Here are miscellaneous drafts,
exhibiting many of Tom Karmo's
(sporadic and modest)
efforts as a creative author.

You are welcome to hyperlink to these works. You are also welcome to disseminate unedited (unmodified) electronic or printed copies, provided you supply an attribution to me, stating my URL, and provided further that you comply with any additional limitations that may be stated in any copyright notices incoporated within the individual works. Copyright is hereby asserted - (c) Toomas Karmo 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 - in any of the works which do not themselves contain explicit assertions of copyright.

To ensure rational ordering by subject matter, the list is displayed in descending order of (rather casually assigned, and not necessarily unique) library call numbers, in the Library of Congress system favoured by academic cataloguers in North America. That ordering rule sends witings on editing, typesetting, and the like to the top, followed by writings on other technical topics, with minimally work-oriented writings on theological and philosophical topics coming last.

• [Call number = Z695.9] "Indexing Tomorrow's Web-Delivered World Wide Library": a long, serious essay on the future of the indexing profession some decades from now, when the full text of all new scholarly and scientific publications will be on the Web. Excerpt: Any one researcher can hope to make only a modest contribution to the work of the remote server, perhaps contributing only a handful of useful new indexing terms or new cross-references a year to the growing server-side thesaurus. However, even in a small discipline such as astronomy, the depth of the cumulated term-selection wisdom will be considerable. . . . anyone asking, "How should we index, say, a graduate-level book-length survey of current knowledge in stellar astronomy?" will have a credible answer: "Well, as our server makes clear to the world, our own people, the very people competent to read and write those stellar-astronomy books, are finding that they need THIS particular set of some hundred or thousand terms to index the various facets of this specific astronomical topic." . . . Just as we do not now take scholarly and scientific writings seriously unless they incorporate diligently constructed bibliographies, so the readers of 2051 will not take World Wide Library publications seriously unless they incorporate indexes diligently harmonized with . . . controlled server-side vocabularies. Harmonization cannot be perfect. . . . SEE ALSO: Essay on good Web development practices, at call number QA76.76.94 below.

• [Call number = Z253.4.T47] "TeX Self-Test": a short self-test, inviting readers to appraise their eye for typographical nuances as delivered by the TeX typesetting package.

• [Call number = Z253.4.T47] "Whither TeX in the XML Régime?": a short, flamboyant prose poem on the joy of using the TeX typesetting package, with perspectives on SGML and XML. Excerpt: In the end, there was the printed page, the unobtrusive, even transparent receptacle of its author's meaning - a page produced for the machine-mad, computer-crazed marketplace, and yet reflecting, in its well-placed folio, headline, and margins, in the fine kerning, ligatures, and leading of its print, the accumulated wisdom of a five-century typographical tradition.

• [Call number = SB451] "Tulips Suggest Something Naughty?": journalism to help promote the Sixth International Tulip Festival in Truro, Nova Scotia, in the spring of 2003. Published as a special on pages A1 and A2 of the Truro Daily News for 2003-05-17. The paper serves a conurbation of about 20,000, plus outlying parts of Colchester County. Excerpt: The tulips, seasonal successors to the daffodils, suggest...something deliciously un-English, something a little naughty, something less akin to respectable Wordsworth than to tiptoeing Tiny Tim... Even the tulip's botanical origins suggest a certain unrestraint. Some of the genes have been traced to the snowy uplands west and northwest of the Himalayas...

• [Call number=QB88.D5] "The Future of the David Dunlap Observatory: Corrections in Language from the University of Toronto Press Release of 2007 September 10": corrections to a press release which in my own private judgement (I do not herewith write as a representative of any group or any other individual) contains a material omission and a demonstrable error of fact. The essay may be useful to groups or individuals seeking to preserve DDO, or its surrounding land, or both. Excerpt: Leaving the allegation of academic unsuitability out of the equation, we may ask: How could a damaging factual error regarding research unsuitability have crept into the 2007 September 10 press release? It is possible in retrospect to see what happened. In its eagerness to make a case, the Faculty of Arts and Science, the entity ultimately responsible for instructing the press-release writer, pardonably blurred two distinct concepts: there is, on the one hand, the concept of suitability for 'research purposes' in general; and there is, on the other hand, the concept of suitability for those specific 'research purposes' belonging to the current Departmental research strategy. It is fair to say that the DDO does not fit well with those specific 'research purposes', and one has much sympathy for the Departmental administrators in their difficulty.

• [Call number = QA76.76.O63] "No-Frills GNU/Linux: Philosophical Foundations": the opener, composed early in 2004, for what may be an eventual series of essays, on running a professional GNU/Linux workstation with minimal resources. Here is a section-by-section summary (displayed also at the start of the essay text itself): The first section, 'Taking Inventory: Frillies in the Biosphere' and the second, 'Taking Inventory: Frillies in Computing' together introduce the thesis that the problems we face in our deteriorating physical environment are paralleled by problems in the virtual space of software. - The grim thesis is taken a step further in the next section, 'Frillies, Tainter's Spiral, and Societal Collapse': so severe are our software problems that our situation is (not just uncomfortable, but, more radically) unstable, as the late Roman Empire was. - A ray of hope is first offered in a section entitled 'No-Frills GNU/Linux: A First Look', then put into the wider history-of-computing context in a section headed 'No-Frills GNU/Linux, Unix Permaculture, and Noosphere Conservation'. - The long final section, 'No-Frills GNU/Linux in the Noosphere: Details from a Debian Implementation' explains in concrete terms, with many a screenshot, many a real-life example, how a permaculturist, deeply noosphere-green, computing philosophy may today be implemented. The essence of the long story, in essence a tour of the author's own workstation environment, is that we do well to avoid pointless software elaboration. We should, instead, harness within the X Window system the archaic power of the command-line interface. Robust contemporary incarnations of the 1980s glass teletype are lauded, notably in the context of a real-life Debian software-discovery scenario, essentially as lived in 2003 by the delighted author himself. The 14,000-word essay is respectfully dedicated to the Linux Users Group of Iraq (http://linux-iraq.org/), a community working in difficult conditions for a worthy cause.

• [Call number = QA76.76.O63] "No-Frills GNU/Linux: Imposing Order on Filenames and Directory Hierarchies": another in what may be an eventual series of essays, on running a professional GNU/Linux workstation with minimal resources. This twenty-thousand-word (fifty-printed-page?) piece may prove useful even to some readers outside GNU/Linux, on the one hand to some Microsoft and Macintosh end users, on the other hand to high-level specialists in the emerging, nowadays typically XML-driven, disciplines of "information architecture", "Document Management Systems", and "Content Management Systems". Here is a section-by-section summary (displayed also at the start of the essay text itself): The first section, 'About This Essay' and the second, 'Basic Workflow Concepts', lay foundations. The third, 'Filenames: Case, Sort Order, and Related Issues', is likewise foundational, talking about conventions governing a fundamental chore, the naming of directories (in Microsoft and Macintosh terminology, "folders") and their contents. The fourth, 'Allowing a Degree of Untidiness in the Home Directory', argues that there is no need to keep one's home directory tidy, provided an appropriate "Big Four" of subdirectories is present to impose order on what lies below home in one's filesystem hierarchy. The following four sections, namely the exceptionally long 'Organizing the Maintenance Area' and the shorter 'Organizing the Public-Documents Archive' and 'Organizing the Private-Studies Area' and 'Organizing the Client Area', explore this Big Foursome of handy directories. I finish with short sections entitled 'Further Reading' and 'Acknowledgements'.

• [Call number = QA76.76.O63] "No-Frills GNU/Linux: Timekeeping, Timestamping, Timelogging": another in what may be an eventual series of essays, on running a professional GNU/Linux workstation with minimal resources. Three excerpts: (a) Basic GNU/Linux chronometry starts with our synchronizing our software clock...with some "Stratum 2" time server under Network Time Protocol (NTP). (b) The Geneva-based International Organization for Standardization, or ISO, brought order out of [timestamping] chaos with its standard ISO 8601:1988... (c) [My logging] formalism is lean and mean. No software tools are needed, apart from the Perl script which generates weekly totals. I'd be willing to bet that my formalism makes timelogging as efficient as elaborate software does, since what I lose in sophistication I gain in ease of maintenance.

• [Call number = QA76.76.H94] "Web Development: Current Good Practices": a long, serious essay on current good practice for creators of Web pages. Proposes as good practices the formal validation of HTML, the separation of content from presentation, the adoption of disciplined information architectures, the tight integration of Web and press publishing, and participation in the public Web-accessibility initiatives. Excerpt on the information-architectures theme: To avoid blurring the mental map, the number of links joining a pair of "subsidiary", or non-introductory, pages from two distinct theme sections is to be kept low. For the same reason, pages within any one theme are not to be organized into a randomly interlinked structure, but essentially into what mathematicians call a tree . . . . SEE ALSO: Essay on indexing tomorrow's Web-delivered World Wide Library, at call number Z695.9 above.

• [Call number=PE1408.K123] "Logic Blueprints Take the Stress Out of Writing Nonfiction": advice on writing, prepared in the first instance for a a private individual to whom I was selling a mix of tutoring and editing services. The advice may also be useful to students preparing term papers, and to some limited degree even to professional writers and editors. Excerpt: Make the amount of time you put into writing your logic blueprint about as great as the amount of time you put into writing your first draft. Make the investment in stress and sweat - in mental energy - much greater for your blueprint than for that draft.

• [Call number = J99] "Cyber-Elites and Body Lotions: Some Business Values": business journalism, produced at the request of a client, profiling some of the movers and shakers in today's lamentably wobbly world. Excerpt: We do not have to point an accusing finger at the Union Carbides, the Boeings, and the Exxon-Mobils of this world to prove that businesses can do harm. The potential for nastiness, both intentional and unintentional, is already obvious from what I've been obliged to say about today's cyber-elites. But Dame Anita [Roddick] shows us a less obvious truth. 'Businesses,' she writes …, 'have the power to do good.'

• [Call number = J99.1] "Snapshots of a Planet in Peril": current-issues journalism, produced at the request of a client, profiling Earth's essential problems over the coming decade. Excerpt: Our twenty-first century woes are the reflection of a population overshoot, of the same kind as causes a rodent population to die off disastrously after exceeding the carrying capacity of its region, and indeed of the same kind as killed off many a past human civilization. We gaze at _National Geographic_ pictures of those great Easter Island statues, now weathering peacefully amid treeless terrain, or of Mayan agri-theocracy plazas now swamped in vines, or of city walls in the Fertile Crescent, now baking amid lifeless Iraqi sands, and we ask: can Manhattan, London, Paris, Chicago, Toronto be spared? What must we, in the affluent cities, now do to begin _deserving_ to be spared?

• [Call number = HZ75] "Worldly? But 'God So Loved the World'": a very short list of concrete, practical things we can do for the world. Excerpt: We can promote the health of our intellectual environment: . . . A good substitute for television is the BBC World Service - still available on shortwave, but nowadays more conveniently treated as a print publication, continually updated on the Web . . . .

• [Call number = HE2810] "VIA Still Valued": a short journalistic piece, reporting favourably on the state of VIA rail service between Nova Scotia and Toronto. Excerpt (actually the sole deeply purple passage): In the end, though, travel decisions are often driven by feelings, not facts. Who can resist the domecar immediacy of the Wentworth mountains before Amherst? of the Tantramar marshes after? of the endless kilometres of brooding conifers separating the Maritimes from Place Ville Marie and First Canadian Place? And who can resist the whistle's conflicted note of reassurance and warning, recalling for us (a reminder still more salutary now than before September 11) the uncompromising solidity of distance, of oncoming night, and of steel meeting steel?

• [Call number=DS318.20] "Letter from Toronto: Two Styles of Activism": a short journalistic piece on what I heard and saw on the one hand in 2003 March street politics, and on the other hand at a meeting with human-shields Iraq peace activists at the Catholic Worker Movement. An earlier version was entitled "Iraq: Voices of Anguish". Excerpt: Every boy wanted a copy of the magic sheet for himself. In the end, order was restored when a local man with a big beard simply read the text out. As the CPT [Christian Peace Teams] workers drove away, one lad ran after the departing vehicle, slowly at first, and then for a while quickly enough to keep up. Thank you. he said; and again thank you, he said; and again he said thank you.

• [Call number = DS318.84] "Peace Hymn of the Republic": a rewrite of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, addressing the Iraq crisis as at 2003 February 15. To appear in (perhaps among other publications) the March-April 2003 number of Poemata (http://www.mirror.org/cpa/poemata.html), the newsletter of the Canadian Poetry Association. Excerpt: Our strength lies not in battle gear but in humility;/ Through anguished meditation we discern our destiny;/ Our city on a hilltop shall embrace humanity;/ God's truth shall lead us on.

• [Call number = DS318.85] "Open Letter to American Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld": a short essay, used in my minor 2002 street protest outside the United States Consulate in Toronto, and subsequently published in the 2002 September 11 number of the Toronto Estonian-English weekly Eesti elu. The essay argues against the envisaged invasion of Iraq. Excerpt: The Department of Defense calculates, in terms worthy of Napoleon Bonaparte, that American and Iraqi lives are of unequal value. It conceives its responsibility to be first and foremost the safety of the American people - the safety of others being, at best, a secondary consideration, at best a balancing or qualifying factor. Rational though this view may have seemed to the dismal French Consul, or to Clausewitz or Bismarck, it was never a morally tenable view. Neither was it a view congenial to the best of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American governments, who correctly saw themselves as breaking with morally empty traditions in political thought

• [Call number = DS318.86] "Open Letter to His Excellency the United States Ambassador in Canada Mr David Wilkins and to the Public Generally, Concerning the 2005 November 26 Disappearance in Baghdad of My Friend James Loney and His Christian Peacemaker Companions": a long essay, used as an accompaniment to my 2005 street vigil outside the United States Consulate in Toronto. Excerpt: I assert war to be the most far-reaching form of terrorism known to humanity, to be the specific terrorism that begets and nurtures, even to the third and fifth and seventh human generation, the other terrorisms tormenting us. What is the hideous Middle East situation now, the situation that has threatened to take the lives of Jim and his three companions, if not the toxic residue of World War I? … My friend Jim, perhaps the kindest, gentlest person I have known in all my endless travels, is a witness to truth. It is as witnesses, as marturoi, that he and his three companions will be remembered, no matter how their terrible situation is resolved over the coming days, weeks, months, or even years.

• [Call number = DS318.87] "Getting Started in Pacifism: The Practical Why, the Practical How": a medium-length essay, first used as an accompaniment to my 2006 September 17 afternoon vigil across the street from the Ontario legislature. That vigil was occasioned by the unveiling on the legislature lawns, days after the fifth anniversary of the "9/11" terrorism, of an elaborate memorial to veterans. The unveiling was introduced by one of the largest military parades seen in Toronto since World War II. In the essay, I recycle some sentences from the open letter (see above) that I addressed to the USA ambassador during the James Loney crisis. Excerpt: Today's Eastern European peace did not come from guns, uniforms, or the expensive overflight displays of jet fighters we have lately been seeing in Toronto. Its roots lay, rather, in the fearless expression of dissenting political opinion by ordinary citizens, massing by their hundreds of thousands. … If the peaceful dismantling of communism in our own generation demonstrates the practicality of pacifism, then the futility and ruin of war is, by contrast, demonstrated in the experience of the previous generation, in other words of my parents and aunts and uncles and family friends, between 1939 and 1945.

• [Call number = BX1795.H66] "Leather Lent": a short, occasionally bitter, occasionally lighthearted two-act play on the realities of Catholic pastoral practice and Toronto's gay leather scene. Consistent with the moral teaching of the Catholic Magisterium, but critical both of twelve-step recovery movements and of certain patronizing tendencies within the Church. Contains a little obscene language, notably from some demons. Excerpt (chorus of leathermen, commenting on a plot development): Brother Ashton, bigtime failure/ Couldn't run a lemonade stand/ Now he'll proffer moral guidance/ Why, oh GOD, are all things Catholic/ So hilarious, so unreal? Withdrawn from the Web as of 2005 August 4 because no longer consistent with my understanding of twelve-step recovery movements. (I now feel that the play uncharitably misrepresents such movements, witty though it succeeds in being at their expense.) Persons wishing to read the play should now ask me for it through private e-mail, using a subject line that incorporates the phrase "Leather Lent".

• [Call number = BX1795.H66] "Total Catholic Woof": an occasionally lighthearted attempt to articulate an authentically Catholic position on chaste, yet unrepressed, homosexuality. Cast in the form of a computer- industry FAQ (list of "Frequently Asked Questions"). Revised heavily late in 2003 to incorporate a roughly 3700-word discussion of the strengths and failings of the institutional Church. Excerpt: If two buddies were really to love each other, with every inch of their bodies, with their full and absolute and total mutual being, they could demonstrate the depth of their love, perhaps indeed should demonstrate the depth of their love, by loving in renunciation and chastity.

• [Call number = BX 1500] "Utopia 2184: Front Matter": Legal text essentially putting this large literary piece into the public domain, followed by foreword to reader. Excerpt from foreword: This document is a work of theology or politics, not of science fiction. While essentially belonging to the utopia, or dystopia, genre in didactic fiction, my work also features extended factual asides (in many cases, historical flashbacks), interwoven with my narrative through the literary technique of voice change. My governing purpose is to instruct, not to entertain. The rather vigorous entertaining that I do undertake is incidental to that purpose, as the sugar coating on a pill is incidental to the medicine. My title is a loose reference to two of my literary antecedents: "Utopia" as a polite nod to More's 1516 Utopia, "2184" as a polite nod to Orwell's 1984. ... I have not, contrary to what my narrative fancifully asserts, had visions in which Saint Thomas More leads me through the Kent of 2184 or Sainte Thérèse of Lisieux exhibits to me a symbol from modal logic. Thus, for instance, where I claim to have seen a 2184 windfarm, I am writing fiction. Where, on the other hand, I intimate that one turbine in such a farm, following essentially the wind-turbine designs of our own day, may be expected to deliver 500 kilowatts, I am writing fact. SEE ALSO: Introductory essay "Helping to Build a New Civilization in the Shell of the Old, as a Catholic Scientific-Support Worker and Scientific Editor-Indexer in the Crisis of 'Peak Oil': Principles Guiding My Business", in the "Business" section of this site.

• [Call number = BX 1500] "Utopia 2184: Chapter the First": Saint Thomas More leads me along a Yew Walk out of contemporary Ontario into the Kent of the rather remote future, when fossil fuels are exhausted. Excerpt: It was ... between great nine-foot topiary mitres that a paved yew walk beckoned. Yew, the tree of Death. Yew, the lych-gate tree, here flanked by Bishops.

• [Call number = BX 1500] "Utopia 2184: Chapter the Second": The Saint and I cover much charming, if now energy-starved, countryside - noting, however, biohazards amid the rice and papaya, ribaldry at the railway line. For an unhappy half hour, our path traverses even a Special Enterprise Zone. Excerpt: Still the shadows lengthened, and the sunlight reddened, as we paced forward on our long way to town and supper. I felt a pang of melancholy as the now-slanting rays brought our pavement into ever sharper relief, picking out not the usual rubble alone, but in one spot an actual plastic card with magnetic strip, such as might once have been used at some banking machine ...

• [Call number = BX 1500] "Utopia 2184: Chapter the Third": In an artisan town, we find disparate cooperative forms of enterprise proceeding in the spirit of the old Open Source movement. Evidently urban life can survive, with a certain joy, the twilight of humanity's Fossil Fuel Hours. Our dinner of toast and lenttils we take behind the ramparts of English domesticity, with a Myles, a Preethi, a Sammy and a Timmy, a Sir James Wu, an Avivah and a Mee Wun. Excerpt: 'But seriously,' I persisted, 'what is the depth of moral reform? I see signs of progress, no doubt; I see some backsliding, perhaps (I can't say I admire that World Wide Pillory); I find much - to take one instance, the substitution of vanity for avarice as the propulsive force of the book trade - that I scarce know whether to praise or damn. Has England moved, on the whole, forward?' - 'Well, Englande is Merrie again,' came the suave reply.

• [Call number = BX 1500] "Utopia 2184: Chapter the Fourth": A different Saint, she of the roses, warns that much is contingent. Excerpt: Could this, then, [instead] be all that is in store: ruins, barbarism, even in the heart of England - more, in the very heart of Italy: the whole world a single pestilential ruin? Or some different, but no less savage, decline, one made 'more sinister, and perhaps more protracted,' in the words of the Prime Minister in 1940, 'by the lights of perverted science'? - I see once again, now for the last time, the simple Kentish scene. As I grasp in the company of others the broken bread of our simple evening meal, I feel the community of the dead, the living, the unborn.

• [Call number = BX 1500] "Utopia 2184: Appendix A: A Real-Life Chronicle of Our Early Woes, from the Iraq Invasion Onward": A factual appendix-cum-journal, in which are illuminated diverse issues of our own time as we commence our progress, through Middle Eastern war and North American infrastructure collapse, toward 2184.

• [Call number = BX 1500] "Utopia 2184: Appendix B1: Notes for the Skilled Reader Seeking to Investigate Further": A factual appendix, in which are expounded diverse matters conceivably intriguing the sophisticated reader: packet radio as a tool for maintaining a rudimentary Internet after the fibre-optic backbones collapse, the recipe for my energy-efficient Risotto Club-de-Rome, and more.

• [Call number = BX 1500] "Utopia 2184: Appendix B2: Notes for the Unskilled Reader Seeking Help with Allusions and Foreign Terms": A glossary, in which are expounded diverse matters conceivably troubling the unsophisticated reader: the 'Strine' language, two Roman legal maxims, the role of the Nuncio in such diplomacy as may be conducted in a boîte; GNU/Linux 'distros', literae humaniores, the distinguished racing horse smuggled past a contingent of Old Girls to the top of the Sixth Form staircase; and more.

• [Call number = BX 1378.5.W455] "John Paul II Still Young": journalism produced at top speed after I returned to my desk from the Toronto World Youth Day concluding Mass, on 2002-07-28, and published the next morning in the Truro Daily News (a Nova Scotian paper, serving a conurbation of about 20,000, plus outlying parts of Colchester County. Excerpt: Speaking Sunday morning, JP2 claimed to be old. However, to be young at heart is to hope. Hope (the kind worth having, the kind grounded in realities, in substance) was the core of his message... The guy is young, and so the young at his big Toronto party heard in him the echo of themselves.

• [Call number = BC 999] "Depression, the Body Politic, and Frankelian Freedom-to-Appraise": an essay on the ways the political world can help in understanding the experience of clinical depression. For possible publication in a multi-author volume coordinated by Canadian editorial freelancer Stephen Roney. Draws on logotherapist Viktor Frankl's analysis of freedom-to-appraise. Excerpt: ... given the usual physiological hardware, there is a residue of free will, capable of coexistence with even violent external or internal compulsion. Our situation may conceivably be so adverse as to make us unfree to modify the evolution of external events, and also, more subtly, unfree to modify the evolution of our feelings. Nevertheless, we are free to take up either an affirming or a negating attitude toward the totality of these facts, external and also, more subtly, internal. In selecting that attitude, we create one or another meaning, and so ultimately select either to die a special kind of death or to have life abundantly - as life may be had abundantly even behind guard towers and barbed wire.