My book club is reading How to Wreck a Nice Beach, on the history of the vocoder. One of my compatriots DJs for CBC Radio 3, and put together this YouTube playlist of vocoder tunes:

I read The War of Art this weekend, on my iPod, high. In other words: it’s a quick, easy read.

I’ve been reading a lot of books on the creative process and this one is a good summary of the type: writer’s block is fear and fear comes from living in an illusory reality. Realize when you’re in your fear, look at why you’re doing what you’re doing, and then adjust how you’re thinking to remove the fear.

Easier said than done — as with all self improvement stuff understanding is different from grokking — but the first step is being able to structure it. For someone who’s read a lot of these things the ideas are clear, and amusingly presented.

This sticks in my mind as the most absolutely terrifying thing I read growing up. I don’t know if it holds up, but El Orfanato is a three compared to this thing’s definitional five. If you made the scale arbitrarily width, this book would be the end point. The French definition of what it means, to me, to say something is scary: metric terror. I used to have nightmares so bad I couldn’t sleep because of this series.

But now I’ve oversold it. The memory of the terror is more perfect than the actuality of the book, I’m sure — it’s for kids, and crawling with the supernatural. It was just so damn eerie, and I grew up in old, settling houses so my imagination had the materiel it needed to build crazy edifices of self-inflicted terror.

Following the rule of everything I liked from childhood involving Vincent Price, Edward Gorey, or both, The House with a Clock in Its Walls was illustrated by Gorey and the television adaptation was hosted by Price.

I’m just finishing up The Spirit Molecule by Dr. Rick Strassman, a book about his results and experiences administering DMT in a clinical setting during the mid-1990s.

First let me say this: the book is crazy. I question Dr. Strassman’s methodologies from experimental design all the way through to footnoting the book. If you do read it, make sure to follow the footnotes — there’s an effect whereby something footnoted looks more legit, but the notes in this thing trade on that power without backing it. Footnotes like, “I couldn’t find anything to support this.”

Strassman’s theories begin with the scientific and verifiable and end well within the realm of the spiritual and untestable. Part of this is by design, and part of it is because of the nature of the material studied. Strassman believes that a proper study of psychedelics is very nuanced. The first section, for example, begins with a lengthly discussion of the language used to frame psychedelic drug research and how that has the potential to affect the outcomes of that research.

From there Strassman discusses the chemical structures of various psychedelics (it turns out that DMT has a simple, perhaps minimal, psychedelic structure) and the biological processes through which DMT acts on the body and brain.

This leads into Rick’s quest to obtain regulatory approval to produce pure DMT, to get permission to test it on human subjects, and to design the experimental protocols in use through the rest of the book. The dose response study, for example, involved a double-blind series of doses determined relative to body weight, not absolute drug mass.

Then things get weird. Patients start reporting fairly consistent drug experiences, which allows Strassman to guide them with some success. Until, that is, they start meeting entities (machine elves, clowns, and saguaro-beings — the last of which I once encountered). At this point Rick begins discussing them with patients as though the beings are manifestations of internal mental processes. This is never met well by the patients (though my saguaro-demon was a manifestation of my own fear), leading to a loss of rapport with Strassman.

Leary’s set and setting theory governs Strassman’s experimental design — the circumstances of ingestion being as key to the total experience as the actual drug — so a loss of rapport between the experimenter and the subject is a large problem. From then on Strassman decides to take entity contact reports at face value. It is here the book moves from the Pop Sci section of the bookstore to New Age.

So The Spirit Molecule, as indicated by the name, ends up with a lot of pseudoreligion and spiritualistic speculation (some of which I quite like). Strassman’s experiment design was also filtered through his buddhist practice (babysitting a tripper being an exercise in calm mindfulness) and he chronicles his essential excommunication from the community once his research gets close enough to their concerns. For example, can psychedelics offer a shortcut, albeit temporary, to an enlightenment experience — and will we strive not harder for the peak, having once glimpsed the vista?

The final part of the book is on future directions for experimental and clinical uses of psychedelics. These ruminations are very interesting. They indicate that the psychological, psychiatric, spiritual, religious, personal, and social aspects of psychedelics, while worth studying individually, are inextricably tangled. Psychedelics have fewer negative and more positive effects than opponents traditionally assume and also fewer positives and more negatives than proponents typically believe.

Rebel Without a Crew is Robert Rodriguez’s memoir of the creation of El Mariachi, from writing it in an experimental drug research hospital where he participated in human trials to finance the film, through to his explosion onto the Hollywood scene.

It’s about a two-day quick read with lots of good nuggets about filmmaking and the business side. One of the great things about it is that he’s huge enough to burn all the people that messed with him on the way up, so he names names.

Indie filmmaking is even easier now that end-to-end digital is the low-cost norm. About 70% of El Mariachi’s budget went to the cost of film, development, and printing — one can lop that right off the top now.

The new versions of this book which include the 10-minute film school are — or should be — the bible of what I’m calling the New Canadian Cinema.

I am reading Invisible Cities at the moment and had to pause to recommend it. It’s poetic, fabulist philosophy about semiotics, language, architecture, and the nature of memory and experience. It comes highly-recommended by Toronto Jared — Ben — and it’s really effing good.

The frame is that Marco Polo is describing to Kublai Kahn the cities of his crumbling empire. It has the flavor of Kubla Khan, and of Umberto Eco.

Apparently I love late 20th century academic Italian fantasies — and somehow the poetry survives in William Weaver’s translation.

Today I had a tough conversation with a professor. He said that I was talented, and that my procrastination problems made him feel sad for me.

Thanks to Jared this blog has a minor reputation in the productivity sphere. His post on GTD with Evernote is an MPF classic. But GTD doesn’t work for me. It’s too high-level. It presupposes a level of organization utterly foreign to me. It assumes the answer to my productivity problems is to make my completely-nonexistent system more efficient.

What do you do if you can’t even start? What if you’re not just disorganized, but anti-organized? What if productivity setups you come into contract with implode?

Despite Merlin’s disdain for the Lifehacker crowd (“joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging“), Lifehacker’s shotgun-survey method of productivity tools dredged up a winning suggestion: The Now Habit.

The thesis of The Now Habit is that procrastination is not a problem, it’s a symptom. The problem is anxiety, which is treatable. Entrenched procrastination, divorced from the underlying condition, is not treatable. It’s the only productivity book I’ve read which feels like it addresses problems I actually have instead of ones I’d like to. If you feel like “schedule time to do your weekly review” is a vaguely humorous existential joke the book might interest you.

Essentially The Now Habit, a very quick read, boils down to a powerful change in point of view: that workaholism makes workaholism necessary (entrenched procrastinators can easily be end-of-cycle workaholics), that procrastination is incurable because it’s not the problem, and that creating, identifying, and defending lots of downtime is an essential productivity skill. It moves procrastination away from Puritan morality (“work harder”) and towards positive psychology (“think different”).

If Getting Things Done seems like too much work then check out The Now Habit. First, the systems are compatible. Second, TNH requires very little effort, most of it fun: plan your time off before you plan your work; orient your thinking towards the well-deserved break and away from dreading the task; work in little chunks and follow them with outsized rewards.

The Library of Congress just uploaded a bunch of portraits of American Civil War peoples to Flickr. Public entities providing content for private companies — sure, whatever.

Asylum, almost completed, is the The Civil War-Ken-Burns-style film that I’ve been wrestling mightily with for about a month now, maybe more. I’ve been looking at photos like these, of period mental patients, for that whole time.

Partly because I’m in the middle of The Name of the Rose and love A Scanner Darkly I’m riffing off the fact that these tend to be digital photos of prints of negatives of people, and in some cases the digital copy of the reversed copy of the reversed copy (which we see upside-down and automatically interpret downside-up) is all that remains of the memory of the person. The photos are on Flickr to sort out the multiple layers of disintegrated signs and get people to use metadata to reconstruct the original sign, the name of the signified.

It occurs to me that the issue of Transmetropolitan where they resurrect all the cryogenics people is actually rad — in that book, technology is at the point where we can reconstruct the signified.

The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco is an historical-fantasy detective novel set in Southern Europe in the Middle Ages. I’ve just started it, I’m a little way in, and here are my initial impressions.

The book I am reading is an English translation of the Italian. It is presented as a fictionalization of a set of notes the author took from a rare, archaic French manuscript before it was stolen from him, which itself was a translation-slash-contemporization of an earlier Latin manuscript, written in a before-its-time dialect, that is extremely obscure, its non-fraudulent existence attested by direct citations found, again, in second-language translations of rare books found in open markets in exotic parts.

This is all clearly put to the lie immediately as Eco makes it obvious his main character and the book’s protagonist are an earlier Watson and Holmes, perhaps with shades of Chesterton’s Father Brown — or perhaps not.

Brother William’s first set of observations deduce the whereabouts of a horse he had never seen and the structure of part of the monastery by “reading the book of nature”. The signs left on the landscape by the animal’s passing and the structure’s existence. Further on the book describes parts of the abbey implied by its architecture, but which are not visible, and the opening leaves of the novel contain what I think is a mislabeled map of the abbey. Several paragraphs, so far, have been dedicated to the numerology and astrology of the design of the architecture — why a balcony has seven sides and faces West, for example.

Umberto Eco, it should be noted, is a Semiotician. His work involves a good philosophical understanding of symbolic thought — having a dense structure of pointers to things that aren’t there is an intensely interesting way for him to start a book: exactly how much can we “know” simply by parsing logical structures? Is that “real” knowledge? Etc.

“All the same,” I said, “when you read the prints in the snow and the evidence of the branches, you did not yet know Brunellus. In a certain sense those prints spoke of all horses, or at least all horses of that breed. Musn’t we say, then, that the book of nature speaks to us only of essences, as many distinguished theologians teach?”

“Not entirely, dear Adso,” my master replied. “True, that kind of print expressed to me, if you like, the idea of ‘horse,’ the verbum mentis, and would have expressed the same to me wherever I might have found it. But the print in that place and at that hour of the day told me that at least one of all possible horses had passed that way. So I found myself halfway between the perception of the concept ‘horse’ and the knowledge of an individual horse. [...] And so the ideas, which I was using earlier to imagine a horse I had not yet seen, were pure signs, as the hoofprints in the snow were signs of the idea of ‘horse’; and signs and the signs of signs are used only when we are lacking things.”

Plus, the main character eats cannabis — instead of Holmes’ preferred cocaine — which is how I assume he comes to understand all the crazy connectivity he sees.

As a computer science undergrad, one of my (and my girlfriends’!) favourite books was Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs. The book is about a group of Microsoft programmers who leave Microsoft to found a start-up company, before the dot-com bubble. Besides the characters’ career arcs, a large part of the book is about [SPOILER!] Daniel and Karla gradually getting together. Ultimately, Microserfs is a romance set in a very realistic Silicon Valley.

Coupland effectively rewrote Microserfs as JPod, changing the setting to Electronic Arts in Vancouver. Except JPod skips over the few months where [SPOILER!] Ethan and Kaitlin start dating. In his rewrite, Coupland removed the aspect of Microserfs that I liked best: JPod is a boring piece of crap (that made for an even worse TV show).

The only two films about programming that I can recall are Hackers and Antitrust. Both films have male protagonists supported by technically-competant love interests: Hackers was Angelina Jolie’s first major role her best haircut ever and I don’t remember much about Antitrust, but Wikipedia assures me that the girls kicked ass*.

I finally got around to seeing The Social Network, which got a lot of attention when it came out for its “angry nerd misogyny”. Writer Aaron Sorkin flip-flopped on whether it was a pure Hollywood fantasy, sexed-up to sell tickets, or if he was accurately reflecting the mysogyny of the tech industry. I think The Social Network was an amazing script, making a fast-paced film out of typing and depositions, but maybe I would have liked the film more with some romance?

* Although Rachael Leigh Cook’s career-best hair was in Josie and the Pussycats.