Odyssey Online

…partly because my seventeen year old son is writing a fifteen page paper on Thoreau’s legacy, and partly because I’ve been a lifelong reader of Henry David Thoreau, I thought we’d do a little Thoreau blogging.  I’ve just finished Robert Sullivan’s book The Thoreau You Don’t Know: What the Prophet of Environmentalism Really Meant, and it’s excellent: witty, insightful, a marvelous personal reflection on Thoreau.  With that in mind, and with summer reading season officially open, below is a list of editions of Walden and other writings, along with newer titles about Thoreau:

• A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, Maine Woods, Cape Cod Literary Classics of the United States
• Wild Fruits: Thoreau’s Rediscovered Last Manuscript Edited by Bradley P. Dean, Illustrated by Abigail Rorer
• Walden Wood Engravings by Michael McCurdy
• Walden Edited by Edward Hoagland
• Tracking Thoreau: Double Crossing Nature and Technology by John Dolis
• Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing by Alfred I Tauber
• Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau Edited by William E. Cain
• Henry Thoreau A Life of the Mind by Robert D. Richardson Jr.

Great way to start the summer. ODY is closed over the Memorial Day weekend, but open again on June First.  Because of various teaching and bibliographic commitments Odyssey Online is going to be dormant until June Seventh, but then we’ve got some great summer blogging planned. Until then…

Walt Crawford is a long time and very interesting commentator on librarianship, and for years has been publishing his own newsletter, Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large.  In the most recent issue, he has a piece called “There is No Future” (it starts on page 3) where he cites to comments on a thread about the future of libraries that recently tied a bunch of library oriented blogs together.  What Crawford does that’s so good is contextualize this particular discussion by describing how many of the opinions blogged fall into patterns common in the literature of librarianship. He’s good at separating the wheat from the chaff…so if you are interested in reading an involved (it’s a bit long) librarian to librarian dialogue on what the future seems to hold for libraries as institutions, and a dialogue that includes both the thoughtful and reactive, give Walt a read…

…or at least showing some considerable awareness that Facebook activity has privacy implications.  Two interesting pieces in the New York Times by Sarah Maslin Nir and Laura Holson chronicle young Facebook enthusiasts making very deliberate decisions about what they put online.  It all rings as good news these kids thinking about their futures through privacy savvy.

However, in thinking about the sum total of networked information technology that the whole concept of privacy is going through a significant change, a change with cultural breadth, and a change that ends up with privacy-lite as the norm, particularly if you accept that privacy is the ability to control who has access to personal information.  To a certain extent the articles linked here demonstrate individuals doing just that…exerting control…but to do so they have to game the system. The system isn’t set up for them to control personal information.  Perhaps the ability to control personal information was never one held in both hands, but a memory can’t be hacked…that has to mean something…

…neither of course, can an abacus…

…getting going again, a few things on the “state of the Net.” This from Atlanticwire.com on the steady erosion of Internet Explorer’s market share. While still the biggest player, it continues to cede screens to Firefox and Chrome (to name two). While we’re at it here’s an interesting piece on the next iteration of Firefox, and something, maybe, on Chrome’s continued evolution into an operating system.

…what better to fill up a finals week study break, then to read a short story.  With that in mind, here is a list of anthologies of short stories, and a couple of titles about short stories mixed in.  Good reading between cramming for calc or psych…

• Short Stories of the Civil Rights Movement Edited by Margaret Earley Whitt
• Short Story Writers and Short Stories Edited by Harold Bloom
• Anchor Book of New American Short Stories Edited by Ben Marcus
• American Fantastic Tales: Terror and Uncanny Edited by Peter Straub
• American Short Stories Since 1945 Edited by John G. Parks
• On Writing Short Stories Edited by Tom Bailey
• Best American Short Stories of the Century Edited by John Updike

Enjoy. With finals here Odyssey Online is going to take a short break, but catch up with you next week with plenty o’ blogging…