I am … unhindered by talent

This is absolutely hilarious, and spot on in its commentary. It really makes it clear that computers are genuinely more complex than books. The problems he’s having are funny in part because it’s just so ludicrous that his spatial skills would be so poor, since a child or a chimp would easily master the problems that are causing him to lock up. I suspect, for example, that you could set a picture book down in front of nearly every human that’s ever lived, and they would be able to figure out the basic idea fairly quickly. They might be amazed or annoyed by the photos or art or whatever, but the mechanics of the book itself would become fairly clear fairly quickly. Hand them a laptop opened to something like a web browser, however, and I suspect they’d be fairly mystified. And even if they managed to figure out how to click around, it would probably seem totally miraculous, and their mental model for what’s going on would almost certainly be severely broken.

Would it be possible to build a computer that’s as intuitive as a book? Probably not a general purpose computer, although it seems possible that one might be able to construct a computing appliance that’s pretty close in its limited domain.

Big ups to KK for passing along a link to this pointer.

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I’m reading a strange and often incoherent book by Nick Tosches called Where dead voices gather. For all it’s jumping about and disconnected tangents, it’s actually a fascinating take on the minstrelsy of the 1800s and early 1900s, and the transition from minstrelsy and vaudeville to the country and blues are central to what is often called “American roots music”.

In and amongst all his ramblings I just got to this great quote:

As to the true origin of the cakewalk, it is believed to have begun at about the same time as minstrelsy, around 1840, with slaves parodying the formal dances of their masters. These burlesques came to be mimicked [by whites] in minstrel shows. After the Civil War, when blacks entered minstrelsy, they assumed parts in the minstrels’ cakewalk. As Terry Waldo puts it in his book This Is Ragtime: “By the time the ragtime era began in 1896, the cakewalk was being performed by blacks imitating whites who were imitating blacks who were imitating whites.” I’m sure the gist of this wonderful little observation can, with not much squinting, be applied to the whole of popular culture.

Ah, what wonderful stuff. It reminds me of this excellent essay, “When wrong is right”, written by Ed Ward as a companion piece to the PBS documentary on John Lennon’s jukebox. In it Ward argues that one of the great strengths of the Beatles’ music was that they tried to copy the American R&B they loved and failed. In failing, however, they created new combinations and opened new doors:

This is what makes artists artists: they take little bits of things from here and there and put them together in unexpected combinations that seem new and original. Some of them are pretty obvious: one of Little Richard’s trademarks is the “Ooooo!” he interjects into a lot of his hit songs. Richard got it from the world of gospel, where it’s a standard of Alex Bradford, among others. The Beatles grabbed this little trick for themselves, and it’s all over their first recordings: girls went wild when Lennon and McCartney stepped up to a single microphone, shook their mop tops, and went “Ooooo!”.

Makes me want to go off and butcher a good song or two… :-)

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I can always count on my family to provide me with a wonderful assortment of media at Xmas that will exceed the time available to absorb it. Books are especially problematic as I’m a slow (if avid) reader and I almost never clear last year’s booty before the new batch rolls in. Music’s much easier to process since I can listen while I do some of those other “necessary” things like my job, but a big stash can be a challenge to process as I like to listen to the good stuff over and over to really get it in my head. Also, it’s hard to work everything I’d like to play from the prezzies into our family radio show. Ah, the trials and tribulations of a middle-class white guy.

One of the gift themes this year has been bits and pieces of the fallout from John Peel’s most unfortunate demise just over a year ago. Earlier in the year my birthday was graced (as reported elsewhere in these pages) with the complete Peel sessions by The Fall from WeatherGirl. Xmas continued the trend (although I sense that it’s near run its course) as I received both Peel’s biography, John Peel: Margrave of the marshes (from WeatherGirl), and the 2 CD set John Peel: A tribute (from WeatherGirl’s wonderful mum).

In fear that I just wouldn’t get to these things (the book esp.) in a timely manner, I pulled the biography to (near) the top of a significant and fascinating collection of Xmas books, and as a consequence I just finished it, a mere two weeks after receiving it. The book was only partially completed when he died, closing early in his time in the U.S. in the 60’s, but his wife Shiela and their four children finished it as a tribute, and did an excellent job. Shiela’s style and approach are obviously different that John’s, but there’s a clear rapport in the writing that no doubt reflects the rapport that lead to some 35 happy years together.

As I have mentioned here more than a few times, I loved Peel’s shows and greatly miss his influence, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading this telling of his life. In the end, though, that life is arguably not all that remarkable from the outside. Certainly he and Shiela can tell a few (OK, a lot) more stories about interactions with famous people than WeatherGirl and I can, but part of what made him such a wonderful influence over so many years is that he really didn’t care about fame or interactions with famous people. (One of the things he liked about Shiela was that she’d tell him when he was full of it when other, more star-struck, acquaintences were hanging on his every word.) The book, however, doesn’t tell us much about why he was who he was, or even much about how he succeeded in his crazy ways despite fairly consistent failure to “get it” on the part of his BBC superiors. Why, on the one hand, was he never fired and, on the other, weren’t more people like him hired?

All that said, I did thoroughly enjoy the book and suspect I would have really enjoyed knowing him and his family if my general inability to deal well with “famous” people had ever allowed such a thing. I doubt that anyone’s like to pay much attention to this book in 50 years, although my guess is that the music he championed over the years will continue to be important. It seems likely that the (sometimes small) ripples that spread from his work will continue to be measurable well into the future that if we just know where to look. I can imagine someone accepting a life-time achievement award decades from now and saying they owe it all to some old fart named John Peel that many in the audience won’t have ever heard of. And such is the way of life.

The CD set is quite a lot of fun, with a lot of really great songs on it. It tends to avoid his real noise-fest tendencies (no Extreme Noise Terror here, folks, we’re releasing this on Warner), although it does include an obviously necessary Captain Beefheart track (which must have caused the suits no end of grief, which would have thoroughly amused him). Also it arguably doesn’t sufficiently acknowledge the wonderful racial diversity of his tastes (no hip-hop?) which both he and Shiela discuss to good effect in the book, which is a bummer. It does, however, nicely capture his gender eclecticism with great tracks by people like PJ Harvey and Laura Cantrell.

One can’t do a post like this without a few quotes. I kept running across great little bits in the book, but always set them aside because I wanted to finish the book before I posted. In the end, I’ll go with the last paragraph of Peel’s letter to his agent outlining the events he’d cover in his biography:

There will be a very real danger of the book degenerating into a hymn of praise to Sheila but without her there would be no book worth writing anyway.

It’s clear from the book that John and Sheila really were a wonderful couple, and while he was the public bit of the iceberg, his wife and children were obviously a vital part of the life that enriched ours so. And, unlike all the stuff about having the White Stripes play live in their house, this is a bit I could imagine myself saying (and absolutely meaning!).

Of the various bits in the liner notes to the CD set, the best (by far) is the opening two pages by Peel acolyte and later colleague at Radio 1, Andy Kershaw. His ending is probably as fine an analysis as any of Peel and Big Media in the Modern Era:

The ethos of Room 318 [where Peel and Kershaw shared an office for a while] was one with which all BBC bosses should be tattoed: “We’re not here to give people what they want but what they didn’t know they wanted.”

…

With the Peel programme, we the listeners never knew what might be coming next. It was broadcasting rather than narrowcasting. And that’s radio at its most compelling and exciting. Thanks, brother.

Amen to that! One of the things I’ve always loved about college radio at its best is that it’s broadcasting instead of narrowcasting. I hope we can maintain that tradition.

In the end, though, how in the world could anyone hope to encapsulate (in book or CD) the wonderful breadth of music and ideas that Peel brought to us in that “low drone” that we all loved? The writing of this (overly long) post was set aside for a wonderful dinner of tacos while WeatherGirl and I talked about all of this. (I’d just finished the book, so I was pretty pumped.) For me, the most meaningful and significant comment to come in the wake of his death has been the mumbling and sometimes only semi-coherent tributes from the musicians whose lives were changed by John’s decisions to play their music. That, much more than the charming stories of home life or the harrowing tales of near misadventure on mountain roads, is the real legacy.

When we lived in Britain five years ago I thought several times about writing to John, but never did. Famous people (even famous curmudgeons like John Peel) scare me in stupid ways, and I’m always horribly anxious about intruding. Louden Wainwright III has lunch 20 feet from us here in Morris, and I don’t have the nerve to go up and say hello. Maybe he wanted to be left alone, but maybe he would have enjoyed the company, and I didn’t give him the chance to make that decision. Sigh.

I’ve been thinking since the John Peel Day last October that I’d like to write Shiela and their children a letter with a copy of my tribute radio show, as one more heartfelt (if ultimately pretty insignificant) token of what he meant to so many of us. I still haven’t done it, but maybe I should.

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Since I went on yesterday about Not the end of the world, I thought I should mention briefly that the book that Sub-Evil Boy and I just finished (thereby opening up the option of reading Not the end of the world) was pretty good.

The book in question was The amulet of Samarkand, the first in the Bartimaeus Trilogy. Bartimaeus is a fiesty djinni summoned by Nathaniel, a young magician-in-training in an alternate universe London. Unlike the Harry Potter universe, where the ability to use magic is a gift one is born with (or not, for us muggles), here magicians are trained by taking/buying young children from their families and raising/training them in magician households. The governmental structure is vaguely similar to the current system (Ministers of departments and the Prime Minister at the top), but with magicians in all the ministerial positions going well back in time (Disraeli and Gladstone were magicians, apparently). This creates a strong social class system, where the magicians are “the Good and the Great” and the rest are (just) “commoners”, and I suspect that much of the second (and perhaps third) book will hinge on that tension.

Nathaniel is a high precocious fellow, and summons a very powerful djinni in a fit of spite. They then have many exciting adventures before winning the day (in a manner of speaking) and setting the stage for the next book. It’s not high art, but it’s fun and addresses some significant issues without beating you about the head and shoulders with them. Probably more substantive than the Artemis Fowl books (which are major faves of Sub-Evil, and which I also enjoyed), but hard to say at this point how they’d compare in terms of depth and development to the Harry Potter books.

The second in this series (The Golem’s eye) is out, but still in hardback, and the third is yet to be published. Sub-Evil’s keen to read more, though, and I look forward to it.

Also, it’s pretty clear that Sub-Evil isn’t going to press on with Not the end of the world. I’m quite taken with it, though, and will read it on my own.

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Sub-Evil Boy and I have just started Not the end of the world by Geraldine McCaughrean. The opening’s pretty dark (more below) so we may quit this and try something else (which is perhaps a shame, because it seems to have some real potential).

One good thing to come out of it, though, is Sub-Evil’s excellent observation that only taking two of each creature wasn’t the brightest plan because “What if those two didn’t want to mate later?”. Obviously his exposure to his aunt’s interest in and work on animal behavior, conservation, captive breeding, and reintroduction, has left it’s (good) mark.

As to the book, McCaughrean explores the tricky problems of the reality of standing by while the rest of the human population drowns around you, begging for aid and mercy, and then starting the human race over again. A striking example from early on:

Hands were clinging to the hull, the hands of swimmers who had somehow managed to find a grip on the rough timber … Fearless, placable as ever, Shem swung out from the ship’s rail by one hand, wielding his stave, dislodging people from the hull in the same way you might swat horseflies…

Not surprisingly, Sub-Evil found this and similar passages pretty tough, especially as bed-time reading. It’s not the bulk of the book, though. The death of the rest of the human race is complete within the first 30 pages of a 180 page book, but still it’s tough going, with even Timna herself pointing out

It should have been over in a flash. If it had to happen, it should have been quickly over… If it had to happen, then all life ought to have been extinguished in an instant, like a candle flame pinched out. But people are so resilient. They put up such a struggle.

The writing’s quite good and reads aloud almost like poetry, although not always as carefully crafted and edited as poetry would be. The ideas are quite striking, with all manner of rich parallels to our world and lives and strong (if perhaps overly modern) commentary. Timna (mentioned above), for example is an introduced character, the daughter of Noah who knows even in her life that the men get all the glory and*

They are the only ones who will be mentioned a hundred years from now when people tell our story. I know I won’t figure.

I’ll end with this question from Timna to her mother, which has wonderful parallels to the common worries today of how we balance human jobs and lives against the loss of creatures and species:

‘No, I meant … If it weren’t for the animals, we could have picked up so many. So many people, I mean. Why did they have to … ?’

It’s an interesting start, and I suspect I may finish it on my own even if Sub-Evil doesn’t want to press on.

*And who’s actually on board according to the King James version?

And the rain was upon the earth forty days and forty nights.

In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark;

They, and every beast after his kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, and every fowl after his kind, every bird of every sort.

Four women, all as nameless as “every beast”. Sigh.

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My recent post on linguistic origins (and the cool comments that followed) brought to mind a really interesting book I read some 20 years ago: The nine nations of North America.

I think I got this as a gift from Bud, and while it’s been decades since I read it, the basic ideas still stick quite clearly, which is saying something given my sift of a brain. Quite happily the entire(?) book is available on-line. To quote the opening chapter:

Forget about the borders dividing the United States, Canada, and Mexico, those pale barriers so thoroughly porous to money, immigrants, and ideas.

…

Forget the maze of state and provincial boundaries, those historical accidents and surveyors’ mistakes. The reason no one except the trivia expert can name all fifty of the United States is that they hardly matter.

…

Consider, instead, the way North America really works. It is Nine Nations. Each has its capital and its distinctive web of power and influence. A few are allies, but many are adversaries. Several have readily acknowledged national poets, and many have characteristic dialects and mannerisms. Some are close to being raw frontiers; others have four centuries of history. Each has a peculiar economy; each commands a certain emotional allegiance from its citizens. These nations look different, feel different, and sound different from each other, and few of their boundaries match the political lines drawn on current maps. Some are It’s valuable to recognize these divergent realities. The layers of unifying flavor and substances that define these nations help explain the major storms and excursions through which our public affairs pass.

While one may disagree with his details, the idea is really interesting and carries much truth. My experience in Oregon, for example, was that there was a very substantial split on many levels between the thin green strip along the Pacific and the great dry region farther inland.

One of the most useful concepts I got from the book was the importance of boundaries between regions as places where ideas collide and commingle. In other words, that’s where the action tends to be. Living in Austin, TX, was an interesting example. There we had the Bread Basket (mid-west) of my youth in North Texas merging with MexAmerica (even more evident in San Antonio), all within spitting distance of East Texas and the beginning of Dixie. This position led to a wonderfully fluid mixing of cultures that was readily evident in things like music and food and was an important part of why it was such fun to live there.

Wikipedia has a short, but helpful, page on the concept. The book is apparently out of print, but appears to be widely available in used form, and the book web site suggests that it may be reprinted soon.

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Through random wandering via paths of links now forgotten, I stumbled across a wondrous fact I had somehow missed last fall: Art Spiegelman has written about his experiences living in Manhattan during the horrors of September 11, 2001, in a book entitled In the shadow of no towers. Spiegelman’s Maus is still one of the most powerful stories I’ve ever read, and this new one is rushing off to my wish list as we speak. No idea if it’s good, but my money says that it’s damned interesting.

BTW, I started linking to BookSense, which I discovered via Cradle to cradle, which is another winner.

This is my 100th post - Woot!

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In what has to be one of the more unusual concepts for a concept album, the Genomic Dub Collective in Birmingham (UK) is using the text of Darwin’s The origin of species as lyrics in their reggae inspired drum and bass. They apparently premiered this last Friday as the closing event on Darwin Day at the University of Birmingham (where we spent a wonderful year on sabbatical 4.5 years ago). I wish I could have been there.

To quote Professor Pallen (one of the creators) from this article:

When I was thinking about this year’s celebrations, I was very keen not to just play to the creationist versus evolutionist thing.

I wanted to make it very broad.

Both Charles Darwin and his grandfather Erasmus were profoundly affected by the slavery they witnessed in places like Brazil and wrote poetry speaking out against it. I invited the poet Benjamin Zephaniah to read the poems last year and that gave me the idea to do something different.

Kudos to WeatherGirl for pointing this out to me.

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Last week I finally finished The Kite Runner, and definitely enjoyed it. Parts of the novel are extremely powerful, and it nicely raises important questions of diversity. You could easily transplant many of the issues from Afghanistan to, for example, the American south and get something not unlike To kill a mockingbird.

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Via a Kuro5shin article, I just ran across an article on Wired.com entitled “The Long Tail” that says some really nice things about the impact of digital media on its sales and distribution.

The short version is that there’s at least some reason to hope that the vanishing distribution costs can break the stranglehold of Big Media with its emphasis on the big hits. At some level it’s all stuff I’ve heard (or even said) before, but it’s a nice analysis with more actual evidence and support than me just ranting.

If you haven’t thought about or read about these issues, you probably should, and these are nice places to start.

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