Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education

Thank you, Arthur C. Clarke, for all of those orbits round the Sun

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died. 

Where to begin to respond?  From the start, or my start, I suppose.  I can't think of another writer who so strongly influenced my imagination when I was a child and teenager.  I remember so many stories and novels, and how my little mind was blasted wide open by possibilities.  I remember the stories' physical housing - I can easily recall the covers of Rendezvous with Rama, 2001, Expedition to Earth, and every other short story collection, often fresh from the library, sometimes in my own precious paperbacks, as I devoured the books in car, or sitting outside on the grass. 
(I still have a Science Fiction Book Club Wind from the Sun, pages crinkly from the cheap printing, an elementary school notification slip caught in the inside front cover.)

These tales were pedagogical devices for me, as a boy.  Each book, each story taught me science and storytelling.  Clarke's elegant prose let me learn both without intimidation or at excessive speed, challenging me just past my ever-growing Vygotskian edge.  Rotation for gravity - check.  Not being able to land on Mars because your ship isn't aerodynamically shaped - ah, got it.  Why don't we hear about the angry mob planning to attack the atomic spaceship?  To build suspense, I see.  How can a space elevator work?  I get it.  How do you capture an audience with a single sentence?  I see, I see...

And fear!  Some of his tales had powerful currents of terror.  "A Walk in the Dark" (1950) scared the heck out of me - I remember reading it in an indoor tennis court, drenched in artificial light, waiting for my father to finish playing... and carefully keeping away from each tiny shred of shadow.   Rendezvous with Rama (1972) was, for me, suffused with impending dread.  Each new, cryptic discovery surely concealed some dire attack, especially as the humans worked their way ever deeper into the thing.  And who else saw 2001's lunar and orbital monoliths, in movie or on page, with pangs of terror?  Remember the piercing shriek from the movie, as the sun's light lanced the exposed artifact, astronauts clutching their helmeted heads in agony and surprise?  Clarke gave us machine crusades against all life, people dying alone in space, men plunging towards the death on the moon, vast squids snuffing out explorers, a man awakening as a bodiless recording in an alien machine, and all of these terrors often enough within the slimmest stories.  Reread "Billion Names of God" (1954), with whose final line I opened this post.

Alienation: Clarke was one of the writers who taught me, a child atheist without any religious knowledge, that the rest of the world had this current of belief to which I has scant access.  "The Star" was probably my first encounter with destroy-the-world fiction - think of how enormous that is, to a child - and yet I had no real connection with its terrible irony.  I knew the Overlords' appearance in Childhood's End (what an awesome reveal!) must have been terribly shocking to folks, but couldn't connect with it emotionally.  I didn't realize until I was an adult that Clarke shared my dislike and alienation from religion.

And exhilaration.  Clarke is peerless in evoking the classic sense of wonder, of course, to the point of my not really having to mention this.  But I started this post thinking of my childhood with Clarke's writing, and I'm looking at my battered copy of Wind from the Sun, as I type this, and remember the soaring feeling that overwhelmed me at 9 when I finished "Transit of Earth."  I can't hear Bach's Toccata and Fugue without remember that last astronaut striding across the Martian landscape to his death.

2001 occupied a huge swath of my imagination.  The novel astonished me, and I reread it frequently.  I read the heartbeaking short story, "The Sentinel."  I read Worlds of 2001.  I had a couple of plastic models.  I made my own versions of the awesome spaceships out of construction paper (and was heartbroken when my mother didn't appreciate getting one for her birthday).  All of this was before I saw the movie.  When I did, I was surprised by how people were confused by the finale - surely they read the book, and understood the evolutionary step engineered by aliens, yes? 

I even recorded 2001 on an audio recorder.  Yes, when some tv station broadcast a chopped-up version, such was my obsession that I sat next to the tv, Radio Shack device in hand, patiently capturing those precious sounds.  (Years later, I found that old, dusty tape, and played it back.  I was horrified to hear an unearthly scream, about halfway in.  Then I remembered my brother.  He'd been fussing about during the recording.  We had tussled, I'd smacked him, and he'd bellowed outrage, caught faithfully by Radio Shack.  Years later, sibling hatred cross-cut with Jovian orbit.)

I don't mean to suggest that Clarke was a childhood writer for me, although nothing he wrote during my adulthood struck me with such power.  He did his work for me early on, which structured who I am as a person.  Learning of his death is like witnessing a geological catastrophe, seeing my landscape holed.

And yet what joy to have shared the planet with him, to have become a biological adult while he also rotated around the Sun.  I'm not thinking of his Rama collaborations, but of seeing life imitate the science fiction he helped create.  How can one not feel delight when watching Clarke's video greeting to JPL, as Cassini reached Saturn?  It reminds me of Heywood Floyd calling home from Earth orbit, bearing his secret knowledge to the moon.  Or hearing about a space elevator company, and thinking of learning about this from his stories.  Or seeing science fiction turn to ideas he offered decades earlier: posthumanism, machine intelligence, religious populism fighting science, life emerging from interconnected computers (in 1950!).

You should read anything by him.  And, right now, you could watch this video, where Clarke ruminates on turning 90.  Listen to his three wishes, think about that lifespan, and be amazed by his optimism.  I can't watch without crying, and smiling:



(thanks to Googleblog for spotting that, and to the Appreciation blog in general)

Lost Quranic documents resurface

This account of rediscovered Islamic manuscrips reads like a Gothic tale of hidden documents.  The general themes of forbidden texts and global religious crisis are fascinating of themselves, but even the details of the Munich documents feel Gothic, with a touch of technological history:

The Munich archive began with one of Mr. Nöldeke's protégés, Gotthelf Bergsträsser. As Germany slid towards fascism early last century, he hunted down old copies of the Quran in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe. He took photographs of them with a Leica camera.

In 1933, a few months after Hitler became chancellor, Mr. Bergsträsser, an experienced climber, died in the Bavarian Alps. His body was never given an autopsy; rumors spread of suicide or foul play...

(via Memeorandum, Charles Cameron)

Bookstore in a church

A nifty idea for a bookstore: build it within a church.  This is the Selexyz Dominicanen, Maastricht.  It used to be a Dominican church.

Architects are Merkx+Girod.

(via MetaFilter)

Unusually good article on reading

"Twilight of the Books" is a much better article than the title suggests.  Caleb Crain isn't an alarmist, doesn't rely on the NEA study, nor does he target the internet.  Instead this New Yorker piece examines the history of reading and literacy, and is well worth the read.

It offers many nice touches, such as framing the issue internationally, rather than as an American problem (at least at first, and the piece is clear about its scope when focusing on the US).  Rather than flailing at the internet or bashing the general specter of electronic media, Crain returns to television critique, then embeds that within internet critique, disaggregating web video from the rest of the net.  And he summons up this wonderful nineteenth-century exchange about reading versus conversation:

Ruskin once compared reading to a conversation with the wise and noble, and Proust corrected him. It’s much better than that, Proust wrote. To read is “to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately.”

The center of gravity for the article is a mix of Walter Ong's orality theory with Maryanne Wolf's recent book, Proust and the Squid.  Crain follows Wolf's neurological argument, arguing that reading becomes powerful when the process is easy, rather than challenging.  This then heightens Ong's description of cultural and psychological differences between oral and post- (or secondary) oral societies.  It's the most sensible recent argument I've seen for cultural divergence on reading.

It would be fascinating to apply this model to coding.  Would Wolf see programmers thriving on that passage from dorsal to ventral pathways, initial difficulty giving way to easy fluency?  And would the proportion of people who code eventually be statistically similar to those who read a good deal?

I'm disappointed in the final argument about print and identity, which really deserves an article for itself.  Crain touches on the echo chamber idea, offering a tantalizing suggestion:

It can be amusing to read a magazine whose principles you despise, but it is almost unbearable to watch such a television show. And so, in a culture of secondary orality, we may be less likely to spend time with ideas we disagree with.
Self-doubt, therefore, becomes less likely.

But this begs engagement with several fields, notably 20th century propaganda, comparative media (consider radio versus film versus tv on this score), tv criticism, and fan studies.

Book fetish: J. K. Rowling's latest

A gorgeous book in an extremely limited run is the latest J. K. Rowling.  The Tales of Beedle the Bard is hand-written, hand-bound, and auctioned (for charity) at Sotheby's for vast sums of money.

The opposite of a bestseller in quantity, with all of the desire compressed into a handful of volumes.

Another book bound in human skin

A 1606 book was bound in the skin of the man whose execution it describes, according to the Guardian.

There's an unusual aspect to this gruesome tale:

Sid Wilkinson, from Wilkinson's Auctioneers in Doncaster, South Yorkshire, who will be selling the book on Sunday, said he could see the Jesuit priest's face peering out from the cover.

He said: "It's a little bit spooky because the front of the book looks like it has the face of a man on it, which is presumed to be the victim's face."

That's a sequel, in a sense, since Garnet's face appeared on an inanimate object before the book hit the presses.  On a piece of straw from the pile surrounding the execution stand, apparently.

Here at Infocult we keep up with anthropodermic bibliopegy.

(via the Cranky Professor)

The stone book, or bibliomania knows no bounds

More book fetish: the stone book.  This item appeared in the University of Newcastle's collection, and has been the object of speculation.

I like the discussion of what a closed book symbolizes - death? illiteracy? a guild's test, or thank-you gift?

(via BibliOdyssey)

Programmer archaeologists

A fine information literature post crossed the nettime list transom this morning, concerning a recent sf novel:

Vernor Vinge (Hugo-award winning SF writer, and a computer scientist in a previous life) came up with the concept of "programmer archaeologist" in "A Deepness in the Sky". The book is set very far in
the future, and to cut a long story short, the idea behind the programmer-archaeologist is that most programming problems have already been solved in one form or another. So a large part of the task of the
programmer-archaeologist is finding previous solutions to the problem, and then stacking up emulators to make those programs work again.

The book is uneven, but the good parts are excellent.  There are several fine revenge plots, a scary social organization, and an interesting augmented reality extrapolation.

Dan Simmons, The Terror

I read Dan Simmons' recent novel The Terror over a trip, and enjoyed it immensely.  A strange book, it fuses together an historical account of Arctic exploration with a horror story, but seamlessly, without calling attention to the genre mix.  His imagination of the still-mysterious fate of the Franklin expedition is credible throughout, even with one monster.  The story is relentless, dealing horrific, grim fates to the dwindling, ice-trapped crew.

There's fine, fun writing throughout.  Simmons certainly knows how to start a chapter:

When Tom Blanky's third and final leg snapped off, he knew it meant the end. (540)

Except for the fact that John Irving was sick and half-starving and his gums were bleeding and he feared that two of his side teeth were loose and he was so tired that he was afraid he would collapse in his tracks at any moment, this was one of the happiest days of his life. (461)

The northern lands and seas draw out lyrics, like this:

There was no sound now except for the panting of the men, the creak of leather, and the rasp of runners.  The wind had died completely but the air was even colder with the dimming of the twilight afternoon sun.  Ice crystals of breath hung above the procession of men and sledges like slowly collapsing spheres of gold.(450)

There is also a tentative engagement with literary and cultural history, either by extrapolation, historical record, or fantasy.  At one point the crews stage a version of Poe's "Masque of the Red Death," which ends badly, of course.  Simmons connects the expedition to Charles Darwin, the Fox Sisters, and Charles Babbage.  Not to mention the inspired use of Hobbes' Leviathan as a text for religious oratory.

Twenty more spooky stories for Halloween

Twenty spooky stories for Halloween, all freely readable on the web.  It's a fine mix, mostly English-language and from the 19th, early 20th centuries. 

Add it to yesterday's haul of Victorian Gothic.

(via librarian.net)