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A longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence has commented on my March 1 post: “One of my worst apprehensions about my son’s college education came true in his freshman English class. The professor brought up Lamb only to highlight something he said that would strike modern progressives as racist. Such a great language stylist, and my son’s likely only exposure to him was in the villains’ gallery of his college’s CRT indoctrination. Grrr!” By now, a familiar story. That Lamb of all writers should be Zhdanov-ized is a bitter joke. Yes, he is “a great language stylist,” but also one of the funniest writers in the language. His sense of humor, spanning the spectrum from nonsense to erudite wit, is distinctly modern. As he wrote in a letter to Robert Southey: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.” English profs tend today to be humorless and puritanical, at least about other people's beliefs, disapproving of the pleasure we are meant to take in literature. In Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense (2021), Robert Alter reflects on a visit he made to the Soviet Union in the final year of its existence. He was there to attend a Nabokov conference, contrasting it with “the never-never land that American academia has become.” He writes: "Literature in our own academic circles is regularly dismissed, castigated as an instrument of ideologies of oppression, turned into a deconstructive plaything, preferentially segregated by the pigmentation and the sexual orientation of the writers, or entirely displaced by clinical case studies, metaphysical treatises, psychoanalytic theories, and artifacts of popular culture.” Let’s ask the basic question: why do academics, some of whom are intelligent and well-educated, behave this way? It seems to boil down to two things: a hunger for power (always the highest value on campus), a withered aesthetic sense and and a peculiar form of laziness. You don’t have to bother reading a book if you know in advanced you want to disapprove of it. Such descendants of the kids in grade school who complained about reading a book are now in a position to get their way. Alter bluntly states the reality for many of us: “There is something irrepressibly celebratory about Nabokov’s writing . . .”
A librarian friend and I were talking about the similarities between library cataloguing and taxonomy in biology – the art of classification – and the sort of people such specialized disciplines attract. Formerly a piano teacher, she was attracted to library science by way of cataloging and loving books. It’s less formulaic than I would have assumed. There’s an art to it, even a creative aspect, that goes beyond author/title/subject in the catalog. The goal is to aid the reader as much as possible in locating what he wants. Until ninth grade I planned to become a biologist. That year’s biology teacher, a bitter, unimaginative man with a crew cut and a pencil neck, changed all that. What I especially enjoyed was binomial nomenclature, the naming practice devised by Carl Linnaeus, the great eighteenth-century Swedish biologist. Binomial: Genus, species – the Latin name; for example, Homo sapiens. The idea that every life form could be named to distinguish it from every other appealed to me. So did the notion that all organisms are related, that you could literally devise a family tree, an effort which always reminds me of Borges’ Library of Babel. The librarian and I agreed that classification, in this sense, is useful (and somehow comforting) but it also invites hubris. Any attempt to collect and systemize knowledge – a dictionary or encyclopedia, the Human Genome Project – has a comically presumptuous aspect. Biologists are forever revising categories, distinguishing sub-species from species. We’ve learned so much and know so little. Accumulating knowledge and attempting to draw lessons from it, is a handy metaphor for out state. The English poet Stevie Smith, in a September 1937 letter to the novelist and journalist Helen Mitchison, writes: “I don’t think we can pass the buck to forces of evil or to anything but our own humanity. We are bloody fools—but then, we are hardly out of the egg shell yet.” Every human accomplishment is shadowed by its opposite. We solve one problem and it turns into another. According to the editors of Me Again: Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith (1982), Mitchison had previously written Smith “‘a gloomy letter’ about the world situation.” During that autumn, Hitler was in his ascendancy and rapidly rearming Germany, Stalin’s Great Terror was accelerating, the Second Sino-Japanese War was well under way and Spain was self-destructing. Smith, whose first and best novel, Novel on Yellow Paper, had recently been published, urges Mitchison to keep her cool: “I think we want to keep a tight hand—each of us on our own thoughts. I think at the present moment you are in a state of mind that hungers for the disasters it fears. If there are forces of evil, you see, you are siding with them, in allowing your thoughts to panic. Your mind is your only province—the only thing that is.” Around the time of Smith’s letter to Mitchison she wrote “Beautiful”: “Man thinks he was not born to die But that’s no proof he wasn’t, And those who would not have it so Are very glad it isn’t. “Why should man wish to live for ever? His term is merciful, He riseth like a beaming plant And fades most beautiful, “And his rising and his fading Is most beautiful. “Not, not the one without the other, But always the two together, Rising fading, fading rising, It is really not surprising To find this beautiful.” Smith died on this date, March 7, in 1971 at age sixty-nine.
Bertie Wooster has asked if he can purchase a gift for Jeeves while he is out, and the valet replies: “‘Well, sir, there has recently been published a new and authoritatively annotated edition of the works of the philosopher Spinoza. Since you are so generous, I would appreciate that very much.” This comes in the first chapter of Joy in the Morning, published by P.G. Wodehouse in 1947. I was reading it late the other night, alone in the front room, and I started giggling and my eyes watered. The dog looked concerned. Ever since my nephew told me he had discovered Wodehouse and was going through his novels and stories like a guest at a party with an open bar, I’ve been reading Plum between more imposing volumes – including Spinoza, a thinker I discovered as a teenager thanks to a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. (In another B&J confection, Carry On, Jeeves, Wodehouse has Jeeves say: “You would not enjoy Nietzsche, sir. He is fundamentally unsound.”) A reader tells me in a comment on Tuesday’s post that he is reading Wodehouse’s Something Fresh (1915): “Every silly yet perfectly crafted page," he writes, "was a declaration of allegiance to something more enduring than even the greatest historical catastrophe -- the unexpected pleasure potential of just being alive. God bless the man – it’s a reminder I needed right now.” An amusing scene with a clerk in a bookshop follows Jeeves’ request. While there, Bertie runs into Florence Craye, an intellectual woman to whom he was once engaged. “‘Bertie!’ she says, ‘This is amazing! Do you really read Spinoza?’” Bertie, our narrator, thinks: “‘It’s extraordinary how one yields to that fatal temptation to swank. It undoes the best of us. Nothing, I mean, would have been simpler than to reply that she had got the data twisted and that the authoritatively annotated edition was a present for Jeeves. But, instead of doing the simple, manly, straightforward thing, I had to go and put on dog.” Bertie tells Florence: “‘Oh, rather,’ I said, with an intellectual flick of the umbrella. ‘When I have a leisure moment, you will generally find me curled up with Spinoza’s latest.’” Is there a moral component here, a lesson for all good readers? I suppose so. Don’t lie. Admit your shortcomings. But all of that is irrelevant. We laugh because all of us, at least on occasion, are tempted to put on airs so we appear smarter or better educated than we are. In effect, to lie. I’m reminded of something Nabokov told an interviewer: “All writers that are worth anything are humorists.” This seems obvious to some of us. Much of the best humor implies a nuanced understanding of the world, the ability to see comedy in tragedy and vice versa – the essence of literary accomplishment. The humorless are earnest and dull and leave little room for a good laugh or an insight into human nature. “I’m not P.G. Wodehouse,” Nabokov continues. “I’m not a funny man, but give me an example of a great writer who is not a humorist. “ [Nabokov’s 1962 interview with Phyllis Meras for the Providence Sunday Journal is collected in Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor (eds. Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy, 2019).]
Varlam Shalamov (1907-82), who ought to know, opens a poem with this line: “Memory has veiled / much evil . . .” Shalamov survived almost eighteen years in the Gulag, in the Arctic region known as Kolyma. His final imprisonment, from 1937 to 1951, was imposed after he referred to Nobel Laureate Ivan Bunin as “a classic Russian writer.” Don’t read his stories looking for inspirational tales of courage, perseverance and adversity overcome. He would laugh bitterly at such foolish naiveté. That he survived the Gulag, unlike at least 1.7 million others, may be impressive. That so physically and emotionally damaged a man could write so many stories, Chekhovian in their understated precision, is miraculous. Today, the seventy-second anniversary of Joseph Stalin’s death, is an appropriate time to read Shalamov’s poem, as translated by Robert Chandler: “Memory has veiled much evil; her long lies leave nothing to believe. “There may be no cities or green gardens; only fields of ice and salty oceans. “The world may be pure snow, a starry road; just northern forest in the mind of God.” The Anglophone world is finally catching up with Shalamov’s accomplishment. Now we have Donald Rayfield’s versions of his Kolyma Stories (2018) and Sketches of the Criminal World: Further Kolyma Stories (2020), which I reviewed here and here. Their combined 1,200 pages include 145 stories. An English-language website devoted to Shalamov and his work has posted a remarkable document, “What I Saw and Learned in the Kolyma Camps” (trans. Dmitry Subbotin and Robert Denis). The piece is dated 1961, ten years after his release from Kolyma. Here is the first of his forty-six hard-earned observations: “The extraordinary fragility of human nature, of civilization. A human being would turn into a beast after three weeks of hard work, cold, starvation and beatings.” Shalamov lived his final years in the Soviet Union in poverty. He was blind, deaf and suffered from Huntington’s disease, but continued composing poems until his final months, when visitors took his dictation. He died in 1982 at age seventy-four. “Somewhat like Paul Celan and Primo Levi,” Chandler writes, “Shalamov seems in the end to have been defeated by the destructive forces he withstood so bravely and for so long. His own life story may be the most tragic of all the Kolyma tales.” Here is a poem by Shalamov from 1955, as translated by Chandler: “All that is human slips away; everything was mere husk. All that is left, indivisible, is birdsong and dusk. “A sharp scent of warm mint, the river’s far-off noise; all equal, and equally light — all my losses and joys.” “Slowly, with its warm towel the wind dries my face; moths immolate themselves in the campfire’s flames.” [Chandler translates nineteen poems by Shalamov in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry, edited by Chandler, Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski.]
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A recent visit to Teotihuacán — the ancient Mesoamerican city in present-day Mexico, built by earlier cultures around 600 BCE and later rediscovered by the Aztecs — left me wonder-smitten by the see-saw of our search for truth and our search for meaning, by a peculiar confluence of chemistry, culture, and chance that unrinds the layers of reality to put us face to face with the mystery at its core. Situated at the foot of a dormant volcano, Teotihuacán stunned the Toltec settlers with the discovery of a lustrous black material partway between stone and glass, brittle yet hard, breathlessly… read article
A longtime reader of Anecdotal Evidence has commented on my March 1 post: “One of my worst apprehensions about my son’s college education came true in his freshman English class. The professor brought up Lamb only to highlight something he said that would strike modern progressives as racist. Such a great language stylist, and my son’s likely only exposure to him was in the villains’ gallery of his college’s CRT indoctrination. Grrr!” By now, a familiar story. That Lamb of all writers should be Zhdanov-ized is a bitter joke. Yes, he is “a great language stylist,” but also one of the funniest writers in the language. His sense of humor, spanning the spectrum from nonsense to erudite wit, is distinctly modern. As he wrote in a letter to Robert Southey: “I was at Hazlitt’s marriage, and had like to have been turned out several times during the ceremony. Anything awful makes me laugh. I misbehaved once at a funeral.” English profs tend today to be humorless and puritanical, at least about other people's beliefs, disapproving of the pleasure we are meant to take in literature. In Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense (2021), Robert Alter reflects on a visit he made to the Soviet Union in the final year of its existence. He was there to attend a Nabokov conference, contrasting it with “the never-never land that American academia has become.” He writes: "Literature in our own academic circles is regularly dismissed, castigated as an instrument of ideologies of oppression, turned into a deconstructive plaything, preferentially segregated by the pigmentation and the sexual orientation of the writers, or entirely displaced by clinical case studies, metaphysical treatises, psychoanalytic theories, and artifacts of popular culture.” Let’s ask the basic question: why do academics, some of whom are intelligent and well-educated, behave this way? It seems to boil down to two things: a hunger for power (always the highest value on campus), a withered aesthetic sense and and a peculiar form of laziness. You don’t have to bother reading a book if you know in advanced you want to disapprove of it. Such descendants of the kids in grade school who complained about reading a book are now in a position to get their way. Alter bluntly states the reality for many of us: “There is something irrepressibly celebratory about Nabokov’s writing . . .”
20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 3) Previously in "20 years of Linux on the Deskop": After contributing to the launch of Ubuntu as the "perfect Linux desktop", Ploum realises that Ubuntu is drifting away from both Debian and GNOME. But something else is about to shake the world… 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 1) 20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 2) The new mobile paradigm While I was focused on Ubuntu as a desktop solution, another GNOME+Debian product had appeared and was shaking the small free software world: Maemo. It will come as a shock for the youngest but this was a time without smartphones (yes, we had electricity and, no, dinosaurs were already extinct, please keep playing Pokémon instead of interrupting me). Mobile phones were still quite new and doing exactly two things: calls and SMSes. In fact, they were sold as calling machines and the SMS frenzy, which was just a technical hack around the GSM protocol, took everybody by surprise, including operators. Were people really using awkward cramped keyboard to send themselves flood of small messages? Small pocket computers with tiny keyboard started to appear. There were using proprietary operating systems like WinCE or Symbian and browsing a mobile version of the web, called "WAP", that required specific WAP sites and that nobody used. The Blackberry was so proprietary that it had its own proprietary network. It was particularly popular amongst business people that wanted to look serious. Obama was famously addicted to his Blackberry to the point that the firm had to create a secure proprietary network only for him once he took office in the White House. But like others, Blackberries were very limited, with very limited software. Nothing like a laptop computer. N770, the precursor In 2005, Nokia very quietly launched the N770 as an experiment. Unlike its competitors, it has no keyboard but a wide screen that could be used with a stylus. Inside was running a Debian system with an interface based on GNOME: Maemo. The N770, browsing Wikipedia Instead of doing all the development in-house, Nokia was toying with free software. Most of the software work was done by small European companies created by free software hackers between 2004 and 2005. Those companies, often created specifically to work with Nokia, were only a handful of people each and had very narrow expertise. Fluendo was working on the media framework GStreamer. Immendio was working on the GTK user interface layer. Collabora was focusing on messaging software. Etc. Far from the hegemony of American giant monopolists, the N770 was a mostly European attempt at innovating through a collaborative network of smaller and creative actors, everything led by the giant Nokia. During FOSDEM 2005, GNOME developer Vincent Untz lent me a N770 prototype for two days. The first night was a dream come true: I was laying in bed, chatting on IRC and reading forums. Once the N770 was publicly released, I immediately bought my own. While standing in line in the bakery one Sunday morning, I discovered that there was an unprotected wifi. I used it to post a message on the Linuxfr website telling my fellow geeks that I was waiting for my croissants and could still chat with them thanks to free software. Those days, chatting while waiting in a queue has been normalised to the point you remark someone not doing it. But, in 2005, this was brand new. So new that it started a running meme about "Ploum’s baker" on Linuxfr. Twenty years later, some people that I meet for the first time still greet me with "say hello to your baker" when they learn who I am. For the record, the baker, an already-old woman at the time of the original post, retired a couple years later and the whole building was demolished to give place to a motorbike shop. This anecdote highlights a huge flaw of the N770: without wifi, it was a dead weight. When I showed it to people, they didn’t understand what it was, they asked why I would carry it if I could not make calls with it. Not being able to use the Internet without a wifi was a huge miss but, to be fair, 3G didn’t exist yet. Another flaw was that installing new software was far from being user-friendly. Being based on Debian, Maemo was offering a Synaptic-like interface where you had to select your software in a very long list of .deb packages, including the technical libraries. Also, it was slow and prone to crash but that could be solved. Having played with the N770 in my bed and having seen the reactions of people around me when I used it, I knew that the N770 could become a worldwide hit. It was literally the future. There were only two things that Nokia needed to solve: make it a phone and make it easy to install new software. Also, if it could crash less, that would be perfect. The Nokia (un)management guide to failure But development seemed to stall. It would take more than two years for Nokia to successively release two successors to the N770: the N800 and the N810. But, besides some better performance, none of the core issues were addressed. None of those were phones. None of those offered easy installation of software. None were widely released. In fact, it was so confidential that you could only buy them through the Nokia website of some specific countries. The items were not in traditional shops nor catalogues. When I asked my employer to get a N810, the purchasing department was unable to find a reference: it didn’t exist for them. Tired by multiple days of discussion with the purchasing administration, my boss gave me his own credit card, asked me to purchase it on the Nokia website and made a "diverse material expense" to be reimbursed. The thing was simply not available to businesses. It was like Nokia wanted Maemo to fail at all cost. While the N800 and N810 were released, a new device appeared on the market: the Apple iPhone. I said that the problem with the N770 is that you had to carry a phone with it. Steve Jobs had come to the same conclusion with the iPod. People had to carry an iPod and a phone. So he added the phone to the iPod. It should be highlighted that the success of the iPhone took everyone by surprise, including Steve Jobs himself. The original iPhone was envisioned as an iPod and nothing else. There was no app, no app store, no customisation (Steve Jobs was against it). It was nevertheless a hit because you could make calls, listen to music and Apple spent a fortune in marketing to advertise it worldwide. The marketing frenzy was crazy. Multiple people that knew I was "good with computers" asked me if I could unlock the iPhone they bought in the USA and which was not working in Europe (I could not). They spent a fortune on a device that was not working. Those having one were showing it to everyone. With the iPhone, you had music listening and a phone on one single device. In theory, you could also browse the web. Of course, there was no 3G so browsing the web was mostly done through wifi, like the N770. But, at the time, websites were done with wide screens in mind and Flash was all the rage. The iPhone was not supporting Flash and the screen was vertical, which made web browsing a lot worse than on the N770. And, unlike the N770, you could not install any application. The iPhone 1 was far from the revolution Apple want us to believe. It was just very good marketing. In retrospective, the N770 could have been a huge success had Nokia done some marketing at all. They did none. Another Linux on your mobile In 2008, Google launched its first phone which still had a physical keyboard. Instead of developing the software from scratch, Google used a Linux system initially developed as an embedded solution for cameras: Android. At the same time, Apple came to the realisation I had in 2005 that installing software was a key feature. The App Store was born. Phone, web browsing and custom applications, all on one device. Since 2005, people who had tried the N770 knew this was the answer. They simply did not expect it from Apple nor Google. When Android was first released, I thought it was what Maemo should have been. Because of the Linux kernel, I was thinking it would be a "free" operating system. I made a deep comparison with Maemo, diving into some part of the source code, and was surprised by some choices. Why Java? And why would Android avoid GStreamer in its multimedia stack? Technical explanations around that choice were not convincing. Years later, I would understand that this was not a technical choice: besides the Linux kernel itself, Google would explicitly avoid every GPL and LGPL licensed code. Android was only "free software" by accident. Gradually, the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) would be reduced to a mere skeleton while Android itself became more and more restricted and proprietary. In reaction to the iPhone and to Android, Nokia launched the N900 at the end of 2009. Eventually, the N900 was a phone. It even included an app store called, for unknown marketing reasons, "OVI store". The phone was good. The software was good, with the exception of the infamous OVI store (which was bad, had a bad name, a non-existent software offering and, worse of all, was conflicting with deb packages). The N900 would probably have taken the world by storm if released 3 years earlier. It would have been a success and a huge competitor to the iPhone if released 18 months before. Is it too late? The world seems to settle with an Apple/Google duopoly. A duopoly that could have been slightly shacked by the N900 if Nokia had done at least some marketing. It should be noted that the N900 had a physical keyboard. But, at that point, nobody really cared. When failing is not enough, dig deeper At least, there was the Maemo platform. Four years of work. Something could be done with that. That’s why, in 2010, Nokia decided to… launch Meego, a new Linux platform which replaced the Debian infrastructure by RPMs and the GNOME infrastructure by Qt. No, really. Even if it was theoretically, the continuation of Maemo (Maemo 6, codenamed Harmattan, was released as Meego 1), it felt like starting everything from scratch with a Fedora+KDE system. Instead of a strong leadership, Meego was a medley of Linux Foundation, Intel, AMD and Nokia. Design by committee with red tape everywhere. From the outside, it looked like Nokia outsourced its own management incompetence and administrative hubris. The N9 phone would be released in 2011 without keyboard but with Meego. History would repeat itself two years later when people working on Meego (without Nokia) would replace it with Tizen. Yet another committee. From being three years ahead of the competition in 2005 thanks to Free Software, Nokia managed to become two years too late in 2010 thanks to incredibly bad management and choosing to hide its products instead of advertising them. I’ve no inside knowledge of what Nokia was at this time but my experience in the industry allows me to perfectly imagine the hundreds of meetings that probably happened at that time. When business decisions look like very bad management from the outside, it is often because they are. In the whole Europe at the time, technical expertise was seen as the realm of those who were not gifted enough to become managers. As a young engineer, I thought that managers from higher levels were pretentious and incompetent idiots. After climbing the ladder and becoming a manager myself, years later, I got the confirmation that I was even underestimating the sheer stupidity of management. It is not that most managers were idiots, they were also proud of their incompetence and, as this story would demonstrate, they sometimes need to become deeply dishonest to succeed. It looks like Nokia never really trusted its own Maemo initiative because no manager really understood what it was. To add insult to injury the company bought Symbian OS in 2008, an operating system which was already historical and highly limited at that time. Nodoby could figure out why they spent cash on that and why Symbian was suddenly an internal competitor to Maemo (Symbian was running on way cheaper devices). The emotional roller coster In 2006, I was certain that free software would take over the world. It was just a matter of time. Debian and GNOME would soon be on most desktop thanks to Ubuntu and on most mobile devices thanks to Maemo. There was no way for Microsoft to compete against such power. My wildest dreams were coming true. Five years later, the outlooadministrative hubris. The N9 phone would be released in 2011 without keyboard but with Meego.k was way darker. Apple was taking the lead by being even more proprietary and closed than Microsoft. Google seemed like good guys but could we trust them? Even Ubuntu was drifting away from its own Debian and GNOME roots. The communities I loved so much were now fragmented. Where would I go next? (to be continued) Subscribe by email or by rss to get the next episodes of "20 years of Linux on the Desktop". I’m currently turning this story into a book. I’m looking for an agent or a publisher interested to work with me on this book and on an English translation of "Bikepunk", my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist typewritten novel which sold out in three weeks in France and Belgium. I’m Ploum, a writer and an engineer. I like to explore how technology impacts society. You can subscribe by email or by rss. I value privacy and never share your adress. I write science-fiction novels in French. For Bikepunk, my new post-apocalyptic-cyclist book, my publisher is looking for contacts in other countries to distribute it in languages other than French. If you can help, contact me!
