eating cucumbers without permission...

Reading literary theory is fun, but I try and keep this piece by Billy Collins in mind.

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

It’d have been useful to hear it in highschool, I think, before discovering what all those poems were “Really About” — Hypocrisy, The Poet’s Grief At His Wife’s Passing, The Plight Of The Working Class In A Certain Town At The Turn Of The Century; specific meanings carefully elucidated by sufficiently invasive interrogation, by surgical insertion of salient socio-historio-biographical fact. Feh. Is it any wonder I never enjoyed it until I discovered it on my own?

I’ve been borderline-obsessed with “Fanfiction” (or “fan fiction”) for a while now, so I’m planning to write a series of entries on it in the hope that, by articulating my fascination, I can expunge it from my system and get on with something productive. It seemed best to start with an introduction.

Watched recently: Kung Fu Hustle, God of Cookery, Sideways, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Intolerable Cruelty, Full Metal Jacket, Finding Neverland.

I spent yesterday hacking the PEAR Text_Diff package into the wp_versioning plugin for WordPress. The idea is basically stolen from the MT-Revision plugin, which you can see in use here.

All my email (the bulk of it from several mailing-list-only addresses) gets directed to my Gmail account, since it’s fast and responsive and “conversations” are great. I’m unwilling to have the mail sent directly to Gmail, not least because re-subscribing would be a real pain, but mostly because I don’t want to get locked in to Google the way I was locked in to Hotmail.

The annoyance is that most lists don’t accept mail from non-subscribers — I can’t reply from Gmail, because I’m subscribed with a different address. I can fire up my mail client to send a reply from the right address, but that ruins message-threading. Clients send an In-Reply-To header containing the ID of the message being replied to, and others go further, sending References to every previous message in the thread. Most users never sees this information; the client handles it all.

If I reply with another client, that that information is lost. It’s annoying as hell, but you can get around the problem and preserve threading by manually setting the In-Reply-To header. For future reference, here’s how to do it in Thunderbird.

Step one is to get the ID of the message you’re replying to; it’s in the cleverly named Message-ID header, e.g.

Message-ID: <425937EB.5080609@example.com>
Message-ID: <d3bcq0+8c2o@example.com>
Message-ID: <29347298349283@example.com>

Step two is to enable adding the other headers from the composition dialogue. If you don’t have a user.js file in your Thunderbird profile directory, create one. Just add this line:

user_pref("mail.compose.other.header", "In-Reply-To, References");

That’s just a comma-separated list of headers to add to the compose dropdown, so feel free to add whatever you want, e.g. "In-Reply-To, X-Not-In-Reply-To, X-Random-Quote".

When composing a message, just add the message ID (including the < & > characters) to an In-Reply-To header. Note that if you click reply to open the message composition window, Thunderbird will already be silently sending an In-Reply-To header. If you add a custom header of the same name it will probably be ignored.

If you want to send a certain header automatically, you just add a few other lines to your user.js. I’ve started sending X-Swedish-Chef headers with every message.

user_pref("mail.identity.id2.headers", "swedish");
user_pref("mail.identity.id2.header.swedish", "X-Swedish-Chef: Bork bork bork");

You’ll need the relevant profile ID (search prefs.js for “identity”) in place of “id2“.

Notes on literary vampires in general, and “Interview with the Vampire” in particular.