The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, de Thomas Kuhn, acaba de fazer 50 anos de lançamento. The Chronicle dá uma geral nos motivos que fizeram o livro ficar tão popular — vendeu cerca de 1.4 milhões de cópias.
Será que ficou mesmo? Ainda continuo lendo “o que a ciência diz sobre…” em muitas capas de revistas por aí. Como se A Ciência fosse um bloco único e coerente, definidor do que é verdade. Nem mesmo o Karl Popper toparia completamente esse tipo de visão.
- I’m almost willing, right now, to pay people to read my books.
- Wow! Really?
- Yes. So I’m actually working on ideas right now where if you read my book you get paid. Or you pay $10, and if you read it, I’ll give you $9 back. Because people aren’t reading books — particularly books, particularly long-form books. They’re still buying a few, but they’re not reading very many of them. There’s just so many other things to do or read or whatnot that getting someone to read a book is just really hard.
Kevin Kelly, escritor, em entrevista ao blog Findings. O resto do bate-papo engrena por especulações sobre como as pessoas vão ler no futuro próximo.
The Hunter S. Thompson from 1959 and 1960 was this long, lean, athletic, handsome man, who used to type The Great Gatsby over and over to see what it felt like to write a masterpiece.
Depp está na versão cinematolgráfica de The Rum Diary
So here was my first lesson in self-publishing: While the capitalists with whom I’d gotten into business might abstractly admire my entrepreneurial imagination, they drew the line at letting me give my work away.
O escritor Bill Barol conta como pode ser difícil distribuir gratuitamente um livro pela web.
Boa entrevista de William Gibson no Boing Boing. O autor de Neuromancer fala sobre a impermanência das nossas visões de futuro…
There was an effort in the seventies to lose the usage science fiction and champion speculative fiction. Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.
…E de passado:
In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.
Of course, we might be Victorians, too.
Update: confira os equipamentos que William Gibson usa para trabalhar.
YOUmedia is in Chicago’s Loop, right at the intersection of several of the city’s train and bus hubs. The design of the space replaces the sterile shelves of traditional libraries with a setting that more closely resembles a cozy living room or collegiate lounge. And, while students can still access the thousands of books in the library’s collection, the center also comes equipped with computers, video cameras, video and photo editing software, and an in-house recording studio with keyboards, turntables, and a mixing board. It’s all free for any high-school student with a library card.
Agora que os livros ficam cada vez mais digitais, como fica o (oops) papel das bibliotecas? Liz Dwyer fala sobre a YOUmedia, um experimento sediado em Chicago, EUA.
Ontem o Forasta me lembrou do neurocientista e blogueiro Sam Harris. Já o conhecia há algum tempo, por indicação de Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, que recomendou um dos seus livros, The End of Faith. Harris acaba de lançar Lying, um livro de cerca de 60 páginas, apenas em formato digital, que custa U$ 3,99, na versão Kindle. Trata-se de um ensaio sobre a mentira. Nele, o autor tenta nos convencer de que devemos sempre dizer a verdade, a qualquer custo. Embora não seja um texto bem documentado cientifica ou filosoficamente, é interessante. Exatamente por ser enxuto e despretensioso. Ajuda a enxergar como é limitante tentar basear nossas vidas em pequenas mentiras e estratégias cotidianas. A pessoa que se permite dizer a verdade, naturalmente se vê obrigada a sair das zonas de conforto. Desenvolve abertura, flexibilidade e coragem.
Há quem acredite que livros são capazes de “definir” décadas. Não estou exatamente certo disso, mas a BBC tenta eleger os que serviriam para descrever a época pós atentado ao World Trade Center.