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Not far from the invention of fire must rank the invention of doubt.
-Thomas Henry Huxley

"Rage Against the Machine humbles Simon Cowell"

Rage Against the Machine fans rise up in holiday spirit. Fun read here from The Associated Press.

Excerpt:
"There are other ways to make music than to stand in front of a panel and perform like a circus bear," Morello added. "Free expression, uncompromising content are sitting on top of the U.K. pop chart this week."

David Foster Wallace interview

For any writer, but particularly if you are an English major who remembers literary theory and creative writing classes, I highly recommend the interview of David Foster Wallace found here. The chat gets a bit intellectual occasionally, but most of the time it's a frank look at pop culture and literature.

A few highlights:

That’s not what fiction’s about. Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

You’ve got a gift for lit-speak, LM. Who wouldn’t love this jargon we dress common sense in: "formal innovation is no longer transformative, having been co-opted by the forces of stabilization and post-industrial inertia," blah, blah. But this co-optation might actually be a good thing if it helped keep younger writers from being able to treat mere formal ingenuity as an end in itself. MTV-type co-optation could end up a great prophylactic against cleveritis—you know, the dreaded grad-school syndrome of like "Watch me use seventeen different points of view in this scene of a guy eating a Saltine." The real point of that shit is "Like me because I’m clever"—which of course is itself derived from commercial art’s axiom about audience-affection determining art’s value.

If you mean a post-industrial, mediated world, it’s inverted one of fiction’s big historical functions, that of providing data on distant cultures and persons. The first real generalization of human experience that novels tried to accomplish. If you lived in Bumfuck, Iowa, a hundred years ago and had no idea what life was like in India, good old Kipling goes over and presents it to you. And of course the post-structural critics now have a field day on all the colonialist and phallocratic prejudices inherent in the idea that writers were "presenting" alien creatures instead of "re presenting" them—jabbering natives and randy concubines and white man’s burden, etc. Well, but fiction’s presenting function for today’s reader has been reversed: since the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate—satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon’s Zulu back-ups—it’s almost like we need fiction writers to restore strange things’ ineluctable "strangeness," to defamiliarize stuff, I guess you’d say.

(Chastising the interviewer for making Raymond Carver = minimialism):
I was talking about minimalists, not Carver. Carver was an artist, not a minimalist. Even though he’s supposedly the inventor of modern U.S. minimalism. "Schools" of fiction are for crank-turners. The founder of a movement is never part of the movement. Carver uses all the techniques and anti-styles that critics call "minimalist," but his case is like Joyce, or Nabokov, or early Barth and Coover—he’s using formal innovation in the service of an original vision. Carver invented—or resurrected, if you want to cite Hemingway—the techniques of minimalism in the service of rendering a world he saw that nobody’d seen before. It’s a grim world, exhausted and empty and full of mute, beaten people, but the minimalist techniques Carver employed were perfect for it; they created it. And minimalism for Carver wasn’t some rigid aesthetic program he adhered to for its own sake. Carver’s commitment was to his stories, each of them. And when minimalism didn’t serve them, he blew it off. If he realized a story would be best served by expansion, not ablation, he’d expand, like he did to "The Bath," which he later turned into a vastly superior story. He just chased the click. But at some point "minimalist" style caught on. A movement was born, proclaimed, promulgated by the critics. Now here come the crank-turners. What’s especially dangerous about Carver’s techniques is that they seem so easy to imitate. It doesn’t seem like each word and line and draft has been bled over. That’s a part of his genius. It looks like you can write a minimalist piece without much bleeding. And you can. But not a good one.

In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.

Christmas Shopping Rant - or, Online Retailers, Get Your Act Together

We hear a lot about struggling merchants, poor sales, bad economy, etc., and while retailers claim to be responding I am amazed by a recent experience with online shopping. As someone who does user interfaces (UI), I know the damage poor UI's can do, which for shopping sites translates to lost sales, often invisible because the user just leaves.

I had a simple goal today: buy a pair of dog-themed pajamas. Simple enough, right? I started by following a link from a catalog to Sahalie.com. The catalog had exactly what I wanted, but when I typed in the item number I saw a page with a red version (I wanted cream). Okay, maybe they were out of the cream. But nowhere on this page did it reference that a cream version even existed. Why does that matter? Because users want to understand. Without any reference I am left wondering, is the item number wrong, did they stop carrying it, what do I do next? Many shoppers are lost there, but I followed navigation to the pajamas and there it was, a large image of the cream colored version. I clicked on it and found myself back on the original page, with--you guessed it--no reference to the image I just clicked. I'm done at that point.

Next, a Google search showed some pajamas that looked cool at Eddie Bauer. So I click through and the product page matches the Google search image. Great. There are two radio buttons for me to choose: Regular and Petite. Regular is checked for me. Except next to the radio button are options for color and size, and both are empty. Hmmmm. So I select Petite and now find one color and several size options. Clicked Regular again...no options. So my assumption is, they are completely out of the Regular...but why make me deduce that by having the Regular option and letting me choose it? Why not gray it out, or remove it, or say, Out of Stock next to it? Next.

I find a site with links to dog print pajamas on various sites. I find one to The Pajama Company. Except when I arrive at the site I am greeted with: Access denied! You are not allowed to access that resource! Love it. Now, to be fair, they can't control what link someone gave me, but they sure could provide alternate paths to keep me shopping. And really, if access is denied and there is no further messaging to explain why, perhaps the best thing to do is take me to their home page and let me start looking for my product. Regardless, I am gone.

That same page of links takes my next to Cherrybrook. The image is confusing...just a dog in a triangle on a black background...not sure if the background is the color of the pajamas or ?? So I click Zoom & More Views, but it is just the same view on the page in a pop up window. Then, I see this disclaimer (not a UI issue but I'm on a roll): "ORDERS PLACED AFTER DECEMBER 1 MAY NOT ARRIVE FOR CHRISTMAS." Are you kidding me? Have they looked around the web and noticed that retailers are guaranteeing deliver if ordered by the 23rd? Do they understand that a large percentage of shoppers coming to their site this time of year are shopping for Xmas? Are you kidding me? Gone.

Now, retailers can/wil/do sell out of merchandise and/or sizes. Of course I understand this. What I am talking about here is user experience. They must know that being out of what I want already risks me moving on, unlike a store, where I will walk by other items and perhaps find something to substitute. The key for the online experience is to a) communicate clearly (and honestly) and b) to give options that might keep the user on the site.

For example, if I am told an item is sold out or out of stock (and I should be told if more stock is expected), my frustration might be mitigated somewhat if I am given links to similar items. In no case should I be left to figure things out in the ways I mention above.

Web based analytics is the statistical analysis of what users do--where they enter a site, what paths they follow, what actions they take, what ads work and what ads don't work, how long they stay on a site, what pages they leave from. But none of that numerical/percentage-based analysis conveys the frustration of a user, how a poor UI decision can actually drive people away, and, most importantly, how many times such an experience means the person will never come back. For retailers I already know and like, such as Eddie Bauer, I will probably return to shop at some point. But for retailers new to me, like Cherrybrook or Sahalie, I have a chip on my shoulder now and will not return. That's their loss and they'll never realize it.

Quote

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

-Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin