Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!
Friday, January 24, 2020
"The Longest Book in the World" is no longer "The Blah Story"; John Fish's experiment on artificial self-expression
John Fish’s recent videos (from his gap year from Harvard
working in tech in Montreal) seem to indicate an interest in combinations of
things, combinatorial algebras, and the like.Isn’t that what quantum theory is about?
So this leads him into a self-publishing print-on-demand exercise,
with Amazon CreateSpace, to prove that any individual can “make” the “longest
book in the world”. Making a book is not the same as writing it, which Fish
admits and we’ll come back to that. The
video, at this point, does point out the ease of using Create Space as you want
to (although it has ended providing its own editorial support – that’s another
matter).
Fish starts out by discussing Steven Pinker and Noam Chomsky
– linguistic theories (not Chomsky’s super Leftist politics) as to how word
combinations give humans the ability to express ideas with mathematical
combinations. Compare this to animals – dogs and cats can make a limited
repertoire of words or syllables.(Cetaceans – whales and dolphins, especially orcas, would stimulate a
good discussion – why haven’t we deciphered their languages?)
He moves on to "The Blah Story" by Nigel Tomm as the longest
on record, until he (John) created one with 12 million words, by writing a program (in Python) to generate grammatically correct sentences from "parts of speech" from finite lists of vocabulary words (for each speech part). OK, if the paragraphs so generated were blog posts, AI would probably consider them "spam". In foreign languages, this would be harder to do because of verb conjugation, adjective agreement, etc. (I won't get into possible "pronoun controversies" here.) He ordered one copy of each volume from
Amazon Create Space.200,000 words would
be a long novel, so that would mean about 24 volumes.He titles it “Duree”(French for “duration” or “time taken”). He stacked
them in his apartment as a decoration.No, he isn’t selling them; he will have a real one soon. As I remember
it is to be called “Intentional Attention” (see his April 6 video about Casey
Neistat). It sounds like the "real book" will deal with the idea of attention as a currency
(comparable to crypto, a kind of virtual blockchain) that could fund a business
model (maybe without persistent identifiers, causing so much legal controversy now
with CCPA and COPPA?) I wonder if Fish
has a minds.com channel (I did not see him at the conference in Philadelphia
Aug 31, nor did I see “Economic Invincibility” but they both would have been good
choices as speakers – but so would have been Jordan Peterson).
In fact, my own experience shows it is possible for an
Internet self-publisher to have considerable political influence on certain
issues without necessarily large analytics or sales volumes or supportive
income as by normal accounting records.This was my case previously, especially with the past issue of gays in
the military (in the US – the “don’t ask don’t tell” policy – not to be confused
with the transgender policy now) which generated my (controversial) use of the “do ask
do tell” wordmark today. But it’s not hard to see why such an individualized “business
model” as mine (depending on accumulated personal assets, some of them
inherited maybe, and very low cost of operation compared to “real” media companies)
would incur questions, as maybe lowballing “real” career journalism and hollowing
out normal political activism (leaving it to the polarized extremes).There is a real big debate today,
particularly in the YouTube world, as to the value of independent journalists
and political columnists in keeping big media honest.It was, for example, independent channels
that busted big media on the Covington Kids “scandal” and then blew up with “Adpocalypse”
last summer.
One other question: could “The Blah Story” or John’s experiment
(“I did this and this is what happened” kind of thing, like some of Luke Korns’s
videos) make for a subject for a good independent bookstore party?(See previous post.)
By the way, the first of my three “Do Ask Do Tell” books
runs 187,000 words as I remember (about 580 pages in iUniverse, including the
roman numerals).The novel manuscript
for “Angel’s Brother” is now about 106,000.It will probably top out at 115,000 with supplementary materials.
John says he paid back karma points for printing so much (like I used to do at work decades ago, as CYA) by writing an app that raised money to plant trees (late Nov. video).
Adam Driver's character (a school bus driver) writes poems that sound like similar plays on words in the 2016 film "Paterson" (my review).
I can remember that in sixth grade, in December 1954, all of my Christmas presents were books (except one). A couple of them were about trains.
Picture: Cambridge; I visited Boston and the Harvard campus (and P-town) in Aug. 2015.
Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!
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