7fff – think max value

Juliana Hatfield, When I Grow Up (Book Review)

Juliana Hatfield, When I Grow Up: A Memoir (2008). $24.95. [Amazon]

I’m a sucker for a good rock and roll memoir, and picked up Juliana Hatfield’s when I first saw that it was available. Hatfield was the lead singer and bass player of the Blake Babies, and went on to a decent solo career (for the history and discographies, see Wikipedia and allmusic). She has a wonderful sense for melody, and the good sense to pick great producers who can beef up her guitars and voice to balance out her sound. She spent time at Berklee and knows her musical onions.

The book is a mixture of nearly present-day tour diary and reflection on past days, alternating chapters (more on less) on these two topics. The tour is a multi-city trip of her most recent band-effort, Some Girls. In both parts, everything that is concrete and detailed is funny or thought-provoking or memorable. You hear about the creeps who want more than her autograph, the jerks who have interviewed her unfairly, the bad hotels and good hotels (I want to go to the Congress Hotel in Tucson based on her brief assessment here), the friends and lovers (?) she sees only on the road. Good stuff. There is a great story of the first meeting of the Blake Babies. She is trenchant on the difficulties managing personalities on a tour. And she’s honest about the money.

Picture: Christian Kock

There is also a lot about her personal weaknesses and artistic efforts: This was tougher for me. She is hopelessly shy and self-doubting, but at the same time driven at the core to make music. But there was maybe too much of this. When she does go into detail on her emotional ups-and-downs — for instance, on her trouble with food — she gets interesting again. But, really, I’m on already on her side emotionally because her music is great.

One thing for sure: If you’re in a band and thinking about a tour, or about making a career of music . . . This is one to read, because it’s a tough road.

Weaving the Web (Book Review) [about ten years later]

Tim Berners-Lee (with Mark Fischetti), Weaving the Web (1999). [Amazon]

We are coming up on the 10th anniversary of the publication of Tim Berners-Lee’s Weaving the Web, so it seems appropriate to reflect on it about ten years later. Re-reading it now, it is striking how utopian it is. Berners-Lee ended the book on an incredibly hopeful note, talking about how the Web models the real-life web of human relationships, and there is a lot of stuff about how the Web will be about everything, and will be the vehicle for human/computer augmentation. It may be hard for you to remember it, if you read the book when it came out, but it finishes with reflections on faith, as Berners-Lee talks about his personal discovery of Unitarian Universalism which in his view “match[ed . . .] the objective I had I in creating the Web” (207). He saw Unitarianism and his practices for the Web allowing for “decentralized systems to develop” emphasizing the value of individuals and the common good (208).

I wonder what Berners-Lee thinks now? In the last chapters of Weaving the Web, we hear of many technologies sponsored by the W3C that, while they are everywhere, have hardly become dominant. Most images on the web are still GIF or JPG (not PNG), SVG is not available on all browsers (IE requires a plugin), PICS doesn’t seem to be in use, and P3P was a bust. The semantic web is still a project of the universities and startups (though perhaps it is about to explode, through simplified analogues such as microformats). Compared to the explosion of activity in the years covered by the book (1989-1999), 1999 to the present has represented a refinement of the standards created before 1999. Perhaps the most significant triumph of the W3C has been the emergence of a mostly standard DOM on most browsers, and the advent of XML as the most important data-exchange standard; while its low point has been SOAP and a disdain for REST.

And it would seem to me that the idea that the Web emphasizes the value of the individual and the common good is contested on all sides.

Still, the book has significant high points and sections that deserve re-reading today. Throughout the book, there is a critical drumbeat around the failure of browsers to provide an easy means to edit an arbitrary page, which is still a huge gap. In Berners-Lee’s view, the whole point of the Web client was to provide for both reading and creating content. Nowadays, content creation has largely been relegated to hosted apps, and those apps rarely respect nicely the idea of the URI, which Berners-Lee considered the most important standard element of the Web, ahead of HTTP and HTML (p. 36). (The idea that the Internet should balance production and consumption of content was everywhere in the late 90s — you also saw it in Negroponte’s Being Digital [1995], where he strongly advocated having the same bandwidth upstream and downstream to facilitate home video production and transmission.)

Other fascinating areas where Berners-Lee is prescient regard “code” and net neutraility. He agonizes over the tension between human-made laws and the protocols of code (pp. 123-124) — it is almost as though he is writing the brief for Lawrence Lessig’s later work on the real-world primacy of “code” in dictating how things (really) work in society. Regarding net neutrality, Berners-Lee is an absolutist, and provides the core reasons for preventing companies from making certain types of content privileged on their public networks (p. 130).

The last thing I would want to say about the experience of re-reading this book is that the core structure of the web is still pretty basic compared to the visions of hypertext from the 1960s and 1970s. Anyone who has read Ted Nelson knows that he was onto something when he advocated micro-payments as a part of the core infrastructure of hypertext systems. We still don’t have decent micro-payments. Another gap is around transclusions: links are great, but transclusion remains a hack. But the book answers the question as to why the web is so basic in its protocols: It’s because the process of introducing these standards was inherently political, and the raw standards were about the most anyone was willing to adopt.

World Made by Hand (Book Review)

James Howard Kunstler, World Made by Hand (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2008). [Amazon]

James Kunstler’s novel World Made by Hand is about the end of the world as we know it; it’s a must-read, and I hope everyone I know reads it so we can have a big argument about it!

In the near future (by around 2015, it would seem) both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. are destroyed by nuclear weapons. As a consequence of this, oil no longer flows to the USA, and therefore fertilizers, insecticides, plastics, petroleum-fueled vehicles, and, generally, modern life, are all swiftly defunct. The power grid comes on only a half-hour a day; the only radio transmissions are the rantings of preachers. The Internet has become a fairy tale.

The story focuses on a small upstate New York town that has the good fortune to have its water supply gravity-fed, and to be populated by a number of residents skilled in the essentials of nineteenth-century living: a doctor, a dentist, a minister, a carpenter, etc. Despite the great changes in the world, they live on. Their population has been decimated though, from flu and encephilitus.

The novel explores the kinds of groups that populate this new world. There are roughly six factions: First there are the townspeople: the remnants of a middle class and “normal” life: the novel is narrated by Robert Earle, who was once a manager at a Boston-based high tech firm. Robert has lost his family to illness. Then there is a Mr. Bullock, who is a de facto plantation master, whose peasants work for him in exchange for stability and a top-down collective economy; Bullock has accomplished some remarkable things, such as getting a small hydro generator going. Another group is the hive-like New Faith Brotherhood, led by Brother Jobe — they’ve arrived recently from Pennsylvania, which they have fled due to race-based fighting among the refuges from D.C. and Baltimore. Wayne Karp is the top dog in Karpstown, a loose-knit cabal of scavengers who live near the town dump, which they excavate for spare parts from the past. Further afield in Albany is Mr. Curry, who runs the docks. Finally, there are those who live outside these groups in isolation.

What Kunstler does is spin these characters and groups into a ripping yarn that wouldn’t be out of place in a nineteenth-century novel by Twain or Dickens. There are a couple of levels to this: At the level of individual characters, the novel is a bit of a soap opera, with hair-raising escapes, romance, sentimentality, tears and even some laughs. All this will keep you turning the page. There’s also some solid scene-painting of the post-oil remnants:

The once meticulously groomed grounds of the state capitol building, an impressive limestone heap in the Second Empire style, were now choked with box elders, sumacs, and other woody shrubs. Knapweed, vetch, and blue chicory sprouted from the cracks between the broad front steps where a few ill-nourished layabouts sat listlessly surveying the scene. Inside the grand old building, every surface had been stripped down to the bare masonry. Carpets, draperies, chestnut wainscoting, metal fixtures, all gone, probably long gone. The stink of urine and excrement told the rest of the story. I would have turned and left had I not heard a familiar tapping sound seeming to come from distantly above somewhere up the southeast stairs. (p. 166)

On another level, though, he’s posing a great sociological question: Can civilization survive after this disaster? What combinations of these groups might balance one another into a kind of stability? It’s a little hard to know how serious Kunstler is in this orchestration, because the last few chapters of the novel veer into some weird territory. But I don’t want to give away the ending. For exploring social organization through fiction, he’s right up there with Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein, and I’m a sucker for this kind of speculative fiction that works its way through problems via believable characters.

Some readers are going to wonder how the world could go to pieces so quickly after the destruction of two cities. After all, the United States has recently suffered the partial destruction of New Orleans, an important port city. But Kunstler knows whereof he speaks: He’s the author of an important book The Long Emergency, which is about the consequences of “peak oil,” that moment when the maximum rate of oil extraction is reached, and it becomes increasingly hard to get it out of the ground and run society. If even 1/10 of what Kunstler reports in The Long Emergency comes to pass, then the story of World Made by Hand won’t be fiction, it will be fact.

Kunstler was born in the late 40s, so he came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. One thing that amused me . . . somewhat . . . is that once the power goes off, people revert to a stereotype of . . . hippies! There’s a lot of pot-smoking, long hair, and mate-swapping; taste in music tends towards folk. A brief mention is made of “Smells like Teen Spirit,” but the characters in the novel make fun of it. I wondered at times if Kunstler was having a bit of satire with his melodrama.

But this is just quibbling. It’s a good book, and if you believe “it can’t happen here,” then go read The Long Emergency as a followup.