How many of you have I pressured to read “Perdido Street Station,” by China Miéville? It’s been more than a few of you and everyone I know of has dug it, some as much as I did. Artist Gordillo has taken a stab at a new visualization of the titular station. If you haven’t read the book yet, consider this artwork a reminder that you should.
Not that it’s a huge surprise, but I’m a big fan of free literature. I like it even more when it’s digital and there’s no need to toss a book out on its head once I’m done reading it. Charles Bock is a first time author receiving high praise for his new novel “Beautiful Children.” I downloaded a copy of the book and read the opening scenes. It looks like it will be a rip-roaring good read. I don’t generally endorse writers I haven’t read personally but come on, it’s free!
>> Get a free digital copy of “Beautiful Children” until 2/29 here
>> Check out the “Beautiful Children” website for more information and promotional material
Evidently, Mark Twain went a bit existentialist as he aged and spent the final 20 years of his life working off and on on a story encapsulating some epiphanies related to the dream-like nature of life. What he came up with is a bit darker than most people would probably believe came from Twain.
It’s worth while to take a few minutes to read the wikipedia article on “The Mysterious Stranger” before watching the creepy video below. Just call it your literary moment of the day.
Tom Waits. The voice. The performer. One of the only people on the planet I will pay hundreds of dollars to see play and KNOW that it’s money well spent.
Well, the good news is that Harper Collins has just published The Early Years: The Lyrics of Tom Waits 1971-1983, a collection of the first 10 years worth of his lyrics. While you can easily look up any lyrics of Tom’s that you like online, having them all put in a nice little book that you can flip through - jumping between road songs, songs of grief, loss, chocolate confections, old cars, cologne, deals with devil, late nights, drinking, and dancing; why, that’s just too much to pass up now isn’t it?
Ol’ 55
Now the sun’s coming up, I’m riding with Lady Luck, freeway cars and trucks,
Stars beginning to fade, and I lead the parade
Just a-wishing I’d stayed a little longer,
Oh, Lord, let me tell you that the feeling’s getting stronger.
Click the little widget below to view pages from inside the book. It will be fun. I promise.
A great hour-long interview with Jeff Bezos, mostly centered on the new Amazon Kindle e-book reader but with other interesting tidbits on innovation in general.
First of all, congratulations to Doris Lessing.
I’ve never read her work before but I’ve been thinking about starting a series of blog posts where I read all of the Nobel Prize winners for Literature and write about the experience. Have any of you read Doris Lessing? Any thoughts on what book I should start with? I read in her wikipedia entry that she considers the Canopus in Argos series to be her most important work to date.
If you have ideas on which Doris Lessing book I should start with, please suggest it in the comments.
Update: You can check out the New York Times article here. I love the photo of Doris Lessing sitting there in disbelief on her front porch.
Stout, sharp and a bit hard of hearing, after a few moments Ms. Lessing excused herself to go inside. “Now I’m going to go in to answer my telephone,” she said. “I swear I’m going upstairs to find some suitable sentences which I will be using from now on.”
Update 2: With everyone getting in on the action, it was only a matter of time before Kakutani weighed in.
The primary skill of an economist is identifying all of the explanations for various phenomena. Cognitive dissonance is, at its core, the inability to recognize and accept other explanations. I’m oversimplifying, but you get the point. The more your brain is trained for economics, the less it is susceptible to cognitive dissonance, or so it seems.
When you see an explosion that no one could have survived and the person is still running, then it’s bullshit. And that’s frequently why digital effects are not as good. Whereas when you do it physically, you’ve got to be careful — like, really careful. With digital, the painting book is unlimited; the world in, say, Lord of the Rings would not have been nearly as impressive 30 years ago as it is today.
This one goes out to the folks who read “Against the Day” with me. It’s the best review of the novel I have read to date, exposing the great faults and the dizzying underlying talent at the same time. It comes as little surprise that a review this well-written wasn’t written anytime near the books release. This sort of understanding can only come from serious time invested.
VQR: Back to the Future: On Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day
[Tip of the hat for finding this one goes to the Marginal Revolution blog. Thank you!]
The article is here:
In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year, according to several people who have tried the device and are familiar with Amazon’s plans. The Kindle will be priced at $400 to $500 and will wirelessly connect to an e-book store on Amazon’s site.
Update: Apparently, this is a hot Amazon story today. Another blogger is reviewing the product before it even comes out.
David Weinberger’s “Everything is Miscellaneous” is a well-written exploration of the various “geographies of knowledge” and how our maps of this knowledge are changing as our tools and computational processing improve. If you are a data wonk, organization freak, or just somebody intrigued by how the classification of massive amounts of data, this is a book for you. It’s a lively mix of historical classification schemes and modern use cases of companies finding ways of making their data more useful.
The inside flap of the book lists three “profound consequences” which it believes are important (the following bullets are quotes from the inner flap):
While I believe the three claims above are well-documented throughout the book, I think that there is a core component of the dialog that should have been expounded in more detail; precisely how this miscellaneous pile becomes relevant and navigable to each individual user. While there are pockets of companies and researchers adding meta-data to digital archives in a way that enriches it for targeted audiences, it’s still a very small group and a very small percentage of the overall material on the web. Indeed, while I know of no metrics on this, I would wager that the index of enriched content is falling further behind the actual pace of content creation. I believe that some rich forms of intent publication need to be added to the equation in an automatic manner in order for this problem to be solved.
In our current world, the internet is an extension of faulty (albeit useful) rules. “Thou must be cited (or linked to) to be useful,” seems to be an underlying rule of the internet. I cannot prove it, but I’m willing to bet there is an amazing amount of useful data, specific to given user search queries, not returned as prominent search results by the current algorithms. Specifying intent in a search query is a difficult matter, often involving programming-like search queries. This is not something the average internet user knows how to do.
While there is infinitely more data available to the layperson than ever before, and our search engines are enormously useful generic indexes, they still only brush the surface of user intent, something that is promised by what everyone is calling the “semantic web.” Theoretically, this is the framework that will allow computers to infer “user intent” on behalf of a user and make a request to other computers for precisely what the user probably wants. In order for this pile of randomness to become useful, we need a generic way of publishing meta-data about the sites being visited in a manner which does not get in the way of the average user. Ideally, this universal schema of intent would be enough to apply to individual user repositories of data. In fact, this might be where the movement for this sort of disclosure would need to occur. Anybody interested in defining a universal classification scheme for intent? Yikes!
I’d highly recommend this book by Weinberger as a thought-provoking and fun read. It had me questioning the organization schema of my own home library (and patting myself on the back for a couple ways that I’d apparently internalized hundreds of years of various classification methods already). It’s a fun read that doesn’t take too long.
I’d love to chat with folks about it so feel free to contact me via the comments if you are interested!
