David Weinberger's "Everything Is Miscellaneous"

David Weinberger is the co-author of the international bestseller The Cluetrain Manifesto and the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined.

Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder is his new book.

Weinberger applied the "Page 99 Test" to the book and reported the following:

This test is simply too, well, miscellaneous to resist.

Page 99 happens to be about the miscellaneous of bits. That's an extreme edge of the book's argument, which is far more interested in the miscellaneousness of meaning. So, I would not have picked page 99 as representative of the book. Nevertheless, by the end of the page, it's lifting its head back into the air it wants to breathe.

Page 99 is in Chapter 5, which is the hinge of the book. The first four chapters have tried to convince the reader that categorization is an important topic and that the obvious ways we organize our world actually have a history. Chapter 5 introduces four principles of organization that change radically once we move from the physical to the digital. The next four chapters discuss those new principles and their implications.

On page 99, I'm trying to show that the digital realm is miscellaneous all the way down to the level of the bits, using Wikipedia as the example. The page the user sees is assembled from contents - text and graphics - stored on several servers. In fact, here's the middle of page 99:

Another level down, Wikipedia, like all computer applications, is even more miscellaneous. The computer may decide to store any single element of an article — say, the text, or a photo of an elephant — in discontinuous sectors of a hard drive in order to fit the most data onto the drive and to optimize the time it takes to retrieve all those bits. That’s why when I asked the chief technical officer of the Wikipedia organization where the text information for the elephant article is actually stored, he replied, in the chat room we were in:

god only knows.

On the disk somewheres

A shame-faced admission of an appalling ignorance? Not at all. The gap between how we access information and how the computer accesses it is at the heart of the revolution in knowledge. Because computers store information in ways that have nothing to do with how we want it presented it to us, we are freed from having to organize the original information the way we eventually want to get at it. The bits and pieces of Wikipedia are, in effect, an enormous reserve of miscellaneous information that can be assembled in precisely the ways we need at precisely the moment we need it. That’s true all the way through Wikipedia, from the microscopic bits stored on the hard drives to the finished articles we read.

Now, I'd worry that page 99 depicts Everything Is Miscellaneous as a techie book about how computers work, except that the very last lines bring the discussion back up to where it should be:

At the top level of this hodgepodge of bits, images, text, articles and ideas, something remarkable happens. The million articles in English are not arranged alphabetically. They are not put into a...

The book is way more concerned with the remarkable ways we are putting our ideas together, and the effect that has on business and authority, than in the bits and bytes. Page 99 leaves off exactly where the real interests of the book are about to be restated.

Read an excerpt from Everything Is Miscellaneous, and visit the Everything Is Miscellaneous website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Charles Tilly's "Why?"

Charles Tilly is Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University.

His 2006 book Why? (Princeton University Press, 2006) is about the explanations we give and how we give them -- a fascinating look at the way the reasons we offer every day are dictated by, and help constitute, social relationships.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the book and reported the following:

Page 99 of my book Why? talks about codes. The book as a whole asks two questions: 1) How do people give each other reasons for the things they do, things other people do, and things they see happening? 2) When they give reasons, how and why do the reasons vary for the same things vary from one pair of interlocutors to another? "Codes" is one answer to the first question. People generally choose among four different ways of giving reasons: conventions such as that's the way things go, eh?, stories such as Jenny hit Billy and he got a bruise, technical accounts such as here's the best medical knowledge we have on how contusions form, and codes such as here are the rules for judging whether Jenny had the right to hit Billy. Whenever people give each other reasons, they are simultaneously confirming, denying, asserting, or negotiating their relationships to each other, which is why you explain the exact same mistake differently to your spouse and your neighbor on the train. The choice among conventions, stories, technical accounts, and codes does the same thing in a bigger way. Lawyers and rabbis claim authority over their listeners by citing codes, geologists and anthropologists claim a different kind of authority by constructing cause-effect technical accounts, but most of the time we handle reasons with the equivalents of shoulder shrugs I call conventions or (when the situation calls for more coherent explanation) nicely crafted stories. Stories are one of the great human inventions, radically simplifying causes and effects but neatly fixing responsibility as they provide reasons.

Learn more about Why? at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

James Oakes's "The Radical and the Republican"

James Oakes is professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the author of, most recently, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the book and reported the following:

Page 99: It is the winter of 1859-1860. Frederick Douglass is in Europe, in part because authorities have found evidence of his connection to John Brown, who has just been executed for treason against the state of Virginia after his abortive effort to provoke a slave uprising at Harpers Ferry. Douglass is defending Brown vociferously, excessively — even though Douglass himself had refused to participate in a plot he considered “desperate.” Why is he doing this?

Think of what’s going on back in the United States. The most momentous presidential election on the nation’s history is getting underway — an election that would determine whether the country would split apart, whether there would be civil war, whether slavery would survive. Douglass’s praise of Brown’s antislavery radicalism sets the black leader apart from the political mainstream. The Democrats are divided between proslavery southerners and belligerently racist northerners. The antislavery Republican Party is committed only to halting slavery’s expansion into the western territories. That’s not good enough for Frederick Douglass. In pronouncing Brown an antislavery hero — virtually a saint — Douglass is staking out a position at the left flank of American politics. It is the classic stance of the reformer — to needle the consciences of elected politicians who must temper their ideals as they answer to a broader constituency.

In this case, Douglass’s enthusiastic encomiums to John Brown sharply distinguish him from Abraham Lincoln’s cautious dismissal of Brown’s insane and criminal act. And therein lies the central theme of the book — the difference between two men whose historical reputations rest on their shared hatred of slavery, one of them a radical and the other a Republican.

Visit the publisher's website to learn more about The Radical and the Republican.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stacey Richter's "Twin Study"

Pushcart Prize-winning author Stacey Richter applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new collection of stories, Twin Study, and reported the following:

I freakin’ love my page 99! It’s from “The Long Hall, ” a story about Salt Lake City punk rockers. In this scene, the fifteen year-old narrator is playing with her big sister’s band for the first time and she’s really nervous. I especially love the last line of the paragraph because it contains a minature seed of the story as a whole — which is about a young person’s sense that the world is full of open doors, and how she feels those doors slam in her face. It’s a little darker and less funny than the book overall but representative of my work in that it touches on my interest in female characters, rock and roll, isolation, and sadness.

By the time we start to play, a few more kids have begun skulking around or climbing up on the bleachers — mostly though, I try not to look at the people. I look at my hands or I look at Shane, singing with her mouth touching the microphone. I’m trying to play right but I have an unhealthy spelling-bee feeling. C C C C, D D D D — aren’t those the right letters? Maybe it’s okay; Shane seems to be singing and Paula seems to be hitting the drums. I try to play in time. I try to listen when Paula clicks her sticks together at the beginning of each song. This is the best moment — right before the music starts, before we’ve had a chance to fuck anything up.

Visit Stacey Richter's website for more about Twin Study and to read several of her stories that are available online.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lore Segal's "Shakespeare's Kitchen"

Lore Segal has worked as novelist, essayist, translator, and writer of children’s books. Her novels include Other People's Houses, serialized in The New Yorker and published by Harcourt Brace in 1964, currently available from The New Press, 1994; Lucinella (FSG, 1978); and Her First American, which won an award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (Knopf, 1985, The New Press, 1995).

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Shakespeare’s Kitchen, and reported the following:

"Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you," says Ford Madox Ford. Is this true of Page 99 of my interrelated stories called Shakespeare’s Kitchen? 99 happens to be one of a two page sketch, an affectionate jab at an old leftist friend who lives in a gated community. My characters, the members and spouses of members of Concordance, a Connecticut think tank, assemble to deal with the proximity of the black ghetto. Only the director’s dog, Cassandra, has the right moral responses; the judgment of the humans depends on their politics: left, right, feminist. My protagonist Ilka, straddles as many sides of the argument as can be argued. Here it is in part:

“Please!” said Leslie. “We’re talking about a sudden wave of crime. The standing lamp disappears from my office, the copier walks itself out of the mail room, Betty and Barbara are mugged coming out of the Pancake house and so are Alvin and Alicia walking down the middle of the street! A robber squeezes past the Bernstines’ air conditioner and turns on the light on! Yvette is accosted on campus at noon.”

“The girl from the project steals my wallet,” Eliza added.

“You don’t know that!” cried Ilka.

Ahmed was arranging the stand for Mr. Charley’s charts and maps. "You're fortunate," said this gentleman, "that Concordance University, originally conceived as the Concordance School for Higher Women, was a gated community. There's still a quarter of mile of wall here, on the right side of Southgate, and another hundred feet here." The man from the Planning Commission flipped to a new map, "and here and here."

“A wa-all!" said Alvin, Alpha, Ilka, and the two Bernstines on a descending note. "A wall?" mused Zack, Maria, Yvette and Eliza Shakespere with rising interest.

The lawyer said, “Leslie wants me to check the charter: The city might have been liable for the upkeep of the wall for half a century. The city might be liable for rebuilding.”

"A wall is a thought!"

"We’re not having a wall!”

"You put a layer of cement on it and embed broken glass," said Officer Right.

What does page 99 reveal about its writer? That I think human beings, including myself, are comical. That I’m rather fond of us. That story is a metaphor for what we mean and dream; that my own first loyalty is to the word, which is honor-bound to be neither larger nor lighter, nor noisier nor cleverer, etc., than the idea to which it refers; that my sentences would like to be shapely.

Learn more about Lore Segal, and visit the publisher's page for Shakespeare's Kitchen.

--Marshal Zeringue

Mil Millington's "Love and Other Near-Death Experiences"

Mil Millington has written for various magazines, radio, and the Guardian (he also had a weekly column in the Guardian Weekend magazine). His website has achieved cult status, and he is also a co-founder and co-writer of the online magazine The Weekly.

His novels include A Certain Chemistry, Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About, and Love and Other Near-Death Experiences, to which he applied the "Page 99 Test" and reported the following:

I often say that context is everything. (Though, of course, what I mean by that depends on the situation in which I say it.) Here the first question I had was, do I take Page 99 of the UK version, or Page 99 of the US one? The former coincides with the start of Chapter 12; the latter is towards the end of Chapter 11 (so much for American get-up-and-go). The British edition's page is full of the protagonist's anxiety about a strange character who's previously accosted him on the street in the early hours of the morning; he's full of doubts and uncertainty (which is very LAONDE), and it also contains a joke about furniture polish that I quite like. However, with apologies to Surrey-born F. Mad' Fo', I'll concentrate on the version published in the former colonies.

I write comedy, and my main interest is characters and (oh dear) themes. In LAONDE an eclectic group of people are confronting that old puzzler, 'Why am I alive?' especially vividly because - for unrelated, and stupidly prosaic reasons - they've all narrowly missed being killed in accidents where others weren't so lucky. Apart from the main character, they're dealing with their oddly still having pulses in the ways that - if you look - people in that position tend to, with worrying regularity. It's not really a thriller - and absolutely not (as some have thought) a mystery riddle. It's a sort of existential, comic frolic with a serious point tugging at its coat. By Page 99, though, the pieces are still being assembled, and we're merely eavesdropping on the protagonist fretting to his best friend in a pub: things are a lot different by fifty pages later. That's not very representative of the novel, I don't think. Though the word 'wank' is used four times, so it is quite 'me'.

Actually, I'm not sure that any page - or even an isolated selection - can quite convey the feel and thrust of the book. I had this problem when doing readings: what ten or so pages should I choose?

It's not funny, which is uncharacteristic, but the opening of the novel is possibly more indicative:
"Hello. My name is Robert, and I haven't been dead for sixty-three days now."

Read an excerpt from Love and Other Near-Death Experiences.

--Marshal Zeringue

Viviana Zelizer's "The Purchase of Intimacy"

Viviana A. Zelizer is Lloyd Cotsen ‘50 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University and author of The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton University Press, 2005).

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her book and reported the following:

Here is the mid section from p. 99 of The Purchase of Intimacy:

Boundaries between intimate relationships have some remarkable characteristics. Although participants, observers, and third parties commonly mark such distinctions with moral discourse and moral practice, rarely are the defining interactions on one side of a boundary or the other universally acceptable or unacceptable in themselves; they depend on context. Sexual intercourse, for example, becomes an enforceable obligation for spouses, an option for lovers, and a forbidden transgression for lawyer-client pairs. Similarly, expensive gifts become obligations in some relations, options in others, and forbidden transgressions in still others. The matching of relation, transaction, and medium matters crucially. Such boundaries also include temporal limits, so that questions arise concerning what relation a couple occupied at the time of a certain transaction: were they then a married couple, engaged to be married, unmarried lovers, spouses of other persons, business partners, lawyer and client, patron and prostitute, or acquaintances on a date? All these relations have fairly clear beginnings and endings. Between those temporal limits, participants, observers, third parties, and boards of discipline work to match relations, transactions, and media. When it involves intimacy, relational work takes plenty of effort.

The book pursues this kind of interplay through three areas: coupling, paid care, and household economies, asking how people mingle their intimate relations and economic practices in everyday life and what happens when some of these issues go to court. I use a range of materials, including court cases, reports on compensation for 9/11 victims, Web sites on financial management, and advice books.

Page 99 may look like common sense but it contradicts widespread ideas concerning the mutual contamination of intimacy and rationality. People worry that mixing economics and intimacy will corrupt both spheres. Think of the concerns with prenuptial agreements, loaning money to friends, or workplace romances. If you mix the cold world of economic activity with the warm world of friendship, marriage, or parent-child relations, many people think, you will turn it into a calculating market. It also works in the opposite direction. People worry that if workers get too chummy on the job, they will spend more time with each other than with their work. Intimacy interferes with efficiency. So, people warn, mix intimate relations with economic activity at your own peril.

My book challenges all these taboos. The Purchase of Intimacy shows that the world does not divide into two segregated spheres of intimacy and economics. All of us routinely mix our most intimate relations with economic activities. In fact, we owe economic support to our children, our spouses, our parents, and often our friends. The separation of spheres is a myth.

Sexual intimacy is only one example. That’s why my book gives a lot of attention to how couples and families behave. But the whole point is that different kinds of intimacy call for different economic arrangements. In quite distinct ways, without any sexual contact whatsoever, people often establish intimate relations with their doctors, their lawyers, their priests, their nannies, or their best friends. Each one of these relations has its own special meaning and involves its own distinct economy.

All of us are living one version or the other of the purchase of intimacy every day; from paying for a dinner out with a new romantic partner, to discussing our household budget with our spouse, negotiating an allowance with our child, deciding on what sort of care we want and can afford for our elderly parents.

Read more about The Purchase of Intimacy at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Marc Acito's "How I Paid for College"

Marc Acito's debut novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater, won the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction, was selected an Editors' Choice by the New York Times, and is in development at Columbia Pictures.

Acito applied the "Page 99 Test" to the novel and reported the following:

What mysterious, mystical force is at work here? Page 99 begins my single favorite scene in my book, the one of which I'm proudest, and which politeness demands I not discuss in explicit detail. Here's a hint — in a book with a subtitle "A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater," which kind of scene do you suppose it is? Suffice it to say it's a scene about a character who can't talk when his mouth is full.

In a culture saturated with sexual imagery, sex is still a subject we rarely discuss honestly. And it makes me apoplectic that we live in a country where the unrestrained violence of the Super Bowl is deemed acceptable while Janet Jackson's nipple during the half-time show can bring down the wrath of the FCC. Hell, I'm still angry that Congress impeached Bill Clinton because he lied about a nooner with an intern.

So I'm committed to writing as frankly about sex as I can. And with laughs. 'Cuz face it, nothing's funnier than getting caught with your pants down. So while Page 99 may only represent 25% of what How I Paid for College is about, it's the one page you'll hear me read out loud any chance I get.

Visit Marc Acito's website and read an excerpt from How I Paid for College.

Acito is an irregular contributor to All Things Considered, the New York Times, and Live Wire Radio.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Conn's "History's Shadow"

Steven Conn is Professor and Director of the Public History Program at The Ohio State University's Department of History. His 2004 book, History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century, is "a study of how the study of Native Americans shaped a variety of intellectual discourses including linguistics, archaeology, anthropology and history from the late 18th century through the 1890s."

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the book and reported the following:

As it happens, p. 99 of my book History's Shadow: Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century features one of the earliest known American daguerrotypes, a spectral portrait of Stephen DuPonceau. DuPonceau was one of dozens of American intellectuals who studied various aspects of Native America in the 19th century. Indeed, part of my purpose here is to demonstrate just how central the study of Indians was to the intellectual life of the United States.

In studying Native American languages, customs, archaeological remains etc these intellectuals tried to figure just who these people were, where they had come from and when. In so doing they shaped a distinctively American historical consciousness and by the end of the century had created a division between Euro-American, who had a history, and Native Americans who did not.

Learn more about History's Shadow at the University of Chicago Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Judith Kelman’s "The First Stone"

Judith Kelman applied the "Page 99 Test" her new novel, The First Stone.

Here is an excerpt from page 99, followed by Kelman's analysis:

Everyone had gone still, even the youngest ones. Every eye in the room was on Brent.

“Has to be almost midnight. See the moon?” He pointed the bandaged knob of his hand at the large silver button mounted high on the shirt cardboard sky. “His nose starts burning, that’s the first thing. Something smells funny, strong. Then all of a sudden it’s so bright, he can see a whole galaxy of stars and comets flashing right through his eyelids.

“He tries to wake up, but he can’t. He’s stuck in this incredible nightmare…

In The First Stone, page 99 is set in a children’s hospital ward. Emma Colten, the story’s protagonist, is a professional artist who has volunteered to do a project with the kids. Her choice, a found-object collage featuring a monster, is the catalyst that induces a horribly burned little boy named Brent to tell the story of his monster father, who set fire to his bed on Halloween night.

At the novel’s heart lies a series of such unintended consequences. In this case, Emma’s attempt to divert the sick and injured kids at the hospital leads to a crucial emotional breakthrough. In another pivotal scene, the unintended consequence proves catastrophic. Emma innocently confides in a friend about disturbing words she heard from an upstairs neighbor’s child. “Daddy, please,” said the little girl, “I’m begging you.”

The “Daddy” in question happens to be the world famous chief of cardiology at the hospital where Emma’s husband is a cardiac surgery resident. Emma’s revelation unleashes a chain of events that threaten to destroy her husband’s future and far worse.

Learn more about The First Stone at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue