Saturday, September 23, 2006

Long Titles, Short Titles, and "I Know When to Shut Up; I'm Not One To Keep Yapping; When Somebody Tells ME To Shut Up I Shut Right Up Right Away and Don't Keep Prattling On Like SOME People I Know" Titles...

There's a lot of stuff going on. Living in a country where the democratic process is deeply compromised and where the populace at large won't remmeber past 40 days and don't want to discuss it is alienating at best. Living in a country where lawyers lie with impunity in open court and judges are so full of ennui because they have virtually no oversight (I could tell you stories - and I will, later) is exasperating. Living in a place where the courts that decide the future of our children, family court, are a badge of failure to judges, and the public education system is a huge failure and a low priority, where the future of our children and the well-being of our citizens seem to be the state's lowest priorities, is downright alarming and causes one to fall silent once in a while. It would be as psychotic as an upbeat drum-majorette to just keep smiling through all that, and I think to resolve issues one must first face them.

Plus my thinking about the planet thing (still going on) is that it's a pretty big deal and there's really no need to move on and step one's own issues while said issues remaion unresolved, and I suspect the planet thing cannot be easily resolved without some collective soul-searchign about the social nature of "scientific truth". All little tremors and aftershocks of rationalism, the enlightenment, and the exceptionally misguided error in logic that this philosophy represents, pushing the idea that because the gardeners at Versailles can do nice topiary designs using applied trigonometry, our mathematical models are somehow the puppet-strings that move the universe... so the need for doing another posting in the next fifty years or so is in question, if I take the view that my audience (bless her heart - I don't know how she puts up with me) can only be distracted from the theoretically lofty concept put forth in one post if we push it out with a subsequent post before the point of the first is cleared up; but I digress...

So a few months ago I was working at this startup, a press for the long tail of vanity publishing. It is a very solid idea to appeal to that part of the spirit, and Dan, perhaps the technology mastermind behind the original expressions of the idea, is a brilliant evangelist and gave me to understand that I would basically be some cobination of Jean Paul Sartre and Mikhail Gorbachov if I came on board and got my head and some code around process and the concept of architecting the community aspects of their technology, which I did. Brilliant. Dan appealed to my vanity and it worked like a charm. Unfortunately, the character of the company changed rapidly, and its roadmap started to differ substantially from my own and those of my friends and sponsors within, so there was a changing of the guard. More power to them. They take great pride in never streching their content beyond a third-grade reading level, and they do produce very nice books for a virtually zero initial outlay. Pretty nice, really.

The funny thing is, once you jump on the bandwagon and start thinking of your stuff in terms of books (you know, the "Picnic at Golden Gate Park on a Foggy Summer Afternoon" coffee-table picture book) there's this titling problem - some of these titles need to be as long as the books are short, and some longer ones also want for longer titles. So the title of this post is just by implication that perhaps long-titling is my own malaise, but the funny thing was that I found it very limiting to produce books with such abbreviated titles that they could only be dramatic representatons. I suppose there's nothign wrong with titling every book, paper, letter, or poem you write with "One", "Two", and so on, but I have always had a special place in my heart for Bugs Bunny and that line...

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