I read “Wikinomics” while flying back to Seattle from New Mexico, and a quote in the preface inspired this illustration:

One of the problems with print literature is the cost barrier with doing full-color interior spreads; books are often 3 to 4 times more expensive to publish in full color. In compositing an image for The Apocryphon of Oxtan Imlay, which is a story in a new forthcoming book, I collaged images from 1860s Civil War-era newspapers, as well as an illustration from a Quaker magazine circa 1910, a cactus from a Mexican cigar box, and my favorite sun image, which I had originally scanned in wayway back wen I was in Canada, consulting for CIBC on long winter weekends. A red wash made the images striking, but unusable in the interior of a black and white spread, so I post the full color image here.I was inspired by a recent Kara Walker exhibit in Paris, and her black-and-white style of illustration and collage really contributed at a meaningful time to an evolution of style I had been making in illustration. This upcoming book hilights the new style of illustration, but this particular illustration is a throwback to The Dreambook of Skyler Dread. Which — yes — is still unpublished. Being by necessity a full-color book, and the Oscura Press being by dint of its present circumstances unable to justify the cost of publishing of a full-color book, this book will have to wait for a while….

The Tokharian Tales is a project I first started seven years ago, and was based on a glimpses of life I got around the time when I was working as a consultant for a now-defunct dotcom. I was living in a high-rise condo on King Street in downtown Toronto at the time, and the first glimpse came to me shortly after I had broken my wrist while snowboarding over the weekend; I curtailed my snowboarding, drove home into the city, and spent the night popping aspirin pills and feeling sorry for myself. I was spwarled out onto my couch for hours into the night, and at some point I noticed a woman was still working in her high-rise office across the street, late into a Saturday night, probably striving for a promotion. In that moment, I realized that even into the far future, on that day when men and women start to depart the planet on spaceships for new futures, there will still be unrecognized people working late into the night for promotions, striving for recognition, even though such recognition is cosmically insignificant. I built on this glimpse of life and as people started quitting my dotcom — quitting, well, or getting fired — I wrote a story for each of the people as they left. I wanted to remember them somehow….

The feeling of working in a dotcom which was going bust in the hinterlands of Canada felt sad, and as the people gradually faded away and died, it felt more and more what life was probably like for the ancient inhabitants of the far western desert region of China. The Tokharians gradually faded and died as their land became less lush and more deserty, and with the blustry gales of snow in the hinterlands, I myself left like the last King of the Tokharians….I want to thank all my former faded Canadian coworkers at BroadVision, who are remembered inside this novel — I want to thank Sean Fitzpatrick, Lisa Bright, Rendi Wardhana, Martin deLoughery, Eric Yip, Alice Jen, Ben Torres, Sergey Grish, Noelly Bonilla, Adisa Lazetic, Chris Wojtowicz, Tina Wong, Greg Selvitelli, Mark Wainess, Jim Vastbinder, Irina Sedenko, Manisha Arora, Gerrie Weldon, Pauline Wylie, Debra Williams, Bill Groves, Jonathan Pollock, Dale Hsu, Marie Sarrasin, Greg Mezo, Kristina McBlain, and of course Sridhar Narra, who somehow became “Sridhar Joe, Hovercipher Pro!”

The Tokharian Tales is a project I first started seven years ago, and was based on a glimpses of life I got around the time when I was working as a consultant for a now-defunct dotcom. I was living in a high-rise condo on King Street in downtown Toronto at the time, and the first glimpse came to me shortly after I had broken my wrist while snowboarding over the weekend; I curtailed my snowboarding, drove home into the city, and spent the night popping aspirin pills and feeling sorry for myself. I was spwarled out onto my couch for hours into the night, and at some point I noticed a woman was still working in her high-rise office across the street, late into a Saturday night, probably striving for a promotion. In that moment, I realized that even into the far future, on that day when men and women start to depart the planet on spaceships for new futures, there will still be unrecognized people working late into the night for promotions, striving for recognition, even though such recognition is cosmically insignificant. I built on this glimpse of life and as people started quitting my dotcom — quitting, well, or getting fired — I wrote a story for each of the people as they left. I wanted to remember them somehow….

The feeling of working in a dotcom which was going bust in the hinterlands of Canada felt sad, and as the people gradually faded away and died, it felt more and more what life was probably like for the ancient inhabitants of the far western desert region of China. The Tokharians gradually faded and died as their land became less lush and more deserty, and with the blustry gales of snow in the hinterlands, I myself left like the last King of the Tokharians….I want to thank all my former faded Canadian coworkers at BroadVision, who are remembered inside this novel — I want to thank Sean Fitzpatrick, Lisa Bright, Rendi Wardhana, Martin deLoughery, Eric Yip, Alice Jen, Ben Torres, Sergey Grish, Noelly Bonilla, Adisa Lazetic, Chris Wojtowicz, Tina Wong, Greg Selvitelli, Mark Wainess, Jim Vastbinder, Irina Sedenko, Manisha Arora, Gerrie Weldon, Pauline Wylie, Debra Williams, Bill Groves, Jonathan Pollock, Dale Hsu, Marie Sarrasin, Greg Mezo, Kristina McBlain, and of course Sridhar Narra, who somehow became “Sridhar Joe, Hovercipher Pro!”

Check out the Oscura Press books on the Kindle!

Tokharian Tales Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole: a modern-day alchemy book A New You

The Oscura Press is pleased to be the first publisher to release all of its books in the Kindle format — for free! You can read each ebook on your Amazon Kindle by downloading it to your computer by clicking the “download” link, and then copying it with a USB cord onto your Kindle. It’s easy!

Download A New You
Download Tokharian Tales
Download Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole
Download The Dreambook of Skyler Dread

Instructions:1) Plug Kindle into your computer with a USB cord.2) In a few seconds, your Kindle screen will say it’s in USB drive mode.For Macintosh users:3) Go to your Finder, and you should see a new drive called “Kindle”. Open up the “documents” folder.

For PC Users:3) Go to your “My Computer” folder, and you should see a new drive called “Kindle”. Open up the “documents” folder.4) Drag the ebook file you just downloaded onto your computer into the “documents” folder.5) Done! Unplug your Kindle and start reading!You do have a Kindle, don’t you? If not, buy one! And while you wait for your Kindle to arrive in the mail, download these books to have some content waiting for you to read!

In analyzing the word-distribution of Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole in my last post, I came across some interesting patterns. If you look at the distribution of words in a text, you’ll find that there’s the usual inverse ratio whereby high-frequency words like “the” and “of” are clumped to the left of the graph, and low-frequency words like “Persian-tinted” and “sombrero” for example are clumped to the right. This is a fairly common statistical result. But what I’ve done is a meta-analysis of such an analysis — this meta-analysis gives me a way to determine if a text is more like poetry or more like prose. The score from this meta-analysis (Prosody Index) is a number between 1 and 100, with a score less than 50 being poetry and a higher score indicating prose.This is actually revolutionary, so let me explain. The first graph shows the Word distribution of words in a text. A value on the x-axis is a numerical representation of a given word; its corresponding value on the y-axis is the frequency of use of this word. Words on the x-axis are sorted by frequency. So for example, the most frequent word (”the”) has a value of 1 for the x-axis and 889 for the y-axis, so this point is plotted near the upper-left corner of the chart. There are lots of least-common words which only appear once (like “sombrero”, for example) and they start from around 1140 and continue through 2381 on the x-axis; because they only appear once, their y-value is 1.

Looking at the chart, you can see that words are clumped into groups; for example, there are (2381 - 1140 = 1241) words which only appear once. Likewise, there are 483 words which only appear twice; these are the next “group” on the graph. Each group can be counted this way, and we can come up with a graph of word-group by group-density. Group-density is word-group times frequency. The first data point has a group-density of 1 x 1241 = 1241. The next data point has a group-density of 2 x 483 = 966. And so on. A sample of this graph for my book is shown in the next illustration.We can consider this graph as a curve, and calculate the area under the curve. A chunk of the area is concentrated to the left, and a chunk is concentrated to the right, with a little bit in the middle. A very simple calculation on the data (using the mean-value theorem from calculus) will tell us at which point on the graph half of the area is to the left, and half is to the right. The value of this point in the case of my own book is at 29 on the x-axis. Since there’s a total of 78 points on the x-axis, the half-way value occurs 37% the way through the text (37% = 29/78) and so the Prosody Index of my book is 37.The next two illustrations show similar graphs for two other texts from the Gutenberg archives, The Frogs by Aristophanes and Sketches New and Old by Mark Twain (chosen because it includes the story of “The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” — yes, we’re going with a frog theme in this analysis).The Prosody Indexes for these texts are 28 and 59, respectively. What does this mean? As you can tell by inspecting the graph, more of Aristophanes’ words are to the left-hand side, the side where we can expect to find groups of words which are used less-frequently. (Remember, all the words that only appear only once are on the first value of the x-axis, all the words that are used twice are on the second value of the x-axis, and so on.) Aristophanes wrote poetic plays, and one of the hallmarks of poetry is a sparse but specific choice of words; in contrast, by inspecting Mark Twain’s graph, you can see that most of his words cluster to the right, indicating that he reuses words frequently. Such a reuse of words is more appropriate to Mark Twain’s journalistic style, and is a hallmark of prose.In analyzing a selection of texts from the Gutenberg archive, you see the same characteristics appearing; texts which are more prose than poetry cluster to the right and yield higher Prosody Indexes, and those which are more poetry than prose cluster to the left and yield lower Prosody Indexes. The following chart shows a selection of such Prosody Indexes by text. I have chosen 50 as the cutoff between poetry and prose, since a Prosody Index of 50 indicates that 50% of the words are to either side of the midpoint of the graph. This choice is confirmed by a Prosody Index of 53 for James Joyce’s Ulysses, commonly considered to be the most poetic novel in the English language. Not unsurprisingly, Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil comes in at 50 — part poetry, part prose, and undeniably philosophy. I have only sampled 25 texts from the Gutenberg archive so far, but I will continue doing this as time permits to see if the assumptions underlying the Prosody Index are still valid.

Some Spring Days in Iowa, by Frederick John Lazell	23.0
The Frogs, by Aristophanes	27.5
Autumn Leaves, by John Bartlett	34.2
The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, translated by the Rev. H. F. Cary, M.A.	35.8
Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole, by Jason Murk	37.2
A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens	44.9
Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche	50.6
The Adventures of Grandfather Frog, by Thornton W. Burgess	52.0
Ulysses, by James Joyce	53.1
The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells	54.0
The Importance of Being Earnest, by Oscar Wilde	54.2
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll	57.1
Sketches New and Old, by Mark Twain	58.6
Frankenstein, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley	61.5
The World War and What Was Behind It, by L. P. Benezet	61.7
The Fat and the Thin, by Emile Zola	62.7
The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde	65.4
A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain	67.6
A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens	68.3
Sense and Sensibility, by Jane Austen	72.3
Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky	74.7
Gargantua and his Son Pantagruel, by Master Francis Rabelais	74.8
Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain	75.1
Dracula, by Bram Stoker	77.2
Bleak House, by Charles Dickens	80.1
Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes	84.7

Of course, going meta to this meta-analysis, is this what you get when a math major from MIT takes to writing novels?

One of the most amazing thing about having your book published is talking to people about your book, connecting with people. Whenever people talk to me or email me about my book, I’m amazed to find that they open up and share their own creativity-related experiences.I’m amazed because I didn’t think this would be part of the book.I know so much more now about the personal trajectories of friends & strangers alike. I know so much more about my own family now, and feel connected with them in ways which I didn’t imagine. I’m hearing from old friends from work & school & marveling that my own experiences ring resonant and true with them. True, and somewhat rue at the same time, because there really is the sensation that the corporate world can often be a crippling place to work, and yet, marginalizing yourself from society to create your art in secret isn’t the answer either. The story of Lisa’s father destroying his books is terrible but sadly all-too-common. There are Genius grants for a chosen few in the mainstream insider tradition, but there’s nothing to motivate all the other outsiders to work in an inspired way at their art. But like I said before, culture always thrives on the fringes, and art which is outside the mainstream tradition is often the most vital. I live in an area of New Mexico where the hills are scattered with isolated artists and independent cultural creators, but there’s no glue to bring them all together, and there are no rewards but those of their own devising. It’s hard to create culture in the outback in which we find ourselves, in the outback which becomes us, but that’s sometimes all that we can do. Enough moralizing! In further news, my book is available now in at least 10 countries (US, UK, Canada, Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Norway, South Africa, and Japan). Amazon is including my book in their “Look Inside the Book” program, which means that in a few weeks (months?) once they’ve ripped open the book with a razor blade and scalpeled out all the words, you’ll be able to see how often statistically improbable phrases like “persimmon-tinted dreams” appear. Until then, I’ve compiled my own concordance of words from my book, which will be of use to:

a) people who sell persimmon-tinted dreams and who want me to host their Google Adwords links,
b) curious readers, and
c) search engine spiders with time to kill.

First, a giant thank-you to everyone who bought a copy of Necktie for a Two-Headed Tadpole during its debut on Amazon.com. The Sales Rank seems to range from between 40,000 and 200,000.

A Sales Rank less than 100,000 means that you might find my book in a large bookstore — the largest chain bookstore is the Barnes & Noble Superstore in NYC, and it carries 120,000 books. However, I refuse to let myself get obsessed by following the vicissitudes of Sales Rank as it dips up or down, or whether it dips into the post-100,000 long-tail distribution. The long tail is actually a great place to be. See this article which describes what a long tail is, and this pdf with the less-than-inviting title of “Consumer Surplus in the Digital Economy” by the MIT eBusiness research center which says that 57% of all Amazon sales come from long-tail books.Warning: this pdf uses functions which you’ve never encountered in your college math class, and introduces you to characters you will never meet again outside of a shady bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So just take it from me, the long-tail is a great place to be. Culture always thrives on the fringes, and withers under the spotlight.

My book is now on http://amazon.co.jp but it still isn’t on the US Amazon!

The Japanese, of course, have long been fascinated by the works of von Jason Murk. I have no idea what they’re selling here, although they seem to be cross-selling my book with a Zojirushi rice cooker. The Japanese equivalent of Kaffe-und Espressogenuss perhaps? Personally, I think that a price of 1000 yen is too much for my book. 1000 yen is an awful lot. I had a layover in Japan for 3 days a few years ago, and it was so expensive that the only way I could afford to eat during those days was to hang out at the “B1F” levels of the Japanese department stores and eat the free food samples. Japanese department stores aren’t like Sears or J.C. Penny, no, Japanese department stores are ultra-luxurious spaceports. They’ve got chic bookstores and sushi conveyor belts and the remarkable “B1F” levels which serve as high-end grocery stores, sort of going to a Whole Foods store which is staffed by women in kimonos who offer you free chocolates and teriyaki eel. On the first basement floor (hence the B1F) of each Japanese department store, they offer samples of primo green tea & takoyaki & Belgian chocolates and normally, of course, Japanese social sanctions prevent people from pan-handling for free samples of food in such B1F grocery stores. You’d lose face, perhaps. But if you’re a 6-foot tall Westerner with a ragged beard and a yellow windbreaker, well, they don’t know that you’re just pan-handling food from these free sample stores. For all they know, you’re an ultra-chic hipster who’s come to relax in the spaceport upstairs, and it just happens that ragged beards and faded yellow windbreakers are in style in America….Enough of my B1F rant.Fact is, I’m on the Japanese Amazon now! Interestingly enough, when you translate this page into English (via the Google translation service)

it seems to offer you a maximum of 1000 cyclotomic restoration. Personally, I think you’re being ripped off. You should demand at least 2000 cyclotomic restoration. You won’t be able to read my book in Japan unless you have a really high cyclotomic restoration.Okay. Now that we understand the nuances of cyclotomic restoration, we should all follow the advice on this website and “buy this commodity cheaply”!

Of course, if such a thing as tadpole sushi existed, then my book would go over great in Japan! You’re not an artistic success in America until your art sells in the Midwest, and you’re not a success in Japan until your art is featured in a new form of sushi.