Charles Bukowski being shunned and his response:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2011/10/charles-bukowski-on-censorship.html
bukowski.net
thanks, gerard
Sunday, October 23, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
EARTH ~
Another eastener kid (Baltimore) who came west and drew out remarkable music and songs to the lay of the land. In Robbie's hands it was all ragas.
Orphaned as an infant, Daniel Robinson, Jr. changed his name in the late 50s to Basho in honor of Matsuo Basho, the Japanese poet. He picked up his first guitar at the same time and moved quickly through various styles and techniques from the American blues and folk to a deep interest and study in eastern thought and music, taking his beloved 12-string guitar drone and tone closer to a sarod than most anyone. India and the North American Indian was much in his heart.
His first album appeared on John Fahey's Takoma label in 1965 and I highly recommend all the albums.
I'm concentrating here mainly off his ravishing Visions of the Country, from Windham Hill, where he also released a stunning album of classical 12-string compositions from the label.
Some say he was never long with this world, and may have even died a virgin. Thirty years ago he would write to me handwritten letters on his pad of yellow, lined stationary, often including his poems influenced by the American Indian. Money was always a problem, his health wasn't right, he never had a driver's license. Somehow he got east a few years before he passed away, way too young, and played a date one summer night in the small town of Buckland, Massachusetts. If you were there, you haven't forgotten.
Robbie Basho was born August 31, 1940 and died Feb 28, 1986 after a freak accident in the hands of his chiropractor. Apparently blood vessels in his neck were ruptured during a procedure which led to a fatal stroke.
ROBBIE BASHO
Another eastener kid (Baltimore) who came west and drew out remarkable music and songs to the lay of the land. In Robbie's hands it was all ragas.
Orphaned as an infant, Daniel Robinson, Jr. changed his name in the late 50s to Basho in honor of Matsuo Basho, the Japanese poet. He picked up his first guitar at the same time and moved quickly through various styles and techniques from the American blues and folk to a deep interest and study in eastern thought and music, taking his beloved 12-string guitar drone and tone closer to a sarod than most anyone. India and the North American Indian was much in his heart.
His first album appeared on John Fahey's Takoma label in 1965 and I highly recommend all the albums.
I'm concentrating here mainly off his ravishing Visions of the Country, from Windham Hill, where he also released a stunning album of classical 12-string compositions from the label.
Some say he was never long with this world, and may have even died a virgin. Thirty years ago he would write to me handwritten letters on his pad of yellow, lined stationary, often including his poems influenced by the American Indian. Money was always a problem, his health wasn't right, he never had a driver's license. Somehow he got east a few years before he passed away, way too young, and played a date one summer night in the small town of Buckland, Massachusetts. If you were there, you haven't forgotten.
Robbie Basho was born August 31, 1940 and died Feb 28, 1986 after a freak accident in the hands of his chiropractor. Apparently blood vessels in his neck were ruptured during a procedure which led to a fatal stroke.
Friday, October 21, 2011
Thursday, October 20, 2011
EARTH ~
(for pennies)
(for pennies)
http://shine.yahoo.com/event/green/20-unusual-uses-for-vinegar-2588664/
what my grandmas
and neighborhood
elder wise women
always told me
as a boy
what my grandmas
and neighborhood
elder wise women
always told me
as a boy
OCCUPY ~
A man signs a huge banner during "Occupy DC" anti-corporations protest at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC. Oct. 10, 2011.
A man signs a huge banner during "Occupy DC" anti-corporations protest at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC. Oct. 10, 2011.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/oct/18/occupy-protests-map-world
photo: jewel samad / afp, getty
photo: jewel samad / afp, getty
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
EARTH ~
Mario Vargas Llosa
from The Fictions of Borges
— Mario Vargas Llosa
from Wellsprings
(Harvard University Press 2008)
Jorge Luis Borges and friend
from BUENOS AIRES
Not by morning light, not when day has come, and not even at night do we really see the city. Morning is an overwhelming blue, a swift and massive surprise spanning the sky, a crystallizing, a lavish outpouring of sunlight that piles up in squares, smashes mirrors with fictitious stones, and lowers long insinuations of light down wells. The day is a playing field for our endeavors or for our idleness, and there is only room for them on their usual chessboard. The night is a truncated miracle: the crowning moment of wan streelights, when palpable objectivity becomes less insolent and less solid. The dawn is an infamous, dragged-out affair, because it conceals the great plot arranged to set right everything that fell apart ten hours before. It goes about straightening streets, decapitating lights, and repainting colors exactly where they were the previous afternoon. Finally, we — with the city already hanging on our necks and the abyssal day yoked to our shoulders — have to give in to the mad plenitude of its triumph and resign ourselves to having yet another day riveted to our souls.
Now for the afternoon: the dramatic altercation and conflict between the visible and the shadows. It's as if visible things begin twisting, going insane. After weakens us, eats away at us, abuses us, but because of its persistence the streets recover their human meaning, their tragic meaning of volition that manages to last in time, time whose very essence is change. The afternoon perturbs the day, and for that reason it agrees with us, because we too are perturbed. The late afternoon prepares the easy decline of our spiritual electricity. It's by force of afternoons that the city goes about entering us.
Mario Vargas Llosa
from The Fictions of Borges
When I was a student, I had a passion for Sartre, and I firmly believed in his notion that the writer's commitment was to his own times and to society in which he lived, that "words were actions," and that through writing a man or woman could influence history. Today, such ideas seem naive and even tedious — we live in an age of smug skepticism about the power of literature as well as history — but in the 1950s the notion that the world could be changed for the better, and that literature should contribute to this, struck many of us as both persuasive and exciting.
By then, Borges' influence was beginning to be felt beyond the small circle of admirers who read his work in the Argentine literary magazine Sur. In a number of Latin American cities, ardent followers fought over the rare editions of his books as if they were treasure and learned by heart those visionary random lists, or catalogues, that inhabit Borges' pages — the particularly beautiful one from "The Aleph," for instance — and tried to incorporate in their work not only his labyrinths, tigers, mirrors, masks, and knives but also his strikingly original use of adjectives and adverbs.
In Lima, the first of these Borges enthusiasts I came across was a friend and contemporary with whom I shared my books and literary dreams. Borges was always an inexhaustible topic of discussion. In a clinically pure way, he stood for everything Sartre taught me to hate: the artist retreating from the world around him to take refuge in a world of intellect, erudition, and fantasy; the writer looking down on politics, history, and day-to-day reality, while shamelessly displaying his skepticism and wry disdain for everything that was not literature; the intellectual who not only allowed himself to treat ironically the dogmas and utopias of the left but who took his own iconoclasm to the extreme of joining the Conservative Party and breezily justifying this move by claiming that gentlemen prefer lost causes.
In our discussions, I tried to show with all the Sartrean malice I could command that an intellectual who wrote, spoke, and behaved the way Borges did somehow shared responsibility for all the world's social ills. That his stories and poems were little more than bibelots d' inanite sonore, mere trinkets of high sounding emptiness, and that History with its terrible sense of justice — which progressives wield, as it suits them, like an executioner's ax or a gambler's marked card — would one day give him his just deserts. But once the arguments were over, in the solitude of my room or the library — like the fanatical puritan of Somerset Maugham's Rain, who gives in to temptation of the flesh he renounces — I found Borges' spell irresistible. I would read his stories, poems, and essays in utter amazement; and the adulterous feeling I had that I was betraying my mentor Sartre added a perverse pleasure.
I have been somewhat fickle in my literary passions; and nowadays when I reread many of the writers who were once my models, especially during adolescence, I find them boring — Sartre included. But the secret, sinful passion I harbored for Borges' work has never faded, and rereading him, which I have done from time to time like a believer performing a sacred ritual, has always been a happy experience. Only recently, I read all his work again, one piece after the other, and once more I marveled — exactly as I had done the first time — at his elegant and limpid prose, the refinement of his stories, the excellence of his craftsmanship. I am quite aware of how ephemeral literary assessments can be, but in Borges' case we can quite justifiably state that he is the most important thing to happen to imaginative writing in the Spanish language in modern times, and one of the most memorable artists of our age.
I also believe that the debt we who write in Spanish owe to Borges is enormous. That includes even those of us, like myself, who have never written a story of pure fantasy or felt any particular affinity with ghosts and doubles, with infinite, or with the metaphysics of Schopenhauer. For Latin American writers, Borges heralded the end of a kind of inferiority complex that inhibited us, unwittingly of course, from broaching certain subjects and that kept us imprisoned in a provincial outlook. Before Borges, it seemed a piece of foolhardiness of self-delusion for one of us to feel at home in a larger world culture, in the way that a European or a North American might.
A handful of Latin American modernista poets had previously done so, of course, but their attempts — even in the case of the most famous among them, Rubén Dario — smacked of pastiche or whimsicality, something akin to a superficial, slightly frivolous journey through a foreign land. Latin American writers had forgotten what our classical writers like Inca Garcilaso or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz never doubted — that through language and history they were part and parcel of Western culture, not mere amanuenses or colonials but a legitimate part of that tradition, ever since Spaniards and Portuguese, four and a half centuries earlier, extended the frontiers of Western culture to the southern hemisphere. With Borges, this engagement became possible once more. But at the same time, Borges' work was proof that being part of this broader cultural history took nothing away from a Latin American writer's sovereignty or originality.
Few European writers have assimilated the legacy of the West as completely and thoroughly as this poet and storyteller from the periphery. Who among Borges' contemporaries handled with such ease Scandinavian myths, Anglo-Saxon poetry, German philosophy, Spain's Golden Age literature, the English poets, Dante, Homer, and the myths and the legends of the Far and Middle East that Europeans translated and gave to the world? But this did not make Borges European. I remember the surprise of my students at Queen Mary College in the University of London during the 1960s — we were reading ficciones and El Aleph — when I told them that some Latin Americans accused Borges of being Europeanized, of being more than a little English writer. They could not see why. To them, this writer, and whose stories so many different countries, ages, themes, and cultural references are intertwined, seemed as exotic as the cha-cha-cha, which was all the rage at the time. They were not wrong. Borges was not a writer imprisoned within national tradition, as European writers are often, and this facilitated his journeys through cultural space, in which, thanks to the many languages he knew, he moved with consummate ease.
This cosmopolitanism, this eagerness to be a master of such a far-ranging cultural sphere, this desire to invent a past for oneself in dialogue with the outside, was a way of being profoundly Argentine — which is to say, Latin American. But in Borges' case, his intense involvement with European literature was also a way of shaping his own personal geography, a way of being Borges. Through his broad interests and his private demons he was weaving a fabric of great originality, made up of strange combinations in which the prose of Stevenson and The Arabian Nights, translated by Englishmen and Frenchmen, appear alongside Gauchos out of Martin Fierro and characters from Icelandic Sagas, and in which two old-time hoodlums, from a Buenos Aires more imagined than remembered, fight with knives in a quarrel which seems like the extension of a medieval dispute that results in death by fire of two Christian theologians. Against the unique Borgesian backdrop, the most heterogeneous creatures and events parade — just as they do, in "The Aleph," in Carlos Argentino Daneri's cellar. But in contrast to what takes place on that tiny passive screen, which can reveal the elements of the universe only at random, in Borges' work every element and every being is brought together. Filtered through a single point of view, and given individual character through verbal expression.
Here is another area in which Latin American writers owe much to the example of Borges. Not only did he prove to us that an Argentine could speak with authority on Shakespeare and create convincing stories set in Aberdeen, but he also revolutionized the tradition of his literary language. Note that I said "example" and not "influence." To the extent that Borges' prose has "influential," it has — because of its wild originality — wrecked havoc among countless admirers, in whose work the use of certain images or verbs or adjectives established by him turns into mere parody. This is the most readily detectable influence, for Borges was one of the writers who managed completely to put his own personal stamp on the Spanish language. "Word music" was his term for it, and it is as distinctive in him as it is in the most illustrious of our classical writers — namely, Quevedo, whom Borges admired, and Gongora, whom he did not. Borges' prose is so recognizable to the ear that often in someone else's work a single sentence or even a simple verb (conjeturar, for example, or fatigar use transitively) becomes a clear giveaway of Borges' influence.
Borges made a profound impression on Spanish literary prose, as before him Rubén Dario had on poetry. The difference between them is that Dario imported and introduced from France a number of mannerisms and themes that he adapted to his own world and to his own idiosyncratic style. To some extent, all this expressed the feelings (and at times the snobbery) of a particular period and a certain social milieu. Which is why his devices could be used by some many without his followers losing their individual voices. The Borges revolution was personal. It represented him alone, and only in a vague, roundabout way was it connected with the setting in which he was formed and which in turn he helped crucially to form — that of the magazine Sur. Which is why in anyone else's hands Borges' style comes across as caricature.
By then, Borges' influence was beginning to be felt beyond the small circle of admirers who read his work in the Argentine literary magazine Sur. In a number of Latin American cities, ardent followers fought over the rare editions of his books as if they were treasure and learned by heart those visionary random lists, or catalogues, that inhabit Borges' pages — the particularly beautiful one from "The Aleph," for instance — and tried to incorporate in their work not only his labyrinths, tigers, mirrors, masks, and knives but also his strikingly original use of adjectives and adverbs.
In Lima, the first of these Borges enthusiasts I came across was a friend and contemporary with whom I shared my books and literary dreams. Borges was always an inexhaustible topic of discussion. In a clinically pure way, he stood for everything Sartre taught me to hate: the artist retreating from the world around him to take refuge in a world of intellect, erudition, and fantasy; the writer looking down on politics, history, and day-to-day reality, while shamelessly displaying his skepticism and wry disdain for everything that was not literature; the intellectual who not only allowed himself to treat ironically the dogmas and utopias of the left but who took his own iconoclasm to the extreme of joining the Conservative Party and breezily justifying this move by claiming that gentlemen prefer lost causes.
In our discussions, I tried to show with all the Sartrean malice I could command that an intellectual who wrote, spoke, and behaved the way Borges did somehow shared responsibility for all the world's social ills. That his stories and poems were little more than bibelots d' inanite sonore, mere trinkets of high sounding emptiness, and that History with its terrible sense of justice — which progressives wield, as it suits them, like an executioner's ax or a gambler's marked card — would one day give him his just deserts. But once the arguments were over, in the solitude of my room or the library — like the fanatical puritan of Somerset Maugham's Rain, who gives in to temptation of the flesh he renounces — I found Borges' spell irresistible. I would read his stories, poems, and essays in utter amazement; and the adulterous feeling I had that I was betraying my mentor Sartre added a perverse pleasure.
I have been somewhat fickle in my literary passions; and nowadays when I reread many of the writers who were once my models, especially during adolescence, I find them boring — Sartre included. But the secret, sinful passion I harbored for Borges' work has never faded, and rereading him, which I have done from time to time like a believer performing a sacred ritual, has always been a happy experience. Only recently, I read all his work again, one piece after the other, and once more I marveled — exactly as I had done the first time — at his elegant and limpid prose, the refinement of his stories, the excellence of his craftsmanship. I am quite aware of how ephemeral literary assessments can be, but in Borges' case we can quite justifiably state that he is the most important thing to happen to imaginative writing in the Spanish language in modern times, and one of the most memorable artists of our age.
I also believe that the debt we who write in Spanish owe to Borges is enormous. That includes even those of us, like myself, who have never written a story of pure fantasy or felt any particular affinity with ghosts and doubles, with infinite, or with the metaphysics of Schopenhauer. For Latin American writers, Borges heralded the end of a kind of inferiority complex that inhibited us, unwittingly of course, from broaching certain subjects and that kept us imprisoned in a provincial outlook. Before Borges, it seemed a piece of foolhardiness of self-delusion for one of us to feel at home in a larger world culture, in the way that a European or a North American might.
A handful of Latin American modernista poets had previously done so, of course, but their attempts — even in the case of the most famous among them, Rubén Dario — smacked of pastiche or whimsicality, something akin to a superficial, slightly frivolous journey through a foreign land. Latin American writers had forgotten what our classical writers like Inca Garcilaso or Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz never doubted — that through language and history they were part and parcel of Western culture, not mere amanuenses or colonials but a legitimate part of that tradition, ever since Spaniards and Portuguese, four and a half centuries earlier, extended the frontiers of Western culture to the southern hemisphere. With Borges, this engagement became possible once more. But at the same time, Borges' work was proof that being part of this broader cultural history took nothing away from a Latin American writer's sovereignty or originality.
Few European writers have assimilated the legacy of the West as completely and thoroughly as this poet and storyteller from the periphery. Who among Borges' contemporaries handled with such ease Scandinavian myths, Anglo-Saxon poetry, German philosophy, Spain's Golden Age literature, the English poets, Dante, Homer, and the myths and the legends of the Far and Middle East that Europeans translated and gave to the world? But this did not make Borges European. I remember the surprise of my students at Queen Mary College in the University of London during the 1960s — we were reading ficciones and El Aleph — when I told them that some Latin Americans accused Borges of being Europeanized, of being more than a little English writer. They could not see why. To them, this writer, and whose stories so many different countries, ages, themes, and cultural references are intertwined, seemed as exotic as the cha-cha-cha, which was all the rage at the time. They were not wrong. Borges was not a writer imprisoned within national tradition, as European writers are often, and this facilitated his journeys through cultural space, in which, thanks to the many languages he knew, he moved with consummate ease.
This cosmopolitanism, this eagerness to be a master of such a far-ranging cultural sphere, this desire to invent a past for oneself in dialogue with the outside, was a way of being profoundly Argentine — which is to say, Latin American. But in Borges' case, his intense involvement with European literature was also a way of shaping his own personal geography, a way of being Borges. Through his broad interests and his private demons he was weaving a fabric of great originality, made up of strange combinations in which the prose of Stevenson and The Arabian Nights, translated by Englishmen and Frenchmen, appear alongside Gauchos out of Martin Fierro and characters from Icelandic Sagas, and in which two old-time hoodlums, from a Buenos Aires more imagined than remembered, fight with knives in a quarrel which seems like the extension of a medieval dispute that results in death by fire of two Christian theologians. Against the unique Borgesian backdrop, the most heterogeneous creatures and events parade — just as they do, in "The Aleph," in Carlos Argentino Daneri's cellar. But in contrast to what takes place on that tiny passive screen, which can reveal the elements of the universe only at random, in Borges' work every element and every being is brought together. Filtered through a single point of view, and given individual character through verbal expression.
Here is another area in which Latin American writers owe much to the example of Borges. Not only did he prove to us that an Argentine could speak with authority on Shakespeare and create convincing stories set in Aberdeen, but he also revolutionized the tradition of his literary language. Note that I said "example" and not "influence." To the extent that Borges' prose has "influential," it has — because of its wild originality — wrecked havoc among countless admirers, in whose work the use of certain images or verbs or adjectives established by him turns into mere parody. This is the most readily detectable influence, for Borges was one of the writers who managed completely to put his own personal stamp on the Spanish language. "Word music" was his term for it, and it is as distinctive in him as it is in the most illustrious of our classical writers — namely, Quevedo, whom Borges admired, and Gongora, whom he did not. Borges' prose is so recognizable to the ear that often in someone else's work a single sentence or even a simple verb (conjeturar, for example, or fatigar use transitively) becomes a clear giveaway of Borges' influence.
Borges made a profound impression on Spanish literary prose, as before him Rubén Dario had on poetry. The difference between them is that Dario imported and introduced from France a number of mannerisms and themes that he adapted to his own world and to his own idiosyncratic style. To some extent, all this expressed the feelings (and at times the snobbery) of a particular period and a certain social milieu. Which is why his devices could be used by some many without his followers losing their individual voices. The Borges revolution was personal. It represented him alone, and only in a vague, roundabout way was it connected with the setting in which he was formed and which in turn he helped crucially to form — that of the magazine Sur. Which is why in anyone else's hands Borges' style comes across as caricature.
— Mario Vargas Llosa
from Wellsprings
(Harvard University Press 2008)
Jorge Luis Borges and friend
from BUENOS AIRES
Not by morning light, not when day has come, and not even at night do we really see the city. Morning is an overwhelming blue, a swift and massive surprise spanning the sky, a crystallizing, a lavish outpouring of sunlight that piles up in squares, smashes mirrors with fictitious stones, and lowers long insinuations of light down wells. The day is a playing field for our endeavors or for our idleness, and there is only room for them on their usual chessboard. The night is a truncated miracle: the crowning moment of wan streelights, when palpable objectivity becomes less insolent and less solid. The dawn is an infamous, dragged-out affair, because it conceals the great plot arranged to set right everything that fell apart ten hours before. It goes about straightening streets, decapitating lights, and repainting colors exactly where they were the previous afternoon. Finally, we — with the city already hanging on our necks and the abyssal day yoked to our shoulders — have to give in to the mad plenitude of its triumph and resign ourselves to having yet another day riveted to our souls.
Now for the afternoon: the dramatic altercation and conflict between the visible and the shadows. It's as if visible things begin twisting, going insane. After weakens us, eats away at us, abuses us, but because of its persistence the streets recover their human meaning, their tragic meaning of volition that manages to last in time, time whose very essence is change. The afternoon perturbs the day, and for that reason it agrees with us, because we too are perturbed. The late afternoon prepares the easy decline of our spiritual electricity. It's by force of afternoons that the city goes about entering us.
Jorge Luis Borges,
from Inquisitions (1925)
from Inquisitions (1925)
Monday, October 17, 2011
EARTHEN ~
While watching Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) last night — and go back and watch it yourself — you'll see the first few minutes of the film are right out of Occupy Wall Street — I was working over two new pairs of work boots, bought the other day at half-price from a local merchant known for their fine footwear. This merchant, with many other shop owners, had gone through Hurricane Irene's flood waters rushing in a four foot tide of mud and misery through the lower channels of town and where this shop owner's boots and hiking and camp gear are housed. It made a royal mess of things. I guess instead of taking the foot wear as a total loss, the shop owner got his army of workers together by digging out of the muck the best of the lot and these were on makeshift shelves today in the same part of town where the flood knocked over the apple cart. Right next door to this temporary headquarters for the boot sale, builders were mad at it laying up new wallboard and putting down tape and mud and making a new place in a rush before winter. The weather has been cooperating, except for the rain, and it was cats & dogs rain when we arrived for the sale.
I was deeper into the film while damp sponging with vigor these new boots of light crud. I was trying to imagine an older work ethic selling boots in this condition and shape, and of course they wouldn't. Every boot would have been wiped down clean on the shelf and managing its best to be civil and presentable. Every worker at work. I watched a half-dozen workers in one big room that day just stand around and bumble around, never thinking of cleaning the boots up more than half-baked. It's a culture thing. In the meantime, I’ve picked up brand new high heel and no steel toe or shank work boots just like I like them but can’t afford them like once upon a time. I have 3 pair of steel toe Red Wing work boots banged up and sloped in my work room back home all with years more life in them. I couldn’t pass up the regular work boot crew, and Sweetheart found a pair of sturdy shoes she likes. Just rub off the dirt.
Occupy.
The consciousness raised from Occupy Wall Street is its merit. It doesn't have to have a "philosophy" since its philosophy is survival. Basic fact. It's the 1% who are now forced to explain, not the 99% who are the victims. The party lines will be dropped when everyone finally gets it through their rigid platform heads that they've been abused and taken to the cleaners by a vast minority who are living way beyond their means, and criminally, with all our earnings. And in many cases peoples lives (who have died because-of). This is when the despicable nature of humankind comes to the forefront without any explanation, except its greed. Von Stroheim spelled it out ages ago in another film. We free the many innocent in prison, and put into shackles the very indecent and crooked. There will be plenty. If Obama is smart, and gets off his slightly elitist horse, he will begin to marshal his vivid instincts into Occupy Wall Street quarters. If he's afraid of losing his giant corporate backing (and he is), it will be the mistake of his lifetime. The climate, the economy, the media, the crass, has now reached a fever pitch
— it's time for the right boot.
image:
from Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni
While watching Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966) last night — and go back and watch it yourself — you'll see the first few minutes of the film are right out of Occupy Wall Street — I was working over two new pairs of work boots, bought the other day at half-price from a local merchant known for their fine footwear. This merchant, with many other shop owners, had gone through Hurricane Irene's flood waters rushing in a four foot tide of mud and misery through the lower channels of town and where this shop owner's boots and hiking and camp gear are housed. It made a royal mess of things. I guess instead of taking the foot wear as a total loss, the shop owner got his army of workers together by digging out of the muck the best of the lot and these were on makeshift shelves today in the same part of town where the flood knocked over the apple cart. Right next door to this temporary headquarters for the boot sale, builders were mad at it laying up new wallboard and putting down tape and mud and making a new place in a rush before winter. The weather has been cooperating, except for the rain, and it was cats & dogs rain when we arrived for the sale.
I was deeper into the film while damp sponging with vigor these new boots of light crud. I was trying to imagine an older work ethic selling boots in this condition and shape, and of course they wouldn't. Every boot would have been wiped down clean on the shelf and managing its best to be civil and presentable. Every worker at work. I watched a half-dozen workers in one big room that day just stand around and bumble around, never thinking of cleaning the boots up more than half-baked. It's a culture thing. In the meantime, I’ve picked up brand new high heel and no steel toe or shank work boots just like I like them but can’t afford them like once upon a time. I have 3 pair of steel toe Red Wing work boots banged up and sloped in my work room back home all with years more life in them. I couldn’t pass up the regular work boot crew, and Sweetheart found a pair of sturdy shoes she likes. Just rub off the dirt.
Occupy.
The consciousness raised from Occupy Wall Street is its merit. It doesn't have to have a "philosophy" since its philosophy is survival. Basic fact. It's the 1% who are now forced to explain, not the 99% who are the victims. The party lines will be dropped when everyone finally gets it through their rigid platform heads that they've been abused and taken to the cleaners by a vast minority who are living way beyond their means, and criminally, with all our earnings. And in many cases peoples lives (who have died because-of). This is when the despicable nature of humankind comes to the forefront without any explanation, except its greed. Von Stroheim spelled it out ages ago in another film. We free the many innocent in prison, and put into shackles the very indecent and crooked. There will be plenty. If Obama is smart, and gets off his slightly elitist horse, he will begin to marshal his vivid instincts into Occupy Wall Street quarters. If he's afraid of losing his giant corporate backing (and he is), it will be the mistake of his lifetime. The climate, the economy, the media, the crass, has now reached a fever pitch
— it's time for the right boot.
image:
from Blow-Up, Michelangelo Antonioni
HAIKU ~
(w/o seasons)
(w/o seasons)
The 400 wealthiest Americans
have a greater combined net worth
than the bottom 150 million Americans.
~
The top 1 percent of Americans
possess more wealth than
the entire bottom 90 percent.
~
In the Bush expansion from 2002 to 2007,
went to the richest 1 percent.
photo © bob arnold
thanks to ny times
Saturday, October 15, 2011
EARTH ~
FAR UP IN THE WOODS AT WORK
I THOUGHT OF LINES TO LATER
WRITE DOWN
You'll notice
in stone-
work
if
yr
patient
every stone
has its place
to fit
every stone
has a
home
the earth's
been
made
care
to
follow?
woodlands
stone cairn
built for
janine
by bob arnold
in vt.
today, Janine Pommy Vega
was laid to rest
in woodstock, ny.
photos © bob arnold
FAR UP IN THE WOODS AT WORK
I THOUGHT OF LINES TO LATER
WRITE DOWN
You'll notice
in stone-
work
if
yr
patient
every stone
has its place
to fit
every stone
has a
home
the earth's
been
made
care
to
follow?
woodlands
stone cairn
built for
janine
by bob arnold
in vt.
today, Janine Pommy Vega
was laid to rest
in woodstock, ny.
photos © bob arnold
Friday, October 14, 2011
EARTH ~
(as the crow flies)
In Paul Theroux's new and plucky book on travel, The Tao of Travel (actually), he shares countless episodes and passages from travel books down the ages. One of my favorite chapters in the book deals with walkers, and the book would be remiss if it had missed this slender book by Werner Herzog. All of the Theroux book, as the Herzog, reads with the saunter of a well prepared long walk, in fact a hike, if it comes to that. The Tao of Travel is leatherly bound with a substantial bookmark built into the text. The book gives one full page to Herzog and here it is :
WERNER HERZOG: WALKING ON FOOT IS A VIRTUE
On his deathbed, "Bruce summoned Herzog because he thought the director had healing powers,: Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in his biography Bruce Chatwin. "When they first met in Melbourne in 1984. . .their talks had begun with a discussion on the restorative powers of walking. 'He had an almost immediate rapport with me,' says Herzog, 'when I explained to him that tourism is a mortal sin, but walking on foot is a virtue, and that whatever went wrong and makes our civilization something doomed is the departure from the nomadic life.'"
Herzog's belief in solvitur ambulando is unshakable. In an interview he said, "I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing."
And he walked the walk. In 1974, hearing that the German film director Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris, Herzog decided to walk the five hundred miles there from Munich, "believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot." He added, as passionate walkers often do, "Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself." He was thirty-two. It was the winter of 1974. He described the journey in Of Walking In Ice (1980).
Herzog traveled almost as a mendicant. He rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to break into unoccupied houses and sleep in them, or sneak into barns and sleep in haystacks. He was frequently taken to be a tramp or an outlaw — he was indeed a trespasser, but that too is often the role of a walker. He was sent away from inns and restaurants for his sinister appearance.
His route was as the crow flies ("a direct imaginary line"), taking him through cities and slums and garbage dumps and past motorways; this is anything but pastoral, and yet his mood is reflective. His prose is cinematic, composed of heaped-up images, like a long panning shot of a young man trudging through snow and rain, across bleak landscapes, never making a friend, never ingratiating himself. His legs ache, his feet are so blistered and sorer he limps. He writes, "Why is walking so full of woe?"
He records his dreams, he recalls his past, his childhood, and his prose becomes more and more hallucinatory. Nearer Paris, where he will find that Lotte Eisner has not died, he is strengthened by the sight of a rainbow: "A rainbow before me all at once fills me with the greatest confidence. What a sign it is, over and in front of he who walks. Everyone should Walk."
Of Walking In Ice: Tanam (1980)
The Tao of Travel: Houghton Mifflin 2011
(as the crow flies)
In Paul Theroux's new and plucky book on travel, The Tao of Travel (actually), he shares countless episodes and passages from travel books down the ages. One of my favorite chapters in the book deals with walkers, and the book would be remiss if it had missed this slender book by Werner Herzog. All of the Theroux book, as the Herzog, reads with the saunter of a well prepared long walk, in fact a hike, if it comes to that. The Tao of Travel is leatherly bound with a substantial bookmark built into the text. The book gives one full page to Herzog and here it is :
WERNER HERZOG: WALKING ON FOOT IS A VIRTUE
On his deathbed, "Bruce summoned Herzog because he thought the director had healing powers,: Nicholas Shakespeare wrote in his biography Bruce Chatwin. "When they first met in Melbourne in 1984. . .their talks had begun with a discussion on the restorative powers of walking. 'He had an almost immediate rapport with me,' says Herzog, 'when I explained to him that tourism is a mortal sin, but walking on foot is a virtue, and that whatever went wrong and makes our civilization something doomed is the departure from the nomadic life.'"
Herzog's belief in solvitur ambulando is unshakable. In an interview he said, "I personally would rather do the existentially essential things in life on foot. If you live in England and your girlfriend is in Sicily, and it is clear you want to marry her, then you should walk to Sicily to propose. For these things travel by car or aeroplane is not the right thing."
And he walked the walk. In 1974, hearing that the German film director Lotte Eisner was dying in Paris, Herzog decided to walk the five hundred miles there from Munich, "believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot." He added, as passionate walkers often do, "Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself." He was thirty-two. It was the winter of 1974. He described the journey in Of Walking In Ice (1980).
Herzog traveled almost as a mendicant. He rarely stayed in hotels, preferring to break into unoccupied houses and sleep in them, or sneak into barns and sleep in haystacks. He was frequently taken to be a tramp or an outlaw — he was indeed a trespasser, but that too is often the role of a walker. He was sent away from inns and restaurants for his sinister appearance.
His route was as the crow flies ("a direct imaginary line"), taking him through cities and slums and garbage dumps and past motorways; this is anything but pastoral, and yet his mood is reflective. His prose is cinematic, composed of heaped-up images, like a long panning shot of a young man trudging through snow and rain, across bleak landscapes, never making a friend, never ingratiating himself. His legs ache, his feet are so blistered and sorer he limps. He writes, "Why is walking so full of woe?"
He records his dreams, he recalls his past, his childhood, and his prose becomes more and more hallucinatory. Nearer Paris, where he will find that Lotte Eisner has not died, he is strengthened by the sight of a rainbow: "A rainbow before me all at once fills me with the greatest confidence. What a sign it is, over and in front of he who walks. Everyone should Walk."
Of Walking In Ice: Tanam (1980)
The Tao of Travel: Houghton Mifflin 2011
Thursday, October 13, 2011
KNOWING ~
LOG OUTIt knows
• The Googlisation of Everything (and Why We Should Worry) by Siva Vaidhyanathan California, 265 pp, £18.95, March 2011, ISBN 978 0 520 25882 2
• In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy Simon and Schuster, 424 pp, £18.99, May 2011, ISBN 978 1 4165 9658 5
• I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards Allen Lane, 416 pp, £20.00, July 2011, ISBN 978 1 84614 512 4
This spring, the billionaire Eric Schmidt announced that there were only four really significant technology companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google, the company he had until recently been running. People believed him. What distinguished his new ‘gang of four’ from the generation it had superseded – companies like Intel, Microsoft, Dell and Cisco, which mostly exist to sell gizmos and gadgets and innumerable hours of expensive support services to corporate clients – was that the newcomers sold their products and services to ordinary people. Since there are more ordinary people in the world than there are businesses, and since there’s nothing that ordinary people don’t want or need, or can’t be persuaded they want or need when it flashes up alluringly on their screens, the money to be made from them is virtually limitless. Together, Schmidt’s four companies are worth more than half a trillion dollars. The technology sector isn’t as big as, say, oil, but it’s growing, as more and more traditional industries – advertising, travel, real estate, used cars, new cars, porn, television, film, music, publishing, news – are subsumed into the digital economy. Schmidt, who as the ex-CEO of a multibillion-dollar corporation had learned to take the long view, warned that not all four of his disruptive gang could survive. So – as they all converge from their various beginnings to compete in the same area, the place usually referred to as ‘the cloud’, a place where everything that matters is online – the question is: who will be the first to blink?
If the company that falters is Google, it won’t be because it didn’t see the future coming. Of Schmidt’s four technology juggernauts, Google has always been the most ambitious, and the most committed to getting everything possible onto the internet, its mission being ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful’. Its ubiquitous search box has changed the way information can be got at to such an extent that ten years after most people first learned of its existence you wouldn’t think of trying to find out anything without typing it into Google first. Searching on Google is automatic, a reflex, just part of what we do. But an insufficiently thought-about fact is that in order to organise the world’s information Google first has to get hold of the stuff. And in the long run ‘the world’s information’ means much more than anyone would ever have imagined it could. It means, of course, the totality of the information contained on the World Wide Web, or the contents of more than a trillion webpages (it was a trillion at the last count, in 2008; now, such a number would be meaningless). But that much goes without saying, since indexing and ranking webpages is where Google began when it got going as a research project at Stanford in 1996, just five years after the web itself was invented. It means – or would mean, if lawyers let Google have its way – the complete contents of every one of the more than 33 million books in the Library of Congress or, if you include slightly varying editions and pamphlets and other ephemera, the contents of the approximately 129,864,880 books published in every recorded language since printing was invented. It means every video uploaded to the public internet, a quantity – if you take the Google-owned YouTube alone – that is increasing at the rate of nearly an hour of video every second.
It means the location of businesses, religious institutions, schools, libraries, community centres and hospitals worldwide – a global Yellow Pages. It means the inventories of shops, the archives of newspapers, the minute by minute performance of the stock market. It means, or will mean, if Google keeps going, the exact look of every street corner and roadside on the planet, photographed in high resolution and kept as up to date as possible: the logic, if not yet the practice, of Google Street View, means that city streets should be under ever more regular photographic surveillance, since the fresher and more complete the imagery the more useful people will find it, and the more they will therefore use it.[1] If it doesn’t already have a piece of data, you can be sure that Google is pursuing a way of getting it, of gathering and sorting every kind of public information there is.
But all this is just the stuff that Google makes publicly searchable, or ‘universally accessible’. It’s only a small fraction of the information it actually possesses. I know that Google knows, because I’ve looked it up, that on 30 April 2011 at 4.33 p.m. I was at Willesden Junction station, travelling west. It knows where I was, as it knows where I am now, because like many millions of others I have an Android-powered smartphone with Google’s location service turned on. If you use the full range of its products, Google knows the identity of everyone you communicate with by email, instant messaging and phone, with a master list – accessible only by you, and by Google – of the people you contact most. If you use its products, Google knows the content of your emails and voicemail messages (a feature of Google Voice is that it transcribes messages and emails them to you, storing the text on Google servers indefinitely). If you find Google products compelling – and their promise of access-anywhere, conflagration and laptop-theft-proof document creation makes them quite compelling – Google knows the content of every document you write or spreadsheet you fiddle or presentation you construct. If as many Google-enabled robotic devices get installed as Google hopes, Google may soon know the contents of your fridge, your heart rate when you’re exercising, the weather outside your front door, the pattern of electricity use in your home.
Google knows or has sought to know, and may increasingly seek to know, your credit card numbers, your purchasing history, your date of birth, your medical history, your reading habits, your taste in music, your interest or otherwise (thanks to your searching habits) in the First Intifada or the career of Audrey Hepburn or flights to Mexico or interest-free loans, or whatever you idly speculate about at 3.45 on a Wednesday afternoon. Here’s something: if you have an Android phone, Google can guess your home address, since that’s where your phone tends to be at night. I don’t mean that in theory some rogue Google employee could hack into your phone to find out where you sleep; I mean that Google, as a system, explicitly deduces where you live and openly logs it as ‘home address’ in its location service, to put beside the ‘work address’ where you spend the majority of your daytime hours.
Some people find all this frightening. Since Google still makes more than 95 per cent of its money through selling advertising – that’s $30 billion a year, or about twice the annual global revenue of the entire recorded music industry – the fear is that all the information about us it has hoovered up is used to create scarily exact user profiles which it then offers to advertisers, as the most complete picture of billions of individuals it’s currently possible to build. The fear seems be based on the assumption that if Google is gathering all this information then it must be doing so in order to sell it: it is a profit-making company, after all. ‘We are not Google’s customers,’ Siva Vaidhyanathan writes in The Googlisation of Everything. ‘We are its product. We – our fancies, fetishes, predilections and preferences – are what Google sells to advertisers.’ Vaidhyanathan, who likes alliteration but isn’t so big on facts, doesn’t explain what he means by ‘sells’ (or whether ‘to sell a fancy’ could mean anything at all), but if he’s implying that Google makes the information it has about us available to advertisers then he’s wrong. It isn’t possible, using Google’s tools, to target an ad to 32-year-old single heterosexual men living in London who work at Goldman Sachs and like skiing, especially at Courchevel. You can do exactly that using Facebook, but the options Google gives advertisers are, by comparison, limited: the closest it gets is to allow them to target display ads to people who may be interested in the category of ‘skiing and snowboarding’ – and advertisers were always able to do that anyway by buying space in Ski & Snowboard magazine. The rest of the time, Google decides the placement of ads itself, using its proprietary algorithms to display them wherever it knows they will get the most clicks. The advertisers are left out of the loop.
So why doesn’t Google market its personal information, when it has so much of it? One answer might be that to do so would be ‘evil’. ‘Don’t be evil’ is Google’s geeky corporate motto – a hostage to fortune if ever there was one, though it usually seems to mean ‘don’t do anything to upset the users.’ We’d be upset – we might even choose to use a competing service – if Google released information about us that we didn’t know it had, or that we didn’t even know ourselves, such as the likelihood, revealed by our searches, that we might be suffering from a particular illness.[2] Facebook gets away with being evil – or does it? – because the personal information it makes available for targeting is information that users have voluntarily surrendered by filling in their profiles: birthday, relationship status, hometown, workplace; every time they click on a ‘Like’ button on the web they are deemed to have declared an interest that can be used for targeting. But another answer might be that the information Google has is too valuable to give away, that it has another reason for collecting every piece of data it possibly can, that the stuff it’s amassing is worth more than just money.
The reason is that Google is learning. The more data it gathers, the more it knows, the better it gets at what it does. Of course, the better it gets at what it does the more money it makes, and the more money it makes the more data it gathers and the better it gets at what it does – an example of the kind of win-win feedback loop Google specialises in – but what’s surprising is that there is no obvious end to the process. Thanks to what it has learned so far, Google is no longer the merely impressive search engine it was a decade ago. Back then, it was assumed that the key to its success in delivering its (as it once seemed) uncannily accurate results was its first and best-known invention, PageRank, the algorithm that assigns to every page on the web a value indicating how authoritative it is, based on the number and the authoritativeness of the pages linking to it. Its inventor was Larry Page (hence, cunningly, PageRank), one of Google’s founders and now once more its CEO; and his model, as Steven Levy explains in In the Plex, was the system of scholarly citation, by which journal articles and books are considered important if they are referred to by other important journal articles and books. Levy is big on origins. Not everyone will think much of the suggestion that Page and Sergey Brin, his co-founder, got where they are today because they were both ‘Montessori kids’ who were taught from an early age to believe anything was possible.[3] But he may be on to something when he says that Page’s academic family background – his father taught at Michigan State, and he hung out at Stanford as a child – meant that when he faced the problem of how to rank importance he recognised that the economy of the web was very similar to the economy of academia. Those at the bottom of the ladder (the junior academics, the lowly website owners) seek recognition from those above them (the celebrated professors, the global internet portals) and use citations in the hope that some of the gold dust will rub off on them if they get cited back. Rankings based on citations aren’t necessarily a measure of excellence – if they were, we wouldn’t hear so much about Steven Pinker – but they do reflect where humans have decided that authority lies.
PageRank, however, has always been just one of the factors determining how Google’s search results are ordered. In 2007, Google told the New York Times that it was now using more than 200 signals in its ranking algorithm, and the number must now be higher. What every one of those signals is and how they are weighted is Google’s most precious trade secret, but the most useful signal of all is the least predictable: the behaviour of the person who types their query into the search box. A click on the third result counts as a vote that it ought to come higher. A ‘long click’ – when you select one of the results and don’t come back – is a stronger vote. To test a new version of its algorithm, Google releases it to a small subset of its users and measures its effectiveness through the pattern of their clicks: more happy surfers and it’s just got cleverer. We teach it while we think it’s teaching us. Levy tells the story of a new recruit with a long managerial background who asked Google’s senior vice-president of engineering, Alan Eustace, what systems Google had in place to improve its products. ‘He expected to hear about quality assurance teams and focus groups’ – the sort of set-up he was used to. ‘Instead Eustace explained that Google’s brain was like a baby’s, an omnivorous sponge that was always getting smarter from the information it soaked up.’ Like a baby, Google uses what it hears to learn about the workings of human language. The large number of people who search for ‘pictures of dogs’ and also ‘pictures of puppies’ tells Google that ‘puppy’ and ‘dog’ mean similar things, yet it also knows that people searching for ‘hot dogs’ get cross if they’re given instructions for ‘boiling puppies’. If Google misunderstands you, and delivers the wrong results, the fact that you’ll go back and rephrase your query, explaining what you mean, will help it get it right next time. Every search for information is itself a piece of information Google can learn from.
By 2007, Google knew enough about the structure of queries to be able to release a US-only directory inquiry service called GOOG-411. You dialled 1-800-4664-411 and spoke your question to the robot operator, which parsed it and spoke you back the top eight results, while offering to connect your call. It was free, nifty and widely used, especially because – unprecedentedly for a company that had never spent much on marketing – Google chose to promote it on billboards across California and New York State. People thought it was weird that Google was paying to advertise a product it couldn’t possibly make money from, but by then Google had become known for doing weird and pleasing things. In 2004, it launched Gmail with what was for the time an insanely large quota of free storage – 1GB, five hundred times more than its competitors. But in that case it was making money from the ads that appeared alongside your emails. What was it getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection.
Three years later, the service was dropped, but by then Google had launched its Android operating system and had released into the wild an improved search-by-voice service that didn’t require a phone call. You tapped the little microphone icon on your phone’s screen – it was later extended to Blackberries and iPhones – and your speech was transmitted via the mobile internet to Google servers, where it was interpreted using the advanced techniques the GOOG-411 exercise had enabled. The baby had learned to talk. Now that Android phones are being activated at a rate of more than half a million a day,[4] Google suddenly has a vast and growing repository of spoken words, in every language on earth, and a much more powerful learning machine. If your phone mistranscribes what you say, you correct it by typing it in, and Google’s algorithms – once again – are taught how to get better still. It’s a frustratingly faultless learning loop. It’s easy to assume that the end result of this increasing perfection will be a Google machine in the cloud that can correctly transcribe all speech in all languages from Afrikaans to Xhosa, however badly you mumble: useful when you’re driving or have your hands full. But that’s to think small.
Before Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion, it had a fledgling video service of its own, predictably called Google Video, that in its initial incarnation offered the – it seemed – brilliant feature of answering a typed phrase with a video clip in which those words were spoken. The promise was that, for example, you’d be able to search for the phrase ‘in my beginning is my end’ and see T.S. Eliot, on film, reciting from the Four Quartets. But no such luck. Google Video’s search worked by a kind of trickery: it used the hidden subtitles that broadcasters provide for the hard of hearing, which Google had generally paid to use, and searched against the text. The service is just one of the many experiments that Google over the years has killed, but a presumably large reason for its death was that although it appeared to work it was really very limited. Not everything is tailored for the deaf, and subtitles are often wrong. If, however, Google is able to deploy its newly capable voice recognition system to transcribe the spoken words in the two days’ worth of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, there would be an explosion in the amount of searchable material. Since there’s no reason Google can’t do it, it will.
A thought experiment: if Google launched satellites into orbit it could record all terrestrial broadcasts and transcribe those too. That may sound exorbitant, but it’s not obviously crazier than some of the ideas that Google’s founders have dreamed up and found a way of implementing: the idea of photographing all the world’s streets, of scanning all the world’s books, of building cars that drive themselves. It’s the sort of thing that crosses Google’s mind. An April Fool’s joke a few years ago advertised job opportunities at Google’s research centre on the Moon, where listening equipment would provide an ‘ear on the chatter of the universe, the vast web of electromagnetic pulses that may contain signals from intelligent life forms in other galaxies, as well as a complete record of every radio or television signal broadcast from our own planet’. Google takes its April Fool’s jokes very seriously, as the marketing man who wrote some of them, Douglas Edwards, explains in I’m Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59: big arguments broke out when the founders felt that proposed jokes weren’t true to Google’s sense of its mission. The jokes – like the friendly logo, and the homepage doodles – are carefully designed to hint at the scale of Google’s ambition without scaring the world to death.
There seem to be no large Google initiatives – however seemingly tangential to the company’s core competency, and unhelpful to its bottom line – that don’t bring as a side benefit, or as the main benefit, an enormous amount of data to Google. They also threaten to put whole industries out of business by being free. In 2009, Google updated its Maps application for Android to include free turn-by-turn navigation: on-screen and spoken directions to whatever destination you choose. The cost to Google was negligible, and the damage to existing businesses was enormous: companies like Garmin and TomTom had been getting large margins on hundred-pound satnav hardware, and then charging for monthly subscriptions. Not any more. Naturally, those threatened don’t always give up without a fight. That a more esoteric battle has been taking place over Android was revealed earlier this year when a little company called Skyhook took Google to court for alleged unfair business practices. Skyhook makes its money by licensing location-detection technology to hardware manufacturers, and – in an impressive coup – had succeeded in persuading Motorola, among others, that its system was better than Google’s. Motorola agreed to pay to use Skyhook’s service on its Android phones in preference to Google’s built-in free one. When Google executives found out what had happened – as subpoenaed emails between them showed – they were incredulous, and alarmed:
This feels like a disaster :(
I think this is worth a postmortem and maybe a code yellow or something like that to really focus here.
What they were alarmed about was not that their system might not be the best – they didn’t quite believe that – but that if manufacturers started using a competitor’s product they would no longer be getting the data they needed to improve their own.[5] In other words, Google faced the unfamiliar problem of the negative feedback loop: the fewer people that used its product, the less information it would have and the worse the product would get. So the executives swung into action and reminded Motorola of various contractual obligations that went with the Android licence. Google got to keep its data. Coincidentally, last month, it announced its plan to buy Motorola Mobility – along with 19,000 employees, nearly doubling Google’s workforce – for $12.5 billion.
Google isn’t invincible. Eric Schmidt likes to say that its competitors are only one click away: if you don’t like Google’s search results, or its business practices, you can always use Bing. But Google is currently facing anti-trust scrutiny by Senate subcommittees, and the bigger it gets the less answerable the regulatory threat will become. Google is getting cleverer precisely because it is so big. If it’s cut down to size then what will happen to everything it knows? That’s the conundrum. It’s clearly wrong for all the information in all the world’s books to be in the sole possession of a single company. It’s clearly not ideal that only one company in the world can, with increasing accuracy, translate text between 506 different pairs of languages. On the other hand, if Google doesn’t do these things, who will?
[1] In 1999, Google’s web index – its copy of every page on the internet – was updated once every three or four months. By 2003 parts of the index were updated once a day, and by 2007 the rate was once every few minutes. By 2009 it was no longer possible to say that the web was being crawled at such and such a speed: if Google considered there was a chance a page might be updated it engineered things such that any change on that page was reflected in its index exactly as it happened. A search for ‘hudson river’ on 15 January 2009 would have showed that a plane had crash-landed on it before it was reported by CNN.
[2] This is something that Google can in theory know. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated search data for flu-like symptoms to estimate the spread of flu pandemics in various countries around the world. Google published an article in Nature explaining its methodology (‘we applied the Fisher Z-transformation to each correlation, and took the mean of the 36 Z-transformed correlations’), and demonstrated that its tool was as accurate as any existing method of estimating flu levels at any given moment and, since it doesn’t depend on health departments’ weekly reports, much faster at providing results.
[3] As further evidence of Page’s thinking big, Levy reports a conversation from 2003, when Google executives were discussing opening engineering offices overseas. ‘Schmidt asked Page how quickly he would like to grow. “How many engineers does Microsoft have?” Page asked. About 25,000, he was told. “We should have a million.”’
[4] Android’s very rapid growth can mostly be attributed to the fact that the operating system is free for manufacturers to license. Previously, a handset-maker such as Nokia either had to develop its own software or pay large sums to use software developed by another company, such as Microsoft. In fact, Android is what is known as ‘less than free’, since manufacturers get an undisclosed percentage of Google’s ad revenue from phones Android is installed on.
[5] In 2010, Google had been forced by regulators to stop its Street View cars from collecting certain location data after it was discovered that they were (Google says) accidentally also recording some of the data transmitted through WiFi networks in people’s homes. One of the emails in the Skyhook lawsuit explained that now that Google was no longer getting location data from Street View cars it relied heavily on the data from Android handsets ‘to maintain and improve’ its location service. It was a revealing indication of how ingeniously Google projects serve multiple ends.
thanks to Gerard Bellaart
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