Odyssey Online

The shut down of the United States Federal Government has shut down the Library of Congress (arguably the cultural gem of the nation).  Web sites associated with the Smithsonian are functional, through the museum is closed. More the implications of the shut down as they become clear–an overview of what is and is not open is available from Firstgov.gov.

…in a pointed and angry essay on contemporary poetry, New Criterion Editor David Yezzi writes, “Poetry has become so docile, so domesticated, it’s like a spayed housecat lolling in a warm patch of sun.  Most poets choose to play it safe, combining a few approved modes in a variety of unexceptional ways…these poems feel t home in coffee shops and on college campuses; they circulate breezily among crowds of like-minded poems and all of them work hard to be liked.” Below is a list of very new titles, perhaps, as spring gives way to summer, spend some time putting Yezzi’s assertion to the test?

• Special Powers and Abilities : Poems by  Raymond McDaniel
• Black Crow Dress by Roxane Beth Johnson
• Letters to Borges by Stephen Kuusisto
• The Word on the Street: Rock Lyrics by Paul Muldoon
• Me and Nina: Poems by Monica A. Hand
• The Eternal Ones of the Dream: Selected Poems, 1990-2010 by James Tate
• Almost Invisible by Mark Strand
• Bright Brave Phenomena: Poems by Amanda Nadelberg
• Home Burial by Michael McGriff
• The Alphabet Not Unlike the World: Poems by Katrina Vandenberg
• In the Futurity Lounge: Asylum for Indeterminacy: Poems by Marjorie Welish
• Pity the Beautiful: Poems by Dana Gioia

Maurice Sendak died Saturday.  (Links to tributes here from NCPR).  We don’t have many titles by Sendak, although we do have this overview of his career as an artist.  The wonderful Canton Free Library has, of course, his major works and it would be worth a walk to spend a little late spring time with Maurice Sendak.  There is magic in “We’ll eat you up we love you so! And Max said ‘NO!'”  The magic of monsters and the magic of simplicity I suppose–how each line in Where the Wild Things Are slips off the previous like rain, like wooden blocks tumbling.  Max is everybody either in remembering oneself or remembering one’s secret wishes.  Yup, worth a walk to the Canton Free Library…

…now that you’ve read the vampire books we have, here’s the theory behind them:

• Blood Read : the Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture Edited by Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger
• Bram Stoker : a Biography of the Author of Dracula by Barbara Belford
• The Darkling : a Treatise on Slavic Vampirism by Jan L. Perkowski
• Dracula : Between Tradition and Modernism by Carol A. Senf
• From Demons to Dracula : the Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth by Matthew Beresford
• Hollywood Gothic : the Tangled web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen by David J. Skal
• The Living Dead : A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature by James B. Twitchell
• The Lure of the Vampire : Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy by Milly Williamson

Like Vampires, read Byron!

…while this article from PC World is largely about Microsoft, it does give current browser share numbers. In a word, more good news for Firefox and Chrome.

One of the real joys of Firefox are the add-ons. Recent news on new Youtube add-ons for Firefox has just come down the pipe…for an overview of Firefox add-ons see the notes for a presentation back a year or two ago, but still current in terms of the add-ons as concept, and the add-ons it covers.

For information on what Chrome is and how Google is positioning it to be a web-based operating system, see these powerpoint notes for a presentation I did last December. Even though it’s a powerpoint it will still provide commentary on what Google is up to (warning, some sardonic comments about Google along the way…)

…we’re back, tanned, rested, and ready as was once quipped in a Saturday Night Live skit back long ago when Saturday Night Live was watchable. Lately, on the television and elsewhere, the debate about a national health care plan is dominating the air waves.  We have many helpful titles on this subject and via an Encore search and a few terms like medical policy United States we find:

• The Public-Private Health Care State: Essays on the History of American Health Care Policy by Rosemary Stevens
• Differential Diagnoses: A Comparative History of Health Care Problems and Solutions in the United States and France by Paul V. Dutton
• Truth, Lies, and Public Health: How We are Affected When Politics and Science Collide by Madelon Ludin Finkel
• Shredding the Social Contract: The Privatization of Medical Care by John Geyman
• Medicare: A Policy Primer by Marilyn Moon
• One Nation Uninsured: Why the U.S. Has No National Health Insurance by Jill Quadagno

Plenty of perspective on this ongoing, important, and emotional debate…

…the Center for Disease Control has published and highlighted information on Swine Flu, and on the current outbreak in North America and Mexico…

…last week (while I wasn’t blogging) I was asked to track down the scope of peer reviewed research that is pubilshed on the open web, that is, the Internet one can access through any browser. The results are compiled here.  This doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, but it is a list I’ll vouch for.  The possiblities of open access publishing of scholarly material were outlined some years ago in a Subversive Proposal by Steven Harnard, and while the items on my little list are the subversion Harnard had in mind, they are, a step?

…having heard Kindles being warmly praised at a cocktail part this weekend, I find a couple of things on Kindle technology Monday morning…Seth Godin (who I just linked to with good advice about networking) has some good advice for Amazon.com about how to vision Kindle, I like his suggestion that Amazon ask it’s customers “how can you use this platform to create a new business model?” (rather than augment a model). However, Farhad Manjoo writes that Amazon has implemented a number of onerous restrictions on book buyers, or, those content for their Kindle. In a word, to Kindle means to use Amazon to the exclusion of anyone else, to Kindle is to kill the concept of the “used book.” The Used Book, see, Birch Bark Books, Colton New York.

…now that the Ecomonic Stimulus Package is in under consideration by Congress (officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan), there are a number of resources that will allow you to follow legislative action “blow by blow.”  LexisNexis Congressional has search features for reserach on Bills and Laws including legislative histories, as well as searches for committee memberships, daily congressional action, and “hot politics.”  On the open web there his (and there has always been) Thomas, the Library of Congress’ legislative search engine.  Thomas allows for many of the same searches, and for bill tracking…that is following the path of legislation and amendments to said through the maze of committees. All of this means that one doesn’t have to rely on the media (CNN or otherwise) to see how this plan (and the tremendous amount of money this plan constitutes) evolves…