booktwo.org

As regular readers know, I’m currently in India as part of the British Council’s UK Young Publishing Entrepreneurs scheme. We’ve spent the last few days at the utterly wonderful Jaipur Literary Festival, and while I’ve got some time online I thought I’d write up one of the many talks I attended, and its associated lessons. Much more of this kind of thing to come.

The very first session I attended on Friday morning was with bestselling author Chetan Bhagat (left). His first novel, Five Point Someone and it’s successor, One Night at the Call Center are among India’s biggest-selling English-language novels of all time, with his recent third book, The 3 Mistakes of My Life in hot pursuit. He’s huge here, as witnessed by the scrum of young and old readers that followed him around. Much of what he talked about in his interview with Jai Arjun Singh, of the Jabberwock literary blog, would have been of interest to booktwo readers.

One of the biggest issues in Indian letters – and indeed, in society at large – that’s become evident to me even in the first few days, is the divide between English and Hindi (particularly, but other Indian languages too). Bhagat believes deeply in trying to reach the widest number of readers as possible, but the distribution for Hindi books is much inferior to that for English novels. So, he says, authors should try to talk to their audiences in Hindi, do Hindi translations, and look to the movies (both his first novels have been adapted into Hindi films). “Bollywood”, he said, “is where India gets its stories.”

Jai Arjun Singh spoke of the frequently vitriolic comments he receives on his blog whenever he writes about Bhagat. This is down, he says, to the perceived lack of literary quality in the writing, a charge which Bhagat rejects: “Indian style is the style of the people, the country, and if some don’t like it: tough.” The audience nodded furiously.

Having picked up and very much enjoyed a copy of One Night at the Call Center, I can see why the accusation is made: to an English ear, it reads in a decidedly YA style. However, it deals in an extremely forthright manner with issues of central importance to India and its youth: the conflict between tradition and modernity, a yearning for Western commodities and Indian dignity, a pride in India’s achievements with a recognition of its shortcomings. In particular, it urges young people, in no uncertain terms, to use their educations for the good of their country, to live for themselves and not their parents, and to distrust those in authority. “The number one dream of every Indian male,” says the narrator, Shyam, “is to hit his boss.” Shortly following this is a desire for success that doesn’t involve ass-kissing stupid Americans (the book is not kind to those taking advantage of Indian’s educated workers), and winning the girl of one’s dreams, and it’s not hard to see why it’s done so well.

The other revelation of interest was in the pricing of Bhagat’s work. English-language novels retail usually around the 300 – 600 Rupee mark (£4.50 – £9.50), but Bhagat’s are a far more modest 95 Rs (£1.50) – still much to high, he says, for many of the readers he wants to reach, but a great driver of sales, and a good effort in widening his potential readership.

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Much more to come when I get a chance. You can also follow some more reactions to the trip over at the Bookkake blog, Times Emit, and the British Council’s Creative Economy blog.

Imagine a book that told a different story every time it was opened. The story might change depending on the gender of the reader, or the sex. It might depend on the location of the reader, or the position of the book in time; the time of day, or time in years. Centuries might pass before the book tells the same story again.

The nature of the web makes such a book possible. Immediately, a simple reading of the user-agent to determine the reader’s operating system and browser could be used to present each with a different version, breaking the narrative along several general pathways. Sections could be hidden or revealed by simple manipulation of the layout.

Secondly, parsing the IP address of the reader would reveal their rough geographical location, or the institution they were calling from. In the first instance, sentences could be run through rough online translators, translating passages into – or out of – the reader’s assumed language. Different nations could be offered different political perspectives on the narrative. In the second, those from academic institutions would find appended a wealth of sources, some true, some false, while government agents might find the entire pages reduced to Xs and punctuation marks.

Finally, simple randomisation could alter the meaning of certain words, their tense or number. Names would be changed, emphasis misplaced. But random number generators are no such thing, and each has a pattern. A one time pad.

The final stage attempts to preclude the existence of a master copy.

FTW (“For The Win”): An enthusiastic emphasis to the end of a comment, message, or post. Sometimes genuine, but often sarcastic. Originated from the game show Hollywood Squares where the result of the player’s response is expected to win the game. [Urban Dictionary]

The term ‘Win’ and its antonym ‘Fail’ have outgrown their origin in FTW. In (extremely) current slang, they are used to denote all aspects of success and failure, and have been both adjectivised (“Incredibly win”) and quantified (“Full of fail”): the ultimate accolades of the emergent argot.

I’m not going to apologise for the ephemeral nature of this subject: the increasingly digital domain of our discussions means that real-time speech – the best indicator of current thought and opinion, is increasingly index- and search-able. The Oxford English Corpus, which is used to create and update our dictionaries, is a collection of texts of written (or spoken) language currently totalling over 2 billion words of 21st-Century English.

A strength of the corpus is that it contains not only published works in which the text has been edited (and made to conform to standard spellings and grammar) but also unpublished and unedited writing like emails and weblogs. Some of the most inventive uses and deliberate exploitations of language, not to mention common-or-garden mistakes, start out in this kind of informal and unselfconscious language, so tracking them is an essential part of tracking the language as a whole.

That definition again: “unpublished and unedited writing like emails and weblogs”. Some might find an argument here.

Slowly, the internet becomes the corpus. With projects as diverse as Google’s Books and Scholar, and Summize, we are indexing everything.

Win and Fail are inherently digital concepts: there is no grey area here, only the TRUE/FALSE dualism of 1 and 0. So they are the natural interjections of the techie. Stephen Pinker says:

I’m very interested in language because it reflects our obsessions and ways of conceptualising the world. Swear words are a window on to the domains of life that arouse the strongest emotions: bodily secretions, powerful deities, death, disease, hated people or groups and depraved sexual acts.

It’s likely that taboo words are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Massive left hemisphere strokes or the entire surgical removal of the left hemisphere can leave people with no articulate speech other than the ability to swear, spout cliches and song lyrics.

What this implies to me – and I am not a cognitive scientist, although I did study in this area – is that these ‘taboo’ words are not ‘mere’ words, simply labels for things. They are inherently emotional terms, carrying with them not only the thing itself, but an entire web of meanings and associations. ‘Win’ and ‘fail’ are ejaculations shorn of their taboo aspects – politically correct, but also precise and targeted.

Trends over time can be microsearched. What happened at 22:10 on June 27th to cause that brief triumph of fail? Almost exactly two days later, ‘win’ spikes again.

Failure, while undesired, is also funnier. Schadenfreude has its zenith in the latest lolcat-variation: the Ship of Fail and its attendants, or in the much-maligned, but equally celebrated Fail Whale. Luckily, Win seems to be winning.

P.S. On the images: I love visualisations, and Twitter is a rich data source (bkkeepr owes its existence to them and it, of course). An honourable mention should go to Twistori, which, lovely as it is, lacks win/fail categories.