First editions

I have succumbed to that illness to which bibliophiles are most vulnerable: first-edition mania. I used to be perfectly happy to go into a bookstore and find a clean well-designed paperback. Now nothing will do but older editions, the closer to a first the better.

Pictured in the Current Reading spot is the latest manifestation of this illness: a 1943 hardback edition of Eliot’s Four Quartets complete with (slightly torn) dustjacket, found in Richmond during a time when Esta and I were supposed to be keeping each other from buying anything. (We were both unsuccessful at that, by the way.) In my defense, my existing copies of the poem were either (a) tattered (paperback edition) or (b) cramped (in the Collected Poems), so of course that excuses getting another copy.

What is it that causes me to go out and do this? This isn’t even my first Eliot first edition; I have a clean Murder in the Cathedral that I found years ago in Georgetown. I think the attraction has to do with several things. First, the typography. There is usually no comparison between the work of a metal press from fifty or seventy-five years ago and modern offset printing. The physicalness of the slight indentations in the paper and the even color are generally far superior. Too, many paperbacks are reproduced in photo offset from the original hardcover settings but with tighter margins, making the page both less legible and more cramped.

And there is a sense of history that often speaks directly to the work. One thing I noticed in this 1943 edition was the color of the paper. Unlike some of my books from the 1920s and 1930s, the paper of this edition had browned like a paperback—because during World War II the only paper that was available had a high acid content (the necessary materials to produce better paper were needed elsewhere for the war effort). Knowing this and holding it in your hands lends an entirely new perspective to Eliot’s poems of loss, time, and redemption, particularly “Little Gidding,” which takes on a terrible concreteness when you situate it in wartime England in 1943:

Ash on and old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
    This is the death of air.

(Thanks to Tristan for an excellent online text and notes on the poems.)

For a better discussion of the semantic interplay between text and book, check out Jerome McGann’s Black Riders: The Visual Language of Modernism.

Review: The Cure, Faith (Deluxe Edition)

the cure faith deluxe edition

This weekend as I was driving around in the rain with Charlie, I was playing “The Drowning Man” from the Cure’s seminal 1981 release Faith on the car stereo. My friend asked, “Which band is this?” When I told him it was the Cure, he said, “Oh. There have been so many new bands coming out that sound like the Cure, I wasn’t sure whether it was one of them or the real thing.”

Which is to say, this new series of double-disc reissues of the Cure’s early albums, which started last fall with Three Imaginary Boys and continues tomorrow with Seventeen Seconds, Pornography, and Faith, could not come at a more auspicious time. Thanks to bands like Interpol and Bloc Party, which owe debts to Robert Smith’s moody musical style and eccentric vocals respectively, the time is ripe for a rediscovery of the Cure’s legacy. And this series of reissues is definitely the right way to do it.

The sound on this reissue is gorgeously clean. At this point in their history, the revolving Cure line-up was down to a core of three: Smith on vocals and lead, Simon Gallup on bass, and Laurence Tolhurst on drums, with keyboardist Matthieu Hartley abruptly leaving days before the recording session started. Slimmed down to the elemental basics, the band’s playing is honed tight, with Gallup’s big bass sound up front and Smith’s guitars washing over the mix. (For better or worse, this is also the release where, perhaps to fill in some of the gaps in the mix, Smith started reverbing the hell out of his vocals.)

And some of the songs on this disc are stone classics. The major lyrical inspirations for the songs are said to be the death of “several friends and relations” and the terminal illness of Tolhurst’s mother, and that combined with Smith’s meditations on faith and disbelief provide the thematic core for the album. There is a broad sonic range within the basic bleakness of the album: “Primary” and “Other Voices,” which both appear on the excellent Staring at the Sea compilation, are jittery, paranoid fun, as is “Doubt,” while “The Funeral Party,” “The Drowning Man,” and “Faith” are majestic, epic stretches of unremitting rainy darkness. This release is where the Cure found the heart of darkness that was only hinted in earlier songs. The band wouldn’t release another album that was so thoroughly and completely dark until Disintegration closed out their classic period at the end of the 1980s, but the darkness that flowered on Faith is what many still consider to be the Cure’s classic sound, and it would reappear lyrically or musically on almost every other Cure release.

The bonus material is excellent on this release, as with the others in the series. Rounding out Disc 1 is a 27-minute instrumental called “Carnage Visors,” a soundtrack to a 1981 tour film and previously available on the cassette version of Faith. Disc 2 consists of home demos and studio out-takes of the “Faith” material, three previously unreleased songs cut during the Faith sessions, and majestic live performances from the summer of 1981. Disc 2 closes with the Cure’s landmark 1981 single “Charlotte Sometimes,” previously available on the Staring at the Sea compilation, in which the dead ground covered by the Faith sessions yields a sinisterly beautiful flower, a perfect goth pop single.

On April 26, the Cure release expanded editions of Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography. To hear some of the tracks from all three releases, check out The Cure Sampler Listening Party.

If you are going to buy more than one Cure CD and would like to save money, go to the Rhino website.

Review originally posted at BlogCritics.

House weekend

Lisa and I went with Charlie to see the This Old House Carlisle Project this weekend. As regular readers will recall, we infiltrated the area a few months ago to find trade trucks pulled up but otherwise nothing much in the way of visible activity. This trip was a little different. For one thing, we were paying to go—which was ok as the proceeds from the tickets support a good cause. For another, there were no trades in sight (though there was still some work to be done). This tour was really about the house and what the decorators had done with it.

I’m pleased to report that even the most questionable rooms (with one exception) looked much better in person than they did on TV. The “very red” entrance hall actually looked really good, for instance, as did the kids’ bedrooms. The topiary dragonfly over the breakfast table, however, looked not just out of place but scary. We asked a number of pointed questions about the sculpture, such as whether it needed to be watered and whether the family that bought the house was planning to keep it. (Oh yeah, spoiler warning, highlight text to read: someone bought the house for about $1.8 million.)

One comment from just about everyone on the tour was how much smaller the house felt than it looked on TV. I thought that was a tribute to the architect; it could easily have felt echoey and cavernous. Some spaces, including the library, were just about perfectly proportioned and executed. But I thought the barn was disappointingly unbarnlike after the decorators got done with it. The fireplace helped add ambience as did the barn timbers, but mostly it felt like a room with tall ceilings.

Lisa and I both decided it was much more satisfying watching the actual structural work happen than touring the house as a designer showcase. And we know how I feel about interior design showcases. (I should note, however, that it was a hell of a lot of fun to check out the mechanicals in the basement. The boiler and those plumbing manifolds look even more impressive in real life.)

Free music at Amazon

Via Boing Boing and Joi Ito, the free music download directory at Amazon. Don’t get too excited, though: except for a handful of exclusives (such as a soporific b-side from Moby’s latest album), many of the interesting tracks on the Amazon site are widely available elsewhere, including the artists’s own sites and Salon’s Daily Download (registration or daily pass required).

The interesting bit about Amazon’s service is that it links to everyone’s downloads, not just the interesting ones. So if you were looking for a jazz cover of “California Here I Come,” Amazon is the place. But don’t expect to find buzzworthy singles without a lot of searching. That, after all, is what MP3 blogs are for.

What is more interesting to me is the fact that so many sites like this exist to point people to what is essentially advertising. There is a real ecosystem around free MP3s, and you can see how they can build real buzz around an artist. Look at Bloc Party, for instance; pretty well unknown stateside prior to last fall, but with the help of a free MP3 for their Cure-meets-Thin-Lizzy “Banquet” they were a big favorite going into SXSW. Not surprising that savvy labels like Sub Pop are using free downloads intelligently and programmatically (check the Downloads RSS Feed) to build buzz.

Altering my RSS workflow with BlogLines

Since moving back to the East Coast, I had the luxury of managing a single-location infrastructure. All my mail, calendar, blog management, and most importantly my RSS subscriptions were in the same place: on my laptop. Now that I’ve started work, I’ve discovered some cool ways to manage the RSS part of the workflow from multiple locations.

The key is Bloglines, the online feedreading service that I knew about but had never used prior to this week. I populated Bloglines with a set of important work related feeds (a very short list, compared to my list of 200+ subscriptions). Then I used a new feature in NetNewsWire to add my BlogLines feeds to my reading list, deleting the equivalent versions from my regular subscriptions.

Now, if I read a news item in CNet from home via BlogLines, it’s not downloaded when I open NetNewsWire at home, or vice versa. This enables the best of both worlds: I get to read a subset of my feeds through a lightweight, low impact web interface, and don’t have to manage already-read content through my fuller-featured reader.

The only concern I have about the feature is following up on the items later to blog them. I don’t do very much blogging from work—at least not until I get my formal product management blog ramped up—and there’s no convenient way to keep track of items for later blogging that is preserved from BlogLines to NetNewsWire. My interim solution is to email URLs to myself; not elegant, but effective. (I can also mark memorable items as “keep new,” but since the new setting gets reset when I view the item through Bloglines that’s a less ambiguous way of keeping an item available than flagging it.)

PATRIOT games

CNET News.blog: Patriot Act’s technology-related sections to be scrutinized. Declan McCullagh posts a brief summary to the three sections in question, all of which are subject to the “sunset” provisions mercifully contained in the original act. Section 209 concerns the rules for police access to voicemail stored on a provider’s system; 217 makes it easier for law enforcement to assist computer system owners in monitoring unauthorized intrusions; and 220 allows search warrants for locations anywhere in the country to be issued from the district where the crime occurs.

Declan points to a very cogent debate on 209 and 220 between Jim Dempsey and Orin Kerr, which boils down to: the need for some of the changes in these sections are clear to bring the law into the electronic world, but so is the need for extension of constitutional checks and balances on these new powers. Kerr suggests that including a suppression remedy (ensuring that improperly obtained evidence is suppressed in subsequent proceedings); extending civil action and administrative discipline guidelines to ensure that emergency exceptions are not abused; and finally some concern about how users should be notified if their electronic records are searched.

KatieBlog?

I may be able to add a celebrity blogger to my HooBlogs register of blogging University of Virginia alumni, now that it looks as though Katie Couric (along with NBC’s other anchors) might be starting a blog (thanks to MicroPersuasion for the link, original story at Yahoo).

Katie, if you need any support or advice about blogging in general or blogging from inside a corporation in particular, let me be the first to volunteer my assistance.

Big box stores

My new office is in Framingham, and it’s surrounded by big box stores. Coming in, I pass a financial services complex and a big box mall on my left, and a big box strip on my right. Just past my office is a big box grocery store (the “super” version of Stop and Shop). In a two mile radius can be found Office Max, Office Depot, Barnes & Noble, Home Depot, Target, Macy’s, Filene’s Basement, Best Buy, Tweeter, Comp USA, BJ’s wholesale club, and Old Navy, among many others, plus an assortment of supporting stores like Panera and Starbucks that seem to accompany the big boxes like birds picking insects out of a crocodile’s mouth.

Is it odd that I feel a sort of relief in the litany above? These are stores that can be found next to most white collar office parks. They were in Fairfax and in Redmond (or Bellevue), and tend to show up near most of the places I have traveled on business. Their purpose in life seems to be to place everything within reach that you might need to pick up on your lunch hour or on your way home from work. At this job they are very good. Big box stores are a little like APIs for office worker shopping; they make it easy and simple to accomplish known tasks and are present wherever you go.

Of course, that is their downside as well. There are no surprises with big box stores, only the same things you can buy everywhere else. And there is a terrible cost—in wasted space, in environmental impact (you need an SUV to take home all your big big purchases!), in health (have you ever eaten in the restaurants that cluster next to big boxes? They should all have standard defibrillators to go with the hubcap sized plates), in soul.

But oh, the convenience.

Friends with bands

The benefit of sitting on postable items is that sometimes they pile up into some neat connections, as is the case with these three friends-with-bands stories. First, here in the Boston environs, Chris Rigopulos’s band Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives has released its second album, Second and Eighteen. (Chris was the lead guitarist with the Jack Tang Orchestra back at Sloan.)

Second, Craig Fennell, who sang at our wedding and who was a dear friend for many years starting in the Glee Club days, takes time off from his landscape architecture job (and, apparently, weight training. My God, it’s full of muscles!) to play keys and sing in Wonderjack, a DC area band that’s starting to get some radio play. The band’s bassist is another former Virginia Gentleman and Glee Club member, Dan Roche—congrats on the nuptials, Dan. (Nice band pics by another Glee Club friend, Guido Peñaranda.)

Finally, Justin Rosolino has added a new credit to his resume: producer. Apparently he sat behind the boards (as well as behind the electric guitars) for Portrait of Another, which (completing the UVA connection) is the band of the housemate of Hooblogger Hunter Chorey.

Obsessive iTunes tune management

I thought my iTunes regimen was elaborate, but Glenn MacDonald’s takes the cake. Automatic rating based on playing habits, automatic image handling that marks up the cover art with “fingerprints,” even automatic payment to artists whose tracks are highly rated but unpurchased.

My setup is simple by comparison, and heavily dependent on smart playlists. Never Played is all tracks with a playcount of 0. Just Added is the last 200 most recent tracks. Less Played is any track that hasn’t been played at least twice, and whose last play was more than six months ago. Fell Out of Rotation is a track whose playcount is more than 2 and whose last played date is greater than a year ago. That plus a bunch of manually generated playlists works pretty well for me, but I’d love to take a look at Glenn’s script.

Update: Well, of course it’s a hoax. Or a satire on what you’d have to do to be able to compensate artists fairly. Or whatever.

Job update: reentering the workforce

Astute readers (or folks who click to my site rather than just scanning my RSS feed) may have noticed that my tagline, which formerly read “This blogger is for hire,” has changed. Later today I will start my new job as product manager for iET Solutions, a company that makes software that manages IT services based on the ITIL standard, as well as more traditional customer and IT management offerings including helpdesk and CRM.

I thought it might be helpful for other people in the job market to get some perspective on my search. My full time search started in November, and I received my first offer in early April, almost exactly six months later. During the intervening time, I spoke with almost 40 companies; had first-round interviews with about 15 of them; second round or higher with 8; and secured two offers.

Position availability for product managers has been bursty. There was a hot period for about six weeks from November through early December, then no real positions available until about late February, when things suddenly got hot again. This may be a specifically Boston issue, or it may speak to factors in the economic cycle that influence the availability of this kind of marketing position.

I used several lead management methods to identify new opportunities. Monster and Craigslist were in the mix, as were conversations with friends and colleagues at networking events and ongoing daily conversation. I listed my resumé on Monster as well as on my own blog, and found that both brought a roughly equal number of hits in any given month, though the nibbles from people who found me on Google tended to be less targeted and less serious. No one who contacted me mentioned having read my blog. I also worked with three recruiting and placement firms and spoke with many more. Some of the experiences with placement firms were very positive, and I will be happy to provide specific recommendations offline. The recruiter who placed me at iET Solutions was a single-time recruiter (not someone with whom I had looked at other firms) who found my resumé on Monster.

What’s next for me and this blog? Well, it’s likely I won’t update as often as I have been doing for the last six to eight months, but I anticipate continuing this project well into the foreseeable future. There may be some new directions in content, responding to some of the challenges of my new job. I hope you’ll enjoy the ride as much as I plan to.

Manila 9.5 goes public beta

The new version of Manila, the software that powers this blog, entered public beta over the weekend. Congrats to Jake, Scott, and the rest of the Userland team.

Some of the changes in the software look really interesting for all levels of users, including nofollow support, enclosures, authenticated member signup, better management for comments and trackback (spam management), and a ton of performance fixes. Others, including version control and site access control, look squarely aimed at a specific set of customers—those inside the firewall. Very interesting.

Things I’d like to see fixed that I don’t see listed—I’m going to try to install the beta bits and check for the fixes, but haven’t gotten there yet:

  • Static rendering issues with news items: This is the biggest pain for me. Currently the news item department, comment, and trackback links are all broken on every news item on my static site (www is the static site; discuss.www.jarretthousenorth.com is the dynamic site). The static rendering code should be smart enough to link to the dynamic site for these items—or else we should have the option to do static rendering of comments, trackback, and news item department pages.
  • The calendar on static pages: Unless you go back and re-render a month manually, the navigation on the calendar of a static page does not link to any content published after that page was rendered. This makes paging chronologically forward through the content a real problem. It’s not just a problem for one month, either, since the “next month” link points to the last available content date. So basically you have to manually re-render a given month for a few months in a row to avoid losing the thread of the navigation in statically rendered pages. Manila should either do re-rendering automatically as part of a scheduled maintenance process, or should identify a different way to handle the calendar function.
  • Better archive handling: Now that this site has almost four years of content, the limited archive paging (month at a time) that the calendar control offers is frustrating. I’d like to see automated support for weekly, monthly, or yearly archive pages, even if they only offer titles and not full content. I’d also like to see more robust department archives. Currently they only manage a fixed number of news items (50?) per department, and then you have to use the calendar (or Google) to find older entries. I’d like to see Manila support paging, date-based archiving, or some other intelligent way of finding deeper content without taxing server resources on news item department pages.

I look forward to playing with the beta some more over the next few weeks in my shrinking spare time.

Welcome to the neighborhood

Aaron Swartz: SFP: Come see us. Looks like Aaron got some initial round funding to work on his company this summer as part of Y Combinator’s Summer Founders Program and will be setting up an office here in the greater Boston area. Congrats, Aaron! (I like the description of the area he attributes to Paul Graham of Y Combinator:

“Now you want to go about finding an apartment. You want to get a place on the red line [the local subway] because then you can go see people and people can go see you. The best place to go is Davis Square, because it’s cheap, fun, and on the red line. Harvard is fun and on the red line but not cheap, Porter is cheap and on the red line but not fun, so I recommend Davis, Inman, and Central, in that order.”

Happy Patriots’ Day

I’ve come a long way from three years ago, when I wrote about my confusion about Patriots’ Day (is it a day off to watch the Boston Marathon?). Now I live in a town that claims the highest number of first-day casualties within town borders—22 colonists and at least twice as many British regulars, more than either Lexington or Concord—in the American Revolution. The Lexington Minuteman rounds up all the facts and legends.

Update: Good coverage of some of the reenactment fun in downtown Arlington on Ben Hyde’s blog.