Pages

Wednesday, May 28, 2008

MISC

Hay festival: Rushdie's return to magical thinking

There's a definitive buzz about the literary world in regards to Rushdie's new book. I must confess that I haven't read any of Rushdie's work yet though his Satanic Verses has come highly recommended and necessary read.

Designers Teach Glass (and Themselves) New Tricks

"
...
Tim Dubitsky['s], of the creative agency Li Inc., ...most ambitious project was
to encase a book in glass, with the caveat that the container would
have to be broken for the book to be read. The glass masters created a
delicate casing a little more than one-eighth of an inch thick, which
they allowed to cool overnight before inserting the book and then
sealing up the end."

Why encase a book? There is art in the physical appearance,feel and weight of a book. I would happily admit that the tactile experience of physically interacting with a written work is second to none and also admit that there are definitive moments throughout the week when I find myself simply gazing at the bookshelves in our house, I would,however, question the point of encasing a work in glass.It recalls the idea of a fire extinguisher where the item that would save our house from burning to the ground is held safe and sound in a cave resting until needed. books are not fire extinguishers and they differ on one main metaphorical point. The content of the fire extinguisher will ideally do the same thing each time, which is to put out the fire but the content of the work is not known until the contents of the work have been ingested and marinated in until the work's ideas have added themselves or taken over an individuals world view. By encasing a book in glass the effectiveness of the work is rendered null. The contents, the most important aspect of the work, are kept under glass revealing only the cover of the work which is not sufficient to determine, when the time is ripe and necessary to crack the glass, if the contents are pointed and poignant for the situation.

Tuesday, May 27, 2008

DiRT

DiRT

This is a really sweet project from Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
which I stumbled across while looking for something else. DiRT is an acronym for Digital Research Tools and is designed to collect "information about tools and resources that can help scholars
(particularly in the humanities and social sciences) conduct research
more efficiently or creatively." (Quoted from DiRT's introduction) This is an excellent idea to be able to gather, to a certain extent, many of the already used and established tools to be essentially peer-reviewed as well as providing a space for new tools and resources to be made known. DiRT also seems to provide a forum for discussion on these various items as well. This should be an excellent project. I've already slapped the feed on my igoogle page and am excited to see what's coming up.

Live Tonight: The Raconteurs in Concert

Live Tonight: The Raconteurs in Concert

10 PM TONIGHT!!!
BE THERE!!!
(or listen on your computer like i will be or download the podcast like I probably will)

happenings

This is one of those rare posts when I have accrued enough interesting things to give a personal update on things.
1) Memorial Day weekend: Kara and I went out to Voluntown Connecticut to hang out Kara's parents and Lori/Geoff/thor. Hang out in this case means work in the yard which was totally awesome as it was good to be outside. Chip managed to be up by 7 am on both Sunday and monday so I spent the better part of an hour playing ball from 7-8 on both mornings which was actually really really nice. While we were driving to get ice cream on Monday evening there was a house with a large plywood board with a hand painted sign that asked "Did the 4 o'clock thief come yet?" I have no idea what that means but it was a great sign. (It will also be the name of the next band i'm in. "Hi we're 4 o'clock thief" or "Hi we're the 4 o'clock thieves..")
2) There's a link in the upper right hand corner that will, eventually, give updates as I am able on what I'm reading and where exactly I'm at. I'm not totally sure of how it's going to go but it's worth checking out. It requires a twitter account and I'm having some difficulty setting it up but hopefully that's due to the twitter issue happening currently.
3) This brings the total amount of social network type items I am signed up with to 4.
a)Facebook
b)MySpace
c)W.A.S.T.E.
d)Twitter
Technically I have a xanga account as well but have not updated that in a while and am not planning on it. My network accounts on these are not simply for fun but also to see what new technologies are developing and how other people are using these technologies.
Facebook is probably the best at this point.

Monday, May 26, 2008

The future of Writing Conference

The Future of Writing Conference
This conference looks really interesting. It's being hosted at the Davis Humanities Institute/University of California. There are some good questions being asked and the mixture of digital artwork as well as papers offers an opportunity to explore the historical tradition of writing dealing with new mediums, such as E-Books, and interacting with the new media of digital artwork. I would be very interested in seeing session here that would deal pedagogically with the future of writing. With the continued interest of e-books and the ability to create hyper-linked texts, both for fictional and scholarly texts, while the basic themes of writing won't change the delivery of the text to the reader will diversify and change.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

From blogger to bestselling author

From blogger to bestselling author

This article is interesting from at least 2 angles. the first is the activity of media in China. It is good to see how the internet does allow individuals to pursue the publishing of their own creative works. Also, it is interesting to see how intangible works published online are leading to published works. While ebooks are continuing to increase in popularity and books overall are not being pursued or read as much in the past decade, there is still a drive to publish physical books.
The second angle is the definition of the internet publishing medium as a karaoke bar. I'm not entirely sure if the quote from Liang is designed to equate the furor over internet publishing with the Chinese people's enjoyment of karaoke or if the publishing of works online is equal to a screechy, off-key rendition of "whoops, I did it again" while accompanied by an awkwardly canned track. Or is the quote attempting to infer that karaoke as an imitative form is comparable to posting one's thoughts or writings online. Is self-expression only found in imitation when self-publishing? "The largest proportion of literary manuscripts on the Internet is entertainment literature."(next to last paragraph) If what is being published is derived mainly from this proportion of online work then yes the internet is like a karaoke bar that publishers are striving to pull limited and imitative talent from while the true musicians are at the other end of the city rocking the dive bars.

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Little Pieces of Los Angeles, Done His Way


Little Pieces of Los Angeles, Done His Way

for the record, a million little pieces is a brilliant work. forget for a second it is a "fabricated" memoir. as story it is fantastic, gripping and moving; the language and rhetorical devices employed are sparing and are used with care and focus. i read the second book my friend leonard . it's good as well though not quite as good as its predecessor. my appreciation of frey's work was not particularly affected by oprah's calling him out.
what really matters in a story is that what the writer writes is what happened. the story told is, for all intents and purposes, what indeed occurred. one of the best explanations of this is in the book the things they carried by Tim O'Brien.
hurrah for james frey and his new work!

Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82


Robert Rauschenberg, American Artist, Dies at 82

while this is a quick overview of Rauschenberg's life I think it's interesting to notice the other names popping up here such as Cage, Pollack, Black Mountain College. Rauschenberg was probably at BMC while Wolpe was teaching there and very well may have interacted with him.
Raschenberg's death also emphasize the passing of the modernists, both their work and themselves. Their passing brings them back into memory and notice.

Tuesday, May 6, 2008

music information retrieval (MIR)

onebiglibrary

onebiglibrary unconference
This is a brilliant idea hosted by York University in Toronto. York U also happens to be the place that Wolpe scholar Austin Clarkson is a professor emeritus.
"A conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants."

Saturday, May 3, 2008

my saturday morning

7:00am
you may have noticed in the past two hours I've posted more to this blog than I have in the past two months. i'm currently sitting at work, where I've been for the past 2 hours, waiting for the servers to come back online from their new location. It was supposed to happen at 5am. It didn't. But I still got here at 5. The magic of the morning is steadily diminshing. I brought a coffee pot, grinder, whole beans and tablespoon to make some good coffee but I forgot filters so I had to use the company coffee pot which is grungy artifact of really bad coffee making years. Also the coffee pot that was left with it doesn't actually fit. Thus I managed to make the worst pot of coffee I've ever made. I'm currently sitting alone in the office which is rather strange. I did get caught up on most of my blog reading that i've missed as well as reading this morning NY Times. I've been trying to convince myself to do this, that is, get up early and read. The reading has almost made getting up this early worth it.

8:32 am
servers are up and servers are....down. awesome.
8:37am
and the servers are up and holding steady.
8:46
waiting for hardware test to begin/finish; I've should stayed in bed. Was really thinking I would be out of here by 9am and out to the Doylestown Presbyterian Church for their, supposedly, sweet book sale. Hopefully will still make it. I do have a pretty sweet "ridiculously-early-morning-waiting-at-work" playlist going consisting of The National, both Boxer and Alligator, Pedro the Lion, Jacob Golden, Portishead, PatternisMovement, The Hold Steady, The New Pornographers, The Postal Service, Caribou, John Vanderslice, Rage Against the Machine, Zookeeper, Iron & Wine, Unwed Sailor and Thom Yorke. Eclectic and loud.
9:38
middle of making sure services are back on. dubservers still down therefore can't test anything ...and servers are down again

and up...

10:36 am
and done.

Addendum:
The book sale was awesome. I got there just as it was closing but they were gracious and let me scrounge. I gave them 5$ and they gave me a paper shopping bag. It was pretty scant pickings as I was looking to round out my collection of Grass and Vonnegut, none of whom were in evidence. It was also the last possible minutes of the sale so that might have had something to do with it. Among the good things that accompanied me home:
snow falling on cedars---guterson
short novels of thomas wolfe--wolfe
the crucible--miler (haven't read it yet)
Galatic Pot-Healer---Dick (according to the first couple pages the character can heal pots; you would pick it up too.)
Trojan Women---trans. Sartre
Mortal Coils---Huxley
The Promise---Potok (a really nice hardcover)
oh that old hotel--mitchell



Cuba lifts ban on home computers

Rivalry Played Out on Canvas and Page


Rivalry Played Out on Canvas and Page

this article is good for two reasons; this exhibition has works by DeKooning who was at the Bauhaus with Wolpe.
It makes fun of art critics. What else could you want?
The opening and closing sentences encapsulate the entire article in a sort of Schenkerian analysis. First sentence: "Art is long, art criticism is often very, very brief, its Internet afterlife notwithstanding. "
Last sentence "Neither critic was impressed but, as is so often the case, art went on without them."
It all gets reduced to Mozart in the end.



So It Goes


So It Goes

Can't tell you how excited I am about this book coming out. I've got a deep enjoyment and appreciation of Vonnegut's work. I've read most of it at this point. I was reading TimeQuake this week which is closer to being a collection of aphorisms rather than a story in the typical Vonnegutian vein. I read Man Without A Country, Vonnegut's last published work, last year and there are some definitive shared stories between the two. Sharing between stories is nothing new for Vonnegut I think it's one of the most enjoyable things of reading his works is the act of actively collecting the connections, based on characters, phrases, bird-calls, and seeing how those are reset, re-worked or re-introduced into new settings.
Vonnegut's work is also intriguing because it can be read, possibily to its own detriment, at two different levels. There is the first superficial level where the reader can simply collect the details of the story and work through the story as fiction without picking up any connections. Vonnegut has a very deceptive style postulated as easy to read but he hides rich detail and ideas within his works. This is the second level at which his works can be read. I had to read Man without a Country twice before I realized the almost minimalistic end-result of Vonnegut's writing is purposeful, developed and definitively not accidental.

The Kids Are All Noisy: British teens not welcome in libraries

The Kids Are All Noisy: British teens not welcome in libraries

One of the best quotes from this article in understanding how to approach teens in the library "...we should resist trying to force them to act like previous generations; that was then, and this is now." this is a crucial step to moving the library and library philosophy forward to reach out and embrace new technologies and new approached to pedagogy in information literacy. It's not forcing these next generations to act in the library or to approach the library as we or our parents did but to take the tools they are used to using and see how those tools can interact wityh and mold future ways of thinking about the purpose of the library and its future as its future is truly in the hands of these kids.

Higher Offer by Microsoft Brings Yahoo to Table