Caterina.net

Happiest Moment

caterina — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 19:09:27 PST

I am reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and came across one of my favorites, which I had forgotten, Happiest Moment:

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say that the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

And this, related: A wonderful video from This American Life about another 'shared' experience.

Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret

caterina — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 12:35:25 PDT

Monsieur Proust is the account of Proust's final decade, as told by Celeste Albaret, his servant and confidante. He lived his final days, as is well known, in a cork-lined room with the curtains drawn, awake mostly at night, writing his masterpiece. Albaret kept to his strange hours, fixed all his meals, took his clothes to be laundered, and sat and listened to his accounts of his childhood, his social life and the many people he had known. After Proust's death, Albaret lived for 50 years in obscurity, refusing any inquiries for interviews from journalists and biographers. She finally agreed to narrate this account in her 80s, just to correct the many myths and inaccuracies that had grown up around Proust, to tell his story as best she could. It's quite an engaging read, and I was deeply impressed by Albaret's devotion to and love for Proust. Halfway through the book, I flipped to the back cover, and was a bit taken aback by the review by Angus Wilson printed there:

The strangest story...it can be read, I think, only with the most continually warring emotions--admiration for Proust's courage to endure the slow suicidal routine on which his great novel depended; admiration for Celeste's courage in adapting herself to such a monstrous service;...at last, a deep physical revulsion as one would from a brilliant evocation of a madman's padded cell by his mental nurse; and a strange embarrassment at being privy to a relationship at once so intimate and so deforming...

"Suicidal" "monstrous" "cold-blood" "revulsion" "deforming" "madman" -- wow. I was reading it as a study in devotion, service and sacrifice. I tried to figure out where such revulsion had come from, and it seemed to me that people in Western society have a horror of selflessness, and what they perceive of as subordination and subservience. In some ways this book was a perfect and remarkable complement and contrast to the expendable warrior theme of my prior post on Dogfights and Gameness with their triumphs and heroics -- here was a quiet, modest life, lived in the service of another. She took pleasure in warming Proust's bathwater to the perfect temperature, fixing his coffee just so, and knowing exactly which hat he wore on which occasion.

How do you decide what you should devote your life to? Why would this reviewer feel such disgust at Albaret's chosen path? And since I think he wrote this in the 50s, he wasn't able to read, say, Wendell Berry's essay Feminism, the Body and the Machine which outlines, for me, why a household economy, such as the one Albaret was participating in, though not his wife, is a good, honest way of living. Far from being exploited, she was being made a part of something she knew to be important. She found someone who needed her, and their small, unusual family subordinated itself to a great task: the creation of a work of art.

Head, Heart by Lydia Davis

caterina — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 19:26:36 PDT

Heart weeps.
Head tries to help heart.
Head tells heart how it is, again:
You will lose the ones you love. They will all go. But even the earth will go, someday.
Heart feels better, then.
But the words of head do not remain long in the ears of heart.
Heart is so new to this.
I want them back, says heart.
Head is all heart has.
Help, head. Help heart.

Also from last week's New Yorker, in the book reviews.

Dogfights & Gameness

caterina — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 10:49:37 PDT

In a fighting dog, the quality that is prized above all others is the willingness to persevere, even in the face of injury and pain. A dog that will not do that is labelled a "cur" and abandoned. A dog that keeps charging at its opponent is said to possess "gameness" and game dogs are revered.

In one way or another, plenty of organizations select for gameness. The Marine Corps does so, and so does medicine, when it puts young doctors through the exhausting rigors of residency. But those who select for gameness have a responsibility to not abuse that trust: if you have men in your charge who would jump off a cliff for you, you cannot march tem to the edge of the cliff -- and dogfighting fails this test. Gameness, Carl Semencic argues, in "The World of Fighting Dogs" (1984) is no more than a dog's "desire to please an owner at any expense to itself".

From Malcolm Gladwell's most recent article in the New Yorker, "Offensive Play"

Or, as Mark Twain said, "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog."

The article compares dog fighting with the traumas and injuries suffered by football players and boxers, and the long term brain damage that ensues from the constant battering they take in the game. This is part of the same Valhalla myth and Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori impulse, that the greatest honor is to die on the battlefield for a cause greater than yourself. Cultures of heroics and honor breed this kind of violence, as Fox Butterfield outlined in his (great!) book All God's Children: The Bosket family and the American Tradition of Violence

Magnum PY

caterina — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 18:05:10 PDT

Today Matt Gattis, one of my co-founders at Hunch released Magnum PY, an open source web server, which is possibly the first multithreaded event-driven webserver.

Everyone that I work with at Hunch is smarter than me. I love working with smart people.

Uncertain ends, confident means

caterina — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 17:41:53 PDT

My friend Emily pointed out a great quote in this week's New Yorker, in an article about the painter Luc Tuymans, who describes how he creates his work: "It's like I don't know what I'm doing but I know how to do it." Peter Schjeldahl, the article's author, notes that "uncertain ends, confident means is about as good a general definition of creativity as I know."

And a Lao-Tzu quote I found today: "A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving" which espouses a similar approach.

Working hard is overrated

caterina — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:25:09 PDT

I've seen a lot of hard working entrepreneurs fail, and I've come to the conclusion that working hard, while never a bad thing, is not really the magic thing that leads to great inventions or successful outcomes. Edison, of the "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" quote, tried thousands of materials looking for the right filament for the electric bulb. That might have been hard work, and the fact that he persisted through many failures is key to making something work, but he was also working on the right problem. So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.

When we were building Flickr, we worked very hard. We worked all waking hours, we didn't stop. My Hunch cofounder Chris Dixon and I were talking about how hard we worked on our first startups, his being Site Advisor, acquired by McAfee -- 14-18 hours a day. We agreed that a lot of what we then considered "working hard" was actually "freaking out". Freaking out included panicking, working on things just to be working on something, not knowing what we were doing, fearing failure, worrying about things we needn't have worried about, thinking about fund raising rather than product building, building too many features, getting distracted by competitors, being at the office since just being there seemed productive even if it wasn't -- and other time-consuming activities. This time around we have eliminated a lot of freaking out time. We seem to be working less hard this time, even making it home in time for dinner.

Watson and Crick, who discovered the structure of DNA, are described in Richard Ogle's book Smart World:

At times the two central protagonists behaved like people whose day job was working up skits for Monty Python....they had distinctly lackadaisical work habits. Watson played several sets of tennis every afternoon and spent his evenings alternately chasing 'popsies' at Cambridge parties and going to the movies. Crick, who rarely showed up at the lab before 10 AM and took a coffee break and hour later repeatedly appeared to lose interest in the problem of DNA. On more than one occasion, vital piece of information were obtained not through hard work but as a result of chance conversations in the tea line at the Cavendish laboratory.

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do.

How that idiot made 10 million dollars: Cities and Genius

caterina — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 00:09:49 PDT

In a recent article from the Wall Street Journal, David Byrne, front man of The Talking Heads and a resident of New York, talks about the perfect cities, and in one section says:

The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable -- it's how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt.

There is a lot of truth to that, and I think cities have a lot to do with creativity and invention, but acceptance of failure is not the whole story.

The Romantics believed that genius came from an individual, that they were inspired by a divine spark within them, had been granted a superior mind or vision and were able to see things that mere mortals could not. More recently we've come to believe that genius is really the result of hard work, "99 percent perspiration" as it were, which I wrote about recently as well. But it may be that creativity and invention are more dependent on the networks in which the creator participates than their individual genius or their willingness to put in the hours. As we've so often seen, great ideas occur where there is a confluence of ideas taken from the environment surrounding the creator or creators. Thus, Silicon Valley. Even people designing office spaces have discovered that creating little meeting spaces and sitting areas at the junctures between hallways increase communication between different departments in an organization and increase cross-fertilization of ideas and intra company relationships.

And the networks=genius idea explains why that idiot made $10 million dot com dollars -- he was very literally in the right place at the right time.

My Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon has recently been talking about how New York is poised for a tech revival, and I think he makes some very good points. He says:

New York City has many of the same strengths as Silicon Valley -- merit-driven capitalism, the embrace of newcomers and particularly immigrants, and a consistent willingness to reinvent itself. Silicon Valley will always be the mecca of technology, but now that people here are getting back to, as Obama says, making things, New York City has a shot at becoming relevant again in the tech world.

Yes. As someone who goes back and forth between New York and Silicon Valley, I see more companies being started in the Valley. But I am seeing some great consumer internet companies being started out here too. Etsy is a great example. Hunch has to be on this list. And Kickstarter, which just recently launched, and is changing the way that creative projects themselves are funded. A promising beginning. There need to be more startups, naturally, and more seed capital, and a hometown newspaper, as Chris also notes. And the CS grads moving into startups rather than financial services companies. I'm optimistic.

Products and how to build them

caterina — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 07:22:41 PDT

On the Berg Blog, Matt Webb summarized the learnings from Justin's post about the evolution of GameLayers and what they've learned in the process of moving from their 'passively multiplayers online game' to Dictator Wars on Facebook. These are great observations for anyone trying to build any kind of product and company, be it a game, web site or potato peeler:

Be selective with your innovation. Keep as much of your product predictable, so people can find their way to the gem of awesome that you have pioneered.
Serious Business. If you want to actually hire people to work with you, pay kickass artists to make content for your game, and afford to buy new shoes, figure out what people would want to pay for if they were using your software.
First Five Minutes. If someone can't figure out what to do in the first five minutes of your interactive experience, you are hosed.

It takes a lot of ovaries to abandon the product you've spent all your blood, sweat and tears on, and kudos to Merci and Justin for having the guts to make the leap! Looking forward to giving Dictator Wars a run.

Ken Robinson on schools and how they kill creativity

caterina — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 12:23:55 PDT

One of the best days of my life was May 30 of this year when I received an Honorary Doctorate from RISD. I've always had tremendous respect for John Maeda from his time at Media Lab, and he is now the President of RISD. Amazing students have emerged from those schools, and I admire their approach to creativity and education.

The speaker at commencement was another honorary degree recipient, Ken Robinson, whose work I was not familiar with, and so I looked him up and found this talk that he had given at TED, which was profound, thought-provoking, inspiring -- and funny!:

CNN Article on Wikipedia: Correcting my quote

caterina — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 09:44:25 PDT

I'm quoted today Today's CNN article on Wikipedia

"She said some user-generated sites need an "army of backbreaking community management martinets," or people who help steer conversations in a productive direction, to keep these sites functioning well. That's not a bad thing, she said, just a sign that online communities are evolving and are finding new ways to promote a "culture of generosity.""

That's not what I said....online communities are NOT evolving or finding new ways to promote "the culture of generosity" -- I would posit that in fact nothing has changed, that the rules of civilization and good public behavior have been around since the Ten Commandments, Hammurabi or the Polis.

When I was talking on the phone with John about sites that have that "army of community management martinets" I was saying that was a bad thing and describing corporate sites that do not permit communities to express themselves -- NOT UGC sites such as Wikipedia. Taken out of context he seems to imply that I was recommending that kind of control. I was not. What I was actually saying was that sites like Wikipedia are managed by *the community itself* and that there is no "us" and "them", no overlords, no army.

What the press refuses to understand is that Wikipedia is MORE open as a result of the recent changes. Headline should be: Wikipedia unlocks thousands of topics to user contribution.

UPDATE: John saw my Twitter, read this blog post and then called me, then took the quote down. Good!

Ruby Fern

caterina — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 14:53:51 PDT

Annie talks to her Grandma, Ruby Fern, 103 years old.

A lot of her memories that day went all the way back to when she was a young girl living on the family farm in Arkansas. All the family, aunts, uncles and cousins had little houses on the one big family farm. There was a creek named Sugar Loaf and each kid had a rope swing that swung out over it. They rode their horses into town to buy material and supplies and to go to church. I tried to get her to talk about the Great Depression or how she and my grandpa came out west during the war in their old jalopy with their little baby in tow, warming her milk bottles on the radiator. However, her mind wanted to stay back on the farm of her childhood. She was happy there.

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

caterina — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:51:28 PDT

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

-- T.S. Eliot, "The Rock"

When is enough enough?

caterina — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 13:11:06 PDT

When is enough, enough? - make thousands more decisions on Hunch.com

Alain de Botton on Winners, Losers and the Meritocracy

caterina — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 08:36:14 PDT

A warm, witty talk from writer-philosopher Alain de Botton that will change the way you think about success. He'll also change how you think about luxury cars: "When you see someone in a Ferrari, don't think, 'This is a greedy person.' Think: 'This is someone vulnerable and in need of love.'"

and

"Hamlet is not a loser, though he has lost."