*Monday July 7/09

lake union, seattle, originally uploaded by Bill Hinton Photography.

*Free Isn’t Free

There’s an old Jewish joke:

A woman goes into the butcher shop to buy some lamb chops. The butcher says sure, it’s $4.00 a pound. How much does she want?

She says, Four dollars! That’s ridiculous. The butcher across the street is selling it for $2.25 a pound.

The butcher says, fine. Go buy it there.

The woman says, He’s all out. That’s why I came here.

The butcher says, When I’m all out, I’ll sell it at $1.00 a pound!

That is the essence of Malcolm Gladwell’s rather longer and incisive review of the book Free by Chris Anderson.

Free proposes that since digital costs are next to free, let’s call them free. And since so many people are willing to download free content (according to experiments lots more than would be willing to do so than for even a cent), business should give it away and make their money around the free stuff by ummm, well, advertising and merchandising and so on. Therefore producers of content like writers (you can tell it gets personal here) and such like should expect to just give it away. For free. (Get it? Free.)

Would you buy a t-shirt that says, “Lilian Nattel” on it? Would you buy 2 and I’ll thrown in a book? Action figure anyone? Lilian Nattel typing at her desk with real movable fingers?

Gladwell’s observation:

His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write? It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels?

I especially enjoyed Gladwell’s analysis of Youtube, which is a perfect example and one which Anderson also uses, except that Anderson fails to note that while next to free, the cost of billions of uploads and downloads at Youtube isn’t free but costs hundreds of millions. Advertising wasn’t successful because advertisers don’t wish to advertise with the abundance of unqualified and unscreened material that Anderson lauds. Instead Youtube has had to make contracts with producers of professional material in order to solicit advertisers.

Gladwell also points out another flaw in the “Free” hypothesis, which is that even when certain limitations (like production costs) are eliminated, distribution can be a large chunk of the final tally. Hence not free.

My own take on Anderson’s enthusiasm for the unlimited quantity of material available in the digital age is that it is limited on the receiving end by users’ time and attention. To take the Youtube example, I get frustrated trying to sift through it for interesting material. I don’t have time in my life to see a billion pieces of crap in order to find the good one. No offense to anyone’s pleasure in uploading their child singing Happy Birthday or their own rendition of Thriller. But I’m interested in good music that I haven’t yet been exposed to. I need someone to do the screening and point me in the right direction. And that person has a mortgage and a fridge to fill.

Do we really need more t-shirts or action figures? Wouldn’t it just make more sense to pay people for their expertise?

Full article is here: Malcolm Gladwell reviews Free by Chris Anderson: newyorker.com

*Nature vs Nurture Plus

I often hear parents surprised by the differences between their children, brought up in the same household in the same way. The conclusion is that nature has much more impact than nurture.

It was easy to see the personality differences in my children from the first moment they were in my arms because they weren’t newborns, who, while individually different, let’s face it mainly sleep and nurse. My daughters were close to a year old then and their unique shining beings expressed themselves clearly.

I’ve never been attached to the nature vs nurture question in children because I knew from the beginning that their genetic inheritance was different from mine and each other’s. All I wanted and prayed and hoped for was to be able to parent each of them competently for who they were.

But Vaughan of Mind Hacks points out that when all things are held equal environmentally, of course the differences are due to genetics. That doesn’t tell you anything about which counts more. If those same two children were placed in a very different environment, they would each probably grow up quite differently.

And the conclusion that I personally drew from my own observation is that children come with personalities of their own, but the framework of how it’s expressed, the world view, the values and priorities are set by the parents. In adolescence and adulthood, children question them and may reject or accept them in part or in whole. But they will always be comparing and measuring their choices against that standard which they grew up with.

Vaughan in Mind Hacksexplains the faulty logic of pitting nature against nurture in a lucid and interesting way. I recommend reading the whole post. But here is the excerpt that really made it clear for me:

Nature versus nurture is a lie. Music is not melody versus rhythm, wine is not grapes versus alcohol and we are not environment versus genes. We are their sum, their product and their expression. They dance together and we are their performance, but neither is an adversary.

To me this is empowering. We can’t do anything about the genetics handed down. But there is so much we can do about the environment that we create.

*A Week of Food

Looking at a typical week of food for families around the world, I was interested to see not only the contrasts, but that the greatest weekly expenditures don’t equal the greatest nutrition (though the least is the smallest and saddest amount of food). I think Egypt, where the weekly expenditure is about 1/5th the American, has the most appetizing table.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Have a look here.

*Farting and the Enlightenment

My older daughter has had a sense of humour since her toddler days when she would hide a baby spoon behind her back and produce it with an “ah ha, gotcha!” grin. But I saw a sudden jump in her understanding of comedy when she was three years old.

We were in the park and she was sitting on the tire swing with a couple of her friends, three year old boys (in the days when boys and girls played together indiscriminately), and their older, wiser, more sophisticated five year old sister. She said, “Poop.” And the three year olds burst into wild gales of laughter. She said, “Poop,” again. It was just as funny the second, third, fourth and fifth times. It still hasn’t stopped being funny, years later, and I suspect it never will.

So when I saw The Benefits of Farting Explained by Jonathan Swift in the Oneworld Classics catalogue, I had to see what the 17th century satirist had to say on the subject.

Oneworld Classics issues new translations and lesser known works by authors in the canon, like Jonathan Swift, and this is one of the latter. It’s a small book that consists of two essays, the first being “An Essay Upon Wind” by Charles James Fox and the second the essay that is the title of the volume, which is by Swift (who wrote Gulliver’s Travels).

I wasn’t familiar with Fox, an 18th century writer, whose essay is witty, astute and, I have to frankly admit, hilarious:

Farting is certainly an ancient practice, but not, as some authors have asserted, as ancient as the world, for I believe before the devil appeared in the character of a large snake neither of our first parents farted — for as they were divinely made, it cannot be reasonably supposed that they had such common and nasty operations as man had since the Fall.

It is written in the guise of a treatise for an academic society and it has all the earmarks of categorization, historical analysis and experimental evidence in vogue at the time. (Some attention is given to assertions on the relative weights of different types of farts and what device might be used to test them.) I thoroughly enjoyed it and though I’m considerably older than the kids on the tire swing, and the satirical essay involves more erudition, there is, after all, a lot of commonality underlying the basic humour: in contrast with our lofty thoughts, manners, and aspirations, we human beings make funny sounds and smelly smells.

Swift’s essay was interesting just because he is an important literary figure. It wasn’t as clever or as funny as Fox’s, and seemed to consist mainly of puns and surnames that included the word “fart” or a synonym. I think it might have been funnier if I knew more about 17th century conventions. But in any case it was Swift and his reputation and the fact that he had written a satire on, of all things, farting that got my attention. And that was worthwhile because it introduced me to Fox.

*Snow Falling on Cedars

The story of a Japanese man on trial for murder in 1954, on a west coast American island still reeling from the after shocks of WWII, this is a book that impressed me enough to read sentences over and over for their beauty, for the vividness of detail, for what I could learn. Continued here.

*Book Privilege

People don’t read anymore–that’s the common wisdom. Except that, even in this recession, book sales are up in some places, in others down but less so than anything else.

But this is what everyone knows:
People don’t read anymore because they’re all on the internet.

And when I was a kid, people didn’t read anymore because they were watching tv.

And before that people didn’t read anymore because they were at the movies, and children of that decadent younger generation were spending all afternoon at the matinee on Saturdays!

And before that people didn’t read because children had to go to work at eleven to support their families (though workers’ circles and women’s guilds were full of people attending lectures, as well as getting books from workers’ clubs which had lending libraries, and The Story of Philosphy was a bestseller.)

Some time before that a lot of people didn’t read, it’s true. Because they couldn’t. When A Christmas Carol was published in 1843, only 45% of women and 65% of men were literate. So, it’s true, about half the population couldn’t read it, but it was still a bestseller and those who couldn’t listened to those who could read aloud.

By the time Dickens’s last book was published, a lot more people could read and public education in the west was on the rise so that within another generation nearly everyone could read and did. They haven’t stopped despite matinees, tv, the internet, economic depressions, wars, and other distracting matters.

I’m thinking about this because my childhood wasn’t filled with books. My family valued an education for what it provided: income, status, security. There were books as decoration and furniture in the house, a static collection that didn’t change until after I’d left home. As a kid, I read everything in my school library and traveled by bus (on my own) to another school, which had a library open to the public, so that I could pick up a few more.

So when I began university, and there were floors and floors of books in the library, I thought I’d arrived in heaven. Not only that, but the city itself had a magnificent public library system with many branches that quickly transferred books from one to the other.

My children are growing up within a few blocks of one of those branches. It’s a five minute walk, a walk we take together every Saturday. They have no idea how lucky they are. It’s just a matter of course to them that they are surrounded by books, that if they happen to want one that our small branch doesn’t have, I’ll place it on hold and the next Saturday it’s theirs. Not to mention the shelves and shelves of books in our home, bought, given away, re-stocked.

There is something else they have: the peace to read.

There have been times in my life when reading saved me by carrying me into another world. And there have been other times when reading was closed to me, because the pain that had been shoved away for so long rose up and closed down my ability to concentrate.

I’m thinking of this because I finished Snow Falling on Cedars yesterday and I started Water for Elephants today. I am exquisitely aware that I haven’t always had books at my fingertips, on my shelves, at the library, at bookstores new and used. That I haven’t always been able to read the books I had. And today I do, one bought, one from the library. I have quiet spaces to read, the children asleep, my husband lying at the other end of the couch, our legs entwined. My heart is quiet, and I can focus.

I don’t know if you can understand: it is blindness and then sight.

It is wordlessness and then speech.

When I was in my 20’s, I stopped writing, because the marriage that took me to a nudist camp prevented any sort of creative expression. When I began to write again, I left the marriage. When I began to write again, I felt as if I’d had no arms and didn’t know it until my arms were restored to me.

So when I think of the words to Amazing Grace, I think about books, mine and others, and the blessing that is the sharing of these.

There are many beautiful renditions of that old song–but in the course of looking for the right one, instead I came across this.

Read–and share it. That’s all we need to do.

*Nothing But Ghosts

A generous writer, a weaver of words, insightful, heart-felt, Beth Kephart is the author of Nothing But Ghosts, her latest YA novel, the latest of many compassionately written books. Continued here.

*Monday June 29/09

The Great Wall of China (6), originally uploaded by g_heyde.

Today’s picture is in honour of my older daughter’s Gotcha Day. Ten years ago, today, my husband and I were standing in the hallway of a hotel in Nanchang waiting for the elevator to open. We had travelled seventeen hours to Beijing, stayed overnight and flown into the province of Jiangxi that morning. It was a warm and humid day. Jiangxi is a moist verdant province and as we circled the runway we saw rice fields and water buffalo.

We expected to receive our child, our first, the child who made us parents the next day, but on the bus we were told the children were waiting at the hotel. They’d driven with orphanage staff about five hours on a bus down from a more remote hilly area.

When we arrived at the hotel, we were told to prepare a bottle, a diaper, a change of clothes in our room, and then wait in the hallway for our daughter to arrive. There were nine families traveling together, five whose children came from that particular orphanage in the hills.

The referral had come unexpectedly early, in fact while my husband and I were out of the country in April. We arrived home to a message on our voicemail from the adoption agency, letting us know that the information would arrive by courier the next day. The problem for me was that the next day I was going to be in New York for an interview.

Every hour I called home: did it arrive? Not yet. Not yet. At last, in the airport, waiting for the plane to take me back, my husband said that it had come. I stood at a payphone listening to the name of my child, her birth date, her weight. Her birth date was guestimated. Her weight was inaccurate. It didn’t matter. This was my child and I fell in love with her, sight unseen, standing at an airport payphone, while in the background someone talked loudly on a cell phone.

We were due to travel early in June, but between the referral date and our estimate travel, the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was accidentally bombed by an American plane. Politics affects international adoption; it can even stop it. We were assured by our adoption agency that we would still be travelling. China was committed to bringing the children to their homes, but there would be significant delay. We’d be going a month later–mid to late July at the soonest.

I said to my husband: we’re going in June; I just have a feeling. We have to finish painting her room.

It was June 29th 1999. It was morning. A warm day in Nanchang, about 27 C (80F) and 100% humidity. It would have been warmer if it hadn’t been a late spring. We stood in the hallway, waiting for the elevator doors to open. When the elevator stopped, five nannies came out, each one holding a baby. The vice-director of the orphanage called out names and I held out my arms for my daughter. She was gorgeous, despite mosquito bites all over. She had no teeth yet. She took one look at me, shuddered and cried.

Back in the hotel room, I laid down with her on the bed and asked my husband to cover us with a blanket. He did, and I held her on my chest, under the cave of the blanket, and sang to her until I felt her little body relax against mine.

Today is the 10th anniversary of our gotcha day. I can barely see through my tears as I write this. My daughter is sleeping now in the lower bunk of a bunk bed, her younger sister in the upper bunk. She is an amazing artist. She is stubborn. She is responsible. When she makes up her mind to do something, nothing can stop her. Mosquitoes still love her.

I am the luckiest person in the whole world. In the entire universe.

*Gender Obedience

H/T The Situationist

*Raccoons and Humanity

“Shoo, you bold bloody bugger!” I think those were the words I used. I don’t remember saying precisely that, but as my younger daughter observed that there was no blood on the raccoon, I’ve deduced that the b-words just rolled off my tongue.

We have chili powder around the edge of our back balcony because the raccoons enjoy using it as a latrine and it’s been pretty effective as long as we keep it fresh. But this morning, while I was making breakfast, the sliding doors to the kitchen open for fresh air before it got hot, what did I see? But a bold, fat raccoon right on my balcony! In broad daylight! (Question from one of my children: what’s broad daylight?)

So I stepped onto the balcony and shooed the guy, but he didn’t budge. Hence my epithets. (Other words censored because children were watching.) Then I noticed the raccoon’s fur. Bunched up. Shaggy. Ragged. Looking like it was coming out. And I wondered if he was sick. I closed the sliding doors, looking through them at him. He was trying to smooth down his fur. He moved slowly. And I felt for him as he settled himself into the far corner of the balcony, crouched behind the kid sized picnic table.

I didn’t intend to disturb him. I just thought I’d take a picture. But the camera did what my words didn’t. He sat up, vigilant, even though there was no flash. He didn’t like an instrument pointed at him. Slowly, awkwardly, he squeezed between the railings and disappeared.

Poor guy.

And there in that small interaction is the gestalt of being human: annoyance, anger, outrage, territorial possessiveness,  watchfulness, thoughtfulness, compassion, sorrow.

*Juggling Wallstreet

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