Marla Parker's Weblog

Republic of Pirates
I'm in an all day meeting where a colleague mentioned she has a pirate fetish, and her presentation was spiced up with plenty of pirate references and fun images. I'm inspired to blog about this book and my gratitude to my mother-in-law, who gave it to my 12 year old son.

Near the end of the school year, I asked my son what he was reading.

"Nothing!" he replied with glee. "We're done for the year! no more book reports." Clearly his plan was to not read all summer, which was not my plan for him at all. I put the problem off. Just before the end of the school year, after a grandparents visit, I noticed my son reading.

"Where did you get that book?"

"Grammy gave it to me. It is really good, you should read it, too." I was too busy silently thanking my mother-in-law to pay attention to the book. But my son persisted and after he finished the book, he said: "Mom, really, you have to read this book! It is awesome."

So of course I did. I've made him read enough books, fair is fair, and I never regretted reading all the Artimis Fowl books, and he was right, Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down is a great book.

The author, Colin Woodard, writes this non-fiction book like a novel, and you certainly catch the romance around the pirates, and yet at the same time, the brutality and ugliness. He does such a good job of making the pirates very human. And very different. They are not cookie cutter equivalents. Some are smarter, some are braver, some are opportunists, some are idealists, freedom fighter types in the same century as the American Revolution, a few generations before it. The scope of the book is limited to the Golden Age of Piracy, 1715-1725, with a little bit of history from before that decade to set the stage for the main characters.

Lastly, the plight and escapades of Africans as slaves or pirates are fascinating, though the amount of actual information the author could scrape together is tantalizingly scant.

The Power of One
My mother, born in Kenya, enthusiastically recommended that I read The Power of One, by Bryce Courtenay. (The book has multiple covers, here is the one that matches the copy I read, and I think the best cover. One cover with a small boy and plane on it makes no sense to me at all.)

Wow, was Mom ever right! It is a wonderful book. Exquisite writing, exciting action, and yet another tale of growing up different, but what a tale! I never would have expected to enjoy a book so much that is largely about .....boxing!!?

I love books with characters that are complex and believable, especially when the author picks characters that represent people we are unable or unlikely to personally get to know in our day to day lives. This is such a book. I look forward to reading the sequel someday, even though it is something like 900 pages long and probably not as good. Courtenay has written a dozen or more books, and from the reviews on Amazon, some are not so great, but high praise seems to be: this one is as good as The Power of One.

I see there is a movie, but I'm not sure I want to see it. Would be difficult to make a good move out of such a rich book. Just too much to put in a movie. Plus, the apartheid violence is evil enough in the pages of a book - I really don't think I need to see any interpretation in video, thanks anyway.

Future of Work meeting

On Monday I spoke to a group of a dozen or so Human Resources execs from large companies attending a meeting called Great Employers: The Future Perspective, hosted by the Institute for the Future. They asked about new cooperation models and ways of organizing work that might be learned from the open source movement.

I gave them some quick basics about open source: Free/Open Source Software (F/OSS) means Libre (free speech) not Gratis (free beer); FSF and GPL; OSI, Open Source Definition; Linux is F/OSS but not the other way around; community matters most; the type of community and the types of possible business models depend on the type of license.

The community aspect is the part that relates directly to the future of work. I told them about Coase's Penguin, and the third mode of production described by Yochai Benkler as "commons-based peer production". (The other two modes of production being markets, with transaction costs, and firms, with managerial hierarchies, described in 1937 by Ronald Coase.)

In The Success of Open Source, Steven Weber talks about distributed innovation: there is no weakest link because there really is no chain. Innovation happens on the edges, then gets incorporated into some core if it has value, and sometimes new cores or centers are created.

Weber also coins the term "antirival" goods. If you Google that, it says "Did you mean antiviral?" Rival goods (e.g. a pizza) and nonrival goods (e.g. a park) are defined in economics. Weber calls open source software an antirival good because, paradoxically, the more "free-riders" (users) the better. Unlike with pizza or parks. This assumes there is a core of actual developers, and also that some non-zero fraction of the free-riders will complain or otherwise give useful feedback.

So at the future of work meeting, we talked about ways to make cross-organizational communities happen within a corporation, or across the firewall between the employees and customers, too. We talked about blogging, and how all their companies are way too full of strict secrets for that, even just internal blogging.

I talked a little about iWork at Sun, and the fact that one reason I'm reluctant to leave is that I doubt the infrastructure could be this good anywhere else. They asked how my work is measured, since I work from home full-time now. I gave my stock answer: I'm not paid to do the things I can do, I'm paid to choose the right things to do. I have way, way, way too many opportunities for one person. I could keep a staff of 10 people busy, no problem. But I don't get a staff of 10, so I have to carefully pick what I'm going to do, what will have the biggest impact for Sun, and then do it really well. They seemed to buy that, repeating it back to me as getting paid to make the right bets.

separation, adventure, hegemony

In my continuing quest to read all of the Newberry Medal books with my kids, we recently finished Walk Two Moons, by Sharon Creech. Sometimes my daughter reads ahead, which I encourage. Before we'd gotten too far into this funny-sad book from the first person point of view of a thirteen year old girl, my daughter went away to a week of camp for the second time this summer. I'd gotten hooked on the book and finished it while she was away, reading silently, not reading to my son.

Thank goodness she did not take it to camp!! It is a book about mother-daughter separation anxiety! Not one but two mothers disappear mysteriously for a while in the book. But it is a great book. We enjoyed finishing it aloud when she got back from camp. Even the little brother listened.

Now we are reading The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, by Avi. This one is a Newberry Honor book, but Avi has won a Medal as well, for Crispin, in 2003. Reading other books by the same author is one of many benefits of this quest to read all the Newberry Award books.

After Charlotte causes a great deal of trouble (including the deaths of two men) she is trying to explain she had no idea, she didn't mean to etc. when a sailor says accusingly to her, "Gentlefolk like you never mean, Miss Doyle. But what you do . . ."

And that quote came to me while reading, definitely not with the children, my first Noam Chomsky book: Hegemony or Survival, America's Quest for Global Dominance. Some of the examples of what Chomsky calls "intentional ignorance" reminded me of the sailor's comment.

This book is now a day overdue to the library. I cannot renew because someone else has a hold on it, as I did. I got this book after (1) having it recommended to me as a more piercing analysis of the world, though with no easy remedies recommended, than a Tom Friedman book we'd been discussing; (2) after I heard Chomsky briefly on the radio and he captured my attention.

I don't read books like this very often. I read the Friedman book at least a year ago. The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Very well written, great story telling, but as an ancient friend in India complained to me when I gave it to him as a houseguest-gift, it is only about money. Or as Jerry Michalski said when he suggested Chomsky instead, Friedman takes a one-size-fits-all approach to democracy and financial markets. It is a bit narrow and unimaginative, and now that I've read Chomsky, one might add Robber Barronish and Arthurian. Yup, might makes right.

When I was an adolescent I dreamed of living in the "romantic" times of legends or later the British empire. Well, here we are now in the American empire. Ack!

It is as if we can only give lip service to democracy, but from day one, we've been after empire, just like England before us. Other countries must obey ("cooperate") or be punished, literally.

Oddly this book has made me less fanatically anti-Bush. Before reading it, I was quite disturbed by my inability to discuss politics with anyone. I did not act like a raving lunatic, but only because I have good manners. I felt like one.

Now I "know" at least according to Chomsky that while Bush and his gang are taking us to unchartered and dangerous depths, Kerry would most likely be an Imperialist as well, just like Carter and Clinton, Kennedy and all the rest. I'll still take a Democrat imperialist over the current brand of crazy Republican, but fundamentally, out in the world, they are all continuing the quest for world domination. They seem to take our CEO's motto, eat lunch or be lunch, very literally.