Month: February 2005

  • Walruses and Edwardians

    From Lorrie Moore’s great analysis of why the film Titanic holds appeal for her:

    Certainly, at the end, DiCaprio as Jack gives Kate Winslet as Rose the best seat on their bit of flotsam, and upon his apparent death she does pluck him too precipitously from his post; still, it is Rose who surprises not just her mother but surely love itself and leaps from the safety of a lifeboat, through water, through air, to save her man, madly swimming upstream, through the corridors of a sinking ship (oh, girls, don’t we know it) like a salmon to spawn. The hormonal conviction of it is exhilarating to watch, and much more reminiscent of walruses than of Edwardians.

    From a discussion of the Worst Best Pictures from the Academy Awards about Kate Winslet’s character in Titanic:

    The one critical comment that sums up the film and the Winslet character for me came from MAD magazine. She’s throwing the jewel over the side, and says, (I’m paraphrasing here) “Here I am throwing the jewel into the ocean, when I could sell it and pay back my granddaughter for putting up with me for all these years. I guess I am a selfish bitch!”

  • Wild Animus by Rich Shapero: a Modern Masterpiece?

    Today I am going to tell you a story about an odd literary encounter.

    About two months ago I was at a used bookstore in Houston and noticed two college students browsing the modern literature section. One of them pulled out a book and pointed it out briefly to the other.

    Normally I don’t make conversations with strangers, but in this case I had to.

    (more…)

  • Can’t Wait for Plone

    Denis Mishunoff has some squeezable plone portlets and columns you can turn off.

    I’ve been too preoccupied with writing, personal stuff and system administration tasks to get back to plone programming. And to tell the truth, having no time to work on this is annoying the living shit out of me.

  • Staccato Music Station

    Staccato Music: an radio station consisting only of creative commons (“shareable”) music.

    I got on the CC bandwagon early and have been using webjay, irate radio and other things to amass 35 gigs of legal/Creative Commons music on my mp3 player. About 3 or 4 gigs are still copyrighted stuff (mostly Asian) which I keep for mainly sentimental reasons. The rest of the stuff is culled from listening to lots of crap (I like longish trance/techo mixes, ambient stuff, pre-1922 fiddle stuff and hick Texas blues).

    What Matt May has done is focus on the more eclectic pop/mainstream sound (which is often hard to find on archive.org). and he’s been searching out various other labels. Also, he’s been distributing these playlists both on webjay and his own podcasts and via bittorrents.

    My music site of choice has been webjay, but in his race to remain cutting edge, Lucas Gonze is now masking mp3 URL’s (which makes downloading mp3’s a pain in the neck, one fricking mp3 at a time). I’m not bitching really, and Lucas has suggested ways to scrape mp3’s from a m3u file. (Update: Lucas has changed his mind. Horray! I’ve really been enjoying the downloadTHEMall mp3 scraper, but if Lucas’s vision of XSPF emerging as a universal way to share playlists, user-friendly tools to download playlists (whether it be podcasting feeds or whatever) will emerge. BTW, although the concept of podcasting sounds fundamentally cool, in practice, the tools I’ve used so far have sucked.

    Now that listeners are starting to “obey the law” more and spend more time on “legal” downloads than “unauthorized downloads,” we now come to the original question: how do we compensate artists? (This parallels the same question in the literary world). It all boils down to six questions:

    1. Will audience members give donations to artists if music is freely available? Or will they only give money if it is a business transaction for some ownership rights? (Dose of reality: the Jib Jab brother’s famous This Land is Your Land video earned them less than a $1000).
    2. Would the rewards of “opting in” to a centralized blanket license/divvying of the pie by bandwidth popularity be tempting enough for artists to want to enroll?
    3. Can an itunes kind of service actually offer music to consumers cheap enough that they would view it as “chump change” (not worth trying to steal)?
    4. Can this kind of service have an open submission process for artists? (mp3tunes and magnatune are trying)
    5. Can transaction costs be low enough that an audience won’t view the aggregator service as exploitative?
    6. will mainstream media outlets ever notice CC artists enough that the general public could find out about them? What about radio stations? (XM radio is a very promising sign; I’m sure by now there are lots of CC/unsigned musician stations).

      My answer to the above questions in February 2005: Donations are not widespread these days, but habits can change, and it remains the only way the artist can have a direct connection with audiences. Having that “direct connection” means unmediated profits. (more ). Blanket licensing….I think it’s a doomed concept made popular only because the EFF has supported it. Individual artists just won’t sign up (and they’ll constantly be bickering about their cut). Itunes/chump change: the actual itunes service won’t be reducing costs any time soon, but newer artists might be able to offer their mp3’s for much cheaper. The fundamental problem there is that music is unique; you need to hear it a few times to really want to pay for it, and DRM prevents people from hearing it. Opensubmission policy: this is happening right now; it’s unstoppable. Music services/always be exploitative? Paypal’s transaction cost is less than 10%; costs could easily go that low, so the outrage is likely to diminish. However, artists will probably be more cautious is selling off rights of unlimited scope or duration. Perhaps instead they will opt for Founder’s copyright (limited duration licenses). On the other hand, at a recent concert Kristin Hersh was selling not her commercial CD’s but demos from those commercial CD’s (which she owns rights for). That’s a nice loophole, one that music services are probably going to close soon. Will mainstream media (MSM) ever notice? Well, probably not, but over time ordinary citizens will start paying less attention to MSM, so it’s the same difference.

  • Gratuitous Warnings

    KATE AURTHUR writes about the latest archenemy of Superman: Time Warner’s slimy copyright clearance machine:

    And then there’s Lois Lane. The iconic character (played by Erica Durance) made her debut in the premiere of Season 4, and has enlivened the series with love-hate banter with Clark that, for now, veers much more toward hate. Mr. Millar and Mr. Gough wanted to bring her in during Season 3 and began negotiating the labyrinthine Time Warner structure for permission from both DC Comics and the film unit to use the character. The forthcoming movie, long in development with various combinations of directors and casts, proved to be a roadblock. At one point, it, too, was going to be the story of a young Clark Kent, and a franchise character like Lois would have been a valuable commodity. But when Bryan Singer (“X-Men”) was brought in to direct, he wanted to focus the movie’s plot on the adult Superman. Mr. Gough said, “Once that origins story version of the movie went away, it allowed things to happen faster.”

    The producers would like to bring Lois back for Season 5 but will again have to get approval to use the character. “We think there’s a good chance,” Mr. Gough said carefully, “but we don’t know yet.”

    I’ve written about this issue before , and one person has written about this issue before. I would have liked to discuss the substance of this person’s article, but alas, it seems that the individual has forbidden all readers to copy, retransmit, repost, duplicate or otherwise use without the individual’s express permission. So I shall pass over in silence ( ©Routledge Classics).

  • Making it on Amazon

    Kevin Kelly on how to get your book/cd/dvd listed on amazon.

    Henri Yandell on the tech book market.

    Reference books used to be king. Take Java in a Nutshell, it used to be the best book in Java by a furlong. Back in the ‘old days’ when people still had dial-up and Internet lag was a common occurence. Nowadays, I can store the JDK javadoc and the J2EE javadoc on my watch (must look to see if any browser can read a .html.gz file). So reference books are much less important. O’Reilly have made two noticeable attempts to find new legs in the reference world; the pocket reference book and the Cookbook series. I own something like 20 pocket references, and I’m increasingly finding them to be worthless. I’ll probably go this entire year without opening a single one of them. Cookbooks are better, though they suffer from the brilliance of the first book (Perl Cookbook) and subsequent titles have a hard job matching its standard. Manning are into cookbooks too (Recipe series), I’ve not read one of them yet, but they’ve got quite a few coming out.

    My comment (after having read and reviewed a lot of python/plone books). It’s really hard anticipating what books are going to come in handy. I wrote a slashdot review of Andy McKay’s plone book, but am almost finding Cameron Cooper’s book to be better. Still, my intimate familarity with McKay’s book means that I know exactly where to find what I’m looking for. I found Mark Pilgrim’s Dive into Python book to be first-rate, but when I do need a quick reference, I’ve been checking the von Rossum tutorial, How to think like a python programmer and Python in a Nutshell reference books. With xml books, I’ve found them all fairly useful as background material, but nothing I refer to on a regular basis (admittedly, I haven’t gotten into xml as much as I’d like to). Interestingly, the book I’d really like to have, a collection of documentation for gentoo linux distribution, is still not out. Also, I haven’t seen a decent recent gimp book out (something I really could use). It’s mind-boggling that one of the gimp tutorial writers hasn’t written a screenshot laden guide to gimp.

    Probably the books I refer to most often are my apache book, a Mark Sobel linux reference and a webmin how to.

    I could really use supplemental material for some of my tasks. I like reference cards (like visibone’s css cards) and have even made some of my own for plone and python. But I quickly find that I’m becoming more dependent on open source documentation sites like the plone documentation site and individual developer’s sites.

  • Liberal Arts Students and Football Stadiums

    From Erin O’Connor, I find a fascinating history of the American university by Andrew Delbanco, we get this humdinger:

    Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation and former president of Macalester College, and Morton O. Schapiro, president of Williams, report that even now “the nation’s liberal arts college students would almost certainly fit easily inside a Big Ten football stadium: fewer than 100,000 students out of more than 14 million.”[10] In today’s educational landscape, barely one sixth of all college students fit the traditional profile of full-time residential students between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two. One third of American undergraduates now work full-time, and more than half attend college part-time, typically majoring in subjects with immediate utility, such as accounting or computing. These students, and their anticipated successors, are targets of the so-called electronic universities that seek a share of the education market by selling Internet courses for profit. A few years ago, the president of Teacher’s College at Columbia University predicted that some wily entrepreneur would soon “hire well-known faculty at our most prestigious campuses and offer an all-star degree over the Internet…at a lower cost than we can.”
    As for the relatively few students who still attend a traditional liberal arts college?whether part of, or independent from, a university?what do they get when they get there? The short answer is freedom to choose among subjects and teachers, and freedom to work out their own lives on campus. Intellectual, social, and sexual freedom of the sort that today’s students assume as an inalienable right is never cheaply won, and requires vigilant defense in academia as everywhere else. Yet there is something less than ennobling in the unearned freedom of privileged students in an age when even the most powerful institutions are loath to prescribe anything? except, of course, in the “hard” sciences, where requirements and prerequisites remain stringent. One suspects that behind the commitment to student freedom is a certain institutional pusillanimity?a fear that to compel students to read, say, the major political and moral philosophers would be to risk a decline in applications, or a reduction in graduation rates (one of the statistics that counts in the US News and World Report college rankings closely watched by administrators). Nor, with a few exceptions, is there the slightest pressure from faculty, since there is no consensus among the teachers about what should be taught.

    Actually, this may be a sign of the rise of generalized education (I hope). There’s no reason why a business major or engineering major can’t take a few good history or philosophy courses, and in fact good colleges incorporate a well-balanced curriculum into any degree program. Perhaps I’m naive. One answer would be for the first year to cover general subjects (while providing a certain modicum of choice), and then letting third and fourth year cover coursework for a student’s major. There’s nearly a consensus that this sort of division is probably a good thing.

    One problem is that many of the hard science degree programs involve a brittle sequence of courses which demand a lot of time. Okay, it might be nice for an engineer to make an extra physics course or lab course; or it might be good for a pre-med major to have extra chemistry courses, but shouldn’t those kinds of things be reserved for graduate school? The purpose of undergraduate is to see the similarities and differences between disciplines, not to give a student in-depth knowledge.

  • Decent Enough is Just Not Good Enough

    Dan Green addresses a literary agent’s post on bookangst about there being too many books.

    The fact there is so little money and so much arbitrariness in publishing is liberating, actually. It saves me the bother of praying for worldly success.

    Rather than criticize the book industry, I’ll talk about another writerly habit I find disturbing: writing too many words, stories and novels. That is a response to society’s tendency to reward prolific writers rather than thoughtful ones. (I exclude blogging because I consider it informal writing and everybody needs an outlet to bloviate on). Some talented writers whittle their talent away by turning thoughts too quickly into text without shaping them into something meaningful or stopping to ponder whether the story was really worth writing. After a good ten years of practice, anything a halfway-decent writer can do will be passably decent, and if they are lucky enough to get paid for it, the temptation to be satisfied with something less than great is irresistable.

    Take Stephen Dixon, a writer I generally admire (I could also pick J.C. Oates or Stephen King). All excellent writers. But when I read Stephen Dixon’s works before 1995, I couldn’t help get the feeling that some of his stories just weren’t that important. Interesting, yes, competent, clever, moving (sometimes), yes, but important? I have a hard time saying that. For those writers, I get the feeling that writing is a habit, a compulsion, a ritual they perform whether they need to or not.

    I’m sure postmordem anthologies of each of these writers will be fantastic. But Stephen King (who is capable of knocking off a few terrific stories–see Misery, for example) has written novels totalling thousands of pages. Even a fan might find those things hard to wade though. It’s not just a matter of diluting a brand name (although there’s a bit of that). It’s diluting the quality of the writing as well. Perhaps if the audience and the publishing industry didn’t have unrealistic expectations about an author’s output, this problem wouldn’t occur.

    If I had the luxury of time and money, perhaps I too would be experimenting with a lot of glib mediocre stuff. And of course, one’s person’s high art is another person’s pablum. Self-delusion, after all, is part of the writer’s calling. But writers can’t satisfy themselves with being anything less than perfection. If they don’t, readers will never forgive them.

  • Chris Rock’s Tuxedo

    Interview with Chris Rock in preparation of his hosting the Oscar awards:

    When did the Academy ask you to host?
    They’ve probably been calling me since ’97. I had turned it down – it seemed like an older guy’s gig, with a tuxedo and all, and I really liked doing the MTV Awards.This year, MTV did their awards in Miami, and something just seemed really young about it. Normally, there’s, like, one person I don’t know. But there might have been four people that I had no clue about. ”Who the hell’s that guy? Is he a rapper? A singer?” All these kids were screaming, and I was watching, thinking ”Hmm, I think I’m too old for this show.” At that moment I had a tux made.
    So I’ll assume you don’t care what people are wearing.
    Nothing against people who aren’t straight, but what straight guy that you know cares? Who gives a f—? They’re clothes. I’m wearing Sean John, by the way. Help out the black designer, fine. Like Armani needs me to wear a f—ing tux to help them out.

  • URLCleaner

    Here’s a useful urlcleaner. For those pesky ampersands.

  • Protecting Bloggers

    Persecution of an Iranian blogger. Here’s a BBC report

    “We are not organized against the state,” I said. “I write because I want to criticize the system. There are some things in our state that should be corrected.” “Why don’t you write an e-mail directly to the supreme leader’s office?” he asked. “The supreme leader considers all criticisms and takes corrective actions.”

    “I hadn’t thought about that,” I said. This was nonsense, of course, but I saw an opening. “From now on, I will write directly to the supreme leader and stop writing in my Web log.”

    “It is too late for that,” he said.

    Here’s a website dedicated to protecting imprisoned bloggers. Here’s some good principles on protecting bloggers. According to Julian Pain:

    1. Any law about the flow of information online must be anchored in freedom of expression as defined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    2. Internet users alone must decide what material they can and wish to access online. Automatic filtering of online content, by governments or private firms, is unacceptable. Filters must only be installed by Internet users themselves and only on their personal connection. Any policy of higher-level (national or even local) filtering conflicts with the principle of the free flow of information.

    3. A decision to shut down a website, even an illegal one, must not in any circumstances be taken by the site’s host or any other technical provider of Internet services. Only a judge can ban an online publication. A technical service provider cannot therefore be held criminally or civilly responsible for any illegal material posted on a hosted website unless the service provider refuses to obey a ruling by an impartial and independent court.

    4. A government’s civil or criminal powers are limited to content hosted on its territory or specifically aimed at the country’s Internet users.

    5. The editors of online publications, including bloggers and those running personal sites, must have the same protection and be shown the same consideration as professional journalists since, like them, they exercise a basic freedom, that of freedom of expression.

  • Feed Validator

    Feed validator, by Mark Pilgrim and company.

  • Pigs with Antlers who Marry Bananas

    I’ve written about Kembrew McLeod before. Here’s his prank to replace the college mascot with a pig wearing antlers. Hilarious. He writes:

    In a wonderfully surreal display of ridiculousness, during that year?s homecoming game the marching band spelled out “We Love the Duke Dog” in their tubas and wore plastic dog bones around their necks in a sign of solidarity. During the game someone threw into the stands an effigy of a 3-eyed pig with antlers and the crowd ripped it to shreds. Other students showed their support of the Dog by sending letters to the student paper, and I later found out from the paper?s faculty advisor that he had never seen as many letters concerning a single topic as this one generated–and this was only months after the Gulf War!

    I did a few practical jokes in my day, although nothing like this. While a sophomore at college, I had a chance to witness a prank so subtle it conned a lot of people. Someone paid to put up signs around campus about the new zip code on campus. The posters looked official and serious, and students dutifully noted the change in all their outgoing letters.

    Two weeks later, the campus post office sent everyone a letter, saying, we never heard of this zip code change, and hey, it’s not supposed to be that way. A good prank need to be somewhat plausible to succeed. (See Alan Abel’s Society for the Indecency to Naked Animals). For more about brilliant practical jokes, see Abel’s Superbowl Joke where the true brilliance lay in staging the arrest for the joke.

  • Political Rants do Not Destroy Art

    Dan Green and Steve Almond debate whether explicit discussion of politics in literary works is necessary or distracting. (Btw, here’s my puerile thoughts on the matter: ).

    I’m not familiar with Almond’s works, but the main problem with his political rants is that they seem forced or out-of-place in a book about candy. However, if you made it clear from the start that the book’s main focus is the author’s own opinions (presented in a stream-of-consciousness way), you could easily pull it off. The problem is not that Almond injected politics into his work, but that this kind of rant didn’t seem to belong with other parts of the book (although if the only rant were the one Almond cited, I really have to wonder what the big fuss is about).

    Right-wing readers and left-wing authors mistakenly think that the author’s values need to coincide with the reader for the work to produce pleasure. In fiction this issue is easy to handle: let a character represent or articulate a particular point of view, and present situations for him or her to voice it or to face things that challenge these assumptions. Suppose for example, Almond’s rants were placed in Rabbit Angstrom’s mouth. The reader would start asking: why is Rabbit expressing this opinion in this chapter in the novel? Why does Skylab matter to Rabbit? Criticism then boils down not to political values but plausibility of characters and plot. In other fiction works, political views can merely be a backdrop to the actual story. In the works of Proust, Updike, and Dostoevsky, political events are noted and discussed, but only to place the character in a specific social and political context. Proust’s discussion of the Dreyfus affair at one level reveals Proust’s own horror at the persecution of Dreyfus; on the other hand, it also shows how characters living sheltered lives can prattle on helplessly about topical issues to death (the same can be said how certain people obsess over O.J, Michael Jackson and Monica Lewinsky or the scandal de jour). These political expressions are less important in these novels than the fact that people are having opinions at all and that they are attuned to what’s going on around them. (To contrast with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, I seem to recall a very long-winded discussion of land-reform where the aim seemed more exhortative than revelatory). It’s when we get into the realm of allegory that a work is susceptible to charges of being political (which happens a lot in contemporary Chinese works). A good writer will be able to create allegories with multiple interpretations, if only to be able to make it possible to disavow such interpretations to an authority (Rushdie, etc).

    Recently I’ve been marvelling over two journalists who manage to say interesting political things without stoking the ire of people from the other side of the political spectrum: Molly Ivins and Mike Royko. Royko used indirect dialogues with people (both real and imaginary) to call attention to many political points. Sometimes his imaginary dialogue seems forced, but if we tried to defang his essays by removing the curmudgeon politics, the essays wouldn’t be as interesting. Ivins takes a different tactic: instead of scolding those on the right-wing, she merely laughs at them, but it is a good-hearted kind of laughter (and the genteel manner in which Ivins delivers her critiques make it difficult for political opponents to stay mad at her for very long). Neither journalist aims at high art, yet both have staying power; with Royko, in particular, his dialogues with imaginary people provides a good snapshot of attitudes prevailing at the time. Long after Reagan and Mayor Daley have left us and Ollie North’s heroism has faded away, we will still be reading Royko’s prose, not for his political insights, but for his vigilant, skeptical voice and his ability to find absurdities in people’s politics, and to see how the common man tries to grapple with topical problems.

  • Cleaning house XHTML Strict

    Difference between XHTML Transitional and Strict, a handy reference.

    I spent a few hours yesterday doing a few things for programming piece of mind. On my fiction project, I’ve started validating html more rigorously (even going XHTML strict instead of transitional) using my Oxygen XML editor and Visibone HTML/CSS reference sheet. While fixing things, I noticed that a tracker script includes a lot of nonvalidating crap: a target=”new” and script language=”javascript and amersands not described as an html entity.

    According to visibone, the language attribute was removed in favor of type=”text/javascript”, and according to Jeffrey Zeldman, there’s a way to swap doctypes at the top to allow target attribute in certain circumstances.

    On another note, I tidied up my style sheets for the same project. I don’t dip into css very much (especially not in my weblog), but I actually enjoy when I get an opportunity to do so. Especially now. 2 years ago I wrote a fairly simple css file for a site, and erratic browser compliance made it impossible to get it to look right. For this reason I used some tables where I needn’t have. When I tried revising it now, I found doing so was fairly painless; I think it’s because you can pretty much count on everybody having IE 6 or Firefox. Automatic updates is good for something, no?

    Looking back at my simple style sheet, I found a lot of sloppiness. I left in a lot of styles I was experimenting with, and I didn’t do much commenting, and the styles weren’t described in any order, leaving me to have to figure out what was cascading into what. Reducing clutter in css really makes it easier to see problems.

  • Ben Brown: Do Not Listen to Bloggers!

    Austin writer/publisher Ben Brown is sick of CNN going gaga about bloggers:

    Earlier, they had a special 10 minute section where they covered, like it was real news, what blogs were covering. SO CNN IS COVERING WHAT BLOGS ARE BLOGGING.

    They said the word “blog stars.” And “power bloggers.” I am going to shoot myself. This is the death rattle of everything I hold dear. My world view has literally just split open wide, shot forth an alien parasite, and then withered into a puddle of steaming goo. I hate you all, and I want to die.

    JESUS CHRIST, its still going. HOW DO YOU TRUST BLOGGERS? Who is credible?

    I will tell you who is credible. ME. I am credible. And I tell you this: DO NOT LISTEN TO BLOGS. They are crazy! CRAZY! Anyone who has a blog is a total nut job, and should not be trusted.

    Ben Brown runs the UBER humor site and this crazy online dating parody site (and I still can’t figure out which parts of it are a joke and which is supposed to be serious). (BTW, here’s a funny I’m just not into you card). Ben has written and published a few books with sonewmedia and works with James Stegall on a serial novel site called serialtext. BTW, Stegall’s site contains links to other sonewmedia authors like

    Generally Ben Brown is outrageous, fun, campy and quite a performer onstage at storytelling events. My only complaint is that it’s impossible to navigate through the multitude of his projects online (it sounds petty to say this, but oh, well). Also, it’s hard keeping track of what’s going on. (I wish smaller creative projects could have newsletters with real news that are emailed every two months or so).

    Over the next few weeks I’ll have to explore this site more fully.

    On another note, I have noticed that Brown and others have started migrating over to myspace, thus complicating the universe unnecessarily. First, it was yahoo/msn chatting profiles, then it was friendster (which I barely got though I posted the obligatory about page), tribal.net, flickr.com, linkedin, match.com, eharmony, springstreet, and now this. I am getting really really tired of migrating the same snarky photos and #$#$#$$ data about favorite books, films, singers to the social-networking site de jour.