate and screw us over.

When you ask a Libyan to describe their society, you’ll often get the answer “we’re conservative”. People mistake this for being religious, when it actually just means that Libyans care about what other people think, which is most certainly not a Islamic trait. And it’s sad that we don’t have a more comprehensive answer, or that we limit ourselves to a very narrow political/religious identity. Even the attempts to describe the current conflict as ‘Islamist vs. Liberal’ is way off the mark, since the average Libyan is more moderate than anything else.

A painting entitled ‘Refugees’ by Libyan artist Ali Enaiza, inspired by the refugees of Ajdabiya during the revolution

For the last three days there has been a cultural gallery here. I went to see the books available, but was sad to find that that section was gone (I went late on the third day). Instead I perused through the artwork and photography. There was some very impressive stuff (again, underestimated). Ask the average Libyan about famous artists and you might get one or two names at best.

One of the artists told us about a disagreement he had with his father. “He told me that I was wasting my time by painting,” he said, echoing a common reaction in Libya towards the arts and humanities. This is just my opinion, but I strongly, strongly believe that it’s the arts that will help us form a more national identity than any other pursuit.

Religion has played a large role in Libyan identity. So has tribalism, regionalism, politics, and our long history of invasion and occupation. The 2011 revolution provided a chance for us to finally show the world who we are, and in my opinion, we stuttered. Libyan culture is, among other things, an amalgam of outside influences. This will continue to be our predominate image until we start looking back through our history and start forging our own unique identity. One thing that needs to stop is our desperate cling to one homogeneous Libya. We can be united while still being diverse.

I’m a thirty six year old self-taught programmer born and raised in Central California, but now living in Seattle.

I was born with a few medical conditions, mostly all affecting my eyesight and my hearing. The vision problems were apparent immediately after my birth. It’s hard to miss a baby with his eyes crossed, both pointing directly at his nose. My hearing problems weren’t discovered until several years later, when I started speaking, and I sounded like I was under water. It took nearly 10 years of speech therapy before I had gotten past many of the speech problems. It took me nearly that entire period of therapy before I could say my own first name clearly, and it still sounds wrong to me every time I had to say it. My ADHD manifests in my ability to focus among distractions, a stutter when I struggle to verbalize my thoughts, and trouble with my short-term memory. I’m very obsessive-compulsive.

Within a year or two of my younger brother’s birth, my parents noticed that his behavior was drastically different than my own. His attention span, his sleep habits, everything. My parents weren’t sure what was wrong, and took him to a pediatrician. He thought it would be best to bring me in instead, given the discussions my parents had with him. I was diagnosed with severe ADHD, and placed on the Aspergers scale. I believe I was around three or four years old. It’s hampered nearly every endeavor in my life, especially my education.

When I was four or five years old, my family got a Sinclar ZX81. My parents attached it to our 19″ Sony Trinitron TV, and, as I’ve been told, I sat down in front of the computer and didn’t get up for several hours. Finally, something I could accomplish “hyper-focus” on. This was a revelation for my parents.

I was originally placed in special education, due to my speech impediment and my behavioral problems related to my ADHD. I was frustrated, angry. I didn’t do well in school. I didn’t know how to make the teachers understand me. I physically could not speak to them. My parents had mostly learned to understand me, and insisted that the school place me into regular classes. My attitude shifted. At the advice of my pediatrician, I was prescribed Ritalin for several years, but I asked to stop taking it when I was in the third grade. They made me feel terrible. I felt stupid and slow. I felt like even more of an outsider and I just wanted to be normal like the other kids. It made me the outcast that had to go to the office daily to take his pills. Children are cruel, they don’t need additional ammunition to use against their peers. I was always an outcast. I had a very small contingent of friends, mostly the other outcasts. I learned to try and control my condition. It hasn’t been easy. I get headaches from the level of effort it takes, for example. I have to recognize when it’s time to isolate myself from others and just let it take over.

I feel very lucky in other respects, however. Throughout my childhood, my parents made sure I had some sort of computer around, which was no small feat. We were an average middle class family. Neither of my parents had college degrees. They worked very hard. They weathered the shifts within the oil industry. They never let me believe I had any sort of disability, with respect to either my eyesight, or my ADHD, or anything. I was raised to believe I really could accomplish anything I worked at. I learned my drive and ambition from them, and I still thank them for that.

One of the computers that will always remain in my memory is my Atari 800XL. My parents saved for years to buy it for me. They bought all the best components they could at the time. I had several programming books, and I remember struggling to get the programs in the books to work. Back in those days, the books of computer programs and games were all in BASIC, all the major manufacturers had slightly different dialects of BASIC. I wrote a letter to Atari of America, using Atari Writer, asking for help. I was eight years old at the time, and, they replied! Imagine that, as an eight year old, to have an adult take the time to create a personal response, answering what was wrong. They sent me other books to help me out, and a subscription to Antic magazine, and told me about shareware. I remember getting catalogs from a shareware vendor on a floppy disk, and saving up my allowance so I could get the shareware I wanted. What I couldn’t get, I would try and write myself. This will always be one of my fondest memories. I can’t imagine the computer manufacturers today doing what Atari had done. I look back and I’m still sad that the Atari of the 1980s is gone.

I was good at the computer. It was the one thing that I felt like I had any sort of control over. This had consequences for my education, as I let this focus interfere with my schoolwork.

When I was a child, I remember having this toy Knight Rider car that you could open the hood and program movement into it. I remember spending endless hours programming this car. I perfected having it make loops around the house. I played with it until it broke and was no longer repairable.

Several years after that, I worked on making a MOD file player for the PC. Many of my friends had Commodore Amiga computers, but I had a 286 PC. They could play these wonderful sound files, full of music they had composed, or found throughout the BBS community, etc. I sat down in Turbo Pascal and make one myself. I think my parents finally got tired of listening to me playing the same music repeatedly, and finally let me move the computer into my bedroom.

By that time, I had gotten a 1,200 baud modem. I discovered BBSes. I discovered more people like me, with this same fascination with computers and programming. All of them were several years older than I was, but I made some great friends. I experimented with writing my own BBS systems, a FidoNet mailer, many tools for analyzing BBS log files for user activity, and nearly everything I could think of.

At sixteen, in 1994, I came out of the closet as gay man, just a few weeks after my uncle died of AIDS. I had no gay friends. I didn’t know what any of this meant. I knew I had attractions to men, and I could trace it back for several years and decided to acknowledge it to myself. A “friend” that I had confided in shared this with other kids at school. It made its way to my brother, who told my parents. This was a massive strain on my family, and further degraded my performance in school. I was working as an operator / programmer at the local newspaper, and that gave me an outlet outside of school and my family life, but even that wasn’t without its challenges.

With my challenges in my family and falling grade average, I wasn’t qualified for university. I could have attended community college in my hometown, had I continued living with my parents. With the family problems, this wasn’t an option for me. This would have also left me around the classmates that spent my high school years tormenting me, for being different, both in my interests, and the fact that I was gay. I couldn’t see a way to be able to financially afford to live on my own, and pay for school.

In the Boy Scouts, I remember visiting Edwards Air Force Base in California, getting to see the planes, the service members, and the air traffic control station. I was hooked. I had to be involved. I remember discussing this with my ophthalmologist, knowing that my eyesight wasn’t perfect. He calmly let me know that I would never be able to fly a plane.

Given my interest in aeronautics, and my wonderment at visiting Edwards Air Force Base when I was younger, I decided on a path through the military. I thought this would give me the best option of not only getting out of my hometown, but also afford me an opportunity to get my education. I attempted to join the United States Air Force in 1996. Even knowing that I would not be able to fly, I was still determined to be a part of the Air Force. My attempt to join was only a few years after “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had been passed, but I was willing to try and keep that part of my life quiet. I went through MEPS, and was ultimately disqualified from military service because of my eyesight. I was devastated. I had to go back home and rethink what I would do.

A few months later, A dear friend gave me an opportunity to take a job in Los Angeles, with only about 12 hours notice before I would start. I took that opportunity and never looked back.

Over the years, I learned from experience, a few amazing mentors, and recommendations on various textbooks and papers I would need to read. I worked very hard, often neglecting my relationships and personal well-being to advance my career. It many ways I can say it paid off, but it came at a cost.

I’ve primarily built tooling around marketing. This wasn’t intentional, it just worked out that way. Mostly database-centric applications, both desktop and for the web.

A few years ago, I incidentally got involved with an open source project to implement a Smalltalk on the Java Virtual Machine. I started to learn about parsing, compilation, etc. It helped me really sharpen my knowledge of algorithms, and piqued my curiosity about programming language theory. I started to attempt to absorb every programming language I could find, differing paradigms, etc.

Jumping forward to today, I am the architect at a social media analytics firm. I’ve been working in this field for twenty years. I’ve seen all of the terrible people you can imagine, the sexism, the homophobia, etc. I’ve been questioning my career choice for quite a while. I can navigate the technology. I cannot navigate the people. That’s been a challenge my entire life, and will continue to be something I will struggle with.

Coming into Strange Loop, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Here was a conference full of the people I had come to respect and admire in the industry, ones working on the obscure programming languages I had found, the hard problems related to concurrency, or advancing even the mainstream languages that I made my living off of. The impostor syndrome I felt was very real. I wasn’t sure I was worthy of being around such talented (and educated) people. I’m still not sure I was.

I went to talks given by speakers full of excitement about what they were doing. People that didn’t care if what they were working on ever saw mainstream approval or acceptance. They were doing this because, damn it, they love it, and they wanted to share it with others. People that wanted to change the world.

I’ve been to several other conferences throughout my career. I’ve spoken at one conference, and one MeetUp. The resounding themes at most conferences and MeetUps have been one of marketing a product, or trying to recruit employees. It’s never felt like it was about the technology, or the passion. Strange Loop stood in stark contrast to those conferences. I think only one speaker even mentioned that their employer was hiring. Most didn’t even mention where they worked. It didn’t matter. This conference wasn’t about that. I’m more likely to want to work with the people I’ve met and listened to as a result of this. For me, the company you work for isn’t the interesting part. It’s the people, and the problem solving.

The closing keynote, given by Carin Meyer, Sam Aaron and Jonathan Graham really resonated with me. Here were three people on stage, making music with their computers, and robots, and making them all interact with together. The memories of that Knight Rider car, and the MOD player, came rushing back to me. It actually brought tears to my eyes. It helped me rediscover why I do this. It’s fun. It’s challenging. The opportunity to continually learn new things, and to interact with others that have the same passion as I used to have is the kick I need to keep my head and my heart in this.

So, to those responsible for organizing, those who spoke, and those who attended Strange Loop, those who interacted with me, I say thank you. I needed this. I can only hope to be one of the people standing in front of you all and sharing my passion for this industry with you in the future.

And now, as I’ve seen repeated on Twitter by several people, it’s back to reality. It’s time to to figure out where to start with the things I learned this past week. Maybe Haskell. Maybe Clojure. I have no idea yet. And, it’s time to make plans to return next year!

If concrete could confess.

If soul could seep through cement.

If only one of those monochrome apparitions could reach out and take me by the hand, leading me into a world of smoke and ale and revelation.

The woman stood by the door on the right of the picture is my great grandmother. The two little girls are my grandfather’s older sisters. The guy on the far left, in the bowler hat, is my great grandfather. The other two younger men could be family, I don’t know. Will probably never know. Posing with a football and a trophy of an unknown triumph, they remain silent, anonymous ghosts. Enigmas of imagination.

The building itself, its very brick and mortar, contains more than can be revealed in a two dimensional image. It contains that which is valued in meaning.

Ancestors of mine dwelt in that place between 1901 and 1939. A descendent of theirs also ran the pub for a short period in the 1950’s. What emotions those rooms must have absorbed. Laughter and tears resonating in time. My great, great grandmother died in there, as did her son in law, my great grandfather.

Behind those upstairs windows, in one of those unseen rooms, my grandfather was born. At the other end of life’s spectrum, two of his siblings died in there.

Happy times, sad times. The building stands in the photograph as a mausoleum of memory.

I would love to be able to go into that pub today, buy a drink and take a seat in the corner. Shift my sight and listen to echoes. Watch the ghost of an old man skip through those doors as a little boy. Perhaps whistling the tune of a song that one day, many years in the future, he would sing to another little boy.

Hand me downs of blood and mannerism and story.

Alas the pub no longer stands-it fell victim to the slum clearances that transformed whole neighbourhoods and scattered communities. I’ve been to the site where it originally stood. Ironically there was another pub there, empty and boarded up. Perhaps its own ghosts were walled up inside, caught in the shadows. Memories in a new mausoleum, waiting for people of their line to come searching and shift their sight.