Antiweb Feedbag

Latest posts from: CraqueCast, Extra! Extra!, AlienFlower Blog, Life Less Literary, scot hacker's foobar blog, Literary Kicks, The Fever Of Phineas, Mediajunkie, xian's running monolog, Yes Justice Yes Peace!, Zeigen

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1. Milton Is Awesome (And Other Links)
   → Literary Kicks | 21 Nov 2008 | 2:03am GMT
   

   1. MILTON MARATHON! At St. Olaf College (and yes, the name does make me think of Rose from The Golden Girls; I can’t help it), a professor led a straight-through reading of Paradise Lost. The article says, “Milton is not as boring as you think. Paradise Lost has something for everyone: Hot but innocent sex! (You thought Adam and Eve spent all their time in Eden gardening?) Descriptions of hellfire that would make The Lord of the Rings’ archfiend, Sauron, weep with envy! Epic battles, with angels hurling mountains at their demonic foes! This is edge-of-your-seat material.” And it’s very true. Milton is not as boring as you think. I mean it. Milton is my homeboy.

   2. Terry Eagleton reviews a Wittgenstein biography.

   3. I don’t agree with Richard Dawkins about many things, but I get his point. However, as I was digging through some RSS feeds to bring you thrilling links, I came across this one: Harry Potter fails to cast spell over Professor Richard Dawkins. From the article: “The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in ‘anti-scientific’ fairytales.” I can’t help but picture this in my head as Richard Dawkins surrounded by crying children as he explains that Santa Claus isn’t real. In my head, it goes like this: “IT’S YOUR PARENTS!” he yells as the children wail and vow to hate science as long as they live.

   4. I wish I could bring myself not to be bored nearly to death by Camille Paglia, but I’m not sure that will ever happen. In any case, she goes on and on and on about how she selected the poems for her book Break, Blow, Burn (which came out in hardcover in 2005). Whee.

   5. Ever wanted to know what it’s like to be a freelance term paper writer? You’re in luck.

   6. On the release of his book Why We Suck, Heather Havrilesky interviews Denis Leary. From the introduction to the interview: “Leary called from his home in New York City to talk with Salon about George Carlin’s legacy, the culture of permissive parenting and the controversy surrounding his book. Far from the violent frat boy he portrays on his show, Leary not only referred to himself as a “dyed-in-the-wool Democrat” but said that he considers himself a feminist. Still, he insisted that if no one is pissed off, that means he’s not doing his job.”

   7. Misery memoirs: they sell by the millions, but could their day in the spotlight be coming to an end?

   8. On the Origin of Species: The Illustrated Edition prompts an annotated slideshow.

   9. The Five Most Obnoxious Literary Fads. I nodded at some of this (The Da Vinci Code hatred, for instance), but even though I know I wouldn’t be able to read one now without wanting to throw it out of the window of a moving vehicle, I really liked the Sweet Valley High books. When I was 11. (Also I’ve never read a single word of anything having to do with Harry Potter.)

   10. Of Bibiophilia and Bibioclasm: hurrah for secondhand books.

2. the crazier the market gets, t…
   → The Fever Of Phineas | 20 Nov 2008 | 9:54pm GMT
   

   the crazier the market gets, the less I worry about it

3. National Book Awards 2008
   → Literary Kicks | 19 Nov 2008 | 9:17pm GMT
   

   I had a great time at the National Book Awards ceremony last year, but I’m skipping the show this year, partly because I can’t get excited by these nominations. I’m predicting that Marilynne Robinson will win for Home and Jane Mayer will win for The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, but neither possibility has me jumping up and down. As far as I’m concerned, this year’s fiction award should go to Cost by Roxana Robinson and non-fiction to Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker, but neither title was nominated.

   I’m not even going to venture a guess on the poetry or young adult fiction awards. Anyway, I’m skipping the show this year but will be checking out various real-time online updates. Ed Champion will be twittering and promises podcast updates. Ron Hogan will also be twittering, and the National Book Awards has its own twitter feed as well. If this is your idea of fun, join in …

4. Notes on a Django Migration
   → scot hacker's foobar blog | 19 Nov 2008 | 5:45pm GMT
   

   Earlier this year, I inherited responsibility for the website of the Knight Digital Media Center at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. The site is built with Django, a web application framework written in Python. The J-School has primarily been a PHP shop, using a mixture of open-source apps — lots of WordPress, Smarty templates and piles of home-brew code. Because it’s grown organically over time with no clear underlying architecture and a constantly changing array of publications to support, the organization sits on top of dozens of unrelated databases.

   These are my notes and observations on how the J-School got into this mess, why we’ve fallen in love with Django, and how we plan to dig ourselves out.

   Bailing Wire

   I personally have no formal CS or programming background. Over the course of the six years I managed most of the J-School web properties, I learned just as much PHP and shell scripting as required, on an as-needed basis. Job pressures and constant deadlines never allowed time for pure training.

   Even without training, I’ve been extremely productive with ad-hoc PHP. I ended up developing and/or implementing some very effective web apps, such as a course and instructor review system, events database, story submission database, application and review system, online quiz system, etc. - all more or less stitched together with bailing wire and duct tape.

   But everything people say about PHP systems not scaling well eventually came around to bite us - our systems are sprawling. Login systems are disconnected, disparate databases that should be unified are spread all the place. Instead of a centralized content management system, we have dozens of loosely connected CMSs. From a certain perspective, this made sense, as much of what we do is not about running a single site, but a loose federation of barely related sites. At a journalism school, students, classes, and organizations demand one publication site after another, few of which have anything to do with one another.

   But at a certain point, non-unified systems simply fail to scale. It’s not about traffic, but about consistency. You can’t require students and faculty to create new logins all over the place, and you can’t expect web developers to master dozens of different platforms that work in dozens of different ways. Over the past year, we’ve known it was time to consolidate as much as possible into a single, centralized framework or CMS. The scaling problem is organizational — too many parties, too many tools, too many different ways of doing things, too many cooks in the kitchen. A classic example of PHP spaghetti.

   Quite a while ago, we realized that something had to give. We needed to rebuild everything in a single system - one that came with a foundation flexible enough to model everything the organization is and does, and to build any kind of web-based representation or tools we needed on top of that model. We needed something more than a typical CMS. We didn’t want to have to shoehorn parts into places where they don’t belong. We wanted a system to work for us, rather than against us.

   Framework vs. CMS

   What’s the difference between a content management system and a framework? Look at it this way: If you write in a raw language, like PHP or Perl, it’s like going to Home Depot and buying lumber and nails. You have absolute flexibility, but you’re responsible for every square centimeter of the house you build. If you deploy a content management system, it’s like buying a house - you can rearrange the furniture, but you’re pretty much stuck with the floor plan.

   A framework lies somewhere between those two poles - as if you’re buying parts of a pre-fab house. “Now I need walls. Now plumbing. Now kitchen appliances. Now air conditioning.” The nitty gritty stuff is taken care of, but you have full control over which pieces you use and how they fit together. “Now I need a commenting system. Now I need RSS. Now I need search. Now I need form validation.”

   CMSs have a nasty habit of becoming inflexible. Editorial staff get tired of hearing “we can’t do x, y, or z because the CMS won’t let us.” CMSs make assumptions about how you work, and about how a site is structured. As long as you work within that set of assumptions, all is well. But try to bend a CMS to do things it wasn’t meant to do, and you open the door to failure.

   For example, we do a ton of work with WordPress. WordPress assumes that the basic content type is the story, and that that story has a headline, summary, article body, and maybe a bit of metadata. WordPress is an amazing tool, ideally suited to publication-oriented sites such as blogs and focused publications. But building a custom database application involving arbitrary arrays of fields, or building custom workflow tools, would be a matter of bending WordPress in ways it wasn’t meant to be bent. You may or may not be successful, but you’ll probably never call your solution graceful. You’ll always be working against, not with WordPress’ assumptions about the structure of your content. It’s true that WordPress is much more than just a blogging system - it’s a darn good CMS for a lot of site types. But you wouldn’t use it to be build an equipment checkout system, or an alumni database, or an application processing system. Its limitations come from its assumptions.

   In contrast, a framework is a toolkit you use to build the CMS that matches your organization’s specific needs. No assumptions, just tools and conventions you can use to model data structures and create a workflow based on those structures. A framework takes care of much of the heavy lifting involved in the creation of highly customized web apps, so you don’t have to pour countless hours into things like fighting spam, managing fine-grained permissions, building CRUD tools, etc.

   Because a framework works at a lower level than a CMS, it generally has a steeper learning curve. In exchange for that learning curve, you get more flexibility as your organization changes, grows, and scales. It’s a middle ground between (on one hand) raw code that makes no assumptions but leaves you responsible for every bit, and (on the other) a full-blown CMS that makes too many assumptions about content types, and often feels convoluted and/or limiting (not to mention bloated, which most major CMSs are).

   There are web application frameworks written in many languages. PHP has Cake, Symfony, Zend and others. Ruby is famous for Rails. Perl has Catalyst and Gantry. Python has Zope, TurboGears, and, in recent years, Django. I haven’t done enough work with frameworks to be able to offer meaningful side-by-side comparisons, but I can tell you what it’s been like for a PHP guy to learn Django over the past six months.

   Starting From Scratch

   Here’s why PHP is so popular: You don’t have to learn much up-front. Start with an HTML page, drop in one measly function call, and you get immediate gratification. Need to do something else? Look up another function and drop it in. Over time, you get a head-full of function calls you can use in a pinch, and get to call yourself a programmer. It’s a double-edged sword. The fact that PHP takes no real study to become productive means there are millions of PHP developers who don’t have a grasp of “real” programming concepts. Like me. That doesn’t mean we aren’t productive, but it does mean we tend to build things in non-optimal ways under deadline pressure. And we tend to build things that turn around and bite us in the ass when organizations and data models grow, change, and evolve, because our code is littered with secrets and mysteries, and because we lack the foundations needed to be “real” programmers. I’m generalizing grossly (and being unnecessarily self-deprecating) to make a point.

   For me, learning a framework has been another story. There is no “instant gratification” entry point. You need to have a grasp of the language the framework is written in. For Django, that means learning some Python - at the very least lists, dictionaries and tuples. You need to learn that language’s programming structures - how it handles conditionals, loops, I/O, etc. You need to have some basic grounding in object-oriented programming principles - something I’ve simply never gotten around to. In most cases - certainly in Django - you need to learn MVC (model view controller) or in Django’s case MTV (model template view) principles. And you need to learn the framework itself. How it thinks, how data moves through the system, where to look when things go wrong.

   Finally, you need to know how to deploy. Because PHP is built into virtually every Apache host out there, deployment is something most PHP devs don’t have to think about. For Rails or Django, it’s a different story. Suddenly you’re compiling apache modules, building database bindings, configuring the web server… or looking around for a host who’s done all of that for you.

   I signed up for an online Python course through University Extension. I spent many, many hours reading documentation, blog posts, and watching tutorial videos. I went through the official tutorials, and struggled to get development environments working both locally and on production servers.

   Nothing about it was easy. Which is ironic for a system designed to make you more productive. After years of extreme productivity, I felt like I had been thrown back to Square One, and was starting my web development education all over again. Painful, but much-needed. Only after I started to assimilate and internalize the absolute elegance of the Django weltanschauung did I realize just how bad the systems I’d built over the years really were - both from data modeling and coding perspectives. I needed to completely re-think the way I was doing things. It was time for a hard reset.

   After several months of diving in, experimenting, failing, getting frustrated, and finally succeeding, I realized:

   • It’s all about the data model. Get this right and you win. Think long and hard about the data model your organization is built around, and build web apps around that. Get this right and you can build any view, any tool that will do right by the organization. Get it wrong and you’ll struggle forever.
   • Amateur approaches will only get you so far. Learning on a catch-as-can basis will only get you halfway there. You may be a hero in the short term, but in the long run, real accomplishments come from real programmers. It takes time to learn the bigger picture, but if you do it, you win.
   • As a PHP dev, I wasn’t used to having to spend long periods of time reading documentation. I read just enough to get each little job done. Django made me sit back and read everything. To grasp the gestalt of what I was dealing with before trying to move forward.
   • As long as you expect it to be easy, you’ll be disappointed. As with all things in life, there’s the easy way, and there’s the right way. The right way takes extra effort, but pays off in the end. Yes, Django will make you more productive and enable you to solve hard problems quickly - but only after you’ve put in the effort to wrap your head around completely new ways of doing things. The paradox is that Django (and Rails) claim to make web development easier. And it’s true - they do. But only after slogging through a long ramping-up period. More work up front in order to do less work later.

   I’ve been incredibly lucky to be allowed a big stretch of time to learn Python/Django on the boss’ clock. The key is in getting people on board, convincing them that moving the organization forward means training time is required. You can’t just change languages/systems in mid-stream and expect everything to carry on at the same pace it has been. The larger organization has to feel the pain of the current systems as well, and therefore to support the time/expense of real training.

   Why Django?

   Since we were already a PHP shop, why wouldn’t we choose one of the existing PHP frameworks? Yes, we could have gone that route, but none of the PHP frameworks have the credibility or momentum of Rails or Django. I don’t want to say that PHP is a bad language, but it wasn’t built as an object-oriented language from the ground up. The web framework momentum today is in cleaner, more O-O languages. And from what we could see, the PHP-based frameworks themselves didn’t look as clean as Rails or Django. We had learned the hard way, and were ready to move on.

   To be fair, I’ve only experimented briefly with Ruby on Rails, and am not qualified to say a lot about it. What I do know is that there have been a lot of complaints about RoR scalability and stability over the past few years. I’m sure the Rails community would refute those claims as myths, but for whatever reason, they have been prevalent. And in my reading of half a dozen comparisons between the two frameworks, I haven’t yet found one that showed faster development times or better scalability for RoR over Django. When you don’t have the resources to compare things side-by-side for yourself (how long would it take to learn enough about every framework on the market in order to do a truly objective comparison/analysis?), you have to lean on the opinion of developers who actually have. And from what I can tell, most developers who have tried both prefer Django over Rails.

   The fact that the RoR community is much larger than Django’s was certainly a point in Rails’ favor, but not enough to tip the scales for us.

   One of the real “wins” for Django is in its automatically generated “admin” interface. Once your data models have been defined, a mini-CMS is built for you around that data model, with all of the form widgets properly reflecting the models’ relationships. If a field is a ForeignKey to another model, you get a picklist of that foreign model’s instances. If a field is a DateTime, you get slick little date/time pickers. If a field describes a many-to-many relationship with another model, the admin gives you a combo box. If a field is designated required, the right database constraints and field validations are put in place automatically.

   The Django admin isn’t perfect and isn’t suitable for all tasks, but for the most part it “just works,” and saves you tons of time. In most cases, you can forget about ever having to write CRUD apps. In the journalism context, it means the developer can sit down with the reporter, get a good handle on the data models that describe the feature, and the journalist can start entering data immediately, while the developer continues work on the public-facing site.

   People will tell you “Django is a framework, not a CMS.” That’s true, but the presence of the admin means you essentially get a CMS for free, alongside the framework. The admin is a huge win for Django. If the Admin doesn’t serve a particular purpose, no problem - build your own custom workflow on top of the model you’ve defined, outside of the Admin. Rails doesn’t have anything comparable, as far as I know.

   On the flip side, Django is currently missing an equivalent of Rails’ official “migrations” system, which helps keep database schemas in sync when an application’s data models change. Right now, it’s a mostly manual affair. However, there are currently three separate Django projects in the works to address this need. Thankfully, all three developers are now working together to bring their projects into a single unified solution, eventually to be bundled in Django core (listen to Russell Keith-Magee on episode 44 of This Week in Django to learn more about why model migrations is an inherently hard problem).

   Unlike Rails, no one complains about Django not scaling to very high traffic situations, or about ongoing stability problems. And no one complains about the project being run/controlled by difficult people. Django grew out of the real publishing needs of a real-world news publication trying to do difficult things on tight deadlines (hence “The web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.”) It may look like a small player, but it’s battle-hardened. According to Google Trends, interest in Django over the past year has surpassed Rails. Something’s going on.

   

   To reiterate: I am not dissing on Rails. I haven’t used it enough to have an opinion, and I know it’s chock-full of excellent code and good practices. I just have the strong impression Django has an edge in terms of development speed, scalability, quality docs, and no-bull OSS leadership.

   The open sourcing of Django and the creation of the Django Software Foundation opened the doors to wider adoption, and the September release of Django 1.0 - a version guaranteed to be production-ready and stable - will give bean counters confidence.

   But nothing speaks to market confidence in Django more loudly than its blessing by Google. Google engineers have been Python-centric for years (Python creator Guido van Rossum works at Google). But when Google launched AppEngine - a cloud-based web app framework - they released it with just one deployment option: A somewhat modified version of Django. In their eyes, Django was not only good enough to run in heavy production, but also deemed easy enough to learn that they were willing to ask developers to learn it if they wanted to use AppEngine. Any other company would have looked for the lowest common denominator and made AppEngine work with the most popular languages/frameworks first, in order to snare the the most possible developers. Not Google - they let their love for the language and the framework speak for itself with the offering (of course AppEngine will support more languages in the future, but it’s been all-Django so far).

   And oh yeah - Django has a magical pony.

   Digging In

   In September, two of us spent a few days at Google headquarters in Mountain View for the first annual DjangoCon - an international conference bringing together heroes of the Django world with developers who traveled from all corners for the privilege. Heard a lot of great talks, learned heaps about Django best practices, met some great people, etc. Drank the Kool-Aid and got all fired up (video from the complete session is available on YouTube).

   Shortly after, I realized that part of my Django education needed to involve creating my own pluggable Django application, so set to work on a multi-user, multi-group task list management system called django-todo (yes, I could have built a blog engine from scratch like most Django newbies do, but the truth is I have no intention of ditching WordPress any time soon, so doing that would only have been an academic exercise).

   I was able to finish Django-todo in about a week, and eventually got it up onto Google code, where it’s gotten some good feedback and a few dozen downloads. Even got a mention in episode 40 of This Week in Django!

   Django is renowned for its excellent documentation. It’s true that the documentation is incredibly thorough and well-presented, but from a newbie’s perspective, I often found it frustrating, since you don’t know what to search on to find answers to specific problems. Trying to figure out how to make global variables available to my templates, I found nothing, because the answer is in Django’s “context processors.” All well and good if you already know that that’s what you need to search on. Similarly, quite a few of the code examples in the docs show interactions with the Django API through Python shell examples. Those examples do a good job of showing how the API interaction is occurring, but offer no help for the newbie trying to figure out how to actually implement things.

   For example, I found the docs on Django’s pagination functionality completely inscrutable. Shell examples? Why should users be submerged by that level of abstraction?  Show me a web-based example - with working snippets from model, view, and template -  applicable to common scenarios, which I can use as a starting point. Fortunately, I found an excellent blog post on Django pagination in the wild. After corresponding with the author a bit, I was able to modify the official documentation (which is bundled with every Django checkout), submit a Trac ticket, re-build the docs, submit an svn diff patch, and get it accepted into the official docs — which is why you see it there now.

   Hosting on Birdhouse

   If there’s one big downside to working with a framework based on a language that lacks the widespread support of PHP, it’s in deployment. When you work in PHP, you never have to wonder whether your host will support your app or framework of choice. PHP is like air or water - it’s just there.

   If you want to deploy a site with Ruby on Rails, it’s a bit more difficult - you’ve either got to run/manage your own server, or find a web host that supports RoR out of the box. Luckily for Ror developers, the world’s most popular web hosting control panel cPanel supports RoR natively in recent builds.

   Django folks don’t have it so good. cPanel doesn’t yet support Django (though I’ve filed a feature request). So if you’re not managing your own server, you’ve got to choose from among a fairly limited selection. Trouble is, I already run a cPanel-based web hosting service. If I was going to be able to deploy any of the sites I was already starting to build, I wasn’t going to be able to wait around for official Django support in cPanel - I’d have to roll my own.

   Fortunately, this problem had already been largely solved by @mandric, who has been the hidden mentor/kick-starter behind Django activity at the J-School, and who wrote up an excellent summary on setting up Django with cPanel. Based on his notes, I was able to get Django working on a cPanel host myself, and took my own notes on the process. Today, Birdhouse Hosting officially supports Django hosting. Looks like the first official Django user on Birdhouse will be a commercial wine database with a fairly sophisticated data model. More on that as the project comes along.

   A Django Shop

   Long story short, we finally came to a decision: The J-School is now officially a Django shop. For better or worse, we’re embarking on the long road toward unifying all of our toolsets around Python and Django. Which means A) Finally creating that mythical Grand Unified Database that represents the entire organization and B) Rebuilding a whole lot of tools around that new database. There’s a lot more web to the J-School than meets the eye — we’ve got a pretty expansive hidden intranet and a whole lot of less-visible sites to support that most J-School site visitors never see. It’s going to be a ton of work, and there will be plenty of bumps in the road, but I’m excited — not just at the prospect of getting all of our stuff into one bucket for a change, but at the learning opportunities this decision represents.

   Despite the many frustrations I’ve had with the early stages of the learning process, Django development is fun. There’s nothing like watching things “just work,” the feeling that “web development was meant to be this way.” I look forward to not having to struggle against the expectations and limitations of a monolithic content management system, or of the ghostly chains of bad historical decisions. The process is going to rock as much as the final result.

   Wish us luck.

5. And She’s the California Constitution
   → scot hacker's foobar blog | 19 Nov 2008 | 8:09am GMT
   

   OK, it’s over, right? Get over it? Nope. It’s not over. We’re going to fix this. Humans must be free.

6. Long May You Run
   → Literary Kicks | 17 Nov 2008 | 9:57pm GMT
   
   

   1. If you grew up ordering slim paperbacks in school from Scholastic Book Services, you’ll enjoy this Flickr set as much as I do (via).

   2. Neil Young has written an article for the Huffington Post about how the Detroit auto industry can radically alter its corporate culture by embracing green innovation. Young is clearly a transportation freak — aside from his work with Lionel Trains and Linc Volt, he also once wrote “Long May You Run”, a sweet love song about a favorite car. But I get the biggest kick out of the simple fact that Neil Young has written an article for the Huffington Post.

   3. Judith Fitzgerald of Books Inq., responding to an apt appreciation by Billy Collins of a new Dylan publication, says that Leonard Cohen is a better poet than Bob Dylan. Levi Asher says Judith Fitzgerald has got to be kidding. Leonard Cohen wrote “Bird on a Wire” and maybe two other good songs. The album Blood on the Tracks alone outdoes Cohen’s entire career. A midget can’t play basketball with a giant.

   4. “Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons found that doctors interacting with literature were more willing to adopt another person’s perspective, sometimes after just four one-hour workshops.” I believe it. More here.

   5. A 4th Century Greek joke book anticipates Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch. But what about the cheese shop?

   6. OUP Blog presents William Irvine on desire, a topic of infinite mystery.

   7. The Millions remembers Liar’s Poker.

   8. Neil Young is writing about cars, and Lexus is sponsoring original fiction. Participants include Curtis Sittenfeld and Jane Smiley. The collaborative novel’s visual layout is a little too “Lexus” for my tastes, but the experiment is worth a look.

   9. Joan Didion is writing a film for HBO about Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, who will forever be remembered as the subject of a Watergate-era John Mitchell prediction that didn’t come true.

   10. I caught PBS’s broadcast of Filth, about 1960s British decency advocate Mary Whitehouse, last night. Very well done, and quite even-handed. (Note: the fact that I am praising the show has nothing to do with PBS buying a Filth blog ad on LitKicks, and the fact that I watched the show has everything to do with the fact that Roger Waters sang about Mary Whitehouse on Pink Floyd’s Animals).

   11. Wonkette is a good political website, but they clearly know nothing about The Godfather. Nobody told Tessio (Abe Vigoda) that he was going to Las Vegas before killing him on the way to the airport — that was Carlo Rizzo. Jeez.

7. Reviewing the Review: November 16 2008
   → Literary Kicks | 15 Nov 2008 | 5:13pm GMT
   

   There are two ways to talk about the new “Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $45), edited by Christopher Reid. The first is to approach Hughes’s correspondence as an illuminating aesthetic record, the clearest insight we’re likely to get into the mind of a poet viewed by some critics as one of the major writers of the 20th Century. The second way is to discuss, well, “It”.

   Here’s a third way: what the fuck is up with a $45 price tag on a book about poets? Who does Farrar, Straus and Giroux think will buy this book? Have they not heard the news that we are in a terrible retail climate, that even Starbucks is in a crisis because customers are flocking for cheaper coffee to McDonalds? FSG can’t possibly be oblivious to our economic problems, and so the outlines of the pricing conspiracy become clear: far from believing that general readers will spend $45 on this book, they have concluded that general readers won’t even spend $27.50 (a more reasonable price) for it, and therefore they’ll jack up the price to cash in on library sales, their only captive market. Nice scam, but as a taxpayer I object to severely budget-crunched public libraries falling for it.

   If publishers aren’t publishing books for people to buy, then why should the New York Times review these books? And why, I wonder, should I keep paying attention to the New York Times Book Review if they aren’t reviewing books designed for people to buy?

   Yeah, I really do wonder. Anyway, David Orr provides a tolerable review of the Hughes letters, focusing (of course) on the above-mentioned “It”, that “It” being Hughes’s marriage to Sylvia Plath. This biography-heavy NYTBR includes a condescending Sarah Boxer article on Jackie Wullschlager’s Chagall ($40), which includes the surprising remark that Wullschlager “doesn’t seem to like Chagall much”. Boxer doesn’t either. I understand her problems with the Russian-Jewish artist’s late-career “blur of commissions, exhibitions, murals and stained-glass windows”. Then again, Chagall’s peer Pablo Picasso became just as banal — no, worse — in his celebrity years, and the New York Times Book Review put his late-career biography on the front cover. Whichever way the wind blows …

   I can’t get caught up in Graydon Carter’s excitement over Nelson W. Aldrich Jr.’s George Being George. Unlike Carter and much of the NYTBR’s senior staff, I never got invited to one of George Plimpton’s parties, so I feel left out. James Campbell’s summary of A Great Idea at the Time, Alex Beam’s study of Mortimer Adler’s “Great Books” program, is worth reading, as is Ethan Bronner’s consideration of A. B. Yehoshua’s novel Friendly Fire: A Duet. Joe Queenan’s endpaper essay on book reviews that over-praise shows this humorist’s style to be improving.

   The most enjoyable article in this weekend’s Book Review is Jack Shafer on Roy Blount Jr.’s Alphabet Juice: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, Tinctures, Tonics and Essences; With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory. We don’t see a lot of books with semi-colons in their subtitles these days, and based on Shafer’s appreciative highlights I very much want to read this one. We explore why rhyming nonsense words so often start with the letter ‘h’ (”hillbilly”, “hippy-dippy”, “hanky-panky”, “hurdy-gurdy”) and why terms of disapproval employ the letter ‘t’ (”tut-tut”, “tacky”, “tatty”, “twit”). I think many readers will find this stuff as appealing as I do, and the fact that the book is priced to sell at $25 indicates that the publisher actually has hopes for it (think: Eats, Shoots and Leaves) that aren’t captured by the phrase “take the money and run”. A book designed to be bought and enjoyed — how refreshing!

8. Francoise Sagan: Sex, Drugs and Literature
   → Literary Kicks | 14 Nov 2008 | 3:30am GMT
   
   

   Diane Kurys has directed a film biography of rebellious French writer Francoise Sagan, titled simply Sagan. Perhaps inspired by the success of La Vie En Rose, a recent biopic of Edith Piaf, the new film stars Sylvie Testud (who played Piaf’s friend in La Vie en Rose), and follows the story of Francoise Sagan from the publication of her first book to her final days in Normandy.

   Francoise Quoirez –- she took the nom de plume Sagan after the Princesse de Sagan, a character in Marcel Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu –- grew up in a moneyed family, first in Lyon, and then in Paris. An indifferent student, she was nonetheless fascinated by literature. Her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, was published when she was barely nineteen years old. Bonjour Tristesse caused an immediate scandal in France, but despite the outrage of the bourgeoisie it climbed to the top of the bestseller lists. Sagan became a fixture on the French literary scene, known for her reckless lifestyle: drinking, drugs, fast sports cars, and gambling, and for her advocacy of sexual freedom in contrast to the traditional mores of France.

   The movie Sagan depicts the author’s free-spirited (albeit self-destructive) path through life. She plows through two unsuccessful marriages, enjoying a well-financed vie de boheme, attending innumerable all-night parties and becoming sexually involved with both men and women. After her second marriage with Robert James Westhoff broke up, she lived for a long time with stylist Peggy Roche until Roche became ill and died. As Sagan ages, the movie shows her falling prey to flatterers and sycophants. In her later years she refuses to see her son Denis, and at the end of the film she is alone and dying, attended only by her housekeeper.

   Despite all the partying, despite her chaotic life, Francois Sagan was surprisingly productive. She published over twenty novels and twelve pieces for theatre as well as novellas, memoirs, biographies and even scenarios for cinema. In the film we see her sitting on her bed in front of her typewriter, cigarette dangling from her lip, a bottle of Jack Daniels on one hand and a mirror full of cocaine on the other, pounding the substances and pounding the keys, a perpetually intoxicated hipster artist, much like a French literary Keith Richards. She had several brushes with the law due to drugs, and the royalties from her works are to this day impounded by the French government over a tax dispute in conjunction with a shady oil deal.

   Seeing the movie made me want to read Bonjour Tristesse. I bought a paperback copy, a slim volume of only 154 pages. The story involves Cecile, an amoral seventeen-year-old, who goes on vacation to the south of France with her father, Raymond. Raymond is a widower who leads a life revolving around multiple affaires with women, usually short-lived. Cecile, despite her age, is fully aware of her father’s love life. Raymond has rented a well appointed villa, and Cecile, her father, and her father’s mistress of the moment, Elsa, depart for a month of sun and relaxation. The first days are devoted to sensual pleasure. They lie in the sun, they eat, they drink. Through the characters we feel the warmth of the sun and see the cool brilliance of the sea.

   The idyll is interrupted when Anne, an old friend of Cecile’s mother (and Raymond’s dead wife), comes to join them. Raymond and Anne end up making love, Elsa is pushed out, and Anne and Raymond make plans to get married in the fall. In the beginning, Cecile admires Anne, because she has a certain confidence and poise that her and father lack. In keeping with her upcoming marriage to Raymond, Anne begins to take on the role of mother to Cecile. Cecile in the meantime has taken a fancy to Cyril, a twenty-five year old student who is staying at a neighboring villa. Anne catches Cecile and Cyril in the woods in a state of semi-undress, and then attempts to reign in Cecile’s passions, saying that this sort of behavior “will end up in the hospital”.

   Cecile rebels against Anne’s motherly directlion after Anne tries to force Cecile to spend time studying for her baccalaureate instead of seeing Cyril, Cecile plots a way to break her father and Anne apart. Cyril and the cast off Elsa begin masquerading as lovers, provoking Elsa’s father to see her one more time, resulting in tragic consequences for Anne. What shocked France at the time of this book’s publication was the depiction of Cecile’s permissive family life -– she and her father were more like buddies than father and daughter. Even more shocking was the fact that Cecile had sex with Cyril not because she was in love with him, but because she enjoyed the pleasure of their love-making. This was scandalous to French society in the religious and morally strict pre-pill 1950s.

   The amorality and sensualism of the characters seem less shocking today. The novel is written in a matter-of-fact, existential style that evokes Camus. The characters feel –- the sun, the sea, sex, gambling at Cannes, riding in fast automobiles. They don’t think. Cecile experiences guilt for her actions, but once in the languor of the sun the guilt evaporates. Things happen and are accepted. It still seems a bit shocking that a seventeen-year-old in the 1950s was capable of such behaviour, but we understand her character and the consequences of her actions. The psychological study of Cecile is very satisfying, and her relationships with her father and Anne are well drawn.

   Bonjour Tristesse stands today as a fascinating look at a France that no longer exists. It is an invocation of an era, of a time when young people were beginning to seek freedom from the strict bourgeois society of France after the end of the Second World War. In this sense, the novel is similar to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. On the Road is a weightier novel than Bonjour Tristesse, but it too opens a window into the mores of its country in the 1950s, and shows the era through the eyes of characters who no longer accept those mores.

   The book is worth reading, and I also highly recommend the film Sagan. It concentrates on the scandalous aspects of Francoise Sagan’s life, but offers nevertheless a fascinating look at a complex person, and Sylvie Testud is excellent in the title role.

9. In the Name of Love
   → scot hacker's foobar blog | 12 Nov 2008 | 6:37pm GMT
   

   Keith Olberman gets past the bile and hits this one right out of the park. In the name of love, please watch this, and spread it far and wide.

10. 5D Lust & Working Nights
    → Life Less Literary | 12 Nov 2008 | 10:11am GMT
    

    The 30th November launch date for the Canon EOS 5D Mark ii is creeping closer, and my lust for it is growing. I’ve seen many, many posters commenting that Canon have “lost touch with what photographers want” with this new release - well, not what this photographer wants. It seems their main push has been to improve low light performance, and that’s exactly what I’ve been longing for. 25,600ISO doesn’t exactly look usable (though I’m sure I could coax something from it) but there are some amazing results at 3200ISO. Equally important for me, it’s full-frame, which means my 24mm f/1.4L comes into its own and I can finally produce some decent ultra-wide shots in next-to-zero light.

    This is all academic at the moment. Although the lowest UK price has dropped some £500 over the last month I’m still not going to have the money for one of these for a while yet. But I will get one, I’m determined to.

    However, just thinking about the camera has got me excited. After reading a John Berger essay on Paul Strand in Berger’s About Looking, I’m tempted to try some straight documentary portraiture. And what better than to combine the 5Dii’s low light performance, my own preferred working methods, and a straight reading of the title of my recent photo-book Working Nights (which I don’t think I’ve blogged about yet… life’s been getting ahead of me these past 6 months). So I think I will do some portraiture of people who work 9-5 - that is, 9pm to 5am, or at some time during those hours. Minicab drivers, security guards, cleaners, fluffers (the London Underground type, although I suppose possibly also the other type), 24-hour shop workers, kebab-house owners…

    I like this idea.

11. LitKicks Video Presents: Reading Ulysses
    → Literary Kicks | 12 Nov 2008 | 4:09am GMT
    

    Mark my words: this time I’m going to finish it.

12. Do The Right Thing
    → Literary Kicks | 11 Nov 2008 | 4:11am GMT
    

    1. Mike Huckabee has written a book called Do The Right Thing? That’s not Do The Right Thing. This is Do The Right Thing:

    (Note: yes, that’s Samuel Jackson telling everybody to chill at the end of the clip.)

    2. There’ll be a yearlong Poe Festival in Baltimore. I have a feeling Caryn and I (plus some kids) will be checking it out.

    3. Here’s a really interesting piece on Charles M. Schulz’s use of punctuation in Peanuts strips.

    4. While we’re talking comics, let’s not forget Al Capp.

    5. Or this guy.

    6. Eric Rosenfeld of Wet Asphalt is launching a multi-post blog series to develop the idea that the legendary science-fiction novel Dune by Frank Herbert really sucks. Sounds like the kind of crazy idea I usually come up with.

    7. Beatrice.com presents Deb Olin Unferth and Diane Vadino at the Mercantile Library on November 12 in New York City.

    8. Stubborn but lovable New York rabble-rouser Mickey Z. is performing at Bluestockings on the Lower East Side on November 15.

    9. Ian McEwan on Barack Obama and Climate Change.

    10. Andrew Leonard’s wonderful piece on John Leonard begins like this:

    Feeling like a guilty grave robber ransacking a pharaoh’s tomb, I cleaned out my father’s sock drawer on Sunday.

    It ends with the father, son and a nurse happily watching Colin Powell endorse Barack Obama in a hospital room.

13. RIP: Miriam Makeba
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 10 Nov 2008 | 6:36pm GMT
    
14. Reviewing the Review: November 9 2008
    → Literary Kicks | 10 Nov 2008 | 3:57am GMT
    

    It’s a new day. The weather’s nice, Barack Obama is going to be President of the United States, and Jonathan Lethem has written a superb article about Roberto Bolano’s 2666 on the front cover of this weekend’s New York Times Book Review.

    Steering clear of his dreaded coy side, Lethem constructs a frame of reference to help explain Bolano’s dissembled philosophical narrative, and since everybody seems to be talking about Roberto Bolano these days, I sincerely appreciate Lethem’s step-by-step walkthrough of this 898-page epic. Will I read this book myself? Sure, I’ll give it a try, but like Sarah Weinman I feel some skepticism about this current Bolano craze. The Savage Detectives didn’t pull me in, but I’ll try again.

    Lethem is rapturous, of course, about 2666, whereas Akash Kapur’s The White Tiger gets treated rather rudely in this issue by Aravind Adiga. I’ve read several bloggers who do not think The White Tiger deserved to win the Man Booker Prize, and I guess I’ll have to see what I think of this book too. I’ve got a lot of reading to do.

    Robert Kagan praises Carlo D’Este’s Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War, 1874-1945, making no reference to the stunning case against the heroic reputation of Winston Churchill contained in Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke, which was easily the most influential and widely-discussed history book published in the last year. For Kagan to pretend Baker’s book didn’t pop some pinholes in Churchill’s legend is disingenuous. He approaches D’Este’s book reverently, despite the fact that it appears to be a rather redundant biography (aren’t there already about 40 in print?) designed to be bought for Dads and Grand-dads this Christmas. Since September 11, 2001 Winston Churchill has become just as big a cottage industry as Elvis Presley or Jack Kerouac, but Robert Kagan’s review fails to provide critical insight on this point. Instead, he falls right for the gimmick.

    This issue contains two decent poetry pieces, neither as good as William Logan would have written. Peter Stevenson likes Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry by Donald Hall. August Kleinzahler likes James Merrill Selected Poems, and reminds us that James Merrill was of the “Merrill Lynch” Merrills (this fact takes on special resonance now that Merrill Lynch, an anchor of American finance, has just collapsed).

    The endpaper delivers some serious shredded wheat for your Sunday morning, and in fact I appreciate the chewy heft very much. Richard Parker writes about an influential book about the economy, The Modern Corporation and Private Property written by Adolf Augustus Berle in 1932. I learned much I didn’t know. I also learned a few things I didn’t know from a full-page ad for the Sinclair Institute’s “Lifetime of Better Sex” video series (”Explicit and Uncensored! Real People Demonstrating Real Sexual Techniques!”). Well, if ads like this pay for articles by serious writers like Richard Parker, that’s good enough for me. This was an excellent New York Times Book Review for an excellent weekend.

    Finally, farewell to John Leonard, esteemed culture critic who was the editor-in-chief of the New York Times Book Review back in the early 1970s. I hope to see new editions of John Leonard’s collected writings, and I’m proud to have briefly had a chance to meet him at BookExpo in New York City last year. On that day I found him wiry, growly and certainly highly alert — I imagined at the time that he had many more decades of good writing left to do.

15. Reasons to be Cheerful
    → Life Less Literary | 9 Nov 2008 | 12:07pm GMT
    

    [Some thoughts on the election of Barack Obama, edited from my post on the Empty Space message board]

    …Although there are reasons to be concerned, and the Obama presidency can’t possibly live up to all that’s expected of it, I think there are more reasons for optimism than for pessimism.

    I keep looking back to the 1997 Labour landslide (to the tune of “Won’t get fooled again”), but I think there are important differences. Obama seems more intellectually curious than Blair, and more of a pragmatic realist than Mr. “no reverse gear” (though of course it’s hard to gauge these things until the policy-making gets underway). Crucially, Obama has been elected at a time when America is at its lowest point in over 50 years, whereas Blair came to power when the economy was already climbing and everyone was talking about “cool Brittania” ruling the waves. Blair squandered opportunities because he was too scared of upsetting the gravy train, too worried about losing his grip on power. Obama has a far greater opportunity for making radical changes, if only because he has less to lose.

    It’d be foolish to expect overnight miracles, but there have been some very interesting and positive signs since the election result. The most obvious thing to me was the return of loud American accents to London - signs of a people coming out of hiding, no longer ashamed. I also detected a new sense of pride in black people I saw, whether friends & colleagues, strangers serving me in shops, or just kids hanging out around the housing estates of White City (now there’s an ironic name). There also (though I could be imagining it) seemed to be a greater two-way respect, and a greater willingness to communicate between white & black. And I think this is echoed throughout the world, with countries from France to Iran happy to praise Americans for their choice of president.

    I’m not someone who believes in seismic overnight changes in public opinion and behaviour. Generally, I think that the mood of society changes at atomic level, and it’s only over years, decades, even centuries that we can spot big changes. For example, same-sex relationships have become increasing accepted over the last 20 years, but it’s hard to think of any particular day when everyone woke up and said “you know what? Gay people are OK really”. In science, it’s said that you have to wait for a generation of scientists to die before any radical new theory can take hold. I don’t think that Obama’s election suddently makes the world an OK place, but I do think that it’s accelerated the changes which are very gradually breaking down racial prejudices across much of the world, and it bodes well for future generations (should we manage to keep the world in one piece for them…)

16. 
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 9 Nov 2008 | 12:23am GMT
    
    
17. Our Turn
    → Zeigen | 8 Nov 2008 | 2:12am GMT
    

    Yesterday I set my status label as “Our Turn.” I want to expand on that thought a little.

    Look, I’m a sickening liberal. A smug, self-satisfied liberal. A liberal who can’t believe anyone else with a working mind is a conservative. (Sorry! <– look, at least I’m apologetic.)

    My father would always tell us, “Anyone under 30 who isn’t a liberal doesn’t have a heart. Anyone over 30 who isn’t a conservative doesn’t have a brain.” (This quote is frequently misattributed to Winston Churchill. Wikiquote argues it was François Guizot, who is said to have stated, “Not to be a republican at 20 is proof of want of heart; to be one at 30 is proof of want of head.”)

    Well, here I am, 41, still brainless. (WTB brain?) I’m someone who would quote the fictional Matt Santos (played by Jimmy Smits in The West Wing):

    “Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things…every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor.”

    But even as disgustingly liberal as I am, even as much as I supported Obama and rejoice in his victory, and even though I’m surrounded by people who think like me (California voted 61% for Obama, and my county result was 69% Obama), there’s no way I have blinders on and suddenly believe that all the rest of the country is somehow magically united.

    This week I’m full of optimism and hope (despite Prop 8 passing). I cannot wait to see Bush the Junior leave office forever. Some of the immediate changes in policy (accelerated withdrawal from Iraq, and reversal of bans on stem cell research just to name two) have my full support.

    But I know that Obama has made lots of promises, and he’s just a human being. He’s got a lot to live up to. I hope he can turn around some of the 48% who didn’t vote for him and turn them into supporters. But I know how much of an open mind I had for Bush in 2000 and 2004: Not very open at all. I remember how disheartened I was. And I know that 48% of U.S. voters are just as disheartened now as I was four years ago. Practically everything Bush said reinforced my already highly negative opinion of him. That’s just the way I spin. There was almost no chance he could convince me that he was a good president. (I still think Reagan was a bad president, even though history disagrees with me on that one.)

    So I don’t expect many minds to change. If anything, given the daunting challenges Obama faces in January, many who voted for him will turn on him when there are not overnight positive results.

    Conservatives are conservative. Liberals are liberal. Elections are decided by the people in the middle.

    Here’s the most telling factoid for me from the election (from CNN’s exit polls — scroll down to Party ID result section):

    • Democrats cast 39% of the votes, and 89% of them voted for Obama.
    • Republicans cast 32% of the votes, and 90% of them voted for McCain.
    • Independents cast 29% of the votes, and 52% of them voted for Obama (vs. 44% for McCain).

    Like almost all US Presidential elections, this was a close election.

    And yet here we had an election with an unpopular war, an economic disaster, the most unpopular sitting president since Truman in 1952, a vice presidential candidate demonstrably unprepared for office, and a unique candidate at a unique time in history. While you could argue that the electoral results were one-sided (365 to 173), the popular vote certainly was close. Bush took 51% in 2004; Obama took only 52% in 2008.

    So, “Our Turn.” I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts — because Obama will doubtless need to work miracles to make his turn last more than four years.

    Thing is: I think he can. Yes, he can.

18. Peek-a-Sophie
    → Zeigen | 8 Nov 2008 | 1:53am GMT
    

    I have been so remiss in updating the blog that I have not really described how quickly Sophie transitioned from cruising to walking. She’s firmly in the middle of an adorable stage where she has almost figured out walking entirely, but wobbles to and fro as she goes. A few weeks ago she’d handle a step or two. A week later she was good for ten steps. Then twenty. Now her record is probably thirty.

    

19. "Defenders of Marriage" by Roy Zimmerman
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 8 Nov 2008 | 1:10am GMT
    
20. Updike In Winter
    → Literary Kicks | 7 Nov 2008 | 5:00am GMT
    

    First of all, let’s just get this out of the way: yes the article I am writing about today comes from AARP Magazine. Why am I reading AARP Magazine? Am I secretly over 50? Or is it that I will read anything that’s in front of my face and has words on it? Probably the latter. It would at least explain why I have memorized the strange poetry of the list of ingredients in my shampoo.

    Whatever the reason, I found myself reading an article in AARP Magazine by John Updike, The Writer in Winter. It is about the difference in the writing process as a writer ages. While I can’t exactly call myself an Updike fan, I found the article a pleasure to read. I thought Updike’s points (not only about changing technology — turns out he’s a PC) about the approach to and style of writing as a writer gets older were interesting. For example:

    I can appreciate the advantages, for a writer, of youth and obscurity. You are not yet typecast. You can take a distant, cold view of the entire literary scene. You are full of your material—your family, your friends, your region of the country, your generation—when it is fresh and seems urgently worth communicating to readers. No amount of learned skills can substitute for the feeling of having a lot to say, of bringing news. Memories, impressions, and emotions from your first 20 years on earth are most writers’ main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.

    For one thing, just because I’m a pain that way, I think it’s funny for Updike to appreciate obscurity. But I do understand what he means, to an extent. Since it turns out that I’m not actually secretly over 50, and am still under 30 and get told all the time that I have no concept of how young I am which I’m sure is true, I also know from experience that it’s hard to compete with the excitement of being unfettered by things such as knowing what you’re doing. As someone who has written pretty much since I was literate, I know that my earliest attempts were the most joyful. I wouldn’t necessarily call those attempts good writing, though I can look at some of that stuff and see fledgling skill there, but while I’m not advocating for writing crap, I do think it’s a lovely thing to be able just to write. As I got older and worked on the craft of writing, to the point that I spent a long time being stifled by my own perfectionism, I lost that initial joy of feeling like I had something to say. There’s a balance in there somewhere… and I think I’m on a tangent. Let’s move on.

    An aging writer wonders if he has lost the ability to visualize a completed work, in its complex spatial relations. He should have in hand a provocative beginning and an ending that will feel inevitable. Instead, he may arrive at his ending nonplussed, the arc of his intended tale lying behind him in fragments. The threads have failed to knit. The leap of faith with which every narrative begins has landed him not on a far safe shore but in the middle of the drink. The failure to make final sense is more noticeable in a writer like Agatha Christie, whose last mysteries don’t quite solve all their puzzles, than in a broad-purposed visionary like Iris Murdoch, for whom puzzlement is part of the human condition. But in even the most sprawling narrative, things must add up.

    Reason #9,327,622 why I will probably never write a novel: if one must have a sense of the completed work when beginning, I am screwed. Oh well. My issues aside, I wonder — is this truly an issue unique to aging writers or is it just an occupational hazard?

    Finally, Updike gets into the longevity of writing as a career that doesn’t exist in other fields such as sports. A baseball player isn’t going to be playing in the World Series when he’s 80, yet a writer can continue on as long as possible.

    By and large, time moves with merciful slowness in the old-fashioned world of writing. The 88-year-old Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Elmore Leonard and P.D. James continue, into their 80s, to produce bestselling thrillers. Although books circulate ever more swiftly through the bookstores and back to the publisher again, the rhythms of readers are leisurely. They spread recommendations by word of mouth and “get around” to titles and authors years after making a mental note of them. A movie has a few weeks to find its audience, and television shows flit by in an hour, but books physically endure, in public and private libraries, for generations. Buried reputations, like Melville’s, resurface in academia; avant-garde worthies such as Cormac McCarthy attain, late in life, bestseller lists and The Oprah Winfrey Show.

    Updike closes with the following:

    Among those diminishing neurons there lurks the irrational hope that the last book might be the best.

    I remember in a former incarnation of LitKicks, in the section of the site where we accepted member-contributed articles, the submission guidelines said to close author biographies with the writer’s death or his later works, which in many cases is the same thing. I immediately thought of that when I read that line of Updike’s. And I want to ask — are the issues he raises in his article (there are more I didn’t quote here, so I guess you’ll have to read it) unique to the writer’s aging process or are they just parts of the act of writing itself? Discuss.

21. Best wild animal photos of 2008
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 6 Nov 2008 | 8:28am GMT
    
    Oh Hai!
    
    Best Wild Animal Photos of 2008 Announced
    
    via dwaleberry
22. Another bombed Afghan wedding.
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 6 Nov 2008 | 8:02am GMT
    37 killed and 35 wounded when American planes bomb Afghan wedding party.

    "37 civilians including 10 women, 23 children were killed and 35 others including the bride wounded in the bombing and firing of Coalition forces which lasted from 2 p.m. Monday until late that night."
    
    

    I fail to see how this does anything but make people hate us.

    President Hamid Karzai said the issue of civilian casualties was the biggest source of tension with his main backers, the United States, and called on President-elect Barack Obama to make it his top priority to stop the killings of innocents.

    We've been slaughtering people by the thousands for the last seven years in that country. You'd think we were even by now.
23. 
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 6 Nov 2008 | 4:16am GMT
    Via hoyvenmayven
    
    

    SAN FRANCISCO (Nov. 5, 2008)—City Attorney Dennis Herrera today joined Los Angeles City
    Attorney Rocky Delgadillo and Santa Clara County Counsel Anne C. Ravel in filing a petition for a writ
    of mandate with the California Supreme Court to invalidate Proposition 8, an initiative constitutional
    amendment that intends to strip gay and lesbian citizens of their fundamental right to marry in California.
    The ##-page suit filed with the high court in San Francisco this afternoon argues that the California
    Constitution’s equal protection provisions do not allow a bare majority of voters to use the amendment
    process to divest politically disfavored groups of constitutional rights. Such a sweeping redefinition of
    equal protection would require a constitutional revision rather than a mere amendment, the petition
    argues. Article XVIII of the California Constitution provides that a constitutional revision may only be
    accomplished by a constitutional convention and popular ratification, or by legislative submission to the
    electorate.
    
    Today’s civil action by city and county governments follows a similar action filed earlier in the day by the
    National Center for Lesbian Rights on behalf of same-sex couples. Herrera pledged to lead an aggressive
    effort to enlist additional support in the civil litigation from other California cities and counties.
    
    “The issue before the court today is of far greater consequence than marriage equality alone,” Herrera
    said. “Equal protection of the laws is not merely the cornerstone of the California Constitution, it is what
    separates constitutional democracy from mob rule tyranny. If allowed to stand, Prop 8 so devastates the
    principle of equal protection that it endangers the fundamental rights of any potential electoral minority—
    even for protected classes based on race, religion, national origin and gender. The proponents of Prop 8
    waged a ruthless campaign of falsehood and fear, funded by millions of dollars from out-of-state interest
    groups. Make no mistake that their success in California has dramatically raised the stakes. What began
    as a struggle for marriage equality is today a fight for equality itself. I am confident that our high court
    will again demonstrate its principled independence in recognizing this danger, and in reasserting our
    constitution’s promise of equality under the law.”
    
    
    --- News release by SF City Attorney Dennis Herrera

    
    
    

    ---

    
    PS: For those who are blaming 8 passing on black people voting (ahem), I'd like to point out that is a canard. The real culprits are homophobic religious bigots of all colors.
24. An Election Story
    → Literary Kicks | 6 Nov 2008 | 2:44am GMT
    
    

    What will I do now? I won’t have John McCain to kick around anymore. I’ll keep this page of McCain tongue images around in case I start to miss him.

    Naturally, this has been a big-smile day around New York City. But there are dissenters, including some LitKicks regulars who are pointedly not dancing in the streets. I understand that some Americans think “Obama-mania” is causing our country to abandon its common sense. However, I want to point out that much of what we are celebrating today has nothing to do with the personality or mystique or even the healing historical significance of Barack Obama. Myself, more than any other single thing, I’m celebrating the fact that this nation just effectively voted to end the Iraq War.

    This has been a long time coming. I was very disappointed when the American people failed to vote against the war by throwing George Bush out of office in 2004, and I was horrified to think we might do the same thing again by electing John McCain in 2008. By voting for Barack Obama, we just voted for a candidate who opposed the war in 2002 and pledges to bring the troops home in 2009 and 2010. We don’t know if Obama will manage to make this a reality — he may disappoint us, or changing circumstances may make it impossible for him to end the war. But even if this happens, the fact remains that the American people have made their feelings on the war clear. This is a momentous fact in itself, and it’s one of many reasons I say I’m proud of us right now.

    I’m disappointed about a few election results, though. I was hoping to see what Al Franken would do in the Senate. I’m also surprised and disturbed that California has passed a constitutional amendment against gay marriage. It’s amazing that anybody thinks they can promote family values by denying Americans the right to marry.

    Okay … back to the literary scene, and I’m not talking about the poetry of Barack Obama even though, admittedly, his poetry is pretty good. Here’s what else is going on:

    1. The Institute for the Future of the Book is conducting a close reading of a Doris Lessing novel beginning November 10.

    2. Chad Post rediscovers Carlo Collodi’s original Pinocchio, which has been republished with an introduction by Umberto Eco.

    3. Sarah Weinman reads a long-lost Jack Kerouac/William S. Burroughs collaboration. I’m not too keen on the Beat Generation cottage industry and this one doesn’t sound too great, so I’ll probably skip it.

    4. I’ve been waiting a long time (a little humor there) to catch a production of Samuel Beckett’s much-discussed but little-seen Waiting For Godot. Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin will be clowning it up in a new production on Broadway, while Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart are opening in a different production of the same play in London. I hope I’ll get a chance to catch Lane and Irwin, and I’d also like to catch the new staging of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel.

    5. But first — big news — they’re putting on a new production of Rodgers and Hart’s great Pal Joey, based on John O’Hara’s New Yorker sketches at Studio 54. I’m catching a preview in two weeks and of course I’ll let you know what I think.

25. 8
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 5 Nov 2008 | 3:23pm GMT
    

    Inspired by the passage of prop 8 defining marriage as between a man and a woman, I humbly propose for the next election that we amend the consitution to define childhood as between a boy and his dog.

26. Praise Hindu, Buddha and Allah!
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 5 Nov 2008 | 5:42am GMT
    

    Our god is greater than their god!

27. Congrats Obama!
    → Zeigen | 5 Nov 2008 | 3:54am GMT
    

    Zeigen.com calls it for Barrack at 8:04pm PST. I’m very happy with the results so far.

    EDIT: The above was written before I learned that Proposition 8 is passing, early Wednesday morning. So, while I’m very happy with the Presidential race results, the election is overall feeling a little bittersweet to me.

    However, that Proposition 8 was close shows progress overall. Eight years ago, Californians voted on Proposition 22, which added language to California marriage law to formally define marriage in California as being between a man and a woman. That passed with 61.4% voting in favor.

    We wait eight more years, and my bet is Californians will support an initiative that removes this wording. Alternately, in the same way that the courts overturned Proposition 22, it’s possible courts could overturn Proposition 8.

    If you voted for Proposition 8, does your marriage really feel any different yesterday vs. today? I’d urge you to watch this video from Lawrence Lessig, or read this essay by Molly Wood.

28. huh huh — the guy on TV said …
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 5 Nov 2008 | 1:09am GMT
    

    huh huh — the guy on TV said “Tiny Dixville, North Carolina”. Huh huh.

29. Time to Settle in
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 5 Nov 2008 | 12:34am GMT
    

    with a nice expensive Bordeaux and some sweet smelling bud and savor the evening.

30. I’m a Dirty Liberal
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 4 Nov 2008 | 5:28pm GMT
    

    What did liberals do that was so offensive to the Republican Party? I’ll tell you what they did. Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things, every one. So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, ‘Liberal,’ as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won’t work, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor. –The West Wing

31. Hunger by Steve McQueen
    → Life Less Literary | 4 Nov 2008 | 12:24am GMT
    

    My earliest vivid memory of a TV news report was one on the dirty protests at Northern Ireland’s Maze prison. Some earlier events left vague memories - Thatcher’s election as Conservative leader, the rescue of the US hostages from Iran, the Winter of Discontent - but those shit-covered H-Block walls and the hosepipes spraying them down are still clear in my mind as if I’d seen them yesterday.

    So tonight I went to see Steve McQueen’s film Hunger:

    The walls were there, exactly as I remember them. The film’s visual impact - scrub that, the film’s impact - is enormous. I left the cinema three hours ago and have been in some sort of a daze ever since. McQueen has a very minimal but very powerful way of telling a story - for most of the film, there is little dialogue, just a stark succession of images (and sounds) which tell it like words never could. But sandwiched in the middle of all of this visual drama is a single-take static-camera sequence of some 20 minutes in which soon-to-be hunger-striker Bobby Sands explains his intentions to a catholic priest. It’s the most uncomfortable part of a very uncomfortable film, and it kept the audience glued to the screen.

    Hunger is a beautiful, disturbing, mind-opening symphony in shit, piss and blood, and it fuels my rapidly developing admiration for Steve McQueen. Check out this interview with Mark Kermode for BBC’s Culture Show, which talks about Hunger and also his work as official war artist in Iraq.

32. Lessig on Prop. 8
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 2 Nov 2008 | 4:43am GMT
    

    Always impressed by the clarity and perspective of copyright law professor Larry Lessig. His video explication of reasons to vote No on 8 is worth five minutes of your time.

    See also: Amendment Song

33. Self Portrait
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 1 Nov 2008 | 1:52am GMT
    

    Note to self: Look out the window to see if there are any really little kids waiting for treats before putting on the mask and opening the door :)

    

34. why must potato salad be so go…
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 31 Oct 2008 | 8:28pm GMT
    

    why must potato salad be so good?

35. Boo who?
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 31 Oct 2008 | 5:04pm GMT
    
    
    
    

    
    
    
    
    
    
     

    
     
36. The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery
    → Life Less Literary | 30 Oct 2008 | 11:34am GMT
    

    The elegance of the hedgehog is a rather beautiful, if flawed, novel which seems to have been dragged down to earth by a rushed and often over-literal translation.

    The book is narrated by Renée, a lowly concierge with secret highbrow tastes, and features interludes from the diary of Paloma, a precocious twelve year-old who is so appalled by the grown-up world around her that she plans to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday. For most of the first half of the book these two characters are so relentlessly miserable and misanthropic that, had I not been reviewing the book for Amazon, I would have given up long before the halfway point. However, as becomes increasingly clear, the author is setting the scene for a moral lesson, and by the end both characters have learned that you shouldn’t judge by appearances, and that it is better to help others than to sit at home moaning about them. From halfway, the book really picks up pace, and by the end… well, it’s all rather special.

    However, the author doesn’t seem to entirely believe her own teachings. One of the key themes of the book is not to judge people by their appearance or social status, and yet even the most sympathetic characters in the book seem to be completely taken aback at the mere idea of “a concierge who reads”. Also, there is no redemption for most of the upper-class, snobbish and utterly unlikeable residents of Renée’s apartment block: in fact, read differently the lesson of this novel could just as well be “all rich French people are bad, and all foreigners are good (and exotically mysterious to boot!)”

    Several existing reviews of the book use the word “philosophical”, perhaps inspired by Paloma’s “profound thoughts”. Most of these are written in a philosophical way, but aren’t that different from the type of musings-on-the-world which you would expect to find in the diary of many intelligent teenagers. Similarly, Proust is mentioned in a couple of reviews, but the only link I could find is a couple of references to madelines, and the use of other items (jasmine tea, camellias, …) as a similar trigger for memories.

    It’s not always easy to get to the real meaning of the novel, however, as the translation is often stodgy and unsatisfactory. This is most noticable in the translation of colloquialisms, dialect and grammatical oddities: in particular, a key element of the story is that both main characters hate bad grammar; but the errors they choose to vent their fury upon are, in the English translation, so minor as to be imperceptible to all but the most strictly schooled English speakers. The subsequent outrage makes both characters seem like frothing grammar-nazis of the worst order, and for me at least this made me unable to take the characters seriously.

    Throughought the book (although mainly in the first half) I stumbled across awkward sentences which, I guessed, had been too literally translated from the French. This was a huge distraction and greatly spoiled my enjoyment of the book. But if you can fight your way through these then there is a decent reward by the end.

    Buy this book at Amazon UK

37. Castro Theatre, Milk world premire.
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 30 Oct 2008 | 1:51am GMT
    
    
    Moar
    
    Stop the H8!
    Donate!
    No On 8!
38. 
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 30 Oct 2008 | 1:45am GMT
    
39. haven’t pickup guitar in so lo…
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 29 Oct 2008 | 7:58pm GMT
    

    haven’t pickup guitar in so long it’s starting to look like someone else’s

40. Reverse Bradley
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 29 Oct 2008 | 12:08am GMT
    

    Or something.

    For every person who claims he’ll vote for Obama then secretly votes for McCain, I’m sure there’s also a person who publicly claims to support McCain who will really vote for Obama. Right? I mean, isn’t this idea of people who make public statements then secretly do the opposite something that happens all the time, in all directions, for all kinds of different reasons? And doesn’t the fact that it does happen in both directions tend to dampen any statistical significance?

    You know there are people who don’t want to publicly reveal they have changed their mind about McCain and will vote for Obama.

41. Fireplace
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 27 Oct 2008 | 9:23pm GMT
    

    So I bought one of those electric fireplace inserts for my fireplace. I never liked using the Duraflame type logs — there’s a lot of ash, they don’t really burn warm enough, and since they don’t the convection current is not always strong enough to draw the smoke out, so we get backdraft, causing us to open the windows and turn on fans, with the opposite effect of a warm, cozy evening by the fire.

    I’d like to get a gas insert, but my cohort doesn’t respond well to gas appliances and is very sensitive to that sort of thing. So I got an electric one, which really has a very compelling illusion, especially once you put it behind a glass fireplace door. I think this might be corny and I may regret it ten years from now. But right now it’s kind of cool.

    Then I decided the illusion was not complete without sound effects. So I downloaded some fireplace crackling mp3s and hid my little mp3 player behind the fireplace door, and wala*, a complete illusion. It’s fake, it’s dumb, but it’s also cool and I like it.

    * I know how to spell voilà

42. He Died with his Eyes Open, by Derek Raymond
    → Life Less Literary | 27 Oct 2008 | 12:13pm GMT
    

    He Died with His Eyes Open (Factory 1) is a stunning, shocking novel which manages to transcend the genre of crime fiction in a similar way that, for example, James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler do. I rate Raymond above either Ellroy or Chandler though: his books, like the very best of literature, hold the reader’s attention throughout but continue to provoke thoughts and questions long after you have finished reading.

    The book’s narrator is an un-named policeman from “The Factory”, investigating the brutal death of an alcholic writer. While listening to the writer’s diary-like collection of cassette tapes, the policeman finds himself questioning his own life, and increasingly empathising with this intellectual slummer who was uncommonly charitable and yet despised by many of those he came into contact with. By the end of the book, the taped monologues started to affect me, the reader, in a similar way.

    There are also some absolutely wonderfully constructed word-portraits in here. It’s almost worth the price of the book just for the single paragraph where Raymond imagines the possible future trajectory of a junkie’s life, through a sort of forced redemption to a dismal yet insignificant conclusion.

    Click here to buy this book from Amazon UK.

43. Clean Code by Robert C Martin et al
    → Life Less Literary | 27 Oct 2008 | 11:56am GMT
    

    Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, by “uncle” Bob Martin & his associates, is a great book, and one which any developer will learn a great deal from. In most respects, it is a five-star book, but… the title is misleading. By rights it should be called “Clean Java Code”.

    Let me explain: I am an ActionScript developer, and bought this book to improve my code style and structure. For the most part, it has done that: the chapters on naming, comments, functions and classes are absolutely superb. But then, huge swathes of the book are devoted exclusively to Java, and use some fairly complex (and, in my opinion, not very well formatted) code to convey their intention.

    I don’t generally have a problem with using Java-oriented books to learn more general programming concepts (Martin Fowler’s “Refactoring” and O’Reilly’s Head-First Design Patterns are both books I would recommend to anyone, regardless of their language-of-choice), but around 1/3rd of Bob Martin’s book is virtually impenetrable to anyone who does not already have significant Java experience.

    That said, I should re-iterate that this book will be hugely valuable to any programmer. I just wish that they had tried to use a little more pseudo-code and a little less real-world examples, with all of the complexities entailed, and I think a lot could have been done to make the Java code more readable for users of other languages.

    Click here to buy the book at Amazon UK.

44. Yes We Carve
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 27 Oct 2008 | 4:13am GMT
    

    Thanks to YesWeCarve.com, found some excellent Obama stencils. Opted for simpler (read: more do-able) campaign logo background, hoping it speaks for itself (”Oooobama” would have been fun, but Miles’ bedtime was coming up fast). Amy went for the classic black cat (artfully executed), and Miles did a ghost. We’re ready!

    
45. Overheard at Trader Joe’s
    → The Fever Of Phineas | 26 Oct 2008 | 8:51pm GMT
    

    So I’m in line at checkout. A vaguely foreign looking, fashionably dressed lady is checking out. Clerk is energetic, friendly, dutifully cheerful young man, making chit chat with the customers as he works. He notices her unusual blouse, and says, “I like your blouse.”

    She says, “Thank you. It’s my design. I am fashion-designer.” Her accent confirms she’s foreign, but I could not identify it, perhaps Russian, but she’s dark, could be eastern European or Turkish, Iranian or something else. I look more closely at the blouse and it’s got silk-screened images of a photograph of the very woman’s own face, cut and arranged into an abstract geometric design.

    Clerk continues admiring the design as he bags, and them says, “Well, it looks like you’re doing what you should be doing.”

    To which the woman replies. “I am. Are you?”

    The clerk is obviously taken aback, and continues bagging her groceries as he searches for a reply, which he eventually comes up with, a half-hearted, insincere-sounding, “I hope not.”

    The woman offers a vague sounding inspirational message about keeping your dreams.

    She leaves and the clerk greets me. I want to say, “Jeez, you try to give someone a compliment.” But I don’t say that and just say the minimum, “How are you?” “I’m fine”. “Thank you.” And I leave.

    Does her reply sound as unkind to other people as it did to me? Would my offer of solidarity to the clerk have been welcome, or reinforced a message that he should feel bad about what he is doing? What kind of person takes a compliment like that and turns it around to insult the complimenter? Why should a fashion-designer feel like her accomplishments need to be recognized as greater than those of the shop clerk? A fashion-designer can be an awful, unhappy person, and a young grocery store clerk can be a happy, cool, spiritually evolved person. Why the need to define one’s self and others by their occupation? What other accomplishments has the clerk made in his young life that could easily be seem as remarkable that totally transcend his occupation?

    I know there is a cultural aspect to this that I have not quite figured out. Maybe the woman is conscious of her class and was somehow offended by the person of lower social status presuming to be so forward and friendly (even though that’s typical of this culture, and especially characteristic of this store). Maybe her desire to encourage the young man was totally sincere if awkward, and only came across as an insult as a translation loss.

    I recognized this pattern of conversational exchange. I have been on the wrong end of it before.

    I remember once chatting with an old high-school friend who was enjoying some success in a local theatrical pursuit. I said how impressed I was, and how glad I was for her and congratulations and all that. Her response was, “What about you? Are you writing? Have you published? What’s stopping you? I am a success and so can you…” In other words, for her to be successful, it meant I had to be viewed as a failure. Words of encouragement which were rooted in one-upmanship. I had not said anything about feeling like a failure or that I was somehow in need of such encouragement. It was gloating.

    I also remember another time when I was friendly with a group of born again Christians in college. They seemed so beautiful, happy. Their apartment was so warm and comfortable. They were smart and like to laugh, and they made me laugh which was why I liked them. I felt like was being all open minded. I was kind of a punk in those days — but even though my taste in music was the Clash I was open-minded enough to express appreciation for my hosts soft, easy, jazzy, Christian instrumental stuff (I think it was called “Fresh Air” but I’m having trouble finding info on it, maybe this). Point being I was trying to be a good guest by complimenting them on the stuff of their lives they were sharing with me. Which they immediately saw as an opportunity for some Christian evangelizing (what did I expect?): “We’re blessed. And so can you, if you accept Jesus… You can have all of this and more…” basically was their message. They immediately assumed that because I was being a cordial guest paying them a compliment, that meant I was somehow expressing regrets for my own sorry life. I was far too well behaved (some punk, I know) to do what I should have done, something like piss on the record collection.

    But Jesus Christ, can’t people take a compliment?

    This makes me realize a bias I have. To me, evidently, the only proper way to accept a compliment is with humility. To not express humility in the face of a compliment, and worse, to express pride in that which is being complimented on, seems to offend me enough to want to piss on people’s records, or at least blog about it. Maybe this is not the only or even best way to receive a compliment, but it’s where I come from. (Some Christians my hosts were.)

    I’ve over-thought it, I know. But I would welcome any other aspects to this dynamic or this anecdote if anyone has anything to share. I’m sure I’m missing something, and I grant that this story reveals as much about my own prejudices and insecurities as it reveals about anyone else.

    Anyway, that happened.

    BTW, try the lemon crisp cookies from TJ’s!

46. Disk Usage Patterns
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 26 Oct 2008 | 6:55pm GMT
    

    Did some math and took some notes on real-world disk usage patterns by Birdhouse Hosting customers. Short version: The vast majority of users will never utilize even a tiny fraction of the massive amounts of space being offered by some of the largest/most-oversell-crazy web hosts out there.

47. Prof. Noam Chomsky and Prof. Howard Zinn endorse Barak Obama
    → Yes Justice Yes Peace! | 25 Oct 2008 | 7:56am GMT
    And so do I.
    
    Chomsky: In swing states vote Obama without illusions
    
    
    Howard Zinn: Vote for Obama but direct action needed
    
    
    And Colin Powell, Scotty McCullen, and Oprah!
    
    
    "Obama is the one for me" - Peggy Seeger
    
    
    I look forward to protesting President Obama.
48. No more land line
    → Zeigen | 24 Oct 2008 | 6:38pm GMT
    

    I wrote earlier that we were on the fence about cutting the land line. Not any more.

    After monitoring, the only calls we received were useless calls from surveys or businesses. We didn’t make any significant number of outgoing calls.

    I never got a replacement answering machine, so if friends did call, it just rang and rang (confusing to them).

    Now when they call, they get a referral to my cell phone, and after 30 days, that’ll go away too.

    The last four digits of our land line used to be 8486, which spells out TiVo, and I enjoyed that it was an easy mnemonic. I do miss that part.

    Everything else, I don’t miss.

    We do still have a couple of phones connected that don’t require power, so in an emergency we can call 911. (I haven’t tested, but we may be able to call 800 numbers as well even without service.)

    Ditched your land line lately? Plans to do so? If not, why are you keeping it? As far as I can tell, the main reasons to keep a land line now are:

    • You have a whole bunch of talkative people in your house who chat on the phone a lot and require unmetered local calls.
    • You don’t have any options for decent cell reception
    • You really need a working modem for some reason (Series1 TiVo?)

    I’m happy to save $30+ a month.

49. All good…
    → Life Less Literary | 23 Oct 2008 | 10:44pm GMT
    

    I finally fixed my problem with blog comments (turns out the database was locked), and at the same time upgraded to the latest wordpress and tidied things up about around here.

    Next step… re-install my funky K2K design, and then actually start writing posts again.

    Meanwhile, you can always catch me on Twitter.

50. Jaman Movies and Shorts launches on TiVo Video Downloads
    → Zeigen | 23 Oct 2008 | 4:33pm GMT
    

    Earlier this year we announced a partnership with Jaman. Today, we announced Jaman has launched.

    Starting right this second, you can begin downloading some amazing art house, independent and foreign films to your broadband-connected TiVo Series2 or Series3 DVR. There’s also a wide selection of anime.

    To get started, either visit Jaman’s TiVo site or on your DVR head to TIVo Central -> Find Programs & Downloads -> Download TV, Movies, & Web Video -> Jaman Movies & Shorts. You can find more information over at tivo.com.

    Jaman has been a great partner to work with, and I’m very excited about the new content available today for TiVo customers.

51. If Jesus Ran For President
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 21 Oct 2008 | 7:10am GMT
    

    Zowch!

    Music: The Dirty Dozen Brass Band :: Flyin’ High (In The Friendly Sky)
52. This Band Could Be Your Life
    → scot hacker's foobar blog | 20 Oct 2008 | 7:37am GMT
    

    This week at Stuck Between Stations:

    This Band Could Save Your Life
    Roger, on classic tracks that have a bpm count of around 100, matching that of the human heart:

    A Reuters article this week reported that the Bee Gees’ falsetto-fortified 1977 disco hit ‘Stayin’ Alive,” which clocks in at 103 beats per minute (bpm), almost perfectly matches the 100 per minute rate that the American Heart Association recommends for chest compressions during cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

    Strange Fruit
    Roger, recalling the indelible power of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” and the effect it had on his young mind. Connected to recent revelations about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and their sons’ reactions to the revelation.

53. Our doorbell just rang…
    → Zeigen | 20 Oct 2008 | 2:18am GMT
    

    …and it was the cat.

54. Credit Union ONE Launches Online Member Center
    → Extra! Extra! | 15 Oct 2008 | 7:41pm GMT
    

    Congratulations to Credit Union ONE for launching an enhanced website which provides members additional features and benefits.

    CU ONE approached Extractable to help design a website that would “provide exceptional value to CU ONE members by delivering outstanding products and services anytime, anywhere.”  By having the website function as a 24 hour online member center (by empowering members to do more of their financial tasks online and by organizing information on the website more clearly) the website is poised to be a success!

    Some great CU ONE site features include:

    • Secure loan and mortgage applications
    • Ability to open and fund an account online
    • Wide array of financial calculators
    • Numerous online forms
    • Detailed online map
    • Numerous online forms
    • Dynamic Frequently Asked Questions
    • Print and send-to-friend features
    • Online help demos
    • Online chat support

    In the next month CUONE will be working to implement RSS feeds on their website and dynamically pull in rates into specific webpages in order to ensure their members have the latest rate information possibly available.

    If you live in Michigan (or surrounding states) and are looking for a stable financial institution that still feels “personal” please make sure to visit Credit Union ONE.

    
55. “QA-ing” Your Analytic and SEO Strategy
    → Extra! Extra!