Yesterday Apple launched some new applications and services aimed at the education market. They extended the iBooks app to include a textbook store; they announced some deals with major textbook publishers; and they released a free application you can use to write textbooks, and which allows you to publish them on the store. They made their iTunes U service a separate application. The app replicates what’s already available on iTunes, but also seeks to replace some or all of what’s offered by course management systems.

Something’s Always Wrong with Education

The education market is enormous and very heterogeneous. Apple’s initiative covers both grade schools and universities. Those are very different settings, which themselves vary hugely. And as anyone will tell you, the American education system has been in crisis, or facing some central challenge, or in need of some sort of fundamental reform, for a very long time now. Everyone has a scheme designed to fix it.

The alleged problem this time is that in the 21st century students and teachers are being forced to use an outmoded technology from 1950: the textbook. To be honest I was a little disappointed that the teacher in the video didn’t just go the whole hog and condemn the printed book itself as an outmoded technology from 1450. The solution involves Apple selling as many iPads as possible, and taking a cut of textbook sales as well. The demo textbooks shown at the event of course looked terrific, as one would expect. Dynamic transitions, animations, high-quality photography and video, highlighting and note-taking, all that good stuff.

Technology is Always About to Transform Education

Schools have been down the techno-salvation path before with other kinds of hardware and software. It’s worth remembering just how many technologies we already have that were supposed to transform education beyond all recognition. Radio, the television, the VCR, the personal computer, email, the Internet and the web … All of these have been trumpeted by someone as having the power to make education What It Really Ought To Be. The same goes for smaller developments within larger technological shifts. Chatrooms, MUDs, bulletin boards, blogs, FaceBook, Twitter, on and on. Sometimes things do change, in big ways. The TV and (later) the VCR helped make the Open University possible in the UK, for instance. (Which in turn helped make some good comedy possible, as well.) Of course, having a national broadcasting corporation and a state-financed system of faculty and tutors was helpful, too.

Just this week, Wikipedia’s blackout showed how much it has insinuated itself into people’s lives. Of course, the horrors uncovered by Herpderpedia showed how it’s perfectly possible for a technology to transform how students seek out and use knowledge while doing much for the basically clueless. Along with the big shifts have come mid-range changes. The availability of free, high-quality software for statistical analysis, for instance, is one of dozens of changes that are substantial or even remarkable within their domain, but which don’t pretend to transform "school" tout court.

As for the textbooks themselves, I’m skeptical that the many "dynamic" bells and whistles that can be embedded in them are all that effective or useful. I can certainly think of cases where they could be, but it’s also easy to imagine books filled with movies or demos that are watched once and then ignored. Maybe you think I fail to see the potential of these new technologies. But what Apple laid out yesterday seems rooted in the 1990s and its vision of multimedia-enhanced text. Fine as far as it goes, but don’t pretend it’s going to revolutionize schooling. School is an institution, not just a mode of instruction or a state of mind. Textbooks are not what make people hate school. iPad-based textbooks with zoomable pictures and some embedded movies will not make students love school.

Instapaper and the Persistence of the Textbook

In his presentation, Apple’s Phil Schiller heavily criticized the static, text-heavy format of the traditional texbook. Far better to present information dynamically with graphics, supporting illustrations, movies, interactive components and all the rest of it. Sure, why not? But—-consider how many of the most sophisticated computer users consume "content" online, perhaps especially the ones who use iPads. Do they seek out material that looks like this? Do they want multi-modal, multimedia formats? Do they love jazzy Infographics? No. They use Instapaper or some equivalent tool to create reading lists for themselves, and to read those articles in a format that deliberately strips out a lot of the original presentation and replaces it with simple, clean, easy-to-read, blocks of text that look a lot like a well-designed piece of outmoded 1950s technology.

Why do people like Instapaper so much? It’s because they’ve chosen to read what they save, and the app lets them keep it and read it in a straightforward, uncluttered way. Finding the good stuff is the hard part, along with the ability, motivation, and opportunity to read things: once you’re there, you don’t need the dynamic illustrations or zooming or supporting illustrations. You’ll read it because you’re already interested in it, and you’ll even seek out and pay for a way to make the reading and learning experience static and simple, because you don’t want to be distracted. A similar point applies in education. Technology by itself—-let alone Keynote transitions, animations, or what have you—-will not by themselves engage students. The promise of "technology in the classroom" has always been that it will magically "engage" students in what they have to learn. But it never does: you still need a good teacher, the opportunity to learn, and some motivation of your own. More dynamic textbooks aren’t the solution to the problem of education—-they’re not even the solution to the problem of textbooks.

It’s strange to see Apple going down this well-worn road. When the iPad was launched, a standard criticism was to say it’s a device made for consuming content rather than actively making or doing things. But developers quickly found ways to make it a lot more interesting than that. Apps like GarageBand or Star Walk or Leafsnap—-there are loads more—-take advantage of the iPad’s computing power and portability in ways that put it in a different class of activity from watching a video, reading a textbook, or just passively sitting at a computer.. It’s these sort of use-cases where a device like the iPad really shines. So it’s a pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the books.

The College Level

I teach at one of the universities mentioned in Schiller’s talk yesterday. At the University level, the most immediate difference from the K-12 case is that faculty typically get to choose which textbook (if any) to use in their courses. So there’s essentially none of the political fighting about textbook content that bedevils public grade schools. Students also have to buy their own books rather than rent them from the school (or have the school buy them).

The most familiar pathology of the textbook market is that publishers hate used booksellers. Publishers want every student to buy a new copy of their text, but—-Phil Schiller’s claims notwithstanding—-books are annoyingly durable. To fight this, publishers (and textbook authors) produce new editions as often as possible and try to get faculty to require the most recent iteration. There are various inducements on offer to do this, starting with free copies for the instructor and any TAs. As my friend Gabriel Rossman noted the other day, textbook catalogs pitched at faculty often come with little or no information about how much the book will cost students.

Apple’s proposed model would kill the used market, dead. The presentation emphasized that once you buy a book you always own it, and you can download it to any new devices you buy. But a corollary is that once you’re done with the book you can’t give or sell it to anyone else. So, at least initially, publishers can charge much less for their textbooks and make it up on volume. That’s fine by me if students end up paying less, though I immediately wonder whether the next step will be for publishers to modularize the books. Instead of your one giant Bio or Calc or Econ book for $14.99 rather than $129.99, you can have various shorter books available for the same price, but have to buy all of them over the course of a year or semester—-like 19th century serial novels. This would likely be pitched to faculty as allowing for greater flexibility in curriculum construction, but again it’s the students who end up paying for the books.

From my point of view, both the iBooks Author and iTunes U apps are potentially very useful for taking sets of lecture notes and making them available to students easily. Many faculty already post their Keynote or PowerPoint slides so students can review them (or use them to avoid coming to class). The iBooks Author app seems like a natural extension of this, especially given its compatability with Keynote presentations. As for iTunes U, here Apple may be pushing into course-management territory currently dominated by systems like Blackboard and Sakai. This is an easy domain for Apple to take over if it wishes, as these systems range from the merely clunky to the aggressively shitty.

Finally there’s the question of getting college students to buy iPads. This is a more difficult proposition than it might appear. Most students now buy a computer when entering college. As far as I can see there is essentially no compelling reason for a freshman to buy an iPad instead of something like a Macbook Air, for the simple reason that students are required to write too much to not have a computer with a keyboard. Sure, it’s possible to set up a writing environment on an iPad with a bluetooth keyboard, or even write small amounts of text using the on-screen keyboard. But it’s hard to see it competing with an Air or similar laptop. This makes me wonder whether the iPad will get widespread traction on campuses without institutional support in the form of subsidized purchasing programs or pools of iPads available for particular classes—-Duke already has some of the latter.

Encarta is not the Future

The contrast between laptops and iPads for college students brings me back to my earlier point about textbooks. What the iPad does really well, it seems to me, is less about being a whizzy textbook-with-moving-pictures and more about being the sort of device that lets you do things that neither a regular laptop, nor a traditional textbook, nor a single-purpose bit of tech can do. There’s the GPS, the camera, the accelerometer, the touch interface—-the best iPad apps tend to take advantage of these features in some novel way, allowing you to do or make something cool, often in a participatory fashion. Ironically, the best iPad apps for reading things—-like Instapaper—-work to make the iPad more like a simple, static, easily-read book or article, not less. If the iPad is going to make new inroads in education, let along transform it, I think it will be by way of specialized apps like these, and not through an augmented-textbook model that reanimates the corpse of Microsoft Encarta.

Or as good as any so far. Honestly, I was expecting him to live another 15 years at least, yielding 5 or 6 more, so was sickened when I read my mum’s email this morning, which started “No more Dalziel..”. But, according the wiki page, there is one more to come, which this amazon.co.uk page seems to confirm. So, one more to come.

It’s basically a survey of forgotten British moral panics of the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Predictions of the death of decency and/or fall of Western Civilization meet social reform proposals that sound (to us today) right and proper, or at least reasonable, or at least unlikely to bring about apocalypse.

Daylight savings. Should the ban on marrying your dead wife’s sister be lifted? Should spring guns be banned? Should children be forbidden to buy gin (for their parents, not themselves) in pubs? (You might think that the panic was over a proposal to let children buy gin. But no.)

It’s in the minor nature of these cases that, 30 years on – let alone 150 years – we forget these were hot-button culture war issues. Suppose we were to rewrite Turner’s book today. What cases can you come up with? Now-forgotten moral panics in the face of social reforms enacted in, say, the last 75 years?

No-fault divorce and legalized birth control are good examples. Same-sex marriage is going to grow up to be an example, I’m reasonably sure. But the genius of Turner’s book is that his cases are so minor. Birth-control and easy divorce were big deals, socially. Opponents were right about that much. Letting men marry their dead wive’s sisters, by contrast, was never going to make a big difference. What recent examples can you think of that are more like the latter? I’m looking for cases in which politicians and pundits and and so forth really got into the game. It’s a big hand-wringing public End Is Nigh botheration. And, in retrospect, it’s not just wrong-headed but fantastically silly.

It’s more common, I suppose, to get these sorts of moral panics about some new thing the kids are up to. Dungeons and Dragons is turning children into satanists. (Ah, those were the days.) Let’s try to restrict ourselves to cases in which social reformers, not the kids, are the targets. What have you got for me?

The real news on the American right is the mainstreaming of political apocalypticism. … brewing among intellectuals since the Nineties, … a long story to tell, and central to it would be the remarkable transmutation of neoconservatism from intellectual movement to rabble-rousing Republican court ideology. The first neoconservatives were disappointed liberals like Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer … Sometime in the Eighties, though, neoconservative thinking took on a darker hue … At first, neoconservatives writing in publications like Commentary and The Public Interest (which I once helped to edit) portrayed themselves as standing with “ordinary Americans” … neoconservatives began predicting the End Time … the voice of high-brow reaction … was present on the right a good decade before Glenn Beck and his fellow prophets of populist doom … Apocalypticism trickled down, not up, and is now what binds Republican Party elites to their hard-core base.

No evidence is presented to support this claim beyond anecdotes and post hoc ergo propter hoc handwaving. Lilla professes himself to be allergic to the efforts of political scientists to ‘ape’ the hard sciences, instead advocating a `a certain art, a kind of dispassionate alertness and historical perspective, a sense of the moment, and a sense that this, too, shall pass.’ While he does not claim overtly that he, unlike Corey Robin, possesses this art and dispassionate alertness, he surely intends that the reader infer it. For my money, I find explicit attention to questions of causation and evidence more convincing than any number of ostentatious self-advertisements for one’s historical perspicacity.

Second, his suggestion that:

the turmoil in American politics recently is the result of changes in the clan structure of the right, with the decline of reality-based conservatives like William F. Buckley and George Will and the ascendancy of new populist reactionaries like Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and other Tea Party favorites.

is quite a remarkable one. As Ta-Nehisi Coates has already said, it’s hard to reconcile the “sober-minded Buckley” with the “man who posited that the bombing of 16th Street Baptist Church might lay at the feet of ‘a crazed Negro’ and basically worked as a press agent for apartheid in South Africa.” But it’s even more extraordinary if one tries to reconcile it with the discussion of Buckley in Robin’s book. Robin presents evidence (from repeated interviews) that Buckley was anything but reality-based – that he found the conservative emphasis on markets “boring,” and instead preferred to see politics as a Manichean struggle. Buckley indeed suggested that if he were a young aspiring intellectual in 2000 (when the interviews were conducted), he would likely have become a Communist, to stir things up.

All of which would seem to support Robin’s argument, that the right is genuinely reactionary, and that its ideologues are often more interested in the fight than the issues. Myself, when I review a book by an author whom I disagree with, I am inclined to present the evidence that the author presents in support of his arguments, so that readers can have some opportunity to judge it for themselves. Very likely, Mark Lilla does not feel burdened by the same obligation. Or perhaps he simply failed to notice the two points in the book where these comments by Buckley receive extensive discussion. Certainly, his review provides no great evidence of engagement with anything other than the book’s introductory chapter.

It’s a pity that Lilla was given this assignment, and that he turned in such a shoddy review. I’d have liked to have seen a good critical engagement with the book. I think the argument is very interesting, and deserves further attention. I also would have liked to have seen it better worked out – the book is as much a collection of essays as it is a cohesive work, with the result that some of the more provocative claims don’t get as much sustained attention as they deserve. What is most interesting about Corey Robin’s argument is its suggestion that conservatives are true reactionaries – they not only are defined by their struggle with the left, but have taken this struggle for an ethos.

Even when the conservative seeks to extricate himself from this dialogue with the left, he cannot, for his most lyrical motifs – organic change, tacit knowledge, ordered liberty, prudence and precedent – are barely audible without the call and response of the left. … As Karl Mannheim argued, what distinguishes conservatism from traditionalism – the universal “vegetative tendency to remain attached to things as they are … – is that conservatism is a deliberate, conscious effort to preserve or recall “those forms of experience which can no longer be had in an authentic way.” … Even if the theory is a paean to practice – as conservatism often is – it cannot escape becoming a polemic … To preserve the regime … the conservative must reconstruct the regime. This program … often … can require the conservative to take the most radical measures on the regime’s behalf. … Conservatism … offers a defense of rule, independent of its counterrevolutionary imperative, that is agonistic and dynamic and dispenses with the staid traditionalism and harmonic registers of hierarchies past … Unlike the feudal past, where power was presumed and privilege inherited, the conservative future envisions a world where power is demonstrated and privilege earned … in the arduous struggle for supremacy.

Al-Ghazali, as quoted by Ernest Gellner, puts Mannheim’s point more pithily – `the genuine traditionalist does not know that he is one; he who proclaims himself to be one, no longer is one.’ But what I don’t know (and can’t tell from the book) is how much of this agonism is unique to conservatism’s intersection with liberalism, and how much is a generic product of the competitive pressures of political conflict. The left and the right shape each other as they fight. Conservatives read Saul Alinsky. Markos Moulitsas, when he started trying to organize the netroots, was partly inspired by the Goldwater movement (as depicted in Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm). To really get at the questions that I think (perhaps I’m wrong) Robin is interested in, you would need an intellectual history not of the left, or the right, but of how they have shaped each other, and how each has separately been defined by the struggle between them. This would allow you better to figure out which parts of conservatism are uniquely reactionary, and which parts are simply reactive.

Perhaps a review essay that tried to make this case would have been annoying in its own way, being, after all, another version of ‘you didn’t write the book that I would have written if I’d written about this topic.’ But I think that it would have been far less annoying than Lilla’s, and surely more useful (if only because Lilla’s sets such a very low bar).

First, two Dickens Christmas books:

“The Chimes: A Goblin Story of Some Bells that Rang an Old Year Out and a New Year In” (PDF, 35 megs)

“The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain” (PDF, 11 megs)

I included the original illustrations but made them larger in two ways. First, the illustrations are mostly full-bleed. That is, they go to the edge of the page. This is not how they appeared originally and it looks a bit strange if you view the PDF on the computer screen. But it looks fine on the iPad because the device itself is a bit like a picture frame. Pictures want to go right up to the edge. On the other hand, text still needs a white border. I omitted header and footer stuff, since the device shows you page numbers and title if you tap it.

Second, you can zoom the illustrations to take in the detail. I encoded them at 600 dpi for “The Chimes”, 300 for “The Haunted Man” (that’s why the former is three times as big. Does anyone care whether eBook files are large? 34 megs is still pretty small, right?) I think the 600 dpi option is quite noticeably better. But I care about 19th Century illustrated books, so maybe it’s just me.

Also, the files have nice tables of contents, and pages listing illustrations and illustrators, with links.

Next up, an experiment that was sort of a waste of my time, honestly, but now it’s done, and I learned a thing or two. The Internet Archive has complete scans of all six volumes of a nice, Walter Crane illustrated edition of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. (Sort of an expensive set of books if you want to lay hands on paper.) Anyway, the scans are pretty good, as random scanned stuff you find on the internet tends to go. So I made a cleaned up edition of the first volume, in three parts. Part I, Part II, Part III (all PDF).

Now, the first problem here is that, frankly, it’s Edmund Spenser. For a lot of people, that’s a deal breaker. But I like the Walter Crane illustrations and I’m not going to argue with you about poetry just right now. The second problem is that the scans just weren’t quite good enough. (At least 600 dpi, people. 1200 dpi, if there’s fine detail.) It takes too much time, if you can’t do it right in the end. But I have a bunch of nice, 19th Century illustrated books sitting here beside me. I’m thinking it might be nice to make some clean, facsimile editions, optimized for iPad. Do the scanning right. Give ‘em away. Still, it’s time consuming to do this stuff (although I can listen to audiobooks while I’m doing it.)

Scanning issues aside, I think it’s still a pretty ok and basically readable iPad edition of Spenser I’ve made. Again, note how the layout is weird, if you view these pdf’s on your computer screen. I basically punched iPad screen-sized chunks out of original pages – which were, I think, 8.5” x 11” or so. Per my previous post, maybe people ought to resize material for the iPad more often, if they intend the PDF’s they make to be viewed on these devices, not printed (probably). People think PDF’s are bad for tablet readers because PDF’s aren’t formatted for them, but they easily can be.

Last but not least, just as I was building myself this whole ‘PDF’s are great for iPad!’ bandwagon, for my lonely self, I stumbled on a nice little site that lets comics creators, illustrators and such folk, sell their stuff as PDF’s: The Illustrated Section. So I re-formatted some past stuff – last year’s “Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness”, and good ol’ “Squid and Owl” – for iPad and submitted it. So you can get my stuff for a couple bucks. Here are some free samples:

“Mama In Her Kerchief and I In My Madness” (PDF)

“Squid and Owl” (PDF)

I’m reading comics on my iPad these days and generally liking the experience. The slightly greater screen resolution of the iPad makes a huge difference, I find. I’m quite happy with the way my stuff looks now. I don’t expect to make much money this way, needless to say. But I hope the Illustrated Section succeeds. Or something like it.

One reason I’m worrying my head about all this stuff is I’m winding up to make a fresh edition of my Plato book, which I have reserved the e-rights to, and which I would like to do up in a suitably bang-up e-way. That’s a subject for another day.

Hope some of you like Dickens and/or Spenser and own iPads and/or similar devices.

At the present time Epub (or EPUB or EPub, or however you capitalize it) and Kindle (mobipocket) are notably sucky formats. Epub 3 is rolling out, and I’m sure the future will get better and better. But for now we have these beautiful devices; yet the books I’m reading on them look plug ugly. Terrible layout. Limited fonts. In their guts, these HTML-based ebook formats are websites pretending to be books. They don’t have pages, strictly. They jostle images in thoughtless ways. The gestalt is very web circa 1997. This is by design (in a negative sort of way). You can’t be sure what size screen you are dealing with, so every appearance of every bit of every ebook on every device is its own custom-poured page, courtesy of these flow-y formats. But the results are, to repeat, bad. Suppose you had a choice between getting a basically quite nice ‘standard’ garment off the rack, or having an brain-damaged, blind tailor make you a suit – just for you! cut by the poor, mad fellow, just to your measure! on the spot! There’s a lot to be said for not the ‘bespoke’ option, in this case.

So how about: just make a PDF so it looks good on the iPad. (Until 2014, when Epub finally catches up.) Why the iPad? Because I’ve got one, so I can see what I’m doing. No, seriously: how will it look on other devices? Unless you are trying to read it on your phone – which, admittedly, some people want to do – it will look fine. Why PDF? Everything can read PDF, and will continue to be able to do so. If the screen is fatter or thinner on some Nook or Kindle or whatever next year’s flavor may be, there will either be a slightly fatter top or side margin. But slightly fat margins are minor sins compared to the barbarities routinely perpetrated, in passing, by ePub and Kindle. PDF can look great. You pick the font! The pictures are in the right place!

And will Epub catch up? Technically, I’m very ignorant. I don’t code. I sort of know HTML and barely grasp CSS. I make books with InDesign. Maybe that makes me biased in favor of (relatively) old-fashioned laying out of pages. But I have nagging doubts as whether this whole websites-pretending-to-be-books, custom-poured page business really is the future of the book. I’m concerned it is, to some degree, a solution in search of a problem. [UPDATE: gross overstatement. Obviously cross-platform compatibility is a real problem, but I wonder whether the problem isn’t being over-solved, with perfect flexibility becoming an ideal to which some good design values are being sacrificed, when modest flexibility might be better.] Consider this very admirable effort, Bibliotype, by Craig Mod, who is always worth reading on these subjects. By all means, let this sort of thing go forward. We’ll see. But consider: if you want to play Angry Birds, you orient your iPad to landscape, for maximum width (the action is left-right). If you want to play Tetris, portrait is better. Up to you, of course, how you want to play at breakfast or in bed or wherever. But the point is this: no one would say game designers should work to design games that are omni equi-playable in portrait or landscape mode, at arms’ length, one inch from your nose, so forth. Likewise, I don’t see why eBook designers should necessarily be bending over every which way to ensure that, no matter what device, and how you are holding your device, you are getting as good a reading experience as you are getting any other way you hold it. Flexibility is a virtue. But there are others. Maybe it would be better to design something that looks great one standard way, even if that means it doesn’t look so good some other way. We still have pages. They aren’t inherent in the e-nature of the eBook beast. But they are inherent in the readers we read on. The iPad is a page, even if the things on it don’t have pages. Maybe the way to go, ultimately, is back to deliberate page layout. Maybe there is no other way to get the best results.

But that’s a big maybe, and I don’t want to stand in the way of folks like Craig Mod trying whatever stuff they think might be great.

In the meantime, as things stand, PDF’s are almost never formatted for an iPad screen, so it doesn’t readily occur to us that we might look in this direction for the optimal solution. I read a lot of PDFs, academic stuff. It’s all formatted for my printer, not my iPad, so the pages are mostly too big, and if you shrink them to fit, the print is cramped. I would suggest that, going forward, folks might start sizing and shaping PDF pages for these devices. The rules are a bit different. But that’s enough for one post. I’m curious to hear what your recent ebook experiences have been. Do ugly ebooks bother you? Do you crave the ebook analog of the Protean easy chair, from Melville’s Confidence-Man?

“My Protean easy-chair is a chair so all over bejointed, behinged, and bepadded, everyway so elastic, springy, and docile to the airiest touch, that in some one of its endlessly-changeable accommodations of back, seat, footboard, and arms, the most restless body, the body most racked, nay, I had almost added the most tormented conscience must, somehow and somewhere, find rest. Believing that I owed it to suffering humanity to make known such a chair to the utmost, I scraped together my little means and off to the World’s Fair with it.”

In a follow-up post [UPDATE: now posted] I’ll give out some freebie PDF eBooks I’ve optimized for the iPad, and note how slightly different rules apply. Nothing fancy. (How fancy could PDF be, after all?) But nice, I hope.

The Bad Karma Diaries is about two girls going into their second year of secondary school, Anna and Denise, or rather Bomb and Demise, in text-speak. They decide to start a business, and a blog, and then also a karma exchange for the bullies and bullied kids in their school. It all goes horribly wrong; adventures are had, lessons are learnt, ways are mended – somewhat – but there’s no moralising at all.

The verdict? “I loved it I loved it I loved it! :D Is there a sequel?? :)”. I’ve had a few misses as we navigate the tricky reading years between much-loved children’s stories and those first steps of her reading grown-up books for real. So it’s very nice to have really hit the spot. If you are looking for a funny, clever, non-preachy but still very enlightening book for the young teenager in your life, look no further.

For Aifric’s birthday next year, I’m thinking of sending Jo Walton’s gorgeous Among Others. If, as they say, Harry Potter is about confronting your fears and doing the right thing, and Twilight is about the importance of keeping your boyfriend, Among Others is about the joy of reading (especially SF & fantasy), surviving loss, thriving as a fish out of water, and the inherent value of thinking long and hard about people in your life, both good and bad. Not just for adolescents, then.

Any thoughts on books – especially recently published ones – for 12-14 year old girls or boys?

I’ve been using the Readmill ebook reader on-and-off. I like it quite a bit. Using it prompted me to make an ebook of my own. Because I moved my own website over to Octopress a little while ago, everything I’ve ever written on it going back to 2002 is now in Markdown format. So over lunch yesterday I took advantage of John MacFarlane’s amazingly useful Pandoc, which can make EUPB format ebooks out of markdown files, selected thirteen posts from the Archives and made a little anthology called Books I Did Not Read This Year (epub). It’s free to download, because I’m such a generous person. Enjoy it on Readmill, iBooks, your or any other EPUB-compatible reader. Daniel kindly made a Mobi version for Kindle owners. I plan on making a few more of these, forming a Press (e.g. “Harbard University Press” or “Pengiun”), and then adding them to my Vita.

1. I’m running a half-marathon in Philadelphia at the weekend and raising money for an East Africa Famine appeal in Australia. The Australian government will match donations dollar for dollar, and you may also be able to claim a tax deduction, so this is a real bargain. You can sponsor me here – I’m currently a dollar short of halfway to my target of $5000


2. I’m writing a piece about social democratic responses to what Colin Crouch has called the “strange non-death of neoliberalism“, and I’m looking for books that focus on restoring more equality in market incomes, for example by rebuilding unions or constraining the financial sector, as opposed to redistribution through the tax/welfare system. Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

• I’ll ask nicely, but I refuse to bl*g

Works of science fiction, particularly good ones, are almost always dystopian. It’s easy to understand why: There’s a lot of drama in Hell, but Heaven is, by definition, conflict-free. Happiness is nice to experience, but seen from the outside it’s pretty dull.

But there’s another reason why portrayals of utopia don’t work. We’ve all experienced the “uncanny valley” that makes it difficult to watch robotic or avatarial replicas of human beings without feeling creeped out. The uncanny valley also exists, I think, when it comes to viewing artistic renderings of a future paradise. Utopia is creepy – or at least it looks creepy. That’s probably because utopia requires its residents to behave like robots, never displaying or even feeling fear or anger or jealousy or bitterness or any of those other messy emotions that plague our fallen world.

While there are a lot of utopias that have these problems (including the original one), the general claim doesn’t really hold. The utopia genre is, as a general rule, a political genre – which is to say that it’s about the solution of political problems rather than personal ones. In, say, Ursula Le Guin’s Annares, Iain Banks’ Culture, or China Mieville’s Iron Council, people still have jealousy, feuds, fights, bad sex, no sex and all of the other sundry personal unhappinesses that humanity is prey to. The difference is that these are not baked into the political system – they are the result of individual interactions rather than social structures.

George Scialabba has a new book of essays, The Modern Predicament (Amazon (deprecated, but Powells doesn’t list it)), one of which argues eloquently against this mistake. Scialabba is taking on Michael Ignatieff (at the point when Ignatieff was a mediocre public intellectual rather than a mediocre politician).

Tragedy, Ignatieff replies, cannot be eliminated from history. He is surely right. But is he right that this is what utopians invariably seek and that the modern welfare state is the best we can hope for? In arriving at this conclusion, Ignatieff is particularly hard on, and uncharacteristically imperceptive about, Marx. While granting Marx’s fundamental criticism … he charges that Marx went on to prescribe a final “destination for the tragic spiral of human need” and thus succumbed to a “fantasy of deliverance from history.” “Marx,” he writes, “is largely silent about the natural and unalterable elements of our destiny, and it was upon this silence that his utopia was built.”

This is a misunderstanding. Like Freud, Marx sought only to deliver humankind from needless misery to inevitable unhappiness. Implicit … is a definition of utopia; not the elimination of tragedy but its universalization. When each person’s sufferings and failures – her fate – are individual, rather than circumstantial and accidental, as is so often the case in the “great scramble,” then no more can be required of politics. The democratization of tragedy is surely a modest enough conception of utopia. But it is a long way from the contemporary welfare state.

[I scarcely need to add that The Modern Predicament is shot through with many such passages, and is as wonderful as you might expect it to be]

Horkheimer: Thesis: nowadays we have enough by way of productive forces; it is obvious that we could supply the entire world with goods and could then attempt to abolish work as a necessity for human beings. In this situation it is mankind’s dream that we should do away with both work and war. The only drawback is that the Americans will say that if we do so, we shall arm our enemies. And in fact, there is a kind of dominant stratum in the East compared to which John Foster Dulles is an amiable innocent.

Adorno: We ought to include a section on the objection: what will people do with all their free time?

Horkheimer: In actual fact their free time does them no good because the way they have to do their work does not involve engaging with objects. This means that they are not enriched by their encounter with objects. Because of the lack of true work, the subject shrivels up and in his spare time he is nothing.

h/t Brian Leiter.

Steven Syrek, a graduate student in English at Rutgers University, has been working at the OWS library since about the third week of the demonstration. “People talk about this movement like it’s a ragtag bunch of hippies,” he told me when we spoke by phone, “but the work we do is extremely well-organized.” The central commitment, Syrek says, is to create “a genuine clearinghouse for books and information.” Volunteers have adopted a slogan summing up what the library brings to the movement: “Literacy, Legitimacy, and Moral Authority.”

… But the libraries at the anti-Wall Street protests are not quite as novel as they first appear. They have a tradition going back the better part of two centuries. In a recent article, Matthew Battles, the author of Libraries: An Unquiet History (Norton, 2004), noted the similarity to the reading rooms that served the egalitarian Chartist movement in Britain. … points out that libraries emerged as part of the sit-down strikes that unionized the American auto industry in the 1930s. …

So the OWS library and its spin-offs have a venerable ancestry. But what distinguishes them is that the collections are drawing in people with a deep background in library work – who, aside from their feelings about the economic situation itself, are sometimes frustrated by the state of their profession. … The issue here isn’t just the impact on the librarians’ own standard of living. Their professional ethos is defined by a commitment to making information available to the public. They are very serious about that obligation, or at least the good ones are, and they are having a hard time meeting it. If knowledge is power, then expensive databases, fewer books, and shorter library hours add up to growing intellectual disenfranchisement. … joining the occupation movement is a way for librarians “to begin taking power back,” Henk says, “the power to create collections and to define what a library is for.” It is, in effect, a battle for the soul of the library as an institution.

A religiously-inspired progressively-leaning magazine is starting a new series, namely asking people which book “provides support, or is a book to which one often returns”. And the answer cannot be the Bible. I actually don’t think I can answer this question. Most fiction, with very few exceptions, I’ve only read once. Non-fiction I read is either informative (like King Leopold’s Ghost, or Joris Luyendijk’s book on the Middle East), or else it is scholarly, but then I don’t think I see it as providing (moral) support or as an inspirational book. Of course, I’ve opened A Theory of Justice or Inequality Reexamined or Justice, Gender and the Family many times, but that’s mostly because I want to return to the arguments to examine them. Moreover, most of the (non-professional) reading I do is on blogs and the internet.

So what, if anything, could be similar to an atheist as the Bible is to a Christian? I really don’t know. But if I’m forced to give an answer, I would say: I prefer talking to people over reading books if I need (moral) guidance or support, and if I need inspiration or some distance and non-analytical reflection, I turn to poetry. I still have, ripped from a student’s magazine when I was studying in Göttingen in 1994/5, a page with a Poem written by Nazim Hikmet, translated in German – a poem to which I have returned many, many times:

Leben
einzeln und frei
wie ein Baum
und brüderlich
wie ein Wald
ist unsere Sehnsucht.

So give me poetry and people if I need inspiration or support. And you?