JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

I’ve recently placed my books in eBook form at the iBookstore:

25 Secrets of the Muse: A Book of Creative Strategies

A Curmudgeon’s Bestiary

Ancient World

Creative Quotations: Stillness in the Midst of Chaos

Ghost Island, Legend 1: Battle Eternal

Ghost Island, Legend 2: Counselors

Ghost Island, Legend 3: Battle Eternal

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It was a sometimes frustrating process as there is no direct route to creating an epub — the format used by many eBook vendors — in a form that can be validated and formatted satisfactorily. The epub format is really HTML1 — the most basic web, going back years; it is then wrapped in a compressed zip format. I started by using Adobe CS5 Indesign, part of a recently released suite. Although this application was 19 months in development it could not produce an epub that could be validated. Extraordinary.

Well, it was worth it as the final results look beautiful. The books have also been edited, so they are at present, the most current revision. I should note that the books currently on display at the iBookstore were the first version. Apple has yet to display the current revision, which I assume will be available to all who purchase the currently displayed eBooks when parsed in the next few weeks by Apple.

The other issue, which the iBookstore wrote me that they will be improving: some of the ebooks are not sampled so you can get a full idea of the contents. This, as I say, will soon be remedied as well.

I write this book to disembarrass my soul of certain notions that have hovered about in it too long for my comfort. I do not seek to persuade anybody. I am devoid of the pedagogic instinct and when I know a thing never feel in myself the desire to impart it to others. I do not much care if people agree with me. Of course I think I am right, otherwise I should not think as I do, and they are wrong, but it does not offend me that they should be wrong. Nor does it greatly disturb me to discover that my judgment is at variance with that of the majority. I have a certain confidence in my instinct.

I must write as though I were a person of importance; and indeed, I am—to myself. To myself I am the most important person in the world; though I do not forget that, not even taking into consideration so grand a conception as the Absolute, but from the standpoint of common sense, I am of no consequence whatever. It would have made small difference to the universe if I had never existed.

You can tell, not only from the way the ideas are expressed, but from the ideas themselves, that this was written by someone from another age. The perspective, modesty (but with substantial ego), and wisdom, suggest it was written at another time.

It was written by Somerset Maugham in “The Summing Up”. I read that book a long time ago but it really left an impression.

The modern memoir is another deal entirely…

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Christopher Hitchens has written a self-described memoir. The NYT has a brief review which scatters such phrases as, “[Hitchens] has a moving personal story and is a pasha of vice”. A pasha of vice.

The review says there is nothing much new in Hitchens’ memoir but it is hard not to like the guy. Damned by faint endorsement.

(In fact, the NYT is steadily drifting from the pop culture’s version of a “newspaper of record,” to yet another tabloid expression of contemporary junk culture.)

To see the full bloom of the latter you can read the Q&A, in which Hitchens bats the sludge back with some dignity,

Q.Your mother committed suicide, in a pact with a lover, in I973. Did she suffer from lifelong depression?


A. No. I think she was having a bad menopause, and she was losing her looks, which were pretty impressive.

Hitchens is a bracing, unpredictable thinker. People like Hitchens (and there are only a handful) should be given awards just for shaking things up — the hive mind being what it is: smug and intolerant. There is nothing less allowed than trying to work out an issue for oneself. Hitchens’ unfortunate affirmation of his “consistency” in the Q&A is less a bragging point than his efforts at his own brand of honesty, which will often result in honorable contradictions.

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The review is titled, “Do I Contradict Myself?” Perhaps unknowingly meant to be snide (no surprise at the NYT); perhaps knowingly, quoting,

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)
—Whitman

This NYT article about the Human Genome Project says,

…after 10 years of effort, geneticists are almost back to square one in knowing where to look for the roots of common disease.

The expectation that knowledge equates to resolution is part of the contemporary mindset, where concept equals expression.

… with most diseases, the common variants have turned out to explain just a fraction of the genetic risk. It now seems more likely that each common disease is mostly caused by large numbers of rare variants, ones too rare to have been cataloged…

The problem arises in raising hopes and playing to the crowd (media), which causes scientists to overstate the potentials of their enterprise and diminish the difficulties. In some ways this diminishes science itself.

The public wants hope, the media wants a feel good sound bite, so some scientists will abide. Hollywood’s “high concept” approach to pitching films has permeated the culture.

The value of understanding, even if we are currently powerless to do much, is still of value though:

The slowly emerging explanation is that humans and other animals have much the same set of protein-coding genes, but the human set is regulated in a much more complicated way, through elaborate use of DNA’s companion molecule, RNA.

What this scientist says about genome mapping and hopes for cures could be a useful credo:

“One can prefer to be an optimist or a pessimist, but the best approach is to be an empiricist.”

Hollywood cares about money and awards so you have sequels. Well, remakes may not win many awards, but they beckon as safe commercial  bets — even if they don’t payoff as hoped, who can question bringing out another version of something already approved by popular interest? Nothing guarantees the popular taste though — even familiarity.

The NYT says,

The mercenary impulses of the culture industry always have a plausible populist basis: DreamWorks Animation and Disney and Jerry Bruckheimer and Marvel Studios and all the other serial peddlers are giving us what we want — what they know we like. And this is hardly new. The current era of big-budget, mass-market movie sequelization dates back to the 1970s, when the personal cinema of the New Hollywood spawned, almost as a byproduct, a handful of nostalgic baby-boomer adventures, horror movies and action spectaculars that eventually took over the business.

This is true about the popular culture in general — TV, music, and a portion of the commercial art bureaucracy, which is really an extension of the popular culture — in particular. Formulas are synthesized into “new” vehicles. It isn’t influence. It is just lifting an idea and combining it with another lifted idea. Many Indie movies instantiate this approach. They aren’t Indie at all, just conventional remakes.

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After a long hiatus we’ve been sampling Netflix to tryout the streaming feature. We’ve hit on some interesting movies — which is pretty good considering the Netflix streaming library is large but mostly unsatisfying.

Passengers was a good remake of The Sixth Sense. It was actually better in many ways, because Anne Hathaway brought a layered warmth to the role that made the movie more appealing. Speaking of The Sixth Sense, we watched Signs, another M. Night Shyamalan movie that was panned on release. A bit grim and slow moving although M. Night is a talented and bright fellow — you can see his intelligence on the screen. He needs to find some humor, fun, and energy in his movies. His source material is the pop culture but his movies lack that foundationalist quality of junk culture.

A movie called Man, Woman, and the Wall was offbeat but held our attention. About an audio voyeur. That’s a new category. Apparently the walls in many apartments in Japan are thin and it is common for people to listen in to their neighbors. The main interest in the movie was the insight into Japanese society: the casualness with which the main character, a young guy, discussed his obsession with his friends who accepted it without judgment or crudeness. The sexual material was devoid of Western guilt. Japan may be a repressed society, but not sexually. The sexual scenes — sped up by Netflix to keep themselves family safe, a weird decision — was actually sweetly portrayed, when the voyeur and object of his adoration finally began to relate.

Scientists at Fermilab have found suggestive evidence that might help answer an age old mystery. The scientists working at the National Accelerator Laboratory,

…found that the fireballs produced pairs of the particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons, slightly more often than they produced pairs of anti-muons. So the miniature universe inside the accelerator went from being neutral to being about 1 percent more matter than antimatter.

The question why there is something rather than nothing sounds philosophical. But the way science has been going: more abstract, more conceptual rather than intuitive, more mathematically derived rather than observational, makes the question no longer solely a resident in the dominion of philosophy.

I doubt that the answer scientists provide to the great questions will be any more authoritative than that offered by philosophy — or even satisfying. But science is still hanging onto some credibility in a world that challenges common sense. So the discovery might be a revelation of sorts, explaining the mechanics of creation itself. And with knowledge comes hope.

[ via Lifehacker.com ]

The above video discusses in an entertaining way the ideas currently in fashion about economics. The premise, that we are irrational beings deluding ourselves of our reasonableness, is confirmed everyday in the news. But this clear presentation is still interesting.

I would change the wording, but in summary, the presentation notes that money and achievement are not related.

What motivates people if not the carrot of money and the stick of unemployment?

• Play. What the presentation calls Autonomy. If you are allowed to play you collect the best of yourself. One company allows its engineers one day a week to do whatever they want, with the sole stipulation that they show the results to the company.
• Learning. What the vid calls Mastery. People want to grow. It is a blessing of human nature. If we grow we are happy. Surprise. It isn’t looks, status, money — they all help of course given our biological predispositions — but it is the desire to be better and fulfill our capabilities that satisfies in the long run. Life is short and learning is long.
• Purpose. I’ll agree with this word. It is really the social impulse, the religious impulse, the tribal impulse. Something larger than ourselves to which we can contribute.

Human beings really aren’t so bad — despite what you see on the evening news. It is the structures we erect, often with good intent, that force us into a self-made Procrustean bed, where we lose control and become the servant of some system, destroying our natural impulses to grow, learn and contribute.

We’ve been catching every episode of Justified as it is posted @hulu. It is a well-done throwback-modern-day cowboy drama. With so many eunuch-boys in the media and commercials, with so many males portrayed as imbeciles on everything from TV drama to movie comedy (not to mention their black belt rocket scientist girlfriends) the appearance on a TV show of a retrograde knuckle dragging macho guy is almost refreshing. The dialog in Justified can be very funny and the acting is uniformly solid. The level of violence doesn’t correspond to the sophistication of the characterizations, but I guess in an update of Gunsmoke, you’ve got to update the violence quotient as well.

We had been watching CBS nightly news but the story choices are beginning to fail. They had pretty much been the best of the network news shows, with more material and a somewhat more serious look at issues. CBS’s coverage of the oil spill has been excellent. Even with Couric, not a fave, they were better. But it is story choice and point of view that draws you to news shows and CBS is fading as NBC seems to be getting better again. Lehrer now known as something else, has stories that are too long — wannabe video magazine stories. The strength of shows like Sixty Minutes — being able to tell a coherent story — has almost completely been lost in media news coverage. From local to national news to the BBC, the flow of the story is dysfunctional — it doesn’t answer your questions as they come up in the story. It doesn’t help Lehrer that the reporters are boring and the whole enterprise appears adrift. I’d like to see more of Kwame Holman and Woodruff and less of everyone else. New producers and a new group of reporters would be just great. It is amazing the way PBS strives for diversity, wears it on their sleeves, and produces the blandest, most colorless broadcasts.

We missed the Smallville finale. It is probably the best TV has to offer in integrating computer effects with storyline. That means it is better than the movies actually. Video games have deeply influenced the look of TV shows. Many TV shows are beautifully photographed and well-edited. Writing is another matter.

The problem with Smallville is that it is acquiring Heroes Syndrome: character creep. Too many players, and with it, too many storylines.  The finale to V was very good and we look forward to more. I don’t know if it is intentional, but the Queen lizard is looking more and more sinister in every episode. It’s good. Also most fine was the finale to Supernatural.

Having mentioned Hulu: Strictly Sexual and The Sex Monster were pretty good and are very popular. You think it might be subject matter and you might be right. But they are pretty well done TV-movie-sitcoms/melodramas really.

This is the Lost weekend where the networks show they are desperate and lost and looking for something, anything that is popular, and will squeeze every last ounce out of it, even if it is a conventional, juvenile show. Here is another viewpoint about why Lost is lost.

Two end-of-thread comments @ask.metafilter:

OMG. Clearly the most amazing site thread of all time. So glad all is working out.
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I just stumbled across this 10 minutes ago. To all who offered their help: thank you for restoring some of my lost faith in humanity.

The thread: “Help me help my friend…” turned into an online transcript of a rescue mission.

Amazing.

You can find online a study guide to Cognitive Biases.

The descriptions of the biases themselves leads one to think of comedy. Seinfeld could have done, (and by indirection often did), storylines illustrating these irrational paths we all follow in trying to arrive at a rational decision.

Here are some of the biases which could be attributed to those engaged in the partisan wars — apply this to whatever affinity group you wish — they will fit like a glove:

Outgroup homogeneity bias
Individuals see members of their own group as being relatively more varied than members of other groups.
False consensus effect
The tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
Just-world phenomenon
The tendency for people to believe that the world is just and therefore people “get what they deserve.”
Hyperbolic discounting
The tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs, where the tendency increases the closer to the present both payoffs are.
Negativity bias
Phenomenon by which humans pay more attention to and give more weight to negative than positive experiences or other kinds of information.
Illusion of control
The tendency for human beings to believe they can control or at least influence outcomes that they clearly cannot.
Framing
Using an approach or description of the situation or issue that is too narrow. Also framing effect – drawing different conclusions based on how data is presented.
Moral credential effect
The tendency of a track record of non-prejudice to increase subsequent prejudice.
Bias blind spot
The tendency not to compensate for one’s own cognitive biases.
Bandwagon effect
The tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. Related to groupthink and herd behaviour.
Wishful thinking
The formation of beliefs and the making of decisions according to what is pleasing to imagine instead of by appeal to evidence or rationality.
Reactance
The urge to do the opposite of what someone wants you to do out of a need to resist a perceived attempt to constrain your freedom of choice.
Disregard of regression toward the mean
The tendency to expect extreme performance to continue.
Overconfidence effect
Excessive confidence in one’s own answers to questions. For example, for certain types of question, answers that people rate as “99% certain” turn out to be wrong 40% of the time.
Authority bias
The tendency to value an ambiguous stimulus (e.g., an art performance) according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic.

So, we are irrational creatures. Not out of ill intentions, but out of heuristics: the mental shortcuts we use to make decisions. The best we can do is to find the particular errors to which we are most prone and try and compensate.

Social function clicks in though. If you are struggling to be fair and objective and others seem unconcerned, but out of ego are pursuing their irrational goals, you have lost some edge in the argument. But then your own thinking was similarly distorted, so you may be wrong as well and it is ego that drives the argument, on both sides.

This is why the arts deal with ambiguities and not declarations of conceptual truth in trying to express the human condition.

There is no objectivity, in the humanities or even in the sciences, where at one time, it seemed, science was the sole oasis of objectivity.

In a recent op-ed David Brooks compares careerist automatons of a certain age with Elena Kagan.

These [are] bright students [at elite universities] who had been formed by the meritocratic system placed in front of them. They had great grades, perfect teacher recommendations, broad extracurricular interests, admirable self-confidence and winning personalities…If they had any flaw, it was that they often had a professional and strategic attitude toward life.

Perfectly smooth and sanded, without a fissure or crack of interest — nothing to disconcert. Pure calculation and skillset, not much in the way of depth. Brooks says this recent instantiation of the 1950s, with its conformist impulses and happy surface, is disturbing. He says of Kagan,

What we have is a person whose career has dovetailed with the incentives presented by the confirmation system, a system that punishes creativity and rewards caginess. Arguments are already being made for and against her nomination, but most of this is speculation because she has been too careful to let her actual positions leak out.

In this sense, the same criticisms could have been levied against George Bush The Father. In his many high ranking offices, almost comical in its aggregate status — culminating in the presidency — it was often noted that Bush “never left a track in any office he ever held”.

If the system wants a certain type, the factories which produce those types, the universities, crank them out. This is like saying the sky is blue.

Charlie Rose interviewed Ian McEwan recently. Listening to McEwan speak is such a civilized pleasure.

“Humor is such a delicate and changing thing,” McEwan said, in the flow of conversation — a brilliant throwaway — saying why he did not like comic novels. Comic novels try too hard.

McEwan expressed his admiration for the moving ending of Joyce’s “The Dead.”

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Awesome, the way the rhythms and resonant depth of the paragraph and story resolve, in the last line, and then spreads out, into more than itself: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”