Me and My e-Books

Here I am on vacation earlier this week, reading an e-Book.
The book concerned is Blindsight, by Peter Watts, an SF novel available under Creative Commons licence. As you can probably make out, I am reading it on my iPhone with an app called Stanza. I have resisted the temptations of eBooks thusfar, necessitating as they seem to do large investment in readers such as Sony's reader or Amazon's proprietary Kindle. But I already have an iPhone; Stanza hardly costs any more than two bone buttons and a pin; and the fine screen of the iPhone being what it is, I felt it would do no harm to give it a try. Through Stanza you can get a vast amount of free content, so without much ado I've downloaded collections of out-of-copyright short stories by M. R. James and H. P. Lovecraft; Chuckie D's Descent of Man, King Solomon's Mines, Middlemarch, The Complete Works of Bill Shaksper and a few other things. Creative Commons titles include works by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, as well as books by Mr Watts as mentioned above.

Feeling I ought to have some incentive to try Stanza, the first book I read was Fanny Hill, the lubricious contents of which I lapped up with middle-aged pleasure, reflecting, as I did so, on how little has changed in 250 years. Of the various parts of my person that might have been induced to ache by this experience, my eyes were among the last and least. Reading books on the iPhone is a doddle. You can fiddle with the screen brightness, the font size and so on; you can dog-ear pages for future reference; you can turn the pages themselves in a most realistic manner. The only peculiarity is not having any easily grasped physical sensation of where you are in the book.

So, I rate Stanza and e-reading a great success.... except that while on holiday I picked up a much-thumbed copy of The Godfather, and was suckered into the familiar physicality of a book printed on recycled postbags, you know, with pages.

My verdict?

I like the e-Book idea. It's great, convenient, portable, and the books themselves take up very little memory (I downloaded the Complete Works of the Bard over an ordinary mobile phone network in under five minutes - such is immortality). But as far as I am concerned, they don't quite replace the pleasure of print.

Besides, when you are looking at your iPhone, people around you assume that you can be easily disturbed, perhaps more than were I actually hefting a tome. Here, for example, Crox Minima has joined me for a chat ...


... followed soon after by Crox Minor, who challenged me to a game of Scrabble. On my iPhone, naturally. Ain't technology wonderful?

Caroline's Progress

Caroline is my 13-year-old, 120,000-mile eVolvo.She's a great runner, but like many Ladies Of A Certain Age, she has her foibles. Her aircon has long since ceased to function. She has a man-eating glove compartment. But mostly she's prone to all sorts of strange readouts in her engine management system - mainly, the complex web of sensors that controls the mixture of fuel and air that goes into what in my day I called the carburettor.

Last year, her onboard computer seemed to bear a grudge, re-living ancient faults to her oxygen sensors when there was nothing, in fact, wrong. My faithful garage man took a month to track down the fault as essentially one of automotive psychology. He removed Caroline's computer, let it cool down on his test bench, and plugged it back in. End of problem. This reminded me of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when astronaut Dave Bowman disconnects HAL, the malevolent computer. 'What are you doing, Dave?' the computer asks. The reminder is all the stronger because my mechanic just happens to be called Dave.

This year, Dave has taken five weeks (and counting) to track down another fault in the same system. As I understand it, the fault is as follows: the current fuel/air mixture is very slightly too rich, and the relevant sensor is overcompensating by adding more air to the mixture, such that Caroline burns very lean.

I should point out that there is nothing actually wrong with Caroline. Lean burning suits her, and she has the engine of de-coked sparkle that wouldn't disgrace a car of half her mileage. However, Caroline's emissions don't square with the gummint's increasingly strict air quality regulations - an entirely cooked up mechanical fault, dreamed by some idiot in Whitehall. I think it's all a conspiracy to get us to scrap perfectly good cars and buy new ones that we don't need under a smokescreen of environmental health, when it's really all about propping up the motor trade.

Whatever it is, Dave (who says he is now on the point of sending Caroline hate mail) is trying to introduce a kind of valve thingy to outsmart the air sensor.

Honestly, in my day, all you did was lift the hood and twiddle with the screw on the carburettor. Sorted. And they call it progress?

Harumph.

Edit My Wikipedia Page ... Please

I am very disappointed. Very disappointed indeed. I have asked, entreated, begged - even pleaded - for people to edit my entry on Wikipedia. But no-one has obliged. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Ashamed.

Why am I so exercised by this? The fun of ego-surfing aside, I do find such uninvited bibliographic concoctions somewhat impertinent. I'm with the composer Sorabji, who, in spite of his many idiosyncrasies, had a healthy disrespect for those he called, with some disdain, 'lexicographical persons'. Call me idiosyncratic, or even eccentric (I dare you), but it's partly why I am increasingly prone, when interviewed, to send up the entire exercise. At the moment, of course, I'll do this only with friends who can be counted on to see the joke. And who would, in any case, be expecting it. For my friends who want me to be serious and sincere, well, I can do that, too. Anyone else, though, I regard as fair game. And what irks me most about such things as Wikipedia is that they didn't even ask me for an interview. It's as if I was as good as dead.

I hadn't really thought much about this until I was talking with fantasy author Steph Swainston at Constitution the other day. Steph, who is very much alive (and who I hope won't mind me saying this), criticized the habit in literary criticism in which commentators make statements about what they suppose to be the motivation of authors. It's bad enough if you're dead and can't answer back - but much, much worse if you happen to be still living. Steph had learned of a student who was doing a dissertation on her books, and although, one presumes, was diligently beavering away at Steph's novels, hadn't even the wit (or courtesy) to pick up the phone and ask Steph herself what she thought of her own motivations. I suppose that had this student done so, any and all theoretical constructs about authorial motivation would have shrunk to nothing, like overcooked spinach.

So, please, for the sake of authorial amour propre, if nothing else, please do edit my Wikipedia entry. Be as creative and outrageous as you like. I won't sue you, I promise. You can supply a nice picture, for a start. If you're stuck for any, and can supply many pleasing shots of guinea pigs.

Beach Table

Another feature of the Evolutionary Anthropology of Beachcombing (see below) is the desire to collect things. As you can imagine, when one goes out onto the beach with one's blonde beach babe
A Blonde Beach Babe, yesterday

one accumulates quite a lot of strandline treasures. Rather than have these scattered more or less randomly round the house, I built a glass-topped coffee table in which to display them all.
The joinery wouldn't win any prizes, but it's great to have a personal record of our beach treasures. There are a lot of rocks, to simulate the beach, in which you might be able to make out fragments of a crab pot, with bits and pieces of crab, lobster, fish bones, and the sponge I wrote about previously. I have cheated slightly - most of the cuttlefish bones came from Brighton (except one locally, from Happisburgh) and oysters and razor clams mainly come from Holkham Bay - this also yielded the starfish. Apart from that, it's all from Cromer. Enough to make a decent Five-Phylum Stew.

The Evolutionary Anthropology of Beachcombing

I have been consumed with frustration in recent days. The principal cause of this has been industrial action by an assortment of trolls who think that holding strikes for pay in a recession, thus holding commuters to ransom, is a good way to improve public relations. I have been tweeting about this with some vigour, but nothing I seem to do in this regard alleviates a pain conditioned by the fact that any and all rage I feel is impotent. We commuters are so powerless...

Luckily I have several emollients at hand. It's always good for the soul to have a huggable pet at hand, or possibly, foot.

A huggable pet, yesterday

Another healthful and psychologically restorative activity is beachcombing: this column is ample evidence that beachcombing is one of my favourite activities. So, yesterday evening, when the sun was setting and most of the terrorists tourists had packed up for the day, Crox Minor and I took Canis croxorum to Cromer East Beach, the Maison Des Girrafes answer to the Sandwalk .

Cromer is, in fact, somewhat depauperate in terms of biodiversity, especially when compared with the rich profusion of life on the Atlantic seaboard. Shells are remarkably scarce: if you find anything at all, it's likely to be a slipper limpet (Crepidula ... er ... fornicata). There, are of course, lots of crabs, both the shore variety (Carcinus maenas) and the edible sort (Cancer pagurus) for which Cromer is famous. Most of what one thinks is seaweed are actually bryozoa, Flustra foliacea, or hornwrack.

This apparent lack of diversity might be more apparent than real. It's all a question of getting your eye in, and after more than two years we're getting rather good at finding things. Yesterday, for example, Crox Minor found this rather dramatic fish jaw (apologies for the low quality - the iPhone has yet to get a macro lens attachment) which as you can see from the scale is rather large. This will be, of course, just the front half of the entire jaw. I guess it's a cod, but that's just a guess.

Meanwhile I picked up this fragment of weed, which is neither bryozoan nor alga but sponge, which I guess is some species of Leucosolenia. You can tell it's a sponge from the pores or oscula at the tips of the branches, and by the fact that this dried-out specimen (collected from above the tideline) feels - well, there's no other way to say this - spongy.

Why is beachcombing so good for the soul? I have an idea about this, connected with human evolution. When Homo sapiens first evolved in Africa around 200,000 years ago, the first thing he did was head for the beach. There is some evidence for this, from Eritrea, and also South Africa. Once at the beach, Homo sapiens found, in shellfish, a kind of food that was nutritious, easy to catch and didn't always need to be cooked. Seaweeds, crabs and other crustaceans and (of course) fishes made up a diet substantially enriched in minerals and essential fatty acids compared with inland diets. It might be no coincidence that the first vague scratchings of human art and culture occur at beach cave-sites such as Blombos in South Africa. When human beings migrated around the world, strandlines provided the easiest routes, never far from sources of food.

Perhaps more fancifully, our ancient roots as beachcombers might explain why we love living by the sea, and millions of people from inland consider a vacation on the beach a perfect place to relax. Why else would people drive or fly at great expense and inconvenience, to a slim strip of sand or shingle next to a body of salty water?

I should stress that I am making no great claims for this idea: scenarios for the early environment of humans and their presumed legacy in people living nowadays generally have a debatable history. On the other hand ...