Saw the movie 21 this weekend. The movie is loosely based on Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, a great book that no fewer than 6 people ranging from friends to relatives to two separate people working the counter at a bookstore (I bought the book as a gift after reading it) either heartily recommended or thoroughly enjoyed.

On the scale of a movie adaptation’s quality relative to the source material, the book clearly wins out in this case. Mezrich’s book has an immediacy and reality that screenwriters Peter Steinfeld and Allan Loeb failed to capture. Steinfeld and Loeb didn’t have an easy task—blackjack doesn’t possess the same dramatic possibilities of poker. The uncertainty of Mezrich’s ending didn’t dissatisfy; non-fiction is like that, and not everything is wrapped up cleanly in real life. Geeks and geek culture are hard to capture without falling into stereotype (even harder on screen than in print), and almost nothing on the screen gets it right (save the occasional show like Freaks and Geeks, a series which nailed it but sadly proved not to be a commercial hit.)

Knowing the basic outline of the real-life story, for me the arc of the screenplay plodded woodenly and inevitably, although had I known nothing about the book, the shallowness of the development still would have left me even hungry for something more. Within the framework the actors are given to work, they perform well—the movie’s problems begin and end with the screenplay.

The movie trudges along methodically, the highs not particularly high, the lows not overwhelmingly low, until it starts a dive around three-quarters of the way through the movie, a dive that bottoms out with a jarring thud when a down-and-out Ben Campbell (played by Jim Sturgess) shows up on Jill’s (Kate Bosworth) doorstep in a scene that could only be called emotionally hollow and cringe-worthy.

Hollowness, in fact, captures the tone of whole movie. After clipping the treetops with this nearly fatal plummet, Steinfeld and Loeb resort to a tacked-on set piece of Hollywood twists in an attempt to salvage the screenplay, but these don’t quite sit right either. Throughout the movie we never feel anything really is at stake. There’s almost no inner emotional life to these characters and what motivations that are presented are thinly developed. Ben Campbell, genius in the counting of cards and the creative use of strippers as vehicles for money laundering, is implausibly dumb when it comes to securing his own winnings. When he tilts, there’s no logical explanation established nor retroactively given. Even Fisher’s flame-out is explained after the fact as jealousy but we are given no set-up for this. All the characterizations are notable only in how incredibly flat they are.

In the end, the movie serves as a passable adaptation, if only to get people to read the book, yet the troublesome screenplay has the feel of mercenary work outsourced to the lowest bidder. As gambling movies go, it’s no Rounders; Damon’s voice overs gave Rounders a depth and closeness that 21 lacks. As capers go, it’s no House of Games (and Spacey, in this role, is no Joe Mantegna). As Vegas flicks go, this is no Casino; we get the Hard Rock and Planet Hollywood, and maybe this is unfair as the Vegas of Casino was of a grittier time than the antiseptic sheen of Vegas today. As adaptations go, it’s no Searching for Bobby Fischer, a movie that amplified and completely captured the spirit of Fred Waitzkin’s book. Look at Laurence Fishburne’s performance and character in Fischer compared to his role in 21, and you have a hint of the opportunities missed here.

Read the book first; wait for the rental.

Irvine Welsh’s If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work includes four short stories and one novella. The short stories cover more conventional American turf than do many of his past works, with a couple of stories set in the American Southwest, and one in suburban Chicago (and a final one across the shore set in Costa Brava), yet still capture a deeper exploration of some of the classic horror stories, urban legends and reversals of urban legends that you might find in the work of Chuck Palahniuk. Welsh is the kind of guy you could imagine bringing the Ryan’s Steakhouse Story to life in cringing, vivid Technicolor. One has to only remember the “Worst Toilet in Scotland” scene from Trainspotting to see how short of stretch that actually is.

But the crown jewel of If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work is the concluding novella set in Cowdenbeath, Scotland, “The Kingdom of Fife”, which interleaves the stories of the unemployed four-foot seven ex-jockey and competitive table football (i.e., Subbuteo) player Jason King and the depressed horse jumper Jenni Cahill. In alternating chapters, we get pulled into the visceral, utterly unpretentious and earthy world of Jason, who lives with his father (a dispossessed middle-age white man in Scotland who listens to 50 Cent and finds kinship with the plight of the African-American) and between nights of drinking the “black gold” (pints of Guinness) at the local bar called the Goth, stalks Jenni and schemes how to make some money. Jason narrates in the first person, in a kind of phonetic Scottish dialect that at first can be hard to parse but after a few chapter flows and resonates in the ear. (Sample translations: Ehs == He’s, goat == got, yin == one, tae == to, doon == down.)

For her part, Jenni is the lesser light to her more outwardly beautiful and more talented friend who also jumps showhorses (with more success–Jenni’s horse is a lame burden upon her family.) Jenni is of a higher class–her narration is more straightforward linguistically and captures the angst of a miserable emo listening to Marilyn Manson alone in her room, plotting her escape from Cowdenbeath.

Welsh’s novella covers a wide emotional range in just a couple of hundred pages, and despite the trials, slights, deaths and travails that befall Jason and Jenni, conveys to the reader Jason’s relentlessly realistic and optimistic outlook. Jason’s foibles are readily admitted and owned shamelessly, making him someone you can root for, warts and all.

It’s hard not to see this novella—which carries echoes of Trainspotting, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Ulysses, and a kind of bizarro-world The Graduate— not being optioned for a screenplay. Like the wee Jason, it may end up being a wee movie, but a wee one that I would pay to see.

If you’re patient enough to work through the dialect, If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work is without a doubt one of the most gritty (not quite filthy) and heartwarming stories you’ll read this year.

More links:

• If You Liked School, You’ll Love Work
• Irvine Welsh’s website

On the heels of my recent posts related to great programmers of the 70s and 80s, Leonard Richardson comes out this week with an excellent “Where are they now?” follow-up that tracks down the current disposition of each of the programmers profiled in Susan Lammers’ 1986 book Programmers at Work, another influential text I read in my formative years as a developer.

Lammers’ book profiled what might now be called the original rockstar programmers: guys like Andy Hertzfeld, Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, and Jonathan Sacks.

What’s striking is that unlike the rockstar entrepreneurs of today (on display in PaW’s equally zoological companion book from the 21st century, Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days), the programmers interviewed back in the mid-80s are humble, curious and focused on the code, perhaps even surprised that anyone would care to interview them about their work. In Founders, you can’t open a random page without encountering yet another insufferable ego (with the exception of a few notable interviews with del.icio.us founder Joshua Schacter and recently minted millionaire HOTorNOT founder James Hong); yet in Programmers at Work, the wonder shines through. There aren’t any Zed Shaws lurking in those pages.

Much of Programmers at Work holds up well even after 22 years. By today’s standards, a few of Lammers’ questions seem rather quaint (”Do you write a lot of comments in your programs?”), but then you’ll run into something interesting, like Simonyi taking a potshot at the “cult of simplicity” and how in the long run of computer science and other symbolic sciences, he believes that embracing complexity over simplicity will be what leads to the biggest breakthroughs. Leave it to the space-traveling creator of Hungarian notation to comment on that. At least Lammers didn’t ask Simonyi about his commenting style.

While The Soul Of A New Machine showed a deep slice of real coders and engineers at work and inspired almost through tacit observation, Programmers at Work captured the breadth of the development opportunities available, in the programmers’ own words, and by showing their own work products in a much more explicit and expository form.

More PaW stuff here:

• Salon’s coverage of the reunion.
• Susan Lammers’ Amazon review of Founders at Work

Can literature influence a career?

Tracey Kidder’s The Soul Of A New Machine, published in 1983, follows the engineers who designed and built the Data General Eagle, a 32-bit minicomputer competing not only with the DEC VAX for market share, but with Data General’s own Eclipse project for internal resources and mindshare.

Kidder’s book won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction. I first read it sometime around 1985 or 1986, trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. This past winter, I picked it up again, rediscovering all the reasons I loved the book. Back in the mid-80s, I hadn’t programmed much—a few class projects, some home projects, a summer spent mucking around with 65C02 assembly language writing a simple graphical game. What the book captures so well—and what makes software development such a stimulating pursuit—is the satisfaction of making something from nothing, and the engrossing challenge of debugging your creation.

The story follows two groups—the Hardy Boys, Tom West’s hardware engineers who designed and built the Eagle—and the Microkids, Carl Alsing’s software developers charged with writing the 75-bit microcode implementing the Eagle’s instruction set. In one of the chapters, Kidder sits through a marathon debugging session where the microkids and Hardy Boys try to discover the source of flakiness causing the automated tests to fail. Speculation rages as to whether it is a problem with the Instruction Processor (the IP) or the System Cache; a case can be made for either. Step by step they hypothesize, experiment and evaluate results to track down the ultimate source–the need to insert a NAND gate delay the arrival of a signal thrown by the Sys Cache that was causing the timing issue.

Some problems are easy to find and hard to fix; some are hard to find and easy to fix; some go both ways. They have seen and will continue to encounter permutations of all three. This one was hard to find. It happens to be easy, almost trivial, to repair. Now Holberger and Veres know where the failure occurs. They move fast. Seen working at such a moment, they might remind you of a couple of airline pilots, in the cockpit of their big jet, preparing for takeoff—heroes of technique, flicking switches with both hands, reading dials, and talking to the tower all at once.

Still undecided on a major a year or two later, I found myself writing microcode for Doug Jones’ Computer Architecture class and the deal was sealed—I would finish up my computer science degree and try to find a job in the field of software.

The Soul of a New Machine is one of two literary books—Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values is the other—that are essential reading for a developer wanting to get the right mindset for development, debugging and pursuing quality. It’s not that there aren’t great books out there that are just as essential covering the technical side of development or providing a specific methodology for software development. It’s that these two books focus specifically on the mindset, motivations and philosophy necessary to solve problems and find harmony with work. In these books lie the important values associated with valuable work. Soul, zen, values—these are the kinds of spiritual and philosophical terms you rarely find in technical books.

The truth knocks on the door and we say ’Go away, I’m looking for the truth’ and so it goes away. Puzzling.
—Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

You come away from TSOANM with the essence of the computer and software business at its best: the deep satisfaction of creation and the challenge of solving puzzles. These same attributes are found in novel writing, when you track and integrate complexity arising from multiple aspects operating at different levels: character , plot, theme, motif, language, pace. The most beautiful code in the world, the most elegant solution to a complex problem—neither are far afield from James Joyce’s Ulysses?

The Nature of Gothic

As the book winds down and the Eagle nears completion, Kidder finally gets to the heart of the matter—what it is that motivates these guys.

“In The Nature Of Gothic, John Ruskin decries the tendency of the industrial age to fragment work into tasks so trivial that they are fit to be performed only by the equivalent of slave labor. Writing in the nineteenth century, Ruskin was one of the first, with Marx, to have raised this now-familiar complaint. In the Gothic cathedrals of Europe, Ruskin believed, you can see the glorious fruits of free labor, given freely. What is usually meant by the term craftsmanship is the production of things of high quality; Ruskin makes the crucial point that a thing may also be judged according to the conditions in which it was built.”

This expository paragraph springs jarringly from Kidder’s narrative, and he elaborates on the specific culture of Data General—an environment where management guides the craftsmen to success at the same time it allows them the freedom to invent. While you can’t coerce the creation of a cathedral without attracting people willing to work for a higher purpose, you can affect the quality and the values in the work by giving the craftsmen the latitude to pursue their craft. Both purpose and latitude are necessary to create something great, and from the result alone can you judge whether these conditions existed during the work’s creation. In the result of the labor, the soul can be found.