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The Case for Books

Uh-oh, look at that cover. It’s a meta-book, about books, and the title promises to make an argument for why they are important in the present age. Judging a book by it’s cover, I’d say we are going to talk about books that are plugged in - based on the white cords, perhaps an Apple Tablet, [...]

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Asides

• Confused about what happens now with the GBS settlement?  There's a reason for that. by rachel #
• a problem with hypertext as a media is that pieces of it tend to disappear. linear documents may disappear but by in large, when present, they remain whole. this is a problem for libraries and for commercial publishers. for content creators and consumers, is it a boon? by caleb #
• I usually only post about American Libraries, the magazine of the American Library Association, if I am going to make fun of it. The November 2009 issue has great columns by Joe Janes and Kate Sheehan, but however, also an interview with David Weinberger. I just may love to hate this guy, but he reads a lot of interesting stuff and talks about it, so I was intrigued by his comment that "Andy Clark points [out] in a book called Being There ... that our species externalizes consciousness. Take away a physicist's whiteboard, and she can't do her work." He is also referencing Marshall McLuhan and stating that the web has brought "epochal change". I immediately related to the quip about externalizing consciousness because I use writing (e.g.) to help organize my thoughts. But I shudder at Weinberger's use of "species" - isn't what he describes a cultural, learned behavior? Substituting nature for nurture is a rhetorical device that bugs the hell out of me. I care enough to ILL Clark's book to find out the deal. It looks like it was on cognitive science, was published 11 years ago and may be a little dated. I think this means that I'm either crawling under a rock or coming out from one, but at least now I can recycle this magazine! by caleb #
• Like a most other 0th-generation Oregonians I've met, I'm interested in the local lore. I usually find it hard to identify with people scalping indians, trapping beaver and cutting down the biggest trees they can find, but the landscape is fascinating, and I haven't yet grown tired of its starring role in the recent, desperate history of the West. Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker's memoir, (with Barbara J. Scot) Child of Steen's Mountain (OSU Press, 2008) humanizes that story for me. McVIcker grew up poor, though she didn't know it, on a sheepherding homestead on Steens Mountain, outside Fields and almost all the way in the southeastern corner of the state. I caught a glimpse of the Steens on a visit to Burns. It was far away. This passage recounts when the O'Keeffe family moved closer to Burns so that McVicker could go to high school. This is the early to mid 1940s: It should have been easier to get to high school with a school bus making the route instead of the old Studebaker, but somehow we were always in trouble with the principal for being late. In fact, we were late so many times that he kept a special book for our excuses. "Well, which was it this time?" he would say. "High water, a runaway horse, or you got behind a bunch of cattle being driven somewhere and couldn't get through the road?" I'm sure we were a legend in the teachers' lunchroom. It isn't like the school bus actually came to our house. We rote our horses down our extremely long lane and left them in a corral by an abandoned house. When we got to the old house, we took off the saddles and tied the horses to the manger Dad had built there and fed them hay for the day. Then we changed out of our jeans, put on our school clothes and walked about a quearter of a mile to the blacktop highway to catch the bus. If we were late we had to go home, but sometimes if the bus driver saw us he would wait as we ran down the rest of hte lane. I think he felt sorry for us, to tell the truth, and sometimes when we got off the bus at the end of the day he would slip us each a candy bar as we left. McVicker is scorned, and she is pitied, and she knows it, and still she manages to give us the gift of empathy. by caleb #
• I was going to write a whole post about this but it never happened so, here, I want to direct your attention to this lovely essay by Karen Joy Fowler at the Powell's blog because she describes beautifully the feeling i was trying to explain here.  Stupid (awesome) internet. by rachel #