A Weblog

Boil some speghetti. Strain the water and put the pasta in a small, blue bowl. Add chopped tomatoes, some spinach. Coat with Caesar salad dressing to taste. Mix throroughly. Serves one.

I have some spare time in between my summer job and my fall classes. So I’ve spent the past five days learning to program in PHP and MySQL. My focus has been on the development of so-called large scale web applications. Luckily my dad has agreed to accommodate my unemployment, taken me back in, and even found me a room in the apartment so that I no longer have to sleep on the couch in the living room. In process of learning good organization and coding practices, I came across the idea of templates. And then I realized why graffiti never became an art form, despite its introduction into high-class New York galleries in the early 90s. Stephanie, this post is dedicated to you.

Templates are pretty natural and, nowadays, pretty common. Anyone who has used Microsoft Word or Excel has probably seen a template, some have maybe even used one. They’re empty containers which you can fill in with your own information to produce a finished product without too much effort. What they do, though, is subtle. I hadn’t realized just how subtle they are until last night. Templates allow you to separate content from presentation. This is important. The same thing works in programming, except in web development it’s a little bit more complicated.

A web application has three parts: the content, the presentation—both of which you, the user, see—and the business logic—the code which does the actual heavy-lifting in the silently backroom in the dark. It’s a good idea to keep these guys as far away from each other as possible. You enter the content, more or less, in HTML. Fortunately and unfortunately, the paragraph tag < p > is blind to your content. You wouldn’t format the address in a letter the same way you format a recipe, for example. HTML, however, can’t distinguish between the two. It treats everything similarly. Luckily, that’s where another standard, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), comes in.

CSS allows you to tell the browser exactly how you’d like a certain type of text to look. You can control placement, font face, font weight, behavior in response to events (like when the mouse cursor hovers over a link), and more! This is the presentation part of it all.

A clever little package, aptly named Smarty, lets you keep your PHP scripts from mingling with your HTML and your CSS. That way you can redesign the look of your pages without having to update the guts which control the functionality, too. Your copy editors and content managers stay happy, too, because they aren’t effected, either, and can continue doing what they like to do best: write content.

And all this got me thinking about my friend Stephanie and her undergraduate honors thesis. It straddled the divide between literature and art history; she wrote about the rise and subsequently fall of graffiti in the art world. She argues that the art world rejected graffiti, actually, a particular type called Writing—writers would never call their Writing graffiti, so why should we?—because it was written and people got caught up in trying to read it. And that makes sense. Try to take in the artistic value of the following:

Do not read this.

You can’t. If you know how to read in English, then you read and processed the above statement, even though I intended it as a purely visual object. Writing is a little bit more subversive. A single author didn’t always tag with one name, and often the script was so stylized that it was impossible to read in the popular sense of the word. Yet other Writers had no problem identifying authorship. The trick is, they were able to distinguish between the presentation and content of a Writer’s tag. Critiques strove to find meaning in the words the Writers presented—meaning that was never there. And the style discovered its author, not the name. Writers had deconstructed the written word, extracting only a visual idiom while leaving the word’s referent alone to fend for itself fully detatched from its referrer.

Few people in the academia of literature, it seems, study the effects typography and layout have on a written work for better or for worse. Perhaps it is more important to distinguish the two when investigating Islamic writing (and its calligraphy) or medieval, illuminated texts. Too bad, though, that presentation has been relegated to the design world. Everyone interacts with layout. It affects so much of what we do everyday.

ImagineifIhadalternatedcolorratherthanusedspacestobreakbetweenwords?

What are the implications of my scheme?

I don’t even want to mention what a meta-language like XML might mean to literature academes. At least not now.

I often like to take my dinner at Christopher’s in Porter Square. They provide a warm, brick bar atmosphere, good burgers, and both a rotating and static selection of fairly amazing beers. Plus one of the bartenders, here left anonymous to protect the innocent and my beer alike, knows me as a regular and sometimes passes me free pints.

I try never to pay attention to the other customers while I eat. In my experience, it’s best to let the barflies whirl around someone else. In fact, I find that that’s true in general. Since the Sox pregame was on, and not the game itself, I tried to focus on my burger and beer, measuring carefully how quickly to eat and drink. Occasionally I’d turn to my right and wonder about the woman next to me and her vegetarian burger. She’s a regular, too. She used to work as a receptionist at one of the Boston Sports Clubs, but that was years ago. She’s since moved on and works as a receptionist at Genzyme. It’s hard to guess which is better. But it’s been five or six years now, and she seems happy. She reads well, looks good, eats well. Things can’t be that bad. At least that’s what she was telling one of her old customers at the other end of the bar.

But none of that was interesting to me. No, instead I wanted to know about her veggie burger. I know she eats meat and she’s defended before that Christopher’s just serves a fine veggie burger. To judge by analogy, I’m sure I’d agree. But I’ve never tried it. I like meat. So why would a non-vegetarian order a vegetarian meal? I preoccupied myself with this thought, trying to come up with reasonable excuses.

Not fully aware of my surroundings, I was disturbed when I heard the bartender tell another customer, this time to my left, “Yeah, I’ve got a girl, but she’s spayed.”

My head swung up for the response.

“I’ve got a girl, too. So it shouldn’t matter,” the customer replied.

For the next several moments I tried to reconstruct their conversation. In not too long, I had it. The customer started out with a question:

“So, do you want to come by this weekend for some backyard doggy-time?” I knew I had heard him say it, but at the time I was still mystified by the woman on my right and her meatless patty. Even still, the words are too fantastic to understand taken alone, and the bartender’s response does little to clarify the situation.

“Sure, but do you have a backyard?” He seemed skeptical. His tone alluded to nefarious undertakings. What were they talking about: drugs, sex, something far worse? It was hard to know. In any event, it was more exciting than the two tool consultants between them and me who exclaimed loudly how awesome and important their work, and they, by extension, is.

“Yeah, I have a backyard. What do you have, anyway?” the customer answered. And here we enter.

And then it all made sense. He did not spay a human girl; backyard doggy-time was just that—time spent in the backyard with your spayed doggies. Somehow I wish otherwise.

Last week I met Susannah at the Coop to pick up a book I had placed on hold before we traipsed off to Cambridge 1, our usual Red Sox, beer, and gourmet pizza haunt. After waiting in line at the register for an attendant to fetch the book, a practice they’ve since changed years ago, the clerk sent us to the information counter in the center of the store on the ground level. We walked over to the the empty kiosk and contemplated the high-profile books. Susannah pointed out her printed acknowledgment in Dean Harry Lewis’s book. Suddenly, we were inundated by service.

I explained to the younger of the two men that I had a book on hold, and as I was slightly embarrassed to mention its title, I volunteered my last name instead.

“Just a minute,” he said, “I have to get it from the back.”

To pass the time, Susannah listed some more books she had recently read or was currently reading. She’s been on a blog-to-book kick. The idea of it all makes me tremendously jealous in that petty, why-didn’t-I-do-that sort of way. But before too long, the clerk had returned, to my surprise, with not one but two books.

“I’ve got one called Google PageRank and Beyond and the Laws of Love,” he stated in a somewhat self-satisfied way. “I wasn’t sure which one was yours,” he added.

“I just want the Google book,” I answered.

“Are you sure you don’t want to know about the laws of love?” he asked. He italicized the laws of love with his voice.

“No, I just want the math book,” I pleaded.

No sooner had he handed me the book, then we had made it back to the rope and stanchion guarding the check-out. Being on my dinner break, I wasted no time at the register, even refusing a bag to speed things up. Then it hit me:

“Wait a second,” I started without turning to Susannah, “do you think he was hitting on me—did that really happen?”

She pointed out the obvious missed opportunity and suggested I order another book. It didn’t work. And the Sox lost that night.