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John Books

About a week ago, several days before the release of book 7 of the Harry Potter book, I was reading through the comments section of Digg. The thread wasn’t anything memorable… something about health care in the US sucking or being great. The flames were powerful in the thread that night and the argument back and forth was generally amusing because, let’s be honest, I was bored.

Then suddenly, right in the middle of it all, with no warning or even a title, was a post that didn’t look like the rest. It was long and prose-ish looking instead of the usual Digg comment bickering.

I started reading it, and after about 10 words realized, it was lifted from the upcoming Harry Potter book! It was a major spoiler!

WTF??

I mean … if I was reading comments about the book … or the movie … or obsessive fans … anything like that, sure, I’d expect a spoiler, but this was completely non-related. Who the heck posts a spoiler for a book in a random thread on health care??

I’m not a crazed Harry Potter fan, but I have enjoyed the series, and my wife IS something of a crazed Harry Potter fan, so I didn’t particularly want to be spoiled, so after Monday, I went into Internet hiding mode. I didn’t read ANYTHING from any site where someone could possible post a spoiler. I advised Timmi to do the same.

I was successful, if feeling somewhat paranoid. Timmi a little less so. She was watching the TSN coverage of the hot dog eating competition at Nathan’s in New York when some guy went up to compete holding a “XXX dies” sign. I have blotted out the name of the person who supposedly dies, even though the answer was wrong. I’m a staunch anti-spoiler person, even when the spoiler is wrong.

So Friday night comes and we went to the big Harry Potter release party at the Indigo at the Manulife Center. I knew it was going to be big, as we’ve been to it in the past and been impressed with the volume. This time though, the number of people was truly amazing. They had shut down Bay Street between Bloor and Charles and turned it into Diagon Alley and there were thousands of people there with bands and DJs and all sorts of folks in costume. Timmi got a wristband for her place in line and she was 1102, and she was nowhere near halfway back.

We were out of there by 1:00 and Timmi was done the book by 11:00 with a nice nap in the middle. It took me longer (I didn’t have the drive or the endurance she does, and she reads faster), but I’m finally done.

It’s a curious feeling, no longer being scared of user submitted content on the Internet. Liberating. Now to go boldly into threads where people call each other retards and loosers.

John Books

Possibly my favourite writer, or if not my favourite, one of the ones that had the biggest effect on my life, has died.

When I was in university, I was a co-op student, and as a result, I spent a summer at school. University in the summer was a weird experience and although there were lots of normal people who attended university in the summer who went to Waterloo, just down the street there were people who went to school in the summer at Wilfred Laurier, and in general, those people were weirdos. Weirdos who loved school.

One of those weirdos lived in my house, which was a boarding house with 7 other people. We got to know each other pretty well because the summer was a quiet time, and there was a lot of socializing. There was a guy named Paul who was different than most. He was studying literature and doing his Master's degree on the writings of Thomas Pynchon. One day we started talking, and I mentioned that I was looking for a book to read. He asked me some questions about what I liked, and didn’t like, but didn’t phrase it in terms of books or authors, just what I liked and didn’t like about life. At the end of it, he said, "You should read Kurt Vonnegut, come with me." We went into his room, and he showed me the biggest bookcase I'd ever seen a student have at school. He stroked his chin a bit and said that it wasn't Vonnegut's best book, but the best one to start with was Breakfast of Champions. I thanked him, took the book up to my room, and read it in an afternoon. I then went straight back down to his room and asked for the next book I should read. That one was Cat's Cradle, and it took me about a day to read. Then I asked for the next, and read Slaughterhouse 5. By the time I was finished that book, my mind was blown and my life was changed.

I'd never read anything like Vonnegut before. His writing was funny and very conversational (something that has influenced the way I blog, for example), but at the same time it is about very deep issues. It had aliens and weird scientific concepts, but it wasn't about them, they were just parts of the plot. No wonder even the people writing for his book jackets have a hard time classifying him. "One of America's most hilarious authors!" was something you would often see on the back of his books. I love comedy more than most, but I didn't even think of Vonnegut as funny — I certainly wasn't reading him because he was a comedy writer. It was precisely because of this type of thing that I believe he was a truly great author. So many people would read his books and find different things. Other jacket comments referred to him as one of America’s premier science fiction writers. I love science fiction, but I would have never considered Vonnegut science fiction.

Vonnegut, along with Stephen King, holds a place in my heart for giving advice to fellow writers that cuts right through all the crap around writing. Vonnegut listed eight rules for writing short stories that I think about every time I write.

1. Use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.
2. Give the reader at least one character he or she can root for.
3. Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water.
4. Every sentence must do one of two things — reveal character or advance the action.
5. Start as close to the end as possible.
6. Be a sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your leading characters, make awful things happen to them — in order that the reader may see what they are made of.
7. Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.
8. Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages.

The rules themselves are great examples of Vonnegut's writing. When I read them, I think, "Wow, that is amazing advice for writers". Someone else probably reads it and thinks, "Damn, he's funny."

The main thing that I think of hearing this news though, is that I'm sad that I'll never read another new book of his.

So it goes.

John Books

Arnolds’ next shot would surprise everyone

Originally uploaded by mind the goat.

On BoingBoing, I read about a Wired article about the concept of the six word story.

According to the wired article:

Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words (”For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”) and is said to have called it his best work.

As a writer who can never finish a story, I love this idea.

The Wired article includes dozens of six word stories written by famous (though not necessarily all good) authors. Some of my favourites from the article include:

Longed for him. Got him. Shit.
- Margaret Atwood

With bloody hands, I say good-bye.
- Frank Miller

It cost too much, staying human.
- Bruce Sterling

Please, this is everything, I swear.
- Orson Scott Card

Thought I was right. I wasn’t.
- Graeme Gibson

Leia: “Baby’s yours.” Luke: “Bad news…”
- Steven Meretzky (I include this one for Chelsea)

There is also a Flickr pool devoted to writing six word story captions, one of which is included as the picture to the right.

I decided to write some myself. Since writing a six word sentence is pretty easy, I figured writing a six word story would be as well. I was wrong.

It’s easy to write a six word sentence that tells a really lame story (One day my car didn’t work). It’s also easy to write something that sounds really cool, but is actually just a saying rather than a story (like “Spanking hurts more than you think”, which is a line I saw on the subway today).

No, a good six word story evokes something, and makes you wonder what the rest of the story was. That’s what’s so great about Hemmingway’s story. Why did they have the baby shoes? Who was the baby they bought them for? Did the baby die? Did the shoes belong to a woman who always wanted a baby but never had one?

I spent a good part of several boring meetings thinking on this. Here’s my story:

Roger loved Robin, but married June.

(Thanks to Sarah for suggesting a better name… Robin is much better than the original Francis.)

John Books, The Weeb

One of the greatest science fiction writers of all time has died.

I don’t say that lightly, at all. I love science fiction, all kinds of it, and I have read enough to know that there is bad sci-fi, there is good sci-fi and there is great sci-fi that surpasses the genre and writes about things that change the way people think, like great philosophy. Stanislaw Lem was one of those great authors.

When you get right down to it, most science fiction is adventure writing in spaceships. Westerns set in the stars. Don’t take that in a bad way, adventurism and escapism are wonderful things. There are some people who can read nothing but super highbrow literature and philosophy all the time, but I am not one of those people. For every super complicated piece of literature I read, I need to read something fun and trashy to lighten up my brain. Lem was not one of those trashy novelists.

Even when Lem was being funny in what he wrote about, he was writing about things from a perspective that turned your head upside down, and the way that he did it, the things that he wrote about, made you realize how rare it was that science fiction really wrote about things that were truly strange and different.

Think about Star Wars and Star Trek, and think about the aliens. For every Jabba the Hutt, there’s 200 aliens that are essentially humans with bad makeup, and even Jabba had a lot in common with me … he had 2 eyes, 2 hands, a mouth and a crazy attraction to Princess Leia in a gold bikini (breow).

In Lem’s most famous novel, Solaris, there is only one alien, and it is a single organism covering an entire planet, like an ocean. The book is about how futile it is for humans to try and communicate with an alien so fundamentally different, and about what happens when the alien decides to communicate with them. I think the reality of space travel will be that whatever we find out there will be so different from us that communicating will be much more like the attempts in Solaristhan it will be like opening all hailing frequencies with a universal translator.

Solaris was made into a movie, twice. Once by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky and once by Stephen Soderbergh. The Russian film is truer to Lem’s book, by most accounts (I haven’t seen the American version), but I mention the movies because they are a good way for someone to experience the type of themes that Lem wrote about without having to wrestle with the text. The Russian movie is one of the coldest, slowest-paced movies I have ever seen. There is a scene with a car driving down a highway in Japan that goes on so long that many people stop watching the film. When asked about it the director said he made this sequence boring “so that the idiots leave before the actual movie starts”. Reading the novel is sort of like that. You need to invest in the book before it starts paying back, but once it does, it’s jaw-dropping.

One of the reasons that few people, even science fiction fans, know much about the works of Lem is that he did not write in English. Lem was Polish/Ukrainian (depending on what year you were drawing the borders — most people refer to him as Polish) and many of his books were not translated into English, and even those that were did not always have the easiest-to-read translations ever. With Solaris, the rights to translate from Polish to English were never negotiated, so the version that anyone has read in English is actually the English translation of the French translation of the Polish. And you thought the telephone game was bad when you were just passing on “I think Alice has a crush on Alex”! No wonder it made your head ache when you read it.

And so passes a legend in science fiction. For anyone out there who has never read any books by Stanislaw Lem, try and pick one up, he hasn’t written many bad ones, and be prepared for an experience unlike almost all science fiction you’ve ever read.

John Books

Those who know me know that I love to tell a story, and that I’m not afraid to speak in front of people. This has meant professionally that I end up giving a lot of presentations, and that I’m also pretty good at it. Part of that I attribute to my personality, and part of it I attribute to training I received at IBM a long time ago. IBM, at least years ago, was a REALLY presentation oriented company. They had a program called FOILS5 that was used to make what we would call “Powerpoint presentations” today, though with none of your fancy colours, clip art or animations. FOILS5 made a manly, spartan type of presentation slide… with one font style and nothing but bullets everywhere. We made them in xedit on our monochrome VM terminals, and we liked it! When we typed them in … the keyboards sounded like German spandau machine guns.

Sorry, I’m waxing nostalgic. Back to the point.

After my last co-op term, when I was working in London, I was hired as a student marketing rep for IBM at the University of Waterloo. As part of my training, I took a course on presentations that must have cost about $500,000 to produce. It was an automated course presented on some specialized learning kiosk. It scares me to think about how expensive the kiosk sitting in the back room of the IBM London office was… and how expensive that course was. Maybe that’s why I remember what they taught so vividly.

One of the key things that course hammered home was that people in your audience deserve your respect, and to never forget that they are intelligent people who if nothing else, can read. Don’t insult them by putting up a slide with a bunch of bullet points and then reading out loud what they read to themselves in 1/10th the time it takes you to say it.

I’ve always taken that and other advice to heart, and so I thought that I was avoiding the major pitfalls that most people hit when they’re presenting. I know more than most what a terrible weapon Powerpoint is in the hands of the average presenter.

And then Harumi loaned me Tufte’s Cognitive Style of Powerpoint.

The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint is an essay, rather than a book, and so it was a quick read. For those of you who know Tufte, it won’t surprise you to hear that it packed more insightful thought into those few pages than most books do in 40 times as many.

After devouring the essay, it became obvious to me that there weretwo key things that I failed to fully consider when I used powerpoint to accompany my presentations:

1) Even when I do a good job of only using a powerpoint presentation as a framing point for my presentations, I would often blithely agree to send out softcopies of the presentation for people to refer to later. I guess in my mind, I would imagine that they would read them over, happily re-living the experience of me standing in front of them talking away. I didn’t spend nearly enough time thinking about what was happening when people were forwarding those softcopies to others who weren’t at the meeting, and most importantly for my career, handing them to people up the management chain. I know that my presentaions don’t give the whole story of what I said, halfway by design, and halfway because as Tufte goes to great length to point out, because Powerpoint sucks at presenting information.

2) The structure of Powerpoint shapes the very arguments and data that you use when making a presentation accompanied with a powerpoint presentation. My data, my conclusions, my recommendations are all under my control and come out of my brain, but ultimately I end up having to cram them onto a slide, into a bulleted list, perhaps with an accopanying table or graphic, so long as that also fits into a slide with a few bullet points next to it. Then the structure of my thesis unfolds, with sequential point after sequential point coming out one slide at a time, each with its acccompanying bullet points. Yet all this time, I never really asked myself “What if my argument doesn’t fit that style? What if my argument isn’t sequential? Isn’t that a rather dumb way of making a point? When it comes right down to it, isn’t it a very very simplistic way of speaking to people?”

The really scary part of Tufte’s essay comes when he deconstructs some NASA powerpoint slides and analyzes how they (and by implication Powerpoint itself) contributed to the shuttle Colombia’s fatal accident.

Some days I feel like Powerpoint will be the end of us all. Let’s face it, for most of us, using Powerpoint or some equivalent is a requirement for our jobs. There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t have to “whip up a deck” in Powerpoint. I certainly can’t say no because Tufte told me to. I will be better about it in the future. I will have accompanying notes, I will write full reports wherever I can, and if my info doesn’t fit onto a slide or into a deck, then I won’t change it to cram it there. That is bullet point number 1 for the new deck of my work life.

In a related note, and to lighten the mood of this downer piece, I offer you this piece of black humour.

John Books, Design