(If the above image makes perfect sense to you, you can go ahead and stop reading, because the rest of this post is just going to be me ranting a bit to the people that don’t get what the hell we’re talking about.)

Yesterday, I meant to just post a link over to the ever-excellent I Love Typography blog to answer a FAQ about book layout. And then I accidentally veered off into the start of an unintentional tangent about Art versus Science, because, really, that’s a “debate” that pushes about twenty of my buttons. No apologies for those scare quotes, either, as the word “debate” is supposed to imply some thought and reason… and there’s just not any (sane) reason why Science and Art should be at odds.

Because they’re the same damned thing, that’s why.

No, not “two sides to the same coin.”  That’d mean only one could be showing at the same time, or that one or the other should be used to win any given competition.  No.  Science and Art are two words for the same. exact. thing.

But No! you may exclaim, from whichever side you’ve found yourself aligned, Because Science is all about boring repetition and crazy complicated math / Because art is all about making stuff up with no real logic or proof!

Neither of you has actually ever paid any attention to the either side, though, have you?  You had some (sorry excuse for) a teacher in school that told you that you were good or bad at one of the other, and you didn’t know any better, so you’ve believed them ever since.

Let me talk to the Scientists in the room, first.  (Of all disciplines, yes, and I’m bundling Math and Medicine into this conversation because you’re a part of the whole.) I know a lot of you, personally, and I know that some of you occasionally look over at art with some reverence and a little bit of jealousy, wishing you could understand it a bit better, so that the Artists in the room didn’t recoil in terror when you tell them what you do for a living.  The thing is, you’re both just uninformed.  The opposite of Science is not Art.  The opposite of Science is Ignorance. You’ve known all your life that Science is a means by which we increase and quantify and share our knowledge of the world, haven’t you?  Your biggest battles have been against the people who are unwilling to learn something new, who are stubbornly set in their incomplete views and just don’t care about any proof to the contrary. Those people are not Artists – those people are idiots.  And that some of them have happened to be holding a paintbrush at the time is an unrelated and unfortunate coincidence.  If you can tell me you’ve never met a self-proclaimed Scientist that was actually just a brick of stupid with some basic party-trick math skills… well, you can’t tell me that, because you know that they exist, too.

And Artists, you know I know a lot of you personally, too. (Of all genres, yes, and I’m lumping Writing and Music in, too, because you’re part of the whole.)  Your community is no less scornful of the Scientists than the Scientists are of you.  In recent years I think I’d wager you’ve gotten a bit louder about it, even.  And yet some of you will occasionally look at a beautiful fractal image and not-so secretly lament that you maybe wish you understood the math required to make one. Or you’ve carefully talked around what sort of Writer you are so that the Physicist in the room will take you seriously just long enough to finish talking about something fascinating.  And sometimes you really do wish those particularly assholish folks in the Science community wouldn’t make you feel quite so much like they’re patting you on the fucking head when you tell them what you do for a living.  The thing is, you’re both just uninformed.  The opposite of Art is not Science.  The opposite of Art, really, is Ignorance. You’ve known all your life that Art is a means by which we grow and scale and share our experience of the world, haven’t you?  Your biggest battles have been against the people who are unwilling to look at something new, who are stubbornly set in their unfinished beliefs and just don’t care about any demonstration to the contrary. Those people are not Scientists – those people are idiots.  And that some of them have happened to be holding a protractor at the time is an unrelated and unfortunate coincidence.  If you can tell me you’ve never met a self-proclaimed Artist that was actually just a brick of shallow with some basic party-trick drawing skills… well, you can’t tell me that, because you know that they exist, too.

And those of you in the middle, like  me, well you already know all this.  It just gets a little tiring having people expect you to take sides, doesn’t it? Or just not even asking before they label you as one or the other, depending on the conversation.  Just because I can freehand a straight line doesn’t mean I can’t graph it, too.

Now, I don’t want to get into what we’re taught in schools and how that’s informed the idea of what’s Art and what’s Science.  We all know all the school systems are broken blah blah, but the fact of the matter is we’re all fucking adults, now, aren’t we?  Many of us have learned by now that a lot of things we were taught in school were bullshit, so that’s not really a strong excuse for this.  I mean, I was fucking lousy at History in school, but that doesn’t mean I’m scared of watching the news, now.  Turns out I’m just not wired to memorize dates, duh, but that in no way affects my ability to understand and be interested in events.

You may have been just wretched at Geometry, in school.  You may still have no ability to balance a checkbook.  But if you know where to stand in a room to take advantage of the best light for a perfect photograph, then you’ve got a working knowledge of Physics, and no one ever bothered to tell you so.

You may have been the kid that ate crayons instead of coloring in the lines, in school.  You may still have no ability to draw even a stick figure.  But if you know where to place your fingers to feel for a pulse on a patient, then you’ve got a working knowledge of shape and anatomy that a lot of artists spend years trying to master.

But Science is all about rules and repetition, and I don’t have any rules and I’m constantly changing, you may say.  Well if that’s really true, then you’re a shit artist, and you probably secretly know that. If your style evolves, it’s because you’ve put in the work to get it there, by practice and by applying the lessons you’ve learned along the way.  Maybe you weren’t taught in a brick and mortar school, but if you’ve closed yourself off to learning anything, ever, then you’re a sorry excuse for a human being, let alone an artist.  You certainly don’t exist in a vacuum, which means you are applying theories that others passed along, even if you think you worked your own proofs to get there.  And, you know, the reason you’re a special and unique snowflake is because someone did the math to figure out how many possible angles you’ve got.  (Someone else, of course, figured out that you’re only unique to this particular generation of falling snow, and odds are you may have a twin snowflake somewhere else, you just haven’t met them yet. But I digress.)

But Art is all about making shit up and running with instinct, and I only follow a set of proven rules, you may say.  I’m not even going to bother ranting at you, because if that’s true, then I (and the Physics committee) are very interested in observing the Higgs boson you’ve obviously got on your shelf, thanks.

Writers are professional liars, sifting through the detritus of civilization to create a world never before seen by anyone living today.  Oh, no, wait, I might have meant to say Anthropologists.  Surgeons painstakingly alter organic objects with delicate precision to create or salvage perfected figures that only previously existed in their minds. Oh, nope, whoops, I probably meant to say Sculptors.  Astronomers observe and record subtle and extreme variations in wavelengths in an attempt to not only understand the universe, but to preserve that understanding for future generations.  Or did I mean to say Musicians?

I could do this all day, and maybe I should, maybe I really need to – but I’m going to trust that you can start figuring it out for yourself. Because if you look, if you just look at it, that ampersand between “Arts & Sciences” is clearly not a fucking “or” is it?

All right, then.

---

(Stealth addendum: Jennifer Day asked me via twitter (@jdaysy) if I’d make a Venn Diagram print, and I really couldn’t think of any reason why not. I mean, honestly, the idea of that Venn on lab/studio/office walls out in the wild just makes me grin. So, if you want one, too, they’re right here. If you do get one, twitter me a picture of it hanging in your workspace, yeah?)

I realize it’s been a couple of days since I’ve posted, so this is just to say that I didn’t stop the planet and get off or anything. My mornings have been occupied by day-job work (as per usual), but yesterday afternoon I jaunted down to the Emerson Salon to get my hair done; and today I moseyed over to the Science Fiction Museum (its offices, rather) for an interview with a marvelous woman from a marvelous magazine.

(I’m not sure if I’m supposed to talk about it yet, though, so in deference to caution I’ll just be vague and conspiratorial.)

Anyway, each of these events took several hours including travel time to-and-from,* and the rest of my writer-work days have been occupied with the usual time-whittling business emails, phone calls, bill paying, and errand-running. So there are no new words to report on Ganymede, and no one is more rueful on this point than yours truly.

But the night is still young.

______________________________________________________________
* Yes, several hours for the hair. I think it’s worth it, once every five or six weeks, to have awesome peacock tresses. The day will eventually come that I change my mind, I’m sure; but for now I’m happy for an afternoon wherein I am not responsible for anything except holding still while the nice man paints up my ‘do.

PDF-mag, this issue focussing on Parisian alt.culture. 4 euros a pop for this one, previous issues are free downloads.

THE DOSE magazine – Issue 3 (Paris) TEASER

• Extremely Bad Advice: Harassment Resources – National Post
  just fucking genius, really
  (tags:peopleiknow funny )

And I am having the best birthday, ever! Thank you to everyone who has wished me happy birthday on the Twitters, and if July 29th is your birthday too, happy birthday to you!

(Image by Chuck Gamble, found at WIRED's GeekDad blog.)

Photo by Ben Corrigan.

Ryan Francesconi‘s wonderful music has been lilting around the edges of my life since 1995 when we briefly worked together with Dan Cantrell in the Toids, an experimental folk group that riffed off various Eastern European idioms in tandem with Francesconi and Cantrell’s eclectic compositional styles. Back then, Francesconi was one seriously intimidating guitar/tambura/bouzouki shredder! He reveled in playing faster, smarter, better than anybody. He’s a shredder still, and no one can approximate his style… but over the years, wisdom seems to have smoothed over some of the sharper, more Malmsteinish edges of his virtuosity. Lately, the music he makes has deepened into an expression of something far more present, and pure.

Nowhere is this more apparent than on a quietly stunning record Francesconi released earlier this year, called Parables. A series of songs for solo acoustic guitar, it reflects his interest in American bluegrass, Bulgarian folk, jazz improvisation and Baroque lute music. Recorded live (no overdubs!), the music is graceful and green with nods of kinship to everyone from Nick Drake to Herman Hesse to the forests of the Pacific Northwest– which is where Francesconi lives when he’s not trotting the globe.

Speaking of– if you’re a fan of Joanna Newsom, the name Ryan Francesconi is probably already familiar to you, since he’s been one of her key players for several years, leading her live touring performers in the Ys Street Band and arranging/playing on just about every song on her new triple album, Have One On Me. They’re kicking off their summer West Coast tour of the States tonight in San Diego, California. Newsom had this to say about Parables:

“Ryan Francesconi is one of the most awe-inspiring musicians I’ve known. On “Parables,” he distills his many realms of artistry [...] into a beautifully minimalist, poetic, intricate, emotionally realized study of themes, variations, organic counterpoint, and such devastating forays into fractal-metric out-lands that it is nearly impossible to believe he’s picking those strings with just one hand. This is solo music that sounds like an ensemble, an ecstatic and measured reconciliation of West African / Balkan / Baroque / bluegrass influences, which ultimately resembles nothing I know.”

Pick up Parables on vinyl over at Drag City (they’re currently sold out of the CD), or in Mp3 format from CD Baby or iTunes.

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Post tags: Events, Faboo, Music, Personal Style

"…nobody should be older than Warren Ellis except maybe Alan Moore."

Courtesy of crisper (many thanks!) four graphs of the pulp publication data:

And since some folks are asking for further breakdown and I can't do that right now, I've uploaded the original spreadsheets:

• Total list of the pulps
• Romance pulps
• Saucy/spicy pulps
• Science fiction pulps
• Sports pulps
• Western pulps

And, yeah, I know there were probably a lot better ways to do these spreadsheets, both mathematically and aesthetically.

Norman Spinrad just emailed me this link to what appears to be the first of a series of posts about The Publishing Death Spiral, the core of which is this:

Here’s how it works. Barnes and Noble and Borders, the major bookstore chains, control the lion’s share of retail book sales. They order centrally for all their outlets together, for instance there is a single buyer for all science fiction, all mysteries, etc. How, you may well ask, can these buyers read and pass judgement on, for example, the over 1000 SF titles published in a year?

Of course the answer is they can’t. Instead, an equation makes the buys of most of the books on the racks or blackballs the ones that don’t make it that far. It’s called ?order to net.?

Let’s say that some chain has ordered 10,000 copies of a novel, sold 8000 copies, and returned 2000, a really excellent sell-through of 80%. So they order to net on the author’s next novel, meaning 8000 copies. And let’s even say they still have an 80% sell-through of 6400 books, so they order 6400 copies of the next book, and sell 5120….

You see where this mathematical regression is going, don’t you?

Read the whole thing.

Jess Nevins never fails to amaze me.

…if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that? Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet (Yes, I’m a stat wonk, I guess)…

And, at the link, you will find the link to said spreadsheet, as well as all the relevant history, explanations and details.

Title:The Devil You Know
Word: starch
Challenger: @annie_kathleen
Length: 200 words exactly

My twenty-second reboot this year, apparently.

Apparently, of course, because I've no memory of previous reboots. That's the deal: for an incredible amount of money, you sign away five years. And one day you wake up, it's five years later, and you have only the guarantee that there are no outstanding warrants for criminal activity.

But reboots regularly wipe your memories. I know I'm more muscular now and I have dark hair instead of blonde. No idea when that happened; could be yesterday, could be two years back. According to the labels in my room, I insist on no starch when my shirts are laundered. Why? No idea.

I stand in front of the machine, pondering. It's always my choice, you see. They make that very clear.

I could decide not to reboot, say I've had enough. I'd forfeit the vast majority of the fee, but I could do it.

I'd have my old life back.

Or I can press the button, hope like hell that the reboot goes wrong, that it wipes out memories from prior to joining up.

I'm told I've pressed the button eighty-three times previously.

I ponder, decide which is safer.

Then I press the button.

� Lee Barnett, 2010

This story is part of the 2010 Fast Fiction Challenge. A list of the first fifty stories in the challenge can be found here. New challenges can be made here.

The Fast Fiction Challenge - The Book; now available from lulu.com and, if you're in the US, via Amazon.com here; 180 of the best fast fiction challenge stories from the first three years' challenges...

I like to think that if Cranes had formed last month rather than 20 years ago, this is what they’d sound like. "See Birds," Balam Acab.

This is, perhaps, the geekiest thing I?ve done in many a month, but it does help me answer a question that?s been bothering me for a while: if the pulps are supposed to have died around 1950, why were there so many pulps published after that?

Certainly, it seemed to me that there were a lot of pulps published after 1950, and that the "death" of the pulps was overstated. But there was really only one way to resolve this: a spreadsheet. (Yes, I?m a stat wonk, I guess).

So, here you go. The link brings you to a spreadsheet I created, covering the years 1896-1960, with seven categories: Overall, Detective Pulps, Romance Pulps, Saucy/Spicy Pulps, Science Fiction Pulps, Sports Pulps, and Western Pulps. (I?d present the information as an easy-to-read table, but?-embarrassingly-?I never learned how to make them). Each entry is for the number of magazines?-not issues?-in that category published that year, so for 1898 there was only one pulp published, in 1931 there were 150 pulps total published, including 28 detective, 24 romance, 8 saucy/spicy, 8 science fiction, 2 sports, and 33 westerns. The number in the Overall category won?t equal the sum of the other categories because I omitted smaller pulp genres (boxing, weird menace) and pulps publishing general pulpy adventure fiction and because some pulps, like Western Rodeo Romance, fit into two categories.



Now, admittedly, this is a hasty and imprecise collection of data-?what would be more useful would be a) the number of pulps published broken down by month as well as by year (can?t be done-?that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps) and b) the sales figures (someone may have some of that data, but, again, that information simply isn?t possible to get for too many pulps). But we can draw some tentative conclusions from this.

First, the pulps didn?t die around 1950. That was the peak post-WW2 year for them. The death of the pulps was a gradual thing, although by 1955 the end of the medium and its replacement by the digest format must have been obvious. Nonetheless, I think it?s fair to say that the death of the pulps and the transition to digests took a while. One obvious precursor was the transition from dime novels to pulps in the 1910s. I don?t have the data to do a similar spreadsheet on dime novels (although, hmm, I could put one together using Galactic Central), but I know, based on the western and detective dime novels, that their death and replacement by the pulps in the 1910s was gradual and not sudden. I think the death of the pulps was like that.

Second, and I know this will be hard for the sf zealots to read, but...sf wasn?t the most important genre for the pulps. (And, please, never write the phrase "the pulp genre." There was no such thing. The pulps were the medium, not the genre). Until 1939 there were more spicy pulps published every year than sf pulps. (Why the number of spicy pulps declined is another question, one I can?t answer). From 1937 to 1951 there were more sports pulps published every year than sf pulps. Westerns clobber sf. And romance pulps...well, this will gall the geeks, but romance pulps were more important to the industry than sf pulps. (And the average pulp romance story was approximately eight times better written than the average pulp sf story, but that?s another issue).

Third, take a look at the saucy/spicy list. The first one came out in 1912. That?s before detective pulps, before westerns, before sf, before romance, before everything except general fiction, adventure, and railway. The saucy/spicy pulps are criminally understudied, not least because they are much less available to scholars than even the romance or sports pulps, but they were around for a long time and deserve further study. Hell, from 1915 to 1924 they made up at least 10% of the entire industry.

Fourth-?the number of Westerns! Criminy! For such a formulaic genre (with a few exceptions) it was remarkably popular. In terms of market share, from 1936, Westerns were the heavyweight of pulps, never making up less than 25% of the entire market.

Fifth, look at the overall numbers for 1929-1931. You?d think that the first three years of the Depression wouldn?t have been a good time to enter publishing or increase the number of pulps that you were already publishing, but clearly people thought it was. I don?t have numbers to hand, but I suspect the economy took a substantial dip from 1931-1933, which would explain the decrease there, but after 1933 the numbers resume increasing.

I?m sure other conclusions will occur to me later, but that?s what I?ve got for now.

I occasionally do these. And today's an occasion. So why not?

A - Act your age? Like most other people, sometimes I act younger than my age, positively childishly in fact.
B - Born on what day of the week? Monday, so I'm told. I don't remember it all that well. I'd put money on the fact that I cried like a baby though.
C - Chore you hate? Filling out memes.
D - Z See answer to C

Interesting though, sparked by something Antony Johnston wrote.

I wonder who I've known the longest online, i.e. who, that I now often interact online with, I've known the longest.

I'm excluding people where the only online contact is by email or IM, because that's just replaced letterwriting or the phone. So that takes out Ian, my oldest friend, because although we email each other, he's not on Twitter and doesn't use Facebook.

And I can't include Laura because although we occasionally "like" something each other has put on Facebook, or chat on IM, it's not exactly as if that's a large part of how we communicate with each other. Similarly, I'm excluding my younger brother because... well, I've known him for 44 years. It kind of skews the results.

OK, so lets set some parameters.

I'm not including anyone I've known for more than 15 years, because I got online in August 1995. I'm limiting it to people I have interacted with, or still interact with, via a message board, forum, Twitter, Facebook or chat rooms.

Obvious answer is people like Warren, Neil, Dave... comics pros with whom I was fortunate enough to become friends after we first met at Compuserve's Comics/Animation Forum, and other friends from Compuserve like Rich Johnston, Alan Porter and Elayne Riggs. (I'm excluding Tony Isabella and Dez Skinn because, although friends, again I only ever really speak to them by email these days)

Despite Colin Murtagh being a close friend, I'm pretty sure we didn't meet for a few months after I got online, and I didn't meet Tony Lee until this century. (Always surprises me, that one - that I've only known Tony that relatively short space of my life.)

So yeah, Warren, Neil, Dave. It's all your fault, mates.

It's genuinely astonishing to me how many people who are important to me as part of my life now... have only known Philip as a fact, i.e. they didn't know me before he was born.

From the Straits Times of Singapore, 23 July 1928.