Today I attended BookCamp Vancouver at SFU. It’s was a well-run, well-organized event that frequently featured an engaging exchange of ideas. It probably could have used a few more of the unconference features that make BarCamp so special. I expect some industries are more comfortable than others with this kind of open, egalitarian model, so better baby steps than none at all.
Throughout the day, I recommended a number of articles to various writers, editors and publishers. I figured I might as well gather them here in case they’re of interest. Long time readers have probably seen me recommend one or more of these articles before:
The Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow - From 1994, but still pretty relevant today. Extremely prescient for the time. “Even the physical/digital bottles to which we’ve become accustomed - floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other discrete, shrink-wrappable bit-packages - will disappear as all computers jack-in to the global Net. While the Internet may never include every CPU on the planet, it is more than doubling every year and can be expected to become the principal medium of information conveyance, and perhaps eventually, the only one. “
The Next Economy of Ideas by John Perry Barlow - Six years later, and even more insightful. I’ve been saying this next sentence ever since I read this piece: “Art is a service, not a product. Created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to “content” is like praying in swear words.”
1000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly - I recommend this to every artist I meet, regardless of medium. It’s an extremely elegant way of thinking about fostering community and building an audience. For some reason it reminds me of the central metaphor in Anne Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”. “A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living.”
I wanted to offset those first three from the next two because the former are truly remarkable, visionary pieces. The next two are smart thinking and worth reading, but might pale a bit by comparison.
The 10 Principles of Lean Publishing by Peter Armstrong - Some very useful thinking about what publishing can learn from software development. Includes concepts like “fail fast” and “a book is a lean startup”. Now, Peter, go write a great, simple manifesto, instead of a waffly top-ten list.
The other day I was searching for the correct phrasing of a poem, and happened upon the SpokenVerse YouTube account. It features nearly 600 poems read aloud in a unadorned, gruff English voice. Here are a couple of poems you may be familiar with:
The video preview frame for the third poem, Michael Ondaatje’s “The Cinnamon Peeler”, features an exposed if tastefully photographed nipple. It’s otherwise safe for work, but I figured I’d better err on the side of caution.
I’m at Web of Change, so updates are likely to be pretty intermittent this week. On my way up–I took the train for the first time from Victoria to Nanaimo–I read the latest issue of Wired magazine. In it, there’s a really fascinating article about the placebo effect, and how, remarkably, it’s increasing:
Why are inert pills suddenly overwhelming promising new drugs and established medicines alike? The reasons are only just beginning to be understood. A network of independent researchers is doggedly uncovering the inner workings—and potential therapeutic applications—of the placebo effect. At the same time, drugmakers are realizing they need to fully understand the mechanisms behind it so they can design trials that differentiate more clearly between the beneficial effects of their products and the body’s innate ability to heal itself. A special task force of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health is seeking to stem the crisis by quietly undertaking one of the most ambitious data-sharing efforts in the history of the drug industry. After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom.
The article uses a term I hadn’t heard before: nocebo. Here’s an explanation:
Like any other internal network, the placebo response has limits. It can ease the discomfort of chemotherapy, but it won’t stop the growth of tumors. It also works in reverse to produce the placebo’s evil twin, the nocebo effect. For example, men taking a commonly prescribed prostate drug who were informed that the medication may cause sexual dysfunction were twice as likely to become impotent.
I followed a link from Beth’s blog to The Stranger’s site (somewhat unsafe for work), where Dan Savage is soliciting new definitions for the term ’saddleback’. I scrolled down to the comments section, and spotted this:
There’s an old, silly online tradition of posting ‘First!’ (or some variation) to popular forums or blogs. This is a particularly poor execution of that practice.
I wonder where this ‘first’ business started. Slashdot, maybe?
Apparently there’s a new phrase in town for TV shows and movies that have crossed the event horizon of just plain silly:
In recent weeks, a similarly ridiculous episode — in this case from the movie “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” — has produced a similar term, “nuked the fridge,” that is gaining traction online. A Google search comes up with 64,000 hits.
In “Indiana Jones,” the hero’s improbable achievement was to survive a nuclear blast by hiding in a refrigerator. Hence, “to nuke the fridge” means to introduce a wildly implausible element to a once-respected franchise, or more generally, to signal the abandonment of past standards of quality.
I’m not sure we really needed a new phrase, but what the heck? ‘Nuked the fridge’ is a suitable replacement, as it seems even more improbably and ridiculous than ‘jumped the shark’.
Here’s my useless idea of the day. What if we could watch live or recorded screencasts of a writer’s screen as they write? The writer–from Stephen King to your favourite local blogger–installs some software on their computer, and it broadcasts the activity in their word processor (or authoring tool of choice) in real time to the web.
Here’s a quick example of what I’m talking about, courtesy of Victor Hugo:
It kind of combines Webex and RobotReplay with the popular notion of radical transparency. It sounds banal, but so does Twitter, and people seem to like that.
The technology for this obviously already exists. There’d be a little work in building plugins for MS Word, NotePad,browser forms and whatever else people write in. But other than that it would be simple.
If you’re Stephen King, maybe you offer some kind of premium subscription that enables people to spy on your writing. Hardcore fans, knowing that King usually writes in the morning, would log in to watch him putter away on his latest novel.
Of course, no writer that I know would permit this. As the saying goes, “there are two things you never want to see made, sausage and legislation”. I’d add most forms of writing to that list.
The latest piece in Slate’s excellent daily audio podcast was Bigger Than Elvis, an encomium of Mariah Carey. In it, writer Jody Rosen repeatedly uses the term ‘melisma’ to describe Ms. Carey’s singing style:
Mariah’s accomplishment begins, of course, with her voice, or, rather, The Voice—that cyclonic force capable of hurtling unnumbered octaves, shattering crystal ware, and inducing musicogenic epileptic seizures in Japanese women. Carey is the most influential vocal stylist of the last two decades, the person who made rococo melismatic singing—the trick of embroidering syllables with multiple no-o-o-o-o-o-tes—the ubiquitous pop style. Exhibit A is American Idol, which has often played out as a clash of melisma-mad Mariah wannabes. And, today, nearly 20 years after Carey’s debut, major labels continue to bet the farm on young stars such as the winner of Britain’s X Factor show*, Leona Lewis, with her Generation Next gloss on Mariah’s big voice and big hair.
I expect this word is familiar to musicians and music historians out there, but it was new to me. Wikipedia says that the technique has its origins in “early mystical initiation rites and religious worship”. Apparently the most well-known usage is in Gregorian chant.
Jody Rosen actually makes a pretty good case for not dismissing Mariah Carey. I’ve never been a fan, but I was reminded of “Heartbreaker”. It’s a half-decent pop song, and has a pretty watchable video:
You can’t go wrong with a pink knit bikini top, a cat fight and that guy from Sliders.
All the women tear their blouses off and the men they dance on the polka-dots and it’s partner found and it’s partner lost and it’s hell to pay when the fiddler stops It’s closing time
Just yesterday, I used the word ‘blouse’ and felt awkward about it. In recent years, the word seems to have disappeared from our popular language. Female friends have kind of smirked at me when I’ve used in it conversation.
The word seems to now belong only to my mother and my grandmother’s generations. What words do we now use to describe women’s shirts? Besides the word ’shirt’, that is. ‘Top’, I guess. What else?
On a related note, I feel like I’m the only Canadian under 40 who uses the word ‘trousers’. I learned to eschew ‘pants’ while living in Ireland, and have never really gone back. There’s similar scoffing when I say ‘trousers’. Undeserved, I think.
Apologies for the light blogging this week, but it’s the first week back, you know? My calendar is positively blue with appointments, etc. It’s been great, but a shock to the system after a year of precious little socializing.
The other thing that’s weird is that, over the past year, I had maybe three time-specific commitments a week. We’ve been very busy, but most days I could choose what I wanted to do when. Alas, no more.
Anyhow, being busy and lame, I’m going to cheat and highlight an old blog post that lives on in comments. It’s a short little thing called “Worst Baby Names Ever”, but it’s accrued 30,000 visitors and 130 comments since I wrote it three years ago. People seem to love coming by to complain about their own name, or mock other people’s.
The most recent comment made me laugh:
Ok I’m dating a man named Richard Panek. (Dick Panek) And if we get married my name will be Kayla Mae Panek.
Given my last name, I shouldn’t throw stones. But that’s a classic.
I was recently listening to the new Slate Cultural Gabfest. One subject they discussed was an apparent backlash in the blogosphere against the great movie Juno. Apparently it focussed on blogger-turned-stripper-turned-screenwriter Diablo Cody (motivated, in part, by jealously) and on a kind of anti-hipsterism. For the uninitiated, check out Wikipedia or this Flickr group. The Wikipedia piece isn’t great (mental note: improve), and thus isn’t easily excerpted, but you’ll get the general idea.
I was thinking about hipsters in the context of yuppies. Both are frequently criticized subcultures. And yet, people still aspire (or at least aspired, in the case of yuppies) to join them. They both seem to be primarily populated by middle-class, college-educated Caucasians.
‘Yuppie’ was a term invented and applied to people who are mostly older than me, and ‘hipster’ is applied to people who are mostly younger than me. Are hipsters this generation’s yuppies?
I don’t mean that they share the same values–just that they might fill a similar role in North American culture.
