Odyssey Online

…the BBC web site ran an interesting piece by Rory Cellan-Jones on Google’s new feature Dashboard. The article is titled My Life Online–Time to Delete? and ponders uploaded information.  Dashboard allows one to see what information that one has uploaded to save is associated with what Google feature. Ergo, what you’ve given Google to mind and where Google has put it.  It’s a fine check, but as Cellan-Jones reflects, it’s your information out of your hands and in Google’s…forever?  Does on want all of one’s online discourse (like this blog post) saved forever?

…the article mentions Viktor Mayer-Schonberger’s book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age,  which is an extremely well written study of the social utility of forgetting, set against the new digital storage technologies. Well worth the time to read it…

…today, November 5th, is Guy Fawkes Day. And what would Guy Fawkes day be without a couple of good books in the SLU Libraries on the man and on the tradition:

• Faith and Treason: The Story of the Gunpowder Plot by Antonia Fraser
• Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day by James Sharpe

…with actors from the American Shakespeare Center offering performances here on campus through the weekend, it seemed like a good moment to do a little early Friday Blogging, and suggest some of the most recent titles we have on Shakespeare:

• Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide by Samuel Crowl
• Shakespeare and Modern Culture by Majorie Garber
• Is Milton Better Than Shakespeare by Nigel Smith
• Cooking with Shakespeare by Mark Morton and Andrew Coppolino
• Time, Space, and Motion in the Age of Shakespeare by Angus Fletcher
• New Wave Shakespeare by Thomas Cartelli and Katherine Rowe
• Shakespeare the Thinker by A.D. Nuttal
• Shakespeare: The World as Stage by Bill Bryson
• Filming Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace by Mark Thornton Burnett
• Why Shakespeare by Katherine Belsey

…the play’s the thing with which we’ll catch the conscious of a king…

…recently Derek Thompson put up an interesting post at Atlantic.com titled Where is the E-Reader Revolution Leading Us? which argues that e-readers are pushing technologies toward a Swiss Army Knife model: a mobile technology that can do many things.  It actually seems to me that the e-reader (with all thy faults I love thee still…) is more akin to Donald Norman’s idea of an information appliance, well articulated in his book The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products can Fail, the Personal Computer is so Complex, and Information Appliances are the Solution. Norman makes a convincing case for what an information appliance could be and could do…

…his book The Psychology of Everyday Things (subsequent editions are titled Design of Everyday Things) is essential reading on the day-to-day implications of design…

…this being National Potato Day we can direct the SLU community to the wonderfully named John Reader’s wonderfully titled book Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.

…also, on the broader topic of our relationship to information (if not potatoes) Jessica Hagy on her blog Indexed has a really very simple and very striking visualization of the relationship between confusion and information…

…this from today’s edition of the New York Times on proposed cuts announced yesterday by Governor Paterson:

Hundreds of programs face cuts — libraries stand to lose $3.3 million, summer programs for special education students face a $10.4 million cut, and more than $14 million would be cut from Child Health Plus, a public insurance program. At least 31 H.I.V./AIDS programs also face cuts.

Tough situation. On a happier Friday note,  here are two new uplifting titles about libraries:

• Libraries for All! How to Start and Run a Basic Library by Laura Wendell
• The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World photgraphs by Guillaume de Laubeir and text by Jacques Bosser

Optimistic reading for reading days…

…Anne Fadiman is an essayist, and is, simply put, a lot of fun to read.  She wrote a book titled Ex Libris about her (and her family’s) life long love of books.  It’s a great read, and in the last essay in this volume she recommends her favorite books about books, reading, and book collecting. This is a sampling of those titles that are here in ODY:

• Reading in Bed by John Wieners
• History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
• Kingdom of Books by William Dana Orcutt
• ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter
• A Gentle Madness, Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and an Eternal Passion for Books by Nicholas Basbanes
• Size of Thoughts by Nicholson Baker
• The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

Read on!

…well perhaps things like our Encore search (and Google) do de-emphasize subject headings…but…the wonders subject headings can bring. Take gastronomy for example. A subject search on gastronomy brings back this fine…dare I say tasty…list for weekend reading:

• American Fried: Adventures of a Happy Eater by Calvin Trillin
• The Artful Eater: A Gourmet Investigates the Ingredients of Great Food by Edward Behr
• Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Food by Gary Paul Nabhan
• Eating in Eden: Food and American Utopias edited by Etta Mattan and Martha Finch
• The Fortune Cookie Chronicles: Adventures in the World of Chinese Food by Jennifer Lee
• Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess by Gael Greene
• The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a Roving Gourmand by Jim Harrison

…and that is but a smorgasbord of the thirty five titles on the list. I’m off to lunch.

…our friends at University Communications have give a web “shout out” to Steve Amick (noted here) and also to Lorrie Moore ‘78, whose books have drawn much praise.  We have a number of her works including Life Stories, Anagrams, Self Help, and Who Will Run the Frog Hospital to name four.

Ms. Moore has built a real name for herself within American literary circles, Ploughshares, one of our better literary reviews, has an interesting profile of her here, and the New York Times published this interview on September 2nd…

…we’ve encouraged here the notion that one should, along with all that one  might be reading in the name of one’s research, have a book on the side.  That argument leads to our Browsing Collection, and there, in with the titles we thought folks would find of general interest, is Steve Amick’s book Nothing But a Smile. Among other things, Mr. Amick is a Larry, class of 1986.  We have his other book too, The Lake, The River, and the Other Lake which is about a summer spent in Northern Michigan, and both books have drawn positive notice in publications such as Booklist, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, and the New York Times…