I bought, downloaded and read the e-book Homo Evolutis right after the last TED conference, where the book was launched. I have a couple of major problems with it. One is the logic of the argument. The second is the presentation of the book. Luckily, it was cheap. And short.

Juan Enriquez & Steve Gullans, “two of the world’s most eminent science authors, researchers, and entrepreneurs” write about speciation, evolution and technological change. In being able to control our genome, we are able to control our evolution, they say. Not only that, but the world we build around us has a feedback effect into our evolution, and things like culture, sport and aesthetics dictate the direction in which our evolution is being engineered. This is all very good and accurate.

They make the historical point that for the vast majority of the time that species of the homo genus have existed, multiple hominid species have roamed the earth at the same time. That is not the case today, they say, but soon it is possible that we will speciate into a new species, the homo evolutis, a new species of a hominid. If the homo evolutis are anything like the homo sapiens, they might just quickly proceed to eradicate or otherwise suppress the other competing hominid species of the planet.

This is rubbish for two big reasons:
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Today, a new news site launched in Finland. Called Topiikki (www.topiikki.fi), the service is a bit like Huffington Post and The Daily Beast (both excellent, innovative services) in its news curation. Topiikki sources the best-written and most insightful news items about the most important daily news and links to them. Topiikki for example gathers the ten most important news items each day and features them on Twitter and on the site as the daily “10X” collection. The site also features own content and debates. I am both an advisor and a columnist on the site.

Content curation is not a new phenomenon, but we are seeing more and more implementations of the idea. I think it the move from aggregation to intelligent curation – partly by humans, partly by smarter technology – that is at the heart of the move from a 2.0 to the x.0 web. I see it in different forms and platforms: from news curation to hyperlocal sourcing to hyperniche services. It may not be a disruptive revolution, but it is certainly rapid and fundamental change in operating logic and principles online. (more…)

Finally, the book is out. It went through an unintentional rewrite after a classic hard-drive failure, and a coffee spill on a couple of maps drawn earlier. But now it’s out. Take a look below – there’s a limited preview there as well.

Here’s what I wrote in the description:

A chronological personal account of a journey into the world and deeper still, from the outside in. Only Treasure to Carry contains 40 pieces of freeform writing and 15 maps from six continents over 14 months. Contains “adult themes”, I was told to add as a disclaimer. There.

If you don’t want to buy the book but want to read it anyway, email me for the PDF.


 

Not being able to sleep, with the hell-weather outside and the coldness now creeping inside too, I’m reminded of something I wrote exactly a year ago, when and where it was spring.

Grown inside a tree here
The lemons sweet as, plums, as sweet as cherries
Accepting the extending light through a door ajar
to step out like the ginger cat in the very early
              morning
When the dew is still

Love in small shrugs and in passing the salt
In picking up the worst dustballs behind the door
adding some coffee when the grind is low
Love in all these things that
happen immediately one after the other:
Incessantly love in very small steps
              and quietly.

There. Remember to be happy.

Pack slowly
over several days
but always as an afterthought
         and if not sure
         when you’ll depart
         if at all
have a 30-litre backpack
always packed, next to the door
ready to go
         then, when departing
remove one third of everything you’ve packed
leave a note
and close the door softly
At this moment of departure
renounce an addiction:
Anything you may think you have
this will pave your dedication for the road

Your small backpack will be on you
ceaselessly
be quick to love it
stuff the rest of your minimal possessions
in a seaman’s sack
         they are rarely stolen
         and if so
         difficult to run away with
Accept that two pairs of shoes
is the absolute maximum
(and that includes the ones you’re wearing now)
         and unless you deliberately pit yourself
         against the elements
nothing
in your luggage
is essential

Always carry a book with you
and choose it diligently
if you finish it in isolation
you just may read it again
A quotable classic should thus serve you well

But eschew guidebooks
instead carry highly detailed, recent maps
of everywhere you go
         and a small pocket atlas
         to maintain perspective
the maps from info booths and reception desks
you’ll only use to find out
         where they end
         and yours continue
being keenly aware
of the authenticity lying without

Ask for directions:
keep asking for directions
even if not going anywhere
this will help you understand connections

Talk with the locals:
keep talking with the locals
even if you speak no language
pull out your maps to share their territory

Listen to all advice
even if you take none
ask for alternatives
and always write the first and the last one down
Especially seek out the advice
of people who are
not intimate with the area
you are covering
but who can read your maps
they understand the big picture
thank them, but do not linger

Take all opportunities
to approach the local population
as your equals
         even if you’ve had
         the luxury of a shower
When travelling in areas of misery
wear dirty, ill-fitting clothes
Shave at night, if you do at all

Learning to recognise warnings and signs of danger
will lead to a more relaxed journey
These include (but are not limited to):
         groups of idle young men
         seagulls gathering in a static formation to face
           the wind
         the arbitrary uniqueness of a natural feature
           turned tourist trap
         a smiling cabbie staring right through you as
           you give directions

Avoid other travellers who seek out other travellers:
otherwise, appreciate the crossing of paths
and the mixture of knowledge, but
Don’t expect an experience
based on another’s journey
Your mileage will vary
         
Make all your small choices
based on whim alone
         continue increasing
         the importance of these choices
         as your intuition develops
but remain aware of any rising desire:
         This is of past things
         yet your path now lies ahead
         Don’t stare at your feet
         when taking a corner

Don’t be perturbed by boredom
or second-guess a turn already taken
Sit it out
Do nothing
         and see what happens
         to the boredom
Embrace randomness
be aware of coincidence
         and be wary of pattern
         breaking any before it breaks you

You may feel fear as you lose
         a path in the darkening jungle
         with the congregating insects
         above singing like a motorway
You may find yourself edged out
         between the lines of a
         tight metropolitan grid
You may succumb to a silent panic
         as the desert continues
         to all horizons and the air freezes up
Yet in the face of all this
every choice and sensation
the solution most likely
is to do less
         To stop, breathe, and do the right thing
         You know what it is.

 

The sound of the opening road is thunder
and inside the windows marked in burning code
are maps with dragons and horizons asunder
in the house where my restlessness has overflowed

A raging moon now kept awake by crickets
in the pregnant air of the morning floodplain
clouds smuggle out the sun in their pockets
and of heat the road roars again

A bridge extends, a sky opens up
the droning noise of all steps ahead
gyrates around this heating hub
as progress bites its tail in dread

This is me boiling in Adam’s brine
a green thought on the black plain
scalding the back nothing but straight spine
a shadowless man may over the sun reign

For this day are clouds summoned
a shelter built of sea and rain
water-wound the time thus released
the inert heat no longer the stock, the cane.

–

I’ve been a bit sick lately, which is unfortunate since these are the only days when I had any kind of a schedule. I can’t make it to Uluru anymore, so I’m concentrating on the Southern coast and Tasmania over here. It’s great being stuck – the movement feels much better after that again. And I need the movement to clear my head before the Vipassana retreat starting in a week.

Oh, and send me your address if you want a cool postcard, potentially featuring me, a motorcycle, and a scenic location in Southern Australia.

 

I read way too much into myself in this book. With its multiple levels and drifts of symbolism throughout, The Bridge hurled me into the deep.

Synopsis that fails to do any justice to the impact: a man is in a coma and lives in his internal world, a seemingly endless bridge. He reflects both his past and his current situation in this state, and the coherence of his coma is further disturbed by the dreams his coma-self has – alternatively, they are just other coma-induced delusions that his mind parses as dreams. Sometimes we even get overtures from the real self, as if he’d scratch the surface of consciousness from time to time. But with the line between realities fairly dim, it doesn’t pay to analyze the source or the place of all these lives, delusional or not, the man lives through. They just are, and they influence each other.

While his adventures on the bridge and in a Scottish-slang, phonetically narrated fantasy world are gripping, it is his impending return that hit me. It’s as if he has a choice to return from this symbolically charged, terrifyingly confusing and fleeting internal world into his real life where he has some months ago crashed an expensive car, drunk. He would be returning to a woman he loves but whom he has for years had to share with the rest of the world, including another man in Paris he has never met. He would be returning to a job in his company, an expanding bald patch, a habit of scotch and spliffs, dying family, friends getting older, no real progress anywhere, his attitudes and values unchanged since Uni, yet progress made in other areas that are less important.

He would be returning to life. Yet, while I think I cheered him on, I was torn with the decision of a return. How terribly frustrating that successful, well lived life sounds like when compressed into a handful of pages, but he decides to return to live his life further, to the end of the bridge.

Instead of observing his subconscious process all the material form his past (and there is enough to last a lifetime and more), like he observes himself on a hospital bed from a small screen in his room on the bridge, he chooses to participate in his life. Hell if that doesn’t ring true to me.

A lot of traveling is observation by default. You go and see places. Sure, you also do things and meet people, to overextend the oversimplification, but these are short-lasting engagements. It all becomes a puzzle, sooner or later, and even the most ferocious appetite for new experiences takes a break as the latest inputs are digested. And some inputs take a long time to digest.

What the hell am I trying to say? Am I getting travel-weary 5 months into my trip? Maybe I am. I do know I want to participate more.

Anyway, Banks is a bloody genious.

 

Rarely have I finished a book in one sitting, and to be perfectly honest, I did move from the breakfast table to the hammock halfway through Philip Roth’s Everyman. But I think that counts.

It’s a sobering novel of family, death and love, told in straightforward, uncomplicated language, the kind that you must speak to yourself in when laying down how life really is. Starting and ending with the same death, brushing others on its way from grave to grave, it is nonetheless surprisingly full of hope and understanding. It is indeed the story of everyman. Only read it if you know you can take death at a face value.

 

A word of warning. “The Cult of the Amateur” must be one of the worse books I’ve read and gotten through. Penned by Andrew Keen, a Silicon Valley Brit who, it sounds, has grown bitter at the web 2.0 phenomenon, is chock-a-block with misinterpretations, misinformation and data taken our of context. Keen has a couple of valid concerns about web 2.0 and couple that are not really related, but most of the rationale he puts behind these concerns is empty and conservative in the worst way. He undermines any little credibility the book might have by wrongly describing the principle of Google’s and other search engines; by comparing apples to oranges in both music and movie industry figures; and by using the word ‘indeed’ more often than any Briton should get away with, as if to echo his own words at the fear of not having enough of an audience.

The book could have discussed valid points and suggested solutions for increasing media and source criticism, and respect for intellectual property – instead, it reads like a sudden burst of negativity from the resentful sidelines. After all, the sub-title is “How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy”, and the tone of the rest of the book doesn’t get much better. I can’t figure out why it was published, since it’s not even worthy of any sensationalist edge Keen so seems to despise in his description of how blogs and YouTube videos are uneducated trite – yet, as he laments after big-budget movies underperforming at the box office, he gives as an example the movie SNAKES ON A PLANE? Oh yes, Internet, please kill our culture if this is what it has become.

 

I just finished reading On Writing, the memoir of the craft by Stephen King. I read King a lot when I was young, and I think The Stand was the first book I read in English that I was completely obsessed about, probably when I was around 13. It left me exhausted, wondering how a better story could ever be told, the scope encompassing human survival, love, evil and higher purpose, all in a tight package (well, a tight 1,000-page package). Later in life, I’ve put a book or two of his down halfway through – Gerald’s Game I’m sure about. It grew tepid too quickly, but the setting, in its desert-like scarcity of material, was a tricky one.

There’s a tone in On Writing that grips you. It’s an unspoken urgency with much effort put into sincerity that comes through first, and by the end of the book you’ll know writing it wasn’t easy. King was hit by a van that almost killed him halfway through this book, and while I wouldn’t recommend that as a source of inspiration or purpose, I think it made a difference. This book doesn’t let you put it down – the author sure as hell didn’t let himself put it down, either.

The book is part memoir, part words of guidance on how King finds books are born. Not a how-to, though there are many points that a writer – especially a fiction writer – can benefit from. Encouragement is the biggest of these points. Dealing with pain is a close number two. Reading the first chapters on a riverboat from Saigon, I realized I was crying freely in a public place since I can’t remember when (no, yes I can – I was 11 and on a boy scout camp I hated). I don’t think anyone noticed.

As a child, King had gone through multiple painful operations due to ear infections that required puncturing the eardrum and draining the infected liquid with a large needle. This all resulted in tonsillectomy later, but the “ear-lancings” were enough to traumatize him.

I could relate – no, I had lived through the same. I was 17 when I had a throat abscess punctured for the same purpose. First time, then another, then a tonsillectomy, then a third lancing since the tonsillectomy didn’t help, then a second tonsillectomy (these episodes helped me bring my clinical operation record to over a dozen hospitalizations before I was 18).

The terror involves the doctor darkening the room while the nurse lights an alcohol lamp for sterilization of equipment. The lamp is the only other light source in addition to the doctor’s head torch, whiter than any light you’ve seen. My doctor never bothered to tell me it’s not going to hurt. He just told me to sit still – or would I rather like to be strapped into that chair over there, he asked gesturing towards a chair that seemed fitting decoration for Hannibal Lecter’s cell. The thin smell of alcohol was everywhere. Local anesthetics were sprayed and injected in my throat, but unfortunately infected tissue doesn’t absorb anesthetics too well. Too bad. Voluntarily holding your mouth open as an unsymphatetic someone with a torch sticks in your throat a needle you’d think to encounter only when salting pork is bad enough, but the pain and the crunching sound from the back of your throat (or is the neck already? Can’t tell in that sweaty darkness) as the needle penetrates layers of different tissue, well, it just has to be experienced. Just by the third time, even seeing the door of the room where the lamp is being lit triggers sheer panic.

For the love of darkened rooms and limited choices all ending with pain – well, I’m not surprised King writes about the subject material he does. Great, illuminating read.