Odyssey Online

…with grades in, winter equinox come and gone, and a blue moon on the horizon, it’s time for recreational reading!  (At least for a couple of weeks!) In keeping with the stated purpose of Odyssey Online, and after much deliberation, we offer a selection of books of poems, books about poetry. Now, I can’t say I’ve read all of these…what’s holding this group together is that they are all very new: a selection of contemporary poetry, poetry criticism.  Holiday reading, what better! Enjoy:

• Can Poetry Save the Earth: A Field Guide to Nature Poetry by John Felstiner
• The Poetry of Rilke translated and edited by Edward Snow
• Our Savage Art: Poetry and the Civil Tongue by William Logan
• With Everything We’ve Got: A Personal Anthology of Yiddish Poetry translated and edited by Richard Fein
• Of this World: New and Selected Poems 1966-2006 by Richard Stroud
• Shelter by Carey Salerno
• Ka-Ching by Denise Duhamel
• All Night Lingo Tango by Barbara Hamby
• Evidence: Poems by Mary Oliver
• Shannon: A Poem about the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Campbell McGrath
• Endpoint and Other Poems by John Updike
• Romanticism: Poems by April Bernard
• In Search of Small Gods by Jim Harrison

Contemporary poetry. With this contemporary post Odyssey Online will be taking its holiday break, but will be back in the new year with posts on all things libraries…

…more commentary from the Washington Post on the hack of Twitter, which there is, apparently, much suspicion that the Iranian regime is itself behind….

…CNN reported that Twitter was hacked and shut down by a group called the Iranian Cyber Army.  It’s not clear, and probably never will be, whether the this group is connected to the Iranian Government, but one should remember the role Twitter played in getting information out of Iran after the last very dubious election.  Commentary on Twitter and the Iranian civil disobedience from Andrew Sullivan is here.

…a little more disturbing, reporting that U.S. Drones operating in Iraq have been hacked, and the hacking that did it wasn’t all that hard.  The story here from the Christian Science Monitor…

Updates on items of interest to Odyssey Online…as reported in the Washington Post the House of Representatives is taking steps to ensure more cybersecurity for legislative action and business. Also, commentary continues on Google’s quiet shift over to a personalized search as the basic Google web search:

• Google’s Personalized Results Could be Bad for a Search PC Week
• Google Extends Personalized Search to All CNET News
• Google Chrystal Ball Equal Parts Fun, Frightening Google Watch
• 3 New Forms of Search Google is Working on Now ReadWriteWeb
• Google Unveils a Host of New Features Vactor News

…from the Washington Post, Google will now apparently gift wrap their browser Chrome for you, so that you can have a Christmas present from Google…

…while it is perhaps a temptation to read too much into this, it got me thinking about the Internet and lonely people.  Years ago, back in the days of when Gopher was the Internet, I heard a story about two tech savvy librarians who took a senior member of the faculty to a computer terminal to show him the wonder known as the Internet.  He sat down and started surfing one Gopher site after another, apparently fascinated. Some time the two beaming librarians returned to this gentlemen, and when he looked up from the screen he said, “I had no idea so many people were so lonely.”  There is a body of literature about the Internet and personality types and alienation and technology and all that, accessible through subject headings like, say, Internet–Social Aspects.  Thoughts on lonely people and browsing the web on a rainy December day…

…with finals upon us, not a lot of time for recreational reading (that’s next week!), but a weekend is a weekend after all and everyone needs a study break. With this in mind, here are some movies from our film collection featuring Peter Lorre.  Why Peter Lorre? I’m not sure, but these, together, are all great films:

• Casablanca Directed by Michael Curtiz with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman
• M with Gustaf Grundgens and Otto Wernicke
• The Maltese Falcon Directed by John Huston with Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor

“You shouldn’t have done that Mr. Spade…”

…an update on my update. While reading Atlantic Magazine Online (yes, I’m goofing off), I came upon this item, Facebook Privacy Policy Makes Users Feel Hoodwinked, which chronicles a variety of strong negative reactions to the new Facebook Privacy Policy from across the blogsphere…

…this is slightly incredible, but there is an application for Google’s browser, Chrome, called Frame. What it does is, well, I’ll quote from this article in Slate by Farhad Manjoo” “Chrome Frame does this by replacing IE’s guts.” Ergo, it inserts the Chrome process into IE…wow…

I’m having recollections from science fiction movies where some alien life from drills down into the human noogin and inserts itself into one’s corporal frame….unfortunately there was a security hole in Frame, apparently, which Google insists has been fixed…

In other news of all things webical, Facebook is thinking again about privacy. The Washington Post has the story…

…in a very interesting very quiet move, Google has personalized all searches. That is, based on the information Google keeps on searches an individual does, and based on information uploaded to Google by gmail and the like users, each Google search will be a little bit different.  Good commentary on what this means from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, and Mercedes Bunz in the Guardian. Sullivan makes a good connection to this and reference work done by librarians.  In a library every search is customized as a researcher works with a librarian to find the best materials…what Sullivan points out though, is that you wouldn’t expect a librarian to remember a conversation, verbatim, you had a half a year ago. That’s what Google does, and, I agree with Sullivan, that’s the creepy part.  What happens in the library stays in the library, even as the books leave…is that perhaps an advantage of a library.

Also, with criticism growing from the news industry of Google’s role in the economics of news delivery, Eric Schmidt takes a few pages of the Wall Street Journal to defend his company…

…this from the Boston Globe, a newly found early edition of Poe’s poems sells for $662,500. Now that’s a Christmas present…

…since snow still hasn’t fallen and the purple-brown Gothic appearance of November is still swept across the land, it’s a good weekend (as any) for reading up on Edgar Allen Poe.  Some new stuff in our collection:

• On a Raven’s Wing: New Tales in Honor of Edgar Allen Poe. Edited by Stuart M. Kaminsky
• Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allen Poe. by Benjamin Fisher
• Poe: A Life Cut Short by Peter Ackroyd
• Poe Shadow: A Novel by Matthew Pearl
• Poe & Fanny: A Novel by John May
• Hitchcock and Poe: Legacy of Delight and Terror by Dennis R. Perry