Rude Vibes at an Academic Conference in Linguistics

We finally got into the department in the mid-2000s, and my advisor was immediately on the track to tenure — writing four club papers, four shrimp proposals, an ordered a quart of RAM and nine fresh boxen.  “Vitamin CPU,” he explained. “We’ll need all we can get.”

I agreed.  By this time the lab was barely able to cut the mouse turds and my howllucidations were down to a tolerable level.  The Dell service guy had a vaguely reptilian cast to his features, his being a native Texan and all, but I was no longer hearing high-pitched CPU fans echoing down the corridors in pools of fresh connections.  The only problem now was a gigantic neon semanticist outside the department, blocking my attempts to enter his vaulted clique — millions of synapses cried out and were suddenly silenced by his overly-complicated discourse semantics, strange symbols & filigree, with discussions of one’s pedigree, giving off a loud hum. . . .

So much for the RAship!

“Look outside,” I said.

“Why?”

“There’s a big data . . . machine in the sky, . . . some kind of eclectic eel . . . coming straight at us.”

“Code it,” said my advisor.

“Not yet,” I said. “I want to study Old Norse.” He went into his office and began pulling my chain and joked about firing me. “Look,” he said, “you’ve got to stop this talk about eels and the inequality of the department funding those who have parents paying their way. It’s making me sick.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be gone by the end of this adventure.”

“Worry? Jesus, I almost went crazy down there in foobar.  They’ll never let us hack back into that place — not after your scene at the hash table.”

“What scene?”

“You bastard,” he said.  ”I left you alone for three semesters! You scared the shit out of those students! Waving that goddamn Parlin stride around and yelling about reptiles. You’re lucky I came to this campus in time. You were ready to call it quits and leave the program without an advisor. I said you should be my RA and that I was funding you up for your bold power. Hell, the only reason they gave us the lab space was to get you in there!”

)nobody eve n(notices) an e.e. freak (

The woman shrugged as he led me away.  In a conference full of compling crazies, nobody even notices an e.e. freak.

(we) struggled
 thr
     -ough thecrowdedlob.by
and   found   2.2.2   stools   at the foobar.
(my)o(my)
                -=advisor=-
ord(ained)ered  2.2.2  cuban cigars  from a libra
a.round  of                cuba libres
                     and a                    gram of categorical grammar
                               umop apisdn
   then he
       opened the
           job offer.
"who's yo
ur contact?" he asked
                                 he's (wait)
-ing for (us)
             [in a room]
                        [do a dance]
                                    [on the floor]
                                                  [in a round]
                                                               on the n+1th floor.

I couldn’t remember. My contact? The term rang a professional bell, but I couldn’t concentrate, nor think of the future. Terrible things were happening all around us, and in my life at the time. Right next to me a huge name in rhetoric was gnawing at a woman’s neck, arguing some post-structuralist point, turning the carpet a blood-red crimson with his drivel. It became difficult to keep our footing with the lack of foundation, and we slipped over each other in the mess. “Order some snowshoes,” I whispered. “Otherwise, we’ll never get off this pile of bullshit alive. You notice these linguists don’t have any trouble moving around in this muck — that’s because they’re clawing up the ivory tower and will cling to any theories that will get them published.”

“Linguists?” he said. “If you think we’re in trouble now, wait till you see what’s happening in industry.”  He took off the sunglasses his Brazilian ex-wife gave him and I could see he was lying.  ”I just went upstairs to see this man Larson,” he said. “I told him we knew what he was up to. He says he’s a philosopher of language, but when I mentioned M.C. Asher — well, that did it; he freaked. I could see it in his bulging eyes and hathead, smell it in his coffee breath. He knows we’re onto him.”

“Good,” I said, “But where does that leave room for me? If you’re on his committee, you won’t have time for mine. And the Rockport shoes? We’re right in the middle of a fucking academic zoo! And somebody’s giving funding to these goddamn people! It won’t be long before they bore us to tears. Jesus, look at the floor! Have you ever seen so much hubris? How many have they funded already? I pointed across the room to a group that seemed to be staring at us. “Holy shit, look at that bunch over there! They’ve spotted us!”

“That’s the lookup table,” he said. “That’s where you have to get hashed for our login credentials. Shit, let’s get it over with, and online. You handle that, and I’ll get the room.”

The face of a Money Eel

Indeed.  Check it in.  But when we finally arrived at the medieval hotel my advisor was unable to parse to a deep structure the registration procedure.  We were forced to stand in line with all the other eggheads — which proved to be extremely difficult under the circumstances of jetlag, absinthe, and pseudo-literature I was peddling in my paper.  I kept telling myself: “Be quiet, be calm, say nothing . . . the best academics do this but with thousands of words . . . speak only when spoken to: name, rank and academic affiliation, nothing else, ignore this terrible jetlag, the absinthe, the eliot, pretend it’s not happening . . . .”

There is no way to explain the terror I felt when I finally lurched up to the desk clerk and started juggling.  It’s what I do when I’m stressed, fall back on muscle memory.  All my well-rehearsed tricks fell apart under that woman’s stony glare, and the knowledge that a Cirque troupe was also staying in the hotel that weekend.  The “Welcome Cirque” placard gave it away and gave me stagefright.  But I was not there to try out for the circus; I had another tightrope to wire.  ”Hi there,” I said. “My name is . . . . ah, Howling Mime . . . yes, on the list, that’s for sure.  The paper had been accepted.  Free tuition, final wisdom, total academic immersion . . . why not?  I have my advisor with me and I realize of course that his name is the one on the list, since he chaired the parse committee.  We must have that suite, and yes this man is actually my advisor.  We brought this laptop all the way from the lab and now it’s time for dessert, right?  Yes.  Just check the list and you’ll see.  Don’t worry.  What’s the language of choice here?  What’s next year’s venue?”

The woman never batted an eye at my banter.”Your paper’s not ready yet,” she said. “But there are plenty of jobs out there for you.”

“No!” I shouted. “Why? I haven’t learned anything yet!” My brain felt rubbery.  I gripped the desk and sagged toward her like a man on absinthe would do, and she held out an offer letter in six figures, but I refused to accept it. The woman’s face was changing: swelling, pulsing like an HR rep from a Fortune 500 company . . . horrible money-green jowels and fangs jutting out, the face of a Money Eel! Deadly poison!  I lunged backwards into my advisor, who gripped my arm as he reached out to take the offer letter.  ”I’ll handle this,” he said to the Money woman. “This student has bad grades, but I have plenty of others.  My name is Doctor Compling.  Prepare our suite at once.  We’ll be in the foo bar.”

Kill the parameters and the head will die

“KILL THE PARAMETERS AND THE HEAD WILL DIE.”

Or for you HTML junkies,

“KILL THE <BODY> AND THE <HEAD> WILL DIE.”

This line appears in my source code, for some reason.  Perhaps I was stumbling for a metaphor, perhaps I was waving a dead chicken over it.  Is he still alive?  Hell no!  Still able to talk?  Perhaps.  I watched a video on YouTube, some horribly twisted video about the Governor of Texas.  A very painful experience in every way, a supposed end to 2004.  Chomsky still keeping linguistics prisoner from a post-war tower at MIT, my advisor jogging home after beers in Edinburgh, my fellow students twenty-something mutants with good intentions, a philosophy professor groping his students in <hall> Hall, no computational or socio profs, strung out on candidates, my department on the verge of death.  My advisor, like Dubya, had finally prevailed for reasons that people like me refused to understand — at least not out loud.

. . . But that was some other era, now I was burned out and long gone from the foul first year of graduate school.  A lot of things had changed in that year.  And now I was in Prague as the writer of this fine slick paper that had sent me out here in the Great White Lark for some reason that nobody claimed to understand.  Two could play this game, I would soon learn.  “Just check it into subversion,” they said, “and we’ll take it from there . . .”

I advise you to derive at top speed

“You bore,” I said.  “When we get to ACL I’ll have you dancing around the nearest club.  What do you think the Gang of Four will do when I show up with a midwestern linguistics professor with a mock Scottish accent?”

“They’ll accept us both,” he said.  “Francis Bond knows who I am.   Shit, I’m your advisor.“  He burst into the kind of laughter only accomplished by a a slot machine paying out or a recently minted PhD.

“You’re full of Kool-Aid, you fool.  It’ll be a goddamn miracle if we can get to the conference and check in before you turn into a mad scientist.  Are you ready for that?  Checking into the conference under a made-up name with intent to commit character assassination with a head full of Kool-Aid?  Oh yeah!”  He was laughing again, then he jammed his nose right into the salt shaker of O’Connor, aiming the coaxial straight into what was left of his morality.

“How long do we have?” I said.

“Maybe thirty more words worth,” he replied.  “As your advisor I advise you derive at top speed.”

Prague was just up ahead.  I could see Charles Bridge and Wenceslas Square looming up over the Bohemian prairie, red as the Sahara in the setting sun.  The minimalism, the government binding, cluster of grey rectangles in the distance rising out of the forest.

Thirty words worth.  It was going to be very close.  The objective was the big tower looming over Wenceslas Square, as downtown as you can get in a Medieval European city — and if we didn’t get there before we lost all control, there was also the embassy across the city.  Worst case was EMNLP a few months later, which felt like a Texas State prison in Calhoun.  I had been there a lot — in solitary, the cinder block walls thick with the paint of twenty generations of student life, or lack thereof.  I didn’t want to go back, not for any reason at all.  So there was really no choice: We would have to run the gauntlet, and Kool-Aid be damned.  Go through all the pendantic academic bullshit, get the QP cautiously parked in the garage, work out on the graduate advisor, deal with the visa, debug the code, run and rerun the experiments, plot the results, typeset the pdf, submit the paper — all of it bogus, totally illegal, a fraud on its face, but of course, it would have to be done.

plenty of vultures out here

“Good luck,” said my advisor. “We had a real funk on our hands. That algorithm made me nervous. Did you see its runtime? He was still laughing. “Dynamic programming,” he said. “That’s a good algorithm!”

I opened the code and scrolled down to the tree kernel. “Move over,” I said. “I’ll code. I have to get this thing working before the next deadline.”

“Shit, that’ll be weeks,” said my advisor. “That’s hundreds of hours from now.”

“So it is,” I said.

“Let’s head out and hear a book reading,” he said. “We can get work done there.”

I ignored the reading. “A large coffee,” I yelled at the barista as the brainstorm took over again. I pounded on the keyboard as I hurtled back into the code. An hour later he leaned over with some friends. “There’s a place ’round the block called Headhunters,” he said. “As your advisor, I advise you to stop and take a break.”

I shook my head. “It’s absolutely imperative that we get this thing working before the deadline to ACL,” I said. “Otherwise, we’ll have to wait until next year.”

He nodded. “But let’s forget all that nonsense about the hardening of the software dream,” he said. “The important thing is the great results dream.” He was hacking around in the sourse code. “I think it’s about time to chew up some CPU,” he said. “That cheap single processor unit ran for a long time, and I don’t know if I can stand to wait for the results any longer.”

“I like it,” I said. “We should distribute the lab with this code and run experiments all night, so the log files fill up all the way to the conference.”

He was flipping through iTunes. The laptop was screaming out Portishead beats ten years old. “The poor fool should have just kept up his research trajectory,” said my advisor. “Punks like that just get in the way when they bite off more than they can code.”

“Speaking of code,” I said. “I think it’s about time to get into the Eliot and the Carver.”

“Forget Eliot,” he said. “Let’s save it for soaking down the models in the training. But here’s this. Your half of the Tom Wolfe. You’ll blow through it like bubble gum. Then on to the Carver!”

I took the Wolfe and ate it, catching flak and radical chic. My advisor was now tweaking the code containing the feature extraction. Opening it, optimizing it. Then pointing and explaining to me where my loops went awry, as my code went all wonky on this day. A very expensive bug arising from the tree comparison module. “Oh, jesus!” he moaned. “Did you see what God just did to us?”  As he was an athiest, I found this disturbing.  If there was a god, he sure as hell wasn’t a linguist.

“God didn’t do that!” I shouted. “I did. I’m having a fucking hard time concentrating! I knew this would happen from the start, you dig!”

“You better stay focused,” he said. And suddenly he was waving a fat black .357 module at me. One of those snubnosed Python programs with the iterators and the generators. “Plenty of vultures out here,” he said. “They’ll pick your code clean before morning.”

my head feels like a gelatinous cube!

But our project was different. It was a new implementation of everything right and true and decent in the Redwoods Treebank. It was a gross, dynamic programming salute to the fantastic possibilities of parse selection in this corpus — but only for those with true grit. And we were chock full of that.

My advisor understood this concept, despite his academic position, but our prospective student was not an easy person to hack. S/he said s/he understood, but I could see in hiser eyes that s/he didn’t. S/he was lying to me.

The code suddenly veered off the schedule and we came to a screeching halt in the gravel. I was hurled against the review board. My advisor was slumped over the desk. “What’s wrong?” I yelled. “We can’t stop here. This is the normal form of the perceptron!”

“My tenure,” he groaned. “Where’s the rhetorical argument?”

“Oh,” I said. “The argument, yes, it’s right here.” I reached into the book-bag for the Ellison. The kid seemed petrified. “Don’t worry,” I said. “This man has a good idea — Ensemble Models. But we have no results for the dual-form perceptron. Yes, here they are.” I picked four stories out of the Alone Against Tomorrow and handed them to my advisor. He immediately cracked it open and started reading, and I did likewise.

He read “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” and fell back into the seat, staring straight up at the sun. “Turn up the fucking Portishead!” he screamed. “My head feels like a Gelatinous Cube!”

“Volume! Clarity! Bass! We must have bass!” He flailed his naked arms at the sky. “What’s wrong with us? Are we goddamn code monkeys?”

I turned both the radio and iTunes up full bore. “You scurvy shyster bastard,” I said. “Watch your language! You’re talking to a doctor of kernelism!”

He was laughing out of control. “What the fuck are we doing out here in this lab?” he shouted. “Somebody call the police. We need help!”

“Pay no attention to this guy,” I said to the prospective. “He can’t handle the Ellison. Actually, we’re both doctors of kernelism, and we’re on our way to ACL to cover exponentially-sized feature sets for parse selection.” And then I began laughing . . .

My advisor hunched around to face the prospective. “The truth is,” he said, “we’re going to ACL to subvert a ling baron named Chomsky. I’ve known him for years, but he ripped us off — and you know what that means, right?”

I wanted to shut him off, but we were both helpless with laughter. What the fuck were we doing here in the lab, when we both had sleep deprivation?

“Chomsky has cashed out!” my advisor snarled at the kid in the back seat. “We’re going to rip his theories out!”

“And eat them!” I blurted. “That bastard won’t get away with this! What’s going on in this field when an entrenched MIT professor like that can get away with sandbagging a doctor of kernelism?”

Nobody answered. My advisor was cracking another Ellison and the kid was climbing out of the back seat, scrambling down the trunk of the tree. “Thanks for the derivation,” s/he yelled. “Thanks a lot. I like you guys. Don’t worry about me.” Hiser feet hit the asphalt and s/he started running back toward computer science. Out in the middle of the lab, no parse tree in sight.

“Wait a minute,” I yelled. “Come back and get an account.” But apparently s/he couldn’t hear me. The music was very loud, and s/he was moving away from us at a good speed.

I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.

Terminal.app psychosis

I am still vaguely haunted by our student’s remark about how s/he’d “never rode in a Chom-ski before.” Here’s this poor geek living in a world of Minimalists zipping past himer in the halls all the time, and s/he’s never even ridden on one. It made me feel like Bar-Hillel. I was tempted to have my advisor log onto the next wifi point and arrange some kind of UT department-to-department contract whereby we could just give the theory to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the theory’s yours.” Give himer the trees and then use the faculty MOU to zap off on a jet to some place like TACC and rent another huge fireapple-red computer for a sleep-deprived, top-speed run across the campus all the way out to the last stop in Calhoun . . . and then trade the computer off for a BSD machine. Keep publishing.

But this manic notion passed quickly. There was no point in getting this harmless kid locked up — and besides, I had plans for the computer. I was looking forward to flashing around the ‘Net on the bugger. Maybe do a bit of serious algorithm development then head down to the Drag: Walk out to that big stoplight in front of the Church of Scientology and start screaming at traffic:

“Alright, you chickenship wimps! You pansies! When this goddamn code compiles, I’m gonna stomp down on this thing and blow every one of you gutter punks off the Drag!”

Right. Challenge the bastards on their own turf. Come screeching up to a conference, ranting and raving with Lem’s Cyberiad in one hand and jamming the horn to drown out the music . . . glazed eyes insanely dilated behind tiny black, gold-rimmed titanium spectacles, screaming gibberish . . . and a genuinely dangerous research assistant, reeking of T.S. Eliot and Terminal.app psychosis. Revving the CPUs up to a terrible high-pitched whirring whine, waiting for the results to change . . .

How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old linguists lock themselves in the ivory tower and drive their students away with obtuse theories.

you should’ve given him some n-grams

Getting ahold of the books had been no problem, but the computer and the tape recorder were not easy things to round up at 6:30 on a Friday afternoon on the Drag. I already had one computer, but it was far too small and slow for computational work. We went to a Pizza bar, where my advisor made seventeen calls before locating a workstation with adequate horsepower and proper coloring.

“Hang onto it,” I heard him say into the phone. “We’ll be over to make the trade in thirty minutes.” Then after a pause he began shouting: “What? Of course the student has a major student loan! Do you realize who the fuck you’re talking to?”

“Don’t take any guff from these swine,” I said as he slammed the phone down. “Now we need a sound store with the finest equipment. Nothing dinky. We want one of those new Belgian Heliowatts with a voice-activated shotgun mike, for picking up conversations in oncoming computers.”

We made several more calls and finally located our equipment in a store about five miles away in South Austin. It was closed, but the salesman said he would wait, if we hurried. But we were delayed en route when a Mini-Cooper in front of us killed a pedestrian on South Congress. The store was closed by the time we got there. There were people inside, but they refused to come to the double-glass door until we gave it a few belts and made ourselves clear.

Finally two salesmen brandishing tire irons came to the door and we managed to negotiate the sale through a tiny slit. Then they opened the door just wide enough to shove the equipment out, before slamming and locking it again. “Now take that stuff and get the hell away from here,” one of them shouted through the slit.

My advisor shook his fist at them. “We’ll be back,” he yelled. “One of these days I’ll toss a fucking Google bomb into this place! I have your name on this sales slip! I’ll find out where you live and crack your wifi net!”

“That’ll give him something to think about,” he muttered as we drove off. “That guy is a paranoid psychotic, anyway. They’re easy to spot.”

We had trouble, again, at the computer rental agency. After signing all the papers, I logged on and almost lost control of it while hacking across the net to the cvs repository. The rental man was obviously shaken.

“Say there . . . uh . . . you fellas are going to be careful with this computer, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Well, good god!” he said. “You just hacked over that linksys firewall and you didbn’t even slow down! Port-scanning in reverse! And you barely missed the pserver!”

“No harm done,” I said. “I always test a distro that way. The backdoors. For stress factors.”

Meanwhile, my advisor was busy transferring code and corpora onto the hard drive of the workstation. The rental man watched him nervously.

“Say,” he said. “Are you fellas thinking?”

“Not me,” I said.

“Just fill the goddamn disk,” my advisor snapped. “We’re in a hell of a hurry. We’re on our way to ACL for a conference.”

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said. “We’re research people.” I watched him put the cat 5 on, then I jammed the thing into runmode 3 and we lurched onto the network.

“There’s another worrier,” said my advisor. “He’s probably all cranked up on speed.”

“Yeah, you should’ve given him some n-grams.”

“N-grams wouldn’t help a pig like that,” he said. “To hell with him. We have a lot of business to take care of, before we can get into the conference.”

“I’d like to get hold of some discourse corpora,” I said. “They might come in handy in parsing.”

But there were no corpus sites open, and we weren’t up to burglarizing a site. “Why bother?” said my advisor. “And you have to remember that a lot of judges are good vicious critics. Can you imagine what those bastards would do to us if we got busted all wrapped up in the details of specific corpora? Jesus, they’d cast us out!”

“You’re right,” I said. “And for christ’s sake don’t type so much at wifi hotspots. Keep in mind that our net’s exposed.”

He nodded. “We need a big Powerbook. Keep it down here on the seat, out of sight. If anybody sees us, they’ll think we’re using aome other net.”

We spent the rest of the night rounding up materials and packing the disk. Then we ate Snickers bars and went swimming in Barton Springs. Somewhere around dawn we had breakfast at Magnolia Cafe, then drove very carefully across town and plunged into the MoPac expressway, heading North.

free software. the american dream.

The Department of Linguistics was not familiar with Funding: they referred me to the NSF just a few thousand miles from Calhoun — but when I got there, the money-woman refused to give me more than an honorable mention. They had no idea who I was, they said, and by that time I was pouring sweat. My topic is too thick for the Feds: I have never been able to properly explain myself in that climate. Not with the soaking sweats . . . wild ideas and trembling hands.

So I took the honorable mention and left. My classmates were waiting in a bar around the corner. “This won’t make the nut,” they said, “unless we have student loans.”

I assured them we would. “You linguists are all the same,” I told them. “You have no faith in the essential decency of the Scientific Community. Jesus, just one semester ago we were sitting over there in Jester Hall, stone broke and paralyzed by Minimalism, when a call for applications comes through from some total stranger in Edinburgh, telling me to do computational linguistics and here’s a position — and then he sends me over to some office in the Service Building where another total stranger gives me a few keys to the labs . . . I tell you, my man, this is the American Dream in action! We’d be fools not to ride this strange torpedo all the way out to the end.”

“Indeed,” they said. “We must do it.”

“Right,” I said. “But first we need the computers. And after that the corpora. And then the iPod, for special music, and some Guyabara shirts.” The only way to prepare for a trip like this, I felt, was to dress up like computer scientists and get crazy, then screech off across campus and do the research. Never lose sight of the primary responsibility.

But what was the research? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own. Free Software. The American Dream. Hunter S. Thompson gone mad on linguistics in Austin. Do it now: pure Gonzo Linguistics.

There was also the sociolinguistic factor. Every now and then when your studies get complicated and the syntacticians start closing in, the only real cure is to load up on semantic theories and then derive like a bastard from Heim and Kratzer. To relax, as it were, in the womb of the Texas sun. Just roll the roof back and screw it on, grease the face with white tanning butter and move out with the music at top volume, and at least a poem of Eliot.

Paint me a cavernous waste shore
  Cast in the unstilled Cyclades,
Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks
  Faced by the snarled and yelping seas.