“The thirteenth-century Franciscan, St. Bonaventura, said that there were four ways of making books: ‘A man might write the works of others, addding and changing nothing in which case he is simply called a ‘scribe’ (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a ‘compiler’ (compilator). Another writes both others’ work and his own, but with others’ work in principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a ‘commentator’ (commentator) … Another writes both his own work and others’ but with his own work in principal place adding others’ for purposes of confirmation; and such a man should be called an ‘author’ (auctor).’ ”

Quoted in Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Communications and Cultural Transformations in early-modern Europe, Cambridge UP, 1979, p. 121/122

I promised to up some quotes from Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability, http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/ambient/, a book that takes a closer look at some of the webdevelopments of the past two years, focussing on yes, findability, traceability, and wayfinding. What to say about a book like this one? Yes, I recognize the problems that Morville identifies, yes, he gives a good overview of current developments (the chapter on the Semantic Web versus folksonomies is balanced and therefore quite good), yes in this very American way that also will appeal to intelligent businessmen, he gets his message across and also refers to Wittgenstein of Lakoff & Johnson when he likes too, or to some obscure psychology-paper if that’s necessary. His writing style is maybe a bit too informal, too much talking-as-if-he’s-presenting-in-front-of-you, but I’m not unsympathetic towards such a pedagogic approach (because that’s what it is). So why does a book like this leave me unstatisfied? Firstly because he doesn’t have new information for me (but he probably has for others). Secondly because when he is critical — and Morville certainly is critical — he only skims the surface, doesn’t dig, doesn’t go into the entangledness of politics, economics and technology. It never becomes really dark and dirty: he believes in markets, intelligent customers and discriminating consumers — but abhors fastfood. He’s not always optimistic, he knows — and points out — that humans are blind and lazy in many respects, but he certainly believes that we have the power to design technology that is good for us, as the internet shows. Nevertheless, if one is not so up to date, this book might bridge the gap.

Well, some quotes then…

“This fast food approach to information drives librarians crazy. “Our information is healthier and tastes better too” they shout. But nobody listens. We’re too busy Googling.” p. 55

“The Web allows our information seeking to grow more iterative and interactive with each innovation. The berrypicking model [of aquiring information] is more relevant today than ever.” p. 60

“The human natural tendency in information seeking is to fallback on passive and sampling and selecting behaviors derived from millions of years of [evolution]” p. 61 (Actually a quote from Marcia Bates, 2002)

“Most of the world will never be ready for the Semantic Web. And We’re still waiting for the few that constitute the rest to catch up.” p. 133

“… most categories we emply in daily life are defined by fuzzy cognitive models rather than objective rules.” p. 133 [Morville pits Lakoff & Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By against the Semantic Web].

“How will we make sense of this tower of babble? In the midst of this cacophony, to whom will we listen? Who will we trust? Will we rely on formal hierarchy or free tagging, library or marketplace, cathedral or bazaar? Will we place our confidence in words or people? And are we talking about cyberspace or ubicomp? The answer lies in the question, for we will not be bound by the false dichotomy of Aristotelian logic. To manage complexity, we must embrace faceted classification, polyhierarchy, pluralistic aboutness and pace layering. And to succeed we must collaborate across categories, using boundary objects to negotiate, translate, and forge shared understanding.” p. 153/154

“Findability is at the center of a fundamental shift in the way we define authority, allocate trust, make decisions, and learn independently.” p. 162

Peter Morville, Ambient Findability, O’Reilly, Sebastopol Ca. 2005.

More Morville: http://www.findability.org/.

Summertime as performed live by Shelly Manne & his Men in 1956 and, played immediately afterwards by itunes, In the Black by Motorhead. Although these tracks are very different (fifties west coast bop versus rock-n-roll-heavy-metal), they also are in the same category — for me. Maybe both pieces exemplify ‘the perfect track’? Manne’s precise and subtile drumming propels what is basically just another version of a classic song, it ensures that what could have been dreary, becomes exciting to listen to. Motorhead is straightforward, completely formulaic, yet very exciting because it is thight and every note, every chord, every word comes at, well, the right moment. Is it simplicity? Not quite. Is it restraint plus exuberance? Maybe. Is it the miracle where a song that could’ve been just as easily boring, becomes an exciting piece of music? If that’s it, I want to entangle that ‘magic formula’, I’d like to know how it is ‘programmed’.

During breakfasts I’m reading ‘indeterminacy 1960-1970’ from Michael Nymans Experimental Music, Cage and Beyond, a book I’ve never picked up, because of my dislike for Glass & Nyman-styled minimal music. But this book is very good. (Read it, buy it). It gives an excellent overview of Cardew’s compositional strategies and formulas (excellent for the lay-musician that I am). I love Cardew’s The Great Learning (or what I’ve heard of it, the total piece runs on for several hours), and I’m inclined to say that it is actually one of the masterpieces of all times. It succeeds in totally transforming our idea of art. (And yes, it is possible to look beyond the Maoist ideology it was supposed to get across).

This is Cardew on discipline: “Discipline is not to be seen as the ability to conform to a rigid rule structure, but as the ability to work collectively with other people in a harmonious and fruitful way. Integrity, self-reliance, initiative, to be articulate (say, on an instrument) in a natural, direct way; these are the qualities necessary for improvisation. Self-discipline is the necessary basis for the desired spontaneity, where everything that occurs is heard and responed to without the aid of arbitrarily controlled procedures and intellectual labor.” (Nyman, p. 126)

This makes sense, certainly, in a musical context. (Probably can be ripped apart and de(con)structed totally when interpreted by some liberal/conservative against a Maoist/revolutionary prespective (bring on Pol Pot)).

So I’m wondering what the connection is between Manne’s Summertime, Motorhead and Cardew. (And no, I cannot substitute just whatever other track here, not Lady Fury ‘Too Much Drugs in Ur System’, Earl Browns ‘Octet 1 for 8 Loudspeakers’ or Camille’s ‘Ta Douleur’, to mention a few other tracks that I’ve recently downloaded and like very much). Not that there has to be a connection…

Cornelius Cardew: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornelius_Cardew
Motorhead mp3 see: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2006/06/dj_compilation_.html
Michael Nyman: http://www.cambridge.org/us/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521653835

‘In reading, one should notice and fondle details. There is nothing wrong about the moonshine of generalization when it comes after the sunny trifles of the book have been lovingly collected. If one begins with generalization, one begins at the wrong end and travels away from the book before one has started to understand it.’

So Vladimir Nabokov in ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’ which introduces his Lectures on Literature (ed. Fredson Browers, Harvest Book, San Diego, 1980).

As I’ve probably remarked here before, I’m not a big fan of Nabokov. Actually I’ve never finished one of his novels, not even Pale Fire. 40, 50, 60 pages long I think, ‘wow, this is great’, and then I lose interest and see no reason whatsoever to continue. But I thought his lectures might be enjoyable, and I was curious what he’s made of Ulysses.

But I found myself reading diagonally after a few pages. Nabokov’s strategy seemed to’ve be trying to make one love a book by retelling the story, reading out passages and making you image what the fictional world of the novel looks like. His insists on this visualization as being the key to reading novels. That’s why for him it’s so important that “(w) have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and can enjoy its details.” Apart from the fact that it’s unsure that we can do this with a picture, I doubt whether this is always so important. (If it is, the novel would surely have been superseded by the movie). In any case, it explains, for me, why Nabokov is so low on my list. I enjoy the language of language, and then the sound of language, and the thought of language, much more.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to enjoy or to be learned in Nabokov’s Lectures. Like, when, at the end of the lecture on Jane Austen, he states that for young author learning to write means ‘free his language from cliches, to eliminate clumsiness, to form a habit of searching with unflinching patience for the right word, the only right word which will convey with the utmost precision the exact shade and intensity of thought.’ (p. 60) That sure is something to think about when you’re spitting out a few hundred of words, rewriting without having the time to rewrite, another text. Pff.

‘Ein neuer Service im Netz war früher an der Idee der Software orientiert, eine halbwegs stabile Versionsnummer rauszubringen. Heutzutage ist alles, gerne auch beliebig lange, Beta.’

Sacha Kosch, WEB 2.0 Einleitung, in Debug 98, http://www.de-bug.de/texte/4137.html.

(I’m reading through 2 years of DeBug issues).

PS, the catchword is of course ‘perpetual beta’. Knew that, but some things one forgets when reading a different language.

‘Imagine having your own self-contained knowledge manipulator in a portable package the size and shape of an ordinary notebook. Suppose it had enough power to outrace your senses of sight and hearing, enough capacity to store for later retrieval thousands of page-equivalents of reference material, poems, letters, recipes, records, drawings, animations, musical scores, waveforms, dynamic simulations, and anything else you would like to remember and change.’

Allan Kay & Adele Goldberg, ‘Personal Dynamic Media’, Computer 10 (3): p. 31-41, March 1977. (Quoted from Wardrip-Fruin & Montfort (eds.) The New Media Reader, MIT Press, Cambridge &c, 2003, p. 394.)

We have that, don’t we.

Samuel (Vriezen — he again — Dutch experimental composer) writes today something worth quoting on http://blogger.xs4all.nl/sqv/archive/2006/05/30.aspx.

“Experimentele kunst is supracultureel omdat ze zich niet wil beperken tot een of andere vaststaande cultuur. Enerzijds verklaart dat waarom het normaal is om experimentele kunst ontoegankelijk te vinden – geen houvast. Anderzijds verklaart het waarom die kunst vaak zo toegankelijk is – iedereen is gelijk voor deze kunst. Als je de knop maar kan omzetten. De muziek van Xenakis wordt pas muziek voor je als je haar kunt horen op haar termen: klankwolken, nevels, draaiende oppervlakten, massa’s, chaos en orde, boomfiguren: en dat zou even moeilijk of makkelijk kunnen zijn voor iedereen, onafhankelijk van met welke muziekstijl hij of zij is opgegroeid.”

In quick english translation:

“Experimental art is supra-cultural because it does not limit itself to one or another fixed culture. Nothing to hold onto. On the other hand this explains why this kind of art is often so accessible — everybody is equal for this kind of art. As long as you are able to switch the button in your head. The music of Xenakis only becomes music when you are listening to it on its own terms: clouds of sounds, mists, revolving surfaces, masses, chaos and order. That should be equally difficult or easy for anybody.”

I can only agree. Xenakis is not difficult music. It is accessible. (And no, there’s no irony here. But there is fun.)

Btw: Samuel searches for a better term than “supra-cultural”.

Reading through De Certeau’s book, checking if there’s anything that I should read or reread (I read a few chapters in the past). Struck by the fact that De Certeau is all the time assuming the existence of power-structure/master-discourse, against which the people/users devise their own counter-strategies. In that way a common poetics will always be defined as something which insinuates itself inside, is set up against, that which is in ‘power’. (Does this make sense — or have I been reading too quickly?)

‘Reading is thus situated at the point where social stratification (class relationships) and poetic operations (the practitioner’s constructions of a text) intersect: a social hierarchization seeks to make the reader conform to the “information” distributed by an elite (or semi-elite); reading operations manipulate the reader by insinuating their inventiveness into the cracks in a cultural orthodoxy.’ Michel de Certeau, ‘Reading as Poaching’, inThe Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley etc., 1984, p. 172

‘[…]
As far as I know, there is still not a Decent Writing System anywhere in the world, although several things now come close. It seems a shame that grown men and women have to rustle around in piles of paper, like squirrels looking for acorns, in search of the phrases and ideas they themselves have generated. The decent writing system, as I see it, will actually be much more: it will help us to create better things in a fraction of a time, but also keep track of everything in better and more subtle ways than we ever could before. […]’

Quote from Nelson’s Dream Machines, 1974, as found on http://www.mprove.de/diplom/ht/tndm.html.

Of course he’s mad, but he also truly is a hero: Ted Nelson. Searching for images in a last attempt to contribute to this weekend’s Tomorrow Book-project, I land at Nelson’s Xanadu-page. You have to love this:

PROJECT XANADU MISSION STATEMENT:
DEEP INTERCONNECTION, INTERCOMPARISON AND RE-USE
Since 1960, we have fought for a world of deep electronic documents — with side-by-side intercomparison and frictionless re-use of copyrighted material.
We have an exact and simple structure. The Xanadu model handles automatic version management and rights management through deep connection.

Today’s popular software simulates paper. The World Wide Web (another imitation of paper) trivializes our original hypertext model with one-way ever-breaking links and no management of version or contents.

WE FIGHT ON.

http://www.xanadu.net/

And wouldn’t it be beautiful to have “deep quotable hypertext”… if only for the terminology…

Xanadu, in development since the 1960s, never took off. I wonder what Nelson thinks about what is happening now, with blogsoftware automatically sending out (meta-)information, that is aggregated by services like Technorati.