As the centerpiece of our date night, Jess and I visited Garrison Keillor’s bookstore Common Goods Books on Thursday. In the hour and a half we spent there, I found many interesting books, but only two I would have liked to buy.
One was a children’s book called This Is Not My Hat. I won’t tell you about the book’s contents; you should make it your minor mission to turn one up for yourself somehow. But I will say: it brought back, in a cathartic, humourous way, that vague, exhilarating twinge of guilt-induced fear that tainted so much of my childhood, and which I thought I had forgotten. We will probably buy it before too long (when Sylvia is old enough to understand words).
The second was a nice paperback edition of Isaiah Berlin’s Freedom and Its Betrayal. I confess I had not heard of him before and don’t know if I’m supposed to like him or despise him (based on my personal alignments and affiliations &c.). But, standing there in the store, I read several pages of it and found it quite engaging. The only thing that put me off buying it was the $27 price tag.
“If that’s what he means,” says the student to the poetry teacher, “why doesn’t he just say it?” “If God is real,” says the parishioner to the preacher, “why doesn’t he simply storm into our lives and convince us?” The questions are vastly different in scale and importance, but their answers are similar. A poem, if it’s a real one, in some fundamental sense means no more and no less than the moment of its singular music and lightning insight; it is its own code to its own absolute and irreducible clarity. A god, if it’s a living one, is not outside of reality but in it, of it, though in ways it takes patience and imagination to perceive. Thus the uses and necessities of metaphor, which can flash us past our plodding resistance and habits into strange new truths. Thus the very practical effects of music, myth, and image, which tease us not out of reality, but deeper and more completely into it.
A friend tagged me in a “book challenge” on Facebook, which means I am obliged to share ten books that have affected my thinking. This is not much of an obligation, of course, because I love books, and there was never any question of my being able to resist the chance to gab about them.
To keep the number down, I’ve tried to stick to the books and authors that have informed my thinking so much that I can’t seem to resist coming back to them over and over. At any given time two or three can be found on my desk or kitchen counter. These are in no particular order of importance.
Beautiful Evidence and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information by Edward Tufte. One of those lovely cases where the books themselves are examples of the principles they teach: using design to drive clear, credible thinking, to remove impediments to understanding, and to show respect for your audience.
The Muse in the Machine by David Gelernter. Starting with the question of how to computerize human creativity, Gelernter delves into the very nature of thought, inspiration and dreams. He brings a clear argument and a wide variety of sources to build an elegant (and correct) model of how we think. Most of the authors here are familiar to most people I meet, but Gelernter is one almost no one seems to have heard of and it drives me nuts because he answers so many questions so well.
I enjoy anything by C.S. Lewis, right down to his unedited diaries. But the two works I keep by my nighstand are The Great Divorce, which should really be added to the canon of Scripture; and The Discarded Image, about the medieval model of the universe, which is the very sap and gnarled rootlets of Western culture.
Planet Narnia by Michael Ward1. Like everyone and their great aunt’s button-eyed rag dolls, I have a soft spot for Lewis’s Narnia chronicles. Planet Narnia took my appreciation of them to a whole new level. For more info, you should read a great review of this book at All Manner of Thing (one of my favourite blogs).
The Elements of Typographic Style by Robert Bringhurst. This is an undisputed classic among typographers and book designers, and, like Tufte’s books, it is itself a great example of how a well-designed book can draw you in and make you feel eminently comfortable.
All of James Herriot’s books, but particularly the collection (get ready for a great title) The Best of James Herriot, drawn from his other books All Creatures Great and Small and All Things Wise and Wonderful. A window into life in 1930s rural England for which I feel, weirdly enough, almost homesick.
Zen Mind, Beginner Mind by Shunryu Suzuki. I am not Buddhist, and I don’t even pretend to understand or make use of everything in here, but this book taught me a lot and stretched my imagination, as well as informing my understanding of Eastern culture. I bought it after chancing across a reading of it by Peter Coyote on YouTube.
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton. I have a love-hate relationship with Chesteron’s writing; this one is definitely on the far ‘love’ end of things. A nightmarish allegory revolving around a spy-poet hunting and being hunted, it’s the perfect combination of thrilling, dense, and fantastically sound. Another one that should definitely be added to the Bible.
From the beginning, what set apart the new and strange sect called Christians from the rest of their culture was their strange sexual ethic… Christians held a bizarrely exalted view of (lifelong, monogamous, fertile, heterosexual) marriage as reflecting the image of God himself, but, even more bizarrely, held up lifelong celibacy as an even more exalted state of life. From the start, alongside the refusal to worship the Roman emperor as a god and Christians’ supererogatory care for the poor, this was what set Christians apart, and goes a long way toward explaining why Pagan writers could scorn Christianity as a religion of “slaves and women.”
Leaving aside the main point of this article, this pastoral of early Christians as the lone torchbearers of clean living strikes me as too convenient and cartoonish to be accurate. In particular it seems at odds with the perspective offered by C.S. Lewis in The Discarded Image:
I have read a novel which represents all the Pagans of that day as carefree sensualists, and all the Christians as savage ascetics. It is a grave error. They were in some ways far more like each other than either was like a modern man… A world-renouncing, ascetic, and mystical character then marked the most eminent Pagans no less than their Christian opponents. It was the spirit of the age. Everywhere, on both sides, men were turning away from the civic virtues and the sensual pleasures to seek an inner purgation and a supernatural goal. A modern who dislikes the Christian Fathers would have disliked the Pagan philosophers equally, and for similar reasons… To a modern eye (and nostril) Julian with his long nails and densely populated beard might have seemed very like an unwashed monk out of the Egyptian desert.
Ten years ago, John Gruber made a thing called Markdown and promptly abandoned it. Now he’s furious — literally furious — that Atwood and co. have named their spec’ed variant “Standard Markdown”, and also that, horrors, they failed to capitalize the word “Markdown” consistently in the first release of the spec.
I doubt that Standard Common Markdown is going to have any but the usual impact on the dialect soup we currently have. But I find it amusing and sad that Gruber should be acting so boorish and obnoxious.
His demands and attitude seem to stem from his central claim to some kind ownership of the name “Markdown”. This claim has no legal basis, because the name was never trademarked and has been in widespread use for years. The license for Gruber’s original Markdown code does include this clause:
Neither the name “Markdown” nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
This constraint, however, is part of a software license, and only applies to the use of the code Gruber provided, not his description of the syntax itself. And thanks to the fact that the actual code released under this license is buggy and hasn’t been touched since 2004 and is written in Perl, no one uses it. All of which means the license is completely irrelevant to the question. Who owns the name ‘Markdown’? Legally, no one does.
So Gruber’s claims to the name thus ultimately rely on an assumption of respect owed to him by the developer community. Which is problematic because, looking at how he’s handled his own little codebase, he’s really done none of the things that would command the respect of any decent developer. It’s like your deadbeat dad, who split when you were six years old, showing up at your graduation to tell you how to cut your hair.
Imagine if Tim Berners-Lee had sat on HTML for ten years, clucking that it’s better off with no standardization1. Imagine if Kernighan and Ritchie had objected to Stroustrup calling his language “C++” because it “sounds too much like ownership” (maybe he should have gone with “Plus Flavored C”?). But these comparisons are very unkind to Berners-Lee and K&R; not only were these men too professional to use their creations as weapons in petty personality wars, but the creations themselves are beyond comparison to markdown.pl by any measure you can imagine.
Atwood did the classy thing and apologized to a boor, and for that he has my respect.2 The responsibility for actually defusing the kerfuffle lies with Gruber at this point.
There was a time before HTML standards, and it really sucked. ↩
Amended; I ought to have realized this sooner, but after Atwood apologized for naming his project without Gruber’s approval, he essentially turned around and did it again in the next breath. Whether he need have apologized is another matter, but having chosen to do so, it was neither smart nor classy to repeat the same move for which he’d just begged pardon. ↩
I have come to believe that advertising is the original sin of the web. The fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.
It’s a long article, worth reading. But cutting to the chase:
Users will pay for services that they love…If we want to build a web that’s really global, we need to rethink online payment systems. Visa and Mastercard may never become pervasive in India and sub-Saharan Africa as mobile money already has a strong market share… The model Ted Nelson dreamed of with Xanadu, where hyperlinks would ensure authors were cited and compensated for their work, required a micropayment system with low transaction costs.
This is what I have been saying for months now. We have a choice between two internets:
An internet where paying for content is a costly/burdensome exercise for both users and creators, which means 99% of anything worth doing is subsidized by the sale of ads, “investor storytime”, and selling users’ personal data.
An internet where micropayments are easy, automated, and built into the infrastructure of the network, making it easy to buy and sell digital content and removing the need for ad sales to extract value from what we create.
Notice in #1 above, I’m not saying buying and selling on today’s web is impossible, I’m saying it’s a sucky experience.1 Imagine if in order to buy a book on the Kindle store you had to do a credit card transaction with every author directly. That’s what the web is like today. That’s what needs to change.
Originally I was saying we need to get micropayments built right into HTTP, but in the end I don’t really care how we do it. All we need is some open, universal way for creators to say “you owe me $0.002 to see this page” and some open, universal painless way for users to give it to them. No committing to some kind of patronage relationship, no weird browser-specific app stores, no credit card details. Just give creators the same revenue per-pageview they’re getting from advertisers, without making them get it from advertisers. That’s how we fix the internet.
On Indieweb’s IRC channel, Tantek Çelik complained that I’m “handwaving” since I’m “not trying” to monetize my own site, as though I were complaining that it’s impossible to sell content online. (If he had bothered to check, he’d see that I’ve actually explored several ways of doing this, all of which work far better for users than his proposed solution of putting my site on the Mozilla App Store, which I found extremely strange.) But that’s beside the point. As I said at the time, it’s as though I wrote an article on minimum wage and someone accused me of not tipping buskers. The internet’s advertising fixation isn’t a problem you can fix one website at a time; it has to be solved universally or not at all. ↩
In this interview on the Longform podcast, Lewis Lapham tells about how he was fired from Harper’s Magazine, later asked to return, and had the board fired as one of his conditions for returning. (This portion starts at 36:30.)
In 1980, Kohls decides to sell it [Harper’s Magazine], because it’s still losing a lot of money. It’s taken over by the MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, and the MacArthur Foundation appoints a board of directors to run the magazine. None of them knew anything about the magazine business. You know, they were investment bankers, philanthropists, academics (ugh)…and I had my first meeting with that board and I knew it was a question of not was I going to be fired, it was just a question of when. …I was fired in the summer of 1981, and then wrote occasional magazine pieces, wrote a column every other week for the Washington Post, began to make, you know, come up with an idea for a book.
But then in 1983 I was rehired at Harper’s Magazine by the young Rick MacArthur, who was representing the MacArthur Foundation’s interest in the magazine; so he asked me to come back and I said I would on two conditions. One, I could redesign the magazine, because I already had the idea in mind, with the index and the readings and the annotation and so on; and two, that all the members of the board who had fired me be themselves fired. And to my surprise, both those conditions were met.
Similar: In 2013, Osmo Vänskä resigned as music director and conductor for the Minnesota Orchestra after a year-long lockout by a similarly clueless board of directors. When after the lockout they asked Vänskä to come back, he too made his return conditional upon the president’s resignation, and got it:
After the lockout ended, Vänskä said Orchestra President Michael Henson would have to step down in order for the orchestra to heal. Orchestra management announced in February that Henson had resigned by mutual agreement. He will step down in August.
