Technology
Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker
by Levi Asher on Monday, March 10, 2008 01:01 pm
Fiction and non-fiction writer Nicholson Baker, whose wide-ranging, exploratory intellect towers over most of his peers in both fields, has just written the most controversial book of his career, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization. Since Baker's career already includes industry-changing attacks on the destructive practices of library archivists, a novel about phone sex that figured in the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, a novel about a frustrated American who very badly wanted to assassinate President George W. Bush, an intentionally goofy study of John Updike that breaks every rule of serious literary criticism, and a charming debut novel about a man riding an escalator in his office building, this makes Human Smoke very controversial indeed.
Baker's thick book, a chronological log of historical snippets ending in 1941, attacks our cherished myths about World War II as a "good war", and presents much evidence that this war's most incredible horrors could have been avoided if America and Great Britain had not chosen to take advantage of Nazi Germany's foolish military strategy by turning Hitler's inevitable defeat into their own plan for economic and military domination of Western Europe and the Pacific Rim.
Human Smoke is not a fun book. It could not be further from the pleasures of The Mezzanine or the sweet Room Temparature. I hope the critical discussion that follows will be an intelligent one. So far, Commentary doesn't think much of the book, but Mark Kurlansky in the L. A. Times considers it important.
I was glad to have the opportunity to discuss Human Smoke in a roundtable organized by Ed Champion for his Filthy Habits blog. The first of five installments is now up, and you can read my first impressions as well as those of others here.
I hope the myth-shattering aspects of this book -- Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt come off very badly, for instance -- do not distract readers from Baker's more positive suggestion that the much-mocked philosophy of pacifism, as embodied by Mahatma Gandhi and many other hardworking activists of the pre-World-War-II era, may still offer the world hope for its future.
I agree with this message, and I am very impressed with Nicholson Baker's bravery in writing this unusual book.
A couple of other notes. The talented blogger Maud Newton's site has been unconscionably hacked by pharmaceutical spammers, and all her posts deleted. Fortunately, she was able to restore everything, but relying on a hosting service's backup tapes to preserve a site of this stature is too close for comfort. I'd like to urge all bloggers to practice self-reliance: create your own backup CDs or DVDs of your SQL databases, preferably using the simple "mysqldump" utility or any other form of SQL backup. A hosting service's backup facility is not usually guaranteed in a hosting contract's terms of service, and even if it were, the hosting service can only be held financially responsible for the cost of the service, not the (often much greater) value of the content. Bloggers: backup thyselves.
What with the inhuman horrors of World War II and the aggravating injustice of spammers deleting valuable content, I find some meaning in this very short movie, "Dimwit Daryl Meets Vexed Volcano", by my younger daughter Abby, who has just discovered that she can create her own animated GIFs. Like the vagaries of life itself, this animation loops forever.
Freeness
by Levi Asher on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 10:58 pm1. Random House, trying something new, is giving away free PDF copies of Charles Bock's acclaimed novel Beautiful Children. Like every other blogger who has talked about this, I think Random House is doing a very good thing (The Millions blog even asked them to explain why they're doing it). Bud Parr says the future is here. This latest e-book experiment brings us closer than the Kindle does, at least.
Okay, but what about the book itself? Jeff Bryant loves it, but I'm standing here waiting for it to grab me, and I'm just not grabbed. My first impressions weren't good, not because the book has been over-hyped but because the "Dirty Vegas" setting feels to me like a cliche. I had the same problem, unfortunately, with another clearly worthy and well-written new novel, The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr. I guess you could say that James McManus' Positively Fifth Street filled me with enough "Dirty Vegas" to last a decade. Opening the new PDF, Bock's heavy, mannered narrative just doesn't pull me in:
They chatter and jibe, passing pitchers of soda, reaching for slices with favorite toppings. Chins shine with grease.
It's hard to say what makes us like or not like a book. I guess I don't enjoy reading about people who can't eat pizza without making a mess.
2. The vibrant Carolyn Kellogg will be covering literary Los Angeles at the L.A. Times' blog, Jacket Copy.
3. Okay, so sometimes I'm wrong. And when I'm wrong, I'll admit it. I said that literary commentators shouldn't underestimate the Quill awards, which celebrated the book business with a more populist/commercial sensibility than the National Book Awards. I still say the Quills could have grown into a success in a few years, and I liked the idea of a higher-profile and less "literary" books award, but founding sponsor Reed Business Information is being sold by parent company Reed Elsevier, and that's the end of the Quills. Now I feel stupid for watching that entire terrible telecast last year. Hey, I once went to a USFL game too.
4. Do critics damn Chinua Achebe with faint praise?
5. Garfield minus Garfield is your daily dose of Dada.
6. It's not getting as much attention as the Beautiful Children giveaway, but Random House is also moving beyond DRM for audiobooks. Good moves.
7. I wish I could go to this, but I'm already going to this.
8. I don't share much of a world view with Mr. "God And Man At Yale", but, what the hell, farewell to William F. Buckley.
9. I've got the new Nicholson Baker book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, and I'm very excited about this fact.
Okay, but what about the book itself? Jeff Bryant loves it, but I'm standing here waiting for it to grab me, and I'm just not grabbed. My first impressions weren't good, not because the book has been over-hyped but because the "Dirty Vegas" setting feels to me like a cliche. I had the same problem, unfortunately, with another clearly worthy and well-written new novel, The Delivery Man by Joe McGinniss Jr. I guess you could say that James McManus' Positively Fifth Street filled me with enough "Dirty Vegas" to last a decade. Opening the new PDF, Bock's heavy, mannered narrative just doesn't pull me in:
They chatter and jibe, passing pitchers of soda, reaching for slices with favorite toppings. Chins shine with grease.
It's hard to say what makes us like or not like a book. I guess I don't enjoy reading about people who can't eat pizza without making a mess.
2. The vibrant Carolyn Kellogg will be covering literary Los Angeles at the L.A. Times' blog, Jacket Copy.
3. Okay, so sometimes I'm wrong. And when I'm wrong, I'll admit it. I said that literary commentators shouldn't underestimate the Quill awards, which celebrated the book business with a more populist/commercial sensibility than the National Book Awards. I still say the Quills could have grown into a success in a few years, and I liked the idea of a higher-profile and less "literary" books award, but founding sponsor Reed Business Information is being sold by parent company Reed Elsevier, and that's the end of the Quills. Now I feel stupid for watching that entire terrible telecast last year. Hey, I once went to a USFL game too.
4. Do critics damn Chinua Achebe with faint praise?
5. Garfield minus Garfield is your daily dose of Dada.
6. It's not getting as much attention as the Beautiful Children giveaway, but Random House is also moving beyond DRM for audiobooks. Good moves.
7. I wish I could go to this, but I'm already going to this.
8. I don't share much of a world view with Mr. "God And Man At Yale", but, what the hell, farewell to William F. Buckley.
9. I've got the new Nicholson Baker book, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, and I'm very excited about this fact.
Dancing With Benny Lava
by Levi Asher on Monday, February 18, 2008 10:30 amComix, Existential, Fiction, Film, Internet Culture, News, Politics, Psychology, Publishing, Technology
1. Filthy Habits, Ed Champion's new website, seems like the kind of place that'll allow a writer to stretch. Here's my first contribution there, an attempt at punditry titled The Politics of Boasting.
2. McSweeneys presents: Famous Authors Predict the Winner of Super Bowl XLII.
3. A useful in-depth conversation on the business of literary translation has been going on between Three Percent, Words Without Borders and The Center for Literary Translation.
4. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, this music video shows what happens when totally unqualified people have too much fun with translation. But the translators can't even be having as much fun here as these great dancers.
5. If they can make a movie about Larry Flynt, they can make a movie about William M. Gaines, the brave publisher of Mad Magazine. I'll go see it.
6. Here's a book that doesn't get talked about nearly enough these days: The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. When I was a philosophy student at college, one professor assigned this and two other Freud books (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and the memorable Civilization and its Discontents) for a course on Philosophy of Mind. I found it ironic that I was reading primary texts from the founder of psychology that no psychology student in my school would be required to read. Sigmund Freud should be read more often. Like William James, he is a dynamic and agreeably brisk writer, his books filled with sharp and highly personal observations. Maybe I'll take a cue from Bookslut and try to discuss some of Freud's books here on LitKicks soon.
7. I'm not completely clear on what this online community project Open Library will do that makes it distinct from Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. But hey, I've missed the boat before, so who knows? The involvement of folks like Brewster Kahle makes this literary-minded open source development worth watching.
8. More literary moments on YouTube, courtesy of Kenyon Review.
9. Do you understand?
10. Check out Unquiet Desparation, a community poetry outfit that periodically publishes its work in PDF format (download latest issue here). I'm not sure what long-term value the PDF format holds for online literature, but it's another way of getting the work out there, and the design possibilities speak for themselves.
11. I couldn't make it to the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference last week in New York, but here are Kassia Krozser's parting thoughts.
12. I often wonder why we literary bloggers so rarely critique film adaptations of novels we like. Too easy a target? Maybe. This person's response to Atonement lays out (more clearly than I did) what the film subtly lost from Ian McEwan's novel even as it retained most of the details and major plot points. On the optimistic side, I've just enjoyed another recently released literary British film very, very much, and I'll be sharing my excitement about this film in these pages soon.
2. McSweeneys presents: Famous Authors Predict the Winner of Super Bowl XLII.
3. A useful in-depth conversation on the business of literary translation has been going on between Three Percent, Words Without Borders and The Center for Literary Translation.
4. Going from the sublime to the ridiculous, this music video shows what happens when totally unqualified people have too much fun with translation. But the translators can't even be having as much fun here as these great dancers.
5. If they can make a movie about Larry Flynt, they can make a movie about William M. Gaines, the brave publisher of Mad Magazine. I'll go see it.
6. Here's a book that doesn't get talked about nearly enough these days: The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. When I was a philosophy student at college, one professor assigned this and two other Freud books (Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious and the memorable Civilization and its Discontents) for a course on Philosophy of Mind. I found it ironic that I was reading primary texts from the founder of psychology that no psychology student in my school would be required to read. Sigmund Freud should be read more often. Like William James, he is a dynamic and agreeably brisk writer, his books filled with sharp and highly personal observations. Maybe I'll take a cue from Bookslut and try to discuss some of Freud's books here on LitKicks soon.
7. I'm not completely clear on what this online community project Open Library will do that makes it distinct from Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg. But hey, I've missed the boat before, so who knows? The involvement of folks like Brewster Kahle makes this literary-minded open source development worth watching.
8. More literary moments on YouTube, courtesy of Kenyon Review.
9. Do you understand?
10. Check out Unquiet Desparation, a community poetry outfit that periodically publishes its work in PDF format (download latest issue here). I'm not sure what long-term value the PDF format holds for online literature, but it's another way of getting the work out there, and the design possibilities speak for themselves.
11. I couldn't make it to the O'Reilly Tools of Change Conference last week in New York, but here are Kassia Krozser's parting thoughts.
12. I often wonder why we literary bloggers so rarely critique film adaptations of novels we like. Too easy a target? Maybe. This person's response to Atonement lays out (more clearly than I did) what the film subtly lost from Ian McEwan's novel even as it retained most of the details and major plot points. On the optimistic side, I've just enjoyed another recently released literary British film very, very much, and I'll be sharing my excitement about this film in these pages soon.
Ten Links
by Jamelah Earle on Friday, February 15, 2008 01:05 am-- The first-ever recording of Allen Ginsberg's Howl discovered in Oregon.
-- Prizewinning author Zadie Smith attacks literary prizes. Yeah.
-- More Harry Potter in the future? Maybe.
-- A review of a Nabokov biography. Woot.
-- There's soon to be a new eBook publisher out there. It's currently in beta.
-- In related news, er, opinion, eBooks will never be our friends.
-- Shot through the heart and you're to blame, this Jeffrey Eugenides-edited short story collection gives love a bad name. (Look, if I ever get a chance to quote Bon Jovi, I'm taking it.)
-- When everyone's an author: creative writing classes are hip.
-- Reading culture on the rise in Cambodia.
-- Movies based on books are staying truer to source material. Students everywhere who watch the movie the night before class rejoice
-- Prizewinning author Zadie Smith attacks literary prizes. Yeah.
-- More Harry Potter in the future? Maybe.
-- A review of a Nabokov biography. Woot.
-- There's soon to be a new eBook publisher out there. It's currently in beta.
-- In related news, er, opinion, eBooks will never be our friends.
-- Shot through the heart and you're to blame, this Jeffrey Eugenides-edited short story collection gives love a bad name. (Look, if I ever get a chance to quote Bon Jovi, I'm taking it.)
-- When everyone's an author: creative writing classes are hip.
-- Reading culture on the rise in Cambodia.
-- Movies based on books are staying truer to source material. Students everywhere who watch the movie the night before class rejoice
Mysterious Strangers
by Levi Asher on Thursday, January 24, 2008 11:12 am1. When a friend pointed me to The Mysterious Stranger, I could make no sense of what appeared to be an odd piece of animated YouTube weirdness involving Mark Twain and Satan in a "Davey and Goliath" version of "The Devil Went Down To Hannibal" ... until a trip to Wikipedia cleared things up. The Mysterious Stranger is based on a unfinished story Mark Twain worked on for twenty years, and the story catches Twain in an uncharacteristically stark, allegorical (and perhaps even Kafkaesque) mode. Now that I understand the background to this animated short film, I'm rather impressed by it.
2. I just attended the New York City reading debut of Mark Sarvas's upcoming novel Harry, Revised at Jami Attenberg's Boxcar Reading with Michael Dahlie, Lynn Lurie and Ceridwen Dovey. Harry, Revised is about a young widower embarking on an apparent search for self, and I cannot help imagining that there must be a lot of Mark Sarvas in the character of Harry, who (in the chapter Mark read last night) attempts to anchor his self-image by purchasing a French literary classic.
One special thing about Harry, Revised is that readers of Mark's Elegant Variation blog have been able to watch and enjoy its process of creation, and this is certainly a unique and effective way to build up anticipation for an upcoming book release. Harry, Revised hits the stores in April.
3. Earlier in the evening, before the Boxcar reading, Ed Champion and I formed an electronic mob to crash Against the Machine author Lee Siegel's conversation with John Freeman at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho (though we were well-behaved and unfortunately had to leave after only 20 minutes to get to the Boxcar in time). Lee Siegel's new book aims to be a rabble-rousing cry of protest against the looming evils of internet culture, though many of us who dwell happily online won't let Lee forget that he only began to develop this hatred of the internet after getting caught in a buffoonish attempt at dominating it.
Lee Siegel has had an acclaimed career as a pugnacious cultural critic (though the above-mentioned "sprezzatura" incident didn't help his reputation), but my encounters with his writing in the New York Times Book Review have revealed an ambitious but intellectually careless writer. He reinforced this impression last night with wild statements like "the internet is 80% porn". Siegel seems to lack the restraint and sense of balance that any cultural critic ought to have. He'll probably sell a lot of copies of Against the Machine -- blunt rhetoric does sell -- but I feel sorry for anyone who wastes their time reading it.
4. "A New Cultural Revolution" may not be the best title for this encouraging survey of the state of popular literature in China, since the actual phrase "Cultural Revolution" was used as a guise for Mao Zedong's brutal crackdown on personal, social and artistic freedom in the 1960s and 70s. But this is an important article, and I'd love to learn more about China's vast book industry.
5. I don't love being greeted with a plea for my email address, but I like everything else about PublicIntegrity.org, a public repository of government documents relevant to current political issues. The new exhibit "Iraq: The War Card" offers a simple and effective search engine documenting the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq.
6. Action Poets -- thanks for your patience with the new software, which is (obviously) still in beta. Coming soon: monthly archives, a better response system, other stuff. It's also a little slow, and I can fix that too (my MO as a software developer, as you may have noticed, has always been "launch first, fix later"). Hang in there, everybody ... and it's good to see old friends popping back in.
2. I just attended the New York City reading debut of Mark Sarvas's upcoming novel Harry, Revised at Jami Attenberg's Boxcar Reading with Michael Dahlie, Lynn Lurie and Ceridwen Dovey. Harry, Revised is about a young widower embarking on an apparent search for self, and I cannot help imagining that there must be a lot of Mark Sarvas in the character of Harry, who (in the chapter Mark read last night) attempts to anchor his self-image by purchasing a French literary classic.
One special thing about Harry, Revised is that readers of Mark's Elegant Variation blog have been able to watch and enjoy its process of creation, and this is certainly a unique and effective way to build up anticipation for an upcoming book release. Harry, Revised hits the stores in April.
3. Earlier in the evening, before the Boxcar reading, Ed Champion and I formed an electronic mob to crash Against the Machine author Lee Siegel's conversation with John Freeman at the McNally Robinson bookstore in Soho (though we were well-behaved and unfortunately had to leave after only 20 minutes to get to the Boxcar in time). Lee Siegel's new book aims to be a rabble-rousing cry of protest against the looming evils of internet culture, though many of us who dwell happily online won't let Lee forget that he only began to develop this hatred of the internet after getting caught in a buffoonish attempt at dominating it.
Lee Siegel has had an acclaimed career as a pugnacious cultural critic (though the above-mentioned "sprezzatura" incident didn't help his reputation), but my encounters with his writing in the New York Times Book Review have revealed an ambitious but intellectually careless writer. He reinforced this impression last night with wild statements like "the internet is 80% porn". Siegel seems to lack the restraint and sense of balance that any cultural critic ought to have. He'll probably sell a lot of copies of Against the Machine -- blunt rhetoric does sell -- but I feel sorry for anyone who wastes their time reading it.
4. "A New Cultural Revolution" may not be the best title for this encouraging survey of the state of popular literature in China, since the actual phrase "Cultural Revolution" was used as a guise for Mao Zedong's brutal crackdown on personal, social and artistic freedom in the 1960s and 70s. But this is an important article, and I'd love to learn more about China's vast book industry.
5. I don't love being greeted with a plea for my email address, but I like everything else about PublicIntegrity.org, a public repository of government documents relevant to current political issues. The new exhibit "Iraq: The War Card" offers a simple and effective search engine documenting the Bush administration's justification for the war in Iraq.
6. Action Poets -- thanks for your patience with the new software, which is (obviously) still in beta. Coming soon: monthly archives, a better response system, other stuff. It's also a little slow, and I can fix that too (my MO as a software developer, as you may have noticed, has always been "launch first, fix later"). Hang in there, everybody ... and it's good to see old friends popping back in.
Did Steve Jobs Just Say This?
by Levi Asher on Thursday, January 17, 2008 12:26 pmConsider my mind boggled. Here's a quote, published in the Bits Blog (Business, Information, Technology, Science) at the New York Times, referring to Amazon's Kindle e-book device:
"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
Wow. I am generally fond of Steve Jobs and his skinny laptops and ever-morphing iPods, but he is way off here. I am confused how Steve must spend his time and I guess he must live a sheltered life, because I see people around me reading all the time. All you have to do is sit on a subway or train and observe the numerous book-absorbed minds around you to know that Steve Jobs is wrong. Oh, there's also the fact that publishers rack up about 35 billion dollars in book sales each year, roughly as much as the music business or the film business.
I think Steve Jobs is a smart guy, but he sure missed this call.
"It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore."
Wow. I am generally fond of Steve Jobs and his skinny laptops and ever-morphing iPods, but he is way off here. I am confused how Steve must spend his time and I guess he must live a sheltered life, because I see people around me reading all the time. All you have to do is sit on a subway or train and observe the numerous book-absorbed minds around you to know that Steve Jobs is wrong. Oh, there's also the fact that publishers rack up about 35 billion dollars in book sales each year, roughly as much as the music business or the film business.
I think Steve Jobs is a smart guy, but he sure missed this call.
Geek Alert
by Levi Asher on Thursday, January 10, 2008 02:50 pmThere's so much to catch up on. There's Simone de Beauvoir's butt (via Maud). There's a new Charles "The Graduate" Webb novel out that David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times doesn't like one bit. There's an amazing year (unfortunately, the year was 1963) at New York City's 92nd Street Y (I sometimes go to literary events at the Y; the best ever was probably John Irving with John Leonard and film director George Roy Hill in the mid-80's).
There's also an illustrated new T. C. Boyle short story called I Dated Jane Austen (via Knowledge Problem). I'm dying to read Oil!, the 1927 business novel by Upton Sinclair that is the basis of the new film There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (when Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, I'm interested).
But I can't catch up on any of this today, because I've been busy geeking out with poetry software. It's hard to explain why I have had to work so long on the LitKicks technical overhaul that's been going on since December of last year. I know many people who enjoyed the old Action Poetry pages on LitKicks are wondering why I had to take the old software down in the first place. Basically, the old software was written in Java, as the entire previous version of LitKicks was, and I've now migrated the site to PHP (using the excellent WordPress content delivery system and a few other open source packages). This involved a physical move to a new server in December, and once this move was complete I had to throw away all my old Java poetry code and begin rewriting the whole thing in PHP. That's what I've been doing for the past several weeks.
I'm also adding some features to the poetry platform, like (sneak preview) member profiles listing all of each member's poems, a rating system (which I'm not ready to show you yet) and a new page layout/design that will hopefully break less often than the old one (old-timers know that Action Poetry wasn't always smooth sailing over in Java-land).
It's an interesting fact that until last month's switchover, LitKicks was one of the very few literary blogs or websites that did not run on PHP (a language that emerged along with blog culture, and is most remarkable for its simplicity and powerful ease of use) or Perl or other "scripting language". Java is an older and more complex programming language that's widely used by companies and organizations around the world. I wrote the original Java version of LitKicks myself of course, back in 2000, and back then I assure you my homegrown Jive-based Java-based content delivery system was some damn well-written state-of-the-art software. I still write Java code for a living (as do many of my techie peers, since Java work pays better than PHP work), but even an old school Java guy like me has to admit that PHP, not Java, is the best language for content-rich web applications. In fact, I'll break ranks with my Java peers and admit straight out that many companies in the financial, legal, health care, government and other industries pay too much to build applications with Java that they could build more simply in PHP and AJAX (I always like to toss a heavy dose of AJAX into my web applications, which you'll hopefully be noticing once the new poetry software is up).
So, am I geeking out enough for you? Now that I've joined the PHP flock, by the way, the only outlier I can think of in the literary blogosphere is Mark Thwaite's Ready Steady Book, whose URLs reveal it to be a Microsoft .NET based site. I've also done some work in .NET (specifically C#, which is a lot like Java), and I can confidently say that PHP is better. I hope Mark Thwaite's having an easier time with his .NET based blog than I did with my Java blog, though. Another literary site with an unusual technical foundation is Michael Orthofer's Complete Review and Literary Saloon, which appears to use very simple flat HTML. This is not a highly scalable approach, but it's got something to recommend it (LitKicks was also flat HTML-based before I created the Java version in 2000).
Anyway, speaking of Java, I would like to thank the company that hosted LitKicks.com for the past seven years, Servlets.net. If you ever need expert Java hosting, Servlets.net is the place to go. I'm now running LitKicks on one of the major PHP hosts, but let's give it a few months to see if I ever start thanking them.
I was hoping I'd be able to re-launch Action Poetry today, but I'm not there yet. Very soon, however, I will place a notice on the top right panel (where it currently reads "Tech Notes") asking members of the old Action Poetry site to re-activate their memberships on the new site. Shortly thereafter, I'll be inviting anyone and everyone to create a login on the new site, and then we can share some poems. Thanks again for your patience, and I look forward to getting back to a focus on literature, not technology, here on LitKicks.
There's also an illustrated new T. C. Boyle short story called I Dated Jane Austen (via Knowledge Problem). I'm dying to read Oil!, the 1927 business novel by Upton Sinclair that is the basis of the new film There Will Be Blood, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson (when Paul Thomas Anderson makes a movie, I'm interested).
But I can't catch up on any of this today, because I've been busy geeking out with poetry software. It's hard to explain why I have had to work so long on the LitKicks technical overhaul that's been going on since December of last year. I know many people who enjoyed the old Action Poetry pages on LitKicks are wondering why I had to take the old software down in the first place. Basically, the old software was written in Java, as the entire previous version of LitKicks was, and I've now migrated the site to PHP (using the excellent WordPress content delivery system and a few other open source packages). This involved a physical move to a new server in December, and once this move was complete I had to throw away all my old Java poetry code and begin rewriting the whole thing in PHP. That's what I've been doing for the past several weeks.
I'm also adding some features to the poetry platform, like (sneak preview) member profiles listing all of each member's poems, a rating system (which I'm not ready to show you yet) and a new page layout/design that will hopefully break less often than the old one (old-timers know that Action Poetry wasn't always smooth sailing over in Java-land).
It's an interesting fact that until last month's switchover, LitKicks was one of the very few literary blogs or websites that did not run on PHP (a language that emerged along with blog culture, and is most remarkable for its simplicity and powerful ease of use) or Perl or other "scripting language". Java is an older and more complex programming language that's widely used by companies and organizations around the world. I wrote the original Java version of LitKicks myself of course, back in 2000, and back then I assure you my homegrown Jive-based Java-based content delivery system was some damn well-written state-of-the-art software. I still write Java code for a living (as do many of my techie peers, since Java work pays better than PHP work), but even an old school Java guy like me has to admit that PHP, not Java, is the best language for content-rich web applications. In fact, I'll break ranks with my Java peers and admit straight out that many companies in the financial, legal, health care, government and other industries pay too much to build applications with Java that they could build more simply in PHP and AJAX (I always like to toss a heavy dose of AJAX into my web applications, which you'll hopefully be noticing once the new poetry software is up).
So, am I geeking out enough for you? Now that I've joined the PHP flock, by the way, the only outlier I can think of in the literary blogosphere is Mark Thwaite's Ready Steady Book, whose URLs reveal it to be a Microsoft .NET based site. I've also done some work in .NET (specifically C#, which is a lot like Java), and I can confidently say that PHP is better. I hope Mark Thwaite's having an easier time with his .NET based blog than I did with my Java blog, though. Another literary site with an unusual technical foundation is Michael Orthofer's Complete Review and Literary Saloon, which appears to use very simple flat HTML. This is not a highly scalable approach, but it's got something to recommend it (LitKicks was also flat HTML-based before I created the Java version in 2000).
Anyway, speaking of Java, I would like to thank the company that hosted LitKicks.com for the past seven years, Servlets.net. If you ever need expert Java hosting, Servlets.net is the place to go. I'm now running LitKicks on one of the major PHP hosts, but let's give it a few months to see if I ever start thanking them.
I was hoping I'd be able to re-launch Action Poetry today, but I'm not there yet. Very soon, however, I will place a notice on the top right panel (where it currently reads "Tech Notes") asking members of the old Action Poetry site to re-activate their memberships on the new site. Shortly thereafter, I'll be inviting anyone and everyone to create a login on the new site, and then we can share some poems. Thanks again for your patience, and I look forward to getting back to a focus on literature, not technology, here on LitKicks.
How They Roll With E-Books in Japan
by Levi Asher on Monday, December 3, 2007 01:11 pm1. I mentioned in my recent disdainful coverage of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader that electronic books will succeed only when they can be read on general purpose mobile devices instead of dedicated hardware. This Tech Crunch article offers a surprising glimpse at the success of mobile-phone based popular literature in Japan, where (if I understand this correctly) it is becoming common practice not only to read novels on handhelds, but also to write them on handheld devices. I'm not sure if I understand why it makes a difference whether a novel is written on a mobile device or not (nor can I imagine myself writing a novel with my thumbs). But I do think that pundits of electronic literature should read this article and see what lessons they might pick up.
2. The Litblog Co-op, after quietly missing a beat this fall, is back! We've picked a very good novel this time around: The Farther Shore by debut novelist Matthew Eck. Dan Wickett provides a good introduction on the LBC site to this harsh, slim novel about a small group of American soldiers lost in an East African battle zone. I'll be running an interview with Matthew Eck here on LitKicks next week, and pointing to other LBC sites that will also feature the book.
3. Matthew Eck's novel paints a descent into a heart of darkness in East Africa, near a beach, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that Eck was inspired by Joseph Conrad, who painted a descent into a heart of darkness in West/Central Africa, near a river. This is Joseph Conrad's 150th birthday, noted at The Guardian (via Conversational Reading) and The Independent (via Saloon).
4. Charles Bukowski a Nazi? Nobody who understands this charming writer's friendly and welcoming attitude towards literature and life will take such nonsense seriously.
5. But please do take this nonsense seriously, from Seattle's The Stranger: "The Levels of Greatness a Fiction Writer Can Achieve in America" by the irrepressible Tao Lin. Finally the glass ceiling is revealed.
6. Had a very nice time at the Small Press Book Fair in midtown Manhattan yesterday. I enjoyed a trivia challenge featuring New York Review of Books kicking the slightly sorry butts of A Public Space, who really only shined when the questions involved Edgar Allan Poe. Tim Brown was a deft and witty MC, and as Ed describes a few of us litbloggers in attendance confronted him afterwards with our desire to compete for the title. Elsewhere in the show, I enjoyed running into travel author Darrin Duford and meeting the mastermind behind Disruptive Publishing, a seriously underground publisher of odd and highly censorable books including the remains of the legendary Olympia Press catalog.
UPDATE: Eric Rosenfield from Wet Asphalt sends another report from the trivia challenge, including a great action shot of me and Ed Champion whispering the correct answer to a question that floored the A Public Space group as Sarah Weinman knowingly smiles. If you are curious, the correct answer to the question was "Becket". No, not Beckett: Becket. The question, naturally, was "who got killed in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral".
2. The Litblog Co-op, after quietly missing a beat this fall, is back! We've picked a very good novel this time around: The Farther Shore by debut novelist Matthew Eck. Dan Wickett provides a good introduction on the LBC site to this harsh, slim novel about a small group of American soldiers lost in an East African battle zone. I'll be running an interview with Matthew Eck here on LitKicks next week, and pointing to other LBC sites that will also feature the book.
3. Matthew Eck's novel paints a descent into a heart of darkness in East Africa, near a beach, and I wouldn't be surprised to find that Eck was inspired by Joseph Conrad, who painted a descent into a heart of darkness in West/Central Africa, near a river. This is Joseph Conrad's 150th birthday, noted at The Guardian (via Conversational Reading) and The Independent (via Saloon).
4. Charles Bukowski a Nazi? Nobody who understands this charming writer's friendly and welcoming attitude towards literature and life will take such nonsense seriously.
5. But please do take this nonsense seriously, from Seattle's The Stranger: "The Levels of Greatness a Fiction Writer Can Achieve in America" by the irrepressible Tao Lin. Finally the glass ceiling is revealed.
6. Had a very nice time at the Small Press Book Fair in midtown Manhattan yesterday. I enjoyed a trivia challenge featuring New York Review of Books kicking the slightly sorry butts of A Public Space, who really only shined when the questions involved Edgar Allan Poe. Tim Brown was a deft and witty MC, and as Ed describes a few of us litbloggers in attendance confronted him afterwards with our desire to compete for the title. Elsewhere in the show, I enjoyed running into travel author Darrin Duford and meeting the mastermind behind Disruptive Publishing, a seriously underground publisher of odd and highly censorable books including the remains of the legendary Olympia Press catalog.
UPDATE: Eric Rosenfield from Wet Asphalt sends another report from the trivia challenge, including a great action shot of me and Ed Champion whispering the correct answer to a question that floored the A Public Space group as Sarah Weinman knowingly smiles. If you are curious, the correct answer to the question was "Becket". No, not Beckett: Becket. The question, naturally, was "who got killed in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral".
Amazon’s Kindle: Loser, Loser, Loser
by Levi Asher on Monday, November 19, 2007 09:09 am
They have got to be insane. Amazon's new E-Book Reader, the Kindle, is now out on the market. It's generating a lot of chatter from OUP Blog to Engadget to Gizmodo to O'Reilly to Silicon Alley Insider to Newsweek, where Steven Levy goes on at some length about the way this device may shake up the mess that is book pricing:
Launched
by Levi Asher on Monday, June 11, 2007 09:08 pmThose of you who hang out with me in real life know I've spent the last three months near-drowning in an exciting but quixotic website development project for a non-profit organization that I consider one of the most influential centers of activity on the international literary scene right now. I'm talking about Words Without Borders, and I'm happy to announce that our new totally revamped website is alive.
Our technical goal with this redesign was to enable a smoother content flow and to help readers dig deeper into the site's considerable archives of modern and classic international literature. I'm really proud of the site we built, not only as a person who cares about world lit but also as a software developer, because it's probably the most ambitious content delivery application I've ever developed.
I make a living building content delivery and search systems, and I've worked on some ambitious arts-related projects, including Bob Dylan's lyric search engine and Pearl Jam's complete and highly detailed concert chronology. But I've never done anything on the scale of the new Words Without Borders system, which cross-references stories, poems, essays, plays and other literary texts from every region of the world by numerous categories including time period, language, country, topic and physical environment. The new site layout also features context-aware tag clouds on every page (that is, unlike most site-wide tag clouds, these clouds change from page to page to represent the context of each specific page).
If it sounds like I'm bragging about my software -- well, I am. But software is hardly the point of this site, so I also want to point to the great work of Dedi Felman, Susan Harris, Alane Mason, Samantha Schnee, Caryn Dubelko, Dina Pearlman, Darrian Rodgers, Blake Radcliffe and Jeff Gregory, who have all been a pleasure to work with. I also want to say that I really hope the new site gets through its first week without crashing, and the odds are 50-50 at best (okay, 90-10).
(Note to anyone who reads the thanks message on the current WWB front page: yes, that programmer extraordinaire is me, going by my other name (which reveals me to be the love child of Marc Chagall and Gertrude Stein), as I generally do when I am employed as a techie. Long story, not even worth hearing. Just browse and read through some of the writings on this site, and get a wider view of the world we live in than you had yesterday).
Our technical goal with this redesign was to enable a smoother content flow and to help readers dig deeper into the site's considerable archives of modern and classic international literature. I'm really proud of the site we built, not only as a person who cares about world lit but also as a software developer, because it's probably the most ambitious content delivery application I've ever developed.
I make a living building content delivery and search systems, and I've worked on some ambitious arts-related projects, including Bob Dylan's lyric search engine and Pearl Jam's complete and highly detailed concert chronology. But I've never done anything on the scale of the new Words Without Borders system, which cross-references stories, poems, essays, plays and other literary texts from every region of the world by numerous categories including time period, language, country, topic and physical environment. The new site layout also features context-aware tag clouds on every page (that is, unlike most site-wide tag clouds, these clouds change from page to page to represent the context of each specific page).
If it sounds like I'm bragging about my software -- well, I am. But software is hardly the point of this site, so I also want to point to the great work of Dedi Felman, Susan Harris, Alane Mason, Samantha Schnee, Caryn Dubelko, Dina Pearlman, Darrian Rodgers, Blake Radcliffe and Jeff Gregory, who have all been a pleasure to work with. I also want to say that I really hope the new site gets through its first week without crashing, and the odds are 50-50 at best (okay, 90-10).
(Note to anyone who reads the thanks message on the current WWB front page: yes, that programmer extraordinaire is me, going by my other name (which reveals me to be the love child of Marc Chagall and Gertrude Stein), as I generally do when I am employed as a techie. Long story, not even worth hearing. Just browse and read through some of the writings on this site, and get a wider view of the world we live in than you had yesterday).
