I just re-read Maciej Cegłowski’s excellent essay on the discovery and loss of the remedy to scurvy.

Incidentally, I’ve seen scurvy used as a case study of how theory colours evidence (or directs the interpretation of it) before in Lukas Vermeer’s talk Creating data: a boat filled with sauerkraut.

There are loads of quotable passages, but rather than try to condense a great read into a few snippets, I’ll share a somewhat ancillary tidbit:

[T]echnological progress in one area can lead to surprising regressions. I mentioned how the advent of steam travel made it possible to accidentally replace an effective antiscorbutic with an ineffective one. An even starker example was the rash of cases of infantile scurvy that afflicted upper class families in the late 19th century. This outbreak was the direct result of another technological development, the pasteurization of cow’s milk. The procedure made milk vastly safer for infants to drink, but also destroyed vitamin C. For poorer children, who tended to be breast-fed and quickly weaned onto adult foods, this was not an issue, but the wealthy infants fed a special diet of cooked cereals and milk were at grave risk.

The essay contained two words new to me: antiscorbutic — having the effect of preventing or curing scurvy; and austral — of or coming from the south.

Style guides from BBC News, The Guardian and Observer and The Economist. Guardian also tweets about its style.

Reorganizing some long-lost demos of mine, I found my programmatic nod to William S. Burroughs’ cut-up technique. While I recall I was originally going to allow users to input text into the demo, I never got around to it. Here’s the demo, with the sample text as my entry on “fascist word processors”.

It’s obviously not perfect (the amount of parenthesis really messes up this sample), but it still sort of works. The script scans through the text, and at each pre-set punctuation mark, it “flips a coin” to determine whether or not to chop there or continue on. As the fragment gets longer, the probability to chop increases.

The first thing I learned about Georges Perec is that he’d written a novel without using the letter ‘e’. Talk about creative constraints!

Perec’s best-known work, Life: A User’s Manual, is divided into 99 chapters, which “move like a knight’s tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment [building], describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.”

He was a member of Oulipo, a literary group interested in creating constrained writing techniques.

Which vs. that. The basic rule: Use “which” plus commas to set off nonrestrictive clauses; use “that” to introduce a restrictive clause.

Instiki may be easy to install, but I wonder if it’s so easy to learn to use it to its full extent.

From the Literary Saloon: “A ‘book’ in five days. That’s what Mara Reinstein and Joey Bartolomeo — writers at Us Weekly — have done: 40,000 words (on Brad & ‘Jen’, who have apparently broken up, which is apparently of interest to someone out there) in less than a week.”

Stephen Johnson writes about how his note-taking system has changed the way he writes — and thinks. Sounds familiar. I had lofty goals for my personal CMS (which I use to publish this weblog) to do basically the same thing. Only my heap-of-code doesn’t have any of the contextual search features of DevonThink, which means my CMS does nothing like it.

Neil Stephenson interview at Slashdot. In his answer to the second question, Stephenson has a great explanation for why “commercial authors” aren’t respected by the literary scene.

...and the newest one, by Margaret Mauldon, is horrible. At least according to Clive James.

... Already, though, it is hard to suppress a suspicion that in the matter of historical fidelity things are out of kilter, and the suspicion intensifies once the book is opened. Professor Malcolm Bowie, who wrote the informative introduction, makes much ado in his back-of-the-jacket blurb about Flaubert's precision, which the professor assures us is matched by Mauldon's brand-new and meticulously accurate translation of the actual work. Any reader wishing to believe this is advised to start on page one. He had better not open the book accidentally at page 178 [end of chapter 12, in part 2], on which we find Emma's lover Rodolphe justifying to himself his decision to ditch her. Rodolphe is supposed to be a creep, but surely he never spoke the French equivalent of late-twentieth-century American slang: "And anyway there's all those problems, all that expense, as well. Oh, no! No way! It would have been too stupid."

Just to be certain that Rodolphe never spoke like a Hollywood agent, we can take a look at the same line in the original: "Et, d'ailleurs, les embarras, la d�pense � Ah! non, non, mille fois non! Cela e�t �t� trop b�te!" The perfectly ordinary, time-tested English idiom "No, no, a thousand times no!" would have fitted exactly. The awful possibility arises that Mauldon has never paid much attention to English idioms like that. Instead she thinks "No way!" is perfectly ordinary. We can take it for granted that she knows the French language of Flaubert's era inside out. (She has already translated, for the same series of Oxford World's Classics, works by Zola, Stendhal, Huysmans, Constant, and Maupassant.) But she has a crucially weaker knowledge of how the English language of her own era has been corrupted. You might say that English has always advanced through corruption, but "No way!" is an idiom so closely tied to the present that it can hardly fail to weaken any attempt to summon up the past. In Alan Russell's translation of Madame Bovary, first published by Penguin in 1950, there is no "No way!" Probably the phrase did not yet exist, but almost certainly Russell would not have used it even if it had. What he wrote was "No, no, by Heaven no!" Not quite as good as "a thousand times no!" perhaps, but certainly better than "No way!": better because more neutral, in the sense of being less tied to the present time.

Looking at this online version of Madame Bovary, I can’t find see who the translator is. A little investigation, based on James’s comparisons, proved inconclusive. The last sentence of part 2, chapter 12 is interesting. It reads: “And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no, no! a thousand times no! That would be too stupid.” Just as James recommends.

Citypages’s story on Plain Layne, including an interview with Odin Soli, fills in some gaps in the story.

“People have asked at what point readers began to suspect that Plain Layne was make-believe, and the answer is, from the very beginning.”

This morning I woke up thinking about an aggressively auto-completing word processor. Read more

Interview of Douglas Coupland in The Morning News. And another one in Guardian. I just recently discovered author interviews on the Web. They’re more interesting if you’ve read the author’s works. Powell’s collection is great. I especially enjoyed Chuck Palahniuk’s interview.

It’s funny to see so many interviews conducted in Q&A format. A journalism teacher of mine once said to me that the Q&A format is garbage. That anyone can do it and that it’s pretentious. Journalists shouldn’t write themselves into their stories, she said. Not unless they’re Hunter S. Thompson.

Reading up on William Gibson’s blog archives—I haven’t been following any blogs and only just today heard (well, read) that he’s kicking the habit to (be able to) begin real work—I chuckled at Orwell’s rules. Very strict. I wonder what Orwell meant by “sounding outright barbarous.” Is he talking about four-letter words or everything that sounds inane? His rules remind me of Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style.

I hate this cardboard colored journal. I hate how it binds me to chronological order, to affected clarity, to the truth. I hate how the words I write are permanent and immutable. I hate what this journal represents, how it pressures me, that it always leaves me unsatisfied. Read more