Wonderful essay by Annie Dillard on writing from NY Times Book Review in 1999. Read it all, but to whet your appetite:

[Via the ever-abundant Metafilter]

Wired editor Chris Anderson has started a good blog to follow up on his Long Tail essay and seed the ground for a book on the subject. Cory Doctorow takes Anderson to task for his “middle-of-the-road” stance on efforts to lock down intellectual property via increasingly desperate and continuingly futile technical schemes for digital rights management (DRM) — schemes that tip the balance between propertyholders and the public way too far.

Anderson is dead right in elucidating the way the Net economy restores market value to works that are not big hits. The story of the next few years will be one about whether that market in “long tail” intellectual goods (I wrote about its promise in October) thrives in the same open environment that allowed the Net itself to evolve and prosper — or shrivels under the furious weight of technical and legal efforts to squeeze every last dollar from every last little hair on the long tail. My money is on the former, happier outcome. But it won’t turn out that way without persistent and stubborn resistance — which we can thank Doctorow and the EFF for ringleading — to the “we control the horizontal, we control the vertical” paternalism and anti-consumerism of the DRM mafia.

(For a little example of what happens when rights holders hold too many cards, check out the sad saga of “Eyes on the Prize,” the documentary that is the “principal film account of the most important American social justice movement of the 20th century,” in a Stanford professor’s words from Wired News’ account. “Eyes on the Prize” can’t be publicly shown or distributed because “the filmmakers no longer have clearance rights to much of the archival footage used in the documentary.” You want your audiovisual history? Pay up first!)

Assuming the Long Tail isn’t clipped by DRMania, we face an ever-expanding banquet of media goods. The BBC sounds an alarm. We are coming
face to face with the scourge of “digital obesity”:

Or maybe not. The term is a ludicrous oversimplification and distortion; we keep all this stuff around precisely because we can now — because it doesn’t fill trucks, it fills infinitesimal chips and drives, and it’s easier to keep everything around than to worry about cleaning house. Carrying the stuff around? No problem. Finding it? Harder. Finding time to absorb it all? There’s our rub.

Obesity is simply the wrong metaphor. This post by Rajat Paharia hits closer to the mark:

I first noticed this phenomenon back in the late ’80s, when I switched from buying music on vinyl to CDs, and noticed how quickly I stopped listening to an entire 50-60 minute CD if the first track or two didn’t grab me. Of course, this kind of impatience coincided with the speeding up of my professional life and my crossing the threshold into my 30s. Something tells me that the problems Paharia and I and perhaps you are facing in this realm of overload may not feel so dire to today’s teenagers and twenty-somethings, for whom this thick soup is a native muck.

Still, the “I feel behind all the time” phenomenon is real enough, as today’s RSS addicts know — and as indicated by the rising popularity among the geeknoscenti of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” methodology, with its promise of liberation from uncomfortable behind feelings.

I’m not liberated yet. Behindness surrounds me on all sides. But finding stuff is getting easier. I’m slowly trying to teach myself the methodology that Doctorow has modeled for several years now: If you want to be able to find something in the future, don’t bury it in your files — blog about it, put it out on the Net, where Google will never lose it, and if for some reason you can’t find it, someone else will probably have picked it up and saved it for you.

So to hell with bookmarks, and long live the blogmark. Here’s a handful:

Lexis Nexis Alacarte: No longer the preserve of big-media newsrooms — now in handy personal-journalism size.

For years, I tuned my guitar with one of those little electronic tuners in a plastic box; but when they were two, my kids decided that it made a great toy and disembowelled it. Well, all that is solid melts into Net: Today you don’t need a physical object, all you need is a Net connection and a browser. Just Google “guitar tuner” for a bunch of options; I liked this one for its retro look.

Feel-good link of the day: First it was the beer and wine, now it’s spicy food! Curry may help block Alzheimer’s disease. (It’s the turmeric.)

I’ve been enjoying reading music critic Alex Ross’s blog over at “The Rest is Noise” for some time now. This thoughtful comment on the role of the critic caught my eye — it pretty well sums up what I aspired to in the many years I devoted to writing about theater and movies:

“As a critic, I’m obliged to describe musical reality precisely as I hear it; I can’t sway in the breeze of intermission chatter. All the same, I want to write a review that will be of use even to a listener who had an entirely different experience. This entails writing with a certain humble awareness that my experience is not universal, that my account will never be carved in granite. Criticism is at its best where confidence meets generosity. It’s a tricky business: the slide into fake omniscience is deliciously quick. But I’m working on it.”

A little of my recent reading:

## A wonderful piece about SpaceWar, the ur-computer game, by Stewart Brand from Rolling Stone, 1972. (Yes, 1972.) Also about: that thing we would someday call the computer revolution. [Courtesy Metafilter.]

## Inspiring interview with Howard Rheingold from Business Week. I first met Howard around the time his “Virtual Communities” book came out, and he was starting a column at the S.F. Examiner, where I then worked. I interviewed him for the Examiner (you can read it here) back then, and what I said about him still, I think, applies: “His blend of enthusiasm tempered with inquisitive caution distinguishes him from both starry-eyed techno-hucksters and atavistic technophobes.” Here’s what’s on his mind today:

Take that, Francis Fukuyama!

## Having linked to Brand and Rheingold I must now complete the Whole Earth trifecta with a general bow in the direction of Kevin Kelly and his wonderful Cool Tools site, and in particular to the great compendium of documentaries, or “True Films,” that he and his contributors have compiled.

## Here’s a fun illustration of how hard it is to keep your brain’s parallel-processing working right when the verbal and visual cues are contradicting one another. Then click on the site’s comments button for an illustration of what it looks like when people’s brains aren’t working at all. [link courtesy Sam Ruby]

For the past several weeks I’ve accumulated a set of links that I wanted to present and comment on. Each could warrant a full blog entry. But since the chaos of my life and schedule means that instead I’ve just been sitting on them, I’m just going to post them in a big underannotated lump. Better than not posting them at all, and probably what I should have done in the first place, one by one. If you’re an avid follower of blogs you’ll probably have seen many of these already.

Teresa Neilsen Hayden’s amazing compendium of “Lord of the Rings” parodies provided me with a nearly inexhaustible supply of merriment.

The long view: Greg Costikyan, with whom I don’t always agree but whose thoughts I will always read avidly, points out that the U.S. will not always be the “sole superpower” — providing a good, self-interested reason for us to pay a little more attention to international law:

Danny O’Brien posts on the elusive and increasingly central issue of just how much fame and celebrity will satisfy us in an era when the middle ground — famous for 15 minutes, famous for 15 (or 150) people — keeps expanding. (This is the aspect of blogging that professional journalists, used to measuring readership by commercial standards, typically miss.)

Danah Boyd pinpoints many of the problems with the current wave of social software in her talk on “Autistic social software” from Supernova. Good reading for anyone who thinks that “social software” started with Friendster — but valuable as well for those of us who already know the longer history here:

Creative Commons is doing important work in helping keep open a space for creative reuse of content in an era of hegemonic copyrightism. The organization recently moved in to share the office space for Mitch Kapor’s Open Source Applications Foundation, where I’ve been spending a lot of time researching my book. Regular readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. So it tickled me to read recently on the Creative Commons blog that the Goats’ John Darnielle has okayed the hosting of a free archive of live shows at the Internet Archive. Darnielle has a low-tech preference for old-fashioned tape trading over the online approach — but the main thing is, he wants people to hear his music, and once they do, many will, as I have, become voracious purchasers of actual Mountain Goats CDs. Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, the Mountain Goats — how can you go wrong?

Hugh MacLeod, whose trademark art is drawing cartoons on the back of business cards, has posted an ever-evolving list of thoughts and ideas on creativity that’s great reading. For instance:

And, finally, a quote from Norman Mailer, via Jay Rosen’s commentary on Mailer’s coverage of the 1960 Democratic Convention — an old one, but, for me, in the “paste this one on your monitor” class:

Tonight I heard parts of Terry Gross’s interview with Neil Young. I’ve been listening to Young’s music since I was young myself. As an 11-year-old, in 1970, I’d bop around my room to those endless jams on “Everybody Knows This is Nowhere.” As a 14-year-old I would cut phys. ed class and hang around outside the gym singing the lyrics to beloved obscurities like “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” I finally heard Young play live in the late ’70s on the “Rust Never Sleeps” tour. But in all those years I’d never before heard an interview with him.

The show is a shambling, illuminating ramble through the mind of this amazing musician, who belongs right up there with Dylan and Reed as a sort of deathless chthonic spirit of popular music. Here is the exchange with which it begins:

Misfitting becomes him well enough.

While we’re on the subject, I can’t resist repeating a quotation about writing that Cory Doctorow recently posted on BoingBoing. It’s by E.L. Doctorow, and, well, it’s just the truth:

Blogging from me will be light over the holidays. Any spare time I get over the next week will be devoted, weather allowing, to building my kids a swing set in the backyard. But before the eggnog haze descends upon us, a few choice links.

First, Mother Jones has an interview with Tony Kushner in which the “Angels in America” playwright states, with crystalline precision, the essential fact of the 2004 election. This should be etched into the consciousness of everyone who hopes that things in the U.S. can be put back on course:

One light of hope this year is that the citizenry has important and still-underestimated tools at its disposal to egg its leaders on to greatness. If you’re keeping up with the blogosphere you may be sick to death by now of reading about the power of many-to-many decentralization, “social software” and the Dean campaign’s remarkable online successes. But what if you’re stuck inside the Beltway? Frank Rich’s Sunday column this week serves as a useful reminder that most of the Washington press corps remains utterly and pathetically clueless about what has already happened during this election cycle. Jay Rosen’s annotation of Rich’s column is well worth reading, too.

So we’re fortunate to live at a moment when the technologies many of us have enthusiastically embraced for two decades are showing signs of achieving social and political ends beyond simply bringing delight to geekdom or fueling the stock market. Cory Doctorow has good words here:

(And Kevin Werbach points out that technology and policy are always intertwined.)

Finally, as many of us retreat from the daily grind to take year-end stock, I want to offer you this wonderful passage that Kevin Kelly cited earlier this month on his Cool Tools blog. It’s from a book titled “Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking,” by David Bayles and Ted Orland, that I will have to add to my 2004 reading list.

Which, I suppose, is an anecdotal version of the Nike slogan, “Just do it.” But I prefer the Samuel Johnson version: “Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must be first overcome.”

Thanks to Salon’s subscribers for keeping us going through these thin years — and special thanks to all the Salon bloggers for keeping their “quantity” and “quality” fires stoked. Happy holidays to all.

Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is one of the very few works of fantasy I’ve read as an adult that moved and excited me the way I was moved and excited by the fantasies (Tolkien et al.) I read as a kid. I’m not sure whether I’d have loved it the same way had I first read it as a kid. I’ll never know, of course.

In any case, Pullman’s New York Times op-ed essay today is a marvelous meditation on the way the rational mind and the imagination coexist. How can a man spend much of his career creating fantasy tales when he doesn’t believe in ghosts and disembodied spirits? Here’s a taste of Pullman’s answer:

Today’s hot meme in the blogosphere is this notion, now heavily Slashdotted, that readers can easily make sense of passages of verbiage in which the words’ letters have been scrambled as long as the first and last letters of each word are left intact. Try it — everyone else in blog-land has!

Waht tihs tlles us, of csuore, is taht cxonett is ideblrnciy intmorapt to our criepoehmnosn of txet.

(And that, as you can see from the above sentence, this approach is tougher to use as the length of words increases.)

This novelty occasioned a few thoughts:
(1) The human brain is much more forgiving than most software, at least today’s software. Fuzzy math may help. Google is getting good at suggesting what you really meant when you misspell a query.

(2) This is why we miss typos. I spent a significant portion of my college years proofreading newspaper paste-up boards, and still spend a lot of time editing on computer screen, and if you’ve ever done this sort of editing work properly, your eyes behave differently from the normal reader, and you notice tiny transpositions and goofs that a typical eye will simply pass over. (This is why Don’s Amazing Puzzle was not amazing to me. I caught it the first time I looked at it back when Dave Winer first presented it. Not because I’m a sharpie but because I’ve worked as a copy editor.) For anyone who reads this way, interpreting words scrambled in this fashion can actually be harder — because you’re trained to see what’s actually there, not what your eye thinks should be there.

(3) Reading slowly is a dying art. As our world pushes us inevitably towards more speedy skimming of information blasting at us through a dozen different protocols, we scan more than we read. That makes it easy for us to parse near-gibberish, and that capability is a wonderful thing. But reading slowly is a wonderful thing, too. It is an art we still need in a number of areas. Reading poetry requires the ability to read slowly. If you read a poem the way you read your e-mail, you might as well not bother. Oddly enough, working on computer code requires a similar ability: Both because the computer is far more unforgiving of typos, bad punctuation and garbled verbiage than the human eye, and also becaause in good code, like good poetry, every word counts, and you need to be able to notice the patterns the words establish.

(Catch the typo in that last sentence?)