Raise your child bilingual, but pick the right second language:

In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction.

By 7 years old, a child who speaks the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr knows north from south from east from west, wherever he is, every moment of his life.  Because he uses these terms to describe the relations of objects to other objects.  He doesn't refer to his left hand.  He refers to his north hand, or his east hand, which could be either hand depending on which way he's facing.

While we don't know what languages the people who originally settled Australia and Polynesia spoke, a tongue like Guugu Yimithirr would be a positive boon to people migrating from Asia to, say, New Guinea, or even in stages to Hawaii.

On the other hand, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, literally, don't know left from right.  And of course epic feats of navigation have been undertaken by relatively primitive people, like the Vikings, whose languages didn't require them to develop a built-in compass.

What I quoted above is just a tidbit from a longer article by Guy Deutscher, whose book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," will be published this month.  The article is well worth your time, and I look forward to the book.

The Diary of Anne Frank is being reimagined, as a sex book for teenaged girls.

Sharon Dogar, who specialises in novels for teenagers, has written a book of fictional diaries of Peter van Pels, Anne's close friend who lived in the same building while she was hiding in Amsterdam.

The diaries, which are to be published in the autumn, include graphic accounts of Peter’s desire for Anne and intimate scenes between the two.

I've always thought that the one thing The Diary of Anne Frank lacks is a handsome romantic lead.  Ideally, in Dogar's reimagining, Peter Van Pels will turn out to be a vampire, a Jewish vampire, born at the time of Christ.  In fact, Peter, before his claiming for the children of darkness, will have had had a smoldering love affair with Judas Iscariot 2000 years ago.  Long passages in the new diary will tell of Peter's rapturous love with the doomed Judas, who is misunderstood.  In fact, Judas, a handsome, brooding presence looming over all of The Diary of Anne Frank, due to his forbidden love with Mary Magdalene, attempted to buy off Christ's executioners with thirty pieces of silver.  And so, before claiming Anne himself for a life of tragic but ever blossoming immortality, Peter explains to Anne that the entire Holocaust is founded on a lie.  The Jews, of whom Peter's mortal lover Judas was the chief, attempted to save Christ from the wicked Pontius Pilate, and have been persecuted ever since.  Especially dark, magnetic, tender yet murderous Jews like Peter Van Pels and his new bride of darkness, Anne Frank, who leave Amsterdam reborn, for Berlin.  There, the two lovers brush aside the SS and the Wehrmacht, to seize the mad Adolf Hitler.  Before draining every drop of Hitler's life essence, in the sight of his sultry mistress Eva Braun, the vampires Frank and Van Pels inform him of their immortal lives and loves, and that his entire career has been a mistake.  Hitler, drained of the precious blood but denied the vampire's gift of an immortal unlife of eternal desire, dies in an ecstasy of the blood haze, crying, "Forgive me!"  Then the two damned lovers, Van Pels and Frank, escape to a ship bound for Buenos Aires, and then to New York, where they haunt the nightclubs and the dinner parties of the high and the beautiful in an eternal unlife of longing and lust.

That's exactly what Anne Frank needs.

But I'm not the man to write it.  Nor for that matter is Sharon Dogar the woman to write it.  Anne Frank has had enough.  She was forced into hiding, murdered before her time, and transformed from a human being into a symbol.  Now she's been transformed into a piece of postmodern teen masturbation fantasy.  The only difference between Anne Frank and Mister Spock is that Frank's erotic fan fiction will be assigned a slightly higher place in the literary canon.

But if some outraged librarian wants to ban it, I won't complain.

This has the potential to be either awesome (like Peter Jackson's adaptation of Lord of the Rings, for instance) or horrific (like the movie adaptation of Bonfire off the Vanities, for instance). The Pillars of the Earth is one of my favorite pulp reads — the apex of Ken Follet's talents for plotting and vivid bad guys.

Clearly the producers recognize that a movie is a fundamentally different art form than a book, and have acted accordingly — the plotline described on the site differs substantially from that of the book, which is epic. We'll see whether they manage to capture what makes the book great even after telescoping the story. They've certainly got the actors to make it work — Ian McShane and Donald Sutherland are exceptional.

I note that it's being released on the Starz network, which gives the producers freedom they wouldn't have on network television. If the Pillars of the Earth miniseries is a success, it will be a yet another example of networks that used to just replay old content producing their own top-notch entertainment — like TNT, AMC, and others before them.

Patrick started this interesting discussion, and asked us to follow with our thoughts. I love books. I have always been a reader. The funny thing is, this was really hard for me. I think I read in an almost disposable manner. I will read just about anything. I go into the library and look through the new books rack until something grabs me. With that in mind, my list of 10 books that shaped me is a little different (and might be considered cheating..) This might be a little long. (and aren't those famous last words…)

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It says something (although probably about me, admittedly) that the most shocking thing in this article was not that Glen Beck makes $13million a year from his books. No, far more shocking is that he is entering the field of fiction with a "torn from today's headlines" story of a revolution (I'm gonna guess armed, since that is how Mr. Beck rolls) of a small band of true patriots against the lawless government that strives to control them.

OK, I am a little shocked and depressed that Beck made so much money. But I guess now we know why those tax increases on the rich bother him so much.

PS – I feel a little bad putting this post under the category books.

A number of bloggers I respect have begun playing Tyler Cowen's "Desert Island Discs" game, with books. I thought I'd play along.  In no particular order, these are the books that (I think) had the greatest influence on who I am.

1.  Fedor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.  If a novel can capture the problem of evil and atonement, this is the one.  Unlike Dostoevsky, I am not a Christian, but one doesn't need to be to draw from the story of Raskolnikov's murder, torture through guilt, and reform.

2. Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.  This book taught me not so much about music or mathematics, but led me to think about the way I discover and appreciate beauty.

3. Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions.  Sowell the newspaper columnist is a polemicist and not a favorite.  But I thank him for this book, which still informs my thinking on economics and the unintended consequences of acting with the best intentions.

4. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.  I read this more as a moral story of suffering and redemption, Dostoevsky writing about a nation rather than a man.  But I won't deny that it powerfully influenced my views on politics and human nature.

5. Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock / Truffaut. This is my favorite book about my favorite form of art, and a witty series of interviews between a master of film, and a student who would go on to become a master himself.

6. Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves. A film within a magic realist novel, the magic realist novel that Dave Eggers wishes he could write.  Eggers was never this clever, while Marquez was never this strange.  My friend Triggercut, whose real name I don't know but who occasionally reads this blog, recommended this book to me, for which I thank him.

7. Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, Illuminatus! More than anything else on this list, Wilson and Shea's satire of conspiracy theory, with a touch of Arthur Clarke, H. P. Lovecraft, and James Joyce, made me the paranoiac that I am today.

8. Raymond Chandler, Farewell My Lovely.  This is perhaps a stand-in for Chandler as a whole, and a host of equally worthy writers toiling in the same pulp noir sweatshop, but of all of the great work that highbrows dismiss as "genre fiction," Chandler's second Philip Marlowe novel is my favorite.

9. William Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experience. If I did have to go to a desert island, and could bring only one book, it would be a Blake collection. These poems are best read together, accompanied by Blake's etchings.

10. David Maurer, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man.  I ask questions, and listen to answers, for a living.  This book, a collection of short stories disguised as a linguistics monograph, taught me to really listen to the answers people give me.  Not to listen as in "to understand," but as in "to appreciate the glory of spoken American English."

I'd encourage my co-bloggers to participate in this project, should they be so inclined, as I'd love to read and discuss their lists.

Via Angus.

A while ago, Patrick recommended a book to me. The Life of Potemkin by Simon Montefiore. It's excellent. As I was reading, a line jumped out at me. I thought that if everyone saw this line, they would almost have to go out & read the book. Keep in mind, there is almost no context for this sentence in the book. It's just that good.

"Later Potemkin was to introduce a badly behaved monkey."

Did you think that the good folks of the Menifee Union School District in California were the only censorious twits annoying us this week? Oh, ye of little faith.

Today it's Culpeper, Virginia. School authorities there pulled the full version of the Diary of Anne Frank, apparently with the intent to replace it with the bowdlerized version that Otto Frank originally published in 1947. The school had been using the definitive, complete version released upon the fiftieth anniversary of Frank's death in a concentration camp.

So — why did they pull it? Were there grim stories of Nazi atrocities? Vivid descriptions of heaps of dead spied out of the garret window? Horrific but apt speculations about the millions of Jews who were not hidden?

Nope. Anne mentioned her Bad Bad Place in a context other than identifying it as a font of pure evil, and a parent was offended.

Citing a parent’s concern over the sexual nature of the vagina passage in the definitive edition, Allen said school officials immediately chose to pull this version and use an alternative copy.

“What we have asked is that this particular edition will not be taught,” Allen said from his office Wednesday morning. “I don’t want to make a big deal out of this. So we listened to the parent and we pulled it.”

Apparently, Anne’s father, Otto Frank, the sole survivor of the “Secret Annex,” felt the need to censor his daughter’s most intimate thoughts as well, eliminating about 30 percent of the original diary published in 1947.

He omitted parts where Anne criticized her mother and other Jews living in the confined quarters as well as some sexually suggestive references.

May I say entirely inappropriately JESUS CHRIST.

The school district is not backing down. Quoth the ironically named Bobbi Johnson:

“The essence of the story, the struggle of a young girl faced with horrible atrocities, is not lost by editing the few pages that speak to adolescent discovery of intimate feelings,” Johnson wrote in an e-mail to the Star-Exponent Thursday. “While these pages could be the basis of a relevant discussion, they do not reflect the purpose of studying the book at the middle-school level and could foster a discussion in a classroom that many would find inappropriate.”

Of course, most people who read the Diary of Anne Frank recognize that it is precisely the juxtaposition of the raw feelings of an adolescent girl and the horror of the Holocaust that makes it remarkable. If people wanted to learn more about how much Hitler sucked, they could just Tivo the History Channel at random. There are tens of thousands of written accounts of the fate of Jews in World War II. Anne's is gripping precisely because of who she is and how she expresses herself.

Now, bear in mind that it is eighth-graders in Culpeper who are reading this. What kind of language is the school district classifying as "explicit", justifying a retreat to a different version that cuts out 30% of the content? This blogger quotes the Washington Post:

There are little folds of skin all over the place, you can hardly find it. The little hole underneath is so terribly small that I simply can’t imagine how a man can get in there, let alone how a whole baby can get out!

Oh my God. If eighth graders read that, society will be DOOMED.

This is absolutely brilliant.

The only comment I'd add is that Orwell wasn't writing, primarily, about Britain and America.  He was writing about the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany.  Thanks in part to his efforts, Britain and America never became Oceania.  Huxley, on the other hand, was definitely writing about Britain and America.

If you disagree, you must concede that Orwell was a better prophet than Huxley.  Orwell's warnings staved off the Hell that he feared.

We all live in Aldous Huxley's Hell.

This week we bid farewell to Robert Parker, prolific mystery author. His Spenser series is a staple of modern detective fiction. As I've said before, I think it started strong and got progressively weaker in later years, but there's no denying that even the later novels showed that Parker was a master of the craft — adept at crackling dialogue and at getting to the point. The characters he devised in later years are fresher, and remain quite good. Spenser, meanwhile, was the inspiration for a brigade of wiseass tough-with-a-conscience detectives, some of them (notably Dennis Lehane's) quite good.

Parker's death may mean that Spenser — who is still getting into fisticuffs at, by my calculation, no younger than 73 — can retire. Or perhaps he can live on in his own non-Euclidian timeline.

Via Flatlander over at OO, I learned that HBO has confirmed most of the cast of the "Game of Thrones" series. This blog has pictures.

Expect a fair amount of out-of-proportion fanboi rage over this series. But as I've argued before, a movie or TV show is an entirely different art form than a book, and it's silly to expect to get from one everything you got from the other. I hear good things about the producers of this HBO miniseries from a friend who knows them, and I think the cast looks good. I suspect the series will be awesome in a way that is completely distinct from the way the books are awesome, probably preserving only outlines of character, plot, theme, and tone — just as both the book and the movie L.A. Confidential are great, but in utterly different ways.

I still think Patrick Stewart would make a great Stannis, and that Brian Blessed would be perfect as Robert if he weren't getting a bit too old for the part.

I don't get jealous of other people's jobs much. I don't tend to pine over the fame or fortune of others; when I covet, it's usually because someone is doing something that sounds like so much fun, and because the way they got there is so cool. Case in point – John Scalzi first made it big as a writer, and based on that was hired on as a "creative consultant" on the new SyFy show "Stargate: Universe." I've never had a clear sense of what a creative consultant does, but Scalzi explains it at length. It's fascinating, and sounds both more substantive and more challenging as a writer than I expected. I particularly like it that he got there through writing, not through the Hollywood route. Good for him.

And you get a cookie, or cupcake, of your choice, courtesy of me.  NO GOOGLING!

More stringent security measures.  Universal electronic surveillance.  No-knock laws. Stop-and-frisk laws. Government inspection of first class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any person arrested before he is even charged with a crime.  A law making it unlawful to resist even unlawful arrest.  Laws establishing detention camps for possible subversives.  Gun control laws.  Restrictions on travel. The bombings, you see, establish the need for such laws in the public mind. Instead of realizing that there is a conspiracy, conducted by a handful of men, the people reason—or are manipulated into reasoning—that the entire populace must have its freedom restricted in order to protect the public. The people agree that they themselves can't be trusted.

The book from which this passage derives is still classified as "science fiction" by bookstores and libraries, though it's older than 95% of what you'll find on such shelves.  So old that I had to change two words to keep it timely.

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Unless I'm dealing with Google.

Google, and the groups suing the company over Google's past, present, and future efforts to digitize the contents of libraries, are taking the position that books and other creative works of intellectual property are fungible.

Under a proposed class action settlement agreement, authors will be paid a set royalty rate for the digitization of their works, which will then be available to the public through the internet, whether the authors desire it or not.  Already published books, under the settlement, will become commodities like fish or dog food or paper.

The problem is that books, by and large, are not fungible:

<Adj.> 1 : being of such a nature that one part or quantity may be replaced by another equal part or quantity in the satisfaction of an obligation <oil, wheat, and lumber are fungible commodities>;
2 : interchangeable;
3 : flexible;

While, as a consumer of books, I'm happy enough for myself that if this settlement goes through I'll have access to many more than I have now, and for free, I'm deeply concerned about the fairness of this settlement to the authors themselves.  I'm sure many will be happy to get a little money they wouldn't otherwise receive.  Others don't know about the settlement, or don't care.  And still others think they should have the right to control their intellectual property, absolutely.

In the latest objection [to the Google Books class action settlement], Scott E. Gant, an author and partner at Boies Schiller & Flexner, a prominent Washington law firm, plans to file a sweeping opposition to the settlement on Wednesday urging the court to reject it.

“This is a predominantly commercial transaction and one that should be undertaken through the normal commercial process, which is negotiation and informed consent,” Mr. Gant said in an interview. Google and its partners are “trying to ram this through so that millions of copyright holders will have no idea that this is happening.”

Unlike most previous objections to the project, which focused on policy issues and recommended modifications to the settlement, Mr. Gant argues that the agreement, which gives Google commercial rights to millions of books without having to negotiate for them individually, amounts to an abuse of the class-action process. He also contends that it does not sufficiently compensate authors and does not adequately notify and represent all the authors affected.

This is the problem with the settlement.  Under ordinary legal principles, if I take a fungible commodity from you, say I total your car, all I owe you is the market value of a suitable replacement.  Every 2004 Toyota Camry is the same.

That can't be said of books.  Although it may seem that every book by Harold Robbins is just like every other, and for that matter every book by Jacqueline Suzanne or Ira Levin, or that most fantasy books printed today are just yesteryear's Dragonlance novels warmed over, that's not true.  Every book, no matter how horrible, is unique, unless it's plagiarized or stolen, in which case the law grants the victim the right to an injunction against further copying, the right to say, "Stop! This is mine. You may not copy or reprint it without my permission and on such terms as I demand."

Only now it isn't.  Under the Google Books class action settlement, Google, alone in the universe, would be allowed to reprint and redistribute the work of any author who doesn't opt out of the settlement, with or without the author's consent.  And it's a fair bet that most authors don't know that their rights are being bargained away.

How the case got certified as a class action is beyond me.  How a court could order a binding settlement, eliminating the unique right of each author of Harlequin Romance novels, or for that matter more worthy authors, to say, "You may not copy this," calls into question whether class actions are really that good an idea to begin with.

Here's hoping the court recognizes that as well.  The ideal outcome would be for the court to reject any settlement that isn't agreed by each affected author, or better still, to decertify the class entirely, leaving Google, and the authors whose work it may or may not be stealing, to deal with one another in individual lawsuits.

At last, the perfect bathroom book!

What, did you think this entry was about sex?  It's old news, but it was new to me.