Steve Reads

I found a copy of Mark Twain’s essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” laying on the web, substantially cleaned up the HTML, and posted it to my site. It’s a hilarious piece of literary criticism, which according to at least one source (my cache) has condemned Fenimore to the literary dustbin:

Making hilarious game of the improbabilities in Cooper’s tales of arcane woodcraft, Twain’s essays about Cooper have been American classics ever since. So have Cooper’s tales, but only in the category of enjoyable hokum. After Twain got through with him, Cooper’s prestige was gone. Reading the reviews that did him in, one cannot avoid the impression that Twain would have enjoyed himself less if Cooper had been less of a klutz. Like Macaulay, Twain used someone else’s mediocrity as an opportunity to be outstanding. This is getting pretty close to malice, for all its glittering disguise as selfless duty.

Ah well. Malice can be fun to read, and in this case it certainly is.

Last night, some friends and I were discussing Disney’s plan to release DVDs that decompose within 48 hours of being opened. Two small points:

1. My friend Joe’s observation: why is it that American companies have a fetish for designing products that are trivial modifications of other products, only disposable? From cameras to diapers to mops (Swiffer) to DVDs, this country loves developing throwaway objects. Are Americans really so lazy that they can’t handle driving to the video store to return DVDs? Environmentally, this might not be so terrible in this specific case — you burn a lot of gas going the store, and the disposable DVD might indeed consume fewer resources — but as a general cultural behavior it’s alarmingly wasteful.
2. I suspect these disposable DVDs are just a holding action until the future arrives, namely movies delivered over the net. Let’s even suppose the DVD is really high-resolution, like 5 gigabytes of data for a two-hour movie. That’s about 1.5 megabytes per second, or 12 megabits per second. That hardly seems beyond the reach of broadband. Give it 10 years, at most.

John Gilmore has a completely overheated response to the practice of obfuscating email addresses on web pages (e.g., what I do at the bottom of this page). (Via BoingBoing; I’ve cached Gilmore’s letter.) He asks whether such obfuscation shows that we’ve “reached a Brave New World in which we all start rewriting online history to suit today’s prejudices.” (Incidentally, I’ve not read Brave New World, but I have read 1984, and it sounds like Gilmore is reciting one of the 1984 police-state’s crimes. By citing Brave New World, was he just trying to avoid being the 10-billionth civil-liberties crusader to use the term “Orwellian”?)

He’s overreacting, and I think that he misunderstands what obfuscation is for. We’re not “rewriting history” at all; if people want to email us, they can still do so. Any reasonably intelligent person can de-obfuscate my email address at the bottom of this page. I don’t see what the big deal is.

Gilmore also writes that “Unwanted communications would exist even if every `spammer’ was flayed and burned at the stake.” Sure. Obfuscating email addresses won’t end all spam, but it might help, and the cost is minimal. Next topic?

 . . . is Chris Smither’s live disc, Live As I’ll Ever Be. It’s inspiring and bluesy and great. And I discovered that no one on the net had transcribed the lyrics to Smither’s song “Hold On I.” Hence it was necessary for me to do it myself. Let me know if you can help at all with the parts that I was confused about, and also let me know if I transcribed anything incorrectly.

I posted a while ago to my own weblog and to the Technical Work weblog about the topic of threading web pages and creating link trails — that is,

1. finding some systematic way to link together weblog discussions across sites, so that we can keep track of who said what to whom and when, just like we do with email conversations, and
2. describing the weblog where you found a particular link, so that people can see how various ideas are connected, which sites are the canonical starting points for information, etc.,

These are two necessary additions to some spec, though I’m not sure which. After finding the Technical Work discussion, I emailed its administrator — Elihu Gerson – to follow up, about a month late. He responded with a couple of great links. First, apparently there’s a successor to RSS, known as Echo. People are having a wiki debate about how to organize Echo, which is wonderful. Elihu also pointed me to a weblog that tries to keep track of what’s going on with Echo. Both look to be fascinating reading.

They also look like they may be overkill for my purposes. All I need is a very minimal set of extensions to HTML, or maybe some XML tags to wrap around the HTML. I appreciate computer scientists’ desire to solve problems in greater generality, but I wonder whether — in a fast-moving arena like weblogs — it would be best to sacrifice some generality in order to get something out there. Why not just adopt a very limited standard for a very limited problem?

I was happy last year when the Harvard Book Store won Bookstore Of The Year from Publishers Weekly. HBS is my favorite bookstore, even topping the rather awe-inspiring Harvard Coop down the street. But just now I read the Publishers Weekly article describing the store. It’s nice to know a little more about a store that I care so much about.

And yes, it’s rare for me to care about a store. Obviously the sense of “to care about” here is different than the one I use when I say I care about my parents. What I mean here is that HBS is a real gem of a bookstore, and I’m willing to support HBS even when it might charge slightly more than Barnes & Noble, because it’s a cause worth supporting. It’s like paying more for Equal Exchange coffee. It’s just the right thing to do.

A new Woody Allen flick will arrive in theatres September 19. It’s called Anything Else, and it looks like it may be another desperately unfunny and utterly conventional movie from Allen, who from the Seventies to the Nineties brought us classic after classic: Manhattan, Husbands and Wives, Hannah and Her Sisters, Annie Hall, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Deconstructing Harry, and on and on. The guy is brilliant. He now seems to have hit a rut. I hope this is just a Bob Dylanesque lull that will lead to more genius when his career comes back for the umpteenth time.

I don’t think there could be a stronger death knell for a movie’s humor than the presence of Jason Biggs within its cast. Anything Else features Biggs. Could the Allen flick that’s in preproduction (tentatively scheduled for 2004) be American Pie 10? Maybe American Divorce?

I just had one of the worst nights of sleep that I can remember, if you count the number of times I woke up and how many bad dreams I had. Right after falling asleep – around 2 a.m. — I started in on a dream where I was watching myself asleep, and my muscles were rigidly locked. It took a severe act of will to force my muscles to move, and my dreaming self told me to wake up. It was the most bizarre feeling of electricity through my muscles, and it persisted through the first few moments of being awake. I checked the clock, and it was 2:18 a.m. It’s rare enough for me to have bad dreams, but it’s rarer to have them that soon after I fall asleep.

At 5:30 a.m. I woke up needing to pee. That never happens; I can’t remember the last time I’ve woken up in the middle of the night for such reasons, and I’ve certainly had a fuller bladder on many occasions.

And just now, before waking up, I had a dream that – don’t laugh — my house in Vermont was infested with all kinds of enormous birds, including some ducks, and that they were trying to eat my cats. The cats put up a good fight, but the ducks were winning. I tried to pick up the cats and move them to a safe place, and the ducks started coming after me. Calling my mother and my roommate didn’t help; I awoke a few moments after yelling my roommate’s name.

I’m not quite sure why the night was so filled with nasty dreams (not a single good dream!  . . .  Oh wait, there was one), and such low-quality sleep. Have I sinned recently and didn’t know it?

A lot of other people have said it, but I’ll chime in: if you’re going to link to a document on your website, don’t say “Click here.” Instead, let the link flow smoothly into the text. Weblogs are terrible violators of this convention: they’ll say “Original posts were here, here, and here, and my responses were there, there, and there.” How can you decide whether you want to visit a page if you have no more of a description of its contents than an instruction to “click here”? If there’s a good description preceding the “click here” instruction — e.g., “I describe my views on the death penalty here” — then why not just rewrite it as, e.g., “I have described my views on the death penalty elsewhere”? Simple enough. You don’t want the reader to be distracted by the fact that he’s reading a web page; the medium should not get in the way of the message.

 . . . is “What’s the Ugliest Part Of Your Body?” by Frank Zappa:

What’s the ugliest part of your body?
What’s the ugliest part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
But I think it’s your mind

I think a lot of people read books and watch television or movies for distraction, and I can’t really get my head around that. It’s not that my own perspective on such things is better than theirs; it’s just that I have a hard time understanding where they’re coming from. I get really angry when I watch a movie that’s just two hours of things blowing up, whereas I’m quite sure that that’s the reason why a lot of people go to see such movies; they like the explosions, and they like taking their minds off their cares for a couple hours. I can’t fault them for this, but I also don’t really know where they’re coming from.

I particularly can’t understand this perspective with books, which are like blood for me (except that they don’t deliver nutrients to my extremities). There are a lot of authors out there who produce books that are basically just a few hours of distraction. It just seems like a waste of paper. I read a book like Memoirs of a Geisha, and every time I turn the page I wonder, “Why am I reading this? What is this buying me that watching a soap opera right now wouldn’t?” And when a book can’t provide any clear benefits over a soap opera, I realize that I should be doing something else with my time. Others may get more value out of such things than I do, but for me it’s a dead-weight loss.

It’s the rare book that’s worth reading, and the rare song that’s worth listening to. I say this not to disparage the authors who fail to produce the Great American Novel, but to elevate those who succeed. The David Foster Wallaces, Arundhati Roys and Philip Roths of the world are doing something that very few people can do. But over the last 500 years, the English language has produced its share of masters. I don’t see the point in reading the rest. There’s just not enough time.

When is Philip Roth going to win his Nobel prize? Or is he just an American phenomenon? The discussion surrounding the Booker Prize (“With someone like [Philip] Roth at his best, I can’t see how an Amis or a McEwan would touch them”) would suggest that he has a more worldwide renown. So when does he get the prize?

For some reason I was just reminded of the story of Jonathan Lebed, a 15-year-old stock trader whom Michael Lewis (author of the brilliant Liar’s Poker, The New New Thing, and Next: The Future Just Happened) profiled for the New York Times Magazine in 2001 (my cache). It’s a brilliant profile, one of whose points is that Lebed’s strategy — find a stock that he likes, then use several AOL screen names to promote it on various Internet message boards — is no more deceitful than what passes for legitimate on Wall Street. Time has proven Lewis correct. Plus the Lebed article is just incredibly well written; Lewis is a master journalist. Here’s one of my favorite passages:

At which point, Arthur Levitt, who had been trying to stare into my eyes as intently as a man can stare, said in his deep voice, “This kid has no basis for making these predictions.”

“But how do you know that?”

And the chairman of the S.E.C., the embodiment of investor confidence, the keeper of the notion that the numbers gyrating at the bottom of the CNBC screen are “real,” drew himself up and said, “I worked on Wall Street.”

Well. What do you say to that? He had indeed worked on Wall Street — in 1968.

“So did I,” I said.

“I worked there longer than you.”

Walker leapt back in. “This kid’s father said he was going to rip the [expletive] computer out of the wall.”

I realized that it was my turn to stare. I stared at Richard Walker. “Have you met Jonathan Lebed’s father?” I said.

“No I haven’t,” he said curtly. “But look, we talked to this kid two years ago, when he was 14 years old. If I’m a kid and I’m pulled in by some scary government agency, I’d back off.”

That’s the trouble with 14-year-old boys — from the point of view of the social order. They haven’t yet learned the more sophisticated forms of dishonesty. It can take years of slogging to learn how to feign respect for hollow authority.

I was home in Vermont the other day, and while driving back from the grocery store I heard Rush Limbaugh going off about the Supreme Court’s recent decisions regarding sodomy laws and affirmative action. He scolded President Bush for supporting these decisions, or at least not doing anything to oppose them. Bush came into office saying that his favorite Supreme Court justices were Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, and apparently was a fan of judges who “interpret the Constitution literally” and aren’t “activist” — i.e., they take what the text tells them and don’t try to legislate. In the view of Limbaugh and Scalia, the Court shouldn’t legislate; that’s the legislature’s bailiwick.

In response to Limbaugh — and to a host of more intelligent commentators who’ve made the same point — I’ve written a long response to the idea of “interpreting the Constitution literally.”

James Grimmelmann has some neat remarks on the Galileo spacecraft, commenting on an article from the New Yorker on the same topic. I’ve not read the New Yorker article, but now I want to. Check out James’s synopsis of the Galileo’s hacks:

Galileo’s story is the story of improvisational engineering at its best. When its main 134 KBps antenna failed to open, NASA engineers decided to have it send back images using its puny 10bps antenna. 10 bits per second! 10!

To fit images over that narrow a channel, they needed to teach Galileo some of the tricks we’ve learned about data compression in the last few decades. And to teach an old satellite new tricks, they needed to upgrade its entire software package. Considering that upgrading your OS rarely goes right here on Earth, pulling off a half-billion-mile remote install is pretty impressive.

(I’m also curious about the security issues. Does NASA use crypto? Could just anyone with a transmitter point it in the right direction and ask Galileo to searh [sic] for rings around Uranus?)

I was talking with my friend Stevie tonight about Philip Roth, whom Stevie and I both adore. I don’t think I really understood Roth’s genius until my second attempt at reading American Pastoral; I had already read Portnoy’s Complaint and Goodbye, Columbus, which are wonderful books but not profound. American Pastoral is a profound look at America since the Vietnam War, as personfied by Swede Levov — beloved football player from the narrator’s high school — and also personified by the narrator himself. And it’s just an amazing story.

The thing about Roth that I didn’t realize until I was thinking out loud on the phone tonight is that he’s so effortless in his mastery of the novel. Reading someone like Salman Rushdie or Milan Kundera or Gabriel García Marquez or Vladimir Nabokov, I can’t help but think “this author is a belletrist.” Nothing is wrong with belletrists; I love all the authors that I listed. But I just contrast their style with Roth, whom you can breeze through if you want. Take another moment to think about what you’re reading, though, and you realize how much is lurking immediately below the surface.

Right now, for instance, I’m in the middle of Operation Shylock (I picked up a pristine hardcover edition for a song in the used-books section of Barnes & Noble; whoever the sucker is who gave it away: thanks). In Shylock, Roth finds that someone named Philip Roth is going around the world impersonating the real Philip Roth, making statements about a movement that he (the fake Roth) calls Diasporism (to be contrasted with Zionism) with which the real Roth violently disagrees. Now the real Roth has to stop the fake Roth. At the same time, both Roths are attending the trial of John Demjanjuk, the (real-life) suspected Nazi extermination-camp torturer known as Ivan The Terrible in the camps. The question throughout the book thus far — never stated outright, at least as far as I’ve read — is whether there’s a doppelgänger within each of us: whether the fake Roth might be a part of the real Roth, and Ivan The Terrible part of Demjanjuk, and how the doppelgänger relates to the real part of us. And also how reality relates to literature. Tie those themes together, and make it about 100 times more eloquent, then practice the novelist’s art and only ask this question by telling a story, and you have my experience with Shylock thus far.

I don’t have the mind to be a novelist, because I’m far too literal — and, truth be told, far too lazy. It is hard work to tell a story without coming out and saying it – saying it in a way that the reader can work out on his own. It’s hard work being an S.J. Perelman, telling a story through humor alone, having a serious point underlying it all while joking on the surface. I just don’t have the energy for it; that’s why my writing tends to come out in essay form. I’m the kind of guy who would sit below his beloved’s window, acoustic guitar in hand, and read out an itemized list of the reasons why she should fall in love with me: “Point 1: our economic needs coincide  . . . ” Best to let Roth be Roth, and leave Laniel a bachelor.

Via GrepLaw: writing an email virus may now be labeled a hate crime (my cache).

Here might be the appropriate place to mention the Drug Enforcement Administration’s guide to jiving with your teen (my cache).

Three thoughts inspired by Geoff Cohen’s recent post about the future of maps:

1. That post is incredibly cool.
2. For a while now, I’ve wanted to see a motion graphic of how a political map of the world has changed over the last millennium — both in terms of how the map is labeled (we used to call China “Cathay,” if I understand correctly), and in terms of who owns what. Someone must have done this by now, right?
3. I own a GPS that’s pretty cool, but I’m surprised that GPS technology doesn’t go further. I’d like to see my GPS just be really dumb: it produces my current coordinates in 3-space, and that’s it. Another program produces my current time. Another program computes my speed from readings at closely-spaced times. Then some program packages all that data inside some XML tags and spits it over to MapQuest, which does Mapquesty things with the data — like telling me the quickest route from my current location to some other place. I.e., all these devices and programs would be nicely linked together, but the devices and programs would be really dumb. Right now, my GPS tries and fails to be a map program, largely because it can’t assume that I have a laptop on hand which will handle a lot of the other tasks. But as time goes on, and portable computing is just what everyone does, I’ll need my devices to do one thing and do it well.