Context & Continuity

Books as Furniture

WSJ, 6.27.12:  A House to Look Smart In

A million years ago, when I was in school (OK, it was only 31 years ago this summer), I was studying book publishing with some people who became very dear friends.  Anyway, we were younger and much smarter than we are now and had many opinions we thought were facts.  And we were so clever.  One of us came up with the expression "books as furniture" to explain editions like those published by the Franklin library and so forth that people bought primarily becuase they looked very good on the shelf and weren't actually meant to be read.  Get it?  "Books as furniture." 

Anyway, for some reason that expression came to mind when I read this article.  Enjoy!

What You Shouldn't Have Missed in Today's NYTimes...

 

One Schlep Forward

Let's say your father and you are going on a religious pilgramage ... to Uman, Ukraine.  You're Jews.  Your father came out as gay when he was 46.  The father is a Reform rabbi.  The pilgramage is a like an Hasidic Burning Man. Who needs to come up with a great idea for a story when this is your life?  [more]

Without Gods

Alain de Bottom's new book on atheism and religion pays proper respect to both.  I've seen the video from de Botton's TED speech and was quite impressed how it honestly presented the short comings of both theology and religion.  From the book review today:  "De Botton looks around and sees a secular scoiety denuded of high spiritual aspiration and practical moral guidance." [more]

 

 

Why Bilinguals Are Smarter

Terrific story about the benefits of speaking two languages.  From the article:  

The collective evidence from a number of such studies suggests that the bilingual experience improves the brain’s so-called executive function — a command system that directs the attention processes that we use for planning, solving problems and performing various other mentally demanding tasks. These processes include ignoring distractions to stay focused, switching attention willfully from one thing to another and holding information in mind — like remembering a sequence of directions while driving.  [more]

 

 

The Way We Read Now

The Week in Review section has a raft of articles on readig and literature.  This one, by Dwight Garner, is an ambivalent comparision of different e-reader platforms.  Here's an excerpt:  I’ve tried poetry on each of these platforms: Larkin, Dickinson, Philip Levine, Amy Clampitt. It’s not happening, at least not for me. There’s not enough white space, nor silence. The poems seem shrunken and trapped, like lobsters half-dead in a supermarket glass pen, their claws rubber-banded. Poems should be printed on paper, or carved onto the dried husks of coconuts, so one can hoard them.

The one bit of verse that charmed me, when read on the iPad, was Clive James’s brilliant and witty “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered.” This poem forces you to wonder: What will remainders look like in our digital future? Where’s the 99-cents bin going to be?

You can’t read an e-book in the tub. You can’t fling one across the room, aiming, as Mark Twain liked to do, at a cat. And e-books will not furnish a room.

Writing in The Times in 1991, Anna Quindlen declared, “I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves.”  [more]

Your Brain on Fiction

Another one of the article from this week's Week in Review on reading explores the brain / reading connection.  From the article:  Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the “classical” language regions, like Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like “lavender,” “cinnamon” and “soap,” for example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those devoted to dealing with smells. [more]

My Life's Sentences

 

From the article:  The urge to convert experience into a group of words that are in a grammatical relation to one another is the most basic, ongoing impulse of my life. It is a habit of antiphony: of call and response. Most days begin with sentences that are typed into a journal no one has ever seen. There is a freedom to this; freedom to write what I will not proceed to wrestle with. The entries are mostly quotidian, a warming up of the fingers and brain. On days when I am troubled, when I am grieved, when I am at a loss for words, the mechanics of formulating sentences, and of stockpiling them in a vault, is the only thing that centers me again.

 

Constructing a sentence is the equivalent of taking a Polaroid snapshot: pressing the button, and watching something emerge. To write one is to document and to develop at the same time. Not all sentences end up in novels or stories. But novels and stories consist of nothing but. Sentences are the bricks as well as the mortar, the motor as well as the fuel. They are the cells, the individual stitches. Their nature is at once solitary and social. Sentences establish tone, and set the pace. One in front of the other marks the way.  [more]

God Bless Brazenhead Books.

There's No Place Like Here: Brazenhead Books from Etsy on Vimeo.

Consensus-Driven Book Recommendations: Proust Makes the List.

From the Guardian...

Do Top 100 Books polls and charts agree on a set of classics?  I scraped the results of over [sic] 15 notable book polls, readers surveys and top 100's. Both popular and high-brow. They included all Pulitzer Prize winners, Desert Island Discs choices from recent years, Oprah's Bookclub list, and, of course, The Guardian's Top 100 Books of All Time. A  simple frequency analysis on the gathered titles gives us a neat 'consensus cloud' visualisation of the most mentioned books titles across the polls. Do you agree with the consensus?  [more]

Well, this is rather a mixed bag.  Let's see... The Hitchkiker's Guide to the Galaxy comes in over War and Peace and Do Androids Dram ofelectric Sheep.  His Dark Materials is about on par with Remembrance of Things Past.  To Kill a Mockingbird leads Harry Potter and Harry Potter leads Scoop, The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Atlas Shrugged, The Wind and the Willows, Twilight and Persuasion.  --Wow.  Where does one even start with this?  On the one hand, I'm amazed, in positive and negative ways that some of these titles are on the list at all.  On the other hand, I see the residue of popular culture, High School / College reading lists and, my favorite category, "more honored in the breach than in the observance." 

The New Yorker, 2.14.11: The Information

Running the risk of being the last one to tell you, I must be sure you notice an article from a couple of weeks ago in The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik:  The Information.   The article follows a theme I've noticed and commented on here for several months now:  the spate of new books about the good, the bad and the ugly about the Information Revolution. 

Gopnik shelves the new books into three different different sections: 

Never-Betters, better-Nevers and the Ever-Wasers.  Huh? 

The Never-Betters believe that we’re on the brink of a new utopia, where information will be free and democratic, news will be made from the bottom up, love will reign, and cookies will bake themselves. The Better-Nevers think that we would have been better off if the whole thing had never happened, that the world that is coming to an end is superior to the one that is taking its place, and that, at a minimum, books and magazines create private space for minds in ways that twenty-second bursts of information don’t. The Ever-Wasers insist that at any moment in modernity something like this is going on, and that a new way of organizing data and connecting users is always thrilling to some and chilling to others—that something like this is going on is exactly what makes it a modern moment.   [more]

Gopnik has done an amazing job collecting and the revelant titles and authors and this is article is a "must read" summary of these three important threads of thought  --So go read it alreaday!

Book Titles That Make Me Sad.

Bedtime reading? 

Joyce Carol Oates: Fanning the Spark to Combustion with Her Wings.

The photo to the left explains the popularity of the Hipstamatic application for the iPhone.  But other than that, it's a photo of Joyce Carol Oates and her beloved husband Raymond Smith from outside their home in Windsor, Ontario in 1970, about nine years after they were married. 

The photograph is from Ms. Oates personal collection and was posted to The New Yorker's website to accompany the publication of Ms. Oates memoir of her husband's death -- and I highly recommend you read the article from the December 13, 2010 issue.

Ms. Oates has a special place in my heart for three reasons. 

1.  Most importantly, she is an amazing writer who has has proven she can write anything, froma Gothic Romance to a study on the sweet science of boxing.  Her writing is lovely and stories always capture my imagination.

2. & 3.  She's ... odd, prolific, and oddly prolific.  I was blessed with the opportunity to cross paths her a couple of times.   My first job in NYC was at E.P.Dutton, one of her publishers.  One publisher was not enough to keep up with her.  While I worked at Dutton, she published two sizable novels, Bellfleur and Angels of Light.  Inbetween, there were the short stories, criticism, novellas and her work on husband Smith's journal,  Actually there was so much work to published, she put two different pen names to work in addition to her own.  Oh, and the poetry.  Oh, and there was her own literary journal, The Ontario Review.  --Oh, and there was the full-time gig at Princeton.  Because she was so busy, and because her audience isn't really susceptible to media hype, Ms. Oates didn't do many interviews, but she did a radio interview while I was there that was organized by one of my bosses, Jean Rawitt.  Ms. Rawitt returned to the office following the interview and the legendary Lois Shapiro, the director of pulicity at Dutton (and latter The Free Press), asked Ms. Rawitt how it went.  Apparently, according to Jean, the interviewer asked Ms. Oates how it was she was able to produce such a prodigious volume of work.  Ms. Oates replied that it wasn't hard at all, she just typed up what the voices in her head had to say.  --And that was the end of the interviews for a while. 

And I admire someone who, in the course of their profession, transcends this grey, slumbering realm and enters into another world that is obviously more alive and vibrant and, of course, imaginative and vivid.  And this is how I usually select my favorite artists.  Can an ordinary human, scuffling around here in the shadows, create art on the order of Moby Dick? The Ring of the Nibelung? Bach's Cello Sonatas?  Leaves of Grass? The second side of Abby Road?  Obviously, I don't think so.  At the very least, these works result from -- at least -- a dialog between the artist and a higher power and, more likely, a visit to this other realm where, like this Prometheus, she steals some fire and, on return to here, some spark survives.  And the artist tends after the ember until she's able to fan it into flame. 

Ms. Oates is a wild and uncontrollable force whose gusts ignites all those tiny sparks she tends to with such loving care.  I've always worried about her because, she's so small, so thin-boned, those gust would snap her or that such flames would consume her.  But, just like the thin-boned bird, her wings carry her above us all.  Amen.

The New Yorker: Regarding Nick Denton.

I don't understand the world, just a little bit of my view from where I stand and one of the places I've stood is in the world of journalism.  There, i've met some very bright people and some people who would have put the children in the coal mines. 

I'm not sure what it is about being a publisher, but it can really bring out the worse in some people.  For example, a million years ago, i worked for someone who intentionally cultivated an image of cruelty.  This person once told me, appropos of nothing in particular, he would never intentionally hire a handicapped person.  Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the office one day and found a lovely lady in a wheelchair setting type.  Deciding to tease the publisher, i strolled into his office and reminded him what he told me.  His reply is forever etched into my memory because I never, to this day, decided if he was kidding me or not.  He said, "Yeah.  I reconsidered.  I thought about it and figured out if I ever needed to get any overtime out of her I could always grabber her wheels and put her up on blocks."  And I will never know.

The New Yorker has profiled Nick Denton and this is what his colleagues have to say about him:

“He’s not, like, a sociopath, but you kind of have to watch what you’re doing around him,” Ricky Van Veen, the C.E.O. of the Web site College Humor, told me.

“The villain public persona is not a hundred-per-cent true,” A. J. Daulerio, the editor-in-chief of Deadspin, Gawker Media’s sports blog, said. “It’s probably eighty-per-cent true.”

“I can’t lie to make him worse than he is, but he’s pretty bad,” Ian Spiegelman, a former Gawker writer, said.

“Other people’s emotions are alien to him,” Choire Sicha, another Gawker alumnus, said.

“He’s got a strong carapace of not really thinking other people’s opinions are that important,” John Gapper, a columnist at the Financial Times, said.

“He’s right,” Matt Welch, the editor of the libertarian magazine Reason, said. “He’s never right about me, of course. But people are lazy and not very good.”

“He almost sees people as Legos moving around,” Sheila McClear said.

“He’s not a fully human person,” Spiegelman said.

“I mean, maybe he thinks he’s the one truly advanced human,” Anna Holmes, the founding editor of Jezebel, a.k.a. Girlie Gawker, said.

“Does he have parents?” Daulerio asked.

“I always imagine that he came fully formed out of British finishing school,” Holmes said.

“What can you do with a person like that?” Spiegelman said. “He’s a character out of Dr. Seuss, frankly.”

“Nick is a bit of a sphinx on purpose,” Joel Johnson, the longest-serving Gizmodo writer, said. “He has some of the attributes of the dork who wraps his Asperger’s around him like a cloak.”

“There’s no point in writing about Nick if you can’t get to the fundamental problem of his nihilism,” Moe Tkacik, who has worked at both Gawker and Jezebel, said.

[more]

If you want to find out how the mind of a publisher works, there's precious few opportunities better than this. 

 

 

Where in the World is Walter Benjamin?

Sometimes when I read a book review, it leaves me baffled.  I can't figure out if I don't like the review or I don't like the book.  And this was exactly the case yesterday when i read a lengthy review of What Ever Happened to Modernism? (Gabriel Josipovici) in the Wall Street Journal.  

One of the upsides of this whole economic recession thing is that it's given me the opportunity to fill in some of the blanks of my so-called education.  Modernism is one of these areas I've only recently checked off my list.  (Watch out, Symbolism, you're next!)  I've developed an appreciation and respect.  So, when I spied the review in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, I thought it would be a great way to test myself. 

Then there was the matter of the author.  Josipovici is the author of the excellent Goldberg Variations, a "modern" novel that springs from Josipovici's textual interpretation of Bach's famous composition.  Anyhoo...

So I can't tell if it was Josipovici or the reviewer, Eric Ormsby, but someone neglected to mention Walter Benjamin, the fellow who coined the term Modernism.  This was hard fought intellectual ground for me, so i want to defend it. 

What is clear from the review is that Josipovici take a broad view of Modernism and dives into Cervantes and Rabelais.  The way Mr. Ormsby explains Mr. Josipovici's argument, this can make sense, but I wouldn't want to defend it myself.  My puny understanding of the material, however, shouldn't dissuade you from at least reading the review.  Myself? I'll be reading more source material before I climb up to (or is that descend unto) the criticism. 

Banned Books: What You Need to Know.

View Book Bans and Challenges, 2007-2010 in a larger map.  The map is drawn from cases documented by ALA and the Kids' Right to Read Project.

September 25 through October 2, 2010 is Banned Book Week.  I'm going to resist posting a list of books that have been banned for various, sundry and ridiculous reasons because it's too easy and much overdone.  Hey, some of the books I wouldn't have in my library or buy for my two kids, but that's no reason for censorship. 

Instead, I submit for your approval a lovely map charting which books were banned where.  I was disappointed to see geographical clusters on both the Left and Right Coasts, but then I realized, book banning isn't a function of metropolitan life or rural life.  Instead, we see that, where there are people, there are people willing to ban books. --C'est dommage.  C'est tres dommage. 

 

Big Day for Jane Austin Fan Club.

It's probably a fatal admission of English major geek-a-tude, but my pulse quickened when I discovered Oxford's Bodleian Library and King's College London have collaborated to post some of Jane Austin's original manuscripts.  For me, it is tantamount to resting my fingertips on the keys of Hunter S. Thompson's IBM Selectric typewriter, if he hadn't blasted it with a twelve-gauge. 

No, really.

It's a fascinating collection and well produced.  If one wants to see a writer hard at work, then no better example can be found than taking a look at the opening of chapter ten of Persuasion.  Ms. Austin scarsely left a single word on that page untouched. 

Included in the collection is an especially delicious item:  the outlines for Mansfield Park and Emma. 

So, in these small years of the twenty-first century, I'm rather inured by the hustle and bustle of the internets but, every now and then, I can just about make out some measure of merit there.  Today is one of those days. 

The Plot Escapes Me: Adventures in Reading.

Thought you might enjoy this essay from last Sunday's NYTBR.  So much of the essay resonates with my own experience. 

One answer is that we read for the aesthetic and literary pleasure we experience while reading. The pleasure — or intended pleasure — of novels is obvious, but it is no less true that we read nonfiction for the immediate satisfaction it provides. The acquisition of knowledge, while you are acquiring it, can be intensely engrossing and stimulating, and a well-constructed argument is a beautiful thing. But that kind of pleasure is transient. When we read a serious book, we want to learn something, we want it to change us, and it hardly seems possible for that to happen if its fugitive content passes through us like light through glass. ...

Still, reading is different from life, and writing is different from those other art forms. Indeed, reading’s great distinction may be that it is not an experience to be experienced only as an experience (otherwise, poets wouldn’t have to sweat so hard to make their poems a performance rather than discourse). A book, even a novel, contains information, in the strictest sense, and the most obvious purpose of reading a book is to acquire that information for oneself. And unlike a catch-and-release fisherman, when I acquire that information, I want to keep it.  [more]

...

 

What a Coincidence! David Edelstein and A.O. Scott Find the Same Thing "Oxymoronic"

Oxymoronic.  How often do you hear that word in an eight-hour period?  Let me explain why that's the pertinent question this morning.

First I'll tell you what you already know: I have aggressive media consumption habits.  I tear through media like Henry VIII at a banquet.  My family believes it's an awesome and frightening habit. 

Second, at that banquet, i always make room for The New York Times and lots of airtime from National Public Radio and from NPR, I usually catch the program Fresh Air.

So, yesterday, while tearing through the Times, I came across A.O. Scott's review of the new George Clooney movie, The American and read this paragraph:

In addition to the priest, he befriends Clara, a prostitute — played by an actress with the splendidly oxymoronic name Violante Placido — who is so stirred by his bedroom prowess that she stops charging him and asks him out for dinner instead. (Some guys get all the breaks.) Meanwhile his business dealings with his client carry a sexual undercurrent that the American may or may not notice.  [entire review]

i noticed the use of the word "oxymoronic" because it was well played and not a word I read in the media on a regular basis.  --Until yesterday.

David Edelstein reviews movies for the NPR program Fresh Air and it wasn't a surprise to hear him queue up a review of The American because the movie was just released and that's how the media works.  What was a surprise was when he spoke this paragraph:

As in "Up in the Air," Jack does make a new friend, Clara, a prostitute played by the oxymoronically named Violante Placido. I wondered why she was so familiar, with her soft, open face and voluptuous body. It turns out she's the daughter of Simonetta Stefanelli, unforgettable as Michael Corleone's doomed Sicilian bride in "The Godfather."  [entire review]

I don't think the reviewers "borrowed" from each other.  Both David Edelstein and, especially, A.O. Scott are "made men" who don't have to struggle towards the top anymore.  Rather, i think that, just like when the lights are out, the room is "dark," if a character has the name Violante Placido, the name is oxymoronic.  Both reviewers noticed it and both called it out and neither could find a better word to describe it than oxymoronic. 

Interesting.

WSJ: Joyce and Carter and Maybe Even Pollack Are Too Smart.

Above, we see a picture of James Joyce and the person responsible for James Joyce being the literary legend we know today, Ms. Sylvia Beach of the bookstore / publisher, Shakespeare & Company in Paris, published Mr. Joyce and for that the world owes her an everlasting debt of gratitude.  But that isn't the point I want to make.

What brings me back to the blog is an article by Mr. Terry Teachout appearing in the June 26, 2010 issue of The Wall Street Journal.  Mr. Teachout, who I've bloged about before here, came across an academic paper that sparked an idea for Mr. Teachout's column about how Modern music, literature and other arts might be too complicated for us to understand.  Observe:

Are certain kinds of modern art too complex for anybody to understand? Fred Lerdahl thinks so, at least as far as his chosen art form is concerned. In 1988 Mr. Lerdahl, who teaches musical composition at Columbia University, published a paper called "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in which he argued that the hypercomplex music of atonal composers like Messrs. Boulez and Carter betrays "a huge gap between compositional system and cognized result." He distinguishes between pieces of modern music that are "complex" but intelligible and others that are excessively "complicated"—containing too many "non-redundant events per unit [of] time" for the brain to process. "Much contemporary music," he says, "pursues complicatedness as compensation for a lack of complexity."

"You have turned your back on common men, on their elementary needs and their restricted time and intelligence," H.G. Wells complained to Joyce after reading "Finnegans Wake." That didn't faze him. "The demand that I make of my reader," Joyce said, "is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works." To which the obvious retort is: Life's too short.

I've been thinking, a lot, about Modernism lately and I'm starting to put these ideas down on paper.  But for the time being, I want to write here that maybe it's still too soon to judge the lasting merits of Finnegans Wake or Eliot Carter.  Perhaps.  But part and parcel of that notion is that it's probably far too soon to summarily dismiss them.

Oh, and here's a link to the paper Mr. Teachout cites, Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems.

The Shame of Reading a Book in Public, According to the NYTimes.

I missed this trend altogether.  I didn't know there was social stigma attached to reading in public.  --Am I the last to receive the news? That's what I get for burying my nose between the covers.

I learned I was a social pariah when I was catching up on some of the bits I clip from the NYTimes.  This is what I found:

Debra Jaliman, a dermatologist in Manhattan, said that she believed technology like her iPad, which she uses to read everything from newspapers to novels, had helped banish social stigmas about reading alone in public.

“There may once have been a slight stigma about people reading alone, but I think that it no longer exists because of the advancement of our current technology,” she said. “We are in a high-tech era and the sleekness and portability of the iPad erases any negative notions or stigmas associated with reading alone.” [more]

It is a shame and a pity that taken more than half-a-century to learn this important lesson.  Given my reading habits, even, gasp, in public, it's a wonder I have any friends at all.

“I think, historically, there has been a stigma attached to the bookworm, and that actually came from the not-untrue notion that, if you were reading, you weren’t socializing with other people,” Dr. Levinson said. “But the e-reader changes that also because e-readers are intrinsically connected to bigger systems.” For many, e-readers are today’s must-have accessory, eroding old notions of what being bookish might have meant. “Buying literature has become cool again,” he said.

Buying literature has become cool again?  I bow to the gods of fashion.

NYTimes, 7.18.10: The Russian Immigrant’s Handbook

The New York Times continues its information, ad hoc serious on the dangers of the new information / internet age with an interview w/ Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story.  Observe: 

I don’t know how to read anymore. I can only read 20 or 30 words at a time before taking out my iPhone and caressing it and snuggling with it.

...Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it’s important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.  [more]

Sir Tom Leading t/ Charge Against Increase in Library Fees.

I'm a member of one of the oldest private libraries in United States, The Mechanics' Institute Library and Chess Club in San Francisco. Besides being a very nice library and an outstanding chess club, it's a terrific place to work and meet with people when I'm in San Francisco. 

I just discovered that Sir Tom Stoppard is president of The London Library, founded in 1841 and home to Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Tennyson, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Rebecca West and Isaiah Berlin.  

I can't find out how much the London Library charges for membership but, according to the story in the Telegraph, the rise in membership is set at thirteen percent.  

Now, I'm obsessed about getting back to London and spending a day at the library.  And if you aren't of the same mind, then I suggest you watch the video I've embedded below.  

The London Library from Jeremy Riggall on Vimeo.

Jakob Nielsen, t/ Smartest Guy in the Room, on eBook Usability.

Jakob Nielsen.  You're already familiar with him and his work because you've been paying attention to web design issues during the past ten years.  He's carved our a well-deserved reputation for knowing more about web design than anyone else.  Period.  

So, I was Very Excited when I discovered Mr. Nielsen turned his high beams onto the subject of eBooks because, as you know, dear reader, eBooks make my short list of interests / obsessions. 

Here's a link to Nielsen's report, and, below are some of the salient points:

(Love this...)  On each device, we asked each user to read a short story by Ernest Hemingway. We picked Hemingway because his work is pleasant and engaging to read, and yet not so complicated that it would be above the heads of users.  (Yes, that would be Hemingway, not too complicated.)  

The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle measured at 10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data's fairly high variability.  (Hooray for books!)

Most of the users' free-form comments were predictable. For example, they disliked that the iPad was so heavy and that the Kindle featured less-crisp gray-on-gray letters. People also disliked the lack of true pagination and preferred the way the iPad (actually, the iBook app) indicated the amount of text left in a chapter.

I didn't seen anything metric on trying to read in sunshine, which is where the Kindle is supposed to shine over the iPad, but it might appear in the full report on in the next report.

Godspeed, Mr. Nielsen.  Godspeed. 

WSJ: Libraries Have a Novel Idea. Ouch.

Today's WSJ has a too cute to bear headline:  Libraries Have a Novel Idea.  Once we get past that headline, we find a story about libraries lending out ebooks, an inevitable development. 

There are several bits in the story that make it very important and I think you should read the entire article but I'll tantalize you with a couple of hors d'oeuvres.  [entire story]

First, the estimable Brewster Kahle and his organization, Internet Archive, is behind a Big Chunk of the project. 

Second, here's a quote from the still ubiquitous Stewart Brand:  I figure libraries are one of the major pillars of civilization, and in almost every case what librarians want is what they should get.  Talk about Mom and apple pie!

Third, here's an overview of how it works:  To read the books, borrowers around the world can download and read them for free on computers or e-reading gadgets. Software renders the books inaccessible once the loan period ends. Two-thirds of American libraries offered e-book loans in 2009, according to a survey by the American Library Association. But those were mostly contemporary imprints from the last couple of years—say, the latest Stephen King novel.

And, finally, here's the part that knocks me over:  Only one person at a time will be allowed to check out a digital copy of an in-copyright book for two weeks. While on loan, the physical copy of the book won't be loaned, due to copyright restrictions.  So, there, in a nutshell, is why this particular instantiation of the idea will fail.  The implementation flies in the face of the potential of the technology.  Just to quote Stewart Brand from 1984, Information wants to be free.  And while I might quibble with the absoluteness of Mr. Brand's statement, I call it forth to help illustrate my point:  If one has an infinite (digital) copies of a book, then those copies are there to be used.  At other times, books were chained to the stacks.  That didn't work out so well and, I predict, the notion that one can't check out the physical copy of a book because the ebook version has been checked out -- this is crazy. 

Knowledge@Wharton, 5.26.10: Turn the Page: What's Next for Publishing?

Sometimes I think I belonged to a Secret Order because I once snuck through the very narrow gate and worked for a book publisher specializing in hardcover fiction.  It was a profession I diligently prepared for and hugely enjoyed ... before I kicked the traces and decided bigger game was afoot and I embarked on a continuing series of adventures with technology and newish media.  Bethatasitmay, I'm inspired to power up my browser and share with you something interesting that just dropped into my mailbox.

The new issue of the Wharton Review is online and in it there's special coverage of a conference Wharton hosted in NYC humbly headlined as The Future of Publishing.  Among other articles, ranging from SEO to search to newspapers, I spied an article on book publishing, my former haunt, Upended by eBooks: Is This the Last Chapter for the Book Business?  Lo and behold, Alberto Vitale, who once ran Random House and has funded the creation of Wharton's Lab for Innovation in Publishing, is quoted as saying, "For over [sic] 600 years, there was only one way to publish. Now we have an alternative to Gutenberg."   --While that isn't exactly a breakthrough in 2010, one must take encouragement where one can find it. 

Here's another extract from the article that should be closely parsed:

To some of the panelists and speakers, the current tumult foretells a return to other earlier models of book publishing. Epstein predicted that much of the sales and marketing infrastructure in the book business will prove superfluous, and that small groups of editors with expertise in specialized areas like trout fishing or Keats will coalesce and attract like-minded authors and readers to their websites.

According to Jim King, senior vice president of market tracker Nielsen, "lots of things that are happening now were happening in the 18th century. Book shops were publishers. Piracy was rampant. The new technology revolutionized content." And "the feedback loop was very quick. Samuel Johnson would finish an essay at 3 a.m. By 3 p.m., it was being discussed in the coffee shops."

Okay, so just as I get the feeling book publishers might be getting a grip on the 21stC, we tumble backwards into the 18th.  Let us pray.
 

TechCrunch, 5.24.10: Carol Bartz To Michael Arrington: “F*ck Off!”

Many people have said many things about high tech public relations, but no one ever said it's easy or without risk -- or reward.  Michael Arrington has been holding sway over the high tech journo pack for a couple of years now, coming out of no where and creating a lovely perch for himself.  Now, we be able to see the inflection point in high reign. 

Mike met up with Carol Bartz, CEO of Yahoo, at one of Mike's conferences. According to the transcript on Mike's site, Mike ran true to form.  

MA: So how the fuck are you?

And it went downhill from there.  But much to Bartz's credit, she was not cowed nor did she shirk from the opportunity to serve Mr. Arrington some of his own medicine. 

MA: Is your pitch kind of BS though?

CB: Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997 — the iPod came out 4 years later. 3 years after that is the first time his market cap grew. It took 7 years. I’ve been here a few months. Give me a break. You are involved in a very tiny company.

MA: Very tiny.

CB: It probably takes you a long time just to convince yourself what to do. So fuck off. 

I haven't administered the survey to my peers yet, but I'm fairly certain any number of PR folks are ready to greet Bartz with a high five.  

TechCrunch transcript here.

NYTimes, 4.19.10: Ex-Pat Paris as It Sizzled for One Literary Lioness

From today's NYTimes, a wonderful review of a new book, The Letters of Sylvia Beach.  Ms. Beach is the probably one of the most important figure in what we've come to call Modern Literature and, perhaps most famously, published James Joyce's Ulysses.  This was her "crowd"

Joyce, Stein, Pound Hemingway Fitzgerald and H.D. and many others. 

Beach was an unlikely champion of literary modernism. The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, she was the second of three daughters and grew up in Bridgeton and Princeton, N.J. She didn’t attend college but saw the world, working during World War I as a volunteer agricultural laborer in France and then as a Red Cross volunteer in Serbia. She was plucky. One letter home from Belgrade describes a springlike day ruined by the “bomby” air.

She was a bibliophile from an early age and debated opening a bookstore in New York or London. But in Paris she met and fell in love with a bookstore owner, Adrienne Monnier, who would become, Ms. Walsh writes in her introduction, “her lifelong personal and professional partner.” (This book’s dust jacket speaks of these women’s complicated “affair,” an odd phrase for a decades-long relationship. That phrase also goes farther than Beach does; she was reserved about her sexuality, and these letters are quite chaste.)

[more]

What You Should Have Read in this Sunday's NYTimes

Out of the Loop in Silicon Valley

Oh.  Someone noticed that women don't rise to the top in Silicon Valley.  My opinion is that this particular ... situation isn't restricted to the wonderland of Silicon Valley, but from sea to shining sea.  America has high expectations on our "new" culture and values.  That doesn't excuse us, but it doesn't let us off the hook either.

Another potential backer invited her for a weekend yachting excursion by showing her a picture of himself on the boat — without clothes. When a third financier discovered that her husband was also a biking enthusiast, she says, he spent more time asking if riding affected her husband’s reproductive capabilities than he did focusing on her business plan.

Ultimately, none of the 30 venture firms she pitched financed her company. She finally raised $1.8 million in March 2008 from angel investors including Golden Seeds, a fund that emphasizes investing in start-ups led by women.

[more]

Eve of Destruction

A book review by Michael Gross of Michael Lewis and Roger Lowenstiein take us backstage on Wall Street. So if you’re showing up late to this party, you had better come either with a strikingly original take that offers an enhanced understanding of the debacle or with an elegantly constructed narrative that covers the story from origins to bailout. Michael Lewis has done the former; Roger Lowenstein has done the latter.

[more] 

I've been following Mr. Lewis appearances in the media and he's perfectly perfect in his enthusiasm for the topics he covers.  It's reminds me of George Plimpton, the guy who knew he was the luckiest guy in the world because he wrote about everything that interested him. 

Indecision-Making

Book Review by Virginia Postrel

A congenial writer, Iyengar is less hard-edged and ideological than Schwartz and less glib than Malcolm Gladwell, who she says encouraged her to write this book. “The Art of Choosing” should appeal to fans of both writers. It’s full of the experimental results that make for good cocktail party chatter, but it offers fewer explicit lessons. Iyengar favors exploration over conclusions. “Isn’t this interesting?” she asks, rather than “Isn’t this awful?” or “Isn’t this useful?”

[more] 

This is very reminiscent of John Gardner's Grendel: Alternatives exclude.

Welcome to Confederate History Month

by Frank Rich

Most Americans who don’t like Obama or the health care bill are not racists. It may be a closer call among Tea Partiers, of whom only 1 percent are black, according to last week's much dissected Times/CBS News poll. That same survey found that 52 percent of Tea Party followers feel “too much” has been made of the problems facing black people — nearly twice the national average. And that’s just those who admit to it. Whatever their number, those who are threatened and enraged by the new Obama order are volatile. Conservative politicians are taking a walk on the wild side by coddling and encouraging them, whatever the short-term political gain.

[more]

Russia and Poland: A Blood Feud Rooted Deep in the Past

Russians who hoped for reconciliation saw reason for optimism. Alexey Vasilyev, deputy director of the Russian Institute for Cultural Research, went to Poland’s embassy. “This is a tragedy that can join us, that can unite our two countries,” he said. “All of us who love Poland and Russia’s friendship with Poland want this to happen.”

[more]

The Paris Review, 1988: The Interview w/ Mr. Stoppard

I can't imagine how I never came across this before, but I've discovered that The Paris Review did one of their "how-I-do-it" interviews with Mr. Stoppard.  This is from back in the Winter 1988 as Hapgood was about to be staged.  That's about six years after The Real Thing. 

From the interview:

As I was doing it I watched a documentary about Crick and Watson’s discovery of the structure of DNA—the double helix. There was only one way all the information they had could fit but they couldn’t figure out what it was. I felt the same. So the answer to your question is that the rehearsals are going well and enjoyably, but that I’m very busy with my pencil.

Here's a direct link to the .pdf 

Nina Bourne ע״ה

Today's New York Times includes Nina Bourne's obituary.  Ms. Bourne was one of the great, if not the greatest, book publicists of all time.  (I worked for Lois Shapiro @ Dutton, so I know what I'm talking about.)  Ms. Bourne brought to market the Eloise books, Catch - 22, and all of Robert Caro's books.  --Just that would be a career. 

She also taught at the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Program where I was blessed enough to enjoy conversation with her over a glass of sherry. 

From the obituary:

Initially employed as a secretary to Richard Simon, one of the company’s two founders, she demonstrated a flair for writing advertising copy under the tutelage of the legendary Jack Goodman, whose restrained, even self-deprecatory, style influenced her deeply. On the side she wrote light verse, which The New Yorker published from time to time.

Ms. Bourne, fresh out of Radcliffe, gained entree into book publishing by writing a letter of application to Simon & Schuster in the form of a poem that presented her qualifications while weaving in the names of the company’s top writers and book titles.

[more]

McKinsey: A glimmer of hope for newspapers (!)

The Internet is driving increased consumption of news, a survey shows, but newspapers can take heart in being the most trusted medium

I certainly didn't expect any good news from any where about newspapers.  But read this?

One finding does suggest a potential revenue opportunity: newspapers have an important inherent advantage as they face the challenges of the digital age—trust. Consumers trust newspapers more than any other medium, and 66 percent describe newspaper advertising as “informative and confidence inspiring,” compared with only 44 percent for TV and 12 percent for the Web (Exhibit 3). This suggests that newspapers have further scope to go beyond news, to drive reader interest and advertising revenues at the same time. Leading newspapers have already created specialized pages and sections in areas such as entertainment, eating out, travel, automobiles, shopping, real estate, and personal finance. The combination of editorial content, ads, and selected commercial offers—while clearly separated—benefits advertisers and is of practical use to readers.

[more]

What You Should Have Read in this Sunday's NYTimes.

Texts Without Context

Michiko Kakutani has written an amazing summary of how the internet has changed culture.  Highly recommended.

It’s not just a question of how these “content producers” are supposed to make a living or finance their endeavors, however, or why they ought to allow other people to pick apart their work and filch choice excerpts. Nor is it simply a question of experts and professionals being challenged by an increasingly democratized marketplace. It’s also a question, as Mr. Lanier, 49, astutely points out in his new book, “You Are Not a Gadget,” of how online collectivism, social networking and popular software designs are changing the way people think and process information, a question of what becomes of originality and imagination in a world that prizes “metaness” and regards the mash-up as “more important than the sources who were mashed.” [more]

W. Eugene Smith and the Jazz Loft Project

As the Book Review’s photography editor, I often choose pictures for the brief art feature that appears on the page with our Fiction or Nonfiction Chronicle. Usually it’s a pleasurable undertaking. As we prepared the issue of March 21, however, the necessity of choosing only one lone photograph to illustrate “The Jazz Loft Project” — Sam Stephenson’s account of the amazingly rich and original body of work accumulated by the photographer W. Eugene Smith between 1957 and 1965 — was somewhat difficult. [more]
 
And I can also recommend the radio series produced by the fabulous Sara Fishko and accompanies the book. [more]

Just Give Him 5 Sentences, Not ‘War and Peace’

My thinking was: I’m a natural leader, so I’m going to study what’s hard and mathematical like finance and operations research, not the touchy-feely stuff that would be easy.

When I finally got a management position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people. The warm, fuzzy stuff is hard. The quantitative stuff is easy — you either don’t do much of this as a manager or you have people working for you to do it.  [more]

Acid Test

Lattin’s book can be viewed partly as a prequel to Wolfe’s. By the time the Merry Pranksters took their show on the road, the West Coast’s anarchic aggression had pretty much rolled over what the relatively disciplined East Coasters had tried to bottle, label and dispense with care. After Harvard, Leary and Alpert had decamped to an estate in Millbrook, N.Y., continuing their efforts to tap into higher consciousness in a controlled setting. When Ken Kesey’s Pranksters showed up, as Wolfe tells it, they encountered “one big piece of uptight constipation.” [more]

' The Whore’s Secret

 Some stories need to be told in a whisper. “Blooms of Darkness,” the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld’s majestic and humane new novel, takes place in an unnamed Ukrainian city during World War II. As the Germans begin liquidating the city’s Jewish population, Julia, a pharmacist whose husband has already been sent to a labor camp, smuggles her 11-year-old son, Hugo, out of the ghetto. Their journey through the sewer pipes leads them to a house on the outskirts of town, where Julia entrusts Hugo to the care of an old friend, Mariana, before taking flight herself. Mariana, as Hugo will discover, is a prostitute, while the house — known simply as “the Residence” — is a brothel catering to the Nazi occupiers. [more]  A million years ago, when I worked for the fabulous Lois Shapiro, זיכרונה לברכה  I did some work on Appelfeld's book, Tzili: The Story of a Life.  

Dostoyevsky and Me

At the conference, they all meet up with Babel’s disgruntled 74-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Nathalie, whose voice is “fathomless, sepulchral, with heavy French r’s.” “I cannot hear, I cannot see, I cannot walk,” Nathalie complains, adding darkly, “Everyone thinks I am always drunk.” Later, taking the micro­phone at a panel on biography, Nathalie announces, “I am confused.” And again: “I am confused.” At the panel’s concluding dinner, she rails, “Is it true that you despise me?” Sotto voce (one hopes), a dinner guest remarks to the conference’s organizer, “I hear that Slavic department enrollments are declining in the United States.” “Oh, do you?” the organizer responds. “Well, you’re probably right.”  [more]

Prison, Day 1

“O'K., are you ready?” I nodded. “Well, say goodbye. It could be a while until he can visit.” She took a symbolic step away from us, I guess to give us privacy. I hurled myself into Larry’s arms, holding on as tight as I could. I had no idea when I would see him again, or what would happen to me in the next 15 months.  [more]

The Optimist’s Blogger

Curbed’s open derision can certainly infuriate the city’s developers and brokers. But none of them will say an unkind word about Steele. In part that’s surely because he wields a certain amount of power: after what you just read, would you buy a unit in Palazzo Grey? But it’s also because Curbed appeals to so many audiences: real-estate daydreamers; neighborhood residents who mourn the loss of local news in other venues; and industry professionals for whom Curbed is essential reading and, for top brokerages like Corcoran, Stribling and Prudential Douglas Elliman, an advertising venue. Above all, Curbed has become a buyer’s tip sheet.  [more]

Rethinking Sex Offender Laws for Youth Texting

In most states, teenagers who send or receive sexually explicit photographs by cellphone or computer — known as “sexting” — have risked felony child pornography charges and being listed on a sex offender registry for decades to come.  But there is growing consensus among lawyers and legislators that the child pornography laws are too blunt an instrument to deal with an adolescent cyberculture in which all kinds of sexual pictures circulate on sites like MySpace and Facebook. [more]

Good News?

From today's NYTimes, this headline caught my eye:  Most Online News Readers use 5 Sites or Fewer, Study Says.   The story is a brief report on a new Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism. 

This paragraph interested me: 

In the Pew survey, just 7 percent of people said they would be willing to pay for access to any news site. And even among the people who are most loyal to a single site, only 19 percent said they would pay, rather than seek free news somewhere else.

I'm interested in the idea about the proposition of asking people whether they're willing to pay for something they're getting for free.  But the other thing that interested me was something that didn't appear in the online version of the story: 

But 57 percent of the audience relies on just two to five sites.  The findings parallel studies that say that people with hundreds of television channels tend to stick to a relative handful.

This is a  link to the Pew Study.   

There are a lot of different angles on this story that interest me.

People with hundreds of television channels tend to watch only a handful, which riles me because I can't buy my Comcast al a carte.  

How does the USA compare to the UK where some people read three or more newspapers a day.

Isn't is a good thing that people are getting news from more different sources.  When I think about myself, an how I have such a limited news diet of just the the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.   (Okay, and more than a few blog, lots of radio, and just a few television shows.

What you should have read this weekend in the NYTimes / WSJ....

    

Depression’s Upside

...The bleakness of this thought process helps explain why, according to the Yale psychologist Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, people with “ruminative tendencies” are more likely to become depressed. They’re also more likely to become unnerved by stressful events: for instance, Nolen-Hoeksema found that residents of San Francisco who self-identified as ruminators showed significantly more depressive symptoms after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. And then there are the cognitive deficits. Because rumination hijacks the stream of consciousness — we become exquisitely attentive to our pain — numerous studies have found that depressed subjects struggle to think about anything else, just like Wallace’s character. The end result is poor performance on tests for memory and executive function, especially when the task involves lots of information. (These deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise.) Such research has reinforced the view that rumination is a useless kind of pessimism, a perfect waste of mental energy.  [more]

On Language:  Webinar
Lewis Carroll famously called blends like Webinar “portmanteau” words because they’re two words packed into one. (A portmanteau was essentially a suitcase with two compartments folded together.) Carroll made up several such words for his poem “Jabberwocky” (1871), including chortle (chuckle + snort) and galumph (gallop + triumph). Chortle has stayed with us, while galumph appears to have gone the way of gyre and gimble. Why? Because chortle is so handy and so onomatopoeically evocative (think of the laugh of a portly chum). [more]    

Justice Dept. Reveals More Missing E-Mail Files

...But it discovered that many e-mail messages to and from John C. Yoo, who wrote the bulk of the legal opinions for the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, were missing. The office disclosed the missing messages in a footnote to its final report, which was released last week.

“We were told that most of Yoo’s e-mail records had been deleted and were not recoverable,” officials from the Office of Professional Responsibility said in the footnote.   ....  [more]  (I've mentioned this before, but I believe it bears mentioning again:  Is this how you would set up the email system for the Justice Dept.?)

Why Psychiatry Needs Therapy

So in DSM-III there was a lot of horse-trading. The biologically oriented young Turks got a depression diagnosis—major depression—that was divorced from what they considered the psychoanalytic mumbo-jumbo. And the waning but still substantial number of analysts got a diagnosis—dysthymia—that sounded like their beloved "neurotic depression," that had been the mainstay of psychoanalytic practice. Psychiatry ended up with two brand-new depression diagnoses with criteria so broad that huge numbers of people could qualify for them. [more]

'529' Plans: Why So Many Flunk Out

...Inherently, saving for college is challenging because we only have a fixed number of years before the bill is due. So no matter how disciplined we are, timing and luck will play a big role. But that often is ignored by investment firms and state and federal policy makers, who have pushed 529 plans as the answer to soaring tuition costs.[more] (My new college savings plan is my life insurance.)

Rogers Quits White House Post

... A senior administration official said Friday that Democratic fundraiser Julianna Smoot, a veteran campaign operative who helped Mr. Obama build a grassroots contributions juggernaut, was the leading contender to succeed Ms. Rogers.

Ms. Rogers's job was to work with First Lady Michelle Obama and the East Wing staff to organize every social event at the White House, including state dinners and birthday parties. [more]

(Frankly, I knew she was doomed from the time I saw this picture in November 09 Vanity Fair magazine and learned that Ms. Rogers has two Hermes notebooks, each one worth more than my car. That level of conspicuous consumption in the White House, or any public post won't be tolerated.)

London Sips a Different Cup

The championship made Mr. Davies something of a cult figure, and he’s using that notoriety to champion other accomplished baristas around town by offering the mischievously named Dis-loyalty Card: get coffee at eight different establishments he admires, and he’ll make the ninth drink for free at his nameless pushcart at the Whitecross Street Market (whitecrossstreet.co.uk). [more]

Hey, Waiter! Just How Much Extra Do You Really Expect?

... Yes, I know you’re all underpaid. But guess what? So am I. When I get $500 for an article that I think is worth $1,000, you won’t see me e-mail the editor, saying, “Just so you know, service isn’t included.” Do I ask you to come into my workplace and supplement my meager income? No, I don’t. [more]

The Free-Appropriation Writer

Maybe that’s one reason for the flurry of attention recently about a teenage German novelist, Helene Hegemann, whose book about Berlin’s club scene was named a finalist for a prestigious literary prize to be awarded next month in Leipzig. After a blogger and fellow novelist announced that Ms. Hegemann had blended sizeable chunks of his own writing into hers, Ms. Hegemann, instead of following the plagiarism-gotcha script of contrition and retraction so familiar in recent years, announced that appropriating the passages from that book and other sources was her plan all along. [more]

Redrawing the Route to Online Privacy

Rules would mean new regulations. And Congress and the Federal Trade Commission are looking at further rules that could limit how personal information is used. For example, the government might ban the use of recorded trails of a person’s Web-browsing behavior — so-called click streams — in employment or health insurance decisions. [more]

T/Economist: A giant sucking sound

The Economist is a must-read for anyone successfully braille-ing the zeitgeist and here's an excellent story from its November 7th issue about the $9.4 billion on-line segment of the $55 billion video game industry growing larger and larger and larger and...

Here's a link to the story. And you have to love the headline.