Preoccupations

Links for 2010-03-17 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-18T00:00:00-07:00

Hot off the Presses: The Newspaper Club Produces--and Prints--a Newspaper at SXSW | Designerati | Fast Company
"As the 1000 numbered copies were "delivered" to the packed ballroom an interesting thing happened, best captured by Twitter user @mattb: "The newspapers are passed out and the quiet sound of typing turns to the white noise of paper rustling.""
Ronald S Burt: Neighbor Networks
YouTube Blog: Oops Pow Surprise...24 hours of video all up in your eyes!
"In May of last year, we announced 20 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. We then challenged you to keep the uploads coming to see whether or not we could get a day’s worth of video – 24 hours – uploaded in the same brief time span."
Marco.org - Overdoing the interface metaphor
"Improving the product, not faithfully reproducing the physical object, always gets priority. … It’s important to find the balance between real-world reproduction and usability progress. Physical objects often do things in certain ways for good reasons, and we should try to preserve them. But much of the time, they’re done in those ways because of physical, technical, economic, or practical limitations that don’t need to apply anymore."
How Privacy Vanishes Online, a Bit at a Time - NYTimes.com
"“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.” Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,” researchers say. … Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell University who studies social networks, is skeptical that rules will have much impact. His advice: “When you’re doing stuff online, you should behave as if you’re doing it in public — because increasingly, it is.”"

Links for 2010-03-16 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-17T00:00:00-07:00

Open Rights Group | What Panorama didn’t talk about: our rights
"in the Panorama broadcast yesterday … we mostly listened to a discussion between different musicians worrying about the future of their industry. While that’s a concern – and the central concern of the BPI – our concern is our rights, democracy, and the future of our society, which is being built on the internet. We do not withdraw the basic tool of society without the most extreme reason. We certainly do not do such a thing without a massive public and democratic debate."

Links for 2010-03-15 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-16T00:00:00-07:00

ongoing by Tim Bray · Now A No-Evil Zone
"The reason I’m here is mostly Android. Which seems to me about as unambiguously a good thing as the tangled wrinkly human texture of the Net can sustain just now. … The iPhone vision of the mobile Internet’s future omits controversy, sex, and freedom, but includes strict limits on who can know what and who can say what. It’s a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers. The people who create the apps serve at the landlord’s pleasure and fear his anger. I hate it. I hate it even though the iPhone hardware and software are great, because freedom’s not just another word for anything, nor is it an optional ingredient. The big thing about the Web isn’t the technology, it’s that it’s the first-ever platform without a vendor (credit for first pointing this out goes to Dave Winer). From that follows almost everything that matters, and it matters a lot now, to a huge number of people. It’s the only kind of platform I want to help build."
Rural Tories would be last to benefit from party's broadband pledge | Technology | guardian.co.uk
""The key difference between the parties is that Labour is already working on government intervention and subsidy to promote the rollout of superband in less favoured areas while the Tories favour a "wait and see" policy," said Tim Johnson, chief analyst at Point Topic. The Conservative technology manifesto says that "if the market does not deliver superfast broadband in certain areas, we will consider using the proportion of the licence fee dedicated to digital switchover to finance superfast broadband roll out under the new BBC licence fee settlement, starting in 2012"."
Synthetic Aesthetics, exploring the territory between art, design and synthetic biology - we make money not art
Kostakis: Wikipedia's Peer Governance
Head: How today's students use Wikipedia
BBC News - Dotcom web address celebrates silver anniversary
"The internet celebrates a landmark event on the 15 March - the 25th birthday of the day the first dotcom name was registered. In March 1985, Symbolics computers of Cambridge, Massachusetts entered the history books with an internet address ending in dotcom. That same year another five companies jumped on a very slow bandwagon.
It took until 1997, well into the internet boom, before the one millionth dotcom was registered."
Daring Fireball: An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox

Links for 2010-03-14 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-15T01:00:00-07:00

Nick Sweeney · ‘the social equivalent of the uncanny valley’
"Perhaps it’s time to accept a new set of base assumptions about online privacy: that coders set the rules, whether they know it or not; that most users accept the defaults, whether they ought to or not; that transgressions become norms, whether checked or not; and that those who research and advocate and educate will continue to fight the last battle, while those with the power to implement their advice most directly will ignore it until shamed into acting."
SXSW Day 2: Privacy is Not Dead | Blog | design mind
"Facebook is a sign of a common occurrence throughout the social Web: we start with everything public and we have to choose what we want private. That’s the complete opposite of how the real world works, which is that you start with what’s private and you choose what you want public. That, insofar as this reporters humble opinion is concerned, is uncanny valley. And according to Boyd, whosoever thinks the debate over privacy on the Internet is dead is wrong. It's far from over." http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/shanerichmond/100004756/sxsw-2010-google-and-facebook-failed-on-privacy-says-danah-boyd/: “Making something that is public more public is a violation of privacy". http://news.cnet.com/8301-13772_3-20000408-52.html: ""Just because something is publicly accessible doesn't mean people want to be publicized".
Destructoid - GDC 10: the Holocaust board game
BBC News - Bikers organise ride in tribute to Wootton Bassett
"The Bike Run, which has attracted thousands of motorcyclists from across north Wales, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and the south-east England, was the idea of 18-year-old biker Elizabeth Stevens. Ms Stevens, a mechanics student at the Central Bedfordshire College, had only planned to ride through the town with a few friends. "Our local bike club was throwing around the idea of a bike run," she said in January, "so I decided to make a Facebook page, and it's just taken off"."
Texas Conservatives Win Vote on Textbook Standards - NYTimes.com
Light Blue Touchpaper » Blog Archive » What’s worrying the spooks?
"The issue isn’t encryption but traffic analysis. … imagine that in the near future those who illegally share copyright material are being disconnected, and websites … are being blocked. … millions of people will start to use protocols that hide the identity of peers … along with software that evades blocking mechanisms … Once this new generation of software is deployed (and it would be ubiquitous within weeks), not only are the rights-holders unable to determine who is nibbling away at their twentieth-century business model, but the spooks can no longer use traffic analysis to determine the members of conspiracies. That’s precisely why they were concerned last October about the disconnection aspects of the Bill, and … why they are even more concerned now with the opposition amendment that has unexpectedly put “web blocking” onto the table. … Diffie & Landau, in their book on wiretapping, said that “traffic analysis, not cryptanalysis, is the backbone of communications intelligence”"
Apple’s Spat With Google Is Getting Personal - NYTimes.com
"While mobile phone developers favor the iPhone for now, “they are all racing ahead to develop for Android, too,” Mr. Kapor says. “Tight control helps in the beginning, but it tends to choke things in the long term.”" http://www.google.com/buzz/timoreilly/MuerW5Z8Lxg/Reading-http-www-nytimes-com-2010-03-14-technology: "It's still sad that two great and innovative companies are at odds. And even sadder that Apple is letting spite trump business judgment, and closing their phone even further from the open web. In the end, if the iPhone fails, it will be because closed systems have weaker adoption dynamics than open systems, not because Eric Schmidt betrayed Apple."
How Google Works
"As a company, Google focuses on three key areas: Search, Ads and Apps. Search is our core technology; ads are our central business proposition; and apps are the umbrella over our web-based software that you can access anywhere, any time. While each of these has a lot of technology under the hood, the basic tenets for Search, Ads and Apps are very simple. We've created some short videos explaining the principles behind our core services."
"Making Sense of Privacy and Publicity"
Facebook Firehose May Be Released at Developer Conference F8
"Is there a reasonable expectation that online social networking activity set to "public" will not be redistributed in bulk to outside parties? How can a company like Facebook respect user privacy as much as possible while still achieving the incredible things that can be achieved by making aggregate user data available for analysis?"
Buzz by DeWitt Clinton: Buzz and a return to the era of long-form personal publishing
"You didn't need to hear it from me, but @Tim O'Reilly is now using Buzz the way I think Buzz can be used best—as a publishing and conversation platform in its own right. … Another trend I've noticed is that many people are returning to their full format blogging platforms (wordpress, blogger, etc), and are taking advantage of the real-time and full-fidelity content-preserving syndication to Buzz to engage with their readers here. … And the best part is that I think we're just getting started in realizing the full potential of the distributed web conversation. With protocols like Activity Streams and Salmon on the horizon, it will soon be possible to publish on your own site using the tools you prefer, syndicate the post out to Buzz and other networks, and have the comments and responses on each site flow seamlessly back and forth between them, such that the syndication will no longer be in only a single direction, but rather a network of threads woven together."
designswarm thoughts » Blog Archive » Experimenting
"made me rethink what we do as designers in the context of science and experiments. I left the event thinking there was much conversation that needed to happen between the 2 worlds"
BBC News - Media tycoons wanted: Make your own newspaper

Links for 2010-03-13 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-14T00:00:00-08:00

frantic gallery | Macoto Murayama
"Here it is, The Flower of Totalitarian Scientific Conscious: properly fixed, totally measured, strictly nominated and distinctly shown. It is not only an image of a plant, but representation of the intellect’s power and its elaborate tools for scrutinizing nature. The transparency of this work refers not only to the lucid petals of a flower, but to the ambitious, romantic and utopian struggle of science to see and present the world as transparent (completely seen, entirely grasped) object. Paradoxically, this scientific challenge to measure the Universe might eventually become one of the sources where art of Murayama draws its strength of fantasy and odor of romanticism, becoming a part of Botech Art, symbiosis of Botanical Art and Technology."
Toward A New Alexandria | The New Republic
Fun Inc: Why Games Are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield | Book review | Books | The Guardian
"As I know to my cost, people with an interest in games are often asked to rebut the same old criticisms – eg, that videogames force children to massacre their classmates while preventing them from learning to read. Chatfield's approach to these issues in particular is sparkingly intelligent and nuanced. As he rightly points out, "the best games are a trigger for discussion, reading and writing – not an end to it". Overall, Fun Inc is a fresh and engaging contribution to that ongoing conversation."
The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis by Jeremy Rifkin | Book review | Books | The Guardian
"The innate sociability of human beings is a fact, but it does not follow that they are likely to cooperate in dealing with environmental crisis. The impact of climate change is rather to intensify human conflict. As global warming accelerates, natural resources such as arable land and water become scarcer, and competition to control them will be acute and pervasive. At the same time, those whose power and wealth come from fossil fuels will do anything they can to promote "climate scepticism". This is where the leaked emails come in. With global warming fuelling a resurgence of geopolitical tensions, climate science has become a weapon in a war of disinformation. Whatever lapses in intellectual probity they might reveal, the messages are being used to obscure a mass of evidence showing that anthropogenic climate change is real, and may be occurring more rapidly than previously believed. … we need to recognise that the climate has become a battleground."
Open Rights Group | Label bosses warn debate could cost them disconnection
"disconnection penalties could be agreed with no democratic scrutiny whatsoever" – http://www.boingboing.net/2010/03/12/leaked-uk-record-ind.html

Links for 2010-03-12 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-13T00:00:00-08:00

There is an inverse relationship between level of anonymity and quality of conversation - (37signals)
"Trading anonymity for accountability has led to radically improved conversations. … A lot less antagonism and a lot more thoughtfulness and general politeness."
Ballardian » “Ambiguous aims”: a review of Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard
"an eclectic and extensive exhibition that can be hard to take in, with its almost random sensory overload. … Crash’s real triumph is the handful of pieces that marry both a deep, unequivocal connection with Ballard and artistic brilliance." "It is Warhol’s brilliant translation of the changes around him that connects him to Ballard and makes “Green Disaster (Green Disaster Twice)” the most important work in the exhibition. Both men represent a mature artistic culture that distanced itself from the political hectoring of pre-WWII art, and absorbed and translated a world of rapid change with cool detachment. The exhibition’s motorways, cars, aircraft and sexual imagery are only superficially Ballard. Tucked away on a back wall, in a small and at first insignificant-looking work, is where you find the essence of Ballard’s work presented succinctly by another twentieth-century great."
Blogger in Draft: The Blogger Template Designer
SMS Alerts come to Pachube | pachube.community

Links for 2010-03-11 [del.icio.us]

2010-03-12T00:00:00-08:00

Google Apps Marketplace
"The Google Apps Marketplace offers products and services designed for Google users, including installable apps that integrate directly with Google Apps. Installable apps are easy to use because they include single sign-on, Google's universal navigation, and some even include features that integrate with your domain's data." http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/open-for-business-google-apps.html
Chatroulette Map
Pondering the cobwebs – 0xDECAFBAD
"Lately, I’ve had this notion that I should try writing and publishing for an earlier version of myself. That is: all these things I end up searching for and researching on the web, I should write them up in a way that I wish had been the first search result in Google. Whatever the topic, if a younger version of me wanted to find it, I should put it out there to be found. Never mind who else I think might read it or (not) comment on it. Write for myself, write what I’d want to read—sounds pretty obvious when I put it out there like that." via Kevin (Reader)
BUTT in the SEAT: A Writer’s Technique | Adventures in Filmmaking with the Daws Brothers
"the only way to become a writer is to put your butt in the seat every day and write. Josh and I fought this for years. We always waited till we were inspired and subsequently didn’t produce much. But, since we started writing together for 4 hours EVERY DAY, we’ve seen our creativity and productivity increase exponentially. And because the only way to get good at anything is through practice, we’re actually seeing a VAST improvement in our writing. Don’t get me wrong, it is still hard. But we’re proving to ourselves that we can do this for a living. … One side note – we don’t watch as much TV or play as much X-box anymore. But it’s all about priorities. Do you want to write professionally or goof off? The choice is yours. So, what excuses are you using to get out of writing?"
The Beginning of the End of Data Retention | Electronic Frontier Foundation
"All in all, the threats to privacy and free speech posed by the Data Retention Directive are on their way to being nullified."
The Conservative Party | Policy | Where we stand | Technology
http://twitter.com/Conservatives/status/10319148979: "Maude: Our plans will bring Britain the fastest high-speed broadband in Europe, helping create 600,000 jobs". http://twitter.com/Conservatives/status/10319258857: "Maude: We aim to be the most tech-friendly govt in the developed world. Next gen of Googles and Microsofts should be British." http://twitter.com/paul_clarke/status/10319133494: "strong stuff from Francis Maude - immediate moratorium on ALL tech procurement in event of a Tory win"
Open Rights Group | BPI drafted web blocking
"Parliamentarians need to recognize that copyright touches everyone and every technology in the digital age. It is no longer a question of inter-business regulation and deals. Getting copyright wrong has the potential to mess up our freedom of speech, prevent us from getting the benefits of new technologies, and damage society in other very profound ways. It is therefore deeply inappropriate for such fundamental proposals to have been introduced by both the government or the opposition parties at the behest of one side of the debate. That applies just as much to disconnection, which Mandelson introduced in the sumer at the last minute under pressure again from the BPI and other rights holders."
Easily type accented characters | Mac OS X | Mac OS X Hints | Macworld
Official Google Mobile Blog: 5 more tips for using Google Buzz on your phone
Philip K. Dick - Letter regarding Blade Runner
Activity Streams / TypePad Activity Streams
"TypePad has shipped PubSubHubbub-enabled activity streams feeds for all TypePad users, which include activity by those users across all things TypePad." http://groups.google.com/group/activity-streams/browse_thread/thread/e36fe105591b4c4

The Thames at Hammersmith [Flickr]

2010-03-03T13:42:32-08:00

Preoccupations posted a photo:

Tow-path gone and the river as high as I've seen it

Schools and young entrepreneurs

2010-02-17T23:55:29+00:00

There was a piece on ReadWriteWeb earlier this month about the Teens in Tech conference: ‘They haven’t learned that the sky is not, in fact, the limit - and for god’s sake, don’t tell them.’

Teens In Tech Conference 2010 from ReadWriteWeb on Vimeo

In January, Stephen Heppell, quoted in the Guardian, said of the iPad: ‘It’s gorgeous, I want one, but I want to see children and teachers develop for it … nearly there.’

I’ve been meaning for some time now to say something here about what George Burgess, a final year student at St Paul’s, has been doing. I’ve known George for three years and he’s the most business savvy student I’ve ever come across. It’s in his blood: he operates with a shrewdness and an eye for opportunities. George is alert to changes in the game:

‘The idea that anyone, all the way from an individual to a large company, can create software that is innovative and be carried around in a customer’s pocket is just exploding. It’s a breakthrough, and that is the future, and every software developer sees it.’ — Apple’s Game Changer, Downloading Now, NYT, 6 December, 2009

Late last year, George had his iPhone app, GeoRev, accepted and on 24 November it appeared in Apple’s store. You can read about it on his website, EducationApps. From George’s press release:

GeoRev is designed to help students revise for their Geography GCSE exam and consists of 600 multiple-choice questions. These questions are separated into 15 topic areas with both foundation and higher tier options. The topic areas aim to incorporate the majority of material required by major exam boards.
GeoRev is the first of many revision apps Burgess will produce as part of his business, EducationApps. The business aims to produce high quality education applications for the iPhone and iPod touch which help pupils to learn and revise for exams.

Since then, he’s released a free, LITE version of GeoRev with only 150 questions, with the aim of sparking further interest in the full version by giving users an opportunity to try it out first. (When I spoke to George in early February, he’d sold over 400 copies of GeoRev, now priced at £1.19.)

Not standing still, he’s gone on to release two Economics apps, with revision notes for Units 1 and 2 of Edexcel’s AS Level Economics. The notes are split into topic areas and there’s a search function to allow users to quickly find relevant material (particularly helpful for homework). ‘I’m currently working with teachers to try and produce the following GCSE apps before Easter: Maths (a basic version of this might be available within the next two weeks), Chemistry, Biology, Physics and RS. I’ve also received permission from OCR to use their word lists in the making of my foreign language apps. I’m therefore working with a developer in Australia to get these started.’

Oh, and over Christmas his seasonal Trivia Quiz made it into MacWorld.

George ran his first idea for an app (GeoRev) past the school and then drew up a contract with our Head of Geography: they co-wrote the questions and answers (George is studying Geography at A Level). Once version 1 was out of the door, he began working on new features for version 2, including random testing and beat-the-clock.

He’s happy for me to re-tell the story of how, in our junior school, he got into some trouble … as a result of his business sense. Travelling quite often between the UK and the States, he noticed how his friends liked the American sweets he brought back. So he started bringing them back in quantity and selling them on. That’s what business people do, but it’s not quite the form traditionally expected of school pupils. (Bruce Chatwin got into trouble as a schoolboy at Marlborough College when he exercised his discerning eye and bought stuff from the local antique shops that he knew would fetch a good price in London. In his case, the local dealers got together to protest to Chatwin’s headmaster: Chatwin was destroying their credibility, they said …)

One thing I find admirable in what George has done is that he’s done it at all, whilst still at school. He’s not the first, of course: there’s a long line now of school-aged innovators seizing the reins, writing code and changing the world a bit.

In George’s case, he didn’t write the code for GeoRev himself. Like me, he’s not a coder, but unlike me he had the idea for an app, knew what it should do and what it should feel like, found a developer in Pakistan and commissioned the work. And in order to do all this, he approached my colleague, his Geography teacher, and invited him to enter into this business proposal, contract-based, clearing the idea with the school as he went.

Since George got his first app on the market, other GCSE revision apps have started to appear. He’s swift to watch for new competition, seeing what each does and appraising the strengths and weaknesses of their products — ‘this developer produces quite boring and basic apps (including the ICT one), which consist only of audio commentary with some notes on the screen’; ‘these ones only cover science but look quite good, with a similar approach to mine (multiple-choice questions)’; ‘this developer just produces revision flash cards with text and pictures’.

It will become a crowded space and then there’ll be the inevitable shake-out. That’s his challenge. Ours is to respond adeptly to this most significant change in empowerment: not just to tolerate or learn to cope, but to create the ethos which encourages entrepreneurial initiatives and offers guidance and support — not least in avoiding the pitfalls. I’ve seen more complicated, student-driven initiatives just recently, and one thing we can bring to all this is a sense of realism about legal and other issues surrounding these ventures. But ‘realism’ must not be a reason for dampening enthusiasm. We’re here to guide and enable, as best we can, as these young entrepreneurs aim high.

Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox

2010-02-16T23:12:55+00:00

‘Learning is paradoxical. Health is complexity.’

Things you might try to pass on

2010-02-15T23:08:15+00:00

I find it hard to believe that the Paxman/Kissinger encounter on ‘Start The Week’ occurred all the way back in 1999 (here’s a Guardian piece about it, too). (I heard it live and I’d love to hear it again: all these years on, a kind of acoustical aftershock is still resonating in my head.) It’s recalled in the first comment to a 2002 post by David Weinberger. Weinberger calls Kissinger a ‘disgraceful, banal man’.

I came across a quotation from Kissinger recently that struck me. (That’s thought-provoking in itself — to come across something that seems important said by someone for whom, at best, you don’t much care.) This is from Nat Torkington’s excellent O’Reilly Radar post earlier this month, Rethinking Open Data. The last sentence is his own.

Henry Kissinger said, “each success only buys admission to a more difficult problem”. I look forward to learning what the next problem is.

In the same post, there’s a lovely bit which runs:

As Krishna was told by Arjuna, “a man must go forth from where he stands. He cannot jump to the Absolute, he must evolve toward it”. I’m just noting that, as with all creative endeavours, we learned about the problem by starting to fix it. …

Conveying something valuable about life’s complexities and problems — that’s one of the very best things in teaching, whether done within a disciplined area of study, in guiding an enthusiasm or individual project or in being alongside someone in the larger matters of living itself.

I liked very much what the Guardian reported Rowan Williams said recently in a lecture about Dostoevsky: ‘he loved Dostoevsky’s characters because of their soul-searching and sharing of other people’s burdens’. And there was this (the words are Williams’ own):

Irony is when you recognise that your own sense of dramatic power is always something that is going to be absurd in the light of truth. The readiness to cope with that absurdity is something that you have to learn in order to grow up.

That’s good.

Datadecs

2010-01-04T12:57:12+00:00

One of the things which brightened up our Christmas holiday was the arrival on 23 December of these datadecs:

(After years of large trees both real and, recently and unappealingly, fake, we were given this wee-but-living tree. As one of our sons said, ‘Not so much minimalist as miniature’. Give it time.)

A lovely present: many thanks to Russell, Tom and Ben at RIG, and to Andy — who writes,

For Christmas 2009 the Really Interesting Group wanted to create a a gift comprising a series of 4 unique decorations based on each recipient’s use of the Flickr, Dopplr, Last.fm and Twitter. Having used a couple of the software APIs they were thinking about using (flickr and dopplr) and with experience of rapid prototyping we worked together to turn the data into something physical. … Three of the four Datadecs are laser cut and one is rapid formed. For the laser cutting I developed a series of Processing sketches to generate cutting paths and the snowmen were generated using RhinoScript.

As Phil summarises it:

The snowman’s head size represents the number of followers I have on Twitter. The cloud and its rain represent my year’s trips on Dopplr. The blue shape shows the apertures of my photos on Flickr. And the red shape is the amount of music I played during the year, got from Last.fm.

More about these datadecs and their making in Andy’s post, and see, too, RIG’s page about them, Twitter mentions and Flickr tagged photos.

Very struck by these. Julian Bleecker: ‘this association between things materialized and things quantified is really significant’.

Technorati tags: Andy Huntington, data, datadecs, Dopplr, Flickr, informatics, Last.fm, making, personal informatics, quantified self, rapid protoyping, RIG, Twitter, visualisation

Waking Up in Toytown

2010-01-03T23:20:02+00:00

John Burnside’s second volume of memoirs is published this week. Of A Lie About My Father, Hilary Mantel, writing in the LRB, said:

To move from the interiority of this memoir back to what passes for ordinary life is like surfacing from under the sea, reshaped by its strong and unforgiving currents.

From yesterday’s Guardian review of Waking Up in Toytown (‘the important narrative is interior and episodic, a curation of carefully examined moments … the supple product of a sustained and quiet looking’):

… he fetched up near Guildford, to begin a “long and solitary ceremony of self-erasure” in garden centres and train timetables and dead-end jobs and cups of tea, a fantasy of latter-day monasticism whose sole point was to deny his awareness of liminal worlds, to shut out the voices with reruns of old movies, to replace the call of drink with fetishised routine. To discover in practice what he already knew theoretically, and most people glimpse sooner or later: that they are building ramparts against the dark and trying to believe in them, however flimsy they may be. And though it works, for a little while, it’s never going to be that easy. Darkness creeps in around the edges: sleep is elusive, and no amount of willed shut-down can rid his empty flat of the presences that animate it. Death stalks him …

… the answer turns out to be not a cycle of denial and fall, but a daily negotiation; what he calls, in A Lie About My Father, “the long discipline of happiness”. And it involves a turn to solitude and nature rather than drugs and alcohol; a sober, thrilled meditation on "the roads, and the places just off the roads, all that God-in-the-details of the land: the sway of cottonwood in the wind, the black of a secluded lake, the monumental quiet of a Monterey cypress near a roadside motel on the way from nothing to nowhere", or the "gloaming just beyond the hedge, where the night begins".
One day, late in the book, he finds himself travelling in Norway, far inside the Arctic circle. Arriving early at the small local airport, he sits and gazes out at the whiteness of the airfield. “I sat a long time, that day, waiting for my flight – and some of me is sitting there still, enjoying the stillness, becoming the silence, learning how to vanish. Every day, in every way, I am disappearing, just a little – and it feels like flying, it feels like the kind of flight I was trying for, that first time, when I was nine years old – but it has nothing to do with the will, and it has nothing to do with trying. If it happens at all it happens as a gift: and this is the one definition of grace I can trust.”

‘My misery is infinite with respect to my will, but it is finite with respect to grace.’ — Simone Weil (Notebooks).

Technorati tags: John Burnside, Simone Weil