I love typography. If I had not been an engineer, I would probably have chosen to be a graphic designer. And when great typography combines with great texts, it can be very impressive.
In this case, impressively funny.
Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.
(shamelessly borrowed from Cori)
Remember that great audio-book I wrote about recently? Well, it’s out in print. And I am in it. Or more exactly on it. Or more precisely on the back cover.
Maybe it’s a modest beginning as a writer, but remember that back covers are far more perused than inside pages - as soon as someone picks up the book from the shelf, there is a 50% chance that my praise (which started out as a comment on the author’s blog and was then promoted to an authoritative literary review) will be read.
And guess what was in the mail today? My very own signed copy. As I always say, compliments are a great investment, especially when they are meant.
I cannot wait to find out whether the characters are still great without Susan’s and Joe’s voices - I’ll probably be making those voices in my head anyway.
I know you all have ToBeRead piles that reach higher than Neptune’s orbit, but please consider adding this book near the top if you want to be reconciled with mankind (and tools).
See? I cannot really stop posting.
You all know I am a fan of Librivox, the website and community that publishes free audiobooks recorded by volunteers from public domain books.
Podiobooks.com is another model. On this website, you can download free audiobooks, but these are not in the public domain : they are mostly brand-new (often unpublished) stories read by their authors to get exposure while struggling to get the book published.
For my first step into podiobooks, I was lucky and selected the novel ‘Clear Heart‘, by carpenter/writer Joe Cottonwood. The story is a wide human saga woven around the construction of a bilionnaire’s ‘perfect house’ in the Silicon Valley, and the life of Wally, the widowed contractor on the brink of retirement. The reading is perfect, the story is gripping, the construction backdrop is something new and worth discovering, and the characters are very very … endearing. I could not say about language skills, but as far as narration and humour are concerned, the book reminded me of a blend of P.G. Wodehouse and Mark Twain.
In the three weeks it took me to listen to the whole novel, I think I have smiled more while riding to work than in the three years before that.
Apparently, the book will soon be available in print. I will definitely order it. Hope it comes with a CD with the audiobook version: the voices were so great…
I have always had a little difficulty to fall asleep at night, especially during exciting or otherwise eventful periods of my life. My head remains on problem-solving overdrive and keeps juggling frantically with ideas, hopes, fears and I can find no ’standby’ button to calm things down for the night. Then I have to wait for sleep to stifle this dance, like a slow rising tide of foam in a giant foam party, and this can take between half an hour to two hours.
Up until a few years ago, it would be fine as it only happened once each night, when I went to bed. But as I get older, any time I wake up in the middle of the night, the hubbub of thoughts awakens too, with less and less slumber power to fight it with.
It probably does not qualify medically as acute insomnia, but believe me that when I am awaken several times each night by a newborn baby (this is going to happen again soon), by a son with whooping cough, by a cat demanding that the door be opened, by a snoring wife, or by a bad dream, and I toss and turn for one hour each time, this begins to eat away the hours of sleep. The next day, I find myself craving for an afternoon nap just like true insomniacs.
However, there is one thing that can slow down the mental race and make me fall asleep in an instant: books. Not every kind of book. Thrillers and detective stories generally keep me awake. But a good old Victorian novel, a slow paced chapter of Proust, or any nonfiction work has a huge doze-off power. By forcing my mind to focus, these books keep my ideas tame, leaving the dance floor open for a fast sleep invasion.
This is great, but if I fall asleep with a book on my lap and the light on, I am bound to wake up soon. And if I close my book, rearrange the pillows and switch the light off before I am fully asleep, there is a 50% chance that my head has the time to revert to overdrive mode before I am properly set for sleep.
I found the solution when I started listening to audio books. It was a chance discovery: I was trying to listen to ‘Treasure Island‘ by R. L. Stevenson, and thought it a good idea to listen to it in bed before going to sleep just like I would with a real book. After one week, I had still not been able to go beyond the first chapter, as I would always fall asleep within the first five minutes.
This was it: this was the solution to my insomnia issues, and it has been how I have kept insomnia at bay for the past two years.
I have identified the following pattern: the first time, the text is new, and the interest of novelty delays sleep for a couple of minutes. Yet I fall asleep within ten minutes generally. Next time I listen to the same chapter, the novelty wears off, but I can still focus. This makes for the fastest sleep effect - less than five minutes. Then after twenty or fifty times, I know the first five minutes by heart, and I have to wait for five minutes of new text before I fall asleep.
One 15′ short story by Maupassant lasted almost one year before its sleep-inducing power became insufficient.
There you go: my very efficientest way of falling asleep or going back to sleep within ten minutes. 90% efficient (for me at least, which is what matters most to, well, me). And not addictive. When I do not have my MP3 player or the battery is empty, I just revert to ordinary sleep patterns (and I use earplugs as a compensation).
For an unlimited supply of free ammo, go to LibriVox.
Gift economy and intellectual production
I have already said that the commercial model is not the right tool for the promotion and the exchange of ideas. When the cost of replicating something is close to zero, applying a model that was invented to deal with scarcity is just nonsensical. Yet, it is what the French representatives are trying to do right now, by legislating clumsily against illegal downloading, motivated by music labels lobbying, and handicapped by an obvious ignorance of how the internet works.
I claim that piracy is not the same thing as theft: when one downloads songs or software, one does not deprive the author of his work. Yet the legislators are trying to make it sound as theft, although we are already paying a tax on all data recording materials (CDs, DVDs, hard drives) as a compensation to the music industry.
In my ideal music world, all music would be self-produced and self-distributed on the web, and artists would be paid either by subscriptions and donations like Radiohead, and/or by selling concert tickets. The web would contribute to their fame, so that I would know and love them when they come on tour near where I live. Probably fewer musicians would become millionaires. Bummer. But I think there are not many musicians who choose music as a way to make money. Behind every artist is a giver. Artists want to give and share pleasure with people. All we need to do to make sure they keep on giving, is to keep them alive (and happy). And I had much rather donate to my favorite artists than buy from their music labels.
There are two flourishing gift economy examples on the web right now that I want to write about. One is Linux, the other is Google. The motivations are different, but the benefits to the world are huge.
Linux is pure gift: not only can everybody have a free better-than-commercial-grade operating system, but no contributors to Linux can ever get it back and claim it’s theirs. In order to promote the idea of freedom, the licenses behind Linux are made so that nobody can confiscate the code. You can sell a bit of open-source code, but you have to leave it open. Essentially, this tends to force the selling price of any generic code to zero, while still allowing premium charging for specific code (e.g. I want Linux integrated with my business’s accounting system) and consulting support. Because it’s free, it does not show in terms of GDP. But the value Linux brings to the world economy is considerable. The simplest estimate would be Linux market share (10%) x Microsoft revenue (60 bn $), and you have a 6 billion dollar industry powered by pure gift.
Google have understood this, but they want a more tangible share of the benefits, therefore they have a more cunning business model than pure gift. They distribute things for free, but they still like to hold the keys. Then they can leverage the power they have over those keys, in addition to selling ads (which unfortunately I see as official spam).
Now a personal example. I stumbled upon a Google tool named Sketchup. It makes 3D drawing as easy as 1-2-3. With its quality, it is on par with 500$ tools for the general public, or 5000$ tools if we consider professional tools (e.g. architecture & construction). And it is distributed for free. It is not open-source, Google can decide one day that version n+1 will be charged 100$, but right now, it is a gift to the world, and more specifically a gift to me.
Some years ago, I had practiced with illegal copies of professional 3D software (3D studio MAX), but had failed to keep up with new versions. Over the past few months, I had been hovering around blender and K3D, two great free and open-source tools, but I found them too complex for what I needed. I do not need to produce a CG animation movie. All I want is sketch my projects in 3D for the next stretch of renovation in my house, and it should not take me longer than sketching them on paper.
And then comes Sketchup. The underlying paradigm is revolutionary, and the upfront personal investment is extremely light. There is also a really fine feature, generally available only with top-notch commercial tools: non-photorealistic rendering. It make 3D look like handmade sketches. Way nicer than pure 3D, which feels bland unless adorned with hi-res textures.
If Google had distributed their tool for 100$ it would still have been extremely cheap for what it can do (and probably considered as dumping by the competition). But I would not have bought it. Not even at 10$. Probably because I would never have known it; and even if I’d known it, and they offered free demo versions, I would not have tried, because 3D sketching was really so unimportant in my hierarchy of things that I would not have bothered. So would everyone else.
But because it was free, I was just one click on a download button away from trying it and loving it. After two hours of toying with the Sketchup toolbar, I could draw a satellite. The next day, I drew my project of composting toilet. Google do not know it, but their contribution to my composting toilet was crucial. I avoided probably four mistakes in the overall design. I found three good ideas. I now have all the dimensions of all the parts I have to make and/or order. And I have a great 3D blueprint that I can share with everybody else on Earth, because I know they can have Sketchup for free.
This example shows how this gift has cascaded into a series of benefits, first for me, and then maybe for the whole world if my initiative contributes to the publicity of composting toilets (I believe composting toilets are the future of sanitation and therefore human health, especially for dry, poor countries). The immediate benefit to Google is that I will obviously contribute my models back to their Sketchup 3D warehouse, so that all architects who want to put a composting toilet (or a spacecraft) in a project will save a couple hour’s work, then they will love Sketchup, then they will buy Sketchup pro, because they know how cool the free version is, and they’ll trust that the pro features are worth the few extra bucks.
So despite the ads, hurray for Sketchup and Google! I doubt that those guys are giving things just for the pleasure of giving. But I do wish more people did as they do.
Google have just released a brand new web browser. Apparently, it is full of high quality innovations in terms of software innards (pretend to be a geek and read the comic-book release notes). As always, it is free, but it is now even open-source. We can understand what they gain in the bargain: by releasing top-quality tools as open-source code, they are encouraging everyone to adopt their choices as future web standards. Cunning.
Still, this is a fabulous gift. Again.
Remember that I recently recommended reading George Monbiot? Well, he’s just agreed to my translating his recent article Small is Bountiful, in defense of smallholdings, on my garden blog. Not that you need a French translation anyway, but I thought I’d let you know.
I have been doing a lot of slate-sorting in preparation of roof works on my third roof. Traditional slates around here are fish-scale-shaped shale (schist?) slabs one inch thick and eight inches to three feet long. The long ones are used near the gutter, and the size decreases as we get nearer the top. This means they have to be sorted according to size.
I have a three planks with small cells of gradual sizes, which I use as a riddle. And one by one, I pick slates from the heap, find the smallest cell in which it fits, and make tidy stacks of matching sizes. This is extremely tedious. The ideal job for listening to audiobooks.
The first audiobook I had been listening to when I started the sorting in January was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. The second book was Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, again a solo work from LibriVox.
The recording was quite unusual, as the voice was particularly monotone and slow, as close to machine-read as a human can imitate. The tone was gramatically perfect, but there was hardly any warmth and emotion anywhere. This was disturbing at first, but then I discovered that I got used to it very easily.
In fact, I found out that this kind of neutral, unobtrusive tone was what came nearest to actually reading the book with my own eyes: what I was hearing was the equivalent of printed text, and I got to put the warmth and the emotion in there myself. This confirmed what I had suspected: for all I know, an audiobook could be read by a machine (if the tone is gramatically correct) or chanted like monks used to read from the Bible, and I would not be put off. This kind of neutral reading is not ‘being read to’: it is reading with one’s ears. The closest image of this process is me reading a book with my ear to the pages.
However, whenever there was dialogue, then the narrator turned from a machine to an actor. The voices, the southern accent, the inimitable negro expressions were so vivid that it proved without a doubt that the narrator’s dull tone for the rest of the text was absolutely intentional.
The story is built around a ‘Prince and Pauper’ frame, with the son of rich Missouri townspeople being switched in his infancy with the snow-white slave son of their snow-white negro servant Roxy. To save her kid from the doom of ‘being sold down the river’, Roxy switches the clothes, and nobody notices the switch. Valet de Chambers (the name of the slave son) becomes Thomas Driscoll and vice-versa. The problem is that the newly promoted Thomas grows to be a complete brat.
The story has many other characters, among which is “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, a passionate collector of fingerprints (guess who’s going to find out about the switched boys?), with a law career completely thwarted by an unfortunate joke he made on the day he arrived in town. Apparently, XIXth-century Missouri townspeople have this sort of zeroth-degree humour that we French and British credit all Americans with (no offense meant). The funny thing about Wilson is that his actual part in the story is almost completely accessory, but Twain managed to make his presence ubiquitous by starting all chapters with a quote from Wilson’s ‘calendar’, a collection of witty aphorisms and such like:
Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.
As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.
The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries,
king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a
Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.
It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.
The story also has a pair of enigmatic Italian twins, which I could not quite ‘locate’. In fact, I understood in Twain’s afterword that they formed part of an initial plot, and were later refactored into secondary characters when the author understood there was not room enough for two stories. This afterword is very interesting: it feels just like a DVD’s ‘deleted scenes’ bonus section. Mark Twain explains his struggles with the manuscript, the story, the characters, and how he untangled the mess by severing the story of the twins off the main story. A great lesson for aspiring writers, I guess.
After Huck Finn, this was my second encounter with Mark Twain, and I must admit I am in total awe. The story is good enough, but the language and the witty criticism of society is so sharp that I cannot help comparing him with Voltaire (and acknowledging Twain’s superiority in the comparison).
I’ll go download some more from LibriVox, to keep me company for the rest of the sorting.
The bulk of technical works is not-for-profit. How many scholars or experts make a fortune writing a book on the specifics of Madagascar nematodes, on extended Kalman filtering for interplanetary navigation, on time and narrative in George Bernanos’ novels? It is already a miracle that they should find a publisher for such works, and another miracle that the book should find its way to a finite number of academic libraries and specialized bookshops. The motivation for writing these books is about sharing the best nuggets of human knowledge with the rest of mankind (at least that part of mankind which can understand it). Sometimes it is also about (peer) recognition. Never about money.
When paper was the only way to get the word out, then authors of technical books and articles had to find publishers. Publishers imposed copyright rules, in the unlikely event the book would sell. Then the knowledge was trapped: trapped in paper, therefore available only from the lucky academic libraries or specialized bookshops who managed to host a copy; and trapped in time, as the probability of a reprint for specialized non-fiction works is close to zero — how many books are gathering dust or lost forever in the limbo of underground shelves and copyright restrictions is beyond imagination. For all practical purposes, these books are largely unavailable to the world, except inside academia (and when you have time to wait for an interlibrary loan). As if academia was the only place where people want to learn things.
But now there is the internet. Knowledge does not need paper anymore. Therefore it does not need publishers, it does not need copyright, it does not need libraries. My understanding is that authors will soon discover this, and they will also discover the one key reason why their works should be freed from paper and copyright protection: what cannot be found by an internet search engine does not exist.
When a book’s card was missing from the library catalog, the book was as good as burnt. Now when a text is not accessible to Google, ditto. Authors whose main intention is to get their message out will therefore make absolutely sure their book can be found via a full-text search on the internet. The Amazon ‘search inside‘ feature is not good enough. First pages of scientific articles at IEEE or Springerlink are not good enough. The result of an internet search is like an anteroom with 50 doors. I will visit the doors that are wide open. The locked ones, or the ones which say ’sign in to enter’, I will not visit because I already have enough with the open ones.
Therefore, if content is to be read, it has to be fully accessible. And authors want content to be read. I imagine that the wish for recognition would not readily accept a complete absence of copyright. I believe that a creative-commons licence with attribution and share-alike clauses would be the general choice for authors, although I would choose public domain straight away myself. After all, Plato, Augustine and Newton have chosen the public domain: is there no pride in just sharing what I know with the world and the world can do whatever they want with it?
This does not preclude paper, under the exact same model as xerox copy in academia: when I want just a short paragraph from a great book, I print the relevant page on my printer. If I want the full book, then I order it. For books which do not have enough orders to justify a conventional printing process, maybe we will see printing services specialized in on-demand printing for public-domain works: they will be sending you the book printed for you with the paper, the font-size and font-family you chose, for a price not higher than you woud have paid for a conventional book which would have had to go through the whole editor/publisher/distributor process.
But there remains a big question in my suggestion: how about editorial quality? Having to go through a publisher has the immense advantage of imposing an editor and a quality target. I know that whatever I write, if I can get someone to proof-read and comment, the result after correction will be greatly improved. What could replace the conventional editing process? The readership is probably generally too narrow to trigger a wikipedia-like self-improvement of the works. Will it just be volunteer-peer-based, with authors trying to find other authors to edit them? Will it be simply survival of the fittest (but then there will be a huge waste of sub-par books who could have made the cut if there had been an editor)? In fact, I am not really worried: I believe a smart solution will appear almost by itself.
And boy will I be happy in a world where all the best knowledge is at my fingertips!
I hate tragedies. I reject fatalism. I am fortunate that I had read a short synopsis with spoilers before the time I reached book 2 of the House of Mirth, because otherwise, I would have been extremely angry at Edith Wharton near the end of the penultimate chapter. I love stories which suddenly take an unexpected course, at least when the new course appears natural and needs no Deus Ex Machina. I hate stories which follow a single bearing from beginning to end. I do understand that the formal purity of classic tragedy as a skeleton for a narrative might be appealing to any writer, but I reject it absolutely.
Tragedy requires that the various characters follow a steady collision course to catastrophe, without ever the slightest (successful) attempt at veering away from it. Maintaining a straight course over three acts is already quite difficult, but over Miss Bart’s life of twenty-nine years plus twenty-nine chapters requires such superhuman quantities of stubbornness, pride, blindness to other people, candid indecisiveness, repeated failure to learn, disregard of inner feelings, and ill-luck that it takes the constant sadistic malevolence of an author/puppeteer to force all of those into the poor characters fallen victims to an unjust plot.
It is lucky that I was listening to the book instead of reading it, because otherwise I would have laid down the book as soon as I had understood that there was no altering the course the author had chosen for Lily Bart, whatever her feeble attempts at emancipation from the inescapable. Yet, because the language of the book (and the LibriVox reader) had such a strong hypnotizing influence, I kept listening to the bitter end.
But please do not force another tragedy under my eyes or between my ears before a long while, because it will revive the two impressions I always have with tragedy: of being forced by a nose-ring to watch the sufferings of a poor puppet slowly thrown at a brick wall by the artificial hand of the narrator; and of helplessly listening along to the unheeded collision-avoidance system calling ‘terrain, pull up!, terrain, pull up!, pull up! pull up! pull up!’.
The list of books I could not finish is growing ever higher. I had started reading the Black Dahlia by James Ellroy some time ago and was put off by the slang and the mob lingo, failing to understand most of what was happening, what with the ellipses and the black humor. I decided I’d give Ellroy another go, with American Tabloid. At first, it went OK, as I found out that the difficulty with language was in fact not really greater than that I would have with the same class of jargon in French: like the lush marine lexicon in sea novels, the exuberant slang expressions in roman noir are the stuff the atmosphere is made of and are supposed to be guessed rather than understood.
But then I began to feel something building up in my throat, slowly as I turned the pages. The cynicism of two of the main characters (Pete Bondurant, archvillain, and Kemper Boyd, anti-hero) was clearly not counterbalanced by the naked and tortured honesty of Ward Littell, and as the body count kept growing steadily, the uneasiness turned into disgust.
I once thought I could detach myself from movie violence. In fact, I think I can only detach from fake movie violence, of the James Bond or possibly the Kill Bill kind. But not the realistic violence. At least not after two events which have altered the way representations of violence are processed in my head.
One Sunday morning, as I was idly cycling the remote control through all the cable channels to find something worth wasting my time on (thank God I do not have a TV anymore!), I came across a very short footage by a war reporter in Africa, in which a handful of paramilitary militia men with at least one kid among them were molesting and stripping another man, then let him run, and without a warning shot him in the back. Obviously I had seen tons of actors shot in the back, but this guy had not been acting. Maybe he was a torturer, maybe he was a landlord, maybe he was a father of two, I don’t care. All I know is that I had nightmares for some time afterwards, and that each time I watched movie violence that was intended to be realistic, these images kept surfacing in my mind.
The second event was shortly after I had become a father, when my mother told me how humans were the animal species which took the most love to make, raise, and grow. She told me how she felt that each time someone died in a war, it was like erasing all the hours of love that had gone into the making of this being, and what a waste it was. This was so powerful I could not forget it in a lifetime.
Now, whenever a scenario kills off insignificant John Does, I find myself unconsciously adding up the breastfeeding, the feverish wakes, the hikes in the woods, the bedtime stories, the lullabies, and dumping all of that down a bottomless mental pit in a splash of gory bits. Mr Ellroy was dumping love by the truckload. It was too much for me. Maybe I cannot read noir anymore. I laid down my book and opted for some P.G. Wodehouse instead.
Next: Something New, and Love Among the Chickens
