Fiction of my imagination

I'd written some notes on reading non-fiction vs. fiction, but after reading through them I realized that a) I'd covered that ground before and b) I didn't really agree with what I'd just written. Because of that I decided to just include a memory of high school English class, and some comments on reading books on science. I don't really have time for more right now.

I recall my high school English teacher, Father Naumann, explaining to us that one of the criticisms of Dickens is that he 'sacrifices art for pamphleteering', but regardless of how faithfully I copied it down in my notes, and preserved it in my brain, at the time, it's not something I fully agree with now (at least, I wouldn't apply it universally to all writers). Novels are a subjective expression of the human experience, whether some well-known historical event or an aspect of life that is universally known but individually experienced, such as love, death, growth, that sort of thing. Poverty is part of the human experience, and part of the power of the novelist is to take that and personalize it by, instead of describing the horrors of poverty, simply showing them. Maybe Father Naumann's criticism was that Dickens was doing quite enough by showing us the poverty of Victorian London, and didn't need to harangue his readers with essays about injustice at the same time. Which, to be honest, I don't recall his doing. It's been a long time since I've read a Dickens novel. And Father Naumann did once also say that my high was home to 'boys and other idiots' so maybe everything he said should be taken with a grain of salt. Regardless, my point is that a novel can have a political perspective without necessarily weakening itself, and a good political rant can be an effective literary device if put into the mouths of a character and not the narrator. Unless the narrator is a character and not outside of the story, in which case it's much more involved. But this is neither the time nor the place for a discussion of the profoundly influential field of narratology.

I should probably clarify that what I said above about non-fiction doesn't apply to books on science, or scientific study in general. Reading about politics and history is essentially looking at words written by humans about what other humans have done. Reading about science is looking at words written by humans about the natural world that we have to deal with every day, regardless of our intellectual inclinations, so I differentiate it as people writing about things instead of people writing about people. I think fiction writers with a knowledge of science have the option to add an extra dimension to their work (and not just in science fiction), which I don't think I'd ever fully considered before. This is something I've been reflecting on since discovering Simon Mawer's essay on Science and Literature, providing me with a delightful and convenient bridge between my recent science kick and my love for the experience of reading good fiction. It included this line:

As an undergraduate I heard the Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen start a lecture course on animal behaviour with the words, “Some people try to extrapolate from our studies to human behaviour but if you wish to learn about the behaviour of man don’t ask the ethologist; turn rather to the great writers. Read Dostoevsky, read Tolstoy.”

Books and life

After a couple of weeks off, and more than a month of nothing more substantive than just posting amusing quotes, I'm starting to get back into the blog game. (Is there a blog game? Doesn't like like it'd be much fun). I've had a lot of literarish thoughts on my mind lately, and had an interesting conversation with J. over some Guinness & Kilkenny last night, so as long work does not demand too much of me today, I'll try to get down some thoughts on what I've been reading and watching lately, including Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Bill Bryson's A short history of nearly everything, Simon Mawer's The glass room, Carl Sagan's Cosmos, as well as articles and interviews on and with the likes of Hemingway and Roth and Bolano. Some superb books, and various life changes taking place around me as well, are providing me with plenty of fodder for the amateurish philosophical reflection which I enjoy so much, and it's a shame to let it all waste away in my brain instead of sharing it with my readership (note that by adding '-ship' to the word 'reader' it makes it sound like more than one person reads this blog).

You might also like to note the new additions to my links section. I just discovered the love german books blog today, and it looks like it might become a part of my daily blog rounds. Maybe I should create my own called love Czech books - tough this site seems to be doing a good enough job.

Douglas Adams, talking about the internet in 1999:

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle, printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Source: http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html

When JFK visited Berlin he was mocked a bit by Germans for saying "Ich bin ein Berliner," which is apparently some kind of a jelly doughnut. Of course to an English speaker this sounds fine. It just occurred to me how funny it would have been had he given the same speech in Vienna, where he'd have said, "Ich bin ein Wiener."

Quote of today

Much unhappiness has come into the world because of bewilderment and things left unsaid.
- Fyodor Dostoevsky

More on libraries

...and why some places are better at providing public services than others. As usual, no comment because it's late and I'm tired.

http://www.thestar.com/article/698252

Quote of the day

All things are subject to interpretation - whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

To be followed by a quote from Monty Python:

It's all very well to laugh at the military, but when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself. And without the ability to defend one's own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could, quite simply, disappear! That is why we'll always need an army, and may God strike me down were it to be otherwise.
- from The Meaning of Life (of course, lightning strikes him down as he finishes the last sentence)

Phoenix envy

In the 'cities are broke' category, I learned about (via cryptogon) serious budget problems in Phoenix, which is forced to cut 10's of millions of dollars from its budget. This article doesn't give any details specific to library cuts, but based on what other city agencies are losing, I'm sure it won't be pleasant.

This is also the first article for which I'm finally adding tags. I don't know why I never bothered to before. Probably because 2 people read this blog. Anyway, maybe I'll go back and add them to some older articles as well.

Information-rich and attention-poor

I don't feel like commenting on this article right now because it's Sunday morning and I want to get outside, but it's a really well-written summary of how information-gathering is changing us and the idea of 'knowledge'. This is one of the most interesting parts of being a librarian - thinking about issues like this. Unfortunately, all I tend to see are calls for understanding or adapting, rather than actual suggestions on how to do so, but still, I thought it was worth sharing. I'm starting to think it might be worth having a whole blog just dedicated to posting articles, with the occasional commentary, on such issues.

Some highlights (the italics are mine):

Knowledge is evolving from a “stock” to a “flow.”...A stock of knowledge may be thought of as a quasi-permanent repository – such as a book or an entire library – whereas the flow is the process of developing the knowledge...Obviously, a stock of knowledge is rarely permanent; it depreciates like any other form of capital. But electronic information technology is profoundly changing the rate of depreciation....Knowledge is becoming more like a river than a lake, more and more dominated by the flow than by the stock.
.....
Consequently, there is little time to think and reflect as the flow moves on. This has a subtle and pernicious implication for the production of knowledge. When the effective shelf-life of a document (or any information product) shrinks, fewer resources will be invested in its creation. This is because the period during which the product is likely to be read or referred to is too short to repay a large allocation of scarce time and skill in its production. As a result, the “market” for depth is narrowing.
.....
There is also under way a shift of intellectual authority from producers of depth – the traditional “expert” – to the broader public.
.....
What makes the mobilization of “crowd wisdom” intellectually powerful is that the technology of the Web makes it so easy for even amateurs to access a growing fraction of the corpus of human knowledge...the traditional experts – professors, journalists, authors and filmmakers – need to be compensated for their effort, since expertise is what they have to sell. Unfortunately for them, this has become a much harder sell because the ethic of “free” rules the economics of so much Web content. Moreover, the value of traditional expert authority is itself being diluted by the new incentive structure created by information technology that militates against what is deep and nuanced in favour of what is fast and stripped-down.
.....
The result is the growing disintermediation of experts and gatekeepers of virtually all kinds. The irony is that experts have been the source of most of the nuggets of knowledge that the crowd now draws upon in rather parasitic fashion – for example, news and political bloggers depend heavily on a relatively small number of sources of professional journalism, just as many Wikipedia articles assimilate prior scholarship. The system works because it is able to mine intellectual capital. This suggests that today's “cult of the amateur” will ultimately be self-limiting and will require continuous fresh infusions of more traditional forms of expert knowledge.
.....
Far better, one might argue, to access efficiently what you need, when you need it. This depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.
.....
For now, the just-in-time approach seems to be narrowing peripheral intellectual vision and thus reducing the serendipity that has been the source of most radical innovation. What is apparently being eroded is the deep, integrative mode of knowledge generation that can come only from the “10,000 hours” of individual intellectual focus – a process that mysteriously gives rise to the insights that occur, often quite suddenly, to the well-prepared mind.

There's not always money in Philadelphia

I learned of the inevitability of the closing of Philadelphia's libraries on October 2 via a library listerv I subscribe to, and after looking into it very briefly I realized the problem goes well beyond just libraries. Serious cuts to fire and police services, not to mention garbage pickup and daycare (after living through this for 6 weeks here, I can only imagine if it became permanent - even though these are just cuts and not a total cancellation).

I was drawn to the story because it relates to libraries, which I think are an essential and fundamental part of any city - they serve as active cultural centres and also repositories of a community or society's cultural memories. They also often act as a key gateway to information for many people, from books & CDs to internet service. However, it's clear that the city of Philadelphia has problems beyond just access to information, and when you're cutting police and fire, I can understand that it's hard to justify keeping libraries open. I don't know enough yet about the details of the situation, so I don't have any real commentary or insight to offer, but it is a shame that any city would reach the point of cuts to so many essential services. It is frightening to think how much the loss of these services will hurt the quality of life for the people of the city. I wonder how widespread this sort of situation is across the United States.

For the record, here is a more or less complete list of what's being cut.

SA pigeon 'faster than broadband'

After reading this article, I have just decided on a new and improved way to transfer my information. I can't afford to wait for my broadband connection to download data and information, especially not when there are so many unemployed pigeons in the world. I wonder if Winston has any relatives?

Quote of the day

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.

- Albert Camus

Open Book Alliance

I’ve recently signed up to receive updates from the Open Book Alliance, which is basically a consortium of libraries, companies and authors’ organizations opposed to Google’s possible dominance of book digitization. On their site they had a pdf of a presentation given that illustrates some of the more glaring scanning and metadata errors that have appeared so far in Google’s massive scanning project. Some of them are absolutely incredible, and in my opinion strong evidence of why we can’t rely on a private company and unskilled scanners – instead of librarians – to digitize and classify millions of books. And while I am a fan of the many of the products Google produces or has bought, and the convient integration of multiple platforms, I'm starting to become wary of doing so, especially as my information sharing is increasingly being stored on and filtered through Google servers.

Anyway, here's the presentation. It's worth checking out:
http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~nunberg/GBook/GoogBookMetadataSh.pdf

On writing - quote

Anyone who cannot come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate... but with his other hand he can note down what he sees among the ruins.
- Franz Kafka

'Tis no man, 'tis a remoreseless reading machine

I’m reading Moby Dick right now, and I'm about 190 pages in. It was clearly a mistake to start such a heavy book so soon before my wedding, as all the planning and discussions have left my little time for reading. Also, it’s a hard book to get into with periodic short fits of reading 5-10 pages at a time - the language is too rich and the ideas too integral to the narrative to be able to dip in and out frequently without missing a lot.

I do have complaints about the book – like how Melville periodically diverts from the story to give essays of moderate interest and (to this point, at least) minimal relevance to the action – but overall I’m enjoying it, and it offers plenty to think about, from its almost poetic language and descriptions to the religious references and themes. In short, there are plenty of interesting aspects worth writing about but, as usual, time limits me to just a short comment, which is what this post will be.

So for now, I'll just point out this quote I liked, from the end of chapter 44 (they’re short chapters), obviously. It’s about Captain Ahab’s madness while lying in his cabin, and his internal torment in pursuit of Moby Dick. The Prometheus reference makes it clear what Melville's going for here, but since this passage describes Ahab’s torments as internal and self-created, to me it felt similar to an obsessive author creating a character that drives him insane.

Therefore, the tormented spirit that glared out of bodily eyes, when what seemed Ahab rushed from his room, was for the time but a vacated thing, a formless somnambulistic being, a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself. God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart for ever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

Aleksandar Hemon

I was just reading this interview with Aleksandar Hemon, a Bosnian immigrant to the US and one of my favourite current writers. I'm biased towards the Eastern European experience, but there's something about his style I really find appealing. I've requested his latest book of short stories from the library, which should be available soon. I can't wait. Anyway, I just thought it was worth sharing this excerpt from the interview, as a taste of why I like his writing.

Hemon unwraps a piece of candy, sucking pensively as he begins a story. As a young Bosnian journalist, he interviewed Benazir Bhutto when she was prime minister of Pakistan. He tells how she went to visit her father, once prime minister himself and now in solitary confinement. She asked her father how he could endure long days in prison, waiting for his eventual execution. "And he said that he would pick a day from his life, and try to remember it in its entirety. One day. It's an incredible project, really."

Now Hemon the philosopher, no longer the slightly bored interview subject, is caught in this thought, staring at the candy wrapper. "Because, do you know what you did on 6 October last year? You can pinpoint existence, you can possibly look at your credit card and may notice you were somewhere. But how about a memory of walking down the street and seeing the sunlight hit at a certain angle?

"Memory is re-creation. Do you know what I mean?... The trick is to tell the truth about human life while lying."

Multitasking Muddles Brains, Even When the Computer Is Off

I think this article could have been personally addressed to me. I notice exactly this problem, even when I'm not at work or on the computer. I really struggle to block out everything but the one task I'm working on. This makes it difficult to concentrate on anything, from doing the dishes to reading a book. I've always had a fairly short attention span but I have noticed it getting worse as I spend my working day doing several things at once. And the fact that I caught myself looking at the 'Most Recent Entries' on the page while reading this article not only drove the point home, but made me realize that it's largely not my fault. Any kind of article or news page will be surrounded by links and graphics that distract you from the article you're trying to focus on, so even if you are trying to do/read one thing at a time, the way web pages are designed makes it damn near impossible.

Anyway, it's good to know I'm not the only one losing my attention span. And now I'm inspired to- has anyone noticed that building there before?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/multitasking

Whachya readin' for?

Time for your Friday-morning digital book fix. I really think this struggle for control is one of the fundamental issues surrounding e-books, since this is probably where a lot of people will start getting their books from, once e-readers get their iPod equivalent. Issues of privacy & content control are huge, and because of the role books play in distributing ideas and information, they affect book publishing in ways other industries - including music - don't have to deal with as much. These issues are too important to be left to the control of private companies, much less one private company (Google).

Maybe an alternative model would be just the digital equivalent of the way libraries work now - Google, Amazon, etc, 'publish' e-books and do what it is they want to do, but then individual libraries or library systems can purchase access to, or subscribe to, whichever books or whichever database they want. There are endless possibilities as to how it could be done. This way, as a 'reader' I can download my books from Toronto Public Library, in the same way I physically pick them up now, but it's TPL who will have the record of what books I, the individual, the consumer, the patron (however you choose to classify the person) have been reading. They have this information now, but are pretty responsible with destroying it, so it's nothing new that a library would be able to keep track of what its patrons are reading. Judging by the ALA's passionate response to the US PATRIOT Act, librarians take privacy issues pretty seriously, and I'd certainly trust a public library with my reading records more than a private company.

Regardless, it's interesting to see what the Open Content Alliance has to say about the issue.

Anyway, here's the article that got this all started:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8200624.stm

More on books

I've just started reading Umberto Eco's On literature. I managed to get through about 5 pages last night before it was time to make dinner, but so far it's pretty compelling stuff. He's talking about the importance of literature and language, not just as hobbies but as serious cultural elements, and Eco has been pretty interested in technology and its role in literature for a while, so I'm curious to see what he'll have to say about that later on. I guess I'll have to wait until I've read a little more until I can comment further

Oh, and in case anyone's thinking it I'm aware of the irony of using a google-owned blog to criticize it for its monopolistic control on the spread of information, so please don't bother pointing it out.

A waste of language

My boss is starting up a new monthly or (I hope) quarterly newsletter, to inform the office of the goings on in the library. She's not quite sure what the contents of this newsletter will be, but she does want me to contribute a 300-500 word article on something interesting about the library, some reference tips, or maybe a 'Did you know?' column. I've spent the past hour looking through old reference questions and answers, thinking about what I've done here that's worth sharing, and I've come to the unsurprising conclusion that what I do isn't interesting enough to write about. Of course, I can come up with something to write about, but there is nothing I care about enough to share it in written form - at least, unlike this particular post, nothing positive.

I do write fairly regularly on this blog so I obviously am not opposed to writing and I do have things on my mind that I think are worth putting into words. But to receive an assignment to write something, and to have to come up with a topic yourself, within the confines of a job that you don't particularly care for, is a frustrating exercise to say the least. Whichever words I do end up throwing together to take up space on the page aren't going to be interesting to read because they won't be interesting to write. I do my job and that's fine, but I can't force myself to care enough to articulate, much less encourage amongst others, an interest in what it is I do here. I take words and language seriously, because they can be used in unique and interesting ways to express thoughts or create images with a precision that can be surprising. There's a beauty to language, whether it's using your native tongue to express a thought in a new way, or just learning how to say something simple in a foreign language. It can also be simply practical, and improve our lives by allowing us to communicate important information to another person. The way I see it, like the title says, writing for such a newsletter, which I'll ultimately have to do and is neither practical nor beautiful, is just a waste of language.

But at least I got a blog post out of it.

Lobster?

This was an ad I jjust saw in my gmail. I know google scans the contents of your emails to send you targeted ads that you might be more interested in, so I'm really wondering - what triggered this one?

#1 Live Lobster in GTA - http://www.maritimelobster.ca/ - Free Delivery, Wholesale, Retail $7.95 lb, pickup at store, Fresh