Herein are described suc­cinctly, and with affil­i­ate links, some things I’ve got­ten recently to read. Said links are there, you know, in case you want them (because they’re good). Or in case you want any­thing else of the sort one gets from this large online retailer.

Just sayin’.

A per­sonal his­tory of OuLiPo, from a recent mem­ber. The result­ing first-​​person asyn­chro­nous faceted work is an hon­est biog­ra­phy and expla­na­tion of the constraint-​​players’ club, rang­ing from its pre­his­tory to future. Too many folks con­fus­edly con­sider OuLiPo to be a rather mathematically-​​tinted but oth­er­wise mun­dane facet of Sur­re­al­ism, or a more reasonable-​​seeming and obses­sively con­sis­tent ‘Pat­a­physics, but as Becker makes clear: it ain’t. And rightly not. A pleas­ant read, and to be frank a game-​​changer for the man­ner of read­ing among the sus­cep­ti­ble: Even now I think back and search for the oulip­ian con­straint Becker must have used in fram­ing the book….

Sure, Byron was weird. But the thing I’ve been learn­ing belat­edly about his­tory and the lives of all those old-​​timey writin’ lit­er­ary folks is how much of their lives is spelled out and yet remains opaque. I mean, I scan old mag­a­zines and as a result end up read­ing a goodly num­ber of them, and yet that sense of, “WTF?!” as an oblique satire or anony­mous homage rolls by remains a con­stant part of my expe­ri­ence. This book, a focused slice of pol­ished the­sis no doubt, clears at least a few cob­webs I’d stum­bled into through the years: sure Byron got around. But Cather­ine Lamb, the crazy minx, comes off in this detailed analy­sis an awful lot like Sher­lock’s Irene Adler: the one from the TV show, I mean, with the naked­ness and the extreme smarts and the gift of pubic hairs in blood and all. And then there’s occultists chan­nel­ing posthu­mous Byronic verse, and the pas­tiches that were ragged satire, and… it gets a bit thick, a bit too schol­arly now and then. But there’s a cos­tume drama or two tucked in here, with naughty bits and verse and all that good stuff.

I’m a sucker for Delany’s prose. I grabbed this as a “sim­i­lar work” from some­thing else I haven’t yet read, and am lik­ing it quite a bit (not least because it helps me under­stand a bit more of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, which even a col­lege junior (as I was when it first came out) couldn’t hope to really ever fathom. (And yes, I’ve nested paren­the­ses three deep. (We’re talk­ing about Delany!) Four.)).

Amus­ingly enough, I’m read­ing Mina Loy because the edi­tor bought a mag­a­zine from me on eBay. What? You didn’t think I Googled the buy­ers of my per­sonal col­lec­tion of zines? Feh; fat lot you know. Hav­ing spent way too much time lately among the orig­i­nal works of the Pro­gres­sive Era, I now want to stage an anar­chis­tic shuffle-​​up: Woolf, Loy, and Voltairine.

Some­where between Zinn and Holton on a scale of History-isn’t-quite-what-you-were-taught (and Wouldn’t It Be Funny if the Con­ser­v­a­tives Actu­ally Knew What They Were Defend­ing), Levin­son is about the prospect of reform. Which is to say: Con­sti­tu­tional Con­ven­tion, to clear up some of those long-​​standing “dif­fi­cul­ties” that remain to date among our hal­lowed fore­fa­thers’ argu­ments, mis­un­der­stand­ings, and crappy opaque com­pro­mises. Yeah, that’ll happen.

I am in love, frankly. Sci­ence books that are self-​​consciously about nar­ra­tive: not rehashes of the god­damned Great Men in Lab­coats trope, but nar­ra­tives that explain the sci­ence itself. How is it we came to be allowed to think of an Ice Age? How is it we came to con­sider that there could be other “men”, miss­ing links, pro­to­hu­mans, and ulti­mately the actual hob­bits and giants we now accept? And (per­haps most inter­est­ingly so far) how is it we’re allowed to call the Pleis­tocene any­thing at all, to shift its mode of def­i­n­i­tion away from the habits and norms of ear­lier con­ven­tions to the point where it’s defined com­pletely dif­fer­ently from other epochs: by ice, and Man. Sci­ence books should be more about sci­ence, like this one is. Not a pop­u­lar­iza­tion so much as well-​​written lit­er­ary crit­i­cism Of Sci­ence!

It’s that time of year. O what might she have wrought, had she sur­vived? Read every­thing she ever wrote, I’m telling you. I’m re-​​reading this, and then her short sto­ries, which I have here by my hand, complete.

I’m mak­ing books. You’ll see. Hendel’s book comes highly rec­om­mended, and I sec­ond that It’s not advice, nor crafts­man­ship, but rather a col­lec­tion of thoughts from many hands on how the text block works (and is worked). Inter­views with design­ers from many places, clas­si­cists and out­ra­geous tweak­ers, with an empha­sis on how and why any book looks like it does. And what that look means.

I remem­ber the cud­geling I got years ago when Cliff Pick­over asked on a fan list whether he should use Palatino or Times New Roman for his “new book”, and I said he should actu­ally use a real font, and design the pages, and make it nice. I don’t know what Sec­ond Cul­ture those folks came from, but they really abhorred the notion that font choice and design was as impor­tant as the damned words on the page. I’d post a link, but I can’t recall the names of the books he finally printed in Palatino, alas.

And there you have it.

Every­body Says I Should Read This. And I’m read­ing it. Slowly, actu­ally, not least because I see, then think. Back up and see, then think. Too easy to have all one’s assump­tions and obser­va­tions brought together and miss the points of fail­ure. So far, I haven’t found those points of fail­ure, so I’m read­ing slowly, think­ing, and read­ing more. But I knew imme­di­ately he was right.

Imag­ine a manic twelve-​​year-​​old Eng­lish [sic] boy was allowed to out­line a novel pub­lished in install­ments in the Boy’s Own Adven­ture Mag­a­zine. Lovely fluff, with meta­tex­tual stuff sprin­kled lightly through­out. Is it sus­tain­able? I’m told it may well be.

For more than a decade I’ve been left in the posi­tion of clean­ing up after dying cura­tors and col­lec­tors. It’s an object les­son in where col­lec­tion actu­ally exists: surely the boxes of pyrog­ra­phy or ele­phants or first edi­tions that waited for your atten­tion are no longer your col­lec­tion, now you’re dead. The record is gone, the record you bore in your mem­ory, the sparks of recog­ni­tion and anec­dotes that you car­ried in response are unreach­able now.

So my father’s mem­o­ra­bilia from NACA and the first days of NASA Lewis Research are now bare pho­tographs, snips of glass­ware blown by the mas­ters in the instru­ments lab, parts of plaques and trin­kets received to honor unknown anniver­saries and projects. My mother’s gar­den­ing books are reduced to a mere pend­ing book sale, her cards iden­ti­fy­ing the jum­bled gar­den she kept as use­less as the plowed-​​over drought-​​purged gar­den itself. My wife’s par­ents, with their own accu­mu­lated and uncu­rated prece­dents, are a genealog­i­cal mys­tery story too baroque for pub­li­ca­tion: Wait, I thought she was mar­ried to him—who’s this? My lost friend Nancy, her­self a col­lec­tor of col­lec­tions, can no longer tell me the dif­fer­ence between the fancy milk glass and the cheap junk, or help me split the Vic­to­rian pyrog­ra­phy from the 1930s kit-​​work she accu­mu­lated in her over-​​small house. My god­fa­ther, who came to this coun­try as if to a fron­tier, with a patent in hand that made a (small) for­tune by stuff­ing your attics full of pink floss, his few passed-​​along bits and bobs sal­vaged from a 1900s Wiener Wek­stätte youth adorn our shelves and con­found vis­i­tors by being so out of place.

There’s a swirl of pop-​​cultural pop-​​psychology float­ing in and around col­lect­ing these days, focused on throw­ing “hoard­ing” glibly down in front of any cul­tural vari­a­tion that shows respect for mem­ory and mate­r­ial cul­ture at the expense of geo­met­ric aus­ter­ity. Yet at the same time we love love love our tum­blrs full of scanned ephemera, the RSS feeds filled with snap­shots snipped from 1940s girlie rags and punk zines, the free (as in what? “beer”?) books scanned up to the cease-​​and-​​desist line of 1923. The past is all the more a for­eign coun­try because it’s kept in other people’s houses, in muse­ums and libraries and pri­vate col­lec­tions we not only never visit but we alien­ate by call­ing “pathological”.

If the autis­tic or the over-​​social, the reli­gious or the ruth­less athe­ist, the cap­i­tal­ist or the vol­un­teer can all make their valid claims for respect in our soci­ety, let this be a claim on behalf of remem­ber­ers. Not those pun­dits who resort to big-​​story macro­scopic remem­ber­ing: where were you when Large Things Hap­pened that Tie Us Together? But the sup­pos­edly triv­ial mem­o­ries, a.k.a. “the fab­ric of his­tory”. The baby thrown out with the bath­wa­ter of hoarding-​​abhorrence is the baby of our ori­gins in fam­ily and cul­ture, the fine wires that con­nect the stuff we read in his­tory text­books to our selves.

Know­ing about all this junk is the only way I know to own your own his­tory, the his­tory of your place and your peo­ple. Oth­er­wise, any­thing not in your head is reduced to a cun­ning sci­ence fic­tion story. When we who breathed leaded gaso­line fumes are all dead, it’ll only be the key fobs for lost man­u­fac­tur­ers, the unin­sta­grammed images of gas sta­tions with uni­forms, the mis­folded road maps and quaint mag­a­zine ads that reminds us what that thing meant to the world.

I’m sit­ting within a few inches of a Chi­nese check­ers board (of Nancy’s, since hers is the stra­tum we’ve recently uncov­ered after the purge of a decade’s deaths) and sit­ting next to it is a lit­tle wooden con­trap­tion: a block of mahogany-​​stained oak carved cun­ningly with chan­nels, dec­o­rated with rotat­ing screw-​​hinged caps, hold­ing mar­bles for the game. It’s a purpose-​​built wooden Chi­nese Check­ers marble-​​holder, man­u­fac­tured by the Van Raden Prod­uct Com­pany of Alter Road, in Detroit. Not by Mil­ton Bradley, but rather by… some dude. You Google it, you’ll find this men­tion, and some forums some­where on some wood­work­ing topic where a fel­low found another and doesn’t know what to make of it.

The address was 3136 Alter Road, Detroit. Go look it up on Google Maps. Zoom right on in there. Look real close at the house where this man lived. What you see? Zoom out a cou­ple blocks. Look at those blocks, that wide-​​ranging per­fu­sion of lawn they seem to have. Spa­cious, yes? Gone. Zoom out a bit more, look at that den­sity. The voids. The holes.

Gone. Gone. Gone.

Tell me the story of the man who made the mar­ble hold­ers, back in the Chi­nese Check­ers craze of the late Depres­sion, in that vacant lot in Detroit. The neigh­bor­hood in which he arose is filled with empty blocks, five or six houses left stand­ing on entire city blocks. Res­i­den­tial blocks. Each miss­ing house once filled with things that ended up dead stuff, the chaff of history.

I don’t know what to do about this. It’s no eas­ier to fix than the death of peo­ple is, and some days it seems there’s no more point in attribut­ing “his­tory” to key fobs from dis­ap­peared car deal­er­ships and framed prints on the wall behind the pho­tographed dead than there is to sav­ing emp­tied milk con­tain­ers and screws in a baby food jar. And yet there is in fact some­thing hap­pen­ing, some­thing odd and inter­est­ing. I can find my godfather’s name here and there in the grow­ing mem­ory of the world and some­how draw the flimsy links through pub­lic records to the point where we can drive up to his Ross­ford neigh­bor­hood and rec­og­nize things from pho­tographs he took the day the house was new, in 1927. I see my father’s tiny image stand­ing at the side of pho­tos in the NACA Lan­g­ley his­tory archives, and that same day he clearly took a pic­ture for him­self, stand­ing look­ing back the other way. And I go to see Van Raden’s street, now, after wars and more wars and aban­don­ment and scour­ing, and if I want take back his hand­i­work and make a new (though flimsy) link of sorts.

Not every thing’s a reminder, nor of his­tor­i­cal import. But the abil­ity to tell mean­ing­ful sto­ries about those things is as far as I know the only way we have to explain them and ourselves—the sort of expla­na­tion that’s not merely our strength but also our responsibility.

This just to say that as I sell things off, and purge and lighten and dis­card, I’m doing all I can to weave as well. Be reminded; that’s all I ask. Be reminded.

It’s been a few years now that Bar­bara and I have been lis­ten­ing to books on CD as we fall asleep. Usu­ally a chap­ter at a time, unless we, umm… you know, retire early. We’re lucky to have a well-​​stocked pub­lic library, with a lot of works by excel­lent and engag­ing lec­tur­ers who aren’t too whiny or hes­i­tant. And (thank good­ness) not all of them are about Greece and Rome.

I mean we haven’t avoided Greece and Rome; nobody can. We’ve had our share of Great Men, Great Philoso­phers, Emper­ors, Tyrants, the world accord­ing to Thucy­dides and Plutarch. Even the “periph­eral” [flag that word for a moment, please] his­to­ries we lis­ten to—the Celts, Asia Minor, Persia—and the off-​​brand facets his­to­ries like the Ara­bic Sci­en­tists and the Enlight­en­ment and stuff always touch on Greece and Rome, democ­racy and empire. Wind, fire, all that kind of thing.

Maybe it’s osmo­sis, or maybe it’s some­thing more akin to repeated slaps on the fore­head with a rolled-​​up scroll while broadly mouthing “LOOK AT THIS AGAIN”, but I’m start­ing to notice some­thing I never saw before. Like any nerd, I grew up learn­ing about Greece from brightly col­ored mythol­ogy books, and Rome out of Spar­ta­cus and such. Our Social Stud­ies classes were all about 1970s Patri­o­tism tinged by that 1950s Dewey-​​would-​​lose-​​against-​​Marx Cold War cit­i­zen­ship stew and ped­a­gog­i­cal style our teach­ers were raised up in. The Found­ing Fathers read about Greece and Rome, inspired by the democ­ra­cies of Athens and the repub­lic of Rome, blah blah. So maybe one needs to have been slapped on the fore­head a few dozen times with the actual his­tory before that patina of received wis­dom starts to crack.

Viz: it wasn’t that simple.

Now any actual his­to­rian will prob­a­bly be mak­ing the Wry Smile Eye-​​rolling Face now. But of course most of us well-​​educated liberal-​​thinking tech­ni­cal folks don’t bother too much, no mat­ter how earnestly and effi­ciently we pur­sue knowl­edge, to dive down the rat-​​hole of Nar­ra­tive Construction.

It all starts with Egypt, of course. I remem­ber as a Junior High stu­dent I would get up at 6am (for some rea­son) and watch a tele­vi­sion class about Egypt­ian art on some broad­cast Cleve­land TV sta­tion. And you know they men­tion this Ptolemy dude, either the Emperor (wait, Egypt didn’t have Emper­ors, it had Pharaohs) or the Astronomer Who Was Very Wrong (wait, were there Astronomers or just Astrologers before Coper­ni­cus?), and it grad­u­ally sinks in and it’s only decades later that some other tid­bit or two falls into place and Whoa whoa hang on, that was Greek no I mean Mace­don­ian I mean Hel­lenis­tic stuff, and Egypt was the south­west­ern Alexan­drine empire, and—hang on—so the Romans were deal­ing with the rem­nants of Alexander’s empire?! and so on. Strands con­geal, like DNA pre­cip­i­tat­ing in an Eppen­dorf tube (hey, that’s my heritage).

And then Whoa, hang on again—so all those let­ters from Bible dudes and Greek Philoso­phers and Geome­ters were from Turkey?! and then But but the “demo­c­ra­tic” Athe­ni­ans were total ass­holes and thank good­ness Alexan­der came along and… well, and so on. Call it “provin­cial­ism giv­ing way slightly to pay­ing atten­tion”, or maybe “nar­ra­tive recon­fig­u­ra­tion”, depend­ing on your background.

Clearly it isn’t that his­tory is writ­ten by the win­ners, but rather that they write and dis­trib­ute the Cliff’s Notes.

OK. That’s the setup. Here’s one point: Seems as though the writ­ers’ guide­lines for Cliff’s Notes demand Clear Sep­a­rat­ing Bound­aries. Starts and End­ings. First there was Egypt where they had mum­mies, then there was Greece where peo­ple were Demo­c­ra­tic, then there was Rome with fuzzy hel­mets and brass skirts, then there was (in advanced classes) Byzan­tium [sic] which was pretty for­eign and dis­si­pated like Paris or some­thing, then after a bit over there you get your King Arthur, and then after a while some­body turns on the lights and we get tele­scopes and gun­pow­der, and here we are. Nice clean starts and fin­ishes, all along the way, like dinosaurs being wiped out so lit­tle furry mam­mals can turn into Balu­chith­erium [sic] and stuff.

Surely there’s a name for this fal­lacy. “Con­sec­u­tivism” maybe? “Dis­cretism”? It is a fal­lacy, clearly; I’ve been hang­ing around a half-​​hour a day with actual his­to­ri­ans, the sort who sound as if they fling their arms around as they read, and they’ve man­aged to get choco­late in my peanut but­ter all over the place: Greeks in my Egypt, and [Greek!] Asia Minor in my Rome, and Celts in the Bible, and Per­sians in my Sparta, and cats and dogs liv­ing together.

And thence: Self-​​definition is all about the bound­aries. Insert a cunningly-​​crafted keen insight about bound­aries here, one that touches on all the expected things about brain­wash­ing, self-​​definition, provin­cial­ism, cul­tural pride, homo­gene­ity and diver­sity, ingroups and out­groups, wind, fire, all that kind of thing. Shorter ver­sion: “Hey, you know those are just Cliff’s Notes you’re read­ing, right?”

All this? All this was crys­tal­lized into an anas­ta­mos­ing tis­sue of rant because I just read Alexis Madri­gal talk­ing about the awful awful things that have hap­pened in our Amer­i­can cul­ture and the grow­ing dichotomy and the wor­ries every­body in pub­lic pol­icy expresses all the time about jobs and decline and inequal­ity.

It makes me sad, every time I see this sort of thing. Sad because of the box it grows within. It’s the provin­cial Star­tups Will Restore Us box, the Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment box, the one dec­o­rated with fine print that counts how many jobs (asses in office chairs!) and Press Releases From Tech Spin­offs (young peo­ple are the only ones who ever do any­thing inter­est­ing!) and with a star-​​shaped brass sticker that reads “Now with 25% more EARNEST HOPE!”

This box is a spe­cial kind of con­ser­vatism. Burke would rec­og­nize it, because it’s all about not break­ing things. Fun­da­men­tally it’s a ubiq­ui­tous habit of want­ing to restore—and more insid­i­ously, to expect change to hap­pen the same way it hap­pened last time—and it relies on the Cliff’s Notes ver­sion of eco­nom­ics and his­tory. As though the only peo­ple in an econ­omy were a few charis­matic megafauna, a corps of earnest and essen­tially non-​​profit bureau­crats, and the undif­fer­en­ti­ated Classes: upper, mid­dle, poor, from which those oth­ers arise now and then by spon­ta­neous gen­er­a­tion. All tidily pro­jected into the future by extrap­o­la­tion: The big charis­matic megafauna of the future must be like the ones of the past, tech­ni­cal not artis­tic, lead­ing not inte­grat­ing, rebuild­ing not repur­pos­ing. The insti­tu­tions of the future will be like our recently lost ones (com­pa­nies, states, all that), the best Mankind has found in the March For­ward. And the Classes, well, they are out of bal­ance.

Now see in your Dark Age, which after all is merely a lacuna between a cou­ple of those ex post facto dis­crete vol­umes of Cliff’s Notes, change hap­pens. The diver­sity of what hap­pens, the details of who’s doing what for whom and under what name, that car­ries on as before. Per­haps moreso. When­ever Empire stum­bles, nov­elty seems more promis­ing out at the unre­marked periph­ery, in the lost provinces and the places where exotic weirdos start try­ing new stuff out. Not in the core.

Some day, hope­fully in a few decades, some­body will real­ize sus­tain­abil­ity is a thing that hap­pens only in places where cen­tral plan­ners look away. I won­der whether we ought to stage a “Dark Age” of our own, rather than wait­ing for all these rebuild­ing rework­ing reboot­ing eco­nomic “devel­op­ment” efforts to fail in turn.

Devel­op­ment is exploita­tion, in Holland’s sense. Let us explore for a while. It’s not merely that the keys aren’t under that light pole, it’s that there are no doors out here in the lovely dark. Let us be bet­ter now to one another, and not worry so much about hon­or­ing the beloved dead: the fac­to­ries, the jobs, the state lines, and the habits of empire.

This is not about “rev­o­lu­tion”, by the way. This is sim­ply a request. Let us please have a King Cnut of Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment: Richard Florida might do fine, if only he was pay­ing atten­tion, because he has con­quered our mind­set for sure. Let him set him­self up on a throne at the shores of our “eco­nomic col­lapse”, and make what­ever ges­tures are called for by his audi­ence to stem the tide of fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tive change, and let him then turn wisely to the fans and lack­eys and point out the moral of this les­son: that Emer­gence is not what you expect and foster.

Sorry. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud there.Richard Florida would never say any­thing of the sort.

Nonethe­less, let us emerge into the dark­ness, in other words. Every­thing that has hap­pened here under the lamp has already come and gone. We should totally leave this lone light here, burn­ing, if noth­ing else to draw the moths and bats it’s always drawn and act out its role as sym­bol of many sorts. Me, I’m headed over there towards those noises….

I real­ize I’ve turned quiet as far as the blogs are con­cerned. I’ve been work­ing on trans­lat­ing the draft con­tent for the Answer Fac­to­ries book into pub­lished man­u­script. Mark­down is lovely, but talk­ing in detail about the process of soft­ware devel­op­ment still requires an awful lot of cutting-​​and-​​pasting, it turns out….

I recently updated the pub­lished draft; if you’re behind, feel free to go update your copy now. New con­tent includes a descrip­tion of the iPad game Cargo-​​bot, and a detailed test-​​driven re-​​implementation of the game logic in an emu­la­tor we’ll use for GP in forth­com­ing chap­ters. I spent a lot of time on the test-​​driven devel­op­ment, so I’d like some feed­back if you’re willing.

These are my recent Pin​board​.in links:

• pry/​pry

  Pry is a pow­er­ful alter­na­tive to the stan­dard IRB shell for Ruby. It is writ­ten from scratch to pro­vide a num­ber of advanced fea­tures, including:
  
  irb ruby software-​​development inter­preter

• Daniel Fischer’s Blog — A Start­ing Guide to VIM from Textmate

  For about four years I’ve been using Text­mate almost every day. I’m very fast with it. I’ve always thought about switch­ing over to VIM or Emacs but I have been scared of los­ing my speed. In fact, I’ve actu­ally tried Emacs in the past and also wrote a blog post on my expe­ri­ence. I liked it in gen­eral, but I ended up com­ing back to Text­mate after a week. Why? I didn’t really feel like I was gain­ing anything.
  
  text­mate vim tuto­r­ial habit

• A Ques­tion Answered — Credit Slips

  “Over cof­fee this morn­ing with a friend, I threw out the same ques­tion from my orig­i­nal post. How does an orga­ni­za­tion get itself to the place where it col­lec­tively comes to think such strong-​​arm col­lec­tion tac­tics on hos­pi­tal patients are a good idea, let alone morally defen­si­ble? A pro­file of Accretive’s CEO, Mary Tolan, in Crain’s Chicago Busi­ness con­tains this gem: “My objec­tive is just to be a happy, con­fi­dent cap­i­tal­ist,” says the devo­tee of Ayn Rand’s and Mil­ton Friedman’s free-​​market gospel, which she applies with a com­bat­ive, survival-​​of-​​the fittest man­age­ment style.”
  
  ran­dism buh-​​bye-​​john-​​galt

• The Hum­ble Ori­gins of the NEXT Global Econ­omy. Don’t Miss Out.

  “It’s sim­ple.  If you want to build a thriv­ing local econ­omy.  A local econ­omy that makes your com­mu­nity resilient to eco­nomic fail­ure and shocks, you need to find ways to help the inno­va­tors in your com­mu­nity make things.”
  
  resilience sus­tain­abil­ity communities-​​of-​​practice mak­ers