“original content”

Scott McCloud begins Understanding Comics^AM wrangling to create a definition of comics, contrasting it with pictures and movies. Taken individually, a picture is merely that, a picture. Arranged sequentially however, pictures are transformed into something else. If the sequence is temporal—pictures alternating in time, fixed in space—we call that art movies. If the sequence is spatial—pictures adjacent in space, “juxtaposed”—we call it comics.

So that’s that. His is a great book and you won’t regret reading it, but for now hearken back with me to the web before blogs. There was, in such olden times, something called the «personal homepage»: primeval websites where people put their disjointed personal trivia for the world to admire. (See An Exploratory Profile of Personal Home Pages: Content, Design, Metaphors.) They were usually boring, disorienting, and self-flattering (think photo albums) but there had been nothing like that before, not on this scale—you could learn about fascinating people you’d otherwise never meet and there were some unbelievable things out there. But back to the photo album metaphor. Personal homepages were piles of scattered, assorted personal paraphernalia—they were, in a way, photo albums.

Then the blogs started to appear. It took a while to notice anything had changed. The diary metaphor obscured as much as it enlightened. With some hindsight it’s easy to pinpoint what happened—and to marvel at how simple yet radical a change it was. The blog era is when websites learned about sequence, spatial sequence. They stopped being fractal trees of buried content and became, yes, comics—post became the new panel.

By spatial, we mean that blogs, just as comics, unfold in space. There’s a post and right below it there’s another, further below, another, and so on. It makes as much sense to talk of a “blog strip” as of a “comic strip”—about the only difference is that the former goes from top-to-bottom while the latter from left-to-right (or right-to-left).

And then there’s sequence. Sequence brought context, interface and development to websites, it gave them personality, motion, and tension, made them subject to change and thus to evolution. Sequence brought time.

Every page in a blog has a natural context: it comes after the previous post and before the next. A blog’s homepage is simply a broad sweep of the most recent panels posts in the strip—an easy way to glimpse the website’s personality and recent happenings. If you’re faithful (or diligent), you can see the writing and the themes evolve through time. The mind fills in the gaps, the bleeds, and the continuity that emerges can feel as real and intense as reality itself. Spatial interface is a brilliant interface in its almost ridiculous simplicity.

(Blogs are the web’s poster boy for spatial sequence but they’re by no means the only (or the first) web form to avail itself of it. Comments, within blogs and beyond, are also spatially sequenced, are also comics. So are forum threads.)

What, then, is the equivalent of movies in the web? What web form is temporally sequenced—”pictures” alternating in time, fixed in space? The hard part, really, was coming up with the question. The answer is obvious: wikis.

Consider a popular pedia^ELZR (Wikipedia article). It’s the product of a myriad interventions (most of them rather trivial) from several Wikipedists, but you are only seeing the most recent frame when visiting the pedia’s URL. If you visit in a couple of hours, chances are someone corrected a typo, reverted vandalism, or added a sentence, and you will thus see a slightly different frame—the pedia has “moved”! Unknown to a surprising amount of users, every pedia has a history where a log is kept of even the most minute change—the movie’s celluloid film. Wikis are movies.

Something made me cry in Harriet Brown’s One Spoonful at a Time —a long, personal story on anorexia from last week’s New York Times. I’ve been unbelievably emotional these days but blame it rather on it being a superbly written account (“The rough days were predictable only in the sense that they kept coming.”) by an extremely intelligent, rational, and honest mother trying to cure her daughter’s anorexia —and that it manages to be a fairly deep, scientific intro into the eating disorder (“Anorexia is one of the deadliest psychiatric diseases; it’s estimated that up to 15 percent of anorexics die, from suicide or complications related to starvation. About a third may make some improvement but are still dominated by their obsession with food. Many become depressed or anxious, and some develop substance-abuse problems, like alcoholism. Almost half never marry.”) while still being punctuated at every paragraph with raw, emotional portraits of desperation (“I woke with my heart pounding, full of rage and hatred for Not-Kitty, the demon who lived on air, who wore my daughter’s face and spoke with her voice.”) and hope.

In what is to date my longest translation I’ve put the story into Spanish: Una Cucharada a la vez. Please pass it along to someone who might need to read it.

Hace unos dias ya que Ben me aviso que, justo despues de un roce con la muerte, Daniel Dennett^WP acababa de escribir una carta, Thank Goodness!, en la que respondia a sus amigos que le preguntaban si en algo se habia afectado su largamente publico ateismo.

La carta me impresiono muchisimo inmediatamente, porque atendia varias preguntas que me estaba haciendo en ese momento (recuerdo que ese mismo dia le decia a mi hermana Chepe en el cafe, medio en broma y medio no, que si realmente no queriamos morir por que no nos volviamos doctores (como Chemito!) y nos poniamos a investigar?) y porque me emociono tremendamente el estilo conciliador pero firme, tan brillantemente elegante, de Dennett. En cierta forma la carta es una buena y sosegada continuacion a la carta elegiaca^ELZR de Eliezer Yudkowsky a su fallecido hermano Yehuda—aquella carta que tanto me marco en su momento, que tanto ame por su cruda rabia y su descarnado optimismo, y que traduje al Español casi por reflejo (reflejo que fue muy gratamente reforzado cuando mi primo Paco me dijo que le llevo la traduccion a sus alumnos de prepa).

He traducido, tambien casi por reflejo, esta carta de Daniel Dennett y se encuentra disponible aqui, como una hoja aparte: Gracias al bien!. Fue una traduccion mucho mas dificil por aquellas oraciones increibles y barrocas de Dennett asi que por favor dejen un mensaje si se les ocurre cualquier forma de mejorar la traduccion. (Gracias, por cierto, a Chemito por asesoria medica en la traduccion.)

Ojala lo lean, ojala los haga pensar y ojala nos veamos en los proximos dias con sus opiniones. (Para ser escritas, las mias tendran que esperar todavia unos dias a que aterrice el desorden de ideas que traigo—esta carta de Dennet me condujo al movimiento de los brights^WP, a las ultimas ediciones de Wired, Time, y Newsweek, a los escritos de Dawkins, a Edge, a leer ciencia, a discusiones, coming-outs, y a muchos, muchos pequeños repensamientos propios).

Why read David Friedman’s Machinery of Freedom^AM:

You could think of money as a bundle of alternatives, options—and you wouldn’t be wrong. (With these five bucks I could buy this week’s Economist, or get an Oreo Blizzard, or go watch El Laberinto del Fauno, or give something to eat to a street kid, or gift Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!^AM to Sergio, or save for my old age, or pay one more month of the gym, or pay someone to do my dry-cleaning and lie on the grass instead.)

You could think of life as a bundle of options—and you wouldn’t be wrong. (With these one more hour of life, I could read part III of David Friedman’s The Machinery of Freedom^AM, or talk to Chemito in Monterrey, or to Sergio in Ciudad Juarez, or write that email for Adolfo, or go to the gym, or flirt with that girl, or masturbate, or work at Domburi, or write my next post, or think through why I believe the government is only legitimized force, or go lie on the grass instead.)

Thus, you could think of money as life—and you wouldn’t be wrong.

Options are our universally valued currency.

Now, of course money isn’t always life. There are some options that we think of as life that may be impossible to get in exchange for money. (I may spend all my money trying to revive my grandmother and, in all likelihood, never be able to do it.) And there are some options that we think of as economical that may be impossible to get in exchange for life. (I may spend my life trying to buy a space station and, in all likelihood, never be able to afford it.)

But there’s still undoubtedly a huge overlap between them that most people are uncomfortable to acknowledge—the most they’re usually willing to concede is the common wisdom that «you need some minimal amount of money to live», which translated yields the tautological «you need some minimal amount of options to have options». The difficulty, seems to me, is that by life we mean both «options» and «taking options». What is the point of always striving for money (options) if you’re not going to live with it (take them!)? Under this light, common wisdom translates to «to be able to take options you need to have a minimal amount of options.» Which is still fairly obvious, but far more wisdomous.

Have you thought just how much you can say, in this tongue we speak in right now, just with words made of just one piece of sound? How short, how sweet, how wow! No? You think it’s no big deal? Well, my hard to please friend, I ask you then to put all that I’ve just said (and a wee bit more that I still have to pour), in words as short as mine, in a tongue that is not the tongue we speak in right now.

We’ll talk then.

(And if you got a thing or two, nice or bad, to say back to this post, please please a form fool and keep your words short. Thanks!)

Some days ago my cousin Cris got married to Julio in a beautiful, simple civil ceremony. They’re having a (huge) Catholic ceremony come December but as of that Saturday they’re already husband and wife. It was the first time I got to see a civil wedding (in Mexico, they’re usually done privately, shortly after the religious service, a furtive formality between the mass and the party) and since I was Cris’s witness, I even took part in the ceremony itself. I loved every minute of it.

The lunch—delicious carnitas ^{WP, F} (we all ate too much)—was held at the family’s over-used reception room and most of the guests were either bride’s or groom’s family (each, as tradition has it, at opposite sides of the room) with a small contingent of the couple’s mutual friends (all looking disturbingly middle-aged from my vantage point). Chemito superstar came from Monterrey in a one-day round trip and got the bride crying :).  Most anyone looked stunning. Most anyone looked happy.

The party would extend well beyond sunset with the polemic smuggling of a TV to watch the Chivas-America soccer classic and the road back home would prove an adventure onto itself owing to treacherous potholes and a monsoon, but it was the actual signing of the marriage contract that so impressed me that day. On one level, of course I was excited and bewildered and happy that Cris was (finally¹!) marrying. And it was the first time it happened to someone so close—all weddings before I felt an spectator, only indirectly related to the bride or the groom.

The judge arrived, the music stopped, and we all gathered around a simple table where Julio, Cristina, and their witnesses sat—everyone expectant. The judge declared the ceremony started with a sibilant, annoying voice, asked the parts to the contract if they had come on their own will (no dramatic “Speak now or forever hold your peace.” though), and proceeded to read a long, overly politically correct text that is still a marked improvement from the 140-year-old anachronism that used to be mandatory at weddings (turns out that was only discontinued 6 months ago). They were then asked to read a brief formulaic statement to each other and finally, in a great anticlimax, bride and groom, and later their witnesses and their parents, got to sign a seemingly endless string of documents amid nervous laughs. The judged pronounced them husband and wife (”...in the name of Law and Society”), the ceremony was over, and in a roar we all came tumbling down to congratulate the newlyweds, tears sprouting all over the place.

So you see, it was actually a very simple affair—and yet dramatically different from a religious ceremony. To begin with, it felt unbelievably more intimate to me. Yes, I was the witness and I was there at the table and I loved the bride and all, but I still think people all over felt very much more involved, standing at arm’s length around us, smiling and crying at the happily terrified couple. The ceremony may have sounded formal, it was, but that’s nothing compared to the rote convolutedness of a religious service. It pretended to be nothing more than the signing of a human contract—which is, of course, what it is—and I delighted in such simplicity—it felt so unadulterated, so raw, so human. Alas, there was still, to be sure, the specter of the State all over the place², but I was so cheerfully entranced by the absence of God that I didn’t notice it then. I was happy.

Is a translator who doesn’t believe linguistic intercommunication problems should or could be remedied as ridiculous as a doctor who doesn’t believe that diseases should or could be remedied? Or put another way, is a translator who believes that linguistic intercommunication problems can or should only be palliated as ridiculous as a doctor who believes diseases can or should only be palliated, not cured?

I frankly don’t know. But those who know me can see on which side I’m leaning. The thought came to me tonight and am still grappling with what it would mean.

Esto me vino a la mente esta tarde, en el cruce de Periferico y Tutelar cuando un limpiaparabrisas se me echo encima a pesar de mi clara y categorica renuencia. Cuando termino no le di nada, lo ignore de la misma estudiada forma en la que el me ignoro cuando le gesticulaba que no, que no queria que limpiara mi parabrisas, pero despues me senti algo mas mal que de costumbre al darme cuenta que habia hecho un trabajo inusualmente bueno y mi parabrisas eran unos ojos recien llorados. Me molesto que algo que podia ser un servicio agradable decayera en algo a rehuir y al buscar una forma de evitar ese empobrecimiento se me ocurrio esta excentricidad mercadotecnica. Quien sabe, se antoja raro pero interesante. No seria memorable que por una vez en vez de solo robar tu atencion hicieran algo por ti?