The queue
Anything I should add?
All – night – long
- Ars Technica: New Orphaned Works Act would limit copyright liability: Huge, important story from last week and NO MENTIONS on the New York Times or any other major news outlet. Shameful. Anyway basically there are now House and Senate bills that would limit your exposure to litigation if you make a good-faith effort to determine the status of an orphaned copyright, fail, and republish it in some form yourself. So like Amazon and Google could put up full text of every single book they’ve scanned that’s in a grey area – and Amazon could actually sell these things on Kindle and deal with rights owners in a uniform way if they pop up and demand compensation. AWESOME. Link via Louis.
- Matt Prager on the WGA strike (PDF LINK): Now this is interesting: Matt Prager asserts that spec screenplays which get bought and produced can never count as work-for-hire, and writes an essay about the consequences. You may not be interested in this, but it’s interesting. Via Lessig’s blog, where I went to check to see if he was involved in the 2008 version of the Orphaned Works Act – if he is, he’s not saying. (You know Prager works in Hollywood because his essay is set in American Typewriter.)
- Engadget: Disney/WowWee Wall-E robot: I might just have to get these for my nieces and nephews.
- Music: Kevie Kev, All Night Long (Waterbed). Old school Sugarhill classic. It’s long, really really long, six minutes long, and you have to be in the right mood, but girl, will you meet me at the waterbed tonight?
- Movies: Guy Maddin – Brand Upon The Brain! The Rapidshare links still work…
Grand Mall
- So I’ve been living with my iPhone for about a week and it’s great, best thing ever. The most valuable information is about how to accomplish your goals, and so far I’ve figured out a store’s new location and checked a recipe while in a supermarket, those kinds of things. Very difficult to do with a Treo. Webclips are actually useful. My main complaint is: there needs to be a “mark all as read” button for email. And the battery life is so-so; you really have to charge up every night. If you’re thinking of getting one, word on the street is to hold out until late May, if you can.
- Speaking of consumerism, recently I’ve been on a little bit of a rampage – robocopped a Billykirk weekend bag made by the AMISH and a Loopwheeler LW09 hoodie. Next up is a messenger bag that can accommodate a laptop – my ACR/Bagjack is OK but not ideal. Initially I was looking at the Timbuk2 Blogger – dorky but functional – but it turns out they’ve shifted their production to China, and although they claim to pay a fair wage to their workers, that’s obviously by local standards, and they don’t provide detail about hours worked, overtime compensation, etc. So now I’m thinking a Tom Bihn Imago, made in Seattle or Montana, would work. Have I become a big fluffy bunny liberal in regard to labor? Apparently yes.
- To read: Flowers of Evil, The Echo Maker, The Way Some People Die. There are still a bunch of movies I want to see, #1 of which is Snow Angels; the trailer looks great. My Wii is rad; I’m taking Super Mario Galaxy one level at a time, and Zack and Wiki is next; I’ve heard great things. Then No More Heroes.
- Also, prepare yourself for a post about No End In Sight, the Iraq documentary. It’s amazingly good; you owe it to yourself as a citizen to watch it. I think it’s better on video because I had to pause halfway through to digest this, like, incredible punch in the gut. Keep in mind that most of those interviewed are ex-Bush appointees.
Nice assemblage; not mine
Two links
- Booksthatmakeyoudumb figured out the correlation between the ten most popular books at colleges as listed on Facebook and the average SAT scores for students at those colleges, and the result: people reading Atlas Shrugged aren’t as good at taking standardized tests as people reading Lolita. Which might not be that damning, when you think about it. Also note the difference between “The Bible” and “The Holy Bible.”
- Nathan Rabin’s Year of Flops: Rabin watched 104 films that failed to earn and sorted them into successes, fiascos and failures – the reviews are a little giddy, but the list itself is informationally dense. I’ve seen fifteen of the 104 and will probably now check out It’s All About Love. I always wondered what happened to Thomas Vinterberg.
Back, sorry
- Luis: I still can’t believe it! Holy shit congrats again.
- SimpleDB is built on Erlang!
- Does anybody know of anything awesome in Scranton? No The Office jokes, please.
- Prodigy of Mobb Deep’s My World Is Empty Without You is amazing. He claims his forefathers built pyramids on Mars – I missed you! H.N.I.C. 2 = most anticipated new album.
- Via Louis I’ve become a huge fan of Ben Croshaw’s, uh, video game podcast or whatever you want to call it. The Peggle one is particularly funny.
- You know what I bought that’s hippyish but I’m kind of in love with? This Sigg bottle. It holds about the same amount of water as a disposable plastic bottle, but it’s not disposable and has a pleasing form. It’s aluminum on the outside with some kind of non-leaching taste neutral liner inside. I’m unhappy about the plastic waste generated by water bottles AND pissed about their cost versus the tap, so this was a perfect little gift to myself.
- There’s this fan-translated manga I’ve been reading that I like a lot – Historie, by Hitoshi Iwaaki – part fiction, part fact, it’s about the travels and development of Eumenes of Cardia, who would become Alexander the Great’s archivist. I’m a sucker for the ancient world.
Grrr
The big tech story today is the Amazon Kindle reveal in Newsweek
Here. The Kindle, if you’re not familiar, is Amazon’s eink book reader. Bits of information about the device have leaked out since it was first spotted on the FCC’s website last September, but now Steven Levy has the whole story. In brief:
- $399, shipping this week. Very expensive, the price of an iPhone, which seems like an amount only nerds would pay.
- Hardware: 10.3 ounces, six-inch black and white eink
touchscreen, 30 hour battery, “200 books onboard” “more with a memory card” which I’m going to guess will be SD, EVDO for buying books from the device. - Software: Some form of DRM – sounds like one purchase = use on one device, web browser, an email address for the device, annotations on texts, search, Amazon’s store. It can apparently read Word documents and PDFs, but no news on txt or rtf.
- Pricing: Classic (read: public domain) books are $1.99, bestsellers and new releases in hardback $9.99 with backlist books presumably somewhere in between. There are also periodicals: The NYT, The Atlantic, others. Weirdly you can subscribe to blogs but have to pay $0.99-$1.99/mo.
Two years ago I would have been really excited about this. Clearly the biggest deal is the wireless store and Amazon’s pricing, which, aside from the DRM and ripping you off on public domain stuff and RSS feeds seems reasonable, even thrifty. However, with the advent of high-DPI displays in mobile phones, I’m not sure that a single-purpose device like this will be successful at any price. The idea of DailyLit emailing you 1000 word segments of a novel to be read on a phone might terrify the old guard, but fuck the old guard.
Update: me and Tim O’Reilly are on the same track here.
Update 2: Here’s the product page on Amazon. It costs 10¢ to email things to the device – I think that’s to cover a payment to Sprint for data transfer on their network.
Update 3: More from Joel Johnson over at Boing Boing Gadgets. Notably PDF is totally unsupported and it’s possible that Amazon’s .azw DRM format and .txt are the only natively readable file formats.
Update 4: Mark Pilgrim rips the Kindle a new port.
Dialogue in examples from Thomas Metzinger’s Being No One that will probably never be spoken aloud in earnest
On the existence of first-person data ((“The epistemological problem regarding phenomenological, first-person approaches of ‘data generation’ is that if inconsistencies in two individual ‘data sets’ should appear, there is no way to settle the conflict.” p. 591)): “This conscious experience of jealousy shows me how much I love my husband!” “No, this emotional state is not love at all, it is a neurotic, bourgeois fear of loss!”
How we might describe the feeling of happiness if we had a true understanding of the mechanical process which produces our subjectivity and therefore lacked Wittgenstein’s Subjektgebrauch aka “subject use”: “The emotional layer of the phenomenal self-model currently activated by the brain of this organism is in a close-to-optimal state.”
This may seem like exhausting wankery, but on the whole the book is wigging me out.
From The Possibility Of An Island
Youth, beauty, strength: the criteria for physical love are exactly the same as those of Nazism.
Happy Bloomsday
I’ll get through it one of these days
McSweeney’s just suffered a disaster
It looks like their distributer went out of business and took $130k of McSwy money with them on the way down, so now might be a good time to buy some discounted backlist titles. I can personally vouch for The Pharmacist’s Mate and Against The World, Against Life: HP Lovecraft, both of which I really really loved.
I’m reading a fantastic special-interest book
Founders At Work – Stories of Startups’ Early Days, by Jessica Livingston. The format is brilliant – long interviews with the founders of 28 well-known tech companies. It’s sort of like Faber & Faber’s Director On Director (Kubrick On Kubrick, ex) film series only for tech startup nerds. So many important people are interviewed and all have FASCINATING things to say. Guy Kawasaki has more. I’m starting something up with one of my best friends and man is it comforting to read this thing. So highly recommended if you’re interested.
Mark Haddon’s A Spot Of Bother
From the author of The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time, if the name sounds familiar. I liked it, but it’s a romantic comedy centered around a wedding. Never have I read such a good-natured novel. I found it impossible to dislike any of the characters. They’re all people who, if they asked (and this is England) “fancy a pint?” you’d say “sure mate, let me get my wally-by,” or however it is the English say “wallet.” But the book slid past without leaving a scratch on me, which is not why I read. Can’t recommend it with whole heart unless you need comfort.
Were I the mystery guest
I told you about this book I was excited about reading, right? “The Mystery Guest” by Gregoire Bouillier? I got it in the mail today from Amazon and just read it in one quick go and it’s fantastic, the best thing under 150 pages I’ve read since Pinball, 1973. It’s actually been a while since I’ve been in love with a book and not just admired its technical aspects or something – laughing at a joke instead of saying ‘that’s funny.’
I’ve been reading a lot lately because I’ve been trying to work on my own novel and I want it to be good. I want it to mean something to someone, even if it’s just one person. In part I don’t think books have been getting through to me because I’ve been down and depressed lately; where does a dog’s amputated leg go? Is it cremated? Bouillier cut through all that and made me feel human again for an hour. It really is like Michel Leiris said:
Literary activity, in its specific aspect as a mental discipline, cannot have any other justification than to illuminate certain matters for oneself at the same time as one makes them communicable to others, and that one of the highest goals…is to restore by means of words certain intense states, concretely experienced and become significant, to be thus put into words.
Amazon gift certificates
Got some Hanukkah GCs to spend here – what should I get? Here’s how my cart looks so far:
- Joy Williams – State of Grace: People swear by this novel
- Gregoire Bouillier – The Mystery Guest: I’m dying to read this – vanished ex-girlfriend invites author to be the ‘mystery guest’ at a party ten years since he’s seen her; so French
- Chris Ware – Acme Novelty Library 17: The continuing adventures of sick characters in beautiful formalism
- Metallica Ride The Lightning t-shirt glow in the dark black: So I missed the tour when I was eight, gimme a break
- Marcella Hazan – Essentials of Italian Cooking: Sort of a classic. Have to get my tortellini game up.
I need like four or five more things. Input?
David Foster Wallace – Consider The Lobster
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is the DFW book of essays I’d unhesitatingly recommend to a friend; Consider The Lobster is for the more entrenched fan, because the pieces aren’t as interesting, basically. The opening bit about the AVN porn awards in Las Vegas is boring, with flashes of horror about the rotted state of the American soul, but not really worth reading. The title essay derails and crashes into a discussion of the intelligability of non-human minds, which…here’s the unpleasant subtext of the book: lobsters, who can’t speak but might feel, don’t deserve to be boiled and eaten. The plight of young porn stars, who we can understand perfectly, warrents no digression about how, perhaps, they’re being taken advantage of, or might, you know, deserve some degree of protection from their own intemperate hell: a gigantic predatory industry that doesn’t care if they wind up dead* or addicted to drugs. Bleh.
*Wallace tosses off a role call of dead porn stars, just for atmospherics.
Bill Buford – Heat
Heat charts Bill Buford’s journey into the stomach of Italy: former fiction editor for the New Yorker*, he gave up his steady job to slave in the kitchen of Mario Batali’s Babbo, then go to Italy and learn pasta-making and later Tuscan buchery from Dario Cecchini. Buford seems very serious and dedicated about all of this, and shares not only his kitchen stories but also original historical research. When was fresh pasta first made with egg? Is Italian cooking the basis for French cooking, or is it the other way around – alla just a copy of a la? These narratives are fascinating if you’re insane about Italian cuisine, like me, and probably deadly dull if you’re indifferent. Buford’s a strong, mindful writer, and I’d like to think that you could pick up Heat and be drawn into it with starting with only an average amount of interest. The only thing that weirded me out was that Buford spent some time with Marco Pierre White, the terrifyingly good British chef who trained Gordon Ramsey, but no mention of Ramsey is made. I would have ascribed this to textual focus, except that the third section opens with a Ramsey quote! White and Ramsey have an amazing relationship, which you can catch a glimpse of when they go fishing together in the BBC’s Boiling Point documentary. Anyway, here’s one of my favorite passages:
If you’re a boy, your principal difficulty in making tortellini, I discovered, is your fingers, which, alas, really need to be a girl’s, and not just any girl’s, but an elfin girl’s.
Your fingers need to be small because all the action occurs on the top of the smallest one, the pinky – in Betta’s case, the tiny top of her very petite pinky – where you place the puniest square of pasta. You then pack the puny square with the largest amount of filling possible and fold it, corner to corner, to form a miniature but bulging triangle. You next tip the top part of of the triangle forward, as though it were bowing in an expression of gratitude, and then (the crucial step) pull the other two corners forward, as though securing the bowing head in a headlock. You then press it all together to form a ring. When you turn the pasta over, you’ll be astonished by what you created: a belly button. What can I say? It’s wildly erotic.
*Also a founding editor of Granta and the publisher of Granta Books – I’m thinking he was responsible for approving Claire Messud’s debut novel When The World Was Steady.
I’m going to read and post about those twelve books from the NYT’s 100 best of 2006 list starting with “The Discomfort Zone”
Franzen got savaged by Michiko Kakutani in the original review of this book and then it gets included in the year-end list: either it was a weak year for non-fiction or the Times is Pitchfork-like in handing out low marks to works it actually likes a whole lot but doesn’t respect.*
Franzen’s exposure of his small, petulant side, which I guess some people didn’t like, is balanced by the fact that it resonates, even if he’s making it up or blowing it out of proportion. (He’s obviously too fine a writer not to know that we’re going to be like ‘ugh’ when he wonders if the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will somehow create turbulence on his flight from California to New York.) If you want fake piety, read Pastor Ted’s Hunting, Fishing and Christ. I prefer fake misanthropy.
Still, I thought the last chapter was terrible. Best was “The Foreign Language,” which has a lot of juicy Goethe quotes – which, easy to lose sight of, Franzen may have translated but did not originate. Still:
Elisabeth [...] It was the summer I turned ten [...] She was nineteen, and her skirts were sensationally short and her little tops sensationally tight, and the world-eclipsing proximity of her breasts and the great southerly extent of her bare legs were intolerable to me. Sitting next to her, I felt like a claustrophobe in a crowded elevator, a person with severe restless-leg syndrome, a dental patient undergoing extend drilling. Her words, being products of her lips and tongue, carried an unwelcome intimacy, and the German language itself sounded deep-throated and wet compared to English. (How prim our “bad,” how carnal their “schlecht.”)
Nobody likes the quotes I pull, ever. Fine. “The Discomfort Zone” is a stupid title, the book is highly readable but fluffy: 6.8/10.
I met Franzen for two seconds two years ago and told him that while maybe everyone in line wanted their copy of The Corrections signed, I’d brought Strong Motion because I thought it was better. Not in so many words. (And it is, by the way, a real American masterpiece.) He was like “I think so too!” Because of SM I’ll read anything he writes.
*Arab Strap, The Week Never Starts Round Here = 6.5!?
What’s up, Litwack?
- Sedo.com. I own ten or so domains that need to be parked, and Sedo takes care of it. Ad revs cover my monthly ice cream budget. If you know what I should do with naturalgothic.com, email.
- David Allen’s Getting Things Done FAST audiobook. It’s eight hours long and I’m on hour three; it’s inspired me to rehab my GTD practices. (I was getting lazy on the bucket-emptying and weekly review fronts.) If you need a copy, try Demonoid. I’m kind of getting into learning-audio – I’ve also been listening to this Berkeley class on human emotion.
- Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip. I thought it would be bad, but to the contrary: it’s fun. Tad Friend correctly reviews the first two episodes for The New Yorker.
- “Auri-” is the prefix for “gold,” as in “aurifer” for “gold-bearing.” Pretty, right?
- A copy of Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac is on its way to me from Amazon Marketplace. I normally wouldn’t read an author like Anita Brookner, so…we’ll see how that goes.
- I’m going to be a woodsman for Halloween, and let me tell you, kids just aren’t buying standard plastic axes anymore because I’ve been to two Halloween superstores and no luck. At this rate I’m going to have to get a real one. Cool.
Total book intensity
Yesterday I finished Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself To Live, which I’ll talk about in a second, and am working on the three other books I took out from the library: David Plotz – The Genius Factory, Seth Lloyd Programming The Universe (the details I like in the book so far are not related to quantum computing – for example, Lloyd says he grew up sleeping in a chicken coop), and BEE Lunar Park. Lunar Park I bet I’ll write a long thing about unless it really disappoints me. So far I like it. (Update: I put down The Genius Factory, which is carelessly done; Plotz takes a prime fillet of a subject and grinds it into hamburger.)
Killing Yourself to Live! What pleasing trifle. I love Chuck Klosterman; I’ve met him, his sister posted on litwack.org once, he blurbed Andrea’s debut novel and I feel like blogfriends with his nemesis. Apart from his wit, I love that he remembers everything and can reconstruct the magic in his life with total gentle accuracy. And the book is about four women he’s obsessed with, just as we who feel are probably obsessed with three, maybe four partners ourselves at varying wave intensities. I do have one complaint, which is that whoever thought the text of the book should be set in bold – bold? – should be made to read the whole thing in one sitting, as I did.
I wrote a quick review of Getting Real by 37signals
It’s an ebook about web application development process, and my review is here.
The throat of madness
I got Ivan Brunetti’s Schizo #2 in the mail today and read it. Brunetti has a gift for articulating the fantasies some of us (just me? I don’t know what your inner life is like) drift toward.
Anarchy is free-form fascism. Animals already live in anarchy: they act only by imprinted instinct and follow no written law, so the strong have every right to oppress the weak. In nature, there is no such thing as a crime. And where did this lifestyle [leave] our friends in the animal kingdom? [At] our mercy [...] my view my sound fascistic, and I guess my world view is almost identical to that of a fascist. The only difference is that a true fascist likes the world as it is, whereas I fucking [hate it.]
Eight years ago David Buss asked if people had evolved psychological mechanisms – “modules” – for killing other humans in certain contexts. I’m sure he meant “if” in a technical sense centered around “evolved,” which we can’t really know – but this is question-begging from a guy who specializes in strategies to prevent sexual victimization and human prestige criteria. The answer is yes, agrees Brunetti, Noé, Houellebecq, Lovecraft: four members of the literature of hatred. Always the awareness of being chewed and crushed by forces beyond human control. Whether strong or weak, there are no strategies for individual resistance except involuntary stupidity, ignorance, or suicide. It isn’t pretty: Houellebecq on Lovecraft’s racism, from his excellent essay H.P.L.: Against The World, Against Life:
It was in New York that his racist opinions turned into a full-fledged racist neurosis. Being poor, he was forced to live in the same neighborhoods as the “obscene, repulsive, nightmarish” immigrants. He would brush past them on the streets and in public parks. He was jostled by “greasy sneering half-castes,” by “hideous negroes that resemble gigantic chimpanzees” in the subway. And in the long lines of job seekers he came across them again and realized to his horror that his own aristocratic bearing and refined education tempered with his “balanced conservatism” brought him no advantage. His currency was worth nothing here in Babylon; here wiles and brute force reigned supreme, here “rat-faced Jews” and “monstrous half-breeds skip about rolling on their heels absurdly.” This is no longer the WASP’s well-bred racism; it is the brutal hatred of a trapped animal who is forced to share his cage with other different and frightening creatures.
Against the backdrop of today’s literary mawkishness – whether the lies of James Frey and “JT Leroy” will translate into point losses in the marketplace – here is something which flashes like a diamond: fear.
I write 