Chris Butler’s mixbooks are an reversal of the popular trend towards e-books: they scrape and un-digitize and materialise bits from the internet, regressing them into paperback format. Also, making your own book of your favourite articles is just a fun thing to do.
The 2011 edition of A Year of Ideas is near the top of my reading pile, and the timing is perfect: I’m about to go traveling, three months backpacking in Asia — oh yes. I’ll be offline most of the time, so I’ll bet this collection of web articles can provide the internet dopamine hit that my RSS-addled brain will no doubt crave.
But I’m trying to pack light. Books are heavy. Bringing a Kindle is a no-brainer. So I decided to go online and save all the web articles featured in the mixbook, and now I can read them on Instapaper while I’m away. Onward the mixbook goes, cycling back and forth from analog to digital. It’s like “Read later” Inception.
December 17th, 2011 - 4 comments
Here are my two favourite photos of Steve Jobs.
This photograph is about the magic and wonder of technology. Poor Woz almost looks blissfully unaware here, like he has no idea of what’s coming next. He’s just hanging out, having fun. But look at the young man on the left. He’s deep into something. He doesn’t know how to make one or even exactly how it works, but goddammit he’s going to figure it out, through sheer force of will if he has to, and he’s going to make something beautiful with it. He’s curious. The way he’s peering into whatever little thing he’s holding, he truly sees it. He sees what’s possible. He clutches it to his chest, keeping the secret to himself for now. But you get the feeling he already knows.
I saw this one just recently, after he had retired from Apple. It’s the other Steve Jobs, the perhaps overly-romanticized version of Steve as a free thinker, a loner, a rebel, an all-round badass. His Side B. Hungry, foolish. This is the guy who read the Whole Earth Catalog, dropped acid, and visited ashrams. The guy who was as weirdly exacting about fashion as everything else he did. But mostly it’s a glimpse of the private side the man. Even if he weren’t as insanely wise, adventurous, profound or ingenious as the personality that we projected onto and expected of him, he enriched the lives of countless people and he lived his own wonderful story. And now off he goes.
October 6th, 2011 - 1 comment
Jared Diamond picks on agriculture as The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race:
Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can solve it.
Then I read this piece on misunderstood jobs in The Atlantic, in which a construction worker describes the paradox of human progress too well for me to not quote the whole thing:
It’s 95 degrees and the humidity is 80%. People don’t understand that. People see a man with a shovel in his hand working on a job site and think he’s lazy because he’s just standing there. What they don’t see is the struggle going on inside your brain. The part of you that has lived in the wild for millions of years is saying it’s too exhausting, it’s too hot, why don’t you go lay in the shade for a while. That part of your brain sees the shovel, sees the ditch, sees the pipe to be laid, and it doesn’t see how this is getting you food or sex. That other civilized part of you is saying, there is food and sex to be found in that ditch. You just need to hunch over that pipe for another 5 hours, and then for another three days, and then it’ll be this made up thing, Friday, and you’ll have this other made up thing, money. Then you can go out and eat and try to procure a mate.
You just need to clinch that shovel tightly for a little longer and you can get what you want. The little tribesman in your mind doesn’t understand this. Things were easier in his time. Sure you only lived to be 26, but if it was too hot you didn’t move, if some bit of fruit was too hard to reach you walked to the next tree and looked for lower fruit. There is no low hanging fruit left in this world though.
You hold that shovel and think if only I could bludgeon that little tribesman in my brain. Then I could be free to give myself to wage labor, free to force my body to do what it doesn’t want to. So when you see a man on the side of the road not moving just watching some machine manipulate earth, know that he may not be lazy, but just engaged in a struggle between a past that shaped us and a present that was made by us but not for us.
That last line is great, no? If I’m honest though, I’m just posting this out of my own little sense of laziness guilt, because today I visited this site’s admin page for the first time in so long that I actually had to log in. Bad sign.
I feel sorry for blogging. How could something so great just wither on the vine? There are vast prairies of abandoned blogs now. Without any specific decision, there’s been a mass migration to social networks, like tribesmen picking up and moving to cities overnight. It’s certainly not the worst decision in internet history but maybe it’s fair to say that it wasn’t given much consideration at the time. “Just imagine a band of savages,” Diamond writes, “exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep.” Progress isn’t deliberated upon, it’s magnetic. But once drawn in, you might find yourself living (in a shotgun shack) on a cheaply manufactured high-carb, high-fructose diet of realtime information. You’ve traded still pools of honest expression for rivers of pageviews and machine-generated timelines. It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether we all made a little mistake with that.
Or maybe not. Maybe the super-accelerated infobahn of internet time just breeds early-onset blogging nostalgia, like how being a tweedy professorial New England type can lead you to be nostalgic about scratching around in the underbrush for berries and shit. Progress is having none of that. Progress tells you to shut up, grab the shovel, and dig.
Previously on Thoughtwax: Running, hunting.
September 2nd, 2011 - 2 comments
I’m unsure whether I should go, considering what happened last week, so I decide to ask the receptionist in my Tel Aviv hotel.
“Nowhere in the world is truly safe,” she tells me. “You can go outside and cross the street right now and be blown up. There’s nothing you can do about it.” I can’t decide whether to admire her stoicism or pity her cynicism.
Jerusalem is a combination of many things. The old city is tiny (barely a kilometer wide, less than a third of the size of Inis Oírr) but it contains the holiest sites on Earth for Christians and Jews, and the third most holy for Muslims. These three sites are within a stone’s throw of each other: a couple of minutes from the Wailing Wall is the street through which Jesus dragged the cross, and behind it is the rock from which Muhammad ascended to Heaven. They are right next to each other, yet somehow there is no sign of tension. In fact, Jerusalem seems a microcosmic model of how different religions might coexist in harmony. Maybe it’s the calm eye of a stormy relationship. In any case, I am only here to observe.
To get to the Wailing Wall you have to pass through metal detectors manned by serious-looking Israelis. There is no security in the church which marks the spot where Christ was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead, but it is full of robed priests telling what you can’t do based on whether you’re Orthodox Christian or Roman Catholic. As non-Muslims we weren’t allowed into the Muslim quarter. Each was telling, I thought. Commerce fills in the tiny gaps between the holy sites, a warren of souks and markets.
For the duration of your time in Jerusalem it seems to make sense to just go along with everyone’s beliefs. There’s no need to qualify any historical claim or address any of the seemingly contradictory statements. Christ rose here, Muhammad ascended over there. Okay.
Everything has been built, sacked, rebuilt, and preserved, heaping layers of history. Near the entrance to the main Christian site is a smaller church, the Church of Saint Helena (she being of Constantinople and mother to Roman Emperor Constantine). Beneath that is a cistern, an underground manmade well, and a swarthy monk convinced us to squeeze down a stone stairway to get to it. It is said to be where Helena found the first fragments of the True Cross, and then the water from this cistern was used to build the main church above us.
Down in the near-dark of Helena’s cave two people stood at the edge of the water. One of them had a sheepskin draped over his bare shoulders. They were singing, and the noise echoed wonderfully off the rock and water. It sounded mournful and hymnal, in an Eastern-sounding minor scale and with wailing Thom Yorke harmonies. I don’t know what they were singing was about, but sometimes it’s fine not to understand or feel part of something, but instead to just observe.
This is my souvenir from Jerusalem, a recording of two people singing in a cistern under the city [MP3, 2 mins].
Photos on Flickr.
April 4th, 2011 - 1 comment
The highway from the airport cuts a cross section through Bangkok. High-rise offices and cranes silhouette the horizon; buzzing taxis swarm around overcrowded buses; massive ornate temples overlook tiny corrugated shacks; and crazy traffic jams, caused in part by the train line that crosses the highway, give you time to take it all in. The buildings that dominate the skyline are less than twenty years old, our taxi driver tells us as he zips between lanes. I ask if he likes the new buildings. He thinks on it for a while. “I like the mountains,” he says.
We spend a couple of days exploring Bangkok. We visit temples and night markets, Pad Thai kitchens and Khao San Road. We zoom around in gutsy little tuk-tuks, which is one of the most exhilerating things I’ve ever done while drunk. Bangkok is strange and beautiful, but it’s also crowded and smelly, and like most people who arrive there we’re just passing through, already thinking ahead to what we really came for.
We go north to Chiang Mai, Bangkok’s more relaxed, hip younger sister. On New Year’s eve we release paper lanterns into the night sky, adding to the hundreds already up there. People gather outside temples where young monks in orange robes help people to light their lanterns and beat huge drums. Fireworks rain around us down long after midnight. For hours on end a constant stream of glowing points drift upwards from all over the city and I’m sure that it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen.
New year’s morning we board a bus and head north again, to a small dusty town near the Burmese border called Chiang Dao. It’s not much more than a row of food stalls and shops along a single strip of asphalt. We see a sign for our accommodation, shoulder our rucksacks and decide to walk it. Shouldn’t be too far. After several miles and a couple of hand-drawn maps courtesy of the friendly locals we’re starting to regret the decision. Then a young family pulls up in a flatbed truck. (I don’t see a car the entire time we’re up north, only open-backed songthaew trucks and mopeds carrying up to four people at a time.) The family don’t speak English and we don’t speak Thai, but we all muddle through — the maps help — and hop into the back with their daughter. They drop us to our accommodation several miles away and drive back the way we came, waving as the go.
Thai people are incredibly kind, friendly, and happy. I’m not religious, but there are some aspects of the Buddhist approach that appeal. Religion seems to have left the Thais with a more constructive attitude to life than the baggage that many Irish have been left to work through.
We’ve arranged to do a three day jungle trek, where we plan to spend the local new year with a hill tribe, as long as the village shaman doesn’t decide to change it to another date at the last minute.
Getting sick is a constant worry in Thailand, and despite drinking only bottled water, avoiding fruit for the first few days, and washing our hands like we have OCD, I’m struck on the morning of the trek. Some kind of stomach bug. We decide to set off anyway, hoping that it will pass by the afternoon. A van drives us as far as it can, an hour up into the mountains and jungle where we meet our two guides. They are quiet and don’t speak any English, but we manage to communicate with them quite well via pidgin sign language.
We hike further uphill, and then down a rough path into a valley. There’s a village here. About fifty Lisu people live in a tidy huddle of huts, with their crops and animals scattered around. They are not big on talking, and neither are we, both of us knowing it would be redundant anyway. There’s no electricity or water, just people sitting in groups and working in the dark doorways of their homes. I rest in the shade of one hut, still hoping I’ll improve.
We move on, up the sides of hills and down narrow trails into valleys. But by the middle of the day I’m still getting sick and can’t even keep water down. I become even more exhausted and dehydrated. It’s 35°C and we are due to hike 15k the next day; I could never make it. We communicate with the guides, fingers walking across open palms, rubbing stomachs, nodding, shaking heads. Maybe I could… but no. They don’t want to take us any further and I can’t go on anyway. We have to turn back. The guides carry my gear for me and make me a bamboo walking stick. I’m really feeling terrible now. The walk back to the village is tough, and by the time we get there I’m struggling just to walk. I collapse onto the porch of a bamboo hut and sleep. We radio for a 4WD to come and bail us out. I’d rather not talk about it.
It takes a couple of days to get my strength back, and in the meantime Paula gets sick too. We spend two days recuperating in our little bungalow. Once I’m back on my feet I have a chance to explore the Chiang Dao countryside a bit. There’s been ecstatic but off-key music on the breeze for the last two nights, and I decide to track it down. I tramp into the nearby national park and eventually find the source: eight or so ridiculously drunk Thai men who have set up their karaoke machine in an old park gazebo. As soon as he spots me, the one wearing an Osama bin Laden t-shirt springs into action, furiously waving me over while pouring a large glass of whiskey. Again there’s a language gap, but karaoke and booze don’t require much conversation anyway. They turn out to be nice guys. I leave before it gets too dark to find my way back home.
We fly south to the islands, and the glorious prospect of being able to swim to escape the heat. But we land in Krabi amid torrents of rain and make the mistake of staying there to wait out the bad weather rather than head straight to the islands. With respect to any readers who may be from there, Krabi town is a shithole, and we spend the night plotting our exit in the only $2 box room we could find. Nearby there’s a notice warning that we’ll be charged for another night if we stain the bedding with chocolate, blood, or ink. Traveling always throws up moments like this, where you’re tired or grumpy or nervous, and we often choose forget about them in retrospect.
The next morning is clear and bright, and the next ten days are distinctly more entertaining. We spend most of our time on the island of Ko Lanta which is beautiful and quiet, and some on Ko Phi Phi, which is beautiful and ridiculously overcrowded. We ride mopeds across volcanic mountains to villages where sea gypsies build their houses on stilts in the sea. We go snorkeling at Ko Haa and see box fish, angel fish, fake clown fish, octopus, parrot fish, puffer fish, barracuda, black tipped sharks, sea cucumber, blue star fish, sea urchin, glowing coral and giant clams.
We follow a path and find a beach, empty apart from an elephant and his owner who join me in the water where the three of us swim together. We eat red curry, mango lassi, banana pancakes, and rum ice cream. We swim through a dark cave and emerge into a small beach hidden in the centre of the island.
Before we go home we spend a night on Ko Phi Phi Lee, and camp out on Maya Bay beach under the millions of stars. At night the plankton in the bay glow if you agitate the water, and so with the entire galaxy clearly visible overhead we wade into the still-warm darkness, and every movement in the water leaves an electric wake of flickering lights like bright blue fireflies just beneath the surface.
More photos on Flickr.
February 1st, 2011 - 1 comment