I recently posted a message on Twitter (https://twitter.com/edw/status/32234616412708865) about the bar situation at Dandelion, Starr's new restaurant on the northwest corner of 18th and Sansom Streets, across from Tria in Rittenhouse Square. I sent that missive before I was seated on the second floor for dinner, and I have to say I had a completely different experience upstairs. It was cozy, which is European for "pleasantly tight". The food was good, especially the devilled eggs, which were made with curry. I can also report that the bread, fries, fish and chips, shepherd's pie, and coffee were all also excellent. This is the best Starr restaurant I've ever been to. He seems to have matured, as the decor doesn't self-consciously scream "I am a high-concept dining experience!" the way each of his previous establishments does. My problem was with the clientele at the bar. They skew toward old, loud, oafish white men with overdeveloped senses of entitlement. I passive aggressively asked the bartender, loudly, if perhaps some of his patrons mistook this new establishment for the Happy Rooster, which is only a couple of blocks away and specializes in serving these sorts of embarassments to manhood and humanity. But again, the second floor is a wonderful place. If I go again, and I probably will, I would refuse to sit anywhere on the first floor, where the bloviations of a mere half dozen bad apples can resonate throughout. Bear in mind that yhis is coming from me, an inveterate bar eater and bar book reader. Anyway, I wanted to set the record straight, or at least provide some more context, as Starr and his collaborators deserve a lot of praise for their efforts.

If you flick through the ebook stores of Apple and Amazon, you may notice the relative dearth of classic literature offered by traditional publishers. Instead you will find free versions made available by Project Gutenberg along with Dover's offerings and low-cost "clones" published by digital-only publishers. Not a problem, right?

Actually, it is a problem. Not for fans of Dickens or Melville or Milton, but very much so for readers of any part of our Western heritage that wasn't originally written in English. Which is most of it.

Nietzsche had a public relations problem in the first half of the Twentieth Century. You may have heard about Hitler and the Nazis. You may have seen Hitchcock's ROPE. You may even have a dim awareness of Leopold and Loeb. What do Hitler, Hitchcock, and Leopold and Loeb have in common? An understanding of Nietzsche informed primarily by Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Friedrich's sister and, more importantly, a racist proto-Nazi eugenicist. In Förster-Nietzsche's hands, the philosopher's work was molded to suit her and her husband's ideology. This worked its way into the English translations, and the Nietzsche that English readers came to know was very much her's, the wife of a man who started a utopian Aryan community in Paraguay, Neuva Germania.

This would all be very academic if tragic history if not for Project Gutenberg, because anyone looking for Nietzsche in ebook form is far more likely to encounter a translation authorized by Elisabeth than they are to find something translated by Hollingdale or Kaufmann, the even-now dated translations that I read when I was discovering Nietzsche in the early '90s.

Translations do not age well. Nor do they travel particularly well. THE STRANGER that I read in 1990, the then-new translation by Vintage, was radically different from THE STRANGER that was previously available. In many ways it was objectively better, but in other ways it was simply better suited to the suburban American white kid I was than the previous standard translation, which carried a much more English sensibility.[1]

Neither of these translations of THE STRANGER are in the public domain, so Project Gutenberg does not (yet) endanger those who wish to read Camus.

Pragmatically speaking, how might we go about solving this problem? There is a broader problem: with the easy availability of public domain classics in dated translations, how are new translations—such as the new Madam Bovary, which I am in love with, if only halfway through—going to get made? As a child, I had to buy a Tale of Two Cities and innumerable other books that I read in high school, thereby underwriting to some extent the work of writers and translators that make the world's literature relevant to the times.

As I write this I cannot help but wonder what, if anything, America's literature departments are doing to make literature relevant let alone vital to the lives of people.

But back to the high schools: there are projects afoot to recreate the textbook, for good reasons. But what happens when these special-purpose iPad-like devices (or iPad applications?) draw their content from the archives, from the likes of Project Gutenberg?

As I recently wrote of Silicon Valley, they're a bunch of autistic philistines. They measure literature in gigabytes.[2]

It may be easy to laugh of sneer at Steve Jobs as he flips the virtual pages of Winnie the Pooh, but at least he understands the magic of a book and is trying to capture it. Would you rather read the beautiful full-color, large format edition of THE LITTLE PRINCE to a child, or a acrid mass-market, black and white mass-market paperback? Just as much as books are important, presentation is important.

One of the most important books of my childhood, COSMOS by Carl Sagan, was as important for its physical beauty as it was for the words it contained. As an adult, I purchased a paperback version to replace my old copy, which is somewhere in my parents' house. It was a pale shadow of my original, and I soon hunted down an original hardcover copy of the book.[3]

It is a depressing irony that Project Gutenberg takes its name from a man who made his mark by creating bibles that were every bit as beautiful as the hand-copied manuscripts that he obsolesced. Project Gutenberg's books have all the charm of a invoice.

NOTES

1: It is in this way that I think the Vintage translation is objectively better, as THE STRANGER was written by Camus as a (failed, in his mind) exercise in Hemingway-esque brusqueness. A faithful translation of the novel into English should respect Camus's basic intent.

2: Academics already understand this, as many are concerned about what Google Books, with its unreliable and incomplete metadata.

3: I would love to see COSMOS updated to reflect current science and re-issued, because while it's filled with interesting tidbits about astronomy and the Cosmos, it's really an intellectual history of the West and a manifesto for secular humanism.

In “Silicon Valley is Broken. Should We Even Bother to Fix It?” Erica Douglass relates her Silicon Valley experiences. It reminded me of my three months in Silicon Valley.

I originally flirted with moving out to the Bay Area in 1997, to work for Inktomi. I flew out for an interview and got an offer, but they wanted me to work for about twenty percent more than I was making here in the Philadelphia area. I owned a house and had an $800 a month mortgage. In the area where we wanted to live, $2,300 a month apartments were typical. So we stayed on the East Coast.

Ten years later, everything was different. I was a principal at a design firm. I moved out to the West Coast, the official story was, to be closer to our biggest client. I spent a lot of time on CalTrain and BART and in local coffee shops. I hated it.

In Philadelphia, we have several big industries—pharmaceuticals, banking, some ad agencies, Comcast—but nothing dominates. When I meet someone, it's as likely they're a painter as a programmer or lawyer or bike mechanic. In the Valley, it feels like all conversation is about Deals. Everyone's sitting around working on a slide deck. Or in Eclipse or TextMate.

You couldn't sit in a Starbucks and not hear someone give an elevator pitch or explain how, "Yes, money is important, but if the _concept_ isn't there, I don't think I can get really excited about a position." (I cannot describe how superficial and robotic and calculating the woman was who I watched deliver this little speech.)

The Valley is a solipsistic, autistic dystopia. And that would be fine if what we think of as a technology product hadn't changed since 1980, but it has, profoundly so. If you aspire to create something that real people use to solve real problems, there's no need to be there. In fact, being there distorts your sense of reality. It takes a genius to resist the prevailing mindset.

I came back to Philadelphia and while there's a lot to gripe about here—the people who talk big about doing start-ups but don't even know what a start-up is, the winters, the summers, the trash, oh I could go on—there's a diversity here that makes it easier to put technology (and life) in perspective. Even NYC is better than the Valley, because there's so much there that nothing dominates: the bigness does.

I recommend you go read Ms. Douglass's piece; it provides a dose of harsh reality to anyone who thinks that success awaits all those who choose to move to Silicon Valley.

At least one person[1] thinks Steve Jobs has accomplished all he can hope to in the technology industry and won't return to Apple, regardless of his health. The line of thinking behind this notion is symptomatic of the condition that afflicts the technology industry. Namely, it thinks of itself as the technology industry.

Twenty-five years ago, one could have said that Steve Jobs could, anachronistically, unfurl the Mission Accomplished banner even as he was being squeezed out of Apple. After all, he had convinced the entire industry that it must adopt the wussified GUI—originally a term of derision: a "gooey"—if it hoped to find users beyond people like my father and me, people who thought that a green phosphorous screen was already a window into a fascinating universe.

Not only that, but he had also created, with the help of a pre-Macromedia, pre-sucking Adobe, desktop publishing with the LaserWriter printer. And simple networking with AppleTalk. In 1986 the revolution was well under way, and technology was being transformed so that the rest of you could use it.

It is now 2011 and I can understand how dumb, unambitious people can again think that Steve Jobs can crack his knuckles, dust off his palms, and contentedly walk away from Apple.

Steve Jobs is one of ten most important people in my life—and yours. He is the single most important force influencing the way technology is brought to bare on the human condition. As a programmer, I would list him, along with John McCarthy, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, and Bob Metcalfe as one of the most important figures in computing's modern history.[2,3]

Programming makes progress by creating abstractions that paper over the unimportant details the come between programmers' intentions and the lines of code that deliver on those intentions. Apple under Jobs's leadership has tended to make human progress by papering over the technological details that separate people from their desires. And we will never be free of the need for people like Steve Jobs, because we can not help but reach for what we cannot grasp.

Yes, many human desires are trivial, and Apple's products have made it easier for trivial people to do trivial things, but there is nothing new here: Sturgeon's Law will not yield. But more fundamentally, human desire is simple: We yearn to eat, sleep, and get laid.[4] To love and be loved. To have children. To feel a sense of belonging. To feel useful. Technology helps us do these things. Full stop. That is why technology exists. Humanity is not your grad school thesis project.[5]

Jobs is an exemplary humanist, if not always an exemplary human being. We may not all be Keynsians now, and we're definitely not all humanists now, secular or otherwise, but of those of us who do proudly embrace the term, I think—I hope—that most of us realize that contrary to some of the more optimistic dreamers of the Enlightenment, humanity is not perfectible. Perfection doesn't exist except as some hazy vision in our minds. And that's why I don't think Steve Jobs will ever finish the task that he has set for himself. You should hope to have a task like that. Fortunately, you have the power to choose what you're going to do with your time here with us, and I hope some of you set your sights on a goal that is at least one tenth as significant as Steve Jobs has.

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1. I long ago flipped the bozo bit on Farhad Manjoo. He's an embarrassment to Slate.

2. If you don't know who these people are, you are in no position to critique this quite critiqueable list.

3. Can you tell that I'm a smug Mac-Unix-Lisp weenie? But seriously, just as the Mac embodies the humanist spirit, Unix embodies the spirit of practicality and Lisp does the same for spirit of programming-as-communing-with-the-mind-of-Einstein's-God.

4. I am reminded of Jobs's critique of the Microsoft Zune's ability to "squirt" music. The anecdote is important and funny enough to point you to a 37signals blog post. (Jason Fried is too similar for me not to hate him.)

5. I write this with Emacs running, editing Clojure and Javascript source files. I see HTML source code there in the back. I've been paid to write assembly language. If you want to engage in some sort of technology pissing match, to you I say game fucking on, asshole.