the Streak

Just read the story. It's wonderful.

pen in hand

Here’s a statement that will find its way into my book on reading:

Of course, you can’t take your pen to the screen. When it comes to annotating the written word, nothing yet created for the screen compares to the immediacy and simplicity of a pen on paper. The only effective way to respond to text on screen is to write about it. The keyboard stands in for the pen; but it demands more than a mere underline or asterisk in the margin. It demands that you write.

That, of course, was the reason for the pen all along: it’s a physical reminder that you are not reading merely to consume the words of others passively, but that you have an obligation to respond. If the democratization of publishing is to reap any rewards, it can only do so if we all become better writers. The first step towards that is to assume the stance of a writer—to read others’ words with an eye to improving your own. First, you must pick up the pen.

I would add, though, that this is not true of all books — some are best read with pleasure, at speed, and without thought of annotation. And such books are especially well suited for electronic reading.

stop it. just stop it.

I wish people would stop saying things like this:

Books are changing from physical to virtual objects. . . . The 25-cent paperback took us halfway there; now we have fully arrived. The physical book does not exist, and has no value.

Not quite in the book-as-despised-Jew category, but still. . . . Let’s be clear: the physical book does indeed exist. Many millions of them exist. They have great value, both in dry economic terms (lots are bought and sold every day) and in unmeasurable personal terms. Those of us who love books are not cut off from the world, and no one is taking our books away from us.

The social role of the physical book may well change — may well decline — but for the foreseeable future books will continue to be available to people who want them. It doesn't help those of us who want to defend books when others (others who also love books) keep weaving these apocalyptic scenarios — especially when they are not claiming that the apocalypse is coming, but rather that it’s already here, that the book is dead. When book lovers talk that way, other people look around, see books everywhere, and conclude that book lovers are nuts. This does not help the cause.

And one more thing. “The 25-cent paperback” was a problem? Are books valuable only when just a few wealthy people can afford them? Does the book decline in worth when it becomes possible for almost everyone to own books? I couldn't disagree more. There are beautiful books, artfully bound and elegantly presented, and such objects are wonderful; but the most beautiful thing about a book is, or should be, the human utterance within it.

words reviewers like

The 20 most annoying book review clichés:

1. Gripping

2. Poignant: if anything at all sad happens in the book, it will be described as poignant

3. Compelling

4. Nuanced: in reviewerspeak, this means, "The writing in the book is really great. I just can't come up with the specific words to explain why."

5. Lyrical: see definition of nuanced, above.

6. Tour de force

7. Readable

8. Haunting

9. Deceptively simple: as in, "deceptively simple prose"

10. Rollicking: a favorite for reviewers when writing about comedy/adventure books

11. Fully realized

12. At once: as in, "Michael Connelly's The Brass Verdict is at once a compelling mystery and a gripping thriller." See, I just used three of the most annoying clichés without any visible effort. Piece of cake.

13. Timely

14. " X meets X meets X": as in, "Stephen King meets Charles Dickens meets Agatha Christie in this haunting yet rollicking mystery."

15. Page-turner

16. Sweeping: almost exclusively reserved for books with more than 300 pages

17. That said: as in, "Stephenie Meyer couldn't identify quality writing with a compass and a trained guide; that said, Twilight is a harmless read."

18. Riveting

19. Unflinching: used to describe books that have any number of unpleasant occurences -- rape, war, infidelity, death of a child, etc.

20. Powerful

Okay, I’ll admit to using . . . some of these. Fewer than half. Maybe fewer than a third. But I’ve published more than a hundred book reviews in my day, so, you know, there are only so many words available. . . .

two links on digital preservation

1) In light of recent posts on the fragility — supposed and real — of digital data, here's an interesting story on how Emory University is dealing with their trove of Salman Rushdie's old computers, disks, et al.:

At Emory, Mr. Rushdie’s outdated computers presented archivists with a choice: simply save the contents of files or try to also salvage the look and organization of those early files. Because of Emory’s particular interest in the impact of technology on the creative process, Naomi Nelson, the university’s interim director of Manuscript Archives and Rare Book Collection, said that the archivists decided to try to recreate Mr. Rushdie’s writing experience and the original computer environment.

Fascinating! A digital diorama!

2) And then there's the kind of fragility we all have to deal with from time to time: John Gruber's hard drive died and he used some very cool Mac apps — all of which I own, use, rely on, and recommend — to salvage every last byte of data. Let this be an example to you all!

Mr. Bowman and the fantasists

In a forthcoming issue of The New Atlantis, James Bowman writes:

Tolkien and the other old-time fantasists may have felt themselves to be working within the Western tradition, from which they would cite the gods and heroes of classical literature as their precedents. But to believe that is to overlook the fundamental difference between their fantastical creations and Homer’s: Homer believed in the reality of his gods and heroes and they did not. More importantly, Homer’s audience thought his gods and heroes were, or had been, real; that was why they incurred the censure of Plato. When Milton, two and a half millennia later, proposed to write the English national epic by making use of the legends of King Arthur, he reluctantly abandoned the project because he had come to think that the Arthurian stories weren’t true, weren’t real. Of the Fall of Man, which replaced them as his subject, he naturally had no such doubts.

(Before proceeding, let me pause to note that, while Milton indeed doubted the historicity of the Arthurian tales — in his History of Britain he wrote, “But who Arthur was, and whether ever any such reign'd in Britain, hath been doubted heretofore, and may again with good reason” — he never explained anywhere the reasons for his change of topic. It seems far more likely to me that in the aftermath of the Commonwealth's failure he was scarcely in a patriotic mood. But in any case, Bowman is guessing here, not reporting.)

(While I’m at it, let me also note that Tolkien certainly wouldn't have cited classical literature as his precedent: all of his key models are medieval.)

(And did Homer really believe in the personal, physical existence of Zeus, Hermes, Athena and the rest? How would one know? Okay, that's enough. . . .)

Confronted by howls of outrage from fantasy-lovers, Bowman has further developed his critique: his chief point in mentioning Tolkien et al. is that “the fantasy actually being produced in our culture today, [including] that which is, in one way or another, merely derivative from Tolkien or Lewis . . . represents a break with the Western mimetic tradition to which the fantasies of yesteryear still, more or less, belonged.” I am pretty confused by what Bowman says in elaborating this point. Is The Lord of the Rings one of those “fantasies of yesteryear” that “still, more or less belonged” to “the Western mimetic tradition”? If so, this contradicts what Bowman wrote earlier. If not, at what point do we place the historical line that separates the acceptably fantastic from the unacceptably fantastic?

Again, Bowman writes, “Fairies were believed in by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as recently as a hundred years ago, and I would not take my oath that Lewis and Tolkien did not believe in them too.” But in his New Atlantis article he says flatly that Tolkien did not believe in his “fantastical creations.” So which is it?

By the end of this second post Bowman seems to have shifted his critique from Lewis and Tolkien to the people he takes to be their contemporary successors. “What I objected to in our contemporary fantasists — the question of their predecessors was too complicated for me to go into in such a short article — was that they deliberately and as a precondition of their art cut me off from any possibility of belief in the worlds they represent to me because they do not believe in them themselves. And if they don't believe in them, why should I?” But Bowman did indeed “go into” “the question of their predecessors,” as can be seen in my first quote above. So is he withdrawing the charge he made against “Tolkien and the other old-time fantasists” that they only, and erroneously, “felt themselves to be working within the Western tradition”? Or is he prepared to reassert it? If he doesn't address these questions, then he’s not answering many (most?) the people who were angry with his article.

"the best moments in reading"

At the bookstore of the National Theatre in London you can pick up a bookmark that features these sentences:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours.

These words are spoken by Hector in Alan Bennett’s play The History Boys, and they’re strong words — fitting for a bookstore’s calling card. But are they true? Are the experiences of having your own thoughts echoed by another really “the best moments in reading”?

I’m not so sure. There’s a great deal to be said for what happens when you come across something quite alien to your beliefs, or your experience, and find yourself transfixed by the strangeness itself. Then, as you read, as you enter more fully into the fictional or poetic world, you discover more connections and commonalities with what you already know — you recognize that there really is such a thing as “human experience,” though you never lose sight of the dramatically different forms that experience can take across time, across cultures.

I’ve had these powerful simultaneous feelings of connection and difference often as a reader, sometimes through reading ancient texts (the Oresteia, say, or The Bacchae), sometimes through reading texts from other cultures (Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day, one of my very favorite books), and sometimes through reading books by people whose cultural situation is very close to my own but whose basic sensibilities are alien to me: this has been happening to me recently as I’ve been reading Iain Sinclair. For me, it’s encountering the strange, the different, and yet the fully human that is the best thing about reading.

Foyle's

On this London visit, I barely escaped from the magnificent Foyle's with my solvency intact — it's way better than it ever was though not nearly as eccentric as it used to be — so imagine my pleasure at seeing this story on its recent renewal.

things lost and found on the march

I’m back from England and full of ideas. I was not able to do what I went to London primarily to do — let me just say that the Jesuit Archive in London is a stern and jealous guardian of the documents in its care — but I had a productive time anyway. There are different ways to be productive, and one of them involves sheer thinking — and in the past week I had many opportunities to think, many provocations of thought.

For instance: I couldn't help meditating on our recent discussion of fragility as I was visiting the great manuscript room of the British Library. I always visit that room when I’m in London, and I never cease to marvel at what it holds. My first thought is, invariably: what a miracle that these things survived. The Codex Sinaiticus — are you kidding me? The only manuscript of Beowulf? And of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the other works of that magnificent unknown poet?

But then I think: what is missing? What has been lost? How do we know that there aren’t poems still greater than Beowulf and Sir Gawain that didn't make it? Thus Thomasina Coverly’s outcry in Tom Stoppard’s much-praised — and rightly so — Arcadia:

Oh, Septimus! — can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians! Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides — thousands of poems — Artistotle's own library brought to Egypt by the noodle's ancestors! How can we sleep for grief?

Her tutor Septimus Hodge gives a noble answer:

By counting our stock. Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, and nineteen from Euripedes, my lady! You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language. Ancient cures for diseases will reveal themselves once more. Mathematical discoveries glimpsed and lost to view will have their time again. You do not suppose, my lady, that if all Archimedes had been hiding in the great library of Alexandria, we would be at a loss for corkscrew?

Noble, yes, but of course completely untrue — except for the good advice to count our stock. Many things of value have indeed been lost “on the march” and cannot be recovered or re-produced. And whether future productions — especially those that take only digital form — will be more or less persistent than their predecessors remains to be seen.

linkage!

Folks, I will be traveling for the next week and may not be able to post, so let me leave you with a few chewy nuggets of information:

Kathleen Fitzpatrick has produced a really interesting online monograph on the future of scholarly publishing, Planned Obsolescence — a recursive scholarly project, that embodies its own subject.

Note also the upcoming special issue of Shakespeare Quarterly employing the same technologies. MediaCommons has great potential — I wouldn't mind doing a book in that medium someday. Here’s more evidence that reading changes the brain, and changes it in really good ways.

Financially challenged colleges are cutting classes, and sometimes whole departments, in physics, German, classics. . . .

On a more positive note, do, please, read Cathleen Schine’s story about being woefully ignorant of literature at age 26 . . . and then beginning a wonderful personal adventure of reading. Good stuff!

book pirates

An excellent point by Ted Striphas:

Wax cylinders, forty-fives, LPs, eight-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, mini discs, digital audio tapes: the fact is that music formats have changed significantly — indeed, regularly — over the last 50 or 100 years. Music lovers have long understood that “music” is not equivalent to “format.” Even before the introduction of digital music downloads, listeners were well disposed to format change.

The same isn’t true for books. With the exception of relatively minor disturbances — chapbooks and paperbacks come most immediately to mind — the bibliographic form [hasn't] changed all that much since the introduction of the codex. The result is that book readers are much less inclined to embrace format change, compared to their music-loving counterparts. And this inertia is, in part, what has held up widespread e-book adoption.

Very true. Though I don't think I follow Striphas’s view that what RapidShare is doing is not stealing, but rather “pirate pedagogy.” But I have a lot to learn in these matters, starting with — I hope, and soon, I hope — what looks like a fascinating book: Adrian Johns’s Piracy.

Interestingly, Johns’s book was available for free last month from the University of Chicago Press, and I downloaded it then, even though that meant having to use that execrable piece of software known as Adobe Digital Editions (to which I shall not even link). Presumably the press chose this venue because it’s resistant to . . . piracy.

Anyway, more on this later, I trust.

a little more anxiety

It’s interesting to consider how the kind of work I’ve just been doing will change as more and more books assume digital form. For instance, I had to look at several different editions of The Age of Anxiety — and to buy them from the wonderful AbeBooks — and compare them page by page in order to discover any significant variations. Will scholars someday have multiple digital versions that they can compare with version control software or a simple diff command? Or will the very notion of different “printings” and “editions” disappear when digital versions can be altered and corrected instantly? People who specialize in texts of the digital era will still do textual editing, but it’s likely to look a lot different than what I’ve been doing lately.

For those who may be interested, here are just a few words from the end of my Introduction to The Age of Anxiety:

The Age of Anxiety remains a vitally important poem — in some ways a great one. It is surely Auden’s most ambitious work: formidably complex as his previous two long poems are, their themes are more bounded. “For the Time Being” meditates on the entry of the Divine into history; “The Sea and the Mirror” on the relationship between art and religious belief. These are large concerns, to be sure, but delimited. The question of what makes for an age of anxiety, on the other hand, is vaster and more amorphous: the condition itself must be described, and its etiology traced. A common anxiety manifests itself differently in those with and without religion; and for both groups alike it is fed by political, social, familial, and personal disorders. In The Age of Anxiety Auden tries to account for all of these, and if he falls short, that is a necessary result of such comprehensive ambition. . . .

In 1953 Auden would write of the moment when, each morning, we emerge from our private worlds: “Now each of us / Prays to an image of his image of himself.” The Age of Anxiety is an extraordinarily acute anatomy of our self-images, and a diagnosis of those images’ power not just to shape but to create our ideas. And it contains some of Auden’s most powerful and beautiful verse: the compressed lyric “Hushed is the lake of hawks,” the great Dirge of Part Four, the twin final speeches of Rosetta and Malin. This poem, for all its strangeness and extravagant elaboration of theme and technique, deserves a central place in the canon of twentieth-century poetry.

anxiety's end

Posting has been light around here for a number of reasons, chief among them being (a) my recovery from surgery and (b) the last stages of my most recent major project: a critical edition of W. H. Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety), to be published by Princeton University Press later this year. (I think.) I just mailed off the typescript yesterday, and am still reeling a bit. Textual editing, let me say, is really, really hard work — at least if you want to do it well.

A few years ago Edward Said — thinking of the great humanistic scholars of the mid-twentieth century — wrote, “This is not to say that we should return to traditional philological and scholarly approaches to literature. No one is really educated to do that honestly anymore, for if you use Erich Auerbach and Leo Spitzer as your models you had better be familiar with eight or nine languages and most of the literatures written in them, as well as archival, editorial, semantic, and stylistic skills that disappeared in Europe at least two generations ago.” Thanks be to God, I did not need the skills of Auerback and Spitzer to edit The Age of Anxiety, but I did need skills I hadn’t been taught in graduate school, and it cost me a good deal of time and energy to acquire them. If I hadn’t had the ongoing assistance and direction of Edward Mendelson I’m not sure what I would have done, but I know that the final product would have been inadequate.

And it may be inadequate still — who knows? But I have worked as hard on this project as I have ever worked on anything, and at the moment I am pleased and proud. There’s something especially rewarding about doing all this work — visiting libraries and archives, working through vast tracts of mostly useless materials, trying to decipher Auden’s terrible handwriting, comparing multiple editions of the poem, reading much of what Auden read as he wrote the poem, carefully marking up the typescript in order to preserve the poem’s intricate formatting — not for the sake of my own critical reputation, but in order to make the work of a poet I love more useful and accessible and comprehensible. I can truly call this a labor of love. But boy, am I tired.

the form of the book

A Working Library says something very true very eloquently:

On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the page, the proper amount of thumb space—and the micro—the right amount of leading, the evenness of the word spacing, the correct break of a line. On the screen, the rhythm of a text encompasses all of these things and more—the placement of a link, the shift from text to video and back again, the movement from one text to another. The rhythm becomes more complex as the orchestra gets larger, but the desire for rhythm does not subside.

In order to create this rhythm, the book must be designed and composed for the screen. A beautiful digital text can no more be arrived at by “converting” from a print design than a beautiful print book can be created by converting a Word file. The digital book will never come into its own so long as it is treated as a byproduct, unworthy of attention.

Furthermore, digital books should no more adhere to identical designs than their print counterparts; different types of writing, different voices and tempos, require unique approaches to design. The current crop of ebook formats were designed for the novel, and on that they do a fine job; but countless other texts—cookbooks, technical books, graphic novels, books on art, plays, verse—are rendered unreadable by that conformity. If the form of the book is changing, it ought to lead to more variety, not less.

Amen and amen.

technology update

So about a week ago I was reading a book on my Kindle when suddenly it disappeared. Not the Kindle, the book. The screen went blank, the Kindle restarted, and when restart was complete, the home page informed me that I had zero items on the machine and zero archived items. I set it aside and came back a few minutes later, and now, it seemed, I had many archived items but none on the Kindle. I tried downloading one of my archived books, but after five or six minutes the “your book is downloading” message (which usually stays on screen for about ten seconds) was still there. An hour or two later I looked again, and my books had returned.

This has since happened twice more, both times when I was seriously engaged in what I was reading. A disconcerting experience. Because I dropped this Kindle the first time I touched it and slightly damaged one corner — a sad tale I told on this blog — I doubt that Amazon will give me a replacement. But I will ask, and report what I learn.

On another front, my emancipation from the clutches of Google remains incomplete. Gmail is gone, replaced by Fastmail, and that’s working out well, with the minor quibble that Fastmail’s spam filter is not as good as Gmail’s — a few items of spam are getting through and there have been some false positives as well. When I used Gmail I just didn't think about spam.

Also, for a long time now my wife and son and I have been coordinating our calendars using Google Calendar, so I don't think I can change that anytime soon. I also miss Google Reader: Bloglines updates slowly and inconsistently, though the new beta site looks very nice, and that’s the only real option for syncing my RSS feeds on my iPhone. But since I don't read RSS feeds on my iPhone very often, I think I’ll stick with a desktop RSS reader, either the full-featured NetNewsWire — with which I have a long history — or the beautiful NewsFire.

These are slight annoyances, but, simply put, I don't trust Google to use my data appropriately, so I can put up with them.

Chatroulette

From everything I’ve read about Chatroulette, it would appear that 95% of the time, or more, people click away within a second or two of seeing someone on screen. Surely Malcolm Gladwell is already working on an article about Chatroulette and snap judgments?

Not every Chatrouletter shows a face to the world. Some show other body parts; some use masks; one commenter on a blog post I saw enthusiastically recommended the use of puppets. But what can you learn about someone whose face you see for two seconds? In most cases, you’ll first notice gender; then age; then relative attractiveness. And that’s about all you’ll have time for if you’re clicking away as often as is the norm.

You know what this reminds me of? Church. Or rather, church gatherings other than the main Sunday morning worship service. Churches in America seem, by and large, across the theological spectrum, to think that it’s best whenever possible to segregate people by age and gender. Boys’ Sunday School, girls’ Sunday School, senior citizens, young married couples, twentysomething singles . . . it’s a curiously, one might even say obsessively, demographic way to organize people’s communal religious experience. Is it really impossible that a teenage boy and a great-grandmother could have something to say to each other, something to learn from each other?

Chatroulette seems to be self-organizing on similarly elementary terms. Similarly, not identically: to judge by the number of “show me your boobs” signs that, by all accounts, turn up on Chatroulette, many of the men using the site aren't interested in talking to other men — or talking at all, for that matter. But the general point stands: people seem to want to organize their social experience in extremely limited and unimaginative ways, and Chatroulette doesn't seem to give them any incentive to do anything else.

But some online venues do. In the comment thread to a danah boyd post on Chatroulette, Melanie McBride says:

right now, the most interesting “random” and intergenerational online experience I’ve had is doing pugs (random dungeons) in [World of Warcraft]. you are grouped by level and by class. So a 50yr old prof healer could be led around by a 15 year old tank. I could end up with just about any kind of person from the millions who have selected random play that day. And that’s what I love about it. and it’s truly “situated” learning – where the learner can self select their “teacher” or “collaborator” based on their own priorities and their perceptions of what other teammates have to offer. If you do poorly, you risk being “kicked” or smack talked. If you do well, you might be invited to do another random with the same group. And random gameplay in MMOs is very much a space of collaboration and curiosity. interestingly, the players most averse to random game play are also those who are least interested in leaving their comfort zones or echo chambers. I’ve talked to a lot of educators who, for example, cannot handle the smack talk in randoms (or pvp) so they refuse to even explore it.

I like this. It seems like the opposite of Chatroulette.

P.S. You gotta love Charlie Park's contribution to this discussion.

who's to blame here?

Google is anything but my best friend these days, as readers of this blog will know, but I don't think Google employees ought to be convicted of crimes because of videos other people upload.

obsessive conclusion disorder

Toby Lichtig has a problem: he can't stop reading books to the end — even when he doesn't like them.

Meanwhile, Alan Bissett has declared war against the forces attacking his attention span, and he's bringing in the heavy weaponry: Tolstoy.

Perhaps the tide is turning. . . .

fragility

Jason Epstein writes,

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter — the human inability to read what is unreadable — will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats's nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary's haikus. That the contents of the world's libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

This is of course not true, and one wonders what caused Epstein to make such a claim. Does he think that every book ever digitized is on a single un-backed-up computer? “Digital content is fragile,” he continues. “The secure retention, therefore, of physical books safe from electronic meddlers, predators, and the hazards of electronic storage is essential.” I agree with this, but maybe not for the reasons Epstein has in mind. Paper codices contain a great deal of information — data and metadata — that can't easily be transferred to digital form, and that information is worth preserving. But it’s not clear, to me anyway, that electronic texts are more fragile than books. It’s true that digital media deteriorate, and at rates and under conditions we still don't understand, but steps can be taken and are being taken to keep those media constantly updated. And books are damaged, lost, or destroyed as well. Few objects persist over time unless they are cared for, which is presumably what certain Chinese Buddhist scholars were thinking about when they built a library.

It’s interesting to think about what would happen if certain sources of information we rely on were somehow to disappear, wholly and instantaneously. Losing Wikipedia wouldn't be a big deal, since by design its information comes from other sources, most of which are online elsewhere. Losing the books that Google has scanned would be more problematic, but there are many other sources of digitized texts. We need to be good custodians of all the information we have gathered, but with proper care, I don't think that digital media are any more fragile than any other kind.

the fairness hearing

The legal wrangle over the fairness (or lack thereof) of the proposed Google Book Settlement is pretty darn fascinating. Check out this clear and detailed report, followed by this one. Well done, Professor Grimmelmann.

fixing email

My recent exodus from Gmail and consequent return to the world of the desktop email client has got me thinking about what an email application really fundamentally is.

It’s three things, it seems to me: it’s a text editor, it’s a database, and it’s a file manager. The problem is that there is no email client that fulfills all these functions really well. And probably no two users will weigh the relative importance of these functions in precisely the same way.

Take Gmail, for instance. It has always been an extremely responsive, extremely reliable database. And as its system of labels, filters, and “Labs” commands developed — Oh how I miss you, Send and Archive! — it became an increasingly sophisticated file manager. But its text editing capabilities were limited and awkward from day 1. As much fun as it was to set up an organizational system in Gmail, it was that much of a pain to write anything in the darn thing.

Contrast that to an ancient favorite of the geeky Mac crowd, Mailsmith — none of that newfangled IMAP crap for me, sonny! — which borrows its text-editing engine from BBEdit and therefore in this respect blows every other email client in the world out of the water. It has a pretty good filtering system too, with fine-grained controls, though in my experience the filters do not work consistently. But its database, while solid, is excruciatingly slow — I mean, go-out-and-have-lunch-and-it-still-hasn’t-finished-your-search slow — so that and its single-minded devotion to POP make it unusable.

If swift and sophisticated file management is your sine qua non, then you can't do better than — well, mutt or alpine, assuming you don't mind working from the command line. Watching a true mutt master compose, send, reply to, and file emails is like watching the knife tricks at Benihana. But mutt and alpine obviously aren't serious options for many users.

So we’re still waiting, I think, for an email app that puts it all together. Maybe Letters, the early-in-development email client for alpha Mac geeks, will do it. But I doubt it. My guess is that email will be replaced by a wholly different communications technology before anyone figures out how to make an email client that isn't seriously compromised in one or more of its functions.

all aboard the Axiom!

It’s been interesting — and somewhat disconcerting — to see the techno-ideology John Gruber has been selling since Apple announced the iPad. See this post, or this one, or the beginning of this one. Basically, Gruber is endorsing the Eloi-Morlock theory of computing experience according to which . . . well, why try to improve on, or even compete with, perfection? Let’s go to the source here, Neal Stephenson’s still-amazingly-brilliant essay from a decade ago, In the Beginning Was the Command Line. Take it away, Neal:

Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works. The much more numerous Eloi learn everything they know from being steeped from birth in electronic media directed and controlled by book-reading Morlocks. So many ignorant people could be dangerous if they got pointed in the wrong direction, and so we've evolved a popular culture that is (a) almost unbelievably infectious and (b) neuters every person who gets infected by it, by rendering them unwilling to make judgments and incapable of taking stands.

Morlocks, who have the energy and intelligence to comprehend details, go out and master complex subjects and produce Disney-like Sensorial Interfaces so that Eloi can get the gist without having to strain their minds or endure boredom. Those Morlocks will go to India and tediously explore a hundred ruins, then come home and built sanitary bug-free versions: highlight films, as it were. This costs a lot, because Morlocks insist on good coffee and first-class airline tickets, but that's no problem because Eloi like to be dazzled and will gladly pay for it all.

Now I realize that most of this probably sounds snide and bitter to the point of absurdity: your basic snotty intellectual throwing a tantrum about those unlettered philistines. As if I were a self-styled Moses, coming down from the mountain all alone, carrying the stone tablets bearing the Ten Commandments carved in immutable stone--the original command-line interface--and blowing his stack at the weak, unenlightened Hebrews worshipping images. Not only that, but it sounds like I'm pumping some sort of conspiracy theory.

But that is not where I'm going with this. The situation I describe, here, could be bad, but doesn't have to be bad and isn't necessarily bad now:

It simply is the case that we are way too busy, nowadays, to comprehend everything in detail. And it's better to comprehend it dimly, through an interface, than not at all. . . . My own family--the people I know best--is divided about evenly between people who will probably read this essay and people who almost certainly won't, and I can't say for sure that one group is necessarily warmer, happier, or better-adjusted than the other.

I don't know when to stop quoting this, so go read the whole thing. It’s great. My point is simply that those who complain about the increasingly closed architecture of the iPad, and the decline of the personal computer and its replacement by digital “appliances,” are resisting the dividing of the world into Eloi and Morlocks. Gruber is embracing it.

My own view is that I was an Eloi for most of my life but have spent the last few years trying to learn how to be a Morlock, at least a minor-league Morlock — and that has been, I think, time well spent. I am concerned that too many people will simply accept their Eloi status, and will give up on trying to understand the technologies that are shaping their minds and experiences, and will end up in a condition more or less like that of the people on the Axiom in Wall•E. It’s rather ironic, to say the least, that the company that’s doing the most to push us in this direction is the other one driven to its highest standards of excellence by Steve Jobs.

I'm not calling anyone "evil," but . . .

Since Google has apologized and reconfigured Buzz, should I perhaps accept their apology and return to my use of their products? I don't think so, for reasons explained by Kontra:

Unsure of its ability to successfully roll it out as an independent product, Google must have then decided to force feed Buzz through its Gmail user base of 175 million. Google executives likely reckoned that in a single day Buzz would garner more users than Twitter has been able to in two years after all that celebrity publicity. That really is why Gmail users woke up one day to find their private account details exposed to the public, unannounced and unprepared, because without such default exposure Google executives likely didn’t believe they could deliver a critical user base for Buzz. That’s not “improper testing,” it’s a platform strategy. And the fact that Google reacted quickly to public pressure doesn’t negate the fact that its arrogance was thoroughly exposed. The correction isn’t significant, the exposed intentions are.

And those intentions are clearly to become dominant in the world of social networking. But I am interested in participating in social networking only in limited and targeted ways, and consciously avoid most soc-net sites. So Google’s intentions run counter to my intentions. Thus we shall (largely if not completely) part company.

It turns out that Fastmail is a fabulous email provider, by the way, and when I’m using my iPhone it’s a relief not to have to deal with Google’s bizarre implementation of IMAP. I think I like this new Google-free (or limited-Google) world.

buzz off, Google

So the other day I read about Google Buzz; it sounded interesting, so I clicked the link and went to the site. On that page was a brief description of Buzz and two choices: one, larger and in bright colors, said something to the effect of “Sure, I’ll try Buzz!” The other, in plain and smaller letters, said “Nah, just take me to my inbox.” I clicked on the large one, and in the next hour discovered that my Google Reader page was now filled with other people’s links and comments, and that Google was doing its very best to populate my Gmail inbox similarly — only being limited in its power to do so by the paucity of information I had entered on my Google Profile page. (Even so, Google on my behalf sent out Buzz invitations to people in my contacts list.) Any Google user who had given more information on their own profile pages now had exposed to any other Google users the list of people they most often emailed and chatted with. So if a man had been emailing with a manager of a company where he was thinking about taking a job, his current employer could find that out. Or if that man had been emailing with a lawyer because he was considering a lawsuit against his employer . . . or (we have discreditable secrets too) if he had been chatting with a woman other than his wife. . . . Google decided without directly informing its users that all those connections should be public knowledge.

As Evgeny Morozov wrote, “If I were working for the Iranian or the Chinese government, I would immediately dispatch my Internet geek squads to check on Google Buzz accounts for political activists and see if they have any connections that were previously unknown to the government. They can then spend months on end drawing complex social circles on the shiny blackboards inside secret police headquarters.”

This response to a shockingly tone-deaf post by Berin Szoka summarizes the issues nicely.

Google has since made minor changes to the system, but overall has been anything but apologetic: responding to an inquiry from the New York Times, “Todd Jackson, product manager for Gmail and Google Buzz . . . defended the setup of the Buzz service. He said that Buzz came with a built-in circle of contacts to provide a better experience to users and that many liked that feature."

I had already been frustrated by Google’s earlier decisions to make certain of their services more “social” — more than a year ago, for instance, my Reader started informing me of the number of people who liked certain links, and flashed in my face the number of “new sharing requests” that had come my way, despite my desperate attempts to turn off every possible venue for “sharing.” So Buzz is not a one-time misstep my Google, but rather a consolidation of a self-defining stance.

My response: after five years and 25,000 email messages, I have abandoned Gmail and Google Calendar. I have deleted all my Google Reader subscriptions, and deleted all my contacts. My principle is a simple one: Google will not determine and range and nature of my social connections, I will. The only thing keeping me from deleting my Google account altogether is, to be truthful, this blog, which is hosted by Blogger. So I’m stuck with Google for at least a while longer — but the first minute that I am able to delete that account, I will do so.

Now back to healing!

hiatus

Gentle readers, I had emergency surgery to remove my gall bladder yesterday and will be incapacitated for a while. I will resume blogging as soon as I am able, but don't know when that will be. (And by the way, the past three days' posts were written over the weekend and scheduled for later publication — I wasn't heroically typing away on the operating table.)