Daily Meh is an edited stream of consciousness, by Simen.

There’s an Ampersand Mountain in New York State, which “takes its name from nearby Ampersand Creek, so named because it twists and turns like the ampersand symbol.” Sadly, I can’t find any pictures of Ampersand Creek, but now I’m really curious.

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture, someone once said. It’s one of those quotes that everyone said, but it doesn’t matter who first uttered it. The question is whether you can talk about one medium through another, and if so, how. An even deeper question is: what’s the use of different media, anyway? Why don’t we just stick with writing, or music, or architecture? It seems absurd because we get different things from literature and music and architecture. They speak to us on different levels, and we can appreciate them for different reasons. Experiencing one isn’t like experiencing another. This must mean there’s something about each medium that other media can’t offer. I think that good works in any medium must play to the medium’s strengths, which must be those things that any given medium does better than every other medium. If that’s so, then a picture isn’t worth a thousand words, because a single picture contains something that’s simply impossible to capture as precisely, or powerfully, or meaningfully in words. A good picture must make the most out of being a picture, which means that it must do something that a song or an essay or a building can’t do. Otherwise, why make a picture? Why not make a building or a text? Only mediocre pictures can be fully captured in words. Actually, describing even a mediocre picture fully in words is probably impossible, but words could at least invoke a comparable feeling in the reader. I believe the feeling of seeing a good picture or hearing a good song is fundamentally different from that of reading. It’s just a different kind of experience, a different quale, if you will, impossible to recreate or fully describe in another medium. But of course this creates problems because we’d like to talk about music or pictures, and we’d like to do it in words.

Music probably isn’t my medium. It’s not that I don’t like music, it’s just that I don’t get the same intense feeling that real music fans get when they hear a great song. At least, that’s what I gather when I read music writing. I doubt music writing can give me a real sense of what it’s like for a real music fan to experience their favorite song, but even imperfect approximations give me the feeling I’m missing out on something. That doesn’t bother me much, because I do like music, even if I might never experience musical ecstasy, and more importantly, I get feelings of comparable intensity from other media. Maybe experiencing a great song is qualitatively different from experiencing a great photograph or great literature, but there may be equally strong sensations involved in truly appreciating these art forms for what they are. If I want to share this or discuss it, though, I hit the same dilemma that music writers do. Literature is easier, because it’s text, and text has always been the best medium to comment on itself; even if it’s hard to describe the feeling you get when you read a great novel, at the very least it’s the feeling of reading a text, and that experience can be described in words much more readily than the feeling of hearing a song or seeing a painting. But what if I want to share or discuss the experience of seeing a great photograph? I don’t want to be dancing about architecture. I want to say something meaningful, but how am I going to do it if the very qualities I appreciate the most are those that are the hardest to capture in any other medium?

The standard approach is either technical description or comparison. The sound of a band may be described by referring to a few genre touchpoles, or as a blend of — at this point, insert unlikely combination of various bands the reader is likely to have heard, or, if the reviewer is smug, bands the reader is likely not to have even heard of — or by a technical listing of instruments, beats, rhythms, samples, lyrics (those are the easiest, since they’re text and hence easy to analyze in text). None of these, usually, succeed in capturing the experience of listening to the band, or why that experience is great or lousy.

The alternative is a lyrical metaphor: it’s the sound of the dull waves moving towards the shore at 2 am on a summer night, as you run along the shore holding the hand of a pretty young girl, but under this lies is something foreboding, subtle drums and something in the riff of the guitar remind you… Ok, I absolutely suck at faux poetic music metaphors. There’s a reason there is no music criticism on this blog. I can’t write this stuff, but you get my point: if this is even meaningful, it’s going to conjure up wildly different associations from different people. If the metaphor is going to come alive for me, it’s probably because I already associate the metaphor with a personal experience and that personal experience with some music. You can’t really rely on the reader having done the exact same things you as a writer have done and having associated music that is exactly like the one you’re supposed to be describing with these memories, so that you can just tap into the memory and automagically activate the sensation of experiencing the music. And if you have no real life associations with the metaphor at all, there’s no logic that can tell you what kind of music the metaphor is supposed to be describing or how it feels to experience that kind of music. If ten talented musicians read the metaphor above, or another, better-written poetic music metaphor from a music review, totally detached from all context, and were told to recreate the music the metaphor describes, they’d come up with ten wildly different interpretations. And none of the interpretations would be any more correct.

Don’t think I’m criticizing music writers. I think they do an admirable job of what’s essentially a hopeless task. I don’t think they have to perfectly capture an experience perfectly to be entitled to write about it. I can’t write well about music. Some people can, and I admire them for it, even as I think they’re doomed to forever circle around the core of their subject, that ineffable essence of music that music does so well that no other medium can capture the feeling.

An analogous situation happens if you try to describe good photography. You could describe genre, subjects, the technical process of creation, objective qualities like aspect ratio, resolution, dynamic range, or formal aspects, like composition, or you could create a dreamy metaphor that supposedly captures the feeling or significance of it, but problems analogous to those that appear in music writing will appear very quickly.

I really don’t know how to capture in a text the essence or feeling of a work of art that isn’t text. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be tried, I’m just saying we may have to accept that it’s something we can only ever achieve in the limit. Permit me my own slightly dreamy metaphor: we’re like flies, and the essence of a work of art — by which I don’t mean any metaphysical mumbo jumbo, but simply the part of the artwork we appreciate the most and the part that is uniquely expressible in the artwork’s chosen medium — is a lightbulb. We can only circle closer and closer. If we get too close, we get burned; if we look directly into the light, we get blinded. Our attempts are nothing but descriptions of perilous journeys around and around the essence, and these roundtrips would need infinite time to fully capture the whole, so in practice we’ll never get there. The peril isn’t any real danger, it’s just the risk of going totally off the rocker, of aiming so closely at the core that you end up getting blinded by it and, trying to jump this chasm between media, end up falling between them, saying something that makes no sense in either writing or music or photography or architecture. Kind of like dancing about architecture.

Designer Blogs

Magazines and newspapers have had three hundred years to figure out the balance between content and form. Some of them still don’t get it. Some of them do. One of the many reasons I like magazines is the way they allow form and content to influence each other. Magazines usually contain different kinds of articles, some short, some long, some serious, some not, some heavily visual, some almost exclusively text, and a magazine is free to lay each article out in a way that suits it. Just like people: man and woman, young and old, short or tall, skinny or fat, black or white or yellow, gay or straight — people differ, and different clothes fit different people. You wouldn’t attempt to design a unisex outfit that fits both your grandma and the pimp down the street, the world’s tallest man and the world’s shortest woman, your kid and your mom, the supermarket clerk and the executive, the nightclub and the office. We recognize that different contexts and different physical properties require different outfits. And texts — perhaps I should say multimedia posts, in the case of blogs — also differ, which is why there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for laying them out either. Texts are written in different contexts and have different attributes, too. Labeling all the different layouts that well-designed magazines employ to present their content “visual experimentation” is absurd.

Rory Marinich disagrees with me when I say I want more “designer blogs”, where different posts have different layouts, different colors, different typography. He writes:

I find that a carefully-picked theme stays exciting no matter how long I look at it. The design of Hacker News still appeals to me like it did when I first discovered it; John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is as sublime a design as it was two years ago, with minimal changes. What makes those sites feel so timeless is the logic that went into their design. Neither site has structures or sections or appendages that they don’t need. The result is that their design fades gracefully into the background, leaving only the content.

I won’t say much about Hacker News, because I think its design is ugly and a poor rip-off of reddit, but I’ll hand it to him: Daring Fireball is beautiful. It’s one of the most well-designed blogs on the internet. The biggest change Gruber has done to the site in recent years is change the font on some of the headers, and that made the design worse (at least on Windows), not better. Even if I’m about to choke from the Mac Superiority Complex on display I can still look at that shit for a long time, because it’s so beautiful. But even so, I wouldn’t say that the site doesn’t grow stale if you stare at it too much. Everything does look the same, and I’m not convinced that every one of John Gruber’s articles are best served in their current layout, that none of them could be more effective if the design was more flexible. Not to mention the fact that any design is constraining in itself; certain layouts lend themselves better to certain styles of content than others, so that the template itself may be a constraint on the creativity of the blogger. Rory seems to understand this:

Perhaps I’m biased. I’m in the process of creating a unique site design for myself; the design I used last year was generic, so this is in many ways the first time I’ve created something for myself that was designed to fit me, fit my work, from the ground up. For a while I considered launching a blog like Dustin Curtis’s and styling every post differently, but I decided against it. I place more valuable in a consistent styling than I do in visual experimentation; rather than creating a bare-bones structure, I tried to create a single template that would fit everything I cared to write about. That’s the challenge of theme design. It’s the part of design that gets denied by those showier blogs.

I love designing blogs. I used to design for myself and release my old themes, but in the past few months I’m discovering a certain passion for it that I didn’t know existed. Now I approach the challenge of designing themes somewhat differently. I’m not giving a blog its look, I’m giving it its feel. I can’t control what appears on the final product, so instead I make something that’s capable of fitting certain things in a certain order. The design I create for a blog is going to influence what that blog’s capable of saying and how it’s able to say it.

You’re never going to create the perfect template that fits everything equally well. That means you’ll either have to constrain yourself or fight the template by putting content into it that doesn’t fit, that would be better served in another layout. I guarantee you, without major tunnel vision and interests so narrow even your fellow übergeeks can’t appreciate them, you’re not going to create a single template that captures everything you ever want to write about. It’s not going to happen. I can’t do it, you can’t do it, John Gruber can’t do it. Even if he could, that’s not the point: I never said every blog should be a “designer blog” where every post is custom designed, I only said I wished more people would try it. Nor did I even use the words “every post”, and if you check out the archives of the blogs I mentioned, Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis, you’ll find that both employ what are more or less post templates. They recognize that not every post is so totally different from everything that came before that it needs its own radically different design. They just think some do. I happen to agree.

Since I’m more comfortable criticizing myself than I am criticizing others (although I do enjoy that occasionally), I’ll continue harping on my own design. It’s “minimalist”. Minimalism being the one style that any idiot with a modicum of skill, a small dose of aesthetics, patience and some common sense can do well. Not that anyone can do it, but most could, if they’d just put in a little effort and had the sense to consider whether or not every element on their site contributed meaningfully to anything but their own ego. (Hint: few of them do.) Anyway, back to my own design. It’s not the best in the world, and it probably contains more elements than it needs, but it’s still reasonably minimal. This means it fits everything equally well, which is to say that everything looks equally mediocre. This design does not boost any of the content. If I’ve done well, it fades into the background and lets the content take over. This is an important point to make: so long as the presentation isn’t an eyesore, I won’t turn my back on good writing just because the presentation is unexciting; I will turn my back on beautiful presentation if what it’s presenting isn’t good content. I have no doubt, though, that some of what I write would be better served by another form. Because of technical and personal limitations — I don’t know how to make Tumblr do what Jason Santa Maria and Dustin Curtis do, and I’m not a great designer, so I know I can’t come up with a significant portion of good, original designs — I won’t do it, but I wish more people would abandon the templates (or rather, stop leaning on them all the time — leaving them behind some of the time is enough).

Rory continues:

Those blogs where everything’s custom-designed work like compositions. They marry the visuals of what they’re saying with the language they’re using to create, hopefully, a finished and polished product. Everything has to work together. Usually it doesn’t: Either the images overpower the writing, or they’re inconsequential additions that work as eye candy but clutter the page.

It’s the problem magazines run into, too: Some are very good at consistently creating beautiful combinations of the two, but most are wasting a lot of time making blandly unique layouts that nobody cares about. When magazines made the switch to the web I realized how much I liked the consistency of having black text on a white background. When I read magazines I find myself irritated by the layout. It distracts me from what matters. (…)

Not everything you write is so important to deserve its own twee layout. If it was, I’d suggest that you revise how you write, because those unique typesettings work best to disguise a lack of content on the part of the writer. Those blogs I know that pay such attention to designs are blogs I don’t read. Without exception they lack consistency and fail to hold my attention.

I absolutely agree that this is really hard to do. That’s why more people should be doing it: the more people are doing something, the more shit there’s going to be, but there’s also going to be more gold. Even if only a few of these blogs are great, that’d still be wonderful. I also agree that moderation is key: not everything is its own special snowflake that needs its own special twee layout.

If the blogs that “pay such attention to designs” are blogs you don’t read, that create extravagant designs to “disguise a lack of content on the part of the writer”, that’s the fault of those blogs, not the form. Returning to the clothing metaphor, this sounds like saying every girl who has lots of outfits and enjoys dressing up is necessarily shallow. Some of them are, sure — but some ugly people are shallow too. Even if most of them are — and I’m not saying they are, but assuming that were the case — there would still be some who aren’t. The same thing applies to blogs. There’s no a priori reason why creating custom layouts for blog posts should serve only as a disguise for poor writing. Some messages are going to be better served by a different layout. Some “designer blogs” are going to be great; some aren’t. Some will be occasionally good and often bad; some vice versa. So it goes.

You could argue that your message is too important to risk crashing and burning by creating a bad custom layout. But chances are your message isn’t that important, and even if it is, maybe it’s worth the risk. Maybe you hit on a form that makes your message much more effective.

Perhaps the best would be to have the designer and the writer be different people. These “designer blogs” are run by designers, and the designers both write, layout and typeset their articles. That’s usually not how magazines work. People work better when they work on what they do best. Typographers and print designers respect the content, and the author of the article respects that the typographers and print designers know how best to lay the content out in print. Sometimes, with the right people, it works beautifully. Many magazines haven’t found the right balance, but some have, showing that it’s not the basic idea that’s faulty, just many implementations of it.

By the way, the two blogs I mentioned in my original post, although they may at times suffer from overdesign and although their designs may at times serve to obscure lack of substance, aren’t all bad. They do contain pieces I’d consider good writing, pieces that ironically may have been better served by a more austere design. I also forgot to mention another website that does this unique-designs thing: A List Apart, which Jason Santa Maria art directs and Kevin Cornell illustrates. Each issue is subtly different from the last, and most articles have illustrations, but ALA does it so subtly that you almost don’t notice. I wouldn’t hesitate to say that ALA is just as well-designed as Daring Fireball.

Measuring meaning

Presumably, to be succinct means to cram a lot of meaning into few words. Best of Wikipedia (as always, thoroughly enjoyable) informs me that mamihlapinatapai is “listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the ‘most succinct word’”. That must mean it’s the single word that packs the most meaning, in any language. Whenever I hear of someone quantifying words, I wonder how exactly they define a word; in this case, what’s troubling is that in many languages you can keep inflecting, deriving and generally adding suffixes and modifying stems and combining words forever, so that by simply adding more and more stuff you could create a word that has an absolutely insane amount of information in it. But let’s forget about that for the moment and just accept that the Guinness World Record people have a working definition of word that mamihlapinatapai falls under but not a compound of fifty different words into one in, say, German. Let’s forget, too, that Guinness World Records aren’t scientific, the way you might say that Hydrogen is the lightest neutral atom because all those words are well-defined and have been measured scientifically — let’s forget that the Guinness Book of World Records is simply entertainment for a moment, and explore just what it means for mamihlapinatapai to be the most succinct word in any language.

If we assume that succinct means “packs most meaning”, a natural question is this: what exactly does “most meaning” mean? If I were to claim that actually “cat” packs more meaning than mamihlapinatapai, which Wikipedia says means “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start”, how exactly are you going to refute me? If one word is the most succinct, that must mean there is some way of quantifying meaning. There must be some unit of meaning that allows us to put a higher number to “mamihlapinatapai” than to “cat”, or at least some kind of well-defined order, so we that given two words, we can always tell which one packs most meaning. What might this unit or measurement be? What are the atomic parts that meaning consists of?

Take cat. You’d think it’d be obvious that “cat” packs less meaning than a word that means “a look shared by two people with each wishing …” and it goes on and on. But how can that be? Does that mean “cat” is an atomic part of meaning? That can’t be so, because you can split the meaning of “cat” into many different parts — all the properties of a cat that make a cat a cat and not something else are part of the meaning of the word “cat”, as are all the cultural connotations that arise in all the contexts that the word is used. A cat walks on four legs. It’s small, unless we’re using it more generally such as when a lion is described as basically “a big cat”. It’s a mammal — but if you’re into wacky hypotheticals, I’d say that if the DNA of a cat wasn’t mammalian in nature, if it was discovered that cats of were the only creatures on Earth whose genetic ancestry is extraterrestrial, but otherwise, cats are exactly like we imagine them, then I’d wager we’d still be calling them cats, so although cats are mammals and talking about a cat implies talking about a mammal, “cat” doesn’t necessarily mean “a mammal”. In short, there are all sorts of things that complicate any given word and makes it really hard to tease apart the “semantic building blocks” that make up the word’s meaning. And assuming you can give a clear definition of a cat that contains only other semantic concepts, then you can repeat the procedure with those semantic concepts, mapping their semantic building blocks in turn, and I can’t imagine you’d ever hit bottom and find that elusive indivisible building block of meaning, the semantic atom. (“Atom”, of course, being a word that illustrates how the meaning of a word can change based on scientific discoveries; the word meant “indivisible” and was supposed to be the most fundamental building block of nature, impossible to split apart into smaller constituents, and then we discovered they must consist of electrons and neutrons and protons and can be divided — atoms aren’t atomic.)

Maybe proving that “cat” is a more semantically fundamental or primitive is too much trouble. Maybe instead we could use succinctness to mean specificity. If cat is a more general concept than mamihlapinatapai, maybe that proves that mamihlapinatapai is a more succinct word. But if you want to define general versus specific concepts in terms of building blocks, you’re back to looking for semantic atoms. Maybe a better way to gauge the specificity of a word is to look at its extension: to be precise, the size of the set of all things that match the word. So maybe if the concept “cat” refers to includes more things than the concept “mamihlapinatapai” does, that means mamihlapinatapai is more succinct. Then you can argue that “cat” means simply a cat, but “mamihlapinatapai” means a look, but not just any look, it means a look shared by two people each of whom wish the other would initiate … and so on, which appears to be very specific. But then, a cat isn’t easy to define, either. It’s an animal, but not just any animal; it’s a mammal, but not just any mammal; and, as I suggested above, maybe saying it’s a mammal isn’t really part of the essential meaning (whatever that means) of “cat”, and in that case, what precisely are the defining characteristics of a cat? Should you find some defining characteristics of a cat, you could then start picking them apart by trying to find defining characteristics of the defining characteristics, and so on, ad nauseam. This looking at the extension idea might very well boil down to counting off each and every thing in the extension, but that means precisely defining the extension of a word, which is a thorny issue for all the reasons we’ve already encountered. Not to mention defining “thing”: do fictional cats count? Do fictional looks shared by two people with each wishing … and so on? What about metaphorical uses? Contextual connotations?

This way of measuring specificity is also rather arbitrary. If every cat on the planet died except one, and no one had ever thought about fictional cats, and so on, so that there was truly only one single thing (however defined) that falls within the extension of “cat”, while at the same time there are several mamihlapinatapais in any given moment, does that mean that cat is a more specific word, and hence more succinct? Does the “amount of meaning” in a word depend on the very contingent and seemingly arbitrary size of its extension at any given moment (or even as an average over time)?

Given all these complications, I think it’s fair to say that consistently and unambiguously measuring meaning is extremely hard, if it’s even possible. Maybe measuring the amount of meaning in any given word or text is a category error: maybe meaning is simply a fundamentally unquantifiable concept that it would be a mistake to even attempt to measure. This highlights what happens when you start to get rigorous about language and meaning: all sorts of things that seem to be very solid and well-anchored get really, really slippery. Whenever you think you’ve caught the definition of some kind of fundamental concept, like “meaning” or even “concept”, it finds a way to complicate matters. Language just wasn’t made for rigour. I find questions of semantics, of organizing the world into concepts and finding relationships between them, to be extremely interesting, but also frustrating, because everything’s so damn slippery. Granting all the above, though, when I wrote, in the first paragraph of this post, that you could “create a word that has an absolutely insane amount of information in it”, I’m sure everyone understood perfectly well what I meant. But if pinning down how much semantic information (or “how much meaning”) is in a word is so damn hard, it’s a mystery how we can really understand the above so well.

That reminds me of the Paradox of the Heap, which is this: how many grains of sand does it take to make a heap? The question has no definite answer. A heap is simply something we recognize when we see it (or don’t, as the case may be). And I’m starting to think that the most fundamental concepts that we use to discuss and define other concepts and meanings are all this way: indefinable and yet understandable. Hell, at this point I’m not even sure if “the most fundamental concepts” is something that makes sense to speak of, even if we seem to understand what it means. To borrow (again) a quote from Quine, maybe these are questions that are “paradoxically meaningless — ‘paradoxically’ because of the vividness of their apparent meaning”.

Another philosophical question is whether there can be such a thing as apparent meaning. If people all have pretty much the same idea — leaving aside issues over how to define “pretty much the same idea” — when they hear a string of words, doesn’t that mean the string of words has a meaning, namely, whatever idea people get in their heads when they hear or read it? Perhaps it should be noted that Quine probably is using a more technical definition of “meaningless”, where things that have no definite truth values, like “what time is it?” or “ouch”, are “meaningless”, even if they do have a meaning. Not even I would say that only 1+1=2 and other definite statements are meaningful, while the rest of communication, which is almost all of it, has no meaning at all. I do believe that communication is meaningful, even if it’s hard to define the concepts used, and even if I am at this point confused about what “meaning” even means.