Print problems

A great piece by Matt McAdam on why it's a problem that deans love books:

[B]y clinging to the outdated notion that scholarship must be published in print, deans and scholars hurt university presses. They tie the legitimate responsibility of determining and distributing quality scholarship to a costly, inefficient, inflexible, and unsustainable publishing model. By insisting that print is a necessary condition for scholarly quality, deans and scholars make it more difficult for university presses to stay in business, thereby making it more difficult for them to publish print books! At the same time, scholars insist on having their own work published in print while they increasingly engage the work of others online. And deans demand that scholars publish print books while not giving their libraries enough money to buy them. They insist on print while undermining the demand for it.

Internet of Cattle

Farmers are connecting their cows to the internet. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

A whole new breed of cat person

The economy of internet cat videos.

Scoop!

An interview with the CU alumni behind the "what-would-i-say" Facebook meme.

Closing tabs

Why Diana Athill moved into an old people's home.  (This is the same place my grandmother lived before she died!)

Francis Spufford reviews Turing's Cathedral.  Have obtained a copy on basis of that review.

Luc Sante on the relationship between writing and editing.

Pantone squares as fruit tarts.  (Not perhaps as amazing, due to constitutive textural irregularities, as the Pantone cookies of yesteryear.)

A purchase

Have taken the plunge and ordered a Kindle - they're not shipping till mid-September, but I won't be in New York to pick it up till the end of September in any case.

I have held out against it for quite some time, and am more inherently attracted to the iPad as a device, but I am having serious book supply issues during this Cayman-based time, and realize that the Kindle is now cheap enough that even if it's only an auxiliary device, it is worth my while to have one.

But what I really want is to be able to get LIBRARY books electronically! I am really missing proximity to the Columbia library...

Enumeration

At Scientific American, the past and future of the U.S. Census. (Via Bookforum.)

Talismans, totems

Significant objects!

Proxy battles

The Cute Cat Theory of Internet Censorship. (Courtesy of Amy.)

1950s B-movie soundtracks

I must confess to a sudden aspiration to take up the theremin. (Link courtesy of The Rumpus.)

Unsend

Orwellian name, convenient service!

AWOL

The adventure begins! An interval of no non-emergency internet connectivity is about to ensue - I will be incommunicado for the next ten days - fuller report to follow, of course...

A thousand words

It goes against the grain with me to say it, but sometimes the picture really does get the point across more effectively...

(I think I am almost the only person in the world who still uses Pine - now Alpine - as my main e-mail program. I love it - it makes the keyboard feel typewriterly and like my utterly perfect writerly prosthesis - no interference, minimal interface of any kind - and fast!)

Symptomatic of the stress and chaos of the last few years was a disastrous accumulation of e-mails in my inbox.

It has dawned on me over the last few weeks, though, that there are honestly only a couple things I really genuinely still need to sort out to make life pretty much exactly as I want it to be.

(Well, there always are taxes, and various things of that sort - and library books that need renewing! - but this we cannot really do anything about other than respond as new demands arise...)

One of these two things is my new office in Philosophy Hall - it is still largely unpacked, and there are books and papers in boxes from pretty much every stage of my life, with some major sorting and organizing needed. (But help is on the way!)

The other was the e-mail inbox.

This morning there were 40,000 messages in it, give or take.

Now there are NONE!

Songs After Dark

And I did go to the Doveman Footloose show and am extremely glad that I did, it was an unusual and quite moving show...

(Also I am glad to say that I heard the voice of reason - I had dinner with training partner S. and his lovely wife beforehand, and resolutely told 'em that I could not meet S. this morning for our projected 9am run because of a deep psychological need for a morning without having to set the alarm! In fact between cat and insomnia I am well up already, but it was the right thing, made for a much less stressful later part of the evening! I will run tomorrow instead...)

This project actually involves Thomas Bartlett a.k.a. Doveman covering the songs from the album accompanying the 80s film Footloose. It was spurred by Thomas's friend Gabriel, who writes as follows:

When I was very young, my half-sister Jenny died tragically. She was a teenager, and it was the 80's. She left behind a wardrobe of brightly colored clothes, rainbow stickers, life-size paintings, doodles on lined paper, and hundreds of tapes. These constitute most of my memories of her. It's sad for me to look at these things, and usually I don't. But a couple of summers ago I found a tape of hers with a startling cover photograph - this was Footloose. I couldn't stop listening: it was a portrait of 80's love, desire, pain, freedom, and frenzy; of being a teenager in a time of change.

He described the tape, when he spoke before the show last night, as a message in a bottle, and it's an interesting notion. I think in some ways that the project/performance/album is a failed experiment, but that the partial failure itself becomes part of the magic of hearing the music played live - it's very lovely to listen to, because all of Thomas's music is, but in fact the Footloose songs do not speak directly and immediately to the audience, so that the music prompts thoughts about absence and loss and the ways in which an emotion might be forcibly reproduced or remembered without being anchored to anything one can really hold onto.

The medium of the cassette tape is the perfect way of thinking about this stuff, too. I don't think it's really because of high-culture things like Krapp's Last Tape - it's more just that Beckett saw exactly the thing about the medium that others would also later see and muse upon. What I was most strongly reminded of: the use of the tape in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go.

I will cannibalize my own blog post on that book, given here in slightly redacted form, having long since given that copy (and several others - but the book and the tape are two quite different media, in my opinion!) away:

A prized possession--in this case, the narrator Kathy H.'s cassette tape of Songs After Dark by Judy Bridgewater--remains prized in spite of the fact that "the music has nothing to do with anything. It's an object, like a brooch or a ring, and especially now Ruth has gone, it's become one of my most precious possessions." .... The "students" at Hailsham misunderstand a teacher's casual reference to Norfolk as England's "lost corner," conflating it with the fact that the "lost corner" is where lost property is kept at the school: "Someone--I can't remember who it was--claimed after the lesson that what Miss Emily had said was that Norfolk was England's 'lost corner', where all the lost property found in the country ended up. Somehow this idea caught on and soon had become accepted fact virtually throughout our entire year." Kathy's precious tape is lost, but she finds another copy years later (this may sound clunky, but it's actually an extremely subtle counterpoint to the cloning stuff): "Norfolk came to be a real source of comfort to us, probably much more than we admitted at the time, and that was why we were still talking about it--albeit as a sort of joke--when we were much older. And that's why, years and years later, that day Tommy and I found another copy of that lost tape of mine in a town on the Norfolk coast, we didn't just think it pretty funny; we both felt deep down some tug, some old wish to believe again in something that was once close to our hearts."

Digital musings

At the NYRB, an interesting piece by Robert Darnton on Google and the future of books.

I am pondering my increasingly pressing internal need for a science-fictional near-future device that will be better than a Kindle and different from an iPhone and will make it magically easy to read the digitized books (most readily accessed as PDF files) in the Gale ECCO without printing out huge wads of pages.

I have consulted the hive mind of the semi-secret cabal of which I am a member, and am tipped off to the Lenovo Thinkpad X-series tablet notebook. Any thoughts? Given that I cannot yet have this or this?

[ED. Forgot to paste in the last couple links - Charlie Stross on why he uses Linux, John Klima on the Espresso self-serve book machine and a Crain's story on early adopters of e-books that I could click through to earlier in the day but that is now only available by subscription (courtesy of Sarah).]

"FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory"

Paul Collins at the Paper Cuts blog. Here he praises the internet and searchable archives:

Computers have created a Golden Age for historians, because searchable archives make no distinction between the mighty and the obscure — if it’s in there, you’ll find it. Let me give you an example: I wrote an article on the Tricho medical scandal, about a 1920s company that used radiation for cosmetic hair-removal. It was run by a physician named Albert Geyser. When I plugged his address — not even his name, just his address — into the New York Times Historical Files, out jumped a “Lost and Found” ad he’d run in 1923, before his company launched: “FOUR FIELD MICE lost from laboratory, 244 W 74th St., each mou[s]e has a round bald spot on right side caused by scientific experimentation; $20 reward …”