kip/bot/blog

“power is the ability not only to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” - Chimamanda Adichie

This might be a top 5 TED talk, for its power, clarity of concept, and speaker presence. Nigerian novelist (and Booker shortlister) Chimamanda Adichie solves the riddle of the truth and incompleteness of stereotypes and biases, by exposing the “dangers of the single story.”

Listen to the talk, but here’s an example: Africa does have failed states, serious infrastructure problems, and the severest forms of economic hardship. That is a true story. But, for most people, it is either the only story they know, or they only know “different versions of [that] single story.” Since that story doesn’t include a thriving and growing African middle class (across many countries, of course), an African intelligentsia, and economic success stories, we remain stuck in our stereotypes. In addition to solving the riddle of stereotypes that are true (now they are stories that tell one truth and the charge is to learn the other stories), it also helps me personally get out of the prejudiced/non-prejudiced quandary. Too often conversations involving narrow cultural understandings (single story versions of a people or their lives) are polar: you have to confront the misconceiving as prejudice. While it is a prejudice, the cure is not solely about fixing a character flaw, it’s about expanding the story.

Adichie says single stories of Nigeria “flatten her experience” (around 13:11 in the video). Reading The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind was a huge revelation of how flat my understanding of Africa is. I have only known Africa from a policy perspective: the summary numbers and prose about famine, civil war, wasted aid, problems in education and information technologies. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind tells a range of stories in William KamKwamba’s life: two famines, going to school, playing as a boy, playing/hanging differently as a teenager, his experience of popular culture, the mixing of magic and science in his life, his curiosity and tinkering, simple family life. When I started reading the book, I was actually frustrated when the first several chapters had nothing to do with his windmills, but focused on his life. I wanted the other single story of his inspiring move against his economic condition.

The whole talk is fantastic, but one other great moment that lays it out when she illustrates the principle “if you want to dispossess a people, start the story with the word ’secondly’” and goes on to explain how you can tell the story of Native American starting with arrows (the secondly) rather than the arrival of Europeans, or start with the failure of the African state rather than the colonial creation of those states. This line starts around 10:00.

An ignite talk by Mark Argo about the increasing open-sourcing and personalization of gadgets begins with a fun account of the way in which the word gadget has evolved and been depreciated. According the usual on-line sources (OED, dictionary.com, Wikipedia), the origin of gadget is not entirely clear, but there was a late-19th early-20th century sense that gadget was originally a good thing. An early appearance of the word occurs in the 1918 memoir of a pilot in the Royal Flying Corps (”Above the Clouds”): “our ennui was occasionally relieved by new gadgets — “gadget” is the Flying Corps slang for invention! Some gadgets were good, some comic, and some extraordinary.”

Argo highlights that gadget covered useful inventions back in the day and lightly laments its devolution. (Think how it is used today: “gadget” plays are gimmicks in football and seen most frequently in bad football movies; gadget freaks are unnaturally attached to their devices; gadget and gizmo are ways for normal people (either the hero or the villainous suit who doesn’t get it) to marginalize something as esoteric).) Argo kind of undermines his attempt to recover the word by highlighting some laughable, if useful (who knows), canes: one has a ruler for measuring horses at the racetrack, one has doctor supplies.

One of the things this sparked for me, was that we no longer have a word that covers the sense of invention in the “Above the Clouds” quote. Something that highlights the excitement and potential value of something. The Name of the Rose (one of my favorite movies and favorite books) has a great gadget scene in which Brother William (of Baskerville . . . get it?) is inspecting a book and whips out a crude pair of glasses.

This gets the other brothers all a-twitter:

Which prompts the best Sean Connery picture ever:

An earlier scene shows Brother William’s other ‘dangerous’ possessions:

In the scene, Brother William slowly unpacks the items (for our benefit) but, the moment he hears footsteps (of the approaching abbot), he throws a cloth over them and assumes a casual air. The gadgets are an hourglass and an astrolabe. (Brother William takes astronomical measurements at night.)

I love how these things have life-changing and even heretical potential. Sadly, my mind, now owned by marketing-speak, can only come up with tepid words: innovation, game-changing, category-creator, novelty, differentiator. Invention has potential, but it goes to sad cranks toiling in their workshop hoping to strike it rich with their invention (and the inevitable cliche of the inventor who actually does create something great, but never sees the rewards). Gadget’s not terribly exciting, but it has some of the energy of the word invention back in the day.

On his site, Argo lists the links he refers ton in a delightfully low-rent way:

I’m becoming a big fan of criticism, at times enjoying how people write about other people’s work even more than consuming the work directly.

From today’s NY Times, a review of DJ Tiesto’s show in NYC, with some background description of what means this trance:

Virtually unchanged since the 1990s, trance is basically a gargantuan boom-chicka-boom with a steady kick-drum on every beat, and it’s supremely adaptable: euphoric, martial, perky, ominous, indefatigable. A trance D.J. set cycles through stark beats, pushy synthesizer lines, pop vocals and song remixes, and passages in which the beat drops away and synthesizer chords hover for a reverential moment, awaiting the next round of thumping propulsion.

Love this email I just got from Amazon:

Full disclosure: I get quite a kick out of the Dan Brown oeuvre, despite the horrible writing. It’s like the old computer adventure games made into a book. Literally. The old games — like MYST, Journeyman Project, Tex Murphy, Last Express, Obsidian, Lighthouse, Gabriel Knight, even the fighting adventure games like Resident Evil — had a winning formula:

- gruesome/startling crime in the beginning (Lighthouse wins this one hands down with not one but two great openings: 1) you explore a house with interesting objects, but only when you press the answering machine button to get a hysterical call for help does the game kick in with a great drive through the rain sequence that presents the credits and great animated lightning effects); and 2) when you explore the house of the friend who called you, you see a baby quietly sleeping in its crib. When you return to the baby’s room, you see an alien stealing the child. Seriously jump out of your skin freaky. Dan Brown has the usual Robert Langdon being interrupted in some refined pursuit (dreaming about hiking the pyramids with a babe, or giving a lecture) and then being dragged to a mutilated corpse.

- discovery of solvable riddles — adventure games are riddled with barely- to not even close to plausible riddles that you’re happy to solve. They propel the story. Nearly every image presented in Dan Brown allows the reader to puzzle out the clue.

- obscure reasons for villainy The worst example of this was a ten minute or longer discource in Journeyman Project Turbo. These reasons usually warrant a page or two of monologue and sufficiently flawed logic for Langdon to feel the need to correct the villain on the true meaning of the text. Not quite “that belongs in a museum” but close.

Final disclosure, while I won’t leave my battery on, my morning ritual of turning on the wireless will have an extra jolt of excitement (I like it even when I’m just getting the paper) tomorrow morning.

Many of the times when I’m writing about craft, I’m talking about being close to the work and its intricacies and materials. Last week, I started re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a book I last read, appropriately, in 1984 while I was in college. It was a perfect undergrad read: a salad of philosophy (complete with interwoven Platonic dialogues), personal wellness, a post-hippy balanced suspicion and enjoyment of technology, and a focus on the word/idea quality. (It was also my introduction to Chautauqua, a tradition which filled my mind for many years and was the name of a school paper I started my senior year.) The perfect summer after freshman year book.

This weekend, the NYTimes has a magazine piece about working with one’s hands, doing physical labor in an age of info-workers. The writer, Matthew Crawford, is a PhD, who once struggled to find work after rejecting the nomadic life of seeking tenure. When he got a gig, heading up a DC policy shop, he stayed long enough to buy tools and start his own, admittedly under-priced, one-man motorcycle repair business.

Both the book and the article seem to say things about craft, and they definitely both reference motorcycles, so a blog post that strings together quotes from each.

In Zen…, there is an early salvo about quality as the area of focus:

‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively results in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned to be concerned with the question “What is best?”, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answer tend to move the silt downstream.

I’m only 60 pages into the re-read, but I remember and feel that the rest of the book, which the author Robert Pirsig describes charmingly (and goofily) as a Chautauqua, is about how we comprehend and pursue quality in our lives. This gets into values, personal quirks and tastes, and most of all a cognitive approach to one’s life and its problems. This is where the Crawford article resonates.

[Motorcycle repair] frequently requires complex thinking. In fixing motorcycles you come up with several imagined trains of cause and effect for manifest symptoms, and you judge their likelihood before tearing anything down. This imagining relies on a mental library that you develop. An internal combustion engine can work in any number of ways, and different manufacturers have tried different approaches. Each has its own proclivities for failure. You also develop a library of sounds and smells and feels. For example, the backfire of a too-lean fuel mixture is subtly different from an ignition backfire.

This passage seems romantic in its sense-based level of work and deeply satisfying. Crawford has a body of knowledge and experience that has translated into a finely tuned engagement of his senses. I picture him looking at the engine and considering one possibility with his mind, while reaching a hard to get to place and considering another possibility with his fingers while he samples the oil’s viscosity and a third possibility by the smell. In some cases, I imagine he can smell or hear the problem as a customer rides his motorcycle into the shop. If the problem lies deeper than his immediate senses, I picture him puzzling over the data, House-like, and testing theories in his head before testing them on the machine.

Earlier in the piece, Crawford talks about the intangibility of achievement in office life. Back in the 90s I split my time between database programming and writing union and political propaganda and position papers. The latter activity was where my heart was, while the former paid the bills and supported the first. But there were times when programming was the more, and more deeply, satisfying pursuit. Sure, I’d get excited when a speech I wrote came to a great crescendo or when I found just the right way to tee up an issue. But the computer work was oddly gratifying — figuring out a thorny bug, finding a better, more elegant way to work through a routine, handing someone a disk with compiled code that ran cleanly, running a program overnight and seeing that it had run flawlessly in the morning (this was in the x86 days). It felt great. I didn’t do it for too many years, but I did develop that extra-sense where I could just smell what the problem was. It felt great.

Not only was the work satisfying, it was mine. When I had written good code, I knew I had and there was no doubt. I could settle back and know the job was well done. When I was explaining my double lives of different satisfactions to friends, I remember being quite passionate about it. “When I finish a program, I know it works and I know it’s as fast as possible and can’t be written any tighter. So much better, sometimes, than writing a speech any idiot can say they don’t like. So much easier to prove that one line of code works better than the other whereas with a speech, someone, or I, will always be able to run the work down.” That last bit is part of the personal psychology in Zen… — finding the confidence to say this is good, this is quality and be content and move on. But the other satisfaction, of absolutely knowing seems connected to better sleep and better mornings and better breathing.

Crawford highlights an interesting dynamic around the intangibles of office work:

A manager has to make many decisions for which he is accountable. Unlike an entrepreneur with his own business, however, his decisions can be reversed at any time by someone higher up the food chain . . . It’s important for your career that these reversals not look like defeats, and more generally you have to spend a lot of time managing what others think of you. Survival depends on a crucial insight: you can’t back down from an argument that you initially made in straightforward language, with moral conviction, without seeming to lose your integrity. So managers learn the art of provisional thinking and feeling.

When I was writing speeches, I was self-employed, so I took pleasure in putting out my own work to my clients. I might fail, lose the gig, have to go back for a costly re-write that robbed me of a weekend, but I remember liking the fact that it was my making and doing. But the self-protective double-think Crawford mentions seems like a loss to a person.

This is getting long and connected to more life-stuff than craft-stuff, but I sent this article to a former boss of mine, a man who’s very wealthy and had just started reading the article when I sent him the link. He wrote back:

I just spent the day on Saturday installing the lighting on our roof and when the day was done sat back in the waning daylight hours savoring the work sipping wine with a friend discussing that exact topic of “working with hands”.

Been playing MYST on the iPhone and having fond memories, renewed admiration for the game, and a useful sense of disappointment.

Fond Memories
I loved MYST when it came out. It was a revelation — a rich, lush world that I simply liked looking at, a strong enough (though not great or self-sustaining) story that gave me a sense of urgency and grounding in the game, and puzzles that had a certain logic in the milieu and were genuinely interesting in and of themselves. That last point was a big sticking point in the doomed adventure game genre. All too often in the 90s, game designers would drop in really dumb puzzles (put the broken coffee mug together to see the picture and get the clue!), cliches (the puzzle toy Simon was repurposed in literally dozens of games), or byzantine pixel/scavenger hunts that required you to work but not think in rewarding ways. MYST puzzles were interesting systems that needed to be figured out, or riddles that you could actually think about away from the game, or visual puns that were intrinsically engaging. But that’s just me bemoaning the genre’s demise.

The key for me, though, was how much I wanted to be in the game. There were the crazy brothers, trapped inside a book:

This moment was iconic for several years. The guy is trapped in the blue book (his twin is trapped in a red book), needs you to fill the book with blue pages to free him. As you explore the world of MYST (an island based on Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island), you gather clues about the moral and psychological soundness of the twins. Every time you go to the book, the brothers implore you: “The blue pages, bring me the BLUE pages!”, a line/device which was spoofed in subsequent games.

The game is also beautiful if you enjoy a steampunk/Verne look:

In addition to looking great, this was the first great, and may still be among the best sound designs. Each image and sound gave me flashbacks to the first sense of discovery and wonder at the game (where am I? how cool! how did it get built?), and made wandering around the world fun. I orginally played this with my girlfriend (another gaming landmark: the elusive game your girlfriend will play!) and distinctly remember saying things like “let’s go to Channelwood first, I like it there” or “wait wait, look around a minute”.

Renewed Admiration for the Game

There is much lore around the game’s production. Two brothers with a small number of computers, using Director, 3D Studio Max, home made sounds and a couple computers for rendering, pulled it off. Of course, in those early-WIRED days, when everything wanted to be a movie or would benefit from being more like a movie — rather than being its own form — they were talking to film studios, getting repped by big agents, blah blah blah. But the game was and still is a remarkable thing, proof that tight constraints, even absurdly tight ones like 1990s era PCs, create great designs.

Failure to Immerse

The only disappointment with the iPhone game, and I think it’s instructive, is that MYST just doesn’t pull you in. The screen resolution is fine for the conveyance of information, the screen size is adequate for finding hotspots with a blunt finger-tip, and the sounds still help with gameplay and location cues. But the screen doesn’t take up enough eye-width, or field of vision to be truly immersive.

This was interesting to me, since I actually watched the entire run of Firefly (sf western style TV show that run for fourteen episodes before being unjustly cancelled) on the first generation iPod video, on an elliptical trainer on the gym. Screen size isn’t a general requirement for absorption in a narrative TV show. But a decent screen size is needed for the active suspension of disbelief and immersion. I say active suspension rather than willing, because for a game like MYST, which relies on stills, involves some clunky transitions, and occasional howlers in the dialogue, there is more artifice to overcome — probably more aritifce, even, than reading a book where you don’t have trip-ups that break the flow and risk snapping you out of the undisbelief reverie.

The other artifice that you’re constantly reminded of is the screen itself, which you have to hold and interact with directly. This is an instance where a mouse that is remote from the screen is actually superior to the intuitive touching of the screen. By separating the viewing area from the interface and the hand from the eye (at least physically) you have fewer intrusions into the environment.

Ah well, ten dollars that didn’t result in gaming joy, but did teach me something about narrative, HCI, and immersion.

It also inspired me to dig out the game (or buy it again) and maybe dig out puffy headphones and wander around the Ages again.

Studs Terkel slowly became a hero of mine, in the years when I was moving towards union work. I saw him in Eight Men Out playing a cigar-chomping sports writer covering the Black Sox series, and read excerpts of his book about World War II, one of the first celebrations of the “greatest generation”, but one which didn’t shy away from some of the grittier, nastier realities of the war.

He took a much greater space in my heart and mind when I saw him at Central Park Summerstage in 1989. He was ‘performing’ with John Sayles, who read from his fiction, including a scene of wives and girlfriends riding a bus to prison to visit their men (something which he handled with incredible warmth, sensitivity, and taste, as opposed to the hideously overwraught bus scenes from Oz).

Studs read from Working an oral history of employment in the US, conducted in the 1960s. One of the pieces he read was of a waitress he met in a restaurent. He introduced the piece by talking about Five Easy Pieces and the scene where Jack Nicholson harasses an uncooperative waitress (”what should I do with the chicken salad?” “carry it between your knees” with the soon-to-be-trademark Nicholson hiss.) After describing a bunch of younger people who hooted and whooped at Nicholson’s put-down, Studs got almost angry (but he was sparkly and elfin so it barely felt mad), “you damned little solecistic punks” I remember him saying and then he described the interview. Up on stage, he described the waitress as having a movement in her work that was like a dance (which he started to do), punctuated by small talk with regulars and kitchen staff. Then he read the piece which included details about her family, how she cared for her body, punished by work — it was moving and the thousands in the park were entranced. He went onto tell other stories including that of a 60+ year old couple who protested nuclear weapons and were serving time in separate jails — it was a ‘real love story’, according to Studs.

Listening to him talk is a treat — how he describes people, the stories he has, his own views on American politics, society, jazz, and baseball. What a treasure.

WFMT - Best of Studs Terkel

From the NYT article covering French writer Jean-Michel Gustave Le Clezio award of the Nobel Prize, his answer to what message he would convey in his address:

My message will be very clear; it is that I think we have to continue to read novels. Because I think that the novel is a very good means to question the current world without having an answer that is too schematic, too automatic. The novelist, he’s not a philosopher, not a technician of spoken language. He’s someone who writes, above all, and through the novel asks questions.

Interesting, and interesting to argue, sidenote: Horace Engdahl, the head of the Swedish Academy (which awards the prize) was critical of American literature today, calling it “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” No American has won the Nobel literature prize since Toni Morrison did in 1993.

From this week’s Nation, I learned the word prosopopeia:

One such device is prosopopeia, a rather literary term for what happens when the Pillsbury Doughboy persuades you to buy a bread product by giggling so charmingly after that poke to his puffy little tummy. Prosopopeia is the personification of an abstraction. As theorist Barbara Johnson says in her book Persons and Things, “A speaking thing can sell itself; if the purchaser responds to the speech of the object, he or she feels uninfluenced by human manipulation and therefore somehow not duped. We are supposed not to notice how absurd it is to be addressed by the Maalox Max bottle, or Mr. Clean, or Mrs. Butterworth.”

This is, of course, a fun, left pomo way to talk about Sarah Palin (and the Mrs. Butterworth reference is priceless). The article, which has some interesting cultural stuff in it, highlights the fact that Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech had been written weeks before she was even a serious choice for the VP slot. The article argues that the speech was waiting for someone who could personify it — Sarah Palin.

While I’m not enjoying the cheap shots being taken at the Dems, and I like even less the condescending way Dems are talking about how dumb she is and how dumb, by extension, her supporters therefore are, there is another interesting nugget in the column if you look past the ‘recall’ gag:

In the few weeks since Sarah Palin has become a household name, she’s often been glibly compared to a Barbie doll–and certainly her lack of knowledge of the Bush doctrine, or her comments about not knowing what the vice president does, make me wish she’d been recalled as fast as that talking Barbie who complained that “Math class is tough.” But I think the analogy is more apt when thinking about how Palin has been mass-marketed. As Barbara Johnson says, “The packaging is part of what the consumer buys: not only can Barbie not stand without the box, but in it she is positioned for maximum effect. Some dolls come in boxes that almost function like mirrors: the commodity is surrounded by a gleaming aura that adds glamour to its appeal.”

Leaving politics aside now, there is an interesting thing about the packaging support the product, or the packaging being the message, which covers public figures and even some of Apple’s appeal.

Anyway, it’s a nifty word.
Anyway a nifty word.