Deutsche Literatur Ende von Project Gutenberg. Hauptsponsor AOL zieht den Stecker. Noch ein weiterer Grund AOL alle CD-ROMs zurückzuschicken. Die knapp 10.000 Texte (Romane, Märchen, Gedichte) von 350 deutschsprachigen Autoren jetzt nur noch für 25,46€ auf CD-ROM (via netbib).

Neuer deutscher Literaturkanon (Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung) Von den 25 ausgewählten Büchern der letzten 20 Jahre leider nur zwei online besprochen (Erscheinungsjahr, Auflage):

• Jakob Arjouni: Happy Birthday, Türke! (1987, ?)
• Feridun Zaimoglu: Abschaum (1997, 10.000) Die anderen 23 modernen Klassiker:
• Marcel Beyer: Flughunde (1995, 40.000)
• Maxim Biller: Wenn ich einmal reich und tot bin (1990, 14.000)
• Jenny Erpenbeck: Geschichte vom alten Kind (1999, 20.000)
• Jörg Fauser: Rohstoff (1984, 7.000)
• Wilhelm Genazino: Der Fleck, die Jacke, die Zimmer, der Schmerz (1989, 5.000)
• Gabriele Goettle: Deutsche Sitten (1991, 30.000)
• Rainald Goetz: Irre (1983, 65.000)
• Max Goldt: Okay Mutter, ich nehme die Mittagsmaschine (1999, ?)
• Judith Hermann: Sommerhaus, später (1998, 250.000)
• Wolfgang Hilbig: "Ich" (1993, 50.000)
• Elfriede Jelinek: Lust (1989, 30.000)
• Michael Kleeberg: Der saubere Tod (1987, 3.000)
• Christian Kracht: Faserland (1996, 30.000)
• Helmut Krausser: Fette Welt (1992, 15.000 nur TB)
• Thor Kunkel: Das Schwarzlicht-Terrarium (2000, 15.000)
• Joachim Lottmann: Mai, Juni, Juli (1987, 3.000)
• Thomas Meinecke: The Church of John F. Kennedy (1996, 10.000)
• Sten Nadolny: Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit (1983, 1.500.000)
• Ingo Schulze: Simple Storys (1998, 200.000)
• W. G. Sebald: Die Ausgewanderten (1992, 35.000)
• Peter Stamm: Blitzeis (1999, 30.000)
• Benjamin von Stuckrad-Barre: Livealbum (1999, 75.000)
• Patrick Süskind: Das Parfüm (1985, 3.000.000)

Muss zu meiner Schande gestehen, dass ich nur den Kracht (mit Vergnügen) und den Nadolny (etwas enttäuschend, Netzkarte hat mich mehr angesprochen) gelesen habe. Den Schulze und den Süskind habe ich angefangen, aber nie zu Ende gelesen. Wäre dankbar für Tips, mit welchem Buch der Liste ich nun weitermachen sollte.

Serious stuff

• A paper on how to use compression algorithms like the one used in the famous zip program for author recognition and other classification problems. Claude Shannon's concept of (information) entropy plays a role here. According to Chaitin-Kolmogorov "the entropy of a string of characters is the length (in bits) of the smallest program which produces as output the string" . Zipping programs usually replace often repeated strings of characters, e.g. "the" by a pointer to the last/first occurence of the string. In this way English texts can usually be compressed from 8 bits (one byte) per character to 2 bits per character. The authors (Benedetto, Caglioti and Loreto) of the paper basically suggest to add a part of the unknown text X to several texts T(i) of known authors. The probable author of the unknown text is obtained by minimising the difference in size of the zipped text T(i)+X and the zipped text T(i): Language trees and zipping (via ZEIT-Artikel). And On J. Goodman's comment to "Language trees and zipping".
• ILM: Metal Machine Music - the symphonic tribute on the first live performance of Lou Reed's infamous guitar feedback orgy by the German avant-garde classical ensemble Zeitkratzer at the Berlin MärzMusik festival. I listened to four 20 seconds snippets from this site and was surprised that it did not sound as white noise at all but quite varied. This record must have had a strong influence on anything that Sonic Youth did in the eighties. Another good review here.

Are we just ghosts here waiting to hatch? (Howe Gelb)

• Oligarchist Home Journal on The Mountain Goats All Hail West Texas (6.5/10)
• MP3's: Rare Slowdive and live in Oslo 1993
• Momus, The Elder Statesman (11th March performance review)
• New pop-oriented music blog october's musings. Thanks for the link DJ Oktober.
• Pitchfork on Giant Sand's Cover Magazine: 7.3/10
• Globe of blogs, a new blog directory by location, title, name, sex and birthday (via wannabe girl)
• US bureaucracy not so fit: Terrorist Pilots' Student Visas Arrive
• Paint your photofit picture (Phantombild in German): Ultimate Flash Face via netbib. I did not succeed. Couldn't find my eyes.
• The New Yorker on a book on Poker (via a&l daily)
• A library like in paradise. The books are sent to your place for free. You can keep them as long as you like. Even the return postage is already paid. There are still nice people out there. Booklend: A Lending Library By Post (via netbib)
• An unbelievable conspiracy theory by a frog: 11 Septembre : le grand mensonge des Etats-Unis (discussion at mefi)
• Businesshessisch (via wortmetz)
• My current blogdex stats. Rank: 1,695 (of 14,690), i.e. top 11.5%. Relative link popularity: 33 links to site / 833 links from site = 3,96% (in comparison evhead has 621/604>100%). I am not sure how to call this ratio. The inverse ratio could be called link popularity price as it measures the average no. of links you have to put on your site to receive an external link in return.

I'd rather be thin than famous (Kerouac)

• Lots of mp3 files of a band I have to check out: Hood
• Pitchfork did not like Brian Jonestown Massacre: Bravery, Repetition and Noise.
• Google News search (beta) of 100 sources which are scraped once per hour via researchbuzz
• Microcontent News: Weblogs, email digests, Webzines, personal publishing, content strategy, Microads. Corante. This site is getting very popular in weblogger circles. They write a lot about Google and how we can influence the search results with our little weblogs.

Lambchop - Is a Woman From Nixon to Is a Woman Lambchop have covered about the same distance as the Buddha who was born a prince and became a beggar. The richness of the lush orchestral tone with wind and string section gives way to a stripped down piano and guitar dominated sound with hardly any drums above which Kurt Wagner's raspy tenor thrones. Though the number of participating band members has shrunk by one half compared to Nixon the texture of the music has become even more dense. Is a Woman proves that less can be more. The bass replaces the drums as rhythm section in most tracks. We are much closer to jazz than to alt.country here. It is all very open and relaxed. But the sound stays warm and intimate. The sustained keyboard play adds an ambient atmospheric component. Wagner does not sing in his slightly irritating falsetto anymore. The album has an amazing soothing flow, the first three tracks constitute about the most perfect start of any album I know. Track number 8 is the only weak song. Though I would have wished the album a stronger closer than the title song which turns halfway into a reggae very similar to No Woman, No Cry. Nevertheless this record is a miracle. So simple yet so profound. A perfect soundtrack for a winter night at the open fire. The first truly great record of the new millenium¹. I am really very curious how Lambchop's next album will be. They already have attained a very high degree of maturity on Is a Woman. ¹ On second thoughts maybe the second after last year's Amnesiac by Radiohead.

Links

• Group Z, Belgium : LOVE in 49 variations (via sofa blogger)
• Phil Ringnalda on the unsatisfying free blogspot webspace. Today up till the afternoon all blogspot blogs (including mine) were not reachable. Maybe I will move soon. In case blog*spot does not respond check my Arcor webspace where there is a copy of the weblog already.
• The famous 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica edition online. Nice and simple user interface. Just click on the volume you want to browse (via robotwisdom).
• Which poet are you? (via wherever you are) I could have answered every question with yes. In the end I was four different poets, my favourite two of them are Robert Frost and T.S. Eliot.

"Whee. Sal, we gotta go and never stop going till we get there." "Where we going, man?" "I don't know but we gotta go." I had problems with a 104 error, that's why this post published is one day late. It would have been Jack Kerouac's 80th birthday today. Jack Kerouac is one of the heroes of my youth. The first book I got into was The Dharma Bums. Jack and Gary (Snyder) climbing mountains with some raisins and nuts (Studentenfutter in German) in their rucksacks. Zen it was. On the Road was never my favourite book of his. Too many people, too chaotic, too much stream-of-consciousness. On the similar hobo travelling theme I preferred Jack London's more straightforward The Road. Big Sur was the book that really hit me. Jack in a cabin south of Monterey at the Pacific coast. An alcoholic experiencing the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde syndrome in one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. A true nightmare. Later on I discovered Tristessa where Jack writes on a junkie in Mexico City he falls in love with. A compassionate account of human weakness. Some more links:

• Random Jack Kerouac Quotes

• Pop! The Jack Kerouac Haiku Page

• Jack Kerouac Haiku

• Glorious Noise on a concert of John Darnielle's Mountain Goats in Chicago: "On Friday night at the Bottle, Darnielle’s self-effacing nature, chuckling anecdotes, and folksy delivery made for a sort of Prairie Home Companion for indie kids."

• ILM: I hate hippy music (i.e. the dead, phish, jam bands) do you and why?

"I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves." (August Strindberg via overly caffeinated)

• Ride concert at Milan, Sept. 30th 1992 with 15 songs as mp3 download
• 20 questions: The neural-net on the Internet. Think of an object and the artificially intelligent system will try to guess it with maximally 20 questions of which 19 are yes/no questions. With every game the system learns and becomes cleverer. Check it out.
• I have added an option to subscribe to my site (via bloglet) in the sidebar. You just input your email address and receive a daily (only if I post I think) email with the first 100 characters of all posts I have made that day and the link to access the full posts on my site.

For people who want to make me happy (this will go into the sidebar soon):

• Amazon.de wishlist
• Amazon.com wishlist for the stuff which is not available in the German branch P.S. I have sort of forgiven Amazon for the one time they made me pay shipping when they shouldn't have. They more than quartered their limit for free shipping of CDs from 89 deutschmarks to 20 euro. But this limit is also valid for books now which were totally shipping-free before. I guess that is a fair deal.

Misc.

• Delusions of Adequacy on Xiu Xiu's debut Knife Play: "Although the band is dark in the vein of Joy Division or Pere Ubu's Dub Housing, the band's songs aren't as melodious or even listenable as were theirs'."
• The Oligarchist Home Journal on Giant Sand's latest album Cover Magazine (see music reviews recent - March 8th).
• Uncertainty About the Uncertainty Principle - Can't anybody get Heisenberg's big idea right? (via arts & letters daily)