The multipurpose staircase in the Panorama House. Continue reading You Can't Do This With Digital Books
Popular Science Shuts Off Commenters
Popsci.com, the site of Popular Science magazine, is shutting off comments, because “even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader’s perception of a story, recent research suggests.”
Though most Popsci.com commenters were great, the salt of the earth, spambots and trolls were present as well, and, darn it, this Interweb thing is too unruly to govern with, like, technology.
The Popsci.com editors grieve, “A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again.”
A war on expertise is being waged by spambots?
Extinction soon
Photo credit: Raysonho.
Over at the American Spectator (which seems to have rejected my last submission, but hey, I’m not bitter) Matthew Walther writes about his recent experience at the American Library Association convention in Chicago, where he particularly wanted to talk to people about the increasing trend of libraries dumping perfectly good books because electronic versions are now available.
WHICH REMINDS ME: At this gathering of a few thousand librarians, teachers, writers, publishing types, I saw surprisingly little evidence of reading taking place. With two or three exceptions—elderly women whose badges told me that they are librarians from Indiana—the only printed text I saw anyone interact with was the 308-page full-color conference guide. This also brings me to why I was there. I was trying, am in fact still trying, to understand why, with little or no visible resistance or even comment from patrons, library friends’ societies (local charities that raise funds for libraries and organize things like book signings and reading groups), school boards, members of university faculties, elected officials at the local, state, and federal government level—to say nothing of the national press—thousands of public and academic libraries across the country are all but throwing away millions of books, many of them rare, expensive, or both. Three years ago the Engineering Library at Stanford University was home to more than 80,000 volumes; it now houses fewer than 10,000….
The American Library Association is an organization which looms large in my consciousness these days. Everyone in my Library and Information Sciences class talks about it in terms of “us,” though I have no plans or need ever to join, and it’s not a requirement for the program. Mr. Walther makes no comment on the reflexive progressivism which I perceive in it, based on classroom discussions. His concern is simply to question whether libraries without physical books can really be considered libraries at all (I read the other day that a library in Texas has gone precisely that route). He seems a little Luddite about the Kindle, but at least he gave his a fair try. My own devotion to paper and ink survived my first experience by about 20 seconds. (That’s not to say I want to jettison my own personal books, whose name is Legion, or those I husband at work.)
I spoke with a former academic librarian yesterday, and his opinion was more pessimistic even than Walther’s. Once the digitizers solve the problem of copyright for more recent works (he said) libraries will simply cease to exist. They will go away. They will be made redundant. He’s studying Theology now, in order to teach that for a living.
I don’t know if he’s right. I do think the academic library will survive for a while, if only because accreditation agencies love to set requirements for collection size.
My friend suggested that I join The Association of Christian Librarians, instead of the ALA. I heeded his counsel.
I’m pretty sure I’ll need the support. I’m beginning to think I’m working very hard to prepare for the equivalent of a managership at a Barnes & Noble store.
Flannery O'Connor Wanted Proper Pay for Her Writing
The Billfold has a brief piece on Flannery O’Connor’s insistence on being paid well.
“I do believe that she was quite savvy about the business side of being a writer, and she understood the difference between art and commerce,” says Craig Amason, the executive director of The Flannery O’Connor-Andalusia Foundation.
Take your colon out to lunch
Today, according to this web site, is National Punctuation Day.
I think I’m pretty good at punctuation, generally. The problem comes with differing styles. For years I eschewed the Oxford Comma, because somebody back in elementary school told me you should never add a comma before the conjunction, as in “I had lunch with Gary, Eric and Denny.” It was only fairly recently that I learned there was any controversy. I learned this while acting as editor of the Journal of the Georg Sverdrup Society. I found out that we follow the Chicago Manual of Style, which mandates the Oxford Comma (“I had lunch with Gary, Eric, and Denny”). The Associated Press is against us, but we don’t follow them. So I learned to love it. Now I can’t imagine doing without it. And that’s good, because we use the APA Manual in graduate school, and they’re Oxfordian as well.
I keep wondering how the American Psychological Association’s style book came to dominate graduate school documentation.
The only other punctuation problem I can think of that I personally struggle with is the way Microsoft Word automatically clumps the three periods in an ellipsis together, turning them into a single, compact idiogram. Which we then have to unclump over at the Sverdrup Journal, because we want our periods separate but equal. I don’t know why. I just do it.
Happy Punctuation Day. Period.
50 Contemporary Writers of Faith
The Image Top 50 Contemporary Writers of Faith, expanded from the original 25, is a great reading list for living (or recently deceased) authors who deal with faith in their works. These are reader-recommended authors of “contemporary literature that grapple with the age-old religious questions of our Western tradition.”
48 hours, by J. Jackson Bentley
Is there a category called a popcorn novel? Because that’s what I’d call 48 Hours by J. Jackson Bentley. An interesting plot, engaging characters, and the occasional hint of conservatism. Can’t complain about that. If the technicalities aren’t always perfect, I can hardly grouse. I was satisfactorily entertained.
Josh Hammond is an insurance adjustor in the City of London. He’s not a magnate of any kind, but he’s managed to put away money almost no one knows about. So he’s surprised in more ways than one when he gets a text message from a blackmailer (the book keeps calling it blackmail, but in this case it looks more like extortion to me) telling him to pay up pretty close to all he’s worth, or he’ll be murdered.
Josh goes to his boss for advice, and his boss retains a security company to protect him. This involves a bodyguard, who turns out to be a beautiful woman named Dee, well-suited for Josh to fall in love with. The police are called in. The blackmailer is smarter than they are, and then they are smarter than the blackmailer, and it goes back in forth in a well-matched battle of wits with the occasional spice of a fist- or gunfight.
I was particularly pleased with the social attitudes of this book. Although sex outside of marriage is taken for granted, pretty much a given in our time, I guess, businessmen are treated sympathetically, and the villain is both a Labor politician and a former trade unionist.
There are weaknesses in the writing, but I’ve seen a lot worse. The author doesn’t know what “enormity” means (of course no one else does these days either), and messes up on the choice between “I” and “me” at one point. There’s the occasional redundancy (we don’t need to be informed twice of the heroine’s height). In an odd orthography choice, quotations are set in the American style (single quotation marks inside double quotation marks) but the marks are left off the beginnings of new paragraphs inside speeches.
But 48 Hours was fun. And it’s free for Kindle, at least at the time of this review. Recommended.
When Harriet Beecher Stowe Dropped Calvinism
Barry Waugh describes what the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin thought about God and the historic religion of her region and how she came to believe “the common man must no longer accept the monarchical rule of God; there is neither a king in New England nor one in heaven.”
Nature Meditation: Crickets
Here’s a recording of crickets, played in two tracks. One track is normal; the second is slowed. The beautiful result makes a good meditation on God’s creative genius. (via Jeffrey Overstreet/Facebook)
"Be less authentic, if you don't mind."
Today, as I was brewing the green tea I generally drink at lunch, my thoughts wandered to Sir Thomas Lipton the tea magnate (although I was drinking a different brand). I remembered something that irritated me long, long ago, and I still remember it well enough to vent about it now.
In the early 20th Century, Thomas Lipton was among the most famous people in the world. He was one of the original “self-made men,” a Scotsman who spent time in America and learned American business ideas, which he put into practice in building a grocery empire in Great Britain. Then he shifted to the tea business, with even more success.
He was a prominent philanthropist and sportsman, and it was as a sportsman that he became a true celebrity. He loved yacht racing, and made repeated, expensive attempts to win the America’s Cup, failing each time. But his sunny good sportsmanship won him the affection of the American public, which did his tea sales no harm at all.
I wish I could remember the book or article about Lipton that got my dander up. I was pretty young at the time. I have the idea it was a biographical book I read a review of, but I can’t find the book listed anywhere. Maybe it was an article in Smithsonian or something. Continue reading "Be less authentic, if you don't mind."