Reader’s Diary

Scott Rosenberg

This is a pretty good history of the origins of blogging.  There are some good stories here, and Rosenberg does a particularly good job on the history of political bloggers.  He tends to ignore tech bloggers and has far too little to say about RSS and RSS readers.  His analyses of “what it’s becoming” and “why it matters” have far less substance than the historical parts of the book though he has some interesting observations on the interaction of blogs and traditional media.

Peter Seibel

Six hundred pages of very similar interviews with prominent software developers would probably put most people to sleep.  As a programmer with three decades of experience, though, I found this pretty fascinating.  The book has it’s faults: the interviews don’t seem very interactive -  Seibel seems more interested in his prepared questions then in following up on interesting things his subjects mention.  It’s also biased towards the craft’s elder statesmen.  That’s not entirely bad, especially when the old guys’ opinions agree with mine.  For example, many of them are not fond of IDE’s, think C++ is an abomination, have little interest in Java, and some shun debuggers.  OK, I’m a dinosaur.

Many of the interview subjects equate programming more with literature than with math or even science, something I’ve long thought to be the case.  Writing code and writing prose seem to use the same parts of the brain.  It has never seemed odd to me that the father of Perl,  Larry Wall (who is notably absent from “Coders at Work”), was a linguistics major.

This would be an excellent book for somebody considering taking up the software trade.  It’s also a good book for people who want an “inside baseball” look at software development.

Richard Polsky

Like Polsky’s first memoir (“I Bought Andy Warhol“), this book consists mostly of anecdotes about the world of contemporary art.  During the time covered in this volume, Polsky made the transition from dealer to “art financial advisor”.  Consequently,  it’s more about dollars than art, but it’s an interesting read nevertheless, albeit a little impersonal compared to his first book.

Richard Polsky

This memoir is an amusing series of anecdotes about the art business of the 80’s loosely organized around the author’s quest for a Warhol painting that he could afford.  I’m not a Warhol fan and not fond of modern art, but I enjoyed Polsky’s stories, many of which left me wondering how some of of these dealers manage to stay in business.  It’s about buying, selling, dealing, partying, and posturing.

David K. Leff

This retracing of Thoreau’s 1839 boat trip sounded promising, but I really didn’t enjoy it.  If my copy had been a library book I would have returned it unfinished, but since I had received it as a gift (at my own request) I felt obligated to finish it.  By the second chapter I was already sick of Leff’s monotonous repetition of the phrase “deep travel”, not to mention the wooden – and, I suspect, made up – dialog he stuck in the mouths of his traveling companions, who must have been terribly embarrassed by the way he portrayed them.

Laney Salisbury

For about 10 years John Drewe sold dozens of fake paintings in the English art market.  The art was the work of his partner-in-crime,  John Myatt, a failed painter.    The frauds all had a history, or “provenance”, consisting of bills of sale, exhibition catalogs, and correspondence recording their passage through time.  It’s provenance that seals the value of a work of art, and  Drewe was smart enough to realize that a provenance that looked authentic would cover up any anachronisms or faults in Myatt’s painting.  Drewe, posing as a philanthropist, gained access to museum archives in Britain and not only removed material that he used for forge documents, but inserted material so that a prospective buyer of one of Myatt’s fakes would, on researching the work’s history, find an impeccable pedigree.

“Provenance” is the story of Drewe’s criminal scheme which not only defrauded collectors and dealers but which polluted the history of art by his meddling in the archival records.   Myatt co-operated with the authors, and the sections on his part of the crime are vivid.  Drewe didn’t talk to the authors (and probably would have lied if he had), so his part in the story is fuzzier.  I was left with the feeling that there is a lot more to this story (for example, Drewe’s real past and the mentioned-in-passing works sold by Drewe but not painted by Myatt) than the authors were able to dig up.

In addition to being a good story, it raises questions about the market’s valuation of art, for if buyers are happy with a work, why should its history matter so much?