http://blogcritics.org/ A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, politics, and technology - updated continuously. en Copyright 2005-2007 by the authors Wed, 30 Oct 2002 10:00:48 EST http://backend.userland.com/rss Blogcritics.org custom software http://blogcritics.org/ Phillip WinnSunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding. Administration0@blogcritics.org Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/10/30/100048.php Henry CopelandArthur Phillips' Prague is prefaced with the obligatory disclaimer that "any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental."Phillips' fiction may start with those words. (Or the fiction may have started on the cover: as you probably know, Prague is actually about Budapest.) In any case, as someone who worked as a journalist in Budapest during the period in which Prague is set, I can testify that the book is surprisingly prone to "coincidental resemblances" to fact.I like the book. But since others have amply reviewed the book's literary merit, I'll spend my review sketching the parallels between Budapest fact and Prague fiction. I can't say whether these are unconscious echoes, sheer coincidences or Easter Eggs. But I suspect the latter. First, a few facts about Phillips. He graduated from Harvard in the late 80s and moved with some friends to Budapest. He spent evenings playing saxophone in a small jazz club. He worked briefly for an American politico-turned-entrepreneur named Marc Holtzman. Trivia buffs might be amused to know that today Holtzman serves as Colorado's Secretary of Technology. Phillips disclaimer notwithstanding, perhaps it should not surprise us that Harvey, one of Prague's protagonists, shares a few characteristics with Holtzman, not least his employment of "a sax-playing assistant." (Phillips' apparent proxie remains nameless throughout the book, but crops up with suspicious regularity to nod or mumble a few words and then disappear offstage.) Harvey and his assistant work in a shabby office building with a conceirge located a couple blocks down the hill from the Buda castle; Holtzman and Phillips worked in a shabby building with a concierge on Ostrom street... a couple blocks down from the castle.Harvey is given to name-dropping, idealistic stream of consciousness rambles, sentence fragments and gushing enthusiasm. Here's a fragment of Harvey's extended introductory monologue: Exciting what we're going to do here, brave new world, a chance for all of us to make money together, and that's exactly what I tell the Hungarians: I want them to get rich, too, because I know I can get rich happier and faster if we all get rich together. All in the same boat. Western style office buildings, I have a head start on approvals, option for building convention center, minister a close personal friend of mine, first class fellow... Harvey echoes Holtzman. Here's a slice of a Holtzman monologue from an article I wrote for The New Republic in 1993. Explaining why he was doing business in Eastern Europe, Holtzman said: You have one-tenth of the population of the world that have nothing and need everything. This is probably one of the most impressionable and pivotal times in the history of the world. To be here and to be part of it, not only to be able to experience it, but to have the added benefit of potentially being able to profit from it too, is really close to the biggest thrill I think I can imagine. (To hear today's Holtzman, listen to this radio interview.) Here's a third coincidental character. Harvey's lawyer, Neville, speaks in a "professional BBC voice" and works in an office in one of the villas near the end of Andrassy avenue. Likewise, Holtzman was sometimes represented by Peter Magyar, a smooth-as-silk young British lawyer with an office in a villa near the end of Andrassy. (Further entwining fiction and fact, Magyar is today married to Phillips' sister and is listed in the book's acknowledgments.) Then there's Charles/Karoly, the suave entrepreneur whose acts provide the spine for the book's action. Karoly shares a limited number of traits with real life Budapest financier-turned-industrialist Stephen Frater. (I only met Frater once, skiing in the Austrian Alps.) Frater, like Karoly, was reputed to hop-scotch between two pronunciations of his name, the Hungarian ID rhyming with "otter" and the Anglophone ID rhyming with "freighter." And, like Karoly, Frater leveraged a chunk of foreign money to buy a printing company from the Hungarian state very early in the privatization process. All this is idle speculation. I wouldn't put money on my hunches. But I would bet a non-fictional $5 that the club A Hazam is modeled on the legendary Tilos Az A. Why bother with the change? There was only one such place ever, anywhere and the Unicum shimmer and fog of hand-rolled cigarette smoke are undoubtedly the same.I can't identify any other coincidences in character, trait or action beyond those listed here. And, as I've already noted, I can't guess how conscious the mirrorings are.But it is worth noting that Prague's first chapter opens with five young expatriates playing "sincerity," a game in which each player makes one true statement and three false, then is rated by opponents on the apparent veracity of each statement. The winner is the person who best conflates fiction and fact in the audience's mind. Was this scene Phillips' invitation to former Budapest expats to play a private game of sincerity... or just another fiction? (Disclosures: a) I've never met Phillips. But after he left Budapest, I became friends with his buddy Tony Denninger, who is listed first in Prague's acknowledgments. I've since tried to track down Tony but failed. Tony, drop me a line! b) After the New Republic article, Congress temporarily froze government funding of its novel "enterprise funds" for Eastern European. Among other things, Holtzman's roughly $400,000 a year salary, earned working for a wholly owned subsidiary of the US-funded Hungarian American Enterprise Fund, had aroused Congressional interest. Along with the New Republic, prognosis, Budapest Week, Magyar Narancs and the International Herald Tribune -- all of which had published versions of the article -- I received a letter suggesting a retraction and mooting a possible lawsuit. I had taped everything. The article stood and no suit materialized. c) The recollections in this review were jostled into consciousness reading Rick Bruner's blog.) Books1581@blogcritics.org Wed, 30 Oct 2002 10:00:48 EST http://blogcritics.org/archives/2002/08/13/114846.php Henry CopelandThe joy of Albert-László Barabási's book, Linked: The New Science ofNetworks is that, after reading it, you can't look anywhere withoutseeing networks. The book, which is currently ranked 99th on Amazon's topseller's list, leaves a powerful imprint on the mind's eye.Did you realize that it takes an average of only one link per node tobind together a random conglomeration of 100 nodes into a seamless network?No wonder gossip travels so fast.But although most laymen and scientists imagine a "classic network" to be arandom and evenly distributed mesh of linkages among nodes, Barabásiillustrates that many key networks are, in fact, severely uneven. In thesenetworks, called "scale-free," most nodes have only a few links, while a fewnodes have lots.Obviously, to anyone who looks at their own social network, the scale-freemodel doesn't seem radical. We take for granted that our neighbor Howard isin close touch with 100s of people while most people, like his wife Susie,talk to the same 35 people year in and year out.What astonishes, however, is that nearly every network we know -- whetherit is the network of a cell's molecules, Hollywood, the Internet,Yellowstone's ecosystem, or the "sex map" of patients suffering AIDS -- ispopulated almost entirely by Franks and Susies. None of these networksconform to the classically imagined "random" model. All these arefree-scale networks. All rely on a few hyperlinkers to do the bulk of theirwork, whether that work is communicating, making movies, eating rodents, orpassing on disease. Moreover, these uneven networks display distinct andrecurring distributions of high-linkage versus low-linkage nodes.The scale-free network's linkage distribution has important byproducts. Likethe "classic" random network, scale-free networks are amazingly efficient atdistributing information. Unlike their random cousins, scale-free networksare practically immune to the random failure of individual nodes -- nearlyall nodes can be eliminated and the network survives.Our vision is seared by the ideas in Linked. The badnews is that the book's recurring image of the far flung network reflectsback onthe book itself. Barabási's chapters leave the reader feeling like she'sbeen dragged up and down a tortuous network of ideas, gratuitously whippedfrom one end to the other of a universe of associations. The mind bogglesas Barabási links the hacker Mafiaboy, the Apostle Paul, Gaetan Dugas,patient zero in the AID's epidemic, and Google's Larry Page. Sure, each ofthese individuals have plugged into their respective networks. But theirrelationships to these networks (and to the idea of the scale-free networkin general) are obscured by glare of their differences.Despite this weakness, Linked is instructive reading. The bookreminds me why major league baseball is nothing if not a network (althoughnot free-scale); each team can not survive without its peers and surely league money must be more evenly distributed or the network willcollapse.Likewise, I'm reminded that much of the glue that holds together the averagechurch lies in the interaction of the congregation: the dense mesh ofsocial relationships jerks people out of bed and into church eachweek.And I can see how blogging may help, by replacing the watercooler, toliberatelink-craving minds from dependence on the traditional office-boundednetwork.Finally, I sense how the atomic family, with just two lone adults nodeslinking to their children, stands little chance against the network mass ofjuvenile influences.Buy the book. How often do you get a chance to radically alter your visionfor less than $20? Books33@blogcritics.org Tue, 13 Aug 2002 11:48:46 EDT