The Local Yarn

∞ · Sun Jun 29, 2014 · 1 Notes

Detail, Allison Iris

What is it that you want most, right now?

Maybe you want a sandwich. Maybe you want a raise. Let’s say it’s a raise. OK: if it came down to a choice between you either giving up the raise or your spouse leaving you, which would it be?

You see where this is going. Whether or not you change your answer, I’m going to keep throwing new choices at you until we find out what it is you want the most. I’m not saying the answer is always going to be profound or amazing either. Maybe you just really like sandwiches.

You’re already playing this exercise out, over the course of your life. What do you want more: to sleep in, or to keep your job? To own a house, or live nomadically? Of course you don’t always know what you want. And what you want changes over time. Sometimes pursuing something you think you want makes you realize that you actually want something else more.

But either way, at every turn, you always — always — make the choice that, as far as you can tell, gets you closer to what you want — or what you think you want — the most.

You can’t not do it.

Don’t believe me? Fine, prove it. Go do something that horrifies you — something that would actually have real consequences for your desires. Go rob a gas station, or insult your child, or burn down your house. Of course you might be the kind of person who actually would do those things, right this minute; but still, you’d only be able to choose to do them because of your own particular set of desires.

Read the rest…

∞ · Thu Jun 26, 2014

Practically the first thing I read this morning was Adrienne LaFrance’s article A Corrected History of the Typo. You must read it — it’s an excellent little collection of sources and thoughts on errors and corrections in text, with appearances by Spenser and Milton. I’ve long had an attraction for errata but never really thought about why; LaFrance’s article explained it for me. Reading a text alongside its own corrections, “the reader encounters an added layer of richness in having to reconcile the two terms, almost such that it’s ‘impossible to read one without the other’”:

“What is created is an oscillation … which performs a sense of error as both eternally present — something that happens to books, including books about the necessity of error — and morally, and hermeneutically, productive.”

The article goes back as far as the dawn of printed books; but it recalled for me the earlier birth of errata (in the West, at least), during the days of the medieval scribe. These early calligraphers made plenty of mistakes, and left plenty of amusing endnotes and marginalia in their attempts to clean up after themselves. In Medieval Calligraphy: Its History and Technique, Marc Drogin devotes a short chapter to Titivillus, “the patron demon of calligraphy,” who was originally supposed to collect transcription errors, which were to be read out against erring scribes on the Day of Judgment.

Errors, revisions and printing ambiguities give life to a text, adding new ways of enjoying and exploring it. For example, printing errors and alterations have made the original text of Shakespeare’s plays impossible to pin down; but the uncertainty now surrounding those texts has opened up new possibilities, readings and interpretations for those works, and is no small part of what keeps both scholars and performers coming back to them. Many of these interpretations may even be at odds with each other, and yet are equally valid, collectively possessing a kind of value that comes not from certainty but from possibility.

And not only do we enjoy exploring the errata of old texts, there seems to be some sense among many writers that the errors and corrections in the stuff we’re churning out today are worth preserving for future study — that they are the raw material for insights that later generations will be able to mine and have the distance to appreciate. It’s why practices have emerged among bloggers to make revisions transparent. And I suspect this is why we see the regrettable but recurring interest in version-control systems by writers of prose.

I’ve always had an errata section on this site; it’s a convenient, out-of-the-way place to put minor notes about “the printing” of these web pages, even if those notes often don’t involve corrections of the kind you’d see in old books.

∞ · Thu Jun 12, 2014 · 4 Notes

Empty rows of chairs, pews, places of rest: a collection of thoughts and photographs

Continue reading…

∞ · Fri Jun 6, 2014

If you’d been born a hundred years ago, what would you have done for a living?¹

This is not the same as asking, “Of the jobs that existed 100 years ago, which would you most like to do?” Because if you had been born 100 years ago, no matter what kinds of jobs existed, you’d only have access to a few of them.

One way to imagine possible answers is to drop yourself into a random family a hundred years ago. For location, pick the same one you were born in, or at least one in the same country. If you were born a woman, there were a handful of safe options (teacher, nurse, hope you get a kind husband, etc.) and many more bad ones (think Kate in Nicholas Nickleby or Fantine in Les Misérables). If you were a man, you could have more possibilities, but how many would depend mostly on your upbringing. All of this is still true in many places.

Another method is to dial back your own particular ancestry 100 years — picture yourself taking one of your great-grandmother or great-grandfather’s place. You might know what they in fact did end up doing (or you might not), but what options were available to them? Could they have gone to college, or owned a business? Given their circumstances and the way they were taught to think, what were their real options?

I have this difficulty because I don’t even know what I would have done for a living if I had been born 33 years ago, and in fact I was born 33 years ago. Many jobs exist now that didn’t exist when I was born or even when I finished high school. Someone a hundred years from now will say I could have been, say, a social media manager, or an investment banker. But “could” is a deceptive word because it hand-waves a thousand invisible constraints. Sure I “could” do anything for a living, including social media or investment banking! Except when the “social media manager” job was invented I was busy doing other things. And except that growing up, I didn’t know any investment bankers, didn’t know what they did, and didn’t know of any reason to pursue it. And except that in order to do either of them now, I would have to give up a lot of pay and spend years of effort to restart my career (a definite penalty to my growing family which we see no reason to take, though that could certainly change in response to circumstances over which I have ultimately no control). And except that I consider investment banking horrifically boring and I also loathe the cynical activity of social media marketing. So I “could” do anything! But in fact, I never will, so actually I can’t. I’m not saying I don’t have options — just that they are realistically limited, far more limited than those who idealize individual willpower would like to believe.

And that’s why I find this question interesting: because by trying to understand the real lack of choice we would have had a hundred years ago, I soon come around to the lack of choice we actually still face today. People today face the same set of constraints: the resources of the families we’re born into, the way we’re taught to think, and even our own desires and aptitudes — which we’re famously bad at figuring out.

∞ · Wed Jun 4, 2014

I’ve long been interested in automating the creation of books in multiple formats. I like to dream about a kind of black box, where you put your plain text book in one end, and out the other end comes a web version, a PDF, a Kindle or ePub version, or even a physical paperback edition — all from a single source text or data store.

A great example is Tom Armitage’s code for making books out of his Pinboard links. Now that he’s set it up, he can generate decent printed books out of his reading material with a minimum of effort.

I’d like to finish a similar system of my own, for use with normal prose work. I wouldn’t really have to make my own in order to have that kind of functionality; I could just use Leanpub, currently the best¹ Machine For Making Books that I know of. Markdown files go in, digital ebooks, web books, and print-ready PDFs come out, no code or scripting necessary. But Leanpub’s choice of fonts and page design, although certainly adequate, feel pretty generic. If you’re a true publishing Jedi nerd, at some point you’re going to want your work to be more expressive — you’re going to want to build your own lightsaber.

Pollen

I saw yesterday that the eminent Matthew Butterick has released his own toolkit for digital bookmaking called Pollen, a programming language that generates text documents instead of software. This could be a useful approach — if you fall into the very narrow edge case for which Butterick designed it. Pollen is for books being published (a) directly on the web (b) without WordPress’s elephantine structure but that also (c) have content that can’t be expressed in Markdown. That last one is pretty rare and unusual for most authors. If you want a and b but don’t really need c, then another tool like Jekyll or Kirby would probably work just as well (and ultimately be just as complicated) for creating web-only documents.

Pollen looks like it could be a great tool if you need the capabilities afforded by (or just like the idea of) writing your book as you would a program, with code, formatting and text content all bound in together in a single system. And although it seems geared mainly at creating HTML books that live on the web, it could prove to be the kind of one-to-many tool I look for. Theoretically, for example, you could create Pollen templates that would output the book in other formats like LaTeX or ePub as well as in HTML.

Other Approaches

I have several half-finished attempts to build my own book-making machine. One approach that worked out very well was to use Pandoc as a kind of book compiler.² Pandoc converts documents between almost any document format you can think of: HTML, Markdown, LaTeX, Word, ePub, PDF, etc. Unlike Pollen, it doesn’t impose the need to learn a complicated set of templating rules or a new programming language. You can just create your templates in their respective formats, or even use Pandoc’s default templates. Once you have those templates, a bash script or a makefile setup would then suffice to turn your Markdown text files into LaTeX, HTML and ePub files. I like this approach because if you take away the scaffolding (pandoc) you still have a very useable source (plain text files). The same would not be true of Pollen.

Another possible route is Scrivener, which can compile a book from Markdown source to LaTeX (which you could then use to get PDFs for print or digital reading), and HTML. Scrivener doesn’t directly support converting Markdown sources into ePub files, but with some extra scaffolding you can make this work.

Finally, PrinceXML might be a good option for generating PDFs. It has the advantage of using HTML and CSS to drive the print design, which avoids the need to get messy with LaTeX in any way shape or form. This is what Tim Armitage (the Pinboard book guy above) uses in his system. I have avoided it so far because while it’s free for personal use, it’s quite pricey for commercial use.

For PDFs, especially print-ready PDFs³, I would hesitate to use a workflow that didn’t include LaTeX as the last step, because of its superior typesetting.

Covers

The ideal book machine would also include a mechanism for creating covers. Tim Armitage still just does his covers separately in Photoshop, without automating that part at all. But clearly it’s possible to do better. I love the work Karsten Schmidt did on the Faber Finds series, which generated a whole family of unique book covers algorithmically. I would like to create something like that, but using more of a Lapham-style design vocabulary (such as this lovely cover).