Caveat Lector

I have spent much time today reading and commenting on Shelley’s upcoming RDF book. (Hurry. She wants comments in two weeks’ time. Yeek, that’s practically a chapter a day for me!)

If you are interested in the field and have a little XML knowledge to spare, you should read and comment too. It’s a good book. I’m less than three chapters into it, and I’ve already learned quite a lot.

But I gotta say. I mean, I just gotta say. RDF/XML is about as human-readable as Indus Valley script. I’m all crosseyed, and I’m not even through three chapters yet.

Shelley’s valiantly chipping away at a Rosetta Stone. I foresee a bright future for this book.

But ye gods and little fishes, did RDF/XML have to be this weird?

A lot of links lately to an article about the difficulty of maintaining Project Gutenberg.

Nobody has dared mention another possible factor in Project Gutenberg’s difficulties: its chair, Michael Hart, has angered or otherwise put off a lot of people who could have helped him.

I’m not going to say why I think that is; that would be sheer mudslinging. I will, however, say that I do not personally find Mr. Hart engaging or enjoyable to interact with, and it is for that reason alone that I do not do any Project Gutenberg work. I will also say that I have heard the same thing from other people.

PG has such a corner on the imagination where public-access texts are concerned that it would be nigh-impossible to supplant. And I don’t think Mr. Hart will ever give up his hold on the organization, even were that in the organization’s best interest (a claim I will not make, though I do myself believe it). So it’s difficult to know what to do.

I do believe that the chief’s personality matters in a volunteer effort. I mean, look at Cory Doctorow. He got an impressive amount of highly skilled labor working on Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom in no time flat. Why? ’Cuz we like Cory. It wasn’t even the book; when the lion’s share of that work got done, nobody had read the book yet because it wasn’t out yet. It was Cory.

Lest anyone think I have ambition to take over PG—I would be as bad as Mr. Hart, if not worse. I am a work horse; I can only be a show horse in highly scripted circumstances. I would be a disaster as Charismatic Leader.

But, see, I know that and I work around it. Does Mr. Hart? If not, who can tell him?

A friend, on hearing about my intended foray into library school: “Did I ever tell you about my secret fascination with reference librarians? I’m sure that they’re the *real* Illuminati.”

“I think they’d like to be,” I replied.

I had to read this one play in both college and graduate school. It’s by this late-sixteenth, early-seventeenth-century monk dude who liked to use drama to work out theological issues. (He wasn’t the only one who did that, mind you.)

It’s… well, it’s not a very good play. It’s not even the author’s best work. It’s got one really terrific barnstormer of a soliloquy that I would love to do on stage (yeah, it belongs to a female character, which is something), and one fairly creepy and evocative exchange near the end, but not much else in the way of meritorious writing.

Still, I don’t argue with its inclusion on my reading lists (and if you’ve been around a while, you know that I argue with a lot of the putrid garbage I was forced to read in grad school). See, this play sparked a lot of other work, much of it vastly superior… several other plays in several languages, an opera or two, some fairly ripping balladry, at least one movie and probably more… its title character is a household word.

Okay, so how many of you have figured me out by now?

Does it help if I mention that the title of the play is El burlador de Sevilla? (No fair Googling, y’all.) Maybe not. Most people haven’t heard of it. As I said, it isn’t a very good play. The theological point at issue—whether one can plan on a deathbed confession canceling out a heavily and intentionally sinful life—isn’t very well resolved.

Right. The play’s author is Fray Gabriel Tellez, better known by his pen-name (he wasn’t sure his monastic superiors would approve of this playwriting stuff) Tirso de Molina. His best play is probably El condenado por desconfiado, one I’m rather fond of and would like to stage. Similar theological point, better explored.

I don’t know what Fray Gabriel would think of the many adaptations and (frankly) perversions of the Burlador. I don’t actually think he’d be very keen; I should think he would consider the general fascination with the title character supremely wrongheaded, and the playing-up of the special effects in the final scene pretty offensive. The point, after all, is to evoke the horror of a sinful death, not to provide cheap thrills. I do think he’d like what’s been done with the title character’s sidekick, though.

Who’s with me now?

Right, right, I’ll quit toying. The Burlador is one Don Juan Tenorio, and if you are given the choice between seeing Tirso’s play and Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, I strongly recommend you choose the latter. Much though Tirso would disagree with me.

What price authors’ rights over their work?

Well, in response to my question yesterday about preferred styles of archive navigation, seems I am all alone. In fact, the tone of some responses indicates that I am not only alone, my point of view is an offense unto the good names of blogging and information architecture alike.

Seems not unlikely. So I apologize for any offense or confusion caused, and I also apologize to those who find my weekly archive unnavigable.

This one’s for all you Chomskybots out there.

David asked me this evening, “What’s your favorite linguistic concept?”

“My favorite what?”

“Linguistic concept.”

”Do I have to have one?”

“Yeah.” Pause. “See, there’s this party coming up where the theme is ‘come as your favorite linguistic concept.’”

“Aha, I see.” Long pause. “Well, I could always go, refuse to drink, and say I was an X’.”

David thought it was funny.

(Okay, look, there’s this branch of Chomskybot syntactic theory that involves nesting phrases inside each other to an absurd degree. It’s called X’ theory, pronounced ex-bar. Ha. It’s funny. Laugh.)

My email appears to be on the fritz at the moment. Sorry about that. If it’s hideously important, go ahead and use textartisan at softhome dot net, but otherwise just hang on a bit and it’ll doubtless be fixed.

Update: Seems to be back up. Hope I didn’t miss anything.

A weird problem I’m having with Phoenix lately underscores the desirability of easy-access blog archives.

For some reason, Phoenix is over-relying on cached copies of some blogs. (Yes, tried clearing cache; thank you come again.) Sometimes I can override it by going to the full blog URL instead of the index to whatever directory the blog lives in (e.g. http://yarinareth.net/caveatlector/index.html instead of http://yarinareth.net/caveatlector/).

Sometimes I can’t, and the only way I can read the latest posts is by hitting the archives. (Seems to happen to Blogspot blogs a lot; dunno why.)

I’m gonna pick on Mark here, ’cuz he won’t up and kill me. To get to a particular post in Mark’s archive, I have to click three times: once on the Archives link on the main page, once on the month link, and once on the post I want to read in Mark’s calendar view. (Clicking on a day in Mark’s calendar view only gives me excerpts, not full posts.)

Whereas to read the latest archives on my blog, one need only click the appropriate link in my sidebar.

Not only is Mark’s indirection an annoyance, it’s a waste of expensive bandwidth—diveintomark.org has to serve me up two pages I don’t want so that I can get to the page I do want. I’ll lay odds Mark wastes more bandwidth on these intermediate pages than I do by using weekly archives instead of individual-post archives—though, I hasten to say, there is no way to test this assertion because I don’t even have individual-post archives.

Maybe it’s that I read too damn fast, but individual-post archives never fail to annoy me. When I’m trying to catch up on a blog, as for example after my trip to Indiana a while back, I hate having to click on individual post links. Hate it hate it hate it. Larger date-based chunks, please.

Am I all alone here, or does this irk anyone else?

Sean McGrath, apropos of technogeekery, wants to know (among other things) where irregular verbs come from.

Short answer: Language changes. Some things change more quickly than others. Cruft accumulates in language just as it does in programming.

Various longer answers:

Some irregularities result from language-specific constraints on pronunciation. Take some of the “irregular” Spanish futures, for instance: “saldré” rather than *saliré is a response to (speaking impressionistically) the Spanish dislike of l and r rubbing up against each other like that once the unstressed vowel is deleted.

Some irregularities are inherited from earlier language states. Several irregular preterite stems in Spanish come straight out of Latin, in which a preterite stem looking wildly different from the present stem was perfectly normal.

Some irregularities result from sound changes, alterations over time in the way people pronounce words. If some verbs, or verb endings, get hit harder than others, irregularities result. For instance, the breaking of the mid-low (okay, okay, mid short) Latin vowels into the Spanish diphthongs ie and ue in stressed syllables created a vast class of present-tense verb irregularities—the so-called “stem-changing verbs” such as perder and morir.

And some stuff is just weird. Suppletion, for instance. The Spanish verb ser contains bits and pieces of three different Latin verb paradigms (ESSE, SEDERE, and… crud, what’s the other one… IRE, I think). Heavily-used verbs are most prone to extreme weirdness like this.

Now, languages do have countervailing tendencies. Quick, what’s the past tense of “dive?” How about “leap?” The forms currently perceived as “irregular”—dove and leapt—are gradually losing currency to the regularized forms dived and leaped. This is called “analogy,” and everyone but Chomskybots to whom it is anathema recognizes its power to reshape verbal paradigms.

Okay, that was the quick and sloppy answer. Somebody do a more careful one, please.

I happened upon a growl about editors and Microsoft Word today. The claim is the usual one: everybody’s on the markup bandwagon except the editors, so they just better get with it!

The blogger growling has written, he says, “several plans for end-to-end XML-based publishing where the manuscript does not really exist, where it’s a collection of sections and variations, indexed, threaded and exported for books.”

I bet he’s never put a printed book together in his life. I just bet. I’m willing to be wrong, but I just bet.

I haven’t strength for a spirited defense of editorial use of Word today. I will say, however, that Growlboy probably ought to talk to those recalcitrant editors and find out the reasons they do what they do, not to mention why they use Word to do it.

He is likely to find that the other participants in the process aren’t as markup-ready as he thinks they are. He is also likely to find quite a few necessary editing practices that cannot be replicated in any markup-aware application.

In other words—my opinion showing here—he’s yet another markup fanatic with his head in the clouds utterly lacking clue when it comes to putting words in print.

Okay, okay, I can’t resist just one jab. XML markup is utterly (and possibly irredeemably, Topologi aside) crappy for representing and manipulating a work in progress, however beautiful it is for finished works. An editor’s job is coping with works-in-progress. Guess what. That causes problems when editors and markup intersect.

It’s almost amusing to see one markup fanatic after another finally coming to the conclusion that print publishing really does involve hard problems. Almost.