Experimenting Digitally and Pharmaceutically On Our Kids

On Belief and the Artificial God

The idea of the Artificial God is something I’ve gotten from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide books and Dirk Gently’s Holisitic Detective Agency, among others. The essay is online, and it’s done as much to shape my spiritual life (such as it is) as anything I’ve ever read.

Trying Optimism in 2013

I’m not one for resolutions generally, but maybe I can present a little more pipe and a little less grumble in 2013.

Information Density

No, I don't plan on outlining my entire novel this way. However, who can resist having a bit of fun with a new stack of index cards and a fresh ribbon?

The nice thing about these cards, I can be typing away on a page, come up with an idea to note for later, and insert an index card behind the paper, roll it through, type it up, and then pull it out without messing up the alignment of the page.

Who says you need a modern operating system to run two processes at the same time?

Is More Apocalypse Too Much?

Typewriter Insurgency Versus The Spreadsheet - Part 3

Here's an article from Wired Magazine about that NSA data center.

Typewriter Insurgency Versus The Spreadsheet - Part 1

Not speaking for the insurgency as a whole, of course (after all, it has "no leader, no dogma, and no program.") Still and all, am I presuming too much if I assume these sentiments are shared?

More to come.

On Going in Circles

 

Don’t Do It—For A Better Tomorrow

I’m not entirely sure what I was getting at with the last post, but I think I was prodding at the idea of renunciation as rebellion. On the one hand, it seems like boycott is the lazy man’s path to social change. (What could be easier than doing nothing?) On the other, it sure seems like there’s a lot of evil we could undo by just not participating.

Don’t buy those blood diamonds, for instance.

Don’t buy tickets to the Hollywood movies that fund the MPAA’s war on the Internet.

Don’t drive (and don’t buy gas) if there’s any other conceivable way of getting where you need to go.

Don’t use credit cards for routine purchases. Why support the banks with more transaction fees than you have to?

Don’t buy expensive gifts on Christmas—focus on making things for the people you love, instead.

Don’t click on those banner ads. If nobody did it, they would go away.

Don’t say yes to aggressive sales pitches—ever. If they were rendered completely ineffective, you wouldn’t have to listen to them any more, and the poor employees of faceless corporations wouldn’t be required to put their voices behind things they don’t believe in to keep their jobs. Corporations could go back to producing items of genuine value that people legitimately want to buy.

Don’t purchase the extended warranty or the protection plan. Ever. They exist to make money, not to protect you, and they just give the company an excuse to shovel more obsolescing  shit into your hands, ticking to a break-down just past the expiration of your contract.

Don’t pay for that insurance policy. It’s powering a system that exists to take in more money than it pays out, while driving the cost of services out of reach of the people who need them most. Health insurance, auto insurance, home insurance—isn’t it interesting that we’re legally required to pay these? If they had real value, would we be required to buy them at the point of a gun? Free market, my foot!

For god’s sake, don’t take that loan! Why would you pay interest on crap you you didn’t need in the first place?

And for the love of God don’t go into debt for that college education—which, thanks to the ubiquity of student lending, costs more than a house, without providing a single square inch of shelter.

Even if you have the money, think twice and then twice and then eight times more before you say yes to that college education. It’s an ultimately meaningless piece of paper in a world where everyone has one. Wouldn’t you be better off using those four to eight years building up work experience and saving for a house?

Start saying “no” to bullshit and you discover there’s very little left in our daily experience to say yes to.

Ah, but think of what we can do then, as we start seeking out real relationships and experiences to treasure.

Branding and Distraction

The age of distraction is getting even more distracting. Just turning on a computer now means exposing yourself to notices and branding as soon as the electrons start to flow.

I get the Macintosh chime when I turn on my Apple. Then the anti-virus program pops up a window to tell me about how many threats it's protected me from. Clicking this leads to a web-site that tells me it's monitored 503 "suspicious processes". I guess I'm glad somebody's monitoring them. Launching Evernote--my preferred word processing and research utility--exposes me to little nagging ads in the bottom corner which I can only eliminate by giving them money. (And I would gladly pay them money if it meant a one time purchase. But Evernote wants us to subscribe, and I'm just not ready to pay a subscription fee for access to my own writing.) Then when I launch Firefox, the Google home page comes up with a notice that they want me to "Like" them on Facebook.

Good grief. I haven't read or written a single word yet, and my head is already spinning.

Is it any wonder we all have attention deficit disorder? (For the record, I don't. Or at least I'm not medicating myself for it.)

The question is, how much do I want to cut myself off from these distractions? In a very real sense, we go to our computers to be distracted, the same way we used to go to our televisions. (What's that? People still use televisions? I guess so. Just the other day I was floored by a co-worker who told me she didn't like football, but she always watched the Super Bowl for the commercials.) We want the unexpected. We want something marvelous and new to "pop up" and give us a little rush of endorphins, to make us want to click something. Maybe even want to want something.

Only the objects of desire we're presented with are so banal. The chance to "like" Google on Facebook? I don't think we have the choice of liking Google or not, since they're changing their privacy policy and our online lives simply are Google, at this point. Online security reports? I suppose I should be thrilled I can use this computer I paid a big chunk of salary for without having my bank accounts raped by phishers and malware. But it used to go without saying that you could use the tools you purchased, without them chiming in to tell you what a good job they were doing every hour.

It's the banal stuff getting pushed at us that's crowding out the interesting stuff we come here for. The dark forces that drive television are threatening to turn the Internet into something bland, something that encourages passivity rather than curiosity, and something that you have to spend more and more money, every day, to enjoy.

How do you keep your focus, on the Internet? How do you walk the line between being distracted by crap and finding the stuff you came here for?

Room for Second Life in a Busy Life?

It seems that the more technology I accumulate around myself, the less meaningful work I get done. I used to be able to write a story every week on my typewriter. Now, I’m lucky if I get past checking my email accounts, blog feeds, and facebook statuses.

Then, for some reason, as if I weren’t distracted enough already, I got the grand idea of checking out Second Life. Now, that has sucked up pretty much any free time remaining to me.

Oh, but it is fun! And it’s satisfying, this feeling of being thoroughly engaged, always something to check up on, always someplace to go -- without leaving your chair. And at the end of the day, I have no piles of paper bearing down on me, as I did in the old typewriter days. Am I worse off for not having told a story in the old, traditional medium? Would anyone have read it?

In Second Life, I can listen to a concert performed by folks playing together from  three different continents. I can chat with Australians and Englishmen and South Americans all at the same time. I can be told off by an irate Detroiter in one window while psychoanalyzing a graphic designer with low self esteem in another. I make friends with people from around the globe, and suddenly I’m concerned about what time zones people live in. What time is it in Poland? In Peru? There are friends there I want to talk to, when will they all be on? 

Second Life is rather like World of Warcraft, only instead of all the dull leveling up and treasure hoarding, there’s conversation, art, and music. Not all of the highest caliber, of course, but that’s true of everything. As Ted Sturgeon said, “97% of Science Fiction is crap. But then, 97% of everything is crap.”

My Puritan Guilt has me thinking this new time-sink is a terrible development. If I go after the Nanowrimo trophy this year, I’ll have to set Second Life aside for November.

Ah, but I am still holding down a full-time job, finding time to visit the folks on occasion, scratching the dogs on the head several times a day. And I’ve even gotten outside to replace that broken window-pane and re-putty one and a half whole window sashes. (Only 20 and a half more to go!) I’m going to play the moderation card on this one, just as with booze and tobacco, and say it’s all right.

Will we continue reading stories in the century to come? Storytelling survived radio and television, although it was certainly changed. But now that the words-on-paper format seems stuck in precipitous decline, just what forms will our fictions take in the future? And will we miss the old ones? Can culture survive a population that is aware only of distractions and diversions, and never focused on real content? How can we remain aware of current events when there’s a party going on every minute?

If Romans had computers, would the end of their world have looked a little like this?

Our Day In Court

For free entertainment, you could do worse than going to your district court on hearing day and watching the proceedings.

We weren't there for fun, although I was determined to enjoy the experience as much as one can. Obtaining an execution to evict a tenant who has not paid rent in four months isn't a pleasant experience, but at least it can be interesting.

This district court handles civil and criminal matters together on the same day. It wasn't what I was expecting, and it had me wondering if we were sitting in the right courtroom as docket after docket was called to the bench with "The Commonwealth Versus..." I kept leafing through our paperwork to satisfy myself that "Main Session Courtroom" had to mean this big one with the double doors in the center of the building, and that I had the date right. Our tenant wasn't there either, which added to my confusion. She turned up half an hour after the appointed time, which turned out to be early enough. The criminal matters ran on and on.

So here's a question: if you're summoned to court to appear before a judge because you're accused of shoplifting, say, or operating under the influence, or assaulting your sister ("We just don't get along..."), wouldn't you want to put something on besides flip-flops and baggy shorts and a ratty tee-shirt? Maybe, if you're on probation and one more offense means a mandatory 60 day stay in jail, you could cover the gang-letters tattooed down your forearms, or take off that baseball cap? I think the reason that cameras are forbidden in courthouses is so nobody ever has to see a picture of the doofus with the puffy sneakers, the sports jersey, and six inches of boxer shorts showing above his sagging swim-trunks.

"Good grief," I said to The Wife, "a third of the people in this room have neck tattoos."

She said, "That's how you know who the bad guys are."

Having never sat through criminal court proceedings before, it amazed me just how practiced and knowledgeable all the participants were. I'm not talking about the judges and the lawyers - of course they know what they're doing. But there wasn't one criminal defendant there who didn't know where to stand and what to say. Nobody seemed confused about their instructions to contact this probation department or that district attorney. Public defenders were appointed, phone numbers were exchanged, dates were set for further hearings...it was like watching a dance and trying to figure out the moves. I realized that there really are two classes of people in this country: those who regularly participate in the criminal court system and those who don't.

Things sped up when the judge switched over to civil matters. It turned out all the civil cases were about deadbeat tenants and unpaid landlords. I was nervous when my name was called, but I didn't even have to open my mouth. The judge asked our tenant if she owed the rent and she said, "Well...yeah..." and he actually laughed and sent us to mediation.

Later, outside the courtroom, waiting for the mediator, we saw some tenants (not ours) who had just been complaining to the judge that they didn't have money to feed their kid, never mind move out and rent a new place. Out here, they were showing off new tattoos to their buddies. One on the shoulder, one on the back, one on the leg. Who did they go to and how much did it hurt? Talking shop, sharing the hobby of self mutilation.

I'm thinking, huh, maybe your kid could eat those tattoos, he's going so hungry.

The result for us? Well, it seems senseless to talk about "winning" or "losing" in this situation, but let's just say that we have reached an "agreement." And we've got a piece of paper to take to the Sheriff's office in case anyone thinks about changing their mind.

And we also got to watch a couple hours of our court system in action, which was more interesting than I expected.

Young Women Today

It doesn't take long, after a shift, for some of the women I work with to get into trouble.

Today's women behave like yesterday's sailors: they work so hard just to blow their pay in a few quick hours of bad decisions and terrible behavior. Then they get up the next day to haul themselves back to work for more service to The Man.

They may not spend months at sea harpooning whales or pulling up nets. They discard their lives in shorter-interval mistakes which usually have greater consequences.

We were programmed by evolution to be stupid, impatient, and rash. The gene-pool does not reward the patient, the thoughtful, or the careful. Women used to be a civilizing force, doing what they could to temper the stupid of the human race. They were the ones who had to live with most of the consequences. This doesn't seem to be the case, any more. Either that, or they have been sold on the idea that the consequences are actually rewards.

Then again, it seems many of the people who have the most satisfying lives are the ones who started off stupid and then came to terms with their "mistakes."

The question, I suppose, is at what age do you have to start getting smart?

Accelerating Change

There are times when the realities of the world really bowl me over. Like when I realize I can sit in my backyard and use a cheap four year old netbook to publish anything I want to say to a worldwide audience. (Sure, that audience consists of maybe a dozen people, but still: the potential is there.)

These kids these days, they have no idea how revolutionary this is. Brats. We'll see how they'll deal with the accelerated change that's coming in their lifetimes, after they roll their eyes at our stories of computers with keyboards and cars that burned oil and couldn't steer themselves.

They'll probably deal with it fine, actually.

Huh. So this is how it feels to be middle aged.

High Tech Hallucinations

When I think about it, it seems like a lot of energy was expended in the second half of the last century trying to get high in one way or another.

Drugs, literature, art, music. Choose your poison. A lot of it came down to the pursuit of that wow man, far out, sort of experience. Jimi Hendrix playing an electric guitar with his feet, Jackson Pollock splattering canvases with house paint, Philip Glass droning on with his repetitive rhythms and harmonies, Phil K Dick blurring the boundaries between the real and the hallucinatory, movie directors translating those visions to the screen, quantum physicists seeking the cracks in the fundamental laws of nature.

There was this sense that we were constantly on the verge of something fantastic and abstract and mind expanding. Much of the time, this something didn’t seem like it could come from outside, in the world. It was just waiting to burst out from within us, if we could just find a way to give it permission. If only we could nurture our inner child and rub the right crystals and find the reiki practitioner with a light enough touch.

Well, the quest goes on, I suppose. Because, well, let’s face it: if we find these moments at all, they never last. That’s why the addict always needs another hit, and why yesterday’s paintings don’t evoke the same response the second or third time we’ve seen them.

Fortunately, there is this: the portals into these sorts of experiences seem to be everywhere now, and most of them are a good deal safer than the pills and needles so many resorted to in the past.

I just lost a couple of hours messing around with a few free gizmos on my PC which I hadn’t even been aware I had.  I’ve long used Winamp, for example—it’s a far superior media player to the toxic ITunes disaster that Apple foists on the world—and I’ve used it to rip, play, and organize my audio files for years. I just hadn’t bothered to click on the little “Visualizations” button before. Which, in a moment of idleness, I did today.

At which point these images you’ve seen here started cascading across my monitor, in full high definition, at a rather dizzying 30 frames per second, and pulsing and dancing in sync with the music. Screen edges crumpled, vortices spun, fireworks launched, fractal ferns swayed, clouds and stars fought for dominion of the moon.

It helped that I was listening to Ludovico Einaudi, who tends to be fairly meditative and soothing. But the program transformed my easy listening background music into something utterly captivating.

And I thought, hell, any one of these frames puts to shame anything Jackson Pollock ever threw against a canvas. The Evernote screen capture utility did a nice job catching a few of the stills, since I had the odd compulsion to grab some of this stuff that was being generated on the fly. But after a few minutes of doing that I just sat back and listened to the entire two-disc album.

Far out, man. The things I’ve seen. And it’s nice that I didn’t have to drop acid or otherwise put my neurochemistry at risk to do it. William Burroughs should have been so lucky.

Swearing at Citi Mortgage

We get this letter from our insurance company. They say they haven’t received payment for this year’s premium, and our policy is going to be cancelled in a couple of weeks.

Only our insurance company is paid by our mortgage company, which holds funds for such in escrow. So I try calling up our mortgage company to ask them why they haven’t made a payment.

It takes some time to get through to an operator, since none of the menu selections have anything to do with escrow or insurance payments. But hitting zero enough times finally gets me a live one, who offers to transfer me. Only he comes back on the line after five minutes of hold time to say that the escrow department is backed up right now, so why doesn’t he give me their phone number so I can call them later directly?

Reasonable enough. Instead of being put on hold, I’m prompted for my account number. I have a mortgage statement in front of me, so I punch it in.

Only the system won’t accept my number. “This number cannot be verified. Please try again.” So I do.

Eight times.

This turns out to be a very tight, closed loop. There are no options, except for entering the account number again. But even though I’m looking at the account number on my statement, apparently I don’t have an account. At one point, a voice suggests I make sure to enter all leading zeros, but I’ve been doing that all along.

Pressing zero doesn’t work, and neither does speaking the word “operator.” I’m not sure why it would, since there have been no suggestions that this is a voice-activated system. Regardless, I’m so frustrated at this point that I swear, at the top of my lungs, into the cell phone. And I’m in the middle of a rather long string of uncharacteristically vile words (many of which I haven’t used since my sheet-rocking days) when an operator comes on the line.

I had read that some telephone systems had been programmed to register stress and anger in a caller’s voice, but I’ve never encountered it before. And I actually felt a little embarrassed. The operator has a hard to understand Indian accent, but however I feel about outsourcing, she doesn’t deserve to listen to that. She seems very eager to help, though, and apologizes multiple times when it takes her a few seconds to locate my information.

She authorizes a payment to my insurance company and confirms they have the correct account number. “Just give it a few days for the payment to go through,” she says.

Only today we have another letter saying the insurance is being terminated—today—because they still haven’t received the payment. So I try calling the mortgage company again, and get in the same account number loop. This time I only try twice before launching into my vulgar tirade.

Magic! It works.

And the woman says, “If you have to call again, don’t enter the final digit of your account number. Skip anything after the dash.”

“It’s not zeros,” I say. “It’s a four.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “Just skip the final number and press pound.”

Okay.

Anyway, it’s all straightened out. Probably. The check cleared after the final warning letter was sent.

But what really gets me here are three things. First of all, how is your average caller supposed to know not to punch in part of his account number?

Second, When we were approved for this mortgage, it was about eight years ago. We used a local bank, who actually did the full-on credit check, employment verification, etc. We had a local mortgage officer we’d dealt with on two previous deals, and we frequently called her up with questions and received excellent service. Then, as the world proceeded to go crazy, our mortgage was sold four times before landing with Citi Mortgage, a corporation we would never have borrowed from. Each time our note was sold, we went through a nightmare trying to get the escrow department of each new bank to connect with our insurance companies and our municipal tax collectors. It was demeaning and unnecessary.

Finally, and most importantly, what does it mean that the only way to receive service from a massive corporation (and one which holds a great deal of power over you) is to scream profanities into a telephone? It just seems like another failure of decency in culture, when the system demands you act like an asshole in order to be treated like a human being.

Wallace and the Tyranny of Irony

I so wish that David Foster Wallace had stuck around a bit longer. What a waste of a fantastically perceptive mind.

I know that the tyranny of irony was getting him down. I don't think he understood that the age of irony was coming to a close.

We're not going to have time for irony when energy becomes expensive. We're going to be too busy working, and hopefully working together, in earnest, to be looking for snide little ways to put each other down. When we say something, it’s going to be what we mean, because we won’t have time for anything else. Good manners and well-defined roles will come back into style when, after a hard day in the fields, we want to settle down to good food and pleasant conversation. If we manage the transition without killing each other, life is going to start to seem very hokey by 20th century standards. And there’s lots of ways in which that could be a good thing.

But maybe that was just it. DFW was invested in the age of irony, as much as he lamented it. He excelled at it, even as his characters longed for stability and meaning. The ironic age was the only age he knew.  It may have been too much for him, to watch it start to crumble in 2008.

Or maybe he was just really, really depressed.

Damn, but I bet he’d have some interesting things to say about the next few years.

TMI as a Meal Ticket

I heard something on the radio the other day about employers demanding that job applicants sit down at a computer during an interview and log in to their Facebook pages and their blogs.

Needless to say this was another one of those what is the world coming to moments for me. Are you obligated to “friend” your boss? Do they get to read your email, too? Or tap into your Skype conversations? Or paw through your dirty laundry?

Good grief. We used to get worried about big brother installing cameras in our homes to spy on us. Now we purchase web-cams and strap them on top of our computers.

But it has me wondering. Can someone who is unemployed use their unfortunate blogging practices as a way to continue receiving unemployment benefits? Why yes, Uncle Sam, they could argue, I have been looking for work. But nobody will hire me because of some compromising photographs I put up on MySpace in 2004.

Self-embarrassment on social media could be to generation-Y what drug and alcohol habits were to Gen-X and the Baby Boomers: that “handicap” you inflicted on yourself that means you no longer have to take care of yourself. It’s a healthier way of staying on the dole than, say, developing a heroin problem. Eats up a smaller portion of your unemployment benefits too.

Lord, it’s almost self sustaining!

Some Good News About Books

McSweeny’s has a series of articles up on why the rumors about the death of books have been over-exaggerated, with pages about the state of libraries, publishing, and global literacy.

This is nice to hear. I’ve been having, for the past couple of years, mixed feelings about the trajectory of the printed word. Electronic readers finally seduced me with their siren song. I’ve got a Barnes and Noble Nook and spend at least an hour with it each day.  Before that, I’d turned my little Asus 701 into an e-reader for catching up on free classics from Project Gutenberg and Manybooks. What times we live in, that the whole of the Western Canon is available for download in seconds, for free.

The old assertion that “People aren’t going to read books from a screen,” fell by the wayside as soon as screens got portable and crisp enough. And then it’s amazing how quickly books change from an object of desire—something we want to handle and collect and accumulate—to something bulky and inconvenient. I’ll find myself looking at a beautiful hardcover in the bargain bin, a book I actually intend to read, sitting there available for just six dollars. And I’ll check my Nook and see that the e-book version is $11.99. This should be an easy decision. On the one hand, an elegant physical product, something I can write in and loan out or pass on or even sell. On the other, and for twice as much: the license to an ephemeral digital file that winks out when the power goes off. But I’m struck by how damn heavy the book is, and how much space it’s going to take up in my house, and how much energy it’ll take to pack up and move it the next time we re-locate.

It’s a bit hypocritical, I suppose, to bemoan the loss of our independent bookstores and the shrinking inventories of our chains, and then refuse to pay even six dollars for an object that, one year ago, retailed for five times that. And it’s petty of me, perhaps, to get irritated with publishers who don’t make the stories I want to read available in electronic form. (I’m looking at you, Europa Editions. I get that you use lovely cover art and high quality paper. But I want to read your stuff, not hang it on my wall. And what’s with you, Haikasoru? Kindle and Apple Bookstore versions only? I’m eager to exchange my pretend electronic money for your pretend electronic content. Japanese culture is supposed to feel cutting edge. So get cutting, already!)

In fact, as I look around at the books that I do have, it’s with designs of selling them, or giving them to friends, or donating them to the library. I realize that I have bought, perhaps, six new books in the past five years. (The Boston Public Library was my favorite place for a couple years, there, and then along came the electronic readers.) The last three times we moved, our library shrunk with each trip.

And then, sometimes, it hits me. Ten, twenty years down the line, I’m really going to miss books. Especially once the effects of Peak Oil set in, and cheap electronic gadgets and the power to run them are a thing of the past.

It’s a matter of both common sense and experience that hard drives and digital storage will fail. That’s fine, when storage is cheap. We backup our data, and copy information from old storage to new. I just bought a one terabyte hard drive for seventy dollars, popped it into a computer that came from the dump, loaded it with everything digital I’ve done during my entire life, and used less than a quarter of the space. When it fills up and wears out in a couple of years, I’ll buy a four terabyte drive and backup onto that.

A few years after that, who knows? Chinese factories might be producing petabyte drives by then, if the minerals and the energy needed to extract them are available. That in itself is a big if. Then, will our dollars be strong enough to pay for them? But will they be shipped around the world on 400 meter long diesel powered container ships that burn 1,660 gallons of heavy fuel oil per hour? Will they be doing this when oil costs $200 or $300 a barrel?

What, in short, is going to happen to our digitized culture when the machines that display and share it become precious and irreplaceable? What is going to happen to culture in general if so much of it is digitized right at the end of the era of cheap energy?

This is what keeps me from unloading my paper library—or at least those volumes which are worth saving and reading again. And it’s what makes me happy to know that 752 million books were sold in 2010, just a little off from the 2009 peak of 777 million. It’s nice to know that those books are still out there, getting printed and purchased. We might have a use for them again.

Even if it’s not me who’s buying them.

Old People's Houses

There is a Sadness when you visit an Old Person's house and you can date the moment at which they stopped engaging with the world. It is the date on the top magazine of the stack by the easy chair, or on the bookshelf of sun-faded paperbacks. It's the date on that first page with the library of congress information, the ISBN and the rest of the numbers. It's the last important book they read, the Pulitzer Prize winner from 1967, or 1974, or 1988. It's the shelf full of James Michener, or James Clavell, or Norman Mailer. This marks the point at which they have not only given up on acquiring the new, but have ceased to trouble themselves with unloading the old.

These old people typically have newer things in their house than these artifacts. Usually the television is less than a few years old, and the microwave might be battered although it's certainly not antique. They might even have a gleaming stainless steel refrigerator with an ice-maker and dispenser built into the door. But you can tell their heart is not in these things. Most likely some child or grand-child or social worker has stopped by, said, "Oh Harold, you can't possibly go on living with this old thing in your home," and taken it upon themselves to arrange delivery and installation of the replacement. And the Old Person likely shrugged and said, "sure, I suppose so," and sat looking over the top of his bifocals with a battered paperback in his hand, a bemused expression on his face, while his caregiver fussed and grunted to attach co-ax and AC power and argue with utilities over the phone.

If it's a good natured Old Person, he perhaps said to his caregiver, "You like to read, do you? Why don't you take this copy of Shogun with you? Maybe you'll enjoy it. Don't mention it, it's the least I can do."