Odyssey Online

…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…

…since the Obama Administration’s ruling on supporting network neutrality (reported on here at Odyssey Online), the debate has come more into public focus, the politics of said have become a little sharper.  The Washington Post reported that the FCC is drafting the specific rules that will keep ” Internet providers as acting like gatekeeprs,” and also reported that CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, favors network neutrality but thought it would be “a terrible idea for the government to involve itself as a regulator of the broader Internet.” Atlantic Magazine provides ran a useful Political Primer on network neutrality, identifying the players and what they are after.

…with Bill Fox’s inauguration at hand and the air of celebration much about the autumnal scenes here at St. Lawrence, I thought it would be in the spirit of things to point to books written by our faculty that are home here in the St. Lawrence University Library Collections.  These folks are great teachers, they’re fine writers.  This is not a comprehensive list, but, rather, a sampling for an inauguration weekend:

• Rabbit (un)Redeemed: the Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction by Peter Bailey
• The Springfield Story: A Satire by Roy Caldwell
• El Interticio de la Colonia: Ruptura y Medicion en la Narrativa Antisclavista Cubana by Ilia Casanova-Marengo
• Los Corridos en la Memoria del Migranta by Martha Chew Sanchez
• Dream Season: A Professor Joins America’s Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team by Bob Cowser Jr.
• The Good Society: An Introduction to Comparative Politics by Alan Draper and Ansil Ramsey
• Shaping the Upper Canadian Fronteir: Environment, Society, and Culture in the Trent Valley by Neil Forkey
• Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: the Austrian Perspective by Steve Horiwitz
• Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myths of the Nuclear Family by Val Lehr
• African Studies and the Undergraduate Curriculum edited by Patricia Alden and David Lloyd
• The Sky is Not the Ceiling: An Astronomer’s Faith by Aileen O’Donoghue
• Freedom’s Promise: Ex Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation by Elizabeth Regosin
• Memory from a Broader Perspective by Alan Searleman and Douglas Herrmann
• Scraping by in the Big Eighties by Natalia Singer
• Economics as Moral Science: the Political Economy of Adam Smith by Jeffrey Young

…today’s Boston Globe has an interesting piece on Facebook, friends, and guilt.  It gets gently to the heart of the matter, is Facebook really about friends.  I suppose that is one positive associated with Facebook: it encourages people to think about what friendship really is.  Can you sustain a friendship over Facebook with photographs and wall posts.  Try an experiment–take someone whom you regularly Facebook (is this a verb like google too?) and write them a letter. You know, stamps, envelope, the whole nine yards. If your immediate response is “But, I’m too busy to write a letter…” you can consider that the results of the experiment.

…and while it’s been promoted here before the best thing ever written about Facebook is by Michael Gerson…

…this just in, Atlantic Magazine has posted it’s list of the five essential cookbooks for anyone/everyone.  I’d add to the list several by the Frugal Gourmet…

…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…

…from the Washington Post, a well written article about twenty-somethings who do not social network. While it is not Civil Disobedience there are some interesting comments made about social networking platforms–what they are and what they result in–by “ordinary folks,” not professional commentators.  A very useful article in terms of how people define genuine experience…

…back to blogging, and with October break here plenty of blogging time. Network Neutrality is back in the news…a few weeks back we mentioned Network Neutrality here and linked to Edward Felten’s fine guide to what it is.  Network Neutrality is back in the news with a number of prominent Republican Senators asking FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s decision to create new network neutral rules, note here and here. Which perhaps caused the appearance of a few interesting commentaries on the whole thing–Preston Gralla details how Network Neutrality issues are playing out between Google and AT & T, and  interesting commentary in the Wall Street Journal by Holman Jenkins Jr. on how hand held digital technologies may turn the whole issue on its head.