mandarine

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website, you can download free audiobooks, but these are not in the public domain : they are mostly brand-new (often unpublished) stories read by their authors to get exposure while struggling to get the book published.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…

The problem: racing thoughts

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.

The clue: books

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.

The solution: an ipod and audio-books

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.

The technical requirements

• I choose an audio-book which is interesting enough to keep me focused. Dull stories may allow my mind to wander away, so that the soundtrack only adds to the cacophony of ideas. The same goes with music, by the way. I have seldom found music that would be captivating enough to prevent my mind from escaping to the circus of ideas.
• I choose a narrator with a soft voice, and a narrow dynamic range: I do not want to have to turn the volume up to listen to whispered lines and then be woken up by sudden roaring as the narrator experiments with pirate voices in a dialog. Note that this requirement is also valid for any sort of outdoor listening (car, airplane, bicycle,…)
• I set the volume as low as possible. The objective is to be able to hear everything to stay focused on the story, but not be disturbed after I fall asleep.
• I use an MP3 player with the best autonomy (and a rechargeable battery). Although I do not recommend it for those who are (like me) suspicious of proprietary formats and windows-only sluggish and buggy proprietary syncing software, my Sony NW-E405 MP3 player has a breathtaking autonomy of 50 hours.
• I use comfortable earphones. As I like to sleep on my side, I often have only one earbud on, and the other one under the pillow. The earphones have to have sturdy cords and connections too, as there can be a lot of wear and tear. The ones which last longest are not necessarily expensive: I have had my little 6€ Philips earphones for three months now, and both ears are still functional (whereas I have had 20€ earphones go kaputt in both ears after less than a month).
• Unless you have an MP3 player which is capable of playing only the specified track and then stop, you want to upload only one or two tracks to the player at a time. Otherwise, you’ll be draining the battery each night as the novel keeps playing to the end, and you’ll probably be woken up at some point. With only one or two tracks in the novel, I can ask the MP3 player to play only the album corresponding to the novel, and the reading will stop (hopefully when I am already asleep).
• An important detail: you probably want to choose an MP3 player which can fast-forward fast (this can only be tested by trying, as it is not often mentioned in the specs). This allows you to skip the first five or ten minutes of a given chapter once you know those minutes really by heart. In this respect, my Sony is appalling: the maximum fast-forward ratio is limited to 2x or 3x, so that I get cramps in the fingers before I can get to the point I want. This feature is very important if you intend you use the same player for listening to podcasts or audio-books in your waking hours: audio-book or podcast tracks can be one-hour long. No way I am going to keep the fast-forward button pressed for fifteen whole minutes just to get to the part I want.

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).

Where to find audio-books

For an unlimited supply of free ammo, go to LibriVox.

The context

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 audiobook

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

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.

The author

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.

Trapped in paper and copyright

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.

What is not searchable does not exist

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?

What if I do not like to read on-screen?

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.

What about editors?

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

The wealth of the world does not come from our material labour. This is becoming more and more obvious each day. Look around and count how much of your stuff is more than thirty years old: you will agree that what really matters is not the accumulation of material wealth from the commercial labour of past generations, but the legacy of intellectual riches from the volunteer contribution of our elders.

Let us pick a few examples from the public domain:

• washing one’s hands (the biggest life-saving practice of all times)
• quantum physics (which made the internet revolution possible)
• democracy (Athenian, American, French, …)
• crumpets, muffins, pancakes
• soccer, football, baseball, basketball, golf,…
• the English language

In fact, as soon as we are considering ideas, concepts, inventions, or intellectual production at large (except books, songs and movies), it is actually harder to find something that is not in the public domain than something that is.

However, I am worried. The public domain has seldom had powerful advocates. For the past couple of centuries, works have generally ‘fallen’ into the public domain inadvertently, instead of being given as offerings to the world. And the insane divergence of recent capitalistic greed in staking claims over things which should (and used to) belong to the common good (molecules, genes, seeds, theorems) is ominous. In my nightmares, I see large auctions in which Universal buys exclusive rights for Elizabethan theater, Monsanto buys corn (any variety), Apple buys Beethoven, Intel buys quantum physics and HSBC mathematics, and so forth, so that everything is now owned, making things so much simpler…

Meanwhile (from a very-well researched economics paper on the value of the public domain):

Older [copyrighted] works gathering dust in vaults or even rotting away (as has occurred with a large amount of early film in the United States (Lutzker et al 2002)) generate no revenue or value for society, and represent a tragedy for any nation’s cultural heritage.

On the other hand, there are also encouraging signs that mentalities may be changing. The internet is an ideal medium in which the public domain can thrive, as it considerably reduces the cost of exchanging and duplicating intellectual production. The uptake of Linux and open-source software, the growing number of GPL or other Creative-Commons-licenced content on the web, the rise of wikibooks and other books directly published in the public domain are unprecedented phenomena. My belief is that if we lean to the right side, we can sway the balance in favor of the public domain, and private owership of ideas will nicely return to its original minority niche.

If, like many, your are making a list of resolutions for the new year, let me suggest you added a line for one thing you could contribute to the public domain. The good thing about contributions to the public domain is that you never have to keep up. The cumulative nature of intellectual production is such that what is done will never have to be done again. Whereas reducing chocolate intake in the new year is an everyday’s endeavour, if you give something to the public domain just once, it will be forever: what you give will be available for people all around the world and in all future generations.

Below is a list of activities that everyone should contemplate at least once in a lifetime:

• Proofreading public-domain e-books for Project Gutenberg
• Creating, editing, completing, commenting Wikipedia articles or any wikibook
• Recording, proof-listening, editing public-domain audio-books for LibriVox
• Contributing to open-source software projects (code, documentation, support forums)
• Uploading your pictures to flickr and specifying ‘no rights reserved’
• Collecting copyrighted material for the time it goes out of copyright (be a library/vault)
• Recording public-domain music and uploading it to musopen.org
• Dropping the copyright notice on your blog
• Exchanging seeds
• Publishing and exchanging cooking recipes
• Inventing something and just publishing it instead of filing a patent
• Writing a novel and publishing it over the internet instead of running the obstacle course of finding a publisher and then having your book out of print after one year and until 70 years after your death
• Bookmooching and bookcrossing (from Dew)
• Writing quality content and making it available (if not necessarily public-domain) on a website or blog (from Dew)

If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment: I’d like this list to grow to outrageous proportions to show just how much anyone can do.

After my recent diatribe against scientism, maybe this is the right moment to write a little something about Jules Verne, the archfather of scientism in literature. I used to love Jules Verne novels when I was a child, although the red cover of the hardback editions had always intimidated me. Then I had almost forgotten all I’d read until some years ago when I delved into ‘De la Terre à la Lune’ for a physics class I was giving: I ripped all space mechanics references from the book and made a very funny physics test out of them (providing that units were properly converted). The one question I remember best was an illustration of Michel Ardan’s head, where I had drawn a downward arrow with a legend ‘m.gamma’ representing the apparent weight of the head on the neck during the acceleration phase of the shell in the cannon. Students were expected to show that even with the hydraulic cushion below the cabin floor, there was no way Ardan & co. could come out alive from an acceleration of 21,000g (you can check for yourselves: the cannon is 900 feet long, the liberation velocity was and still is 11000 m/s), as the head would have appeared to weigh more than 30 tons, i.e. the weight of twenty midsize cars. [more]

You may by now know that I am very fond of audio-books in general, and of free audio-books in particular. Among those, I have a clear preference towards the public-domain audio-books which the LibriVox volunteers offer as unconditional gifts to the whole world and all future generations.

What you do not know is that I have come to worship one specific LibriVox voice. Warm and crystalline at the same time, this voice is the ideal bedside storytelling mother’s. If I’d been born to an English-speaking family, my dreams of being read Peter Pan, Narnia or Harry Potter to would feature that very voice.

My greatest luck is that I have had the privilege to edit some of the recordings in which this dream voice had been preciously collected, for subsequent release on LibriVox. Even if it was easy work (there are hardly any bits that need to be edited out), I am proud to have contributed to these priceless presents for humanity.

Dear Cori, I am in love with your voice.