Odyssey Online

…J. D. Salinger died January 27th, at 91. He is, of course, the author of Catcher in the Rye, a book that simply put should be read by everyone in their late teens.  Here is a sampling of the critical work we have on Salinger:

• With Love and Squalor: 14 Writers Respond to the Work of J.D. Salinger Edited by Kip Kotzen and Thomas Beller
• Catcher in the Rye: New Essays Edited by J.P. Steed
• In Cold Fear: Catcher in the Rye Censorship Controversies and Postwar American Character by Pamela Hunt Steinle
• J.D. Salinger Revisited by Warren French
• J.D. Salinger Edited by Harold Bloom

The Guardian has published a “round-up” of online commentary and reactions to the man’s death…

Siva Vaidhyanathan is one of the most articulate and most provocative commentators on Google.  Recently on his blog, the Googlization of Everything, he has published a number of commentaries on the China hack of Google…long but well worth the time to read them, they make an interesting case that the situation is not a simply question of resistance to censorship, but rather the culmination of numerous complex legal, business, and security issues.

Robert B. Parker died January 18th.  Parker was a crime fiction writer who authored 60 books, and is best known for the Spenser series–a Private-I series set in Boston that became a perfect stage for Parker’s crisp descriptive prose, his sense of humor, his wonderful ear for dialog.  He apparently died while at his desk, at work upon another Spenser novel.    The Canton Free Library has an excellent collection of books by Parker, and we have this sampling in ODY:

• Early Autumn
• Perchance to Dream
• Potshot
• Death in Paradise
• Shrink Rap
• Back Story

Perchance to Dream is a Philip Marlowe story…Parker took a one chapter fragment of a manuscript left by Raymond Chandler, and developed out a complete plot. Parker was a great admirer of Chandler, and so, with Parker in mind, some other recommendations on Chandler and kindred-crime-writer-spirits:

• Stories and Early Novels by Raymond Chandler
• Later Novels and Other Writings by Raymond Chandler
• Nine Dragons by Michael Connelly
• Crime Novels: American Noir of the 30’s and 40’s
• The Right Madness by James Crumley
• Morse’s Greatest Mystery and Other Stories by Colin Dexter
• Crime Stories and Other Writings Dashiell Hammett
• Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith by Patricia Highsmith
• When the Women Come Out to Dance: Stories by Elmore Leonard
• The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense Ed. Joyce Carol Oates
• Amsterdam Cop Stories by Janwillem van de Wetering
• Outsider in Amsterdam by Janwillem van de Wetering
• Exit Wound by John Westermann

…to suggest a baker’s dozen.  Parker left several finished manuscripts that have yet to be published, so we haven’t quite read the last of the man’s work, and anything on this list would be a great mid-winters read, even if prompted by somewhat melancholy circumstances…

…reported by CNN, China responds to the allegations about hacking Google…

…Tuesday a.m., and it finds us look at Clay Shirky’s essay The Shock of Inclusion. Shirky is writing about the future of collaborative thought, whether the quality of public thought is collapsing, and whether “publishing has become the new literacy.” Lucid and insightful, and most certainly worth a look…

…couple of things on the situation between Google and China (what does it mean that I’m writing about Google like it was a country)…the Washington Post is reporting that Google’s decision comes on cyber-attacks launched against Gmail, and that these attacks “on Google that the search giant said originated in China were part of a concerted political and corporate espionage effort that exploited security flaws in e-mail attachments to sneak into the networks of major financial, defense and technology companies and research institutions in the United States.”

Also of note, Peter Fallows, who writes on a variety of topics for Atlantic Magazine and is a frequent commenter on China, writes of the implications of the Google v. China stand off here and here and here.  National Review lauds Google’s decision here, useful reading on what is really an interesting, and in some ways frightening situation.

On January 14th I’ll be part of a panel with Michelle Gillie (of ODY!) and Amy Hauber (of Fine Arts!) discussing the Creative Commons. My notes for the presentation are here.

So if you’re interested in documents related to either the founding of the Creative Commons, or documents foreshadowing the necessity of the Creative Commons, take a look!

…two good posts on Google’s decision to at least consider cutting off business with China.  Both are from Atlantic Online, one by Marc Ambinder on the immediate implications, and one by Derek Thompson on future implications.

…more soon, both men do point out that Google itself is not a transparent company and there is a lot to read into their decision/announcement…

…in the reference area of ODY there are eight new beautiful white-as-bone art deco iMacs.  Brand new, ready for any Apple-leaning researcher who happens by and are first in line. These are networked machines sporting all the things you’d expect with a Mac, plus Photoshop and both Firefox and Safari.

And after a morning on the Mac, why not read about the company from which these beauties sprung.  We have a number of books in the collection on Apple, and on the implications of the technologies they’ve produced and so successfully marketed:

• The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, Coolness by Seven Levy
• The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman
• iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith
• West of Eden: the End of Innocence at Apple Computer by Frank Rose
• iPod Therefore I am: Thinking Inside the White Box by Dylan Jones

…just before the holidays Jessmyn West over at librarian.net got to blogging about e-books.  In objecting to some promotion Amazon.com was doing, she made the assertions that

• 1. they’re creating a distinction that isn’t necessary, between ebooks and paper books
  2. at the same time they’re obscuring the very very real distinction that exists and is terribly important: you do not own an ebook, you license or lease it.

The idea of owning materials or accessing them via digital technologies as a controversy withered years ago for librarians, just think about all the stuff we have only electronic access to.  Yet, with the Kindle this question now bleeds over into personal book collections, into everyone’s interaction with what we have, up to this moment, thought of as books, and it seems to have energized energized the ownership v. access question enough,  to give pause. Because, stated simply, Jessmyn’s right–you don’t own an ebook.

A big part of the issue is with Amazon is their inability to clarify what exactly the terms of the license for content are. As Thomas Claburn reported in Information Week, Amazon had to amend/clarify policies on deleted books (after one lease had expired) after controversy and accompanying rumors swirled. This and concerns of Google privacy policies have brought to the fore that licenses for digital content are not static, they aren’t, (I can’t resist) book-like. They can be changed, and changed without consent or even knowledge of the purchaser/reader. Remember shrinkwrap licenses?  Those we licenses you agreed to by removing the shrinkwrap from a package, only the terms of the license were in the shrinkwrapped box which you couldn’t actually read until you got the shrinkwrap off…licenses for software or digital content are not (nor do they show any signs of becoming) simple transactions.

This and the idea of the content of a book without the physicality of a book give, for me, an unfortunate feeling of a disposable object to the narratives that were books. Of all of the things that were commonly kept that are now commonly thrown away–table ware, razors, food scraps (for everyone who doesn’t compost), hay, clothes, spouses–books were a permanence.  The book as object was a ballast (as John Updike characterized it) to a well navigated life.  Jessmyn West links to a Cory Doctorow asserting the place of books in people’s lives.   He makes an interesting assertion about how the image of book burning is one that comes to mind for very diverse groups of being when thinking about barbarism.  His point is that technologies like kindles represent a kind of book burning…do I agree completely, no, but to dismiss the permanence of an on hand library is a misplaced thought on a Friday afternoon…