Random Shopper

Dear Internet Denizen,

You may be interested in purchasing some algorithmically-glitched apparel courtesy of the Glitch Logos bot. We have several fine designs available. They may cause people to remark, “That design is distressing to me.”

This holiday season I am offering 50 limited edition “prints” of the Random Shopper project. I will run the Random Shopper algorithm with an address of your choice instead of my own, and a single purchase of random stuff will be sent to that address.

Do you like randomness? (If you follow this tumblr you probably do.)

Do you like 80s freestyle battle rapping? (If you follow my other tumblr you probably do.)

February's order has arrived! This time around, it consists of three books.

The first is David Ferry's Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (Phoenix Poets), a collection of poems and translations by renowned poet David Ferry (who, weirdly, lives about four miles away from me). "Poems and translations" means the book contains a mix of both original poems as well as translations of other, mostly ancient, verse. The book won the National Book Award. It looks like it was pretty well received, so I look forward to reading it!

Meanwhile, Palmistry for All (Illustrated Edition) is yet another automatically generated book from the Project Gutenberg archive of public domain works. It was published in 1916 by the mysterious "Cheiro", who notes in the text that he is retired and anyone claiming to be him should be taken as an impostor! Cheiro's real name was William John Warner, and he was a well-known occultist of the kind you'd find hanging out in aristocratic circles in the early 1900s.

Couple of amusing things: Amazon reviews of this book complain that there are no illustrations, which makes a book on palm reading kind of useless! In my edition there are illustrations, so it must have been updated due to complaints. The other funny this is this page in the front of the book, listing Kissinger Legacy Reprints' other "scarce and hard-to-find reprints":

Um, oops.

Amazon has lots of algorithms that try to determine what kind of a consumer you are. I've always maintained that if a computer program ever attains sentience, it's likely to be Amazon's recommendation engine.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to keep track of what kind of person Amazon thinks Random Shopper is. For the first two months, it didn't offer any recommendations because it didn't have enough data. But it's finally started recommending things for Random Shopper to buy. I've pasted the list below.

Probably the weirdest thing about it is that it's almost what an alternate-universe version of myself would buy: a version of me that was slightly more interested in sci fi and film studies. Still, the fact that it's got plenty of political philosophy and Philip K. Dick stuff makes it not too far off from my own tastes. (Granted, the companion book on Covenant Discipleship is... not really my thing.)

For this month's shipment, I got two books: Machiavellian Democracy, by John P. McCormick; and Canadian Notabilities Volume I, by John Charles Dent.

First, let's talk about Canadian Notabilities. First of all, it is a work in the public domain that you can read online for free. I'm excited because I knew from my test runs that sooner rather than later I would receive a public domain book. There are tons of these on Amazon--in fact there appear to be nine separate editions of this book alone, available for purchase anywhere from $0 (free ebook) to $88.99 (unadorned paperback)!

I'm not sure what the original publication date was for this book, but the author only lived from 1841-1888, so I assume it was published in the mid-19th century. It's a collection of short biographies of notable people from then-recent Canadian history.

I just got it tonight so haven't read it yet, but the first page is pretty interesting! It's setting up the story of Thayendanegea, AKA Joseph Brant, a Mohawk leader from the late 18th century. I was ready to read some pretty racist stuff, but at least the first paragraph is strikingly modern in its treatment of First Nations:

Most of us have grown up with very erroneous notions respecting the Indian character [...] We have been accustomed to regard the aboriginal red man as an incarnation of treachery and remorseless ferocity, whose favourite recreation is to butcher defenceless women and children in cold blood. A few of us, led away by the stock anecdotes in worthless missionary and Sunday School books, have gone far into the opposite extreme, and have been wont to regard the Indian as the Noble Savage who never forgets a kindness, who is ever ready to return good for evil, and who is so absurdly credulous as to look upon the pale-faces as the natural friends and benefactors of his species. [...] The fact is that the Indian is very much what his white brother has made him. The red man was the original possessor of this continent, the settlement, of which by Europeans sounded the death-knell of his sovereignty. The aboriginal could hardly be expected to receive the intruder with open arms [...] It would have argued a spirit of contemptible abjectness and faintness of heart if the Indian had submitted without a murmur to the gradual encroachments of the foreigner [...] The first and most hideous butcheries were committed by the whites. And if the Indians did not tamely submit to the yoke sought to be imposed upon their necks, they only acted as human beings, civilized and uncivilized, have always acted upon like provocation.

The other thing I want to note about this book is how weird its page layout is:

The margins are very thin, and the text is big -- but the end result is that while it's easy to read the big letters, it's actually tiring to move your eyes left and right over the page.

Machiavellian Democracy is a book that foregrounds the democratic leaning in Machiavelli's political writings (while his name is synonymous with self-interest, his actual philosophy is far more diverse than popular imagination gives him credit for). From the description of the book:

Inspired by Machiavelli's thoughts on economic class, political accountability and popular empowerment, McCormick proposes a citizen body that excludes socioeconomic and political elites and grants randomly selected common people significant veto, legislative, and censure authority within government and over public officials.

A randomly selected legislative body? In what will be a surprise to no one reading this tumblr: THAT is something that I can get behind.

Thanks to some donations from "Jannes" and "Andreas from Germany" I was able to place an order this month that came out to $72.90.

I got the second and third parts of my December order last night, and I'm pleased to say that they're much more along the lines of what I was expecting when I started this project.

The first package I opened contained this religious manual:

It's an "alternative to the traditional age-based Communicant's Class, offering Reformed and Presbyterian churches of any size a way to bring students into the church as communing members when the students are ready."

I'm going to read this, as it's pretty short, but... I am neither Presbyterian nor a parent so. Yeah. Just skimming the first few pages it's interesting to read a book that presumes A LOT about its audience. Not only is it using terminology I don't understand, but it's also making moral and ethical and personal assumptions about me as a reader that are out of the ordinary compared to what I usually read.

Next up, we have Screamers, an obscure sci-fi movie from 1995:

The first part of a three-part (I think) December shipment has arrived!

Yes, it's The Oxford History of World Cinema. Um, wow, yet again I get something that I'm interested in reading. Flipping through it, it's a reference book that covers major historical movements in cinema with a bunch of sidebar biographies of key figures. It certainly earns its "World" title: in addition to covering the usual North American and European film history, about 1/3 of the book discusses the history of  film in China, Japan, India, the Arab Middle East, Iran, Taiwan, Australia, Russia/USSR, and other areas of the world.

I'm fairly film-illiterate. My wife (who went to film school) and I are thinking of doing a one-Kubrick-movie-a-month thing in 2013, so this might provide some good background reading to help me appreciate the project in a historical context.