Author: admin

Dagmar raised an interesting question yesterday in her comment. We have all had the experience of thumbing through an old-fashioned paperback book and magically finding the spot we want. There is something about this physical medium – the way the book remembers those pages you’ve lingered on before, and then falls magically open to the right spot – that is incredibly appealing.

But suppose, just for a moment, that Amazon and SONY did not have a monopoly on the look-and-feel of their respective eReaders. Imagine an open marketplace for whatever cool software idea might be out there for navigating your way through an eBook.

My guess is that given a sufficiently open marketplace of ideas, people will converge on a paradigm for the different ways to read an eBook – skimming, marking pages, knowing how to make the book “fall open” to your favourite passage – that is every bit as compelling as the methods we currently use for finding our way within a paperback book.

It wouldn’t replace paper books, of course – it’s a different medium, and one medium rarely replaces another outright – but it would be a big improvement.

The thing that keeps me away from the current crop of eBook readers is not that I think they are inherently bad, but I just don’t think they are ready yet. It’s not that I’m in love with paper per se, it’s that I’m in love with the fact that a book is such a transparent vehicle for connecting author and reader. There are no switches to fiddle with or keys to clutter your visual field – just those lovely words and thoughts, thoughts to soak up and enjoy whether you are on the subway, at the beach, or curled up in bed.

I find the little keyboard along the bottom of the Kindle II to be visually jarring. I want my eBook to be like a paperback – small enough to slip in my pocket, unobtrusive, portable as hell. I’m put off by the idea that I’m supposed to carry around this unnecessarily large brick, to make room for all those weird little buttons and switches and a built-in keyboard at the bottom that isn’t even pleasant or comfortable to use.

Of course that keyboard is temporary – in the next few years eBook readers will go over entirely to using multitouch screens (and then, somewhat later, a complete wrap-around multitouch skin), and then questions of the proper interface for page-flipping and other navigation, typing in titles, author searches, etc., will all move entirely into software, where they belong. If you prefer a particular gesture or method to turn the page, thumb through the index, or find a particular article in last week’s Times, sooner or later somebody will implement just what you want.

Rather than think about how to fix the current crop of eBook readers, I prefer to ignore them, and focus on what I really want – the paperback book I want to take with me everywhere. Here is one of my all-time favorite paperbacks:

My techno-wish is that my eBook reader will be the exact size and shape as a paperback, with no buttons or knobs whatsoever, since all controls will be via intuitive multitouch gestures and soft keys on the front, sides or back of the book:

And when I finally get one of these, I’m going to back and reread Salinger.

I was having one of those far-ranging conversations with some friends this evening, the kind of talk, with an open bottle of wine on the table, that jumps from topic to topic, taking in philosophy and personal history, touches on politics, jumps back to shared times together, and then goes off on a tangent.

And I found myself relating to my friends the oddest little tidbit from my own life – something I hadn’t thought of for years. Some time around 1992, back when I was a heedless young guy who liked to roam around the world with little more than jeans, a tee shirt and a guitar, I was in a taxi coming back from the airport – I think from a visit to Brazil – and the cab driver said to me “You know, it’s funny, the fare before you was the actor River Phoenix. He was also coming from the airport with just a small bag and a guitar, dressed in jeans and a tee shirt.”

I remember musing about this on the way home, thinking that somehow I was in the wrong taxi – I had been just one taxi ride away from being a world famous movie star (at the time River Phoenix was at the top of his game – “My Own Private Idaho” had come out just the previous year). How strange, I thought – even as I realized the thought was absurd. It felt like being one number off from someone who had won the lottery.

A year later, of course, River Phoenix was gone – from an overdose of heroin and cocaine on Halloween 1993. In my mind, since that taxi ride, I had developed an odd feeling of connection with him – that other guy carrying his guitar in the taxicab, on his way from the airport.

And so, hearing the tragic news, I had a weird epiphany, about the craziness of fate, and the vagaries of chance and circumstance. I know it doesn’t make any rational sense, but there it was. I had indeed been one taxi ride away. But it turned out that I had been in the right taxi after all.

This discussion we’ve been having – the ways that science and religion seem to become linked in peoples’ minds – could be said to come down to the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek. It’s interesting that both of these icons of scifi came out of the same general cultural era, and yet in a way they represent wildly different views of existence.

The world of Star Wars is, fundamentally, a religious one. Powerful beings are in touch with The Force, commanding the Universe itself to bend to their will. Much of the mysterious power we see is cloaked in symbolism and religious trappings – Jedi knights wear midieval cloaks and work their eerie magic while muttering mysterious incantations. Death only makes Obiwan more powerful. The old and wise Yoda, with his deceptive childlike qualities, is clearly modelled on a Buddhist monk of old, while his methods for training young Luke seem lifted right out of the pages of “Zen and the Art of Archery.” You can practically feel the infinite force flowing through the epic saga, echoing like passages read aloud from some biblical allegory of good versus evil.

Star Trek – I’m thinking here of Classic Trek, more than the endless spinoffs and variations that folowed – is quite the opposite. There are no deities to be found, merely nations at war or locked in a wary peace, and a very human science and technology straining against their limits. Klingons are not evil, merely obstreperous. There are no infinite beings here. As in science, the horizon of what is known is always expanding, but is always finite. We are witnessing the secular expansion of a curious young civilization.

Captain Kirk does not live in a world where religion holds any special power. Aliens who claim higher powers inevitably turn out, after all, to merely be our fellow travellers in a voyage through the galaxy.

Perhaps there is something in our culture that requires both of these archetypes, side by side. One could even say that taken together they represent our crazy, wonderful, contradictory culture – a culture built upon a divided self.

When I was a teenager, whenever I would ask my dad a foolish question, he would reply: “Do you want to go to Brooklyn, or by bus?” Essentially, of course, he was telling me that I was assuming a false dichotomy, and so my question made no sense.

I think that’s what’s been going on with a few of the comments on yesterday’s post. “Science versus religion” is a false dichotomy. That’s what I was trying to say in the original post (and apparently saying badly). Science doesn’t speak to metaphysics, and science doesn’t speak to moral teachings – the two great subjects of religion.

Yes, Einstein was a great man, but his pacifism and spiritual beliefs did not come from his discovery of E=MC² or quantum explanation for the photoelectric effect. It simply happens that a great physicist had other interesting dimensions as well. There have been plenty of great physicists who have not had such outsized political or spiritual dimensions.

We did not ask of Frank Sinatra that he answer questions about religion simply because he was a great singer of torch songs. We do not look to Meryl Streep for spiritual guidance, no matter how many Oscars she takes home for her acting.

Why do we try to misconstrue science as some sort of opposition force to religion? It seems to me that this is a misunderstanding of what science is.

Yes, I agree that we may ponder deep philosophical questions about hypothetical beings who have fundamentally greater intelligence than ourselves. These are great questions, but they are, quite literally (and specifically), outside of the bounds of scientific inquiry. That’s why they are called metaphysical questions.

Yes, feel free to explore these exciting and unanswerable mysteries. But please don’t claim that what you are talking about has anything to do with science. Or acting. Or singing torch songs.

Today a very serious and intelligent fifteen year old asked me whether I thought that science is a form of religion. I was immediately wary – I didn’t know what form of rhetoric he had been listening to, and I worried that there might have been a political slant to his question of which even he himself was unaware.

I told him I thought that in some ways science is the opposite of religion, or at least the opposite of faith. If you’re doing science honestly, then you can’t be influenced by any pre-expectations of what you might find. If you drop a rock from a height and it falls, you need to report that. If next week the same rock hovers in mid air, you need to report that as well, no matter how emotionally disturbing you might find it.

Then the young man suggested that this view might also be a form of faith – a faith in science. I told him that he might be using “science” as a buzzword. In a sense science is just codifying what we all do every day, all the time. We look at what exists around us, and we react to what we actually see in the world.

What I meant by this was that when we walk we place our feet where there is firm ground, we choose to pass through doorways and not through solid walls, and we drink water but not gasoline. We simply form a model of everyday reality, by inferring from the evidence in front of us. Science starts there, and does not stray from that mentality.

Then he asked “But aren’t both science and religion a search for truth?” I responded that the problem here is that “truth” is an overloaded word, with multiple meanings, so a question like that doesn’t end up asking anything.

There are real and serious reasons that we try to find emotional sense in the world around us. We grapple with the enormity of birth and love and death, we try to come up with core principles to guide our relationships with each other, we see inequity and suffering in the world and try to understand what we should do about it. Religion helps many people to navigate these difficult and deep waters, although others try to navigate them without religion.

But science doesn’t deal with any of those issues. Scientists may, because they are human, and to be human is to grapple with metaphysical, moral and emotional questions. Scientists can be religious, just as they can be good citizens. But when scientists are engaging with these questions, that is not the “science” part of what they do. A scientist might be deeply motivated by a desire to alleviate suffering, but she cannot let those emotions replace an honest evaluation of what she is measuring, lest she find that she has merely engaged in pseudoscience, and has failed to help anyone.

Conducting science can be a scary business, because we may discover that the Universe doesn’t care a fig about us, that it is a cold and heartless place devoid of any meaning other than the emotional shadings that we ourselves provide. To engage in science means to be prepared to look honestly at the Universe, whatever the emotional distress one might feel at the outcome.

And then to keep looking.

Today I read an interpretation of the Jewish Sabbath, and a reason for its great importance in the culture, an interpretation that made more sense than any explanation I had ever heard. The gist of it was as follows.

The Jewish people have lived with uncertainty since the destruction of the second temple, around two thousand years ago. There has never been a time when they have been completely secure. As we have seen just from the last century, even the most culturally accepting host culture could turn, in a few years, into something quite the opposite.

Unlike many religious groups, for the last two millenia the Jewish people have not had their cathedral. No Notre Dame, no St. Peter’s, no Anghor Wat, Canterbury Cathedral, Mahabodhi or Great Mosque.

So, it is posited, they built a cathedral not of space but of time. A day of the week, one of every seven, that belongs not to the world but to the spirit. A temple can be defaced, torn down or set on fire, its rubble and ashes strewn over the uncaring countryside.

But a day of the week cannot be destroyed. It is a portable cathedral, packed in one’s bag when fleeing the Pogrom, carried in the heart like a secret, indestructable and serene, ready to serve as a place of worship anywhere in the world.

Thus we may see the brilliance of this cultural adaptation to adversity. So long as a single breath is drawn by those who wish to worship within its walls, so stands the Sabbath.

On an airplane today looking out at the clouds, while taking in their majestic loveliness, I found myself pondering the nature of beauty. As far as I can see, we cannot know anything of the nature of beauty outside of human experience, since we can confer on the subject only with our fellow humans.

I don’t expect Martians to land on Earth anytime soon to invite us for tea and some good conversation on the nature of beauty. Our nearest companions here on earth don’t seem particularly interested either. I’ve never known a dog or a cat to look up at a cloud (although I’d be willing to be surprised).

And so we are faced with this odd situation – the wonder of a tree, the dance of a flame, the delightful meandering path of a mountain waterfall, none of these wonders can be teased apart from the human brain that perceives them. Perhaps things matter only because they matter to us.

And so I wonder – does “beauty” exist in the universe outside of the human perception of beauty? Or is the question itself meaningless?

On a whim I went on-line and watched Ben Stiller’s directorial debut “Reality Bites”, which I had not seen since its opening weekend in 1994. At the time I had enjoyed it, but I hadn’t fully appreciated what Stiller and his partner in crime, screenwriter Helen Childress, were really up to.

On the surface the film is a Gen X take on an age-old romantic triangle. Disaffected young post-college cute girl caught between two guys. One guy is a useless, fickle, completely self-absorbed loser/slacker hottie, the other a kind, sweet, supportive, loving, successful not-as-hottie. So which one turns out to be Mr. Right, her one true love?

Since this is a Hollywood movie, there is only one right answer to this question. Hint: the first guy is played by Ethan Hawke, the second by Ben Stiller himself. Of course she realizes that her one true great love is loser/slacker Hawke.

After all, this was still 1994. Audiences were not yet ready for the sexy-as-hell ICW (Irresistible Child-Woman) to choose Zach Braff – “Garden State” was still a full decade away. Wynona Ryder’s job was to fill the deep and yawning vacuum in the ICWU (Irresistible Child-Woman Universe) that had begun with the retirement of Audrey Hepburn from motion pictures. Yes, Natalie Portman was already bursting on the scene, but she was not yet ready to be seen as an object of full-on ICW lust (there was still too much of an inconvenient proportion of Child), unless you happened to be Luc Besson.

But I digress.

The genius of Stiller and Childress is that the entire enterprise is a subversive satire of the conventions of romantic comedy. There is no “other guy shows his true evil colors”. There is no “good guy does something to redeem himself and show he is at last ready for a grown up relationship” in the third act. None at all in fact.

Throughout the entire film, Stiller’s character remains the perfect gentleman, loving, thoughtful, caring, believing in the potential of the woman he loves. Whereas Hawke’s character persists in acting like a total bastard. He insults her, throws tantrums like a three year old, runs away after intimacy, blames her for his own failings, and does absolutely nothing – ever – to redeem himself.

But this is a Hollywood romance, and casting is destiny, so of course she realizes that the slacker/loser is her great love and soulmate. Basically, this film is the ultimate raised finger to everything that’s stupid and unthinking about the idiocy of the Hollywood formula.

You have to hand it to Stiller and Childress. They sailed this right past an entire nation, and as far as I can tell, at the time nobody even noticed what was really going on. Now of course we have seen “The Cable Guy”, “Zoolander” and “Tropic Thunder”, so we know exactly how subversive Ben Stiller is.

I wonder whether this is a kind of identifiable genre: Works of art that shout out their true message to an audience still far in the future – after all, that’s what D. A. Pennebaker was doing with “Don’t Look Back” – a genre that we might perhaps call “Future Subversive”.

Today over lunch somebody explained to me some of the dynamics behind the way the music industry lost control of the debate over song distribution. It was something I hadn’t really thought through before, and I found it fascinating.

For many years the recording industry had been taking a hard line with musicians. The general attitude was “We’re putting all this money into production support, promotion and distribution. Therefore we should get the lion’s share of the profits.” Artists responded by learning to depend upon another source of income: Concerts and touring. While the industry was making money hand-over-fist, first on record sales and then later on CD sales, musicians learned to maximize their earning power as performers, rather than relying on the modest cut they received as recording artists.

It all worked fine until the dawn of the age of internet downloading. Suddenly the recording industry found that its natural ally – the artist – didn’t really care. Consumers would have listened if their beloved musicians had asked them not to indulge in free downloading. But the musicians simply weren’t all that invested in the issue.

And so the great unwashed masses of the music-loving public engaged in a massive collective act of intellectual property theft, and the industry was powerless to stop them. In the end, the labels were brought to their knees.

And one could argue that they were done in by their own greed, which had led them to establish an adversarial relationship with their greatest natural allies – the recording artists.

Fortunately for the film industry, directors and actors make their money through film sales, not through film promotion. So Clint Eastwood, Meryl Streep and all the other glamorous Hollywood icons are right in step with the studios on this one.

I guess there is a lesson in this: Don’t get too greedy. You never know when you’ll need friends.