Copyrighteous

Order Without Law is a fantastic book by Robert Ellickson published in 1991. In a way, the book is an in-depth case study of the irrelevance of law. Subtitled, "how neighbors settle disputes," Ellickson shows how people solve complicated problems in an archetypal area of liability law without knowledge of the law. Ellickson shows that even when people know exactly what the law says, they often ignore it in favor of community norms and, in his examples, models of "neighborliness."

Specifically, the book is about how neighbors in northern California settle disputes related to damage caused by roaming cattle, how neighbors construct and share costs of fences, and how, although the law is frequently debated in relation to classifying land as either open or closed to free grazing, the law tends to take a back seat to unwritten norms in the way that problems are actually solved. There is order and a shared understanding of rules in Ellickson's account; it just has very little to do with the law.

As part of his description, Ellickson goes into some detail about the types of damage that cattle cause. For example, Ellickson describes how bulls, will often break down barbed wire fences and go on rampages impregnating heifers, eating vast amounts of food, and destroying crops and equipment.

When I was on a long bike trip through northern California a few weeks ago, I was sitting under a tree waiting for my cyling partner to catch up. A giant black bull nearby noticed me. Shorting, mooing, and shaking ribbons of slobber from its mouth, it lumbered toward me. Only a rather weak-looking barbed wire fence separated us. All I could think about was Order Without Law.

About a year ago, I read American Gothic by Steven Biel and the book has left a surprising lasting impression on me. The book describes the background, history, and life of "American Gothic: America's most famous painting" by Grant Wood. Even if you don't recognize the name "American Gothic", you are likely to recognize the picture or the scene. The book is a serious and -- as far as I can tell -- reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject that is interesting, insightful at points, and a breeze to read.

Of course, the book is not actually about the painting that hangs in the Art Institute of Chicago -- although it will certainly teach you more than you probably ever wanted to know about that painting, its subjects, its settings, etc. The book is really the story of how that paining has been received, understood, and used. Nearly half of the book focuses on examples of people who have remixed, reworked, reimagined, and reproduced the painting in myriad forms, formats, settings, and ways. The book contains scores of photographs of celebrities posing in American Gothic style settings, dozens of political cartoons based on the paintings, images of talk shows, magazine covers, Broadway plays, product advertisements, toys, gifts, kitch, and more, done up in recognizeable representations of the basic American Gothic form. There is a very incomplete of references to American Gothic in popular culture at Wikipedia that can give a tiny taste of what is out there.

The last chapter of the book is devoted to these "parodies" and there's some brief talk of issues around copyright and control of the image. Wood's sister Nan was the owner of the copyright for much of the second half of the twentieth century and is also the woman in the painting. She famously charged several makers of more lurid take-offs with defamation and successfully blocked a number of remixes. In 1988, Nan transferred ownership to the Visual Artists and Galleries Association (VAGA) which will hold the copyright until 2025. VAGA also claims "rights of publicity" in Nan's image which will last until 2060. VAGA takes a very expansive view of its copyright claims and argues that it has both veto power and royalty rights to any recognizably similar work. For example, VAGA does not want the American Gothic image used in alcohol advertisements and has successfully had such ads pulled. Biel's book contains no reference to the amount of money made from licensing the work but one can only conclude that it must be massive. VAGA blocked a plan by Iowa to use the picture on the back of the Iowa state quarter due to licensing disagreements; instead Iowa used a different Wood painting that was clearly in the public domain.

What struck me most about Biel's book is related to just how deeply ingrained in American culture the American Gothic image has become. The book cites simple surveys that show that almost every American recognizes the painting (although only a small fraction know the painting's name or who painted it). The thousands of parodies that the book documents are testament to the fact that the painting has become a way of representing something essential about American culture and its values. But in a strange way, the painting's popularity and incessant reuse has also made it part of the culture that it so effectively captured.

We can think of culture as a set of shared values and references that help us related to each other and to communicate. Just like idioms in language, culture helps us communicate more effectively, certainly, but also lets us communicate messages that would not be communicable otherwise. When Out Magazine, Coors, or any of several dozen others replace the figures in American Gothic with a gay or lesbian couple, they are succinctly sending a message about homosexual relationships and American traditional values that could not be made any other way. In this way, American Gothic -- both the painting and Biel's book -- represent a strong argument for free culture.

If American Society has infused American Gothic with so much value, how can it be fair to let one person or organization own it? Are they not owning an essential mode through which a society can relate, experience, and communicate? I can't help but conclude that it shouldn't matter if VAGA does not like alcohol, advertisements, homosexuality, or wants to make a some money every time someone makes a cartoon parody. These are trivial concerns next to the importance of our society's need to communicate about these issues. If doing so requires the use of a shared cultural reference in VAGA's painting, I find it hard to justify VAGA's position of control.

We need to be able to reproduce and reimagine American Gothic because it has become part of us. It's a striking example of the way that art becomes culture and the reason that truly free culture is the only appropriate response. We can't afford to let our experience of the world and each other -- to let ourselves at a very fundamental level -- be owned and controlled.

Another year has past and another edition of the Official Ubuntu Book has been finished and will be released soon. Over the last two years, the two previous editions of the book have grown along-side Ubuntu. The book has continued to sell very well, received almost universally favorable reviews, and been translated into more than half a dozen languages

While Jono Bacon has mostly been pulled into other projects, Corey Burger stepped up to help play the major supporting role in this version of the book's production. The whole text was updated to reflect changes in Ubuntu over the last year including a major rewrite of the chapter on Kubuntu and important work on the Edubuntu chapter. If you use either, you'll understand that there's plenty of churn to report.

In a sort of experiment, Barnes and Noble will also be selling a custom edition with an extra chapter by Matthew Helmke on the Ubuntu Forums which I hope to include in the next edition of the book. It's an excellent introduction to the best support resource Ubuntu has to offer that I hope many beginners -- the group that always been the book's audience -- will find useful.

You can pre-order the custom edition from B&N or get the book from Amazon or many other sources.

Like all previous editions, the book is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license and soft-copies should be up on the publisher's website once the book is released. Please support commercial free culture publishing by buying a copy if you find the book useful.

It's been fun to see a stream of translations of the The Official Ubuntu Book coming in. I now have copies of El Libro Oficial de Ubuntu and Das Offizielle Ubuntu-Buch on my bookshelf. I'm particularly happy about Ubuntu徹底入門 The Official Ubuntu Book日本語版, the Japanese translation. It was coordinated by the Ubuntu Japan community, looks great, and has won me all kinds of brownie points -- and a congratulatory bottle of top shelf shōchū -- from Mika's family members.

I think that this sign in the Housing Works Used Book Cafe is an example of how fixing "/ Crime" to any subject heading in a bookstore can have humorous results (apologies for the blurry phone picture).

One of my favorite weekend activities is spending a Saturday afternoon going through the dollar book carts outside many New York and Boston area used book stores. It's not only because the books are cheap -- although I like that.

The dollar book section is the great equalizer of bookstores. A neglected Dickens or Shakespeare can rub out against a discarded Mary-Cate and Ashley teeny-bopper quasi-romance novel. In the best cases, random shelving creates perfect (if unintuitive and ironic) pairs like Run Run Run about Abbie Hoffman and Fun Fun Fun about other youngsters -- a pair I found adjacent in a dollar book section last week.

But you also get to meet books you will never meet in the bookstore sections you normally frequent. The dollar book section at the Strand has introduced me to a whole class of books with intriguing non-fiction sounding titles that I had pulled excitedly off the shelf only to find out that they were, in fact, novels. There are also the books with titles so good you suspect the book will be downhill from that point. The Complete Idiot's Guide To Being a Model (not, as one might expect, Becoming a model) and this guide to the British pierage are great examples.

Last weekend I was in New York again which meant that I had an opportunity to engage in what was, while I was living there, tied with Belgian beer for the status of my favorite vice: one dollar books.

One of my more intriguing finds was a Grave Matters: a book consisting wholly of epitaphs. The book was a fun and very quick read In terms of the content, the epitaphs are more than able to speak for themselves. A sampling might include...

There are people who seems glad to go, like Lydia Snow:

Gladly I quit this vile, decrepit clay,

To rise in endless youth, in endless day.

— Wellfleet, Massachusetts 1816

There are folks like John Young or Richard Hind whose epitaphs are written by "friends" who were being perhaps a bit too honest:

JOHN YOUNG

Those who knew him best deplored him most.

— [unverified]

Here lies the body of Richard Hind,

Who was neither ingenious, sober, or kind.

— Chestnut, England, c. 1880

There are epitaphs that are just plain confusing like Nicholas Round's:

Here lies the body of Nicholas Round

Who was lost at sea & never found.

— Great Yamouth, England, c. 1790

Additionally, the book is full of warnings and clever rhymes -- not of all which seem completely appropriate for a gravestone.

While I still suspect it's a little premature, I'd like to borrow from Thomas Greenhill at least in part for my own epitaph:

Earth to earth's shovel up is shut,

A Hill into a Hole is put.

While searching for treasures in Widener's stacks recently, I found a beautiful 1896 edition of William Blade's classical book on book collecting and book maintenance: The Enemies of Books. The title and driving metaphor of the book won me over right away. Books seem like inert and relatively unobjectionable objects. Many people dislike certain books or do not care for books in general but who could be the enemies of books in general?

Some people may not like books but William Blades is not one of these people. Blades loves books (Caxtons in particular) and has, to say the least, a long list of ways that he wants to see books treated. Anything that violates Blade's sensibilities becomes the enemy of William Blades. Blades is happy happy to speak for books in general.

Enemies enumerated include both individuals like the "Bagford the Biblioclast", behaviors, occupations, nature, states of beings, children, and most women. There are chapters on fire, water, gas and heat, dust and neglect, ignorance and bigotry, the bookworm, other vermin, bookbinders, collectors, and servants and children.

The book contains something for almost everyone. Blades opens a wonderfully out-of-date section on the danger of gas lighting in libraries stating that, "unfortunately, I can speak from experience on the dire effect of gas in a confined space." Who can't? Nowhere though, is Blades as worked up as when he discusses the evils done by bookbinders who trim (and who frequently overtrim) the margins of books while binding or rebinding them. Blades explains:

Dante, in his "Inferno," deals out to the lost souls various tortures suited with dramatic fitness to the past crimes of the victims, and had I to execute judgment on the criminal binders of certain precious volumes I have seen, where the untouched maiden sheets untrusted to their care have, by barbarous treatment, lost dignity, beauty, and values, I would collect paper shavings so ruthlessly shorn off, and roast the perpetrator of the outrage over their slow combustion. In olden times, before men had learned to value the relics of our printers, there was some excuse for the sins of a binder who erred from ignorance which has general; but in these times, when the historical and antiquarian values of books is freely acknowledged, no quarter should be granted to a careless culprit.

When collectors' turns comes up, Blades rants for pages on the evils of collectors who rip out the title pages or colophons of otherwise good books to build large bibliographic collections.

As Mika was looking through the book, the title page fell from the old and rather fragile binding. It seems that we may have a candidate for a new addition to the book. On the other hand, perhaps we have a new distinction: the enemy of The Enemies of Books.

Mika and I went to the MIT Press Bookstore loading dock sale today. It provided what was, by far, the most relevant selection at any bargain book sale I've attended. It was two small rooms and I could have easily walked out with 100+ books that I would have read. Even with most books at three, five, or seven dollars (US), my student budget was the limiting factor.

At the sale, I bought a large coffee-table sized book called Manhole Covers by Mimi and Robert Melnick. It offers page after mesmerizing page of black and white photographs of manhole covers of all designs, shapes and sizes. At seven dollars, I felt like it was asking a lot but Mika and I decided that on a per-manhole-cover basis, the price was really unbeatable.

The price was 3.3 cents (US) per full-page manhole cover photograph if you do not account for the small thumbnails of manhole covers that pepper the books front matter.

If you are in or around Boston, you should go to their next loading dock sale -- probably in the spring.

Much of my research at the Media Lab in the next couple years is going to involve me trying to help make collaboration around chunks of text, both code and other types of creative works, more effective and efficient.

To prime myself a bit, I'm participating in a class on Computer Supported Cooperative Work being taught in the the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics (!!). This week we're reading about group theory including the book Groups: Interaction and Performance by Joseph Edward McGrath. The professor suggested that we could start on Chapter 3. Chapter 3 begins:

Science is the systematic use of theoretical and empirical methods to try to increase understanding of some set of phenomena or events.

If the third chapter begins by defining science, I can imagine why my professor thought the first two were unnecessary.

Mika tells me that Greg Pomerantz -- who still refuses to have his own blog -- once bought a book called A History of Mathematics. He was looking for a book like it and this volume was sandwiched between several others sharing the similar name The History of Mathematics.

Greg went with A and he made the correct choice. It's clear that the authors of the latter books got at least one thing wrong that the former got right.

I recently bought A Tour of the Calculus.

While book shopping this weekend I found a copy of Parts of the Body in the Later Germanic Dialects by William Denny Baskett and published by the University of Chicago Press in 1920. The book is in strikingly good condition and could almost pass for new. It's not nearly as well thumbed as one might expect such an indispensable reference book to be.

The preface reads:

This investigation deals with the words for the body and its parts in the later Germanic dialects. Its object is to show how these words came to have their present meaning rather than to show the original meaning.

The book is merely a list -- 139 pages and one per line -- of words for body parts in later Germanic dialects. By my estimate, I now have a list of ~150 words for "penis" in dialects of German (circa 1920 of course), several dozen ways to describe double chins, and many choices of ways to describe body parts in later Germanic dialics that I cannot describe in English.

I paid one dollar for the book. A much more worn softcover copy seems to be on sale by an antiquarian book dealer for closer to twenty-five dollars so it appears that I got a good deal. To me however, such a book is priceless.

If all goes to plan, I'm going to set off to visit the Cloisters today. This is very opportune because, at the book fair yesterday, I just happened to purchase a copy of Instruction on the Contemplative Life and on the Enclosure of Nuns! I'll be sure to have it with me.

Yesterday at a book fair, I picked up a copy of Sex For One by Harvey T. Leathem with Hugh Jones. I like the idea of a coauthored book about solo sex on my bookshelf and am intrigued by the idea that writing books about sex for one seems to be an activity best done with company.

I've been reading The Media Lab: Inventing the Future At MIT recently. It was written in 1988 by Stewart Brand who created the Whole Earth Catalog and who has said some pretty observant and insightful things about technologies and the way that they are used.

This observation, from The Media Lab, may not be one of them: "The most surprising and consistent quality in e-mail communities is the human warmth they develop."

Maybe things were better before the invention of top posting.

A week or so ago, I got my copy of 2002. 2002 is a collaboratively authored narrative 2002 world long palindrome. In terms of raw length, it passed George Perec's 1500+ word palindrome by quite a margin. My French really isn't up to the task of making a serious evaluation of Perec's work but my sense is that the quality of his palindrome is, on the whole, a bit better. That said, 2002 is in English and has some really fantastic moments, tells a largely coherent story and and is a 2002 word long palindrome.

You can read the palindrome online at the publisher's website. You also buy the very small but beautifully illustrated book for $16. I did and was pleased when it arrived in a floppy disk mailer.

There is a cute little set of computer (even UNIX) references in there I think my audience might appreciate:

Type it, Bob; abuse vi and—"Abracadabra! Cabala!" Nitro terminal, .EXEs. Bob, nose Mandelbrot codes! A coder.

Here is the middle and the point of symmetry in the story. The X in "sexes" marks the exact middle. This bit is also about sex, which is fun:

Job? Mocha dude? Non! No. Works at node, wades on. Idée fixe snows Bob's ass all under.

Pure ...

Eligible Babs: flesh self's eros revolts, rubs. Babs, looted under Bob, seXes Bob. Red, nude tools. Babs: "Burst, lover! Sores. Flesh self's Babel big. I leer up." Red, null ass, as Bob's won sex: "I feed; I nosed awe!" (Don't ask.) Row on, none dud. Ah! Combo joy.

I highly recommend the whole thing.

When I was in ninth grade, I somehow managed to pick up a copy of the Encyclopedia of Usual Sex Practices on a school field trip. I can't remember where the field trip took us. The book has just about everything in there. It has the standard "unusual" practices like bestiality and pedophilia and a few that are not unusual at all like masturbation. It also had loads of things you have never imagined involving power tools, stretching, burning, costumes and much, much more. Unfortunately the definitions were often complete with little line drawings for those that did not care to use their imagination.

It's not completely unlike browsing through certain subsections of USENET although the form makes it accessible to a larger audience. In any case, I got tired of the book pretty quickly but because the book was a real hit at parties, I kept it around and even took it to college with me.

When I moved back to Seattle from college, I packed everything in six large duffle bags. My sister and my mother flew out from Seattle to my graduation with only carry-on bags. The idea was that we would each take 2 checked bags on the airplane and I could avoid having to pay to get my stuff shipped cross-country. Having packed up everything, a friend, who was also packing up their stuff and had borrowed the book, came by to return the encyclopedia. Having already shipped my books that week before, I opened a large duffle bag containing my stereo and some computer parts, wrapped in foam and my bedding, stuck the book directly on top of the blankets and zipped the bag back up.

The next day we split up the bags randomly at the airport and my mother took bag with the stereo. Our flight left from Providence which meant that the security teams would scan the checked baggage in the main lobby of the airport right in front of the check-in counters before loading it on the planes. Seeing the amplifier on the X-Ray, the security staff decided that they needed to open up the bag. They asked who owned the bag and my mother raised her hand. We then all watched them as they unzipped the bag revealing the Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices delicately placed -- apparently by my mother -- on top of a blanket. The security agent read the title and you should see his eyes get large. Not so discretely, he called over the other security workers. The looked at the book, looked at my mother, and then looked at the book again to reconfirm. My mother, remembering how I packed the book the night before, turned red and looked the other direction.

They zipped the bag up again without moving or examining a thing inside and sent us all on our way.

Mika hates admitting she was wrong or beaten. She also hates failure. Who doesn't? Maybe the only other thing she really hates is flying on airplanes. While I don't particularly enjoy being squashed in like a sardine in any situation, I've never minded flying in particular and Mika and I have had a number of good-natured arguments about her fear of flying. Since she makes a number of international and transcontinental flights each year, it's a pretty annoying fear.

When I found Flying Without Fear by Duane Brown for a dollar, I snatched it up and then pressured Mika until she started to read it.

Unfortunately, the second page of the book included this paragraph:

If you are trying to overcome your fear because [somebody] is pressuring you to do so, as opposed to wanting to rid yourself of a burdensome fear, you are likely to fail. Why? Because in your heart you believe that airplanes are unsafe. Moreover, you have probably been in arguments with the person or persons who are pressuring you, and to overcome your fear would be to admit that you are wrong and perhaps have been wrong for a long time.

Damn. Thwarted.

In the last two months, I'm managed to pick up three review copies of books on IP at the Strand. Review copies are basically available for any books that you might see reviewed in places like the New York Book Review and are always published by big mass-market (i.e., non-academic) publishing houses. The first two that I got to were Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression and David Bollier's Brand Name Bullies. Both were alright. I like Bollier's much more and would recommend strongly although it was not a whole lot of new information for me.

Having heard that Knopf had put out a more entertainment and publishing industry friendly book, I descended into Strand's basement and picked up a review copy of Pat Choate's Hot Property: The Stealing of Information In an Age of Globalization. Choate is a economist and D.C. think-tanker who is probably most well known for writing a handful of books with Ross Perot and running as his V.P. in 1996.

The book's description of the German patent strategy before, during, and after the second world war and how that model is being applied by other countries today was both well written and illuminating as were other parts of the book. One chapter pulled heavily from Drahos and Braithwaite's Information Feudalism which I am convinced is the best and most underappreciated book on IP written in years.

Like Perot, Choate's position is not as simple as high-protectionist or low-protectionist -- right or left. On the one hand, he cries out about how IP piracy, especially on an international scale, is threatening our ways of life and our lives themselves in some cases. He claims that strong IP protection and iron-fist enforcement is the only way out. On the other hand, he is very critical about the role of large corporations in manipulating IP to screw over the little guys.

Basically, he seems to have listened to everything that the industry says about IP promoting art and science, Romantic conceptions of authorship, stories of the self-made inventor working through the patent system and, while critical of the way that corporates are abusing this system, Choate completely buys into the underlying arguments that the industry has create and employs to prop up their behavior. In this sense, I think Choate is well intentioned but a bit naive.

If naivete was Hot Property's greatest sin, it might be excusable. It's not. Particularly in the introduction, the way that Choate argues for stronger IP enforcement (although notably, not really for strong IP protection) is through scaremongering that, while justified in some cases, degenerates into tactics that are unnecessary and in some cases dishonest.

In one section, Choate talks about baby formula and about how counterfeit baby formula is putting our children at risk. He lists quite a few stories. The most egregious of these involved counterfeiters taking normal or substandard dairy-based formula and putting labels on it for a more expensive brand of dairy-free powder. The effect of this formula on lactose intolerant infants could be sickness or worse. Choate implies that we risk paying the price for trademark infringement with our children's lives.

While Choate is correct that the relabeling of this formula is an act of counterfeiting and trademark infringement, there's also a lot of other things wrong and criminal with it. Cleary, the actions of these counterfeiters constitutes fraud. It probably also boils down to criminal neglect, reckless endangerment, and potentially to attempted or actual homicide. We do not need trademark law to prosecute these sorts of crimes except it to add it the end of a long list of other, more egregious, charges. If punishment for trademark infringement is the best or only way to punish people who lie to make a buck and end up killing our children, our legal system has bigger problems than weak IP protection. While the presentation of the baby food issue is misguided, I do not think that it is necessarily dishonest.

However, Choate crossed that line with the way he conflated trademark infringement with other types of business fraud to basically use scaremongering to drive his point home. Choate points out that one frequent cause of plane crashes is "bogus parts." One would imagine that he would have examples of trademark violations at the root of these parts but these examples are nowhere to be found. Instead, he lists a handful of examples of companies who misrepresent the quality or age of their own parts. Choate describes how companies have sold cable to airlines that they knew were substandard or hoses that companies knew would deteriorate under high pressure.

These companies cannot infringing on their own trademark and they are not infringing on anyone else's. They are acting fraudulently and and are putting people's lives in danger in the process. This is already criminal and it has absolutely nothing to do with IP. Choate ends his sections on airplanes with this:

Now imagine this. You are on an airplane six or seven miles up in the sky with your seat reclined, happily reading a book or watching a movie, when the pilot comes on the loudspeaker and announces:

You attention please. We are experiencing some flight difficulties because (a) one of the cables needed to the fly the plane has snapped; (b) an essential [fuel, oil, hydraulic] hose has ruptured; or (c) a key structural part has just broken in two. Our flight crew will help you prepare for an emergency landing. Please stay calm.

Then, an emergency oxygen mask drops from the ceiling and you just hope that yours is not one of those contaminated hoses sold by Air-Pro. At such a moment, pirating, counterfeiting and bogus goods take on an entirely new importance.

None of the example he alluded in that passage had anything to do with pirated or counterfeit goods and the bogus goods had nothing to do with IP violations of any sort. In the context of a call for IP enforcement and protection, this is sneaky, dishonest, and wrong.

Choate may have some good points. However, packaged and presented as disengeniously as they are here, it was hard for me to get past the first chapter..

Today I got about half-way through Media Unlimited: How The Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives by Todd Gitlin. It reminds me a little bit of Roszak's Cult of Information which is not meant to be a glowing complement. Roszak self-identifies as a neo-Luddite and, while I applaud his attempt to deflate the unchecked and unrealistic enthusiasm that sounds many people involved in the information technology industry, is overly cynical in my opinion.

Unlike Luddites and neo-Luddites, I am excited about the increasing and increasingly cheap and uninhibited flow of information and positive social impact that this might have. The negative impact of the overwhelming amount of information and the overwhelming ways that it is distributed are important but I don't believe it is inherently bad. Gitlin is more cynical than I am but more reasonable than Roszak. He is not as unexcited as Roszak but is concerned. He does a very nice job of connecting the problems associated with the massive surge in media with the nature of the information that people are being barraged with.

Gitlin is a good read and it does a good deal of synthesis of a widely varying line-up of thinkers and writers.

I also pleased with the unintended pun in the title. I know many people that can speak to the overwhelming effect that a wholly different type of torrents have in providing highly connected people with more images and sounds than they can easily consume.

So I've known about Sir Thomas Urquhart for a while and read a few bits and pieces of his Rabelais translation in college. Recently though, I reminded of him while reading through a book on eccentricity and I found this excerpt from Urquhart's introduction to his The Jewel (please feel free to skip the bottom as soon as you get the point):

I could truly have enlarged this discourse with a choicer variety of phrase, and made it overflow the field of the reader's understanding with an inundation of greater eloquence; and that one way, tropologetically, by metonymical, ironical, metaphorical, and synecdochical instruments of elocution, in all their several kinds, artificially effected, according to the nature of the subject, with emphatical expressions in things of greater concernment, with catachrestical in matters of meaner moment; attended on each side respectively with an epiplectic and exegetic modification; with hyperbolical, either epitatically or hypocoristically, as the purpose required to be elated or extenuated, with qualifying metaphors, and accompanied by apostrophes; and lastly, with allegories of all sorts, whether apologal, affabulatory, parabolary, aenigmatic, or paraemial. And on the other part, schematologetically adorning the proposed theme with the most especial and chief flowers of the garden or rhetoric and omitting no figure either of diction or sentence, that might contribute to the ear's enchantment, or persuasion of the hearer. I could have introduced, in case of obscurity, synonymal, exargastic, palilogetic elucidations; for sweetness of phrase, antimetathetic commutations of epithets; for the vehement excitation of a matter, exclamation in the front and epiphonemas in the rear. I could have used, for the promptlier stirring up of passion, apostrophal and prosopopoeial diversions; and, for the appeasing and settling of them, some epanorthotic revocations, and aposiopetic restraints. I could have inserted dialogisms, displaying their interrogatory part with communicatively psymatic and sustenative flourishes; or proleptically, with the refutative schemes of anticipation and subjection, and that part which concerns the responsary, with the figures of permission and concession. Speeches extending a matter beyond what is, auxetically, digressively, transitiously, by ratiocination, aetiology, circumlocution, and other ways, I could have made use of; as likewise with words diminishing the worth of a thing; tapinotically, periphrastically, by rejection, translation, and other means, I could have served myself.

Lets ignore the 100+ words sentences. Let's ignore the Mojo Jojo-esque redundancy. A teacher in high school once told me to not use a one dollar word when a fifty cent word will do. Urquhart employs long strings of five dollar words for things that don't really need be said at all. While the result may be nearly incomprehensible, Urquhart is a master of the form. I absolutely love it and I just bought two of his books.

In addition to writing on a large number of subjects (a sample of which is here; I recommend the section on Scottish bankers), Urquhart created a universal language called Logopandecteision with, "eleven genders, seven moods, four voices, ten cases, besides the nominative, and twelve parts of speech; every word signifieth as well backwards as forwards." Of course, the prose is so complex that it's hard to tell he's even talking about a language at many points. I'm still trying to find out what most of those 11 genders are.

I love the idea of an incomprehensibly complex language defined only in a massive tome of incomprehensibly complex prose. I hope to complete a similarly expansive and internally consistent masterwork in my life.

White Noise by Don DeLillo includes one of my favorite vignettes. The characters in the book go on a small tourist trip to an ordinary barn in America had become, through constant photography, the most photographed barn in America. People photograph the barn because it is, after all, the most photographed barn in America. Here's a short expert:

"No one sees the barn," he said finally.

A long silence followed.

"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."

He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others.

"We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura."

You can read here for the full excerpt.

In the last few days in Colombia, where my talk on Ubuntu and Debian put me on the front page of an important newspapers and lots of people have turned their cameras toward me, I empathize a little bit with the barn.

Recently, I found out about a book called Do Snakes Have Legs? by Bert Cunningham (1937). I've been looking for a copy but haven't found been able to find one yet. It seems that the book is on axial bifurcations in serpents which slightly disappoints me. So far, most books with fun names like this, like the Encyclopaedia of Medical Ignorance, have been something other than what their catchy titles imply to me. I suspect Cunningham takes longer to answer the question about snakes' legs than I would.

I think it would be fun to do an art project where I make a series of nice books -- leather or cloth bound -- that answer seemingly obvious questions. My books will be straight and to the point and will give simple answers to the simple questions posed in their titles.

They will have title pages and publishing information, perhaps even a rambling introduction, but when it comes time to answer the question, they will not be evasive. In my answer to Cunningham's book, the first and only chapter will be one word long: "No."

I suspect that my books will be either very short or have many blank pages.

I once lived in a rather dysfunctional apartment. One of my roommates kept the "National Bestseller," The 48 Laws of Power in the bathroom to read while he was on the toilet. During my shift in the loo, I would look over the book as well and it provided a lot of insight into its owner's personality. The book dispenses ideas from Machiavelli, Henry Kissinger, Louis XIV and other wells of wisdom and gives advice on how to be more "powerful" in your daily life with such aphorisms as, "never put too much trust in friends," "crush your enemies completely," and "discover each man's thumbscrew."

The book is complete crap. I always found it somewhat humorous -- in that "it would much funnier if I didn't have to actually live with the person reading this book" sort of way -- that my 21 year old roommate thought that advice given to a monarch half a millennia ago on the virtues of totally crushing ones' enemies was highly relevant and applicable information.

I think that my roommate liked the book because it helped him rationalize being nasty to other people as a strategically important move in a bid for power. People seem to like books that explain why their faults are, in fact, strengths. If being petty and cruel is among you're faults and you're not itching to change, this may be the book for you.

Last time I was in a bookstore with friends and came across this book, my friend suggested that the rules sounded a lot like the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition from the Star Trek television series. I don't have a TV but I'll betray my geekiness and admit that I've certainly watched my share of Star Trek anyway. For those that don't know, the Rules of Acquisition are the religious or societal underpinnings of an alien race that is basically Star Trek writers' imaginative rendition of a people who have made greed, selfishness and pettiness their raison d'etre. I went ahead and looked up the rules and it's true.

Here are three pairs of laws/rules:

• Robert Greene and Joost Elffers say: "Law 1: never outshine the master."
• Ferengis say: "Rule 33: It never hurts to suck up to the boss."
• Robert Greene and Joost Elffers say: "Law 2: Never put too much trust in friends."
• Ferengis say: "Rule 99: Trust is the biggest liability of all."
• Robert Greene and Joost Elffers say: "Law 19: know who you're dealing with -- do not offend the wrong person."
• Ferengis say: "Rule 194: It's always good business to know about new customers before they walk in your door."

It's uncanny; you can find a match for basically every "Law" in the book.

It's a bit depressing when you find pillars of fictional dystopias being reproduced by folks with a straight-face in your own bathroom and on the New York Times bestseller list.

It seems like a fine book, but the Encyclopaedia of Medical Ignorance is not nearly as much fun as the title might initially lead one to believe.

New York City, land of the $1 used books on the street, has been good to me so far. Last week, I picked up Son of "It was a Dark and Stormy Night" which is compiled by Scott Rice from entries to the Bulwer-Lytton Contest. For those that have missed the annual mentions in newspapers and on radio programs, the Bulwer-Lytton contest is named after Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the Victorian novelist who opened his novel Paul Clifford with what has become the ultimate cliche opening: "It was a dark and storm night." The competition is a yearly one that challenges authors to come up with the worst opening line to a potential novel.

I enjoy reading the finalists each year as they make it into the press. You might think that too much of a so-good-it's-bad thing is bad. I am pleased to report that while the pieces are bad, too much of this so-good-it's bad thing is so good.

This book was published in 1986 so it includes some of the early gems that got the contest off and running. To set the tone, here is the winner from 1985:

The countdown had stalled at T minus 69 seconds when Desirée, the female ape to go up in space, winked at me slyly and pouted her thick, rubbery lips unmistakeably -- the first of many such advances during would prove to be the longest, and most memorable, space voyage of my career.

—Martha Simpson, Glastonbury, Connecticut

What I've found hearing the winners each year is that a certain type of bad opening line tends to win every year. They tend to be long, convoluted, and slightly bizarre without being totally outlandish and confusing. They tend to use extremely bad, but not completely puzzling metaphors. What I like about this book is that it highlights a greater range of the types of bad writing submitting to the Bulwer-Lytton contest. Here is one that I enjoyed particularly:

Her breasts lept like lizards from high cliffs as fear welled up from her chest and danced a rhumba in her throat.

—Lucinda Ryan, Alameda, California

I also enjoyed this one:

The rather well-nourished buxomly matron waddled through the pulsating pedestrian traffic of Hong Kong, pensively meditating on the problems of being a big-breasted, broad-butted, broad broad abroad.

—Michael A. O'Neill, Rohnert Park, California

I think this one is my personal favorite:

With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have envied, a tanned unblemished oval face framed with lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that vied for competition, and a small straight nose, Marilee had a beauty that defied description.

—Alice A. Hall, Fort Wayne, Indiana

There are many more that I would love to list but that for reasons of space cannot. According to the BL website, there are the following collections published by Penguin:

• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night
• Son of "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night"
• Bride of Dark and Stormy
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The Final Conflict
• Dark and Stormy Rules Again

Unfortunately, all of these are out of print so Bookfinder or AddALL are the most reasonable choices if your local used book stores don't have a copy. The other good news is that there is apparently another book ready but, the author(s) are having trouble finding someone to publish it. Check out the Bulwer-Lytton homepage for information.

I'm working on my own entry for next years contest. I think if I put my mind to it, I have a chance.

At OSCON this year the organizers gave us a discount coupon at Powell's technical bookstore. By the time I got there the technical books that were of most interest to me had been raided pretty thoroughly (I must have good taste). So I was forced to be a little more creative.

Among my favorite finds from the day was a little book called Harmonograph: A Visual Introduction to Harmony by Anthony Ashton. The book is part math book, part shop book, part art book, and part music book.

A harmonograph is a simple instrument invented in the mid nineteenth century and that reached some sort of in vogue status before the beginning of the twentieth.. There are a number of different types of harmonographs but the simplest model has two pendulums suspended through holes in a table that are swinging at right angles to each other. One of those pendulums has a piece of paper attached to its top and the other one has a pen.

Now, Pythagoras found that musical harmony to appear when the ratio of the frequencies (or wavelengths) of the sounds being produced consist of certain ratios consisting of small numbers: like 1:1, 2:1, 3:2 (these would correspond to unison, an octave, and a fifth).

The book gives a crash course in the physics and math involved, the process of building a harmonograph, and idea of musical harmony. The rest is pretty pictures like this one:

It's very interesting to see the visual representation of certain harmonies which are very easy -- non-challenging -- to grasp audibly (unison and an octave) and to see that the harmonographs are equally easy to grasp visually. As we move to more complex and dissonant sounds, you can see the patterns getting more complex and the form getting lost in the "noise."

Ashton is really into harmonographs and has obviously devoted a large amount of his life to playing with and building and improving his toys2. I'm not so motivated to follow his lead but the book was interesting and fun. I read it one sitting on a Sunny day.

I'd love to see some way to create a computerized harmonograph that instead of just mapping individual harmonies, could actually work over time. It would be cool to, at a glance, be able to compare the harmonic make-up of a piece by Bach with a piece by Bartók.

If you're interested, you can buy the book at your local bookshop or you can do it online at Powell's.

I've recently picked up Letters to Wendy's for what must be the third of fourth time. When I first found this book, I ordered it from one of the libraries in my college's library system. When I went to the pick up the book, the person behind the counter was reading it. She'd liked it so much she had put in a recall for it -- before I'd even picked it up! The library's somewhat bizarre "the second person has precedence" system cut my checkout time down to two weeks and nearly forced a recall war between the two of us. It's that good.

Letters to Wendy's is written by Joe Wenderoth and is published by Verse Press (a small press publisher out of Northampton, Massachusetts). It's pitched as a collection of prose poetry written on Wendy's [1] comment cards: one-a-day for a little more than a year.

The pieces are often descriptions and reflections on Wenderoth's experiences dining at Wendy's. Here's one example:

November 15, 1996

A beautiful women with a Biggie. Nothing else -- just a Biggie. She sat alone; she seemed like she was waiting for someone. What lucky soul could make a beautiful woman with a Biggie wait? Who has that kind of power? What person would a beautiful woman with a Biggie find attractive? Only one answer made sense to me: another beautiful woman with a Biggie.

Another good example in the same vein is this:

February 3, 1997

I tried to order a Biggie coffee today. It couldn't be done. I felt sort of childish asking, like my request betrayed my ignorance in the matter. Ironically, nothing could be further from the truth; I know -- believe me I do -- how wrong it is to have a coffee of that size (I know too that I would never have gone through with it). It's sort of scary, but the truth is: I don't know why I asked.

Other pieces are more reflections on life that span the gamit from profound to bizarre to mundane to obscene -- and any combinations of the above. These reflections tend to be prompted by or refelecting on Wendy's in some way. A good example would be:

May 20, 1997

I'd like to have my muscles removed. Resume the inanimate. Wendy's allows me to extract myself from the retarded narcissism of animal thrivings. I sit still in a warm booth and get thought. All movement wants, in the end is stillness. The animate is just the failure of movement to get what it wants -- one sleeping body. The road to heaven is paved with meat: the road to meat is not paved at all.

My personal favorites are the ones that are actually suggestions. Some of his suggestions I like more than others. Perhaps my favorite suggestion is this one:

December 26, 1996

A sort of hell-garden would be useful. Often, after a meal, I feel inclined to lay myself out in the elements, as though dead, to be picked apart by birds and dogs. It is surprisingly difficult to find a suitable space. The garden I have in mind would be a simple concrete square right off the dining room, and would offer several boulders which one could drape oneself over and feel properly exposed.

Since I read this two years ago, I've found myself gorged with food and wishing for a hell-garden on several occasions.

Many of the pieces are quite raunchy and many make me laugh out loud. Most can communicate to the endeavoring readers one more than one level. Of course, there's no reason to read more into it than you want. The book is off-the-wall and a lot of fun. I recommend it highly. You can grab it, in a number of forms at the links below.

• Salon.com where they are hosting an audio recording of a reading of a few of the poems by the author.
• The book's homepage over at Verse Press.
• If you'd like, you can buy the book at Powell's.