The Archipelago of Culture

Cultural preferences are given a geography in this visualization of the data for the Netflix Prize. The distance between two movies on the map represents the degree of similarity between their ratings by Netflix users. Note that the green Sci-Fi Island to the southeast is quite far away from the "Crocodile"/"Arachnid"/"Leprechaun 4: In Space" cluster, but rather close to the large blue Critically Acclaimed Island.

Little Booklets

Printing and assembling the mini-comic version of Cory Doctorow's story "Printcrime" (from his new collection Overclocked) was so much fun that I had to make my own origami booklet. So here it is: eight poems by W. B. Yeats, including my personal favorite "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in a pocket-sized booklet produced with PagePacker. Open the .pp document in PagePacker, print it, and follow the directions on the PagePacker page to fold and cut the sheet into booklet form. Then put it in your pocket and read it on the subway, bus, in the cafe, etc. (Note: PagePacker is a Mac application. Windows users might try converting the original PDF into a booklet using the PDF-to-PocketMod converter from PocketMod I haven't tested this, however.)

Here's how I made it: First I copied the text of the poems from www.bartleby.com and formatted it into an eight-page document in my word processor (NeoOfficeJ). Then I exported the document as a pdf. Finally, I dropped the pdf into the PagePacker document window. PagePacker handled the rest.

A note on "Printcrime" itself: as usual, Doctorow wraps a healthy dose of geek ideology in an imagined world that's concrete enough to help the pointedness go down. In this case the point is one that's often missed by post-scarcity extropian futures. Intellectual property clearly shows that the absence of scarcity is no guarantee against a world of haves and have-nots. So even if we can conquer matter, how do we get from where we are now to the bitchun/star trek world of universally shared abundance?

Bob Dylan as American Liar

In his essay "The Right to Lie" Thomas Disch asserts that a national admiration for liars (Tom Sawyer, Oliver North, etc.) has made it easy for Americans to "pretend to believe." This willed credulity has in turn paved the way for UFO abduction stories and Dianetics (and has, according to Disch, given science fiction "a special claim to be our national literature"). But what Disch calls an unfortunate blurring of the line between truth and fiction, Keats called negative capability : the ability to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

From his self-portrait in "Chronicles: Volume One," we can see that Bob Dylan is an admirable liar, an embodiment of Keats's ideal, and, as a result of these qualities, a fantasist. He happily confesses to some whoppers: pretending to rediscover Judaism, fabricating a biographical blurb for his first album to pump up his folk cred, and others. But he never comes across as a con man. Rather, he seems to regard surface truth as trivial compared to deeper emotional truths and purposes. And this same approach to outer truth has endowed him with a powerful credulity when it comes to the mythology of folk music:

Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom (236).

Similarly, when he tells us with a straight face that Johnny Cash "killed a man in Reno just to watch him die," Dylan is pretending to believe order in order to illustrate how a culture possessed him. With respect to "Chronicles" itself, this ability to channel myths yields an additional benefit. Young Dylan is a sponge who absorbs vivid details of the characters and places of the folk scene so that old Dylan can echo them back to us. It's worth suspending your disbelief long enough to absorb some of these vividly drawn archetypes of humanity.

Top 20 Geek Novels Poll

In case you didn't see it on Slashdot, let me draw your attention to a list The Guardian has published of "the best geek novels written in English since 1932," based on an informal poll. It isn't all science fiction and fantasy, either (even if you count Cryptonomicon as science fiction).

The Bear

I had this thing about Strange and Norrell all worked up, but then I picked up Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home and reread a few pages. So this week's recommendation is The Bear. I suspect that you don't have to be into jazz to like this novel about a bear who plays saxophone, although I can't verify that from personal experience. In any case, it's about the nature of improvisation and nature as improvisation. It's on my lifetime list, right up there with The Lord of the Rings (not that it's fantasy). Try it.

Tezuka Explores Ethics of Cute Engineering

Imagine that you're reading a comic from the late 40's featuring a boy genius named Doctor Shikishima and a cute talking rabbit who looks Disney's Oswalt. The story promises to be an adventure in the Carl Barks vein, until on p17 the bunny explains, "You see in the Doctor's laboratory he takes the brains of animals and surgically changes them into the brains of humans!" Welcome to The Lost World, an early work by Osamu Tezuka, the creator of Astro Boy. There's no irony here: the cuteness is always sincere, and unrelenting. But there is self-consciousness. One character remarks to the bunny: "you're like something straight out of a comic book!" The Betty Boop lookalikes made out of seaweed take the notion of engineering cuteness to even stranger places.

With this dark utopian fantasy about the technological realization of fantasy, Tezuka reveals himself as a descendent not only of Disney but also of Wells and Verne, and as a progenitor of cyberpunk anime.

The Lost World is available from Amazon.

Wachowskis Do Frankenstein Comic

The Wachowski brothers do love their utopias. The world of the Matrix has Zion, complete with Cornell West and raves, while Doc Frankenstein has a fortress in the desert founded by the Frankenstein monster. In the Wachowskis' recent venture into comic writing we discover that the monster from Mary Shelley's novel has survived to the present of Bush's America, where he has established his desert stronghold as a rationalist haven for freaks and free-thinkers. The existential anti-hero of Shelley's novel has become a superhero in the Wachowski book: instead of confronting a silent God in lonely angst, he confronts a Catholic military organization, guns ablazing. As in the Matrix movies, the utopian prospect is ultimately just a dramatic backdrop for the action. Nevertheless, the backdrop makes the action particularly satisfying for the like-minded. Here's an excerpt from issue 2: [Note that the monster has capitulated to common practice and now simply answers to the name of his creator, Frankenstein]:

Soldier of God: Do you have any sins to confess?
Frankenstein's girlfriend: Only that I didn't kick you harder.
Soldier of God: Then may God have mercy on your soul.
Frankenstein's girlfriend: May Frankenstein have mercy on yours.
Frankenstein (crashing through ceiling): Okay, we can do this the easy way, where you drop your guns, or we can do this the hard way, where I rip your arms out of their sockets.
Soldier of God: I don't need a gun, monster.
Frankenstein: That's Doctor Monster to you, God-boy.

Good clean fun.