Full Width 
Shortcuts 
Sign Up 
Log In 
Articles 
Reading List More from This Space
In order of being read. Giorgio Agamben – What I saw, heard, learned… One night, along Venice’s Zattere, watching the putrid water lap at the city’s foundations, I saw that we exist solely in the intermittence of our being, and that what we call I is just a shadow continuously bidding farewell and saying hello, barely mindful of its own dissipation. All the machinery of our body serves solely to provide that break, that inversion of breath in which dwells the I—the intercessor of its own absence, unforgettable, neither living nor speaking, but the only reason we’re given life and language. [Translated by Alta L. Price] This book has 72 pages. On each of the first 61 there is a single paragraph. Reading them in sequence is like springing from stone to stone to cross a river. Sometimes one gives way. The final 11 pages have a negative version of the title and whose content is comparable to Blanchot's A Primal Scene? in The Writing of the Disaster. Holly Langstaff – Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot The unprepossessing title disguises a brilliant and beautifully written analysis of the subject, and perhaps timely given the step-change in Artificial Intelligence currently wiping out sources of income (including my own). What I learned is that Blanchot's vision of literature is much more radical than I had previously allowed, no doubt enchanted by the romanticism of Blanchot's keywords without facing up to their implications, all due to an unyielding humanism. He may have welcomed the AI-generated novel because it undoes instrumentality and exposes us to "the abyssal non-foundation of art" in which we might find "something profoundly affirmative ... where nothing is predetermined, neither by an all-powerful God nor by the teleological progress of history". In February, I wrote about AI-generated poetry as criticised by Alice Oswald. Wade Davis – Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest There are hundreds of pages in this book telling the story of a generation of amateur mountaineers in the years before, during and after Great War that have a resonance similar to Max Aue's fictionalised account of the Babi Yar massacre in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. The reader also enters into the silence. Thomas Bernhard – Gargoyles At the midpoint of the year I became seriously jaded with reading. Everything was routine and a chore. I bought books assuming the author and subject matter would guarantee the old spark of new life, only to set them aside after a handful of pages. They piled up like a gambling debt. Then, in desultory scanning of bookshelves, I picked out Bernhard's second novel. It had never been a favourite but I hadn't read it for many years and fancied bathing in Prince Saurau's speech that usurps the novel halfway through (the novel should be reissued with a better translation of the German title Verstörung as 'Disturbance', in part to refer to the Prince's state of mind). Before that speech arrived, however, it became one of my favourite novels of all time (why do people use that stupid phrase?), and not just of Bernhard's, which are among the best novels of all time. Someone on Twitter puts it well: "Though his style got more refined, the melancholy and poetry of his earlier works were never matched again, not even by him." Soon after, I would read a book that helped me to appreciate why melancholy and poetry sparked new life. But first, something completely different. Nicholas Rooney – Talking to the Wolf: the Alexander Dugin Interviews Alexander Dugin's reputation goes before him and I began to read these interviews as a means of bypassing received opinion. Once started, I didn't stop. There are over 500 pages covering philosophy, theology and politics. His focus in theology is often on the need for a relation to eternity: The distance between us and eternity is growing and it demands more and more effort in our life in order to return to eternity. So we go out of eternity and fall. Time is a kind of radical sin and not a kind of progress; it’s something completely opposite. We should make time something other than it is, and that is precisely why when Christ was baptised the river Jordan went in the opposite direction. So that is precisely what we need to do. We need a kind of revolution of time. We need to direct time in the opposite direction. Eternity is also a topic for Tancredo Pavone in Gabriel Josipovici's interview-novel Infinity in which the composer speaks a fusion of profundity and bullshit. Whether 'also' should appear in that sentence is up to the reader of these conversations to decide. The question must be why I enjoyed them almost as much as Gargoyles (so not completely different after all). When Dugin turns to politics, his deeply conservative opinions do not preclude proposals for a multipolar world order. This was unexpected and hopeful, which must be why he is demonised by the unipolar West. William Franke – Dante’s Vita nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation Some years ago Lee Rourke, a fellow scourge of Establishment Literary Fiction, identified the default mode of the contemporary novel as 'lyrical humanism'. As he has written for the New Humanist, I assumed this was because lyricism appeals to a residual irrational and thereby religious inclination in secular society and, contra Mallarmé, he seeks to purge literary language of anything beyond functional utility. I may have assumed too much, but reading Bernhard's Gargoyles and especially Prince Saurau's gloriously disconsolate aria, I realised that I am travelling in the opposite direction. This is not a religious turn but faithfulness to an experience that cannot be conveyed by a chronicle of facts. For Dante the experience was the incarnation of eternity in time in the form of Beatrice, conveyable only in lyric. William Franke's book helped to appreciate the prose 'explanations' in the Vita Nuova alternating with the lyrics were necessary to avoid the latter becoming absorbed by a literary and rhetorical tradition rather than the voice of an individual recording a unique vision. In this way the Vita Nuova becomes a contemporary gospel, risking blasphemy in doing so. Prince Saurau's speech may be its recurrence in a secular time, hence its paradoxical glory. I have written before about the Vita Nuova in Dante on the Beach. Gabriel Josipovici – A Winter in Zürau and Partita I wrote about this two-book edition in October, so all there is to do here is to reiterate the gift of the first part is its case for formal adventure in writing and of the second its enactment. It is one Josipovici has made throughout his career, but never with such focus. He makes clear that what distinguishes Kafka is that his experimentation in the Bohemian countryside was not a means to impress critics, not a noodling with sentences, not playing with genre, but a means of relating to "ultimate things" borne on a deeply felt existential anxiety. Mark Bowles – All My Precious Madness The blurb I contributed to this wonderful novel is deceptive in that Mark Bowles is like Thomas Bernhard only in the narrator Henry Nash's exultant anger with the social and political conditions in which we live – more or less unheard of in the British novel – and the triangular relationships, as set out by Thomas Cousineau in his book on Bernhard, in the form of Nash himself, his father and Cahun, the ghastly representative of the professional managerial class. It may be described as the Bildungsroman of a Critical Theorist, only with the rebarbative prose of that movement replaced by luxurious sentences, something else he has in common with the great Austrian.
"A novel is a kind of lazy way of writing a short story, a short story a lazy way of writing a poem" said Muriel Spark, adding by explanation: "The longer they become, the more they seem to lose value". We might wonder then if the most value is to be found in the shortest novels, the shortest short stories and the shortest poems, such as Christian Stevens's Hummingbirds / don't know the words and Giuseppe Ungaretti's Eternal. However, these may be still too lazy for Muriel Spark. A single word instead then? A single letter perhaps, maybe even a punctuation mark. Such logic leads to a blank page as the least lazy and most valuable form, or no page at all, or even better, the space from which the page has been removed. But perhaps Muriel Spark is only cheekily inverting the common assumption that, as a lisping Kingsley Amis might have said, more means worth. If she is, it is only its inversion: the longer a work becomes, the closer it comes to such value in the abyss of prose. Collecting poems or stories into a book draws attention to the spaces between entries that invoke a value effaced by the writing. [1] What can the writer do? The question creates the tension in Blood Knowledge, the story opening Pretty Ugly, Kirsty Gunn's latest collection. Venetia Alton is a writer of bestselling historical romances reflects upon a happy marriage and two successful careers, a beautiful home and garden, with children having flown the nest to find their own happy and successful lives. She publishes a novel every two years, alhough she admits they write themselves: It was a case of doing the research, compiling the characters, and the contents would play out in the same way with every title: Tough times into good. Happy ever after. Wars could rage in Renaissance England, French coasts beset by 19th century piracy and highland estates overcome by rebellion...but all would come right in the end because it was what happened at home that counted; it was a story after all. She sets all this against a disquiet often expressed to Richard, her husband, as a wish to build a different life elsewhere, perhaps abroad, but dismissed by him as "silly". How could it be better than here? She cannot say, not out loud anyway. She turns instead to writing on scraps of paper and hiding them from view. The scraps work in the opposite direction to the novels as they contain evidence of a rebellion against the genre she has lived, that she has been expected to live, as a wife and mother, and as a novelist. What counts for her is the space around what is present to everyone else, a space that cannot be addressed, cannot become part of a happy ever after story. And yet of course it it has been addressed, here. Venetia's secret was made public the moment it was written down, even if it remains forever hidden in a drawer. In keeping with the oxymoron of the collection's title, writing is an open secret. If the ostensible value here is Venetia affirmination of her sequestered self and as such appearing to submit to a familiar genre of contemporary critical discourse – it may be no coincidence that Venetia shares a seven-letter Latinate first name with Clarissa Dalloway and that her husband is also called Richard – its native value is that it pulses with the secret of storytelling, its blood knowledge, a secret nevertheless we have to keep. [2] Notes [1] The reader's demand for the work to efface the ambiguity of value is revealed by the reliably execrable Hadley Freeman in her review of a book "described in the press release, rather untemptingly, as a short story collection". [2] It has become a pattern that, when I write about short story collections, I write about one story only despite such collections tending towards variety. It happened first with Thomas Bernhard's Goethe Dies, then Enrique Vila-Matas' Death by Saudade, followed by Sam Pink's Blue Victoria, and most recently Gert Hofmann's Arno. This appears to be a critical cop-out and/or implicit criticism of the other stories in the collections. Instead, however, I hope it is best to avoid the value-free impressionism I remember from reading reviews in the NME in the 1980s in which tracks of LPs are summarised with adjective-noun combinations – "the upbeat freedom of X, the trenchant melancholy of Y" – as if that helped anyone. In this case, it is ironic that I'm reviewing a book published by Rough Trade, which as a music label gave us records by The Fall, The Smiths and Robert Wyatt, each of which I bought at that time and still own.
A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical. The second claim may not be controversial but the first will come as a surprise to those who remember what he said about the big-name contemporary novelists in What Ever Happened to Modernism?. This novel and non-fiction combination offers an opportunity to experience the two in close proximity – two sides of an LP, as Nick Lezard put it. Side one is is a study of the eight months Franz Kafka spent in the Bohemian countryside after a diagnosis of TB and in particular the collection of notes he wrote there known as the Zürau Aphorisms. On the other side, Partita is a novel written mostly in dialogue following Michael Penderecki on the run after a death threat in which he spends most of this time chasing a lover who herself keeps running away. The threat of death and the promise of escape are two links between the sides that otherwise seem to have little in common. Josipovici's two claims, however, provides another. Before he left for Zürau, Kafka told Max Brod he intended to use the time to "become clear about ultimate things". Josipovici follows him through each day as recorded in the collection known as The Blue Octavo Notebooks. At first the entries include short stories, regular first-person diary entries and legalistic and theological speculations, the latter of which Josipovici is impatient as they lead Kafka into uncharacteristically "clunking" prose. But then the first aphorism appears: The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along. Every edition dedicated to the aphorisms begins here but, Josipovici claims, this is deceptive. On that day in October 1917, Kafka writes a long and indeed clunking paragraph before interrupting himself with the line translated as "I digress". He then writes the aphorism. Every edition deletes this line. Reiner Stach's recent The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka is the exception but relegates it to an aside in his commentary, with the rest discussing the rope motif. Josipovici points out the original German is "Ich irre ab", which he translates as "I'm on the wrong track", backed up by Google Translate which has "I'm going astray". This he says marks a decisive change and relates directly to the form of the rope entry, which he describes as "the melding of fiction and discursive prose in extremely compact pieces". "Ich irre ab" is thereby closer to Dante's "I had lost the path that does not stray" before he begins his journey and gives the first aphorism a similarly salvific imperative. The difference is that Kafka has no Virgil or Beatrice to guide him; belief in God has gone and the means of salvation uncertain, and the word possibly meaningless. By removing the line, the editors place the existential peril at a safe distance from which a critical apparatus can flourish. The generic distinction of 'aphorisms' is therefore inappropriate as Kafka's notes are not the witty or pithy sayings of a wise man but "the anxious jottings of a man under sentence of death". Kafka's digression was not then playing with genre for the sake of it or to show off his talent as a writer but, as he said, to "become clear about ultimate things". The rope motif stands for Kafka's ambivalence about writing and Josipovici is rare in Kafka studies by bringing it into the foreground. Kafka recognised the grace it affords when in his diary he describes writing as "a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being", but then he wonders "what kind of surplus is it?". In a letter to Brod, the doubts are expressed even more succinctly: "Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life?" – a life in which he felt distant, a spectator unable to enjoy join in, as he described in a passage in his diary. Josipovici also shows how doubts about writing are dramatised in his stories. The officer in In the Penal Colony tells the traveller to read the sentence the machine has written on the body of the condemned man but he sees only "a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other". The machine takes twelve hours to kill so the engraving of the sentence has to be embellished to fill the time: In so doing it brings out the paradox of the machine: meant to make the accused feel in his own body the justice of the punishment, it only helps to bring out that language can never be 'true' or 'just', that it will always contain flourishes. In Zürau among simple farmers and labourers, Kafka saw no flourishes. He observed the centuries-old traditions embedded in daily life of the villagers governed by the seasons and centred on the church and recognised he was living the consequences of a society wrenched from such roots. Tradition had to be there already and could not be back-engineered. The best he could do as a writer was to distance himself from literary flourishes, to get as close to what Josipovici describes as "the unthinking life-activity that produces the works of Homer", in effect to disappear as a writer and for writing to disappear as a means of constructing ideas about the world. This was a common theme in the writers of the time. Josipovici cites Eliot's Prufrock and Wallace Stevens's snowman: What they are all searching for in their art – and in their lives, actually – is a kind of perfect anonymity, something that is the opposite of the image of the entrepreneur, the figure of Progress, linked to capitalism in society and, in art, to fictions with beginnings, middles and a nice resolution at the end. Blanchot calls this a "combat of passivity, combat which reduces itself to naught". Of course, that naught is still not disappearance as it is a combat for literature, an irony one aphorism melding fiction and discursive prose recognises: Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear than it is once more covered with dry leaves. Josipovici notes how odd it is not to be told what is the path is like and admits that he's not sure why but the line "would be much weaker if it started with: 'I feel like' or 'My life is like a path in autumn'". The question of why it would be weaker is fascinating and maddening. Josipovici says "this is what Kafka’s best fictions and images do to you: in a few plain and simple words they set your imagination going and refuse to provide it with a safe landing". This is the gift of Kafka's quest to become clear about ultimate things, "a gift we do not receive" as Blanchot says in the same passage. The gift of A Winter in Zürau is that it makes us aware of the distance between us and Kafka, a distance between us and awareness of distance, a distance from the loss of tradition, a distance between us and ultimate things, and so a distance from the deep roots of fiction, as one of Kafka's melded commentaries on myth describes: There are four legends about Prometheus. According to the first, because he betrayed the gods to men he was chained to a rock in the Caucasus and the gods sent eagles that devoured his liver, which always grew again. According to the second, Prometheus in his agony, as the beaks hacked into him, pressed deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third, in the course of thousands of years his treachery was forgotten, the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot. According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of what had become meaningless. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. What remained was the inexplicable range of mountains. The great books by the great writers is an inexplicable mountain range we admire only from a distance. We hurry to name contemporary equivalents but we know something is missing. For Kafka, the horror and the undivine comedy of modern life was close enough in time to contrast with village life to sense what was lost so there remained a tension: "From the true antagonist boundless courage flows into you" he wrote in Zürau, a single sentence that many of us would pass over without pause but for the close attention Josipovici provides: "the agon or trial of strength was the fulcrum on which Kafka’s imagination turned" and cites the father in The Judgment, but then adds a crucial note: "The question is whether for modern man such an antagonist exists." Side two of this edition offers an answer. While Partita's features an Englishman with a Polish name on the run across Europe to escape a threat of death and then pursuing an unpredictable lover in variously dark, comic and surreal episodes, the title points away from the content just as music points away from itself. It has a non-musical meaning too: in Italian verb 'partire' means to leave, to go away, and the noun in the feminine describing someone who has left is 'la partita'. There are seven chapters each named after parts of the musical form; variations on a theme. In the Praeambulum, music is in the foreground when Michael Penderecki's host insists on playing Yves Montand singing Les feuilles mortes (Autumn Leaves) on his fancy record player: A quiet voice of great beauty begins to tell a story. It tells of memory and of those happy days when the sun always shone, days when we were friends; it tells of the dead leaves of autumn swept up into piles, like our memories and regrets. The dead leaves echo the fate of Kafka's true way, in this case one cleared by feet running into the future soon covered again as it becomes the past. The song recurs throughout the novel; a literary earworm reminding us that what ever joy we have, what ever hope we maintain, goes away. Everything passes. Perhaps this modern man's only potential antagonist, the one we confront in every waking moment while music and dreams are the ineffable reminders of escape, the promise and impossibility of escape that we seek anyway in flight from death and in pursuit of love; poles of the same earth. We exalt both with all kinds of rationales from the purely subjective to the purely technical, except music is heard and love felt differently to how we spell it out. In the novel it has a comic equivalence in Michael Penderecki's surname: his name may be spelled Penderecki but he irritates people by telling them it is pronounced Penderetzky. And with two otherwise incompatible books, we have two versions of the name. A Winter in Zürau spells out Josipovici's advocacy of formal adventure in writing as he follows Kafka sounding out the losses and paradoxes that haunt its necessity, while in Partita the antagonist can only be experienced in its pronunciation; it is experienced as it leaves us, forever there and forever out of reach. In this sense, Josipovici is radical as a critic and conservative as a novelist.
On this day in 2004, I posted the first entry on this blog. In recent years many posts have reflected on the past and present of literary blogging (there is no future) so I will not go over that waste land again except to wish more had followed the example of This Space. One of the very few has been Dan Fraser's Oubliette, which he appears to have forgotten, but he has continued writing elsewhere, such as at A Personal Anthology and Radical Philosophy, the latter reviewing a book that has influenced the direction taken by this blog over the years; one might say the opposite direction. I'm always impressed by writers like Dan who can summarise a book with apparent ease. It's the one thing that slows me down, often to a halt. Although I see this as a personal failing, it may be a sign of what distracts from my true interests. With this in mind, last week Donald Clark, the learning theory guru who is himself very adept at summarising, posted a blog about Google's AI tool NotebookLM, which summarises books for you. I pasted my notes taken from various non-fiction books and was stunned by the breadth and clarity of what it delivered. If writing about literature can survive such technology it has to be in pursuing what rational exposition conceals, which in a literary blog may be found in its haphazard and discontinuous non-procedure. One feature of NotebookLM which Donald Clark says will blow your mind is its automated podcast featuring two chirpy American voices discussing what you have uploaded. Here's what they've got to say about my recent ebook: The Opposite Direction. I apologise in advance.
More in literature
“Maurine Smith died March 8, 1919, at the age of twenty-three years. Nearly her whole life had been one of intense physical suffering, and she knew few of the usual felicities.” Yvor Winters is introducing us to a poet whose name you likely have never encountered. Smith and Winters were members of the Poetry Club of the University of Chicago, along with Glenway Wescott, Elizabeth Madox Roberts and a few others. Five of Smith’s poems were published in Poetry two and a half years after her death. After another two years, Monroe Wheeler published a chapbook, The Keen Edge, containing eighteen of Smith’s poems. Winters provided the brief introduction: “Unless one speaks of the dead from a very complete knowledge, one speaks with diffidence, and my acquaintance with Miss Smith was slight. . . . Thin, and a trifle bent, withdrawn she surveys the autumn morning through a window. And then the lines from an unpublished poem: “‘I dust my open book, But there is no dust on the pages.’ “A hand as fine as the lines, and that is all.” Winters’ closing line might almost be a poem. After publication of the chapbook, Smith evaporated from literary history for sixty years. She has no Wikipedia page – one's confirmation of existence in the digital age. In 1987, poet and publisher R.L. Barth returned The Keener Edge to print, and he later gave me a copy. The poet-novelist Janet Lewis, Winters’ widow and also a member of the Poetry Club, published a critical article, “The Poems of Maurine Smith,” in the Winter 1990 issue of Chicago Review. Despite the growth in women’s studies and the revival of interest in many previously neglected female writers, Lewis’ piece remains the only substantial critical examination of Smith and her poetry I've been able to find. Lewis tells us she met Smith only once, in January 1919. I’m touched by Lewis using Smith’s first name after more than seventy years: “I think of Maurine as having a mind well schooled in English verse. I can as easily relate her work to that of Christina Rossetti as to that of Adelaide Crapsey, who was almost her contemporary, and certainly an influence.” Describing her sole meeting with Smith some 106 years ago, Lewis writes: “I cannot remember if Maurine submitted any poems for discussion that evening. She was too ill to attend the next meeting, when Glenway Wescott read [Smith’s] “Ceremony.” He read it, as he read each of the poems which we dropped on the table, without giving the name of the writer. I remember, although not knowing whose poem it was, how deeply I was touched by it, the beauty of the control of both form and feeling. This is the poem. It may as well be introductory now, as it was then: “The unpeopled conventional rose garden Is where I shall take my heart With this new pain. Clipped hedge and winter-covered beds Shall ease its hurt. When it has grown quiet, I shall mount the steps, slowly, And put three sorrows in the terra-cotta urn On that low gate-pillar, And leave them there, to sleep, Beneath the brooding stillness of a twisted pine.” Lewis notes that the members of the Poetry Club were interested in free verse, the formless form then still something of a novelty: “It was not entirely respectable in 1918.” Another Smith poem reminds Lewis of Christina Rosetti’s “Haply I may remember, and haply may forget.” Here is “The Dead”: “You, who were blind to beauty, Unheedful of song, You have time now to remember In your quiet under the ground; And does the time seem long? “Harken, in your silence; All things grow. Is not your heart importunate? You, too, must long again To feel the wind blow.” As late as 1930, Winters was hoped to publish a more complete edition of Smith’s poems, with a biography supplied by her sister. He believed some forty poems were extant. In a letter to Glenway Wescott, Winters writes: “Maurine was one of our best poets, I am more and more certain.” See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (2000), edited by Barth and published by Ohio University Press/Swallow Press.
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
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!
A while back, I wrote a post titled “What is a Platform?”. I defined what a platform is and why tech companies are so determined to become labeled as one. My definition of a platform is a tool that allows users to define and build their own things, which can be used by other users. Tech companies wish to own platforms, as they are the engines that propel the flywheel toward infinite growth. But as Bill Simmons puts it best, there’s always a good “zag” to every “zig”. I want to challenge my own assumptions that platforms are inherently the best business model and explore how the opposite model, point solutions, can be just as healthy in product design. I want to compare two companies I admire: Notion (the platform) and Linear (the point solution). I also want to acknowledge my feelings about Kibu’s place in this battle and how forces like competitors, AI, and market needs influence us. Notion, the Platform Notion, known for its minimalism, speed, and extensibility, has been the techy alternative to Google Docs for almost a decade. Its approach of building ‘Lego for software’ is embedded in the company’s culture and felt inside its product. From the beginning, Notion’s mission was to allow anyone to create software. But, after realizing that everyday humans had neither the time nor care to develop, they switched to productivity. Create a Notion account today, and you will be greeted with a blank canvas, much like a Word doc. But the real magic is the first time you press the / key, which opens a world of blocks, allowing you to seamlessly create lists, tables, charts, mentions, and embeds that all cooperate in the ecosystem of your given folder. Notion called itself the Lego of software. With blocks, you can define your own things. With a collection of things, you can design templates, which can be consumed by many. Notion entered a rocky era when it strayed from this path. On Lenny’s podcast, CEO Ivan Zhao recounts Notion’s “lost years,” where he reflects on a failed feature. Notion introduced Sprints, a specific methodology for managing projects. From the start, Ivan and the team felt Sprints didn’t feel right. After a year, they could articulate that injecting a rigid, less adaptable solution didn’t align with Notion’s core philosophy of block-based design. Imagine opening a box of Legos and finding a perfectly curved, painted airplane inside! Where’s the fun and customization in that?? For Ivan and Notion, anything outside of block-based thing-builders is not a tool that belongs in Notion. While incredibly friendly and familiar, Notion is very much a platform. Linear, the Point Solution I’ve already written about what makes Linear so beautiful. Linear’s strength lies in its focus on building the best issue-tracking tool for the IC engineer: the 20-something developer who just wants to code without the bureaucracy. This unwavering focus on a specific persona is what makes them a point solution for modern software development teams. A point-solution mindset is embedded in how Linear decides on features. In an interview with Head of Product Nan Yu, he reflects on one decision (paraphrasing): We never liked the idea of letting management add custom fields to Linear because if you add 100+ custom fields, all your ICs would hate it. But we kept getting requests for it, and we’d ask, “Well, why do you want custom fields?” And 40% of customers said, “Well, I have Customer X, and their request is really important. I need everyone to know that Customer X needs this. I need to track it.” That sounded like a very useful and powerful thing for us to do. So let’s build a solution that solves that problem without making ICs’ lives harder. Instead of building custom fields, Linear created Customer Requests, which captures issues and tags direct customer quotes from various support channels- all without ICs needing to do anything. I’m impressed by the incredible discipline Linear exemplifies here. Clearly, the easy and “more scalable” solution would have been to introduce custom fields. But because they knew it would undermine their key persona, they kept poking at the real problem and addressed that instead. In spirit, Linear and Notion have polar opposite perspectives: Notion welcomes platform-like design with blocks, custom fields, and automations, while Linear rejects it- staying disciplined in building out-of-the-box solutions that fit the lowest common denominator of its addressable market. So, what’s right? Cold take: they’re both right, and the lesson is that two roads can lead to equally desirable destinations. I’m much more focused on the question: what’s right for Kibu? Kibu is already much closer to Linear as a point solution, and I believe it should stay there. Kibu already has an incredible niche in the Disability Provider market, and we’re building real point solutions tailored for Day Habilitation programs within these providers. Our competitors, namely Therap, take a horizontal approach to their solutions- seeing Disability Providers as just one vertical of many. This forces customers to do upfront and ongoing management of defining generic things within Therap. Some providers may see this as powerful and extensible- likely large organizations with dedicated IT resources. Kibu’s bet is that the vast majority of the market doesn’t have this luxury and would prefer out-of-the-box solutions where things are already in their language (service records, attendance, members). Kibu, as a point solution, makes more sense for the market. Our market is exceptionally non-technical, highly regulated, and rightfully sees software as a secondary asset to their true offerings: the physical facilities and human resources that provide the service. Taken together, my bet is that our market would rather be told what they need than inspired to build it themselves. The more specific we can get, the better. A press release that reads “Kibu launches ready-made solution for Day Habs in Georgia” will resonate more than “Kibu introduces custom fields, allowing any organization to build their own solutions.” Kibu, as a point solution, will open the floodgates for our product team to introduce omotenashi- anticipating our users’ needs before they ask. Notifications and help documentation can be more specific. LLM solutions can be prompt-engineered with niche instructions. Our codebase will be hardcoded with the nouns and verbs our market understands, forcing our tech team to truly understand the needs of our users, which is constrained by our inability to dogfood. There’s so much more to unpack with AI’s influence, scaling the “Day Habs in Georgia” solutions, and more. Nevertheless, I believe that point solutions are what our market needs, and our messaging and product decisions should be guided by that assumption.
