In a forum thread on Maps and Information Analysis and Presentation, Stacey Mason launches an exploration of Tinderbox for gathering information from several sources, keeping track of who said what, and presenting that information to a meeting or class.

Diane Greco sends some wonderful advice to a writer.

Much moved today by the writer and scientist Eliza Blair's birthday post. At 25, Blair has already published award-winning science fiction while pursuing a dream to go to the moon.

Terrific and true and prettyful.

Amazon and Macmillan are a sideshow. If you miss it, don't worry: there will be another one just like it next month, or next week, or next year. I'm pretty sure it's safe to ignore, in favor of the other mysteries that are clamoring for your attention. Only you know what they are – and people like me are out here, enthusiastically anticipating your new work.

I’m sparked.

Dan Phiffer introduces his new weblog with a brilliant exploration of The Second Post, examining the second post in weblogs through history. A genre is born: technocrit at its best. (Thanks, Daring Fireball!)

Why, when a mail server runs amok, does it happen in the middle of the night?

Eliza Blair (“Friends In Need”) is 25 today. She wants to be a writer. She wants to be a rocket scientist. The eBook mess makes writing uncertain, and cancellation of the new American moon program (a cynical Bush ploy, announcing a big space program and leaving the bill unpaid) leaves her other career stalled behind thousands of unemployed rocket scientists with more experience.

This affects me deeply. Not just because I've aspired to someday work for NASA since I was four years old, though let's observe a moment of silence for four-year-old Eliza's sobs of rage, but because it has the effect of dumping a few thousand rocket engineers on the market starting this summer, quite possibly clogging the employment pipeline for years to come and making it that much more difficult for me to find anyone, even the military, to pay for my grad school education. (Everything revolves around me, remember?) It's also crushing the hopes and dreams of many of those engineers, but who cares about them - they already got to live the dream, at least for a little while. >.> Jerks.

Reaction to the iPad announcement has been perplexing. Some people look into the iPad and see their hopes. Some people see their fears. Some people see money.

What we don’t see, interestingly, is the traditional scenario for the tablet computer: on the job, walking around, held like a clipboard. That’s what people have always assumed the tablet would be. It’s not.

Perhaps it’s a tricorder, the original Star Trek fashion accessory. I’m only half kidding here.

The tricorder was invented because, in 1966, television executives thought it looked strange for a young woman to be walking around without a purse, and so they needed to give Yeoman Rand something with a shoulder strap. We’re going to have the reverse problem: what are you going to do with the iPad when you just want to put it down for a moment?

In new installment in Tinderbox Chronicles, publisher Steve Zeoli uses Tinderbox to explore his company’s offerings.

I work for a small, nonprofit publisher of books about sexual abuse. For a recent meeting, I wanted to create a visual representation of our catalog of titles, showing how old our books are by the type of book. The first step was grabbing title, ISBN, price, author and other information on each of our publications which I already had in a spreadsheet on my work PC...

Back in the early 1990’s, Eastgate made a serious run at independent bookstores as a place to buy original hypertexts. To be fair, the heavy lifting in this area was done by Bob Stein and his Voyager Company, which developed the modern eBook; we were hoping that, once Voyager had convinced stores to carry eBooks, we could convince them to carry our original hypertexts.

We had some success, especially at such forward-looking stores as Shaman Drum and Tattered Cover. We closed some chain sales, too.

But in the end, we learned a key reality of bookselling: no publisher can solve a bookstore’s problems (and booksellers always have terrible problems). And no publisher can really cause problems for a bookstore. There are always other books than yours.

Scholastic was able to cause some problems with the later volumes of Harry Potter. But that’s an exceptional case, and even then the problems were annoyances that seldom threatened the store’s existence.

This is the nub of what makes Amazon vs. Macmillan so interesting. Has Amazon become so large that it can make problems for a publisher? Perhaps. If so, we’re into monopoly territory. (This, incidentally, is why I’m so suspicious that the Sunday Forum Statement from Amazon was irregular; mentioning monopolies does Macmillan no harm but threatens Amazon, so it’s strange for Amazon to raise the subject.)

A further fascinating sideline: if Amazon is willing to risk legal sanctions and widespread hostility, then Amazon must think this part of the business is worth a fight. Is the book business really the core of Amazon? Amazon says its the world’s biggest bookstore, but they know their core business is fulfillment, not books. Books were a great place to start — prestigious, non-perishable, rectangular – but they were only practice.

I’ve always thought that the Kindle was, for Amazon, a nice little sideline, a speculation play that had a low but finite probability of a really big payoff in 5-10 years. That’s consistent with Amazon to date, but inconsistent with Macmillan: you don’t go to war over a side bet.

Over the weekend, Amazon went to war with Macmillan (and with them the entire Holtzbrinck Group), and then, suddenly, capitulated. The surrender statement, however, is odd and ill-written. In last year’s Orwell Affair, in which the apparent stakes were much smaller, Amazon’s resolution was brilliantly written.

One tell: the claim that Macmillan’s copyrights are monopolistic does nothing for Amazon – of course copyrights are monopolies, that’s why Queen Elizabeth invented them – but helps Macmillan by focusing attention on Amazon’s potential monopoly in distribution. It’s not in Amazon’s interest to talk this way, but it might be exactly what a stressed division manager would be feeling.

The Macmillan statement is signed by "The Kindle Group"; the Orwell Affair apology was signed by Jeff Bezos.

My guess: someone was tasked with writing a draft, and instead published the thing.

This is going to make an amazing book. As Tim Bray observed: the marketplace of the 21st century was being negotiated before our very eyes.

I spent Friday at Gatz, the 7-hour production of The Great Gatsby staged by Elevator Repair Service at the American Repertory Theater. It’s a staged reading: a fellow comes back to a dingy office, his PV won't boot, he opens up his 5" floppy disk case and finds a battered paperback. He begins reading.

Every word. Other people around the office work, they wander in and out, and from time to time they pick up bits of dialog. This really makes a difference — it makes it theater. Jordan Baker (Sibyl Kempson), Nick’s golf-star girlfriend, lounges around the office practicing her swing, reading golf magazines, and looking at Nick; it’s a quiet part, but Kempson is a terrific clown in the best sense of the word, and with a toss of her head and a twist of her shoulders she transforms herself from a a short, dark worker in a dingy, dark office to the sleek, rich, blonde who might have been Nick’s Daisy Buchanan.

There are too many standing ovations these days — Linda and I pointedly sit through at least half of them — but it’s impressive to get a standing O after seven hours of watching a guy read a book. Brilliant.

Nathan Alderman reviews Tinderbox in MacWorld. 4 mice. (I’ll take it, especially since small companies never get 5 mice.)

Thomas Jefferson, a compulsive note-taker, would have loved Eastgate’s Tinderbox, an innovative and endlessly versatile tool for recording, cataloging, and sharing notes.

Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, writes in Mother Jones about the long, slow demise of the literary magazine and, with it, the apparent end of magazine fiction.

A central point in this much-discussed article is often overlooked.

Back in the 1930s, magazines like the Yale Review or VQR saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000.

Genoways muddles his point immediately thereafter (he seems to be blaming diversity for the amount of bad writing these journals receive), but the core observation stands: literary journals receive lots of submissions, and the people who submit stories to literary journals seldom read them. Indeed, lots of these journals, including some of the best, process far more submissions than their print run.

When was the last time someone told you at lunch that they'd just come across a great short story that you should read? When was the last time you heard the sports guy on the radio mention a new short story?

“People don’t read” is a canard, a silly thing that grumpy people say. It’s patently untrue. There’s no other way to learn physics or chemistry or medicine or software design. We still have physicists and doctors, so someone reads. We don’t read short fiction.

Why not? Because we watch a lot of movies, and we read a lot of novels, we all have bookstores and everyone has Amazon. Magazines were designed for a different set of constraints: tiny bookstores, subsidized postal rates, exorbitant shipping rates for parcels. The gas-powered truck, not the Web, killed magazines by making it as easy and cheap to stock a good bookstore in San Francisco as in Manhattan.

The constraints of the short story are dictated by the shape of the magazine, just as the constraints of the novel are dictated by the shape of the bookstore. (The shape of the feature movie is constrained by bathroom breaks; I don’t know why television favors 48-minute dramas.) We’re still buying stories, but because we buy them in different packages, their shape has changed. (“It comes in pints?”)

Happy Birthday, Mozart.

Get the book.

Visiting Paris, Adam Gopnik asked his hosts why they always went together to Cafe Flore and never went next door to Les Deux Magots. The answer wanders from their foundations in the 1870’s to the characters of long-dead proprietors, the nature of French fashion, the drinking preferences of Sartre. But the core answer seems to be, simply, that in the early 1940’s Les Deux Magots was too often filled with German tourists, and so fashionable Paris grew to prefer Flore.

Ever since reading this wonderful passage, I’ve longed for a rich, anecdotal account of life in Occupied Paris and its echoes. This is a fine book, but it’s not Marianne in Chains and it’s not quite the book I wanted. Glass uses the American community as a microcosm of Paris, one that has a conveniently rich historical record because lots of Americans (and the American government) were naturally eager for news of Americans trapped in the occupation. The subjects of this group biography are varied, ranging from Shakespeare & Co. bookseller Sylvia Beach to the Comtesse Clara de Chambrun, a cousin of the Roosevelts who was also Laval’s mother-in-law.

Glass’s approach strikes me as essentially Marxist: in his account, poor but educated Americans tend to be leftist and joined the Resistance, while rich Americans were inclined to support Vichy and public order. Glass clearly wants to engage questions of loyalty and treason: was it treasonous or commendable for Charles Bedaux, for example, to promote a pipeline that would benefit French West Africa without much regard for who happened to be running France at the time? But these questions are difficult to address in a history, and we’re left with sketchy apologies. Glass accepts the success of the resistance without much scrutiny, and seems willing to accept collaborator’s accounts at face value as well. In the end, there’s lots of institutional history of the American Hospital and the American Library

Get the book.

Thomas Cromwell rose from nowhere to counsel the king. He rose through Wolsey’s household — Wolsey himself was a butcher’s boy — and became Henry VIII’s chief advisor and Thomas More’s rival. Mantel charts his rise, and subtly argues that Cromwell’s character holds a key to the centrality of tolerant intelligence in British political culture.

This is, in some ways, a strange choice for the Booker Prize. The present volume is clearly a prologue, ending suddenly as Cromwell turns (for the first time) to Wolf Hall, the residence of the Seymours, and the second volume might well transform the first. Further, the opening chapter on Cromwell’s boyish struggles with his father strikes me as clumsy, providing an invented source to explain invented character notes. McEwan did this more neatly in Chesil Beach by leaving childhood events in murky offstage shadows. We can never know what really happened in childhood, and in any case what happened isn’t what matters: this child is beaten, raped, abandoned and grows up fine, while an unkind word leaves another child with a lifetime of therapy. But the rest of Wolf Hall is very fine indeed:

Thomas More comes to Austin Friars. He refuses food, he refuses drink, though he looks in need of both.

The cardinal would not have taken no for an answer. He would have made him sit down and eat syllabub. Or, if it were the season, given him a large plate of strawberries and a very small spoon.

I envy the fierce, deniable malice in that plate of strawberries.

I saw 38 movies this year. (I know this because I keep notes in Tinderbox. You can see them in the left column of the main page, http://markBernstein.org/. That’s better than the previous year, when I saw 33 movies. Some of these movies are long: I count a seasonal television show as one film. Still, this seems too low; I’d like, for example, to be reasonably conversant with most of Ebert’s Great Movies, and to even get started on them (there must be 140 by now) I've got to pick up the pace.

I read 44 books in 2009, down from 46 the previous year. Tinderbox again has the notes, and this time I let Tinderbox do the counting, too. I wrote that “I read ^ value($ChildCount(/Books 2009)) books”, where “Books 2009” is an agent that gathers each book note for the calendar year. My favorite book this year was Allegra Goodman’s Intuition. My favorite technical book was Javascript: The Good Parts. In nonfiction, Nick Hornby loved 1599, and so did I.

Get the book.

Dictionary Johnson’s tricentenary has already been the occasion for at least three major new biographies; This one was recommended as the best for Johnson and his milieu, and it turns out to be a pleasant, convivial, and engaging read. Johnson started slow – he was middle aged before he was much of anything. He was always short of money but no one could be more ready than he to provide you with a glass of wine, a dish of tea, a spare half crown, and a memorable quip.

TPM was the first to say it: whether we like it or not, Haiti is now an American protectorate.

As of today, for all practical purposes, Haiti is an American Protectorate. Its own government, to the extent it ever functioned, has now collapsed. Its major city has been leveled, along with most of the institutions of the state and of civil society. Other states and international institutions will contribute aid and resources. Perhaps the UN will expand its current mission in the nation, and assume formal responsibility. But the only nation capable of keeping Haiti from absolute collapse is the United States. Irrespective of the bodies through which we choose to work, the responsibility is ultimately ours.

We might assume the responsibility informally, we might assume it under the guise of a UN mandate, we might do any number of things. But we’re responsible: we can do it, and it needs to be done, and there’s nobody else. Time to get to work. Bear any burden, pay any price. It’s already begun:

“Prime Minister (Jean-Max) Bellerive signed a memorandum of understanding granting airport control to the United States,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley told a briefing.

• gougeres
• blood orange, toasted almonds, dates, parmesan shavings
• home-made pastrami on home-made rye
• roast chicken, double-stock with lemon-sherry reduction
• roast squash, roasted over thyme sprigs and garlic
• grilled asparagus
• Boston salad
• tarte tatin, cheeses
• chocolate chilli cookies

A fresh exploration of what I can manage, given the necessarily late start on a weekday. Not that late: 4pm. Fun with flex time. Still, it was a busy three hours and a close game, but the home team won in the end.

I don’t really remember the chicken, unfortunately; I've been working harder on getting roast chicken right these days, and had real hope for the improvised sauce. I made Clotilde’s cookies with Caillebaut, which I had on hand; they're better with Valhrona, and they're better if you don’t overcook them. They’re still pretty good.

Gunnar Liestøl sends word that Peter Bøgh Andersen has died after a long illness. He was instrumental in early research into the computer as a medium, a concept that now seems commonplace but that once appeared remarkable. His ECHT ’90 paper, “Towards an aesthetics of hypertext systems. A semiotic approach,” is not often cited by played a vital role in the history of literary hypertext, helping to legitimate serious study of hypertext and drawing attention to the relationship between hypertext and cinematic rhetoric.