| Graeme 的个人资料Books and Libraries照片日志列表 |  工具  帮助 |
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4月22日 "Kalpa imperial : the greatest empire that never was"Kalpa imperial : the greatest empire that never was by Angélica Gorodischer, translated by Ursula K Le Guin. There's some serious craft at work in these eleven short stories, both in their writing and their translation. I'm not sure I'm qualified to say much more about the book than I loved and enjoyed every one of the stories, but what kind of review would that be? And I can't say anything about the translation, but Le Guin has produced smooth prose with a clear voice. I don't suppose you expected anything less. It's not so unusual for a book to announce in its title that the story in the book isn't real, whatever that means, but Gorodischer winds this knot tighter and tighter as the book goes along. Some of the stories about the empire that never was are narrated by a storyteller. We're left to wonder whether this is a storyteller in the empire, or a storyteller sitting outside the empire but inside the book. Some of the stories are about people pretending to be someone else, or changing their lives so much that they are, in effect, someone else. Some of the stories are about storytellers, or people who were storytellers for a time. The storytellers that do appear aren't always very cooperative. More than once a storyteller tells his listeners (us, or the listeners in the book?) that he won't bother to fill in some detail, or that if you want to know how the story ends you can look it up, or that anyway everyone knows what happened. There's plenty of apparent history in the book: such and such an emperor is succeeded by his son, who is overthrown by his uncle, bringing the end to such and such a dynasty and the founding of another. But these details are sprinkled throughout the book so finely that they may as well be pixie dust. There's not much indication one way or the other whether the stories are in chronological order. Characters from one story rarely appear in another, and you have no way to construct a chronology of the empire. Silly to try, really, since the empire never was. The same is true of the geography of the empire. The north of the empire is dry, and the south is wet. Parts of the empire are flat and parts are mountainous. Perhaps a more careful reader might be able to draw something like a map, but not a real map. We're meant to interpret some books as allegory. The hardworking blacksmith who shoes the hero's horse for nothing isn't just a blacksmith, he's Charity. Something else is going on in Gorodischer's stories. She has so carefully and thoroughly drained the stories, the setting, the characters and the narrative of any claim to realism that they can scarcely be symbolic of anything. But Gorodischer has performed a sleight of hand, and the stories are just as realistic as any story someone tells you. She has both conquered the particular, and illuminated people's need to make sense of the world through stories. The book is fabulous. It's a shame that only eight libraries in Massachusetts own the book, and not any of the forty or so libraries in the library network I use. 4月17日 "Tribes: We need you to lead us"I recommend that you read Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin, but it's not without flaws.
The basic idea of the book is that the internet and various social networking tools have lowered the barriers to building a community so much that anybody can form and lead one. The book is short (around 150 pages) and mostly either anecdotes or exhortation. There's nothing necessarily wrong with anecdotes. The second person to try bungee jumping had an important piece of information that the first person lacked, even if it was just anecdotal.
The most obvious flaw in the book is the lottery winner effect: Godin presents plenty of examples of people who have been effective in forming and leading groups using, say, a blog, but that doesn't say anything at all about how successful you'll be. But Godin wants you to try, and he makes the excellent point that both the cost of trying and the cost of failure is probably a lot less than you think.
I agree with Godin's tactical point, which is that communication between people provides fuel for change, and the internet has lowered the barriers to groups forming and communicating. What groups need is someone to get out in front and lead. As the slogan goes, "Lead, follow, or get out of the way!".
The book is all about change, but I perceived, or imagined, an implied criticism of people who don't decide to start a blog and change the world, or their part of it. There are millions of people who work in factories and offices making the stuff we rely on, and making it efficiently and well. It's just not true that the Internet changes everything. No doubt factories with effective channels of communication work better than those without one, but when you're dealing with safety and reliability, you need to make a sensible decision about tactics. In fact, that's another good point that Godin makes, arguably too briefly: sometimes you don't need to lead and you shouldn't; you should just follow.
Anyway, I agree with Godin's general point, which is that it's better to try and fail than not to try at all. But Godin isn't talking about building bridges, or making sure that peanut butter doesn't have salmonella in it, or any number of other things where failure has real consequences. Which reminds me of a joke about computer programming I heard a long time ago, "Programming is like mountain climbing: you shouldn't react to surprises by jumping". It doesn't matter whether you understand why this applies to programming — there are plenty of disciplines where careful, incremental changes are better than jumping. Which is not to say that social networking can't be used for careful and incremental changes.
On the other hand, the Internet does change some things, and if it catches up with your thing, Godin shows that speeding up is a better idea than trying to slow down. While I was writing this post, I got a call from Verizon trying to sell me FiOS. I'm very receptive to the idea, since RCN is under the impression that they have a monopoly and have been raising prices regularly. However, Verizon is the phone company, and they're a couple of clues short of a six-pack.
One of my concerns with switching to FiOS is that having had RCN drill a couple of holes in the side of my condo to string cable through, I'd like to avoid a new set of holes. The person who called me sounded as though she was working from a call centre in India, and after we went around a couple of times on the subject of holes, she offered to forward me to a supervisor, so that's what we did.
The supervisor sounded as though she was calling from the US, which is a neat trick, but then they are the phone company. She was puzzled by my question, since according to the records she could see, my house already had an optical interface installed. It turned out that we moved to a new condominium about eighteen months ago, and Verizon's records hadn't caught up. I happily gave her my new address, since I knew what was coming. Verizon don't have my unit in their database at all. something I already knew since I'd tried to check out FiOS on the Verizon web site.
The supervisor from Verizon suggested that they relied on data from the USPS, so I asked her to wait a moment and checked my address at the USPS zip code finder. I was gratified to discover that the condo I've been living in for eighteen months does indeed exist. My final suggestion was that when they get sorted out, they could call me back.
Here's my question. I'll post this entry an hour or two after Verizon's call, and a few people will read it over the next few days. How long will it take Verizon to get my condo unit in their database? Remember, they've already had eighteen months. The Internet doesn't change everything, but if you do get left behind, it's easy for anyone to call you on it.
The best thing about Godin's book, and the strength of anecdotes over theory, is that it gives you a vivid idea of what people have done and what's possible. No doubt the people who achieve great things by building online communities are smarter or luckier than you or me, but Godin makes it clear that it's pretty easy to try, and perhaps you'll achieve something great, or just neat. 2月6日 "The Year's Best SF 13"This is definitely not a review of The Year's Best SF 13, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, a wonderful collection of amazing short stories. (You can follow the link for a list of the stories.) Here's a small taste of Bruce Sterling's story, "The Lustration":
So, I'm thinking of making that my new motto: "I'm not disturbing the people; I'm disturbing the people who worry about the people being disturbed." Perfect! 2月1日 "The Adventures of Johnny Bunko"The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: the last career guide you'll ever need, by Daniel H. Pink, probably isn't the last career guide you'll ever need. On the other hand, it's an excellent start. The six lessons, and the book as a whole, work well to clear away the FUD from career planning. Being scared or confused isn't a very effective place to be to make good decisions, so just thinking clearly is a great first step. 1月30日 In praise of the declarative sentenceAuthors sometimes express some puzzlement or frustration at the process people use when selecting a book in a bookstore. I'm happy to offer them this case study. I was in the local bookstore the other day, waiting for the reading of Blown to Bits to start, and I noticed Watt, by Beckett. I saw this blurb on the back: I could show you a Beckett sentence as elegant in its implications as the binomial theorem, and another as economically sphinx-like as the square root of minus one, and another, on trees in the night, for which half of Wordsworth would seem a fair exchange. The declarative sentence, he makes you suppose, is perhaps man's highest achievement, as absolute as the egg was for Brancusi. — The New York Times Book Review
You're welcome. 10月8日 "Waiter Rant"I suppose you could say that Waiter Rant is to the restaurant front of house as Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential is to the back of the house. In fact, Anthony Bourdain did, right on the front of the book. I can't, since I haven't read Kitchen Confidential.
The book is written by the same anonymous waiter that writes the blog, Waiter Rant. But the blog doesn't have the short entries that are typical of a blog. The entries are more like the chapters of a book, so it's not too surprising that the book appeared. Also, while this book is being marketed as a behind-the-scenes (or would that be in-front-of-the-scenes) expose of the life of a waiter, it's more introspective and autobiographical than just that.
The Waiter (the author's chosen pseudonym) only becomes a waiter by accident, starts a blog, becomes famous, and then lands a book deal by accident. The book ends up being about work and career, and fate I suppose, as much as it is about the goings on in a a restaurant. That doesn't make it worse, just different than you might expect from the way the book is marketed.
I don't think this is the ultimate book on working in the front of a restaurant. That will take someone with far more restaurant experience than The Waiter, and probably a better non-fiction writer. But I liked this book a lot, and recommend it to anyone who is interested in how restaurants work. 7月24日 Readercon 19Last weekend, I went to Readercon 19, a Science Fiction and Fanstasy convention at the Burlington Marriott, outside Boston, MA.
Here is my conference report and book list.
Which goes a little way towards explaining why things have been a little quiet around here. 4月28日 The Dip, by Seth GodinSeth Godin would like you to read his book, The Dip.
My library network has some available, so it is hereby added to the reading list.
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