By Valla Vakili, CEO, Small Demons
A few years ago I was planning a trip to Madrid and Paris from Los Angeles. I was also deep into Jean-Claude Izzo’s Total Chaos, the first of his Marseilles Trilogy, in an English translation published by Europa Editions.
By the time I finished the book, I had replaced the Paris leg of my trip with Marseilles. I’d found Lagavulin, the main character’s scotch of choice. (Mine was always Laphroiag.) And a whole lot of interesting jazz. Of course I wanted to read the next book in the series,Chourmo, and of course, it wasn’t available in English translation yet.
And yet the Total Chaos story continued — with a new city to discover, new music, a scotch that would forever challenge my loyalty to Laphroaig. The story had leapt out from the book and into my life.
Out of that experience, the idea for Small Demons was born. To anyone who’d listen, I’d open up the book, point to the details inside, and say, “Look, a book can take you everywhere. All we have to do is grab all these details and connect them to where they go.”
I did that for two years until I’d worn out the spine of Total Chaos. Then I decided to visualize it, put the idea into a simple graphic. Of a web page where we’d represent every interesting detail in a book — every person, place and thing inside — and show where a story can take you.
That’s what it took. From there came Small Demons, the company. Today, we’re poring through stories to reveal the interesting details inside them, the people, places and things that matter — a concordance of the world’s literature. And in the process what started as something interesting to me has become something more. Something necessary. A new path to discovery.
That’s bold, but true. Here’s why.
Culture has a cadence, and that cadence reveals itself in the work. In the text, in the song, in the art. Where works influence each other, where creators interpret each other just as they do the world.
Borges knew this, in Kafka and his precursors. To read culture like Borges, though, to see what he saw — that’s inaccessible to nearly all of us. And yet today, technology is catching up to Borges. We can sift through works. We can look for the details that matter. Categorize them, visualize them, add depth and context to them. We can find Kafka, and his precursors. And in so doing, piece by piece, reconstitute that cadence, that natural way stories connect to each other, and to the world.
Why bother?
Timing matters hugely. Today, cultural discovery — how we find that next book to read, that next song to listen to, drink to drink, movie to watch, place to visit — it’s all up for grabs. With two contenders eyeing the spoils.
First, the retail machine. People who bought this, also bought that. Culture as a web of SKUs.
Next, the social signal. Reviews, ratings and likes. Culture as a web of opinion.
In each camp, deep technology and huge user bases. Each pushing toward a kind of sameness. Similar purchases, similar likes, often similar categories — book to book, song to song, movie to movie.
Culture is nothing like this. It crosses categories and embraces difference. It’s the work that’s lost on shelves for decades, ignored by all buyers, only to return as a classic. It’s the piece that’s scorned when published, not a like in sight, only to rise as a masterpiece. And it’s all the details that connect those works to creators forever changed by them, to future audiences.
By tracing and connecting those details, we restore the cadence of culture. We lay down a path of discovery where your next song, your next movie, your next book — your next anything — comes from the stories you’ve lost yourself in, the writers you can’t get enough of, the characters you can’t forget.
4 Comments
This is exactly what I’ve been thinking was needed in book discover for a long time because it is similar to what drives the behemoth known as Google: keyword search.
I think this idea is bigger than one start-up company. I think since Google already has their books division, they need to incorporate this philosophy into their main search page as well, but just simply provide a second box clearly labeled Google Books to encourage people to search books instead of just the Web. Too often you have to click through at least five pages of Gooooooogle’s search result before you start finding what you’re really looking for because of all the junk that clutters the first few pages simply because its popularity makes it rise higher in ‘relevancy’.
Fascinating! The idea that your can replace popularity as a major search tool with a complex combination of keywords linked to each other by cultural tendencies. I’d love to hear more about how you work your algorithm – muct be a really complex one!
In any case, congratulations. Book discovery remains one of the most difficult hurdles for both readers (looking for what they think they want to read) and writers (waiting with bated breath to be discovered).
In music, I read somewhere that someone had put together a database of melodies all selected from popular successes and (I guess) historic ones, that enables a music publishing house or music writers to figure out whether their music/song or whatever they’ve composed will become a hit. Apparently, certain beats and melodies are winners and others aren’t. They’re still-born.
Can the same thing be done with novels and poetry? Perhaps. There are constants in human nature but there are also moments in History when certain things, certain kinds of stories become fashionable. What drives fashion? Who knows. But one thing is certain: monotony kills, it is the source of boredom. I for one can’t stand another vampire story!
But then, if you like vampires, if you’re into that genre and never want to get out of it, I guess your “small demons” help you find your next great read! Just type in “vampire”…
Still, I’d love to hear more about your system and how it works, in particular how it handles the phenomenon of fashion, how it rises and how it wanes…
Fascinating! The idea that your can replace popularity as a major search tool with a complex combination of keywords linked to each other by cultural tendencies. I’d love to hear more about how you work your algorithm – must be a really complex one!
In any case, congratulations. Book discovery remains one of the most difficult hurdles for both readers (looking for what they think they want to read) and writers (waiting with bated breath to be discovered).
In music, I read somewhere that someone had put together a database of melodies all selected from popular successes and (I guess) historic ones, that enables a music publishing house or music writers to figure out whether their music/song or whatever they’ve composed will become a hit. Apparently, certain beats and melodies are winners and others aren’t. They’re still-born.
Can the same thing be done with novels and poetry? Perhaps. There are constants in human nature but there are also moments in History when certain things, certain kinds of stories become fashionable. What drives fashion? Who knows. But one thing is certain: monotony kills, it is the source of boredom. I for one can’t stand another vampire story!
But then, if you like vampires, if you’re into that genre and never want to get out of it, I guess your “small demons” help you find your next great read! Just type in “vampire”…
Still, I’d love to hear more about your system and how it works, in particular how it handles the phenomenon of fashion, how it rises and how it wanes…
Thank you.
As fascinating as technology is/was, it manages to be ham-fisted when it comes to search. There’s no serendipity there.
This is exactly what I’ve been hoping for, without knowing it.
Scott A.