Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

I've been in Boston (or Bahston, as the natives pronounce it) since Monday evening, attending a training class at the elegant Wyndham Hotel, in what I'm told is the Financial district. One never knows about some of these classes, but this has turned out to be very good. The class has covered Information Architecture and Taxonomy (but why are they teaching you to stuff dead animals, as someone joked this morning). I may cover the topic on a separate blog; this one is just about my trip. The weather in Boston is brisk; just above freezing. Tonight/tomorrow morning we are supposed to get 2 to 4 inches of snow. Whoopee. But it hasn't been awful. I've gone on several walking trips since arriving; the wind is bracing, not freezing. I get back to the hotel rosy-cheeked. Yesterday went to Faneuil Hall, wandered about and bought t-shirts for the boy-os. This evening I hiked over to Boston Commons and went for a walk until just after dark. Being in a really old city (well compare...

Okay, finally finished Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson (great book, by the way) and am now, how shall I put this, between reads. I've got a couple of things sitting on the bedside, but haven't launched into anything yet. Actually that's not completely accurate: I've got several new Mangas that I'm reading. I also read one of the Hellboy comics I'd picked up at the library. Somehow those don't seem to count. I've got several books of short stories I'm going to start, just for grins, including an anthology edited by Nick Hornby and a couple of John Updike collections. Second draft continues to be slogged through...egad, what agony. Next week I'm in Boston (in my guise as corporate simulacra ) and hoping I'll have a chance to get another dozen pages of the second draft beat into shape.

Found yet another interesting site for Intellectual Property / Copyright issues at Copyfight . It's the end of civilization as we know it. Well, as someone knows it, anyway.

Right now I'm about 2/3rds of the way through Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash , an absolutely fascinating book. What can I say? I love this guy's stuff. Before starting it, I read about 5 pages of Michael Crichton's Disclosure . The two were written about a year apart (Snow Crash: 1992, Disclosure: 1993). But there is no comparison. Don't get me wrong - I've read a number of Crichton books and found them thoroughly enjoyable (read Jurassic Park the summer I was layed up in bed with a herniated disk). Both ostensibly had computers as part of their plot stuff. The Crichton book sounded like your average business intrigue techno-thriller. Stephenson's starts out with virtual reality universes, then moves on to funky Scientology-esque religion (founded by, get this: L. Bob Rife) and ancient Sumerian cult religions using lingustic viruses that leave the afflicted speaking in tongues. How cool is that? Snow Crash is full of what the writer's group I (now) belo...

I'm putting together some appropriate quotes for the prologue of my novel. Here are two of my favorites, from both sides of the issue. First, from Jack Valenti, past president of the MPAA, during testimony in 1982 about the Sony Betamax video recorder: I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. And from the admirable Lawrence Lessig, from his book Freedom Culture (available as hardcopy or free electronic file ). For the single point that is lost in this war on pirates is a point that we see only after surveying the range of these changes. When you add together the effect of changing law, concentrated markets, and changing technology, together they produce an astonishing conclusion: Never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now .