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My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read. I read Alison Entrekin’s English translation because 1) I did not have a Portuguese text handy and 2) I figured it would be too hard for me, which I think is right. I had enough trouble with the book in English. When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy! (162) For 90 pages, Lispector alternates scenes of Joana’s childhood and the beginnings of her marriage. Then we get a hundred pages of the marriage falling apart. The husband has, for example, a pregnant girlfriend, although that is more of a symptom of the collapse. The real cause is that Joana is psychologically, hmm hmm hmm, unusual. How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it. (101) That is maybe the strangest clear thought she expresses. Joana’s stream of thoughts are generally much more abstract. Entirely abstract. Here is the ending of one abstract paragraph moving into the beginning of another. Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession. Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! – and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity. (36) Joana’s thinking, outside of the childhood scenes, if often unconnected, or just barely connected, to a scene, or anything material at all. A lot of this: How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? would a triangle be born fatally? things were rich… Where does music go when it’s not playing? (164, ellipses mine) I would describe passages like this as philosophical if I understood how Joana moves from one thought to another, which I generally did not. Sometimes I felt a move toward Surrealism, although without the playfulness or materiality I enjoy in Surrealism. The man was a child an amoeba flowers whiteness warmth like sleep for now is time for now is life even if it is later… (165, ellipses in original) This is Joana falling asleep, so here I did know what Lispector was depicting. I could, in this section, draw a connection between my own perceptions of what I call “reality” and Lispector’s representation of an aspect of reality, the process and psychology of falling asleep. But mostly I found that hard to do. Another possibility is that Joana is meant to be a pathological case study, repellent to understanding. Or that she is meant to be entirely normal, a version of the way Lispector sees the world, however nuts she looks to me, the kind of mismatch I often bounce off when reading D. H. Lawrence, where I think I am reading about someone who is psychologically unusual and begin to think, oh no, he thinks everyone is like this. Yet another idea is that the novel is full of nonsense and anti-rationality, again like Surrealism, something I usually enjoy a lot. I could have used more, I don’t know, jokes, I guess. Surrealism is fun. And material, too, not abstract. Paris Peasant is about walking around in the mall. Benjamin Moser, in the introduction, suggests that Lispector’s “project was less artistic than spiritual… not an intellectual or artistic endeavor” (xi), a good clue about my difficulties with Near to the Wild Heart. Beyond a couple of the childhood scenes I never found a hook into the art of Lispector’s novel. It is the biggest mismatch of a book with my taste that I have bumped against in quite a while. Tony Malone liked the novel more than I did but his response, section by section, looks similar to mine: “the internal monologues were a little too abstract at times,” were they ever. Someday I will try another Lispector novel, perhaps one from the 1960s, and see how that goes. Perhaps I will try one in Portuguese.
Farewell to The Story of the Stone and a valuable browse in Chinese literature. I’ll do it again someday. FICTION The Peony Pavilion (1598), Tang Xianzu – written up back here. The Story of the Stone, Vol. 5: The Dreamer Wakes (c. 1760), Cao Xueqin & Gao E – some notes here. The quotation in my title is from p. 94. Naomi (1924) & Quicksand (1930), Junichiro Tanizaki – and these are over here. Calamity Town (1942), Ellery Queen – A very lightly metafictional mystery. Not only does the detective share his name with the book’s actual “author,” itself a fiction, but he is a mystery writer who at times seems to be generating the crime within the novel so that he will have something interesting to write about. But not quite doing that, unfortunately. That novel would have been more interesting. The actual novel was fine. This is one of those mysteries where every instance of clumsy plotting is in fact a clue. A Question of Upbringing (1951), Anthony Powell – I think I will write something about this book once I have read another volume of the series. Damned If I Do (2004), Percival Everett – short stories. A perfect Everett title. It is all his characters need since it doesn’t matter what will happen if they don’t. They always do. On the Calculation of Volume I (2020), Solvej Balle – a Groundhog Day story told with more philosophy and less humor. A good fantasy on its own terms, but the puzzle is that the series has six more volumes, two of which have not been written yet. The whole thing will be at least 1,200 pages long, for all I know more. This first volume is reasonably complete, so I have no idea where the series might be going. POETRY NOT IN FRENCH OR PORTUGUESE Selected Poems (1968), Zbigniew Herbert TRAVEL, MUSIC HISTORY Tschiffelly's Ride (1933), Aimé Tschifelly – a Swiss English teacher rides a pair of Pampas horses from Buenos Aires to Washington, D. C., just for fun, and writes an equestrian classic. Lots of emphasis on the horses and horse-riding. My geographical knowledge of South and Central America has greatly improved. I have only been to one of the countries Tschifelly passes through. Peru gets the largest number of pages; Mexico second. Time's Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance (2023), Jeremy Eichler – Before I finished The Emigrants in 1996 I knew that Sebald was going to be an important writer. I knew that people were going to want to do what he was doing. That was the only time I have been right about that, really, and I did not predict how much Sebaldian visual and musical art would follow, nor that there could be Sebaldian music history, which is what classical music critic Jeremy Eichler has written. Lightly Sebaldian – he includes uncaptioned photos, yes, but always says, somewhere in the text, what they are. The book is about World War II memorial pieces, built around Schoenberg’s A Survivor in Warsaw (1947), Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and several Shostakovich works. Highly recommended to anyone who likes this sort of thing. IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE Odes et Ballades (1828), Victor Hugo – young, young Hugo. I had read the first half several years ago; now I finished it up. He sounded like himself from the beginning, but he would not become the greatest French poet until, well, almost immediately after this book. Les songes en equilibre (1942) & Le tombeau des rois (1953) & Mystère de la parole (1960), Anne Hébert – Lovely dream and childhood poems from a Quebecois poet. I have not read Hébert in English, but I will bet there are some good translations. Her Catholic poems did not do much for me. If you have opinions about her fiction, please share them. Éthiopiques (1956), Léopold Sédar Senghor – One would not – I would not – guess that he would be President of Senegal four years later. I have visited his childhood home. Post-Scriptum (1960), Jorge de Sena Flores ao Telefone (1968) & Os Idólatras (1969), Maria Judite de Carvalho – I do not remember exactly how this book was recommended to me by a soon-to-be distinguished Portuguese author. “If you like sad stories about depressed people, these are good.” Carvalho has a place in Portuguese literature and feminism perhaps a little like Edna O’Brien in Ireland or Grace Paley in the United States, sharply ironic domestic stories, although without O’Brien’s sexual explicitness or Paley’s humor. Culture hero Margaret Jull Costa is bringing Carvalho into English and is presumably working right now on these books, recently published in Portuguese in Volume 3 of Carvalho’s collected works. Of course with that recommendation I had to buy a copy.
Two Junichiro Tanizaki novels from the 1920s for Japanese Literature Month over at Dolce Bellezza. Always interesting to see what people are reading. Thanks as usual. 18th edition! The two novels I read, Naomi (1924) and Quicksand (1928-30), are closely related. Both are about dominant and submissive sexual relations, an obsession of Tanizaki. Both were serialized in newspapers. How I wish the books had explanations of how the serialization worked. Both novels are written in, or at least translated as, plain, sometimes even dull prose, perhaps a consequence of tight serial deadlines. Both have narrators who may well be playing tricks on me, although if so I did not see the signals, and believe me I am alert to the signals, well-trained by Pale Fire and The Tin Drum and Villette and so on. Maybe Tanizaki’s tricks are different. Naomi is narrated by a creep of an engineer who picks up – grooms – a 15 year-old waitress who he finds especially “Western.” … most of her value to me lay in the fact that I’d brought her up myself, that I myself had made her into the woman she was, and that only I knew every part of her body. For me Naomi was the same as a fruit that I’d cultivated myself. I’d labored hard and spared no pains to bring that piece of fruit to its present, magnificent ripeness, and it was only proper that I, the cultivator, should be the one to taste it. No one else had that right. (Ch. 18, 161) Pure poison. By this point in the novel Naomi has taken power, well on her way to complete control, crushing her groomer, who is likely, it turns out, happier crushed. Much of the novel is set in the modern, Westernized Asakusa neighborhood of Tokyo, before the terrible earthquake that obliterated the dancehalls and movie theaters. I found all of that detail quite interesting, as it was in Yasunari Kawabata’s The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1929-30). One more piece of bad luck and Naomi might have become one of the homeless teen prostitutes in The Scarlet Gang. Too bad Naomi does not have the innovative linguistic interest of Kawabata’s crackling novel. The Japanese title of Quicksand is a single character, the Buddhist swastika, a perfect representation of the content of the novel, which is a four-way struggle for dominance among the narrator, her girlfriend, her husband, and the girlfriend’s boyfriend. Some of the weapons in the struggle are pretty crazy, like a scene where the narrator and the girlfriend’s lunatic boyfriend swear a blood oath. Eh, they’re all crazy. The narrator is the eventual winner, obviously, I guess. Maybe she is making it all up. Quicksand has a lot in common with Ford Madox Ford’s devious The Good Soldier, another four-way struggle, but as I said if Tanizaki’s narrator is a tenth as tricky as Ford’s I sure couldn’t see it. She seems more unreliable in theory than practice. One technique that is interesting and may hold clues: Tanizaki and the narrator return to key scenes, describing what happened from different perspectives, yes, like in Akutagawa’s “In a Bamboo Grove” (1922), except everything is filtered through the narrator, which does have the appearance of what I am calling a trick, a technique of emphasizing and controlling unreliability. How newspaper readers followed this over two full years baffles me, but my understanding is that the lesbian aspect got the attention. I have trouble imaging the literary world where these were newspaper novels. Naomi was in fact too shocking and was booted from the newspaper, with Tanizaki completing it in a magazine. Should I give an example of what I mean by dull prose? Is it worth the tedium of the typing? I mean that there is a lot of this: “Were you still asleep, Mitsu?” “Your phone call wakened me!” “I can leave anytime now. Won’t you come right away too?” “Then I’ll hurry up and get ready. Can you be at the Umeda station by half-past nine?” “You’re sure you can?” “Of course I am!” (Quicksand, Ch. 15, 98) And this is nominally supposed to be the narrator telling her story to Tanizaki. Serialization filler? Maybe you can see why I am not in a hurry to solve the puzzle of Quicksand. The appeal of both novels, for me, was exploring the psychology of the believably awful characters and seeing how their less believable awful schemes work out. Anthony Chambers translated Naomi; Howard Hibbett did Quicksand.
The teens living in the garden in the YA romantasy The Story of the Stone spend a lot of time reading forbidden books, much older YA romantasys. These books are all famous classical Chinese plays. Cao Xueqin gives a couple of chapters early on to their reading, including a list of titles. I figured I’d better try one of them. How about The Peony Pavilion by Tang Xianzu, written in 1598, an exciting time in English and Spanish drama, too. The play is really an opera, partly sung and partly spoken, a monster, eighteen hours long in a complete performance, a wild mix of stories and tones. An attempt at the story: beautiful young Bridal Du begins her education with a tutor. The explication of four lines of 2,500 year-old Chinese poetry, the limit of her education, are enough to make her curious about the outside world. She goes for a walk in an artificial garden where, in the title’s Peony Pavilion, she falls into a dream where she meets and has sex with a stranger, an experience so powerful that after waking she soon dies. This is one-third of the way in. Luckily the lover is real and stumbles across the garden. After an idyllic period of ghost sex, he figures out how to resurrect Bridal Du, launching the final third of the play which is full of bandits, severed heads, mistaken identities, and heroic test-taking. There is a scene I have never encountered in dramatic form before, Scene 41, where the test examiners grades essays: Every kind of error: what a bunch of blockheads grinding their ink for nothing, not one brush “bursts into flower.” (230) What could be more dramatic than watching a teacher grade papers? The Peony Pavilion also has comic scenes in Hell, songs about manure, comics scenes with a couple of slapstick servants, and a comic scene with a pompous government inspector. I thought this scene must be one of the most cut – the entire opera has been performed rarely, or perhaps never before 1999 (!) – but no, it is one of the most performed, historically, often performed on its own at village festivals. The text is full of quotations and lines and entire poems from two thousand years of Chinese poetry, all identified, as above, by quotation marks and occasionally by footnote identification, but there is so much quotation that the editor gives up on identifying the authors by page 5. The quotations are sometimes turned into dirty jokes or elaborate poetry games much like the kids play in The Story of the Stone. It is all the most amazing thing, is what I am saying, one piece of craziness after another. Someday I will have to read more of these things, and maybe a book or two about how to read them. Cao Xueqin clearly learned more about writing his novel from these plays than from earlier Chinese novels. “It’s very pretty in the garden” but “[t]hat garden is a vast and lonely place” (Sc. 11, 54). Oh, why are classical plays forbidden to the 18th century youth? One, kids are not supposed to be wasting their time with romantasys but instead reading the Five Classics and practicing calligraphy; second, the plays will give young ladies corrupting ideas about falling in love and marrying who they want rather than the dud or monster chosen by their parents. Cyril Birch is the translator. Page references are to the Indiana University Press 2nd edition. The image is from the 1998 Peter Sellars production of The Peony Pavilion. How I wish I had seen it. Tan Dun’s music for that production (the album is titled Bitter Love) is worth hearing.
How I wish all long novels were published in sensible multi-volume editions. I have finished The Story of the Stone, 2,500 pages in five volumes, the last two translated by John Minford. Cao Xueqin and his posthumous editor Gao E again share credit for authorship. Chapters have become shorter and a few episodes seem abbreviated, but otherwise I have no sense of who did what. Perhaps Minford smooths everything out for me. In the last 22 chapters and 380 pages the novel necessarily narrows. Necessarily if it is going to have an ending, which in this case it does. A series of catastrophes strike the family began hitting the family at the end of the last volume, and they only accelerate. Disgrace, crime, debt, deaths, so many deaths, some of them expected for a long time, some real surprises. One shocked even jaded ol’ me. There is some resemblance to the occasional contemporary event of the Chinese billionaire who suddenly falls from party favor and is arrested for corruption. The garden, scene of so many teenage poetry games, is abandoned, a haunted ruin: The Garden’s caretakers saw nothing to be gained by staying. They all wanted to leave the place, and invented a whole series of incidents to substantiate the presence of diabolical tree-imps and flower sprites. (Ch. 102, 72) In the next paragraph a minor character dies suddenly, perhaps as the result of sexual assault by one of those flower sprites, more monstrous than their name suggests. Subplots resolve amidst the disasters and funerals. Story elements abandoned for 2,000 pages return. The architecture of this novel has some long, long arcs. Eventually, the story narrows back to Bao-yu, the boy born with the jade stone in his mouth, who had “degenerated into a complete idiot” (109, 79) to the point where I was beginning to wonder how he could continue to function as a protagonist. But the magical monk, seen rarely but at key moments previously, returns to take our away from the earthly plane into the Daoist fairy realm. More or less. “I know I’ve been somewhere like this before. I remember it now. It was in a dream. What a blessing this is, to return to the scene of my childhood dream!” (116, 286) Bao-yu is here in a complex dream chapter paralleling one that was well over 2,000 pages earlier, pulling together all of the major teenage female characters, dead and alive, like a last farewell to them before Bao-yu himself exits the novel just slightly ahead of the reader. But not before he – I am giving away an important part of the story – so skip ahead if this bothers you – but seriously you probably want to know this one, it is so good – not before saving his family from disgrace by getting a high score on a test. The Chief Examiner presented the successful candidates’ compositions to the throne, and His Majesty read them through one by one and found them to be well-balanced and cogent, displaying both breadth of learning and soundness of judgment… His Majesty, as a consequence of this information, being a monarch of exceptional enlightenment and compassion, instructed his minister, in consideration of the family’s distinguished record of service, to submit a full report on their case. (119, 351) So most of the characters, if they made it this far, get a happy ending of one kind or another. It is not so much that The Story of the Stone is the greatest Chinese novel but rather that it is the greatest Chinese novel. “What is truth, and what fiction? You must understand that truth id fiction, and fiction truth.” (103, 94) This from another (or perhaps the same) magical monk. The words “truth” and “fiction” are puns on the names of the two branches of the novel’s family. Bao-yu is on the fiction side, and to the extent that Cao Xueqin is his double so is the author. The great paradox of the novel, from beginning to end, is the contrast between the materialistic, dangerous “realistic” world of the adults with its budgets and corruption and the idyllic, fantastic world of the kite-flying, poetry-reciting teenagers in the garden, both ephemeral compared to Daoist eternity. What then, was Cao Xueqin doing, who does not become a monk but rather writes a monumental realistic (and ant-realistic, and unrealistic) novel based on his early adolescent moment of happiness? He finds an alternative immortality. “So it was really all utter nonsense! Author, copyist, and reader were alike in the dark! Just so much ink splashed for fun, a diversion!” (120, 375, almost the last words of the novel)
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My subject is Clarice Lispector’s Near to the Wild Heart (1943), her first novel, and the only book of hers I have read. I read Alison Entrekin’s English translation because 1) I did not have a Portuguese text handy and 2) I figured it would be too hard for me, which I think is right. I had enough trouble with the book in English. When she spoke, she invented crazy, crazy! (162) For 90 pages, Lispector alternates scenes of Joana’s childhood and the beginnings of her marriage. Then we get a hundred pages of the marriage falling apart. The husband has, for example, a pregnant girlfriend, although that is more of a symptom of the collapse. The real cause is that Joana is psychologically, hmm hmm hmm, unusual. How many times had she tipped the waiter more than necessary just because she’d remembered that he was going to die and didn’t know it. (101) That is maybe the strangest clear thought she expresses. Joana’s stream of thoughts are generally much more abstract. Entirely abstract. Here is the ending of one abstract paragraph moving into the beginning of another. Eternity was not an infinitely great quantity that was worn down, but eternity was succession. Then Joana suddenly understood that the utmost beauty was to be found in succession, that movement explained form – it was so high and pure to cry: movement explains form! – and pain was also to be found in succession because the body was slower than the movement of uninterrupted continuity. (36) Joana’s thinking, outside of the childhood scenes, if often unconnected, or just barely connected, to a scene, or anything material at all. A lot of this: How was a triangle born? as an idea first? or did it come after the shape had been executed? would a triangle be born fatally? things were rich… Where does music go when it’s not playing? (164, ellipses mine) I would describe passages like this as philosophical if I understood how Joana moves from one thought to another, which I generally did not. Sometimes I felt a move toward Surrealism, although without the playfulness or materiality I enjoy in Surrealism. The man was a child an amoeba flowers whiteness warmth like sleep for now is time for now is life even if it is later… (165, ellipses in original) This is Joana falling asleep, so here I did know what Lispector was depicting. I could, in this section, draw a connection between my own perceptions of what I call “reality” and Lispector’s representation of an aspect of reality, the process and psychology of falling asleep. But mostly I found that hard to do. Another possibility is that Joana is meant to be a pathological case study, repellent to understanding. Or that she is meant to be entirely normal, a version of the way Lispector sees the world, however nuts she looks to me, the kind of mismatch I often bounce off when reading D. H. Lawrence, where I think I am reading about someone who is psychologically unusual and begin to think, oh no, he thinks everyone is like this. Yet another idea is that the novel is full of nonsense and anti-rationality, again like Surrealism, something I usually enjoy a lot. I could have used more, I don’t know, jokes, I guess. Surrealism is fun. And material, too, not abstract. Paris Peasant is about walking around in the mall. Benjamin Moser, in the introduction, suggests that Lispector’s “project was less artistic than spiritual… not an intellectual or artistic endeavor” (xi), a good clue about my difficulties with Near to the Wild Heart. Beyond a couple of the childhood scenes I never found a hook into the art of Lispector’s novel. It is the biggest mismatch of a book with my taste that I have bumped against in quite a while. Tony Malone liked the novel more than I did but his response, section by section, looks similar to mine: “the internal monologues were a little too abstract at times,” were they ever. Someday I will try another Lispector novel, perhaps one from the 1960s, and see how that goes. Perhaps I will try one in Portuguese.
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!
“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 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.
