Listing entries tagged with literature

quoting a quote   02.10.2006, 3:23 PM

Bud Parr, author of the blog Chekhov's Mistress and commenter on if:book, recently posted on a speech given by Susan Sontag, entitled "Literature is Freedom."

Quoting, his favorite quote:

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted - made cynical, superficial - by this understanding.

Literature can tell us what the world is like.

Literature can give us standards and pass on deep knowledge, incarnated in language, in narrative.

Literature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours.

At the institute, we often describe the "book" as both a vessel (technology) and text (information) especially as we work on revising our mission statement. Even so, and only speaking for myself, it is still very easy to get caught up in things like networks, copyright policy, and Web 2.0, which are, of course, all important topics. Sontag's quote is a good reminder of not just what resides in the vessel of the book, but why its contents are valuable.

Posted by ray cha at 03:23 PM | Comments (2)
tags: bud_parr , chekhovsmistress , digital_literature , literature , susan_sontag

X_Reloaded.   01.24.2006, 4:43 PM

This is a bilingual (English/Spanish) post. Spanish version can be found lower down.

Santofile, uses "meme" to allude to creative freedom in the digital world. Meme is mimesis and is self-generating. It refers to mediation in the sense of remix and appropriation, to the mixing of works that circulate in the Internet in order to produce an original piece. Among Santofile's projects is X_Reloaded, an interpretation of the first chapter of Don Quixote, compiled from disparate works inspired by the fourth centennial of its publication.

They put together such diverse creators as William Burroughs and Adbusters, whose common context is precisely the idea of busting. Busting decontextualizes a piece (work of art, advertisement, text) causing it to lose its character as a static icon by giving it a new life inside a new context.

To choose Don Quixote as the text for X_Reloaded, is an allusion to the concept of remix per excellence. Cervantes appropriated chivalry novels with the intention to subvert the genre, and his final remix, decontextualized, is a unique and original work. Printing itself in Cervantes' times required a highly legible copy, which wasn't necessarily the original manuscript. Thus, the "original" was a copy made by one or more amanuenses. And from this "original" corrected by the author, a sort of predecessor of proofreading, the book was put together by the typesetter, with its consequent errata. It is interesting to note that the Spanish Royal Academy's edition of Don Quixote, that celebrates its fourth centennial, claims to be based on about a hundred editions, old and new. If this is not remix, what is?

Cervantes himself is absolutely aware of what he is doing, and of the subversive character of his action. When Don Quixote reads, we don't know who is the madman, him or the one who wrote this:

The reason of the unreason with which my reason is afflicted so weakens my reason that with reason I murmur at your beauty.

Don Quixote changed forever the way novels were written, and three centuries later, Borges' "Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote" would change forever the way one reads. Pierre Menard writes Don Quixote without ceasing to be Pierre Menard, demonstrating how it is possible to transform a text without altering a single word. Decontextualization was inaugurated.

Following that tradition, X_Loaded presents us jodi's map, images like, Olia Lialina's, the conceptual text of Jennny Holzer, or Rosa Llop's windmills.

With her windmills we have to say with Don Quixote, they are indeed giants.

X_Reloaded en español.

Santofile, usa el concepto de meme para aludir a libertad de creación en el mundo digital. Meme es mimesis y es autogenerador. Se refiere a mediación, en el sentido de remix, de mezclar apropiándose de trabajos de otros, generalmente trabajo digital que circula por la red, para a la vez producir una nueva obra original. Entre sus proyectos está X_Reloaded una interpretación del capítulo primero de El Quijote, que recoge obras dispares inspiradas por el cuarto centenario de su publicación.,

Se reúnen creadores tan disímiles como William Burroughs y Adbusters, cuyo contexto común sería precisamente la idea de romper, de volver trizas, que está en el seno mismo del verbo "to bust". Al descontextualizar lo que se quiere romper, se le roba permanencia como ícono estático y se le confiere nueva vida dentro de un nuevo contexto.

El escoger precisamente El Quijote como texto para X_Reloaded, es aludir al remix por excelencia. Cervantes se apropia de las novelas de caballería para subvertir el génro, y su remix final, al descontextualizarlas, es una obra única y original. La impresión misma del texto en tiempos de Cervantes, requería de una copia altamente legible, lo que no necesariamente era el manuscrito original. De ahí que el "original" eran una copia hecha por uno o más amanuenses. Y de ese "original"corregido por el autor, salía el libro, armado por el cajista, con sus consiguientes errores. Es interesante notar que la edición de la Real Academia Española, con motivo del cuarto centenario de El Quijote, es un "texto crítico de la obra constituido sobre la consulta de cerca de un centenar de ediciones antiguas y modernas". Si esto no es remix, ¿qué es?

Cervantes mismo es absolutamente consciente de lo que está haciendo, y del carácter subversivo de su acción. Cuando Don Qujiote lee no sabemos si es él el loco, o el que escribió esto:

La razón de la sinrazón que a mi razón se hace, de tal manera mi razón enflaquece, que con razón me quejo de la vuestra fermosura

El Quijote va a cambiar para siempre la manera como se escribe y tres siglos más tarde, "Pierre Menard autor del Quijote" de Borges, va a cambiar la manera como se lee. Pierre Menard escribe El Quijote sin dejar de ser Pierre Menard, demostrando cómo se transforma un texto sin cambiarlo, inaugurando la descontextualización.

Siguiendo esta tradición, X_Loaded nos presenta el mapa de jodi, imágenes como la de, Olia Lialina', el texto conceptual de Jennny Holzer, o los molinos de viento de Rosa Llop'. Y con ellos, tenemos que decir con Don Quijote, los molinos son en verdad gigantes. Rosa Llop. Y con ellos, tenemos que decir con Don Quijote, los molinos son en verdad gigantes.

Posted by sol gaitan at 04:43 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Remix , art , bilingual , books , cervantes , decontextualization , don_quixote , literature , logo , net_art , spanish , windmill

making games matter   12.14.2005, 3:08 PM

Making Games Matter, a roundtable discussion on the past, present and future of games at Parsons the New School for Design (12/9/05), was a thought-provoking event that brought together an interesting, and heterogeneous, group of experimental game developers, game designers, and seasoned academics. Participants ranged from the creators of Half-Life, Paranoia, and Adventure for the Atari 2600 to theorists of play history and game culture. This meeting was part of DEATHMATCH IN THE STACKS celebrating the launch of The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology, edited by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, and published by MIT Press. The book is a collection of essays that spans 50 years of game design and game studies.

The need to define the present of games was central to the conversation. The academics find that there is a lack of a precise vocabulary exclusive to games. At the same time, they question the use of certain terms by game designers. Videogames started outside the academy and they exhibit a certain hybrid nature, especially as they incorporate aspects of many disciplines. Now, when they are claiming their academic legitimacy, they encounter the "territorial" resistance distinctive of academia. Film or literature, for instance, can be defined within their own terms, but game theory still borrows from other disciplines to define itself. Even though games function as abstract linguistic systems, there is a resistance to analyze and to validate them. "Interactive narrative" is a new concept and it should be studied as such, not by substituting or superimposing it to other disciplines.

The term "industry" that kept coming up in the conversation, was questioned by one of the participants, as it was the use of the verb "to play" in reference to what one does with a videogame. However, do film schools question that film is an industry? What is book publishing anyway? On the other hand, the interactive nature of games, the fact that the players are part of them, is intimately tied to the notions of pleasure and enjoyment that are at the core of the concept of playing. New forms of media technology replace each other, but everyone who has played as a child has used some sort of toy, a medium for amusement and imaginative pretense. So, in fact, one "plays" videogames. When these questions were raised, game designers brought up, as a sort of definer, the differentiation between the industry as producer and the gamer as part of a community. This difference is illustrated in an article by Seth Schiesel, "For the Online Star Wars Game, It's Revenge of the Fans," in The New York Times (12/10/05). He reports on how for the players of the online Star Wars game, the camaraderie and friendship they developed with other players became far more important than playing itself, as they formed "relationships that can be hard to replicate in 'real life.'" This affirmation in itself provocative, raises important questions.

Last month, LucasArts and Sony's online game division, which have run Star Wars Galaxies since its introduction in 2003, unsatisfied with the product's moderate success, radically revamped the game in an attempt to appeal to a younger audience. But to thousands of players, mostly adults, the shifts have meant the destruction of online communities. "We just feel violated," said Carolyn R. Hocke, 46, a marketing Web technician for Ministry Medical Group and St. Michael's Hospital in Stevens Point, Wis. "For them to just come along and destroy our community has prompted a lot of death-in-the-family-type grieving," she said. "They went through the astonishment and denial, then they went to the anger part of it, and now they are going through the sad and helpless part of grieving. I work in the health-care industry, and it's very similar." One of the participants in Making Games Matter, referred to games as "stylized social interaction," and Scheisel's report shows a strikingly real side of those interactions.

After the roundtable, there was an event described as "an evening of discussion and playful debate with game critics, game creators, and game players about the past, present, and future of games." The make-up of the group shows a refreshing permeability that academia is reluctant to acknowledge, but that is enriching and opens up all kinds of possibilities for experimentation and innovation well beyond the mere notion of play.

Posted by sol gaitan at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Games , atari , literature , videogames

the poetry archive - nice but a bit mixed up   12.09.2005, 11:40 AM

Last week U.K. Poet Laureate Andrew Motion and recording producer Richard Carrington rolled out The Poetry Archive, a free (sort of) web library that aims to be "the world's premier online collection of recordings of poets reading their work" -- "to help make poetry accessible, relevant and enjoyable to a wide audience." The archive naturally focuses on British poets, but offers a significant selection of english-language writers from the U.S. and the British Commonwealth countries. Seamus Heaney is serving as president of the archive.

For each poet, a few streamable mp3s are available, including some rare historic recordings dating back to the earliest days of sound capture, from Robert Browning to Langston Hughes. The archive also curates a modest collection of children's poetry, and invites teachers to use these and other recordings in the classroom, also providing tips for contacting poets so schools, booksellers and community organizations (again, this is focused on Great Britain) can arrange readings and workshops. While some of this advice seems useful, but it reads more like a public relations/ecudation services page on a publisher's website. Is this a public archive or a poets' guild?

The Poetry Archive is a nice resource as both historic repository and contemporary showcase, but the mission seems a bit muddled. They say they're an archive, but it feels more like a CD store.

Throughout, the archive seems an odd mix of public service and professional leverage for contemporary poets. That's all well and good, but it could stand a bit more of the former. Beyond the free audio offerings (which are quite skimpy), CDs are available for purchase that include a much larger selection of recordings. The archive is non-profit, and they seem to be counting in significant part on these sales to maintain operations. Still, I would add more free audio, and focus on selling individual recordings and playlists as downloads -- the iTunes model. Having streaming teasers and for-sale CDs as the only distribution models seems wrong-headed, and a bit disingenuous if they are to call themselves an archive. It would also be smart to sell subscriptions to the entire archive, with institutional rates for schools. Podcasting would also be a good idea -- a poem a day to take with you on your iPod, weaving poetry into daily life.

There's a growing demand on the web for the spoken word, from audiobooks, podcasts, to performed poetry. The archive would probably do a lot better if they made more of their collection free, and at the same time provided a greater variety of ways to purchase recordings.

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:40 AM | Comments (2)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , archive , audio , audiobooks , library , literature , mp3 , poetry , sound

google on the air   12.06.2005, 12:34 AM

Open Source's hour on the Googlization of libraries was refreshingly light on the copyright issue and heavier on questions about research, reading, the value of libraries, and the public interest. With its book-scanning project, Google is a private company taking on the responsibilities of a public utility, and Siva Vaidhyanathan came down hard on one of the company's chief legal reps for the mystery shrouding their operations (scanning technology, algorithms and ranking system are all kept secret). The rep reasonably replied that Google is not the only digitization project in town and that none of its library partnerships are exclusive. But most of his points were pretty obvious PR boilerplate about Google's altruism and gosh darn love of books. Hearing the counsel's slick defense, your gut tells you it's right to be suspicious of Google and to keep demanding more transparency, clearer privacy standards and so on. If we're going to let this much information come into the hands of one corporation, we need to be very active watchdogs.

Our friend Karen Schneider then joined the fray and as usual brought her sage librarian's perspective. She's thrilled by the possibilities of Google Book Search, seeing as it solves the fundamental problem of library science: that you can only search the metadata, not the texts themselves. But her enthusiasm is tempered by concerns about privatization similar to Siva's and a conviction that a research service like Google can never replace good librarianship and good physical libraries. She also took issue with the fact that Book Search doesn't link to other library-related search services like Open Worldcat. She has her own wrap-up of the show on her blog.

Rounding out the discussion was Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, a cybertext studies blogger and professor of english at the University of Maryland. Kirschenbaum addressed the question of how Google, and the web in general, might be changing, possibly eroding, our reading practices. He nicely put the question in perspective, suggesting that scattershot, inter-textual, "snippety" reading is in fact the older kind of reading, and that the idea of sustained, deeply immersed involvement with a single text is largely a romantic notion tied to the rise of the novel in the 18th century.

A satisfying hour, all in all, of the sort we should be having more often. It was fun brainstorming with Brendan Greeley, the Open Source on "blogger-in-chief," on how to put the show together. Their whole bit about reaching out to the blogosphere for ideas and inspiration isn't just talk. They put their money where their mouth is. I'll link to the podcast when it becomes available.

image: Real Gabinete Português de Literatura, Rio de Janeiro - Claudio Lara via Flickr

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:34 AM | Comments (2)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , copyright , digitization , ebook , google , google_book_search , google_print , library , literature , metadata , reading , search

thinking about google books: tonight at 7 on radio open source   12.05.2005, 4:58 PM

While visiting the Experimental Television Center in upstate New York this past weekend, Lisa found a wonderful relic in a used book shop in Owego, NY -- a small, leatherbound volume from 1962 entitled "Computers," which IBM used to give out as a complimentary item. An introductory note on the opening page reads:

The machines do not think -- but they are one of the greatest aids to the men who do think ever invented! Calculations which would take men thousands of hours -- sometimes thousands of years -- to perform can be handled in moments, freeing scientists, technicians, engineers, businessmen, and strategists to think about using the results.

This echoes Vannevar Bush's seminal 1945 essay on computing and networked knowledge, "As We May Think", which more or less prefigured the internet, web search, and now, the migration of print libraries to the world wide web. Google Book Search opens up fantastic possibilities for research and accessibility, enabling readers to find in seconds what before might have taken them hours, days or weeks. Yet it also promises to transform the very way we conceive of books and libraries, shaking the foundations of major institutions. Will making books searchable online give us more time to think about the results of our research, or will it change the entire way we think? By putting whole books online do we begin the steady process of disintegrating the idea of the book as a bounded whole and not just a sequence of text in a massive database?

The debate thus far has focused too much on the legal ramifications -- helped in part by a couple of high-profile lawsuits from authors and publishers -- failing to take into consideration the larger cognitive, cultural and institutional questions. Those questions will hopefully be given ample air time tonight on Radio Open Source.

Tune in at 7pm ET on local public radio or stream live over the web. The show will also be available later in the week as a podcast.

Posted by ben vershbow at 04:58 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , books , copyright , ebook , google , google_book_search , google_print , library , literature , radio , research , university

sober thoughts on google: privatization and privacy   11.30.2005, 8:18 AM

Siva Vaidhyanathan has written an excellent essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the "risky gamble" of Google's book-scanning project -- some of the most measured, carefully considered comments I've yet seen on the issue. His concerns are not so much for the authors and publishers that have filed suit (on the contrary, he believes they are likely to benefit from Google's service), but for the general public and the future of libraries. Outsourcing to a private company the vital task of digitizing collections may prove to have been a grave mistake on the part of Google's partner libraries. Siva:

The long-term risk of privatization is simple: Companies change and fail. Libraries and universities last.....Libraries should not be relinquishing their core duties to private corporations for the sake of expediency. Whichever side wins in court, we as a culture have lost sight of the ways that human beings, archives, indexes, and institutions interact to generate, preserve, revise, and distribute knowledge. We have become obsessed with seeing everything in the universe as "information" to be linked and ranked. We have focused on quantity and convenience at the expense of the richness and serendipity of the full library experience. We are making a tremendous mistake.

This essay contains in abundance what has largely been missing from the Google books debate: intellectual courage. Vaidhyanathan, an intellectual property scholar and "avowed open-source, open-access advocate," easily could have gone the predictable route of scolding the copyright conservatives and spreading the Google gospel. But he manages to see the big picture beyond the intellectual property concerns. This is not just about economics, it's about knowledge and the public interest.

What irks me about the usual debate is that it forces you into a position of either resisting Google or being its apologist. But this fails to get at the real bind we all are in: the fact that Google provides invaluable services and yet is amassing too much power; that a private company is creating a monopoly on public information services. Sooner or later, there is bound to be a conflict of interest. That is where we, the Google-addicted public, are caught. It's more complicated than hip versus square, or good versus evil.

Here's another good piece on Google. On Monday, The New York Times ran an editorial by Adam Cohen that nicely lays out the privacy concerns:

Google says it needs the data it keeps to improve its technology, but it is doubtful it needs so much personally identifiable information. Of course, this sort of data is enormously valuable for marketing. The whole idea of "Don't be evil," though, is resisting lucrative business opportunities when they are wrong. Google should develop an overarching privacy theory that is as bold as its mission to make the world's information accessible - one that can become a model for the online world. Google is not necessarily worse than other Internet companies when it comes to privacy. But it should be doing better.

Two graduate students in Stanford in the mid-90s recognized that search engines would the most important tools for dealing with the incredible flood of information that was then beginning to swell, so they started indexing web pages and working on algorithms. But as the company has grown, Google's admirable-sounding mission statement -- "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" -- has become its manifest destiny, and "information" can now encompass the most private of territories.

At one point it simply meant search results -- the answers to our questions. But now it's the questions as well. Google is keeping a meticulous record of our clickstreams, piecing together an enormous database of queries, refining its search algorithms and, some say, even building a massive artificial brain (more on that later). What else might they do with all this personal information? To date, all of Google's services are free, but there may be a hidden cost.

"Don't be evil" may be the company motto, but with its IPO earlier this year, Google adopted a new ideology: they are now a public corporation. If web advertising (their sole source of revenue) levels off, then investors currently high on $400+ shares will start clamoring for Google to maintain profits. "Don't be evil to us!" they will cry. And what will Google do then?

images: New York Public Library reading room by Kalloosh via Flickr; archive of the original Google page

Posted by ben vershbow at 08:18 AM | Comments (7)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Libraries, Search and the Web , books , copyright , ethics , google , google_book_search , google_print , intellectual_property , libraries , library , literature , privacy , publishing , university

world digital library   11.22.2005, 7:41 AM

The Library of Congress has announced plans for the creation of a World Digital Library, "a shared global undertaking" that will make a major chunk of its collection freely available online, along with contributions from other national libraries around the world. From The Washington Post:

...[the] goal is to bring together materials from the United States and Europe with precious items from Islamic nations stretching from Indonesia through Central and West Africa, as well as important materials from collections in East and South Asia.

Google has stepped forward as the first corporate donor, pledging $3 million to help get operations underway. At this point, there doesn't appear to be any direct connection to Google's Book Search program, though Google has been working with LOC to test and refine its book-scanning technology.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:41 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , books , digital , google , library , library_of_congress , literature , preservation , scanning

the book in the network - masses of metadata   11.15.2005, 6:42 PM

In this weekend's Boston Globe, David Weinberger delivers the metadata angle on Google Print:

...despite the present focus on who owns the digitized content of books, the more critical battle for readers will be over how we manage the information about that content-information that's known technically as metadata.

...we're going to need massive collections of metadata about each book. Some of this metadata will come from the publishers. But much of it will come from users who write reviews, add comments and annotations to the digital text, and draw connections between, for example, chapters in two different books.

As the digital revolution continues, and as we generate more and more ways of organizing and linking books-integrating information from publishers, libraries and, most radically, other readers-all this metadata will not only let us find books, it will provide the context within which we read them.

The book in the network is a barnacled spirit, carrying with it the sum of its various accretions. Each book is also its own library by virtue not only of what it links to itself, but of what its readers are linking to, of what its readers are reading. Each book is also a milk crate of earlier drafts. It carries its versions with it. A lot of weight for something physically weightless.

Posted by ben vershbow at 06:42 PM | Comments (0)
tags: ISBN , Libraries, Search and the Web , books , ebook , electronic_literature , folksonomy , google , google_print , hypertext , library , literature , marginalia , metadata , social_software , tagging , weinberger

playaways hit the market   11.13.2005, 2:55 PM

Over the next few weeks, shoppers at Borders and Barnes and Noble will get a first look at a new form of audiobook, one that seems halfway between an ipod and those greeting cards that play a tune when opened. Playaways are digitized audio books that come embedded in their own playing device; they sell, for the most part, for only slightly more than audio books on cassette or CD. Each Playaway is also wrapped in a replica of the book jacket of the original printed volume: the idea is that users are supposed to walk around with these deck-of-card-sized players dangling around their necks advertising exactly what it is they're listening to (If you're the type who always tries to sneak a glance at the book jacket of the person who's sitting next to you on the bus or subway, the Playaway will make your life much easier). Findaway has about 40 titles ready for release, including Khaled Hosseini's Kite Runner, Doris Kearns Goodwin's American Colossus: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, and language training in French, German, Spanish and Italian.

I'm a bit puzzled by the Playaways. I can understand why publishing industry executives would be excited about them, but I'm not so about consumers. The self-contained players are being marketed to an audience that wants an audiobook but doesn't want to be bothered with CD or MP3 players. The happy customers pictured on the Playaway website are both young and middle aged, but I suspect the real audience for these players would be older Americans who have sworn off computer literacy, and I don't know that these folks are listening to audio books through headphones.

Speaking of older Americans, if you go down into my parent's basement, you'll see a few big shopping bags of books-on-tape that they bought, listened to once, and then found too expensive to throw out yet impossible to give away. This seems clearly to be the future of the Playaways, which can be listened to repeatedly (if you keep changing the batteries) but can't play anything else than the book they were intended to play. The throwaway nature of the Playaway (suggested, of course, by the very name of the device) is addressed on the company's website, which provides helpful suggestions on how to get rid of the things once you don't want 'em anymore. According to the website, you can even ask the Playaway people to send you a stamped envelope addressed to a charitable organization that would be happy to take your Playaway.

This begs the obvious question: what if that organization wants to get rid of the Playway? And so on?
How many times will Playaway shell out a stamp to keep their players out of the landfill?

Posted by lisa lynch at 02:55 PM | Comments (4)
tags: audio , audio_books , audiobooks , books , ipod , literature , mp3 , reading

ebr is back   11.07.2005, 12:49 AM

ebr is back after a several month hiatus during which time it was overhauled. The site, published by AltX was among the first places where the “technorati meets the literati” and I always found it attractive for its emphasis on sustained analysis of digital artifacts and the occasional pop culture reference. The latest project, first person series, seems to answer a lot of what bob finds attractive in the blogs of juan cole and others. And although I’ve heard ebr called “too linear” (as compared to Vectors, USC’s e-journal) the interface goes a long way toward solving the problem of the scrolling feature of many sites/blogs which privilege what’s new. The interweaving threads with search capabilities seem quite hearty.

Posted by virginia kuhn at 12:49 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Online , books , digital , e-literature , ebook , ebr , literati , literature , theory , web

pages à la carte   11.04.2005, 7:20 AM

The New York Times reports on programs being developed by both Amazon and Google that would allow readers to purchase online access to specific sections of books -- say, a single recipe from a cookbook, an individual chapter from a how-to manual, or a particular short story or poem from an anthology. Such a system would effectively "unbind" books into modular units that consumers patch into their online reading, just as iTunes blew apart the integrity of the album and made digital music all about playlists. We become scrapbook artists.

It seems Random House is in on this too, developing a micropayment model and consulting closely with the two internet giants. Pages would sell for anywhere between five and 25 cents each.

Posted by ben vershbow at 07:20 AM | Comments (1)
tags: Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , Transliteracies , amazon , books , e-commerce , google , google_print , literature , media_consumption , publishing , randomhouse , reading

google print's not-so-public domain   11.03.2005, 4:16 PM

Google's first batch of public domain book scans is now online, representing a smattering of classics and curiosities from the collections of libraries participating in Google Print. Essentially snapshots of books, they're not particularly comfortable to read, but they are keyword-searchable and, since no copyright applies, fully accessible.

The problem is, there really isn't all that much there. Google's gotten a lot of bad press for its supposedly cavalier attitude toward copyright, but spend a few minutes browsing Google Print and you'll see just how publisher-centric the whole affair is. The idea of a text being in the public domain really doesn't amount to much if you're only talking about antique manuscripts, and these are the only books that they've made fully accessible. Daisy Miller's copyright expired long ago but, with the exception of Harvard's illustrated 1892 copy, all the available scanned editions are owned by modern publishers and are therefore only snippeted. This is not an online library, it's a marketing program. Google Print will undeniably have its uses, but we shouldn't confuse it with a library.

(An interesting offering from the stacks of the New York Public Library is this mid-19th century biographic registry of the wealthy burghers of New York: "Capitalists whose wealth is estimated at one hundred thousand dollars and upwards...")

Posted by ben vershbow at 04:16 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Copyright and Copyleft , Libraries, Search and the Web , OCR , books , copyright , ebook , google , google_print , library , literature , public_domain , scan

electronic literature collection - call for works   11.03.2005, 12:35 PM

The Electronic Literature Organization seeks submissions for the first Electronic Literature Collection. We invite the submission of literary works that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the computer. Works will be accepted until January 31, 2006. Up to three works per author will be considered.

The Electronic Literature Collection will be an annual publication of current and older electronic literature in a form suitable for individual, public library, and classroom use. The publication will be made available both online, where it will be available for download for free, and as a packaged, cross-platform CD-ROM, in a case appropriate for library processing, marking, and distribution. The contents of the Collection will be offered under a Creative Commons license so that libraries and educational institutions will be allowed to duplicate and install works and individuals will be free to share the disc with others.

The editorial collective for the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, to be published in 2006, is:

N. Katherine Hayles
Nick Montfort
Scott Rettberg
Stephanie Strickland

Go here for full submission guidelines.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:35 PM | Comments (0)
tags: art , digital_literature , e-literature , eliterature , fiction , hypertext , literature , multimedia , poetry , writing

transliterature: can humanism transform the web?   10.25.2005, 3:03 PM

For decades now, hypertext guru Ted Nelson has slipped in and out of public awareness, often left for dead or permanently exiled in Xanadu, only to re-emerge suddenly in a wonderful burst of curmudgeonly dissent. A recent Slashdot thread discusses his latest project, or more accurately, the latest stage in his ongoing quest: transliterature, "a humanist format for re-usable documents and media," or, an alternative to the constricting protocols of the world wide web. What exactly will this new format entail? It's hard to tell. But Nelson's plea is worth heeding:

The tekkies have hijacked literature- with the best intentions, of course!-) - but now the humanists have to get it back. Nearly every form of electronic document- Word, Acrobat, HTML, XML- represents some business or ideological agenda. Many believe Word and Acrobat are out to entrap users; HTML and XML enact a very limited kind of hypertext with great internal complexity. All imitate paper and (internally) hierarchy. I propose a different document agenda: I believe we need new electronic documents which are transparent, public, principled, and freed from the traditions of hierarchy and paper. In that case they can be far more powerful, with deep and rich new interconnections and properties- able to quote dynamically from other documents and buckle sideways to other documents, such as comments or successive versions; able to present third-party links; and much more. Most urgently: if we have different document structures we can build a new copyright realm, where everything can be freely and legally quoted and remixed in any amount without negotiation.

Nelson is always given a nod as the coiner of "hypertext", but his other concepts -- "transclusion", "virtual rearrangement", "clinks," for example -- are largely dismissed, or simply unknown to most people. But elements of his thinking can be observed far and wide in some of the emerging practices -- blogging, wikis, APIs -- of what people are calling "Web 2.0", or, the web as operating system. Over the past few years, the web has transformed from an interlinked series of brochures into a massive hypertext conversation, a platform in which we are increasingly able to weave, quote and track back to other documents. This is at least in the neighborhood of what Nelson is talking about.

Granted, the microeconomy of quotation (transclusion) that Nelson envisions has not yet materialized, but that may only be because he is thinking so far ahead of his time. Staying focused on the present, it's worth taking a look at what is developing with online advertising. Keyword ads, Google's "AdSense", Amazon's web services, and even voluntary donation models like PayPal tip jars -- couldn't you say these are the humble foundations of an online micropayment economy? The explosion of electronic self-publishing has not as yet produced an equivelant commercial rigging, but with blogging now accepted as an important medium, that could soon change.

The next generation of publishing software may include a more robust infrastructure that could support some kind of quotation or cross-referencing economy. Right now, the few blogs that make money do so by encrusting themselves with ads. Advertisers will buy space if the site can demonstrate impressive traffic stats. But doesn't this all sort of skirt around the edge of what makes blogging exciting and influential? What if talented bloggers could earn money when significant portions of their writing were quoted?

You can already quote images, video and sound in the way Nelson dreams of quoting text: by loading it remotely, i.e. from another location on the internet. Of course, there is no microtransaction infrastructure in place. It's much more roughshod than that. You simply pull html from the source site, or embed the file's address in a media player, and plug it in your page. That's how I've transcluded John Ashbery reading his poem "The Tennis Court Oath" (source - ubuweb):

There's still a long way to go, but the points of contact with Nelson's theories are many. For me, it's his humanist philosophy, more than the fuzzy mechanics of his proposed system, that is most inspiring. There's a generosity, an understanding of the interdependency of form and content, that is conspicuously absent in the prevailing tekkie culture. Perhaps the thinker closest of kin to Nelson was Jef Raskin, whose work on the humane interface is founded on many of the same convictions about usability and connectedness. I also find there's a kind of poetry in Nelson's dream of a literary hypertext economy, captured not only in his writings but in his frayed, manic illustrations (transquoted here):

I think he's a kindred spirit of the institute too. Here's Nelson on electronic literature (sadly, not transquoted, just cut-and-paste):

What is literature? Literature is (among other things) the study and design of documents, their structure and connections. Therefore today's electronic documents are literature, electronic literature, and the question is what electronic literature people really need.

Electronic literature should belong to all the world, not just be hoarded by a priesthood, and it should do what people need in order to organize and present human ideas with the least difficulty in the richest possible form.

A document is not necessarily a simulation of paper. In the most general sense, a document is a package of ideas created by human minds and addressed to human minds, intended for the furtherance of those ideas and those minds. Human ideas manifest as text, connections, diagrams and more: thus how to store them and present them is a crucial issue for civilization.

The furtherance of the ideas, and the furtherance of the minds that present them and take them in, are the real objectives. And so what is important in documents is the expression, reception and re-use of ideas. Connections, annotations, and most especially re-use-- the traceable flow of content among documents and their versions-- must be our central objectives, not the simulation of paper.

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:03 PM | Comments (2)
tags: Transliteracies , design_curmudgeonry , digital_literature , ebooks , history_of_interactive_media , html , hypertext , internet , literature , ted_nelson , transclusion , transliterature , web , web_2.0 , xanadu

pinter and the nobel prize   10.13.2005, 5:08 PM

Twice in one year now the Swedish academy has used the Nobel Prize as a political swipe at the Bush administration, first giving the peace medal to Mohamed ElBaradei of the IAEA (a difference of opinion on disarmament, you could say), and today awarding the prize for literature to British playwright Harold Pinter, who in recent years has been a vocal critic of US and British policies, once referring to Tony Blair as a "deluded idiot."

But recent years aside, Pinter undoubtedly deserves the prize for his life's work in the theatre, where he developed a politics far more complex, painful and profound than what is on display in his latter-day fumings (generally right though they may be) about American empire.

In college I acted in one of Pinter's later plays, Ashes to Ashes (1996), a mysterious single act about a marriage in crisis, and a good example of the kind of frightening moral puzzle, encompassing the personal and the political, that Pinter excelled at creating. In a comfortable English living room, in a comfortable English university town, a woman seems to psychically rupture before her husband's eyes, traumatized by events she relates only in part, and which she could not possibly have been alive to experience.

She confesses to having had an affair with the warden of a Nazi death camp, and having lived with him there. She describes the horror of the place, obscenely channeling the Holocaust as a sort of sexual taunt toward her mystified husband, but at the same time communicating her distress at the slow suffocation of their marriage. It is a sickening game, but one they must play in order to cut to the heart of their relationship. Ashes to Ashes is a domestic play, but somehow the entire century speaks through it.

On a more general note, it's encouraging to see a dramatist get recognized on this scale, a statement about the continued relevance, at least in concept, of the theatre -- an unmediated medium in a thoroughly mediated age. It also says something about language. Pinter, whose bleak but darkly humorous sensibilities were formed in bombed-out, post-WWII England, uses language sparely and with scalpel-like precision. Playwright David Hare said of him:

"Pinter did what Auden said a poet should do. He cleaned the gutters of the English language, so that it ever afterwards flowed more easily and more cleanly."

His plays have the ominousness of still water, the words like stones breaking the surface. You have to read and feel the ripples. In an age where mass media, and now the internet, have devalued words, Pinter found a way to make them startling again. He also understands the power of silence.

Elevating Pinter as international spokesman for the left, the Swedes missed the point. His recent protests haven't been terribly interesting or original. But in missing, they still struck gold. All this media attention cannot really convey the power of his plays. Hopefully, this will lead to a reinvigorated interest in producing them. They still speak vitally to our times.

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:08 PM | Comments (2)
tags: afghanistan , america , books , britain , bush , drama , empire , english , harold_pinter , iraq , language , literature , nobel , nobel_prize , nobelprize , pinter , politics , theater , theatre

welcome to the 19th century   10.10.2005, 12:30 AM

The following was posted by Gary Frost as a comment to our post on Neil Postman's "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century." Gary recently returned from the Mississippi coast where he was part of a team helping to assess library and museum damage after Katrina.

The mystic advise that we walk into the darkness. Postman’s only qualification is that we do futurism with the right gear. But we cannot wander off into the future with enough AA batteries. An archeologist at the storm damaged Jefferson Davis presidential library greeted me saying; “Welcome to the19th century.” He was not kidding. No water, no electricity, no gas, no groceries. He was digging up the same artifacts for the second time in the immense debris fields left by Katrina.

We were driven to a manuscript era and we were invigorated to do our best. Strangely the cell phones worked and we talked to Washington from the 19th century. We asked if the Nation was still interested in the culture of the deep south. Not really, Transformers were at work and in our mobile society the evacuees had left for good. The army trucks were building new roads over the unmarked gravesites of 3000 Confederate veterans, who in their old age, came to Jeff Davis’ home to die.

We were left hanging about the future and technologies were a sidebar. It wasn’t really important that the 19th century had invented instantaneous communication, digital encoding or photographic representation or that the 21st century was taking the credit for its exploitation of these accomplishments. The gist was that the future deserved to be informed and not deluded. The gist was that the future would be fulfilled as a measure of its use of the accomplishments of a much longer past.

Posted by ben vershbow at 12:30 AM | Comments (1)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , archive , book , books , confederacy , confederate , digital , gulf , gulf_coast , history , hurricane , hurricane_katrina , jefferson_davis , katrina , library , literature , mississippi , paper , preservation , progress , reading , rescue , south , technology

yahoo! announces book-scanning project to rival google's   10.03.2005, 2:00 PM

Yahoo, in collaboration with The Internet Archive, Adobe, O'Reilly Media, Hewlett Packard Labs, the University of California, the University of Toronto, The National Archives of England, and others, will be participating in The Open Content Alliance, a book and media archiving project that will greatly enlarge the body of knowledge available online. At first glance, it appears the program will focus primarily on public domain works, and in the case of copyrighted books, will seek to leverage the Creative Commons.

Google Print, on the other hand, is more self-consciously a marketing program for publishers and authors (although large portions of the public domain will be represented as well). Google aims to make money off its indexing of books through keyword advertising and click-throughs to book vendors. Yahoo throwing its weight behind the "open content" movement seems on the surface to be more of a philanthropic move, but clearly expresses a concern over being outmaneuvered in the search wars. But having this stuff available online is clearly a win for the world at large.

The Alliance was conceived in large part by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. He announced the project on Yahoo's blog:

To kick this off, Internet Archive will host the material and sometimes helps with digitization, Yahoo will index the content and is also funding the digitization of an initial corpus of American literature collection that the University of California system is selecting, Adobe and HP are helping with the processing software, University of Toronto and O'Reilly are adding books, Prelinger Archives and the National Archives of the UK are adding movies, etc. We hope to add more institutions and fine tune the principles of working together.

Initial digitized material will be available by the end of the year.

More in:
NY Times
Chronicle of Higher Ed.

Posted by ben vershbow at 02:00 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Libraries, Search and the Web , archive , book , books , brewster_kahle , digital , digitize , ebook , google , google_print , googleprint , internet_archive , kahle , library , literature , reading , scanning , yahoo , yahoo!

creative versioning project   10.03.2005, 11:59 AM

"I don't have a single early draft of any novel or story. I just 'saved' over the originals until I reached the final version. All there is is the books themselves." - Zadie Smith

This is a call (re-published from the Electronic Literature Organization) for writers to participate in a creative versioning project, hopefully to begin this winter:

Matthew Kirschenbaum is looking for poets and fiction writers willing to participate in a project to archive versions of texts in progress. An electronic document repository (known as a Concurrent Versions System, or CVS) will be used to track revisions and changes to original fiction and poetry contributed by participating writers who will work by checking their drafts in and out of the repository system. The goal is to provide access to a work at each and every state of its composition and conceptual evolution ­- thereby capturing the text as a living, dynamic object-in-the-making rather than a finished end-product. A reader will be able to watch the composition process unfold as though s/he were looking over the writer’s shoulder.

For guidelines and contact info, visit ELO.

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:59 AM | Comments (2)
tags: CVS , ELO , book , books , concurrent_versioning_system , digital , digital_literature , ebook , editing , eliterature , lit , literature , novel , project , revision , revision_history , story , versioning , writing

the future of the institute   09.27.2005, 5:36 PM

lately i've been thinking about how the institute for the future of the book should be experimental in form as well as content - an organization whose work, when appropriate, is carried out in real time in a relatively public forum. one of the key themes of our first year has been the way a network adds value to an enterprise, whether that be a thought experiment, an attempt to create a collective memory, a curated archive of best practices, or a blog that gathers and processes the world around it. i sense we are feeling our way to new methods of organizing work and distributing the results, and i want to figure out ways to make that aspect of our effort more transparent, more available to the world. this probably calls for a reevaluation of (or a re-acquaintance with) our idea of what an institute actually is, or should be.

the university-based institute arose in the age of print. scholars gathering together to make headway in a particular area of inquiry wrote papers, edited journals, held symposia and printed books of the proceedings. if books are what humans have used to move big ideas around, institutes arose to focus attention on particular big ideas and to distribute the result of that attention, mostly via print. now, as the medium shifts from printed page to networked screen, the organization and methods of "institutes" will change as well.

how they will change is what we hope to find out, and in some small way, influence. so over the next year or so we'll be trying out a variety of different approaches to presenting our work, and new ways of facilitating debate and discussion. hopefully, we'll draw some of you in along the way.

here's a first try. we've decided (see thinking out loud) to initiate a weekly discussion at the institute where we read a book (or article or....) and then have a no-holds discussion about it -- hoping to at least begin to understand some of the first order questions about what we are doing and how it fits into our perspectives on society. mostly we're hoping to get to a place where we are regularly asking these questions in our work (whether designing software, studying the web, holding a symposium, or encouraging new publishing projects), measuring technological developments against a sense of what kind of society we'd like to live in and how a particular technology might help or hinder our getting there.

the first discussion is focused on neil postman's "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century." following is the audio we recorded broken into annotated chapters. we would be interested in getting people's feedback on both form and content. (jump to the discussion)

Posted by bob stein at 05:36 PM | Comments (1)
tags: Online , Thought Experiments , book , books , culture , digital , ebook , future , ideas , institute , literature , politics , publishing , reading , society , technology , web

podcast: discussing neil postman's "building a bridge to the 18th century"   09.27.2005, 5:32 PM

(Annotated audio recordings of this discussion appear further down.)

On the dedication page of "Building a Bridge to the 18th Century," Neil Postman quotes the poet Randall Jarrell:

Soon we shall know everything the 18th century didn't know, and nothing it did, and it will be hard to live with us.

Though often failing to provide satisfying answers, Postman asks the kind of first-order questions one hears all too infrequently at a time when technology's impact on our social, political and intellectual lives grows ever more profound. Postman has been accused of deep reactionism toward technology, and indeed, his hostility toward computers and telecommunications betrays an elitism that discredits some of his larger, and quite compelling observations.

In spite of this, Postman's diagnosis is persuasive: that the idea of technological progress bequeathed by the Enlightenment has detached from reason and become a runaway train, that we are unquestioningly embracing new technologies that unleash massive change on our family and communal life, our democracy, and our capacity to think critically. We have stopped asking the single most important question that should be applied to all new technological innovations: does this technology solve a problem? If so, then at what cost? To whose benefit? And at whose expense?

Postman portrays the contemporary West as a culture without a narrative, littered with the shards of broken ideologies - depressed, unmotivated, and therefore uncritical of the new technologies that are foisted upon it by a rapacious capitalist system. The culprit, as he sees it, is postmodernism, which he lambasts (rather simplistically) as a corrosive intellectual trend, picking at the corpse of the Enlightenment, and instilling torpor and malaise at all levels of culture through its distrust of language and dogged refusal to accept one truth over another. This kind of thinking, Postman argues, is seductive, but it starves humans of their inspiration and sense of purpose.

To be saved, he goes on, and to build a better future, we would do well to look back to the philosophes of 18th century Europe, who, in the face of surging industrialization, defined a new idea of universal rational humanism - one that allowed for various interpretations within its fold, was rigorously suspicious of religious or any other kind of dogma, and yet gave the world a sense of moral uplift and progress. Postman does not suggest that we copy the 18th century, but rather give it careful study in order to draw inspiration for a new positive narrative, and for a reinvigoration of our critical outlook. This, Postman insists, offers us the best chance of surviving our future.

Postman's note of alarm, if at times shrill, is nonetheless a refreshing antidote to the techno-optimism that pervades contemporary culture. And his recognition of our "crisis in narrative" - a formulation borrowed from Vaclav Havel - is dead on.

September 19: Bob, Dan, Kim, and Ben discuss Postman's book at our new Brooklyn office (special prize if you pick out the sound of the ice cream truck passing by).

1. Bob's preface - thoughts about how we do business at the institute (1:56) (download)

2. Ben's first impressions - childhood under threat... Dan's first impressions into discussion - a Clinton-era book, sets up a rather straw man caricature with the postmodernists, but society's need for a narrative is compelling - why the Christian right has done so well... Postman seems to be assuming that progress is a law, that there is a directed narrative to history - problems with how he treats evolution. (6:43) (download)

3. Bob: Postman is much better at identifying problems than at coming up with solutions. Which is what makes him compelling. His stance is courageous. People assume with technology that just because something can be done it should be done. This is a tremendous problem - an affliction. If you could go back in time and be the inventor of the automobile, would you do it? People get angry at the responsibility this question imputes to them. How can we put these big questions at the center of our work? (13:34) (download)

4. Another big question... "An electronic community is only a simulation of a real community"? Flickr, Friendster, Howard Dean campaign? What is the vehicle for talking about this? What format is best for engaging these questions? Looking for new forms that illuminate or activate the questions. (15:43) (download)

5. Where/who are the public intellectuals today? [The ice cream truck passes by.] Strange bifurcation of the intellectual elite - many of the best-educated people most able to deal with abstraction make their living producing popular media that controls society. (10:07) (download)

6. Is capitalism the problem? Postman's bias: written language will never be surpassed in its power to deal with abstract thought and cultivation of ideas. But we are arguably past the primacy of print. What is our attitude toward this? (9:39) (download)

7. What opportunities for reflection do different media afford? Films on DVD can be read and reread like a book - the viewer controls, rather than being controlled - a possibility for reflection not available in broadcast. What is the proper venue for discussing this? Capitalism is the 800 lb. gorilla in the room. How do we create, if not a mass agitation, then at least a mass discussion? Tie it to the larger pressing problems of the world and how they will be better addressed by certain forms of discourse and reflection. Averting ecological catastrophe as one possible narrative - an inspiring motivator that will get people moving. How do find our way back into history? (10:09) (download)

8. What should we read next as counterpoint/antidote to Postman? The Matrix - are we headed that way? (12:33) (download)

9. How do we organize new kinds of debates about technology and society? Other issues to be addressed - class, race and gender inequality. (11:26) (download)

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:32 PM | Comments (5)
tags: 18thcentury , Education , Thought Experiments , america , audio , benjaminfranklin , book , books , culture , debate , democracy , diderot , download , enlightenment , hume , jefferson , lit , literature , locke , matrix , neilpostman , philosophy , podcast , postman , progress , reading , reason , rousseau , science , technology , thomaspaine , voltaire

marketing books on mobile phones   09.22.2005, 5:25 PM

Harper Collins Australia's new MobileReader service beams information about new titles and authors, and even book excerpts, to a cellphone. They're beginning with promotions of Dean Koontz, Paul Coelho and others.

(via textually)

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Microlit , Publishing, Broadcast, and the Press , advertising , book , books , cellphone , culture , ebook , gadget , harpercollins , literature , marketing , media , mobile , mobilecomputing , phone , publishing , reading , smartmobs , wireless

"the minotaur project" featured at ELO   09.20.2005, 11:33 AM

Kim's hypermedia poem cluster, "The Minotaur Project," is currently featured at the Electronic Literature Organization. Highly recommended.

Posted by ben vershbow at 11:33 AM | Comments (0)
tags: Kore , Persephone , book , books , digital , digital_literature , ebook , eliterature , hypermedia , hypertext , lit , literature , minotaur , myth , mythology , poem , poetry , reading

"bringing karaoke to literature"   09.15.2005, 3:47 PM

Shanghai Daily reports on a Chinese "mini novel" contest where writers submit bite-sized narratives (350 words or less) by text message.

Commenting on the contest, well-known writer Yu Hua says: "To hold the competition is like bringing 'karaoke' to literature. Before the invention of karaoke, there were only few people who could or would sing in public. Thanks to karaoke, anyone and everyone can sing in public whenever they feel like it. Now, thanks to the mobile phone, the same is true with writing.

The karaoke analogy is apt, and a bit scary.

(via textually)

Posted by ben vershbow at 03:47 PM | Comments (0)
tags: Microlit , book , books , cellphone , china , chinese , karaoke , lit , literature , mini , mobile , mobilelit , novel , phone , writing

"In the dark woods, on the sodden ground,
I found my way only by the white of his collar."   09.14.2005, 5:30 PM

Someone is blogging Kafka's diaries, from 1910 to 1923. They're still in the first year. Either it started recently, or lost steam early at some undetermined date (the editor has opted to remove datelines from posts). Any dates added by Kafka himself are of course retained. Archives are organized by year within the span of the diaries.

I subscribed to the feed to see if it keeps updating (they're using a recent version of Movable Type - more recent than ours - so I bet things are active). It could be a nice way to read these.

There's also a blog of the diary of Samuel Pepys, which seems to have been chugging along for about two years. A nice touch is that instead of comments they have "annotations." A quick glance reveals that quite a number of people are participating in this reading.

update: Another good book blogging experiment worth checking out is Bryan Alexander's Dracula Blogged - "Bram Stoker's vampire novel, published by its own calendar" - which will conclude sometime in November. A particularly clever choice, since Dracula is largely written in letters and journal entries.

Posted by ben vershbow at 05:30 PM | Comments (0)
tags: blog , blogging , blogs , book , books , diaries , diary , franzkafka , kafka , lit , literature , pepys , reading , samuelpepys

the selected, annotated outbox of dave eggers   09.05.2005, 1:52 PM

Email killed the practice of letter-writing so suddenly that we haven't a chance to think about the consequences. The Times Book Review ran an essay this weekend on the problem this poses for literary historians, biographers and archivists, who long have relied on collected letters and papers to fill in the gaps between a writer's published work. In the same review, the Times covers a new biography of the legendary critic Edmund Wilson largely based on his correspondences, and last week covered a new collection of the letters of poet James Wright. Letters are often treated as literature in themselves.

But a crop of writers is working now whose papers are not in order. The email is rotting away on the network, unorganized, not backed-up, and, to a great extent, simply being lost for good. I actually mused about this in a post last month about an email archive visualization tool by Fernanda Viégas at M.I.T.'s Sociable Media Group that shows years of electronic correspondence as sedimentary levels in a mountain-like mass. And a mountain it is. One novelist I know in Washington has her office stacked high with milk crates containing printouts of each and every email she sends and receives, no matter how trivial. There has to be a better way.

There isn't necessarily anything less rich about email correspondence. It excels at capturing a vibrant volley of words with great immediacy, whereas paper letters permit deeper communiques, fewer and father between. But in some cases, these characterizations do not hold up. With reliable postal service, letters can fly back and forth quite rapidly. And just because an email suddenly appears in your box does not mean that it will be immediately read, let alone replied to. Sometimes we write long email letters, expecting that the receiver is busy and will take time to reply. These differences, true and false, are worth evaluating.

But if collected emails are to become a literary tool, there is no question that we will need more reliable ways of archiving and preserving digital correspondence. We will also need new editorial approaches for collecting and publishing them. A printed volume, or series of volumes, might be insufficient for presenting a massive 4 gigabyte email archive by Dave Eggers (No one wants to read the phone book from cover to cover). And according to the Times piece, Eggers' agent Andrew Wylie is mulling over such a project. What would make more sense is an electronic edition that is essentially a selected or complete annotated Eggers Outbox, with folders and tags provided for categorization, a powerful search function, and the ability to organize according to your own interests. There would also be browsing and skimming tools that would allow a reader to move rapidly across vast tracts of correspondence and still find what they are looking for. And maybe, a way to email the author yourself and become a part of the living archive.

Posted by ben vershbow at 01:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
tags: archive , book , books , computers , correspondence , digital , digital_literature , ebook , eggers , email , epistle , inbox , letter , literary , literature , mail , reading , webmail

Intertextual Community   12.12.2004, 9:58 PM

When I read about Shelly Jackson’s new project—to “publish” a story by tattooing each of its 2,095 words onto the body of a different person—I thought what a great idea, and I wondered if it might actually be telling us something about the direction books are going. As the digital book begins to emerge—glorious, ephemeral, and electric—are we going to feel compelled to make something even more intimate and rarified as counterpoint?

"Skin Literature"

Posted by Kim White at 09:58 PM | Comments (0)
tags: experimental , hypertext , intertextuality , jackson , literature , narrative , publishing , story , tattoo

Three Books That Influenced Your Worldview: The List   12.07.2004, 5:06 PM

Yesterday I was thinking about the fact that books were the crucial element in the formation of my world view and wondered if that is the case with younger people. My guess yesterday morning was that people over 40 would easily come up with a list of books that influenced their way of looking at the world. Also - and this was probably the key idea I was testing - I assumed that when baby boomers came of age, specifc books (let's say a dozen titles) were a crucial element in a shared cultural zeitgeist. By contrast, today I don't see particular titles dominating the scene as they did 35 years ago.

Well . . . turns out I was pretty much wrong, at least as far as the 100+ people in my 40+ and 35- sample groups were concerned. Very few titles made it on to more than one list and I don't see dramatic differences in the lists based on age.

One remarkable fact which you'll notice when you look at the lists is the fantastic diversity in print culture. One can only dream that we will one day have such rich variety among works which are born digital.

This experiment of course hints at the bigger question: are books as important today in terms of forming world view as they were 35-40 years ago, and if not, what is taking their place? Most importantly: if not, what effect does the shift in dominant media have on the creation of world view?

If this gets anyone's juices flowing, we'd love to have suggestions about how to explore these questions further.

Continue reading for the list...

THE LIST:

Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
•
Norman O. Brown Life Against Death
Paul Goodman Growing Up Absurd
Jack Kerouac On The Road
•
The Universal Traveler, Koberg and Bagnall
Summerhill, A.S. Neill
The Whole Earth Catalog
•
1. Ayn Rand's _Anthem_ (I know, I know...liberal me shouldn't like such
things; but it came to me in a period that I needed to hear it was OK to
stand up to evil things going on all around me).

2. Mark Twain's _Letters from the Earth_ (his very dark, late writings that
completely transformed how I looked upon human belief and action)

3. Kenneth Burke's _Language as Symbolic Action_ (I didn't encounter this
one until graduate school, but his definition of man--"the symbol-using &
symbol-misusing animal"--has been indespensible on understanding things like
the latest election...).
•
merleau-ponty 'the visible and the invisible'
william mc donnaugh and michael baumgarten's 'cradle to cradle'
simon critchley 'on humour'

tho i might say that william gibson's 'neuromancer' ranks closely as
formative through being what i resist rather than embrace
•
1984, George Orwell
Independence Day, Richard Ford
The Marketing Imagination, Theodore Levitt
•
Communist Manifesto
Story of O
Masterpieces of French Cooking

•
Mysterious Island, Jules Verne
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
Candy, Terry Southern
•
Language, Thought, and Reality
(Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Psycholinguist)
The Tao Te Ching
The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight into Beauty Soetsu Yanagi
•
here are three that come to mind, for different reasons, in the order I
read them:

Boris Vian, L'Écume des jours
Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Chemins de la Liberté
Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
•
In Dubious Battle/John Steinbeck
Feeling & Form/Susanne K. Langer
The Art of memory/Frances B. Yates
•
beckett waiting for godot
kuhn structure of scientific revolutions
wallace stevens the necessary angel
•
Life After God - Douglas Coupland
Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Rebel - Albert Camus
•
early books would be People's History of the united states and the underside of american history collection and probably some literary work like Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations.
•
Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Katie John-- Mary Calhoun, A book for adolescents about a tomgirl who lived in a brick house in Mississippi and was a bit of a female Huck Finn.

•
books I read young enough that they may actually have had an impact on my
world view:
Little Women
Bridge to Terabithia (Katherine Paterson)
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (well, the early parts) (James Joyce)

books that were crucial in forming my world view because they led to a
violent rejection, at least at first:
S/Z (Roland Barthes)
House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)

poets who helped to form my sensibility:
Rilke (Duino Elegies)
Shakespeare (Hamlet)
Milton (Paradise Lost)
Christopher Smart
Lucie Brock-Broido

books that had a big impact but partly because I spent time learning about
them:
the dictionary / the OED / History of the English Language
the works of Anna Trapnel (obscure 17th c. prophet)
Vas de Caminha
•
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
•
To Kill A Mockingbird
Catcher in the Rye
Beloved
•
1. Karl Marx - Capital (honest!)
2. Georges Bataille - Visions of Excess
3. Howard Zinn - A People's History of the United States

bonus two:

4. David Harvey - The Condition of Postmodernity
5. Mike Davis - City of Quartz
•
Female Man by Joanna Russ
Synners by Pat Cadigan
The Social Construction of Reality by Berger and Luckman
•
Hegel, Phenomenology of MInd
Virginia Woolf, Waves
Rilke, Duino Elegies
•
100 Years of Solitude
Executioner's Song
Howard's End
•
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance
When God Was a Woman

i'll bet all of the men list Catcher in the Rye. ;-)
•
with apologies...
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (probably the same for architects but who would ever admit it?)
Catch 22 by Kurt Vonnegut (which is why i understood that i could put the Fountainhead first)
The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard (which took me to structuralism and politics before I knew it)
•
Franny & Zooey - Salinger
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Be Here Now - Ram Dasst
•
to kill a mockingbird
the sun also rises
a doll's house (okay, it's a play, but still...)
•
all of Plato
Magic Mountain
Birth of Tragedy
•
Rem Koolhaas's DELIRIOUS NEW YORK
Elaine Scarry's THE BODY IN PAIN
Joyce's PORTRAIT OF AN ARTIST...
•
Genet by Edmund White
Heretics of Dune by Frank Herbert
The Persian Boy by Mary Renault
•
Against Nature - Huysmans
Morris's Disappearing Bag - Rosemary Wells
Universe - Freedman & Kaufmann
•
Darkness at Noon (Arthur Koestler)
The Long-Distance Runner (Michael Harrington)
Don Quixote (Cervantes)
•
The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
WCWilliams' Paterson
Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning
•
Ulysses, James Joyce
Behavior in Public Places, Erving Goffman
The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels
•
Camus, The Rebel & L'etranger (count as one book ... read in Jr. High)
Old Testament, New Testament, Koran, Gita (count as one book ... read in High School)
Falukner, Yoknapatawpha Co novels ... read in HS & college (actually lots of different books could have gone in this slot ... Blake, Ginsberg, Kesey, Hemingway, Hesse, etc. come to mind ....)
•
Zorba the Greek
Call It Sleep
Crime and Punishment
•
D'Aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
The Book of Genesis
William Butler Yeats: Collected Poems (specific ones: Leda and the Swan, The Second Coming, A Prayer For My Daughtar, The Collar-Bone of a Hare, Under Ben Bulben,Lapis Lazuli, The Circus Animals' Desertion, and so many others).
•
I've listed three books that had, shall we say, an "early" influence and then three books that have been part of a more "mid-life" re-arrangement of this world view:

Three formative books:

1. Freud's Interpretation of Dreams
2. Tristan Tzara, "Dadaist Manifesto" (not a book) along with Lao Tze, Way of the Tao
3. Nabokov's Pale Fire

Three RE-formative books:
1. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey
2. Hardt & Negri, Empire
3. Virilio, War and Cinema
•
Charlotte's Web
Summerhill
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
•
The Big 3 books:

-- In college years, Jack Kerouac, beginning with "On the Road" and moving to " Dharma Bums," "Visions of Cody," "Big Sur," and "Dr. Sax." The whole beat category had the greatest single impact on me in the pre-Vietnam years. But if a single book of the batch has to be named, it's "On the Road." Not the best, but the one that put the rest on the map.

— young adult, Thoreau's "Walden Pond," "Civil Disobedience," and essays

— after 40, Jerry Mander's "In the Absence of the Sacred"
•
Thomas Mann's " The Magic Mountain
Arthur Koestler's The Ghost in the Machine,
Thomas Kuhn's "Scientific Paradigm"
•
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Woman by Natalie Angiers
Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut
•
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
The Killer Angels, Michael Schaara
Nory Ryan's Song, Patricia Reilly Giff
•
the truly disadvantaged by william julius Wilson
my varian microeconomics textbook
catcher in the rye.
•
Forming my world view huh?
Well, just to warn you, you're not going to get my favorite books or one's that I would necessarily recommend to others,
Respond back if you meant novels, more contemporary works, or were looking for an answer with greater utility. I can make lists all day.
but answering the question as literally as possible...

Friedrich Nietzsche - Beyond Good and Evil
Gottlieb Frege - The Foundations of Arithmetic
Emile Durkheim - The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
•
HARD QUESTION, perhaps:
El Quijote
Proust's In Search of Lost Time
Neruda's Canto general.

However
Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment
The Arabian Nights
Mann's The Magic Mountain
Plato's Dialogues
Hesse's Siddartha

and much more. Take your pick, I can't.
•
nikos kazanzakis, Report to Greco
tolstoy, war and peace
michel foucault, the birth of the clinic
•
Camus The Stranger (big bang in high school, not sure how i came across it but remember my father recommending i put it aside and read augustine instead)

Aristotle Poetics along with Pre-Socratic fragments (freshman year, raptured by how the ancients put the world together)

Henry James Portrait of a Lady (while hitchhiking through europe and sleeping in train stations, it emboldened me to think i could put my own life together how i pleased. tho, when i reread it in my 40's it was an entirely different book)
•
Malcolm X Speaks (the first book I ever read that talked about a world as I saw it—found it when I was about 18)

Mao Tse Tung Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art (actually the book is Mao on Lit and Art. But the essay was most important. It spoke to questions I was trying to solve within my art as a young artist. Then I began to get into how he is really exploring questions of work in a united front under the leadership of the proletariat. I literally read the cover off the book I read it so many times)

Dictatorship and Democracy and the Socialist Transition to Communism by Bob Avakian. Though this is a very recent book it is quit challenging and it encouraged me to deeply question some fundamental assumptions that I had held about Marxist theory and practice.
Because I have trouble counting, I want to put Beloved by Toni Morrison on the list. It is the most amazing piece of literature ever written. It doesn’t form worldview in quite the same way as “political theory” but I wouldn’t be the same person without having read this book.
•
geneaology of morals -- nietzsche
epitaph of a small winner -- machado de assis
birds of america -- lorrie moore
•
The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
Fanshen, William Hinton
Constantine Cavafy, Poems
•
It's tough to narrow it down, of course. I guess The Invisible Man, The Bright Shining Lie (Neal Sheehan as I recall) and A Room of One's Own. As achild I read everything James Thurber wrote several times over. So I guess that would count for the absurdist streak that still reigns over all --but the formative stuff was all about injustice and deception.
•
The Iliad/The Odyssey
The Book of Job
At 42, Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival
When I was 17, Joseph Conrad, Victory
When I was 27, Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim
•
this is a difficult request. my list isn't very stable. three books i keep returning to are,
society of the spectacle by guy debord
illuminations by walter benjamin
and lastly the publications of semiotext(e), particularlly the foreign agents series. these little books are wonderful. favorite titles include, speed and politics by paul virilio, nomadology by deleuze and guattari, communiist like us by negri and guattari. if i had to reduce this down to one book it would be the recently published hatred of capitalism/a semiotext(e) reader, edited by chris kraus and sylvere lotringer.

a bonus pick hit just for the pleasure of the rant is t.a.z. the temporary autonomous zone, ontological anarchy, poetic terrorism by hakim bey
•
the Torah
The writings of Rumi
plays of Shakespeare

most recently -
Golas' The Lazy Man's Guide to Enlightenment
a while ago
Watzlawick, Weakland, Fisch - CHANGE

and a long time ago
The Wind and the Willows
•
samule beckett murphy, molloy, waiting for godot
•
Richard Dawkins- The blind watchmaker
Edward O. Wilson- On human nature
Steven Pinker- The language instinct
•
A New Kind of Science by Stephen Wolfram
Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko
The Soong Dynasty, by Sterling Seagrave
•
I guess I'd really have to say that the Lord of the Rings trilogy was huge for me. I know that's not massively intellectual but it was the first time I cut class (stayed in the dorm 3 days and devoured the whole thing). It shaped my views about courage, among other things. It's so pop now that it may not count.

More seriously speaking, you are probably going to chuckle, but Alan Watts' The Book on the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are was seriously formative. Going back earlier still, Stranger in a Strange Land was a huge deal when I was a teenager, and I've re-read it several times since. Finally, Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

I could go on and on about formative fiction but somehow I suspect that's not where you're going with this. Discovering magical realism as a genre was almost as important to me as discovering science fiction. My favorite fiction authors are Louise Erdrich, Charles De Lint, and Sue Miller at the moment.

As a reader of plays it's hard to separate books out.
•
Hmmmmm, that's tough, but this morning I'll go for

1. Ulysses, Joyce: made me realize how vast eternity is if one day can be so large

2. St Joseph Sunday Missal, the standard Amercican Catholic prayer book of the 50s and 60s and likely still. Catholics didnt read the Bible as such, so the Sunday Gospels and Epistles (Latin facing English) are all upbeat New Testament stuff and I was largely unaware of the violent, vengeful, nasty God of the Old Testament. Jesus still sounds good, if you actually look at what he says.

3. Lolita, Nabokov. At 20 I was only dimly aware of the scandal of older Hum with teenie Lo: the fun of the language and dark hilarity of the hero were enough to tip me permanently into life as satire.
•
Bible
Invisible Man
One Hundred Years of Solitude
•
Thought and Action by Stuart Hampshire
The Hidden INjuries of Class by Sennet and Cobb
Capital by Karl Marx
The Informed Heart by Bruno Bettelheim,

oops over already and that does not include fiction and works about love, sex and etc.
•
I guess Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth qualifies.
That's one.

Discovering Paul Valery's notebooks and M. Teste was monumental.
That's two.

In lieu of a third, you get the list including authors that were more affirmative than formative:
Borges (Labyrinth, Fictions)
Diderot (Jaques Le Fatalist)
Didion (everything, but especially White Album) and
Nabokov (Speak Memory if I had to pick)
Cortazar (Hopscotch)

wait, I forgot an entire category:
the classic dystopias I read in junior high:

Animal Farm
1984
Lord of the Flies
not to mention The Diary of Anne Frank ...

one more category:
the civil rights lit from the 60's:
Black Like Me (no one reads that or even knows about it any more)
Soul on Ice
Autobiography of Macolm X

They qualify as formative, but they never come to mind when I get these questions.
•
Crime and Punishment: the complexity of ethics
Anna Karenina: how tragic love is
Marjorie Morningstar: how not to marry a boring guy
•
off the top of my head i can think of john berger's ways of seeing. parts of the old testament are also pretty powerful to me. as are many companion books of feminist theology... i could say 'standing again at sinai' by plaskow.. and there were years of holocaust related books which informed my world view alot. it's hard to narrow it down... of course.. just here to help!
•
Fear of Freedom by Erich Fromm
Don Quijote de la Mancha by Cervantez
The Prince by Machiavelli
The Odyseey by Homer
•
"Sex, Time and Power" by Leonard Shlain
"Constantine's Sword" by James Carroll
"The Origins of Consciousness in The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by
Julian Jaynes
"The Tao of Physics" by Fritjof Capra
"The Spell of the Sensuous" by David Abram
"The Holgraphic Universe" by Michael Talbot
•
The Count of Monte Cristo
A History of the 20th Century (still reading)
The Stranger
•
Michael Strogoff (Jules Verne)
Niels Holgerson's Wonderful Journey (Selma Lagerlof)
The Red and the Black (Stendhal)
•
As a child, I was mesmerized by fairy tales, Aesoph's ables and Greek mysthology, loved Tom Sawyer and the Wizard of Oz, books by Erich Kaestner, as well as a
bunch of Croatian books.

As a teenager, up to my mid twenties I was very drawn to dark, existentialist literature. My favorite book of all times is "The Return of Filip Latinovicz," a
brilliant Croatian book by Miroslav Krleza, the best author we ever had. Also, I was extremely shaken up by "Kinder von dem Banhoff Zoo" by Christianne F. And
for good reason.

Then much later the Tao Te Ching came my way and I immediately connected on it very deeply. Never been the same since. Guess Hesse's books also had a pretty
deep influence on my, particularly since my father was very fond of them too.
•
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Shambhala: Sacred Path of the Warrior.
Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity
•
Gulliver's Travels
Don Quixote
Candide
•
"nine stories," j.d. salinger
"self help," lorrie moore
"the portable dorothy parker" (her fiction is grievously underknown and
under-read; focus is placed on her poetry, which indeed was witty and clever, but her fiction was so much more than that ˜hugely sensitive and insightful, as well as angry and politically/socially astute)

is it strange that these 3 "world-view forming" books are works of fiction? and not overtly political? nowadays, i'm reading more nonfiction than fiction, and almost everything i'm reading is politically oriented. but when i was a teenager/ college student, my leisure reading was fiction mostly.

when does a world view form, anyway? when are we officially finished forming one? i was fairly politically active in college; then i basically slept through the entire clinton administration, and through most of bush the elder, too; but in recent years i've read more and done more, in terms of politics and activism, than i ever had before. and i'd say i'm more to the left than i used to be˜or maybe it's that the democrats, in whom i used to place a decent amount of faith, are more to the right than they used to be. ˜when i went to sleepaway camp at age 12, there was a vegetarian meal-plan option, and i picked it. i'd never been a vegetarian before and hadn't realized i was about to become one. but when presented with the choice of a good diet with meat or a good diet without meat, there was, for me, no question. i've been a vegetarian ever since. you could say that the meal-plan option changed my world view by showing me that if i did not have to eat meat if i didn't want to, an idea that, at 12, i hadn't yet grasped on my own.

"fear of flying" was one more world-view-shaping book for me, when i was 17 or so. seriously. it's known for the sex but honestly it is not very sexy, in my opinion: it is an honest, well-written, well-woven story of family, partnership, religion, autonomy, monogamy, ambition, and how to survive these things.
•
Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Circles of Confusion by Hollis Frampton
The Divine Comedy by Dante

Though the early Marx, Benjamin's essays and he Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas H. Kuhn would be contenders as well.
•
I picked these because I was totally immersed in them (read them over and over and over) when I was very young. (I have a few books that I do that with as an adult too, but I don't think it's the same.) I actually don't know if these had any particular effect on my world view, but I figure they must have, because the exposure was constant and intense.

•
Before I could read: Goodnight Moon

Right after I learned how: a beautiful, large-format, illustrated Cinderella (I know. Yikes.) I don't know who the illustrator was or what the edition was. I could probably find out from my mother.

A couple of years after that: Mad magazine, supplied by my older brother
•
Narcissus and Goldmund
The Bible
A Soldier of the Great War
•
1. "A Pattern Language", Christopher Alexander et. al.
2. "On Growth and Form", D'Arcy Thompson
3. "Codex Seraphinianus", Luigi Serafini
•
it sort of depends on what stage of develoment of that view you are getting at. like the lion the which and the wardrobe has always been on my bookshelf since I was a kid. marshall mcluhan got me interested in what i do today . . . but now i don't find his books really relevant or even interesting. so i am not even sure how to answer this one, but here's a shot. i'm giving

1. The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the
World's Slowest Computer, Stewart Brand
2. The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord
3. Silence, John Cage
4. it's not a book but was like a book on tape for me - Laurie Anderson's box set
5. Andy Warhol Diaries
•
The Communist Manifesto _ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Corazón de Piedra Verde_Salvador de Madariaga
Bersonism _ Guilles Deleuze
•
Doris Lessing, Golden Noteook
Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers
Carl Schorske, Fin-De-Siecle Vienna
•
grimus by salman rushdie
the bluest eye by toni morrison
a people's history of the united states by howard zinn
•
mont st. michele and chartres adams first edition (the book)
a timeless way of building christopher alexander
essentials in education rudolf steiner
medium is the massage mcluhan
the idea of / lovers discourse roland barthes
•
Brave New World
Catch –22
A Portrait of a Marriage
•
Film as a Subversive Art-- Amos Vogel
The Origin of the Family, private property and the state-Fred Engels
Amazon Odyssey--Ti-Grace Atkinson
•
Fanshen by William Hinton
Black Like Me, John Howard Griffith
Trotsky (3 volumes) by Isaac Deutcher
Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (sad but true--but it was a way of getting to Aristotle)

•
Hard to remember back to when my world-view was forming, but
here's some things that had some influence (in all cases there were probably several books by the same author involved, I've picked one)

Abbie Hoffman: Revolution for the Hell of it
Hunter Thompson: Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
Noam Chomsky: The Chomsky Reader

Then there's the books that started my obsession with quantum mechanics,
like Werner Heisenberg's "Physics and Beyond", but that's kind of a different story...
•
A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy
The Electronic Word, by Richard Lanham.
•
Baghavad Gita
Stranger in a Strange Land (but only until I reached the age of 25)
100 Years of Solitude
•
Turning The Tide, Noam Chomsky
The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins
Homage To Catalonia, George Orwell
•
A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius by Dave Eggars
Multiple Intelligences by Howard Gardner
Son Rise by Barry Kaufman
•
The Grapes of Wrath
The Diary of Anne Frank
Great Expectations
•
Walden (pond) h.d.thoreau
Lipstick Traces, greil marcus
Max Jamison wilford sheed
•
Melville, Moby-Dick (the power of metaphor/ambiguity)
Gaddis, The Recognitions (the place of artistic creation w/r/t forgery)
Joyce, Ulysses (structure & style, design)
•
Taylor Caldwell's Captains and Kings
Leon Uris's QB7
Orwell's Animal Farm
•
The Iliad by Homer
War and Peace by Tolstoy
The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez,
all because they take the long view on human nature.
•
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Albert Camus, The Outsider
Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women
•
When books were still able to rock my world - that was in my teens.
So the first most shattering experience with reality (in Germany) was the follwing book I read in high school:

no1
Christiane F. – Wir Kinder From Bahnhof Zoo
(10 years later they made it into a stupid film)

much later: no2
Sculpting in Time, Andre Tarkovsky

much much later: no3

"The Book of Kings vol 2y" – Klaus Theweleit
ex aequo:
The Telephone Book – Avital Ronell
•
1. Marx, German Ideology
2. EP Thompson, Making of the English working class
3. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature
4. Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super Rich
I'm not sure that the last holds up but I remember being affected by it in reading it in the late 1960s when it first came out.
•
thomas kuhn, structure of scientific revoultions
john donne, devotions
william burroughs, naked lunch
•
Gulliver's Travels - Johnathan Swift
Gödel, Escher, Bach - Douglas Hofstadter
Prometheus Rising - Robert Anton Wilson
•
for my early self
chronicles of narnia or the hobbit

for my college self
left hand of darkness

for my grad school self toss up between
discipline and punish:the birth of the prison, michel Foucault and
gender trouble, Judith butler
also: jeanette winterson's, the passion
•
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Summerhill
We the People, Leo Huberman
Golden Notebook
History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Jean Daubier
•
A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilbur
The Hydrogen Economy, Jeremy Rifkin
Understanding Media, The Extensions of Man, Marshall McLuhan
The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume II (The Power of
Identity), Manuel Castells
•
L'étranger, Camus
Neuromancer, Gibson
Distinction, Bourdieu
•
groups. for shaping how i see and interact with the world, i have 5. aside from the first they're in no particular order.

1) "men in dark times" by hannah arendt
2) "italian folktales" by italo calvino
3) "waiting for the barbarians" by j.m. coetzee
4) "the education of henry adams" by henry adams
5) "self-reliance and other essays" by r. waldo emerson
•
Movement for a New America
Brecht on Theatre
The Free-Lance Pallbearers (Ishmael Reed)
•
Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson
Isaac Deutscher's biography of Trotsky
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
•
Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Stephane Mallarme, Collected Poems
•
CS Lewis Narnia titles
How to Lie With Statistics
Austen/Pride and Prejudice
...Shakespeare, Kafka, Machiavelli
•
A giacometti portrait
Hemmingway's "In our Time"
and maybe Ulysees.
•
Proust, La Recherche;
Benjamin's Illuminations;
Flaubert'sSentimental Education.
•
Zen Mind, Beginners Mind - Suzuki Roshi
A General Theory of Love - Dr. Thomas Lewis
Stranger in a Strange Land - Heinlein
Ficciones -- Jorge Luis Borges (in college)
Breakfast of Champions -- Kurt Vonnegut (in high school)
Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good Very Bad Day -- Judith Viorst
(as a youngster)
•
Childhood's End (Arthur C. Clarke)
On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche)
Crash (J.G. Ballard)
•
a cool million by Nathaniel West
100 years of solitude, Marquez
Edie: an american biography. (edited by George Plimpton)
•
The Fourth Way - P.D. Ouspensky
The I Ching
Brother Karamazov – Dostoevsky
•
Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Portnoy's Complaint – Philip Roth
We Would Like to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families
Philip. Gourevitch (non-fiction about genocide in rwanda in '94)
•
Three books that have influenced my current weltanschauung (and when I read
them):

1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (summer 2003)
2. American Woman by Susan Choi (winter 2004)
3. The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto (fall 2004)
•
Jürgen Habermas: The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity;
Raplh Elison: Invisible Man
Harold Cruse: The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual
•
I chose my three on the basis that I already get
unrestricted access to the bible and shakespeare and maybe
Freud thrown in... is that a deal??

The Alexandria Quartet. Lawrence Durrell. Actually first
published as four books initially...but also published as a
single volume very commonly..so I claim as one. Same story
four perspectives is not the same story

On Not Being able to Paint. Marion Milner. A diary of her
giving up trying to paint and draw according to
´'instruction manuals' and embarking on a road of art self
therapy.

Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. (Only read in
translation) stands in for all his writing that affected me
enormously as a student.
•
charlottes web,
Siddhartha
no exit
•
gaston bachelard, the poetics of space
salinger, catcher in the rye
nabokov, Lolita
•
T. H. White, The Goshawk
Anja Meulenbelt, The Shame Is Over
Aldous Huxley, Point CounterPoint
•
Travels With Charley
The Doh of Homer
Hiroshima
•
1. Jonathan Livingston Seagull - Richard Bach
This is a tiny little book with an immense, immeasurable content. You read it in one breath, however, you constantly need to go back over and over again to "soak" dialogues/thoughts. It is about courage to be different, to be an early bird, to be considered and regarded "odd", weird, loose cannon, you name it. I have read it long, long time ago in Belgrade while I was in my high school, and believe you or not, I still remember reading it, the excitement to get to the end of the book. I may like this book so much as it reflects my own feelings about being brave to be different, in thinking, dressing, whatever, but still keep your integrity, passion, and take responsibility for this oddity that people perceive about you.....finally it also speaks about the price that each person has to pay to be what he truly believes in and not bend to the formality of the society. A lovely book, you should read it if you have not already, only about 100ish pages.

Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery
Another, little gem, written for kids apparently, however meant to be read by adults. This book has thought me about the value of friendship, and what each side has to give for friendship. It is not something as granted! A friendship is like a rose, as Little Prince was told, you have to water it to keep it alive. We so frequently take friendship for granted, and yet there is somebody out there who may be waiting for our call, a sympathetic ear etc. Also, it has thought me that in a relationship, any date, one should be punctual and this is for the following reason, as a Rose has told to Little Prince .....you should come as you have told me, not with such long delay. I have prepared my heart for you, and I have been excitingly waiting for you for hours before the moment you were supposed to come. My excitement has been building prior to that hour. If you do not come as
promised, I will be disappointed, and worse, I will never know when to prepare my heart for you, so when you come I will be indifferent. These are not the actual words, however this is a message that has been living with me ever since I read the book...again in my high school days. As a matter of fact, I was with a friend in Boston in February, and I brought myself the book in English.

3. Difficult decision for the third place, I am in between Demian - Herman
Hesse and Crime and Punishment – Dostoyevsky I will tell you about both. Demian - my high school favorite, it tells you about the magic and power of your wish! If you wish something deeply, deeply, from the heart and you never, ever has any doubts, not even for a split second, it will happen, it will occur, you will make it. Guess why it was my high school favorite.....I would meet a guy that I would like, he would not like me, but I would implement the advice from Demian......I will leave odds of my success to tell you in person.
Crime and Punishment - I love that book for the way it makes you feel about
the poor, underprivileged people./ I just loved Raskolnikov, the murderer, and Sonia the prostitute. My whole heart went for them. I guess this book has thought me that not everything is black or white when people are concerned. I know that I may sound very opinionated on many occasions, however, believe me, I do not judge people for what they are doing. I could only say that I do not like it and would not do it + everybody, everybody, including the worst murderer, still has a bit of something nice, it is up to other people to find out about it......if you do not believe me than go and read Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.
•
The Assistant, by Bernard Malamud
In Our Time, by Ernest Hemingway
A Sentimental Education, Flaubert
Sadly also, Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut
•
bible
san mao ("three hairs")--chinese comic about impoverished, malnourished, semi-bald boy
the decisive moment--Henri Cartier-Bresson
•
Rudolf Otto's "Idea of the Holy" is hard to find these days, but was influential in terms of seeing "holy" as a broader thing than just Christianity.
I remember Pearl Buck's "The Good Earth" moving me a lot in high school; made me think about all the development and urban sprawl issues more.
"Kenny's Window" by Maurice Sendak has come back to me again and again with different layers of meaning poking through.
•
The Bible
The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand
The Kama Sutra
•
To Kill a Mockingbird
The Sound and the Fury
Henderson the Rain King
•
"Beat The Turtle Drum" (a "young adult" book) — Life sucks, and people you care about die.
"The Grapes of Wrath" — Life sucks, then you either die or work much too hard.
"Blown Sideways Through Life" — Work sucks, and it can always suck more.
•
The Hitcher's Guide to the Galaxy, because it made writing seem fun and easy
Moby Dick, because it made writing seem laborious and futile
The Odyssey, because it is better told than written
•
Saul Bellow: Humboldt's Gift
Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse
Charles Dickens: David Copperfield
•
The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Jane Jacobs
Catch-22
Advertising the American Dream
Lies My Teacher Told Me
•
as for 3 books forming my "world view" that's hard to answer i guess (maybe easier when aimed at truer Young People?) so i will maybe swipe at a broad interpretation and guess The Little Engine That Could, Franny & Zooey, and a third to hopefully be determined by the end of this email.

let's see, my third. maybe the jungle? i'm having an awful time placing myself back in time. perhaps i'm trying too hard
•
1. Georg Lukacs, "The Theory of the Novel"
2. Jacques Derrida, "Limited Inc"
3. Woody Allen, "Without Feathers"

(postscript: oh, and of course Leviticus.)

•
When I think about the part books played (and still play) in forming my world view, I have to think about them as tethered to a set of circumstances. It is impossible to say, for example, whether it was Gardner’s Art Through the Ages that awakened my passion for visual art, or my teacher Gretchen Whitman, who introduced the book to me and led me through it.

The book is part of a matrix that is difficult to parse. How is one’s world view formed? Certainly books are a part of the process, but maybe they function more as “tools” then as “beings.” Insofar as they are extensions of the people or circumstances that drove us to them. With this in mind, it’s not surprising that very few of these lists are the same.

It’s interesting that nobody confesses that children’s books formed their world view. I was profoundly influenced by the books I read when I was a child. The Little House on the Prairie series, and the Wizard of Oz still resonate with me. Dorothy and Laura Ingalls were pioneers—girl scouts, who were always prepared and never complained. They were independent, pragmatic survivors. I'm not saying this is the best collection of virtues one could strive for, but, nevertheless I recognize them in myself and think, to some extent, they were engendered there by those books. Also, I must mention the fantastic strangeness of Dr. Seuss (who prepared me for surrealism), Maurice Sendack, Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Hans Christian Anderson.

Children’s books are there at the beginning, digging into our consciousness. The fact that children must, initially, be read to, illuminates something about how the book functions for humans. My son is 14 months old and he loves books. That is because his grandmother sat down with him when he was six months old and patiently read to him. She is a kindergarten teacher, so she is skilled at reading to children. She can do funny voices and such. My son doesn’t know how to read, he barely has a notion of what story is, but his grandmother taught him that when you open a book and turn its pages, something magical happens—characters, voices, colors—I think he has a given him a vague sense of meaning. My son understands books as ojects printed with symbols that can be translated and brought to life by a skilled reader. He likes to sit and turn the pages of his books and study the images. He has a relationship with books, but he wouldn’t have that if someone hadn’t taught him. My point is, even after you learn to read, the book is still part of a complex system of relationships. It is almost a matter of chance, in some ways, which books are introduced to you and opened to you by someone.

I think people who are resistant to electronic books worry that this intimacy will be lost in a non-paper format. But clearly, it’s not the object itself, it’s the meaning brought to it by and through people. The medium won’t really change that.

Post childhood influence goes to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude. And the book of Ecclesiastes, which I read during a particularly disturbing and enlightening business trip to Hong Kong in the late 1980’s. I read Ecclesiastes several times during that three week trip, always late at night alone in my hotel room while eating spicy Indian food. I don’t know if it was the food or the book, but I would have the most astounding nightmares after those sessions.

•
Graham Greene once wrote that "it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives," and in that spirit I'd have to answer honestly that the list would have to include:
Jack London's The Sea Wolf
Palgrave's Golden Treasury
Howard Fast's Citizen Tom Paine
•
There was one book that came to mind immediately as a transformative book : Love's Body by Norman O. Brown. There are other books that I can think of as extremely enjoyable (100 Years of Solitude) or books that definitely shaped my thinking ( Childhood and Society by Erik Erikson; I and Thou by Martin Buber). But, at this moment, only Love's Body was "crucial".
•
Tao te Ching, by Lao Tzu
The Animal Rights Handbook, by Linda Fraser (have read other material since
buying this book at 16 but it was the most revolutionary - and shocking - to me because it was my first on the subject)
Frog and Toad are Friends, by Arnold Lobel
•
women's room by Marilyn french
middlemarch by george eliot
surfacing by margaret atwood

or more recently
middlesex by jeffrey eugenides
•
Lord of the Rings
Redwall (by Brian Jacques)
The Bible
•
urgent? is the book dying out that quickly?!?

jeez. in the interest of diversity, i'll name 3 philosophy books that have influenced my thinking; otherwise, i'd have a hard time answering such a tough and broad question:

kant's critique of pure reason
schopenhauer's the world as will and idea
kierkegaard's fear and trembling
•
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Dispatches by Michael Herr
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien

Sorry for the Vietnam focus, but I think both books belong on my list. The Herr because it so deftly lays out the folly of most wars, and the O'Brien because of what he says about more personal things, like love and courage.
•
Kind of like picking the three most important dandelions in a field, but:
Dune, Frank Herbert
The Essential Foucault
JM Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians
•
okay, great, interesting question. I'm not sure i have 3, but i'll tell you what i can.

First, my favorite book of all time, and crucial to forming, or better yet, clarifying or explaining to me my existing worldview, is
Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey.

Also, The Sandman graphic novels by Neil Gaiman.

ummmmmmm...

Really not sure otherwise. i hope this helps. the Kesey is very true.
•
the toughest part is getting this down to three. to do so, I will avoid the cliche of The Bible, because that book was indirectly crucial; i think judaism in general was more crucial than the bible itself.

so I will say:

Moby-Dick by Melville.
Sacred Fragments, a book about Judaism by Neil Gillman
Greatest American Leaguers, a YA book about baseball
•
1) To Kill a Mockingbird
2) Brothers Karamazov
3) Old Testament
•
Burnett, The Secret Garden
Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
Saramago, The Stone Raft
•
The Bible
Anna Karenina
Johnny Learns to Type
•
The User Illusion -- Tor Norretranders (about consciousness)
The Path of Blessing -- Marcia Prager
Moby Dick -- Melville
•
"Hiroshima" by John Hersey
"Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn

And third place is a dead heat between:
"An Actor Prepares" - Stanislavksi in combo with "Respect for Acting" - Uta Hagen; all of my high school text books in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, geography, environmental science and
calculus; and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

If I have to pick, I'd say the textbooks more than anything else. If textbooks don't count, let's call it Stanislavski because he taught me how people work on the inside.
•
- The New Testament
- The collected writings of Bertolt Brecht
- Howards End by E. M. Forster
•
Howard Zinn: A Peoples History of the United States;

Where do I come from? (a sex-ed book for children, my mom gave it to me as a young kid, and I think it was fundamental in helping me have an educated and appropriate understanding of the process of reproduction from a young age);

English Grammar for students of Russian (without this book I wouldn't be where I am today)
•
SIX NONLECTURES BY ee cummings
NEW YORK TRILOGY by Paul Auster
DESERT SOLITAIRE by Edward Abbey
•
The Divine Comedy--Dante (does that count as 3 or 1?)
Various dialogues by Plato (apology, meno, republic) Machiavelli's 'The
Prince'
1984--George Orwell--my world view has been much more laden with
conspiracy theory after this
People's History of the US--Howard Zinn
If This is a Man--Primo Levi
Frames of Mind:The Theory of Multiple Intelligences--Howard Gardner
•
Ficciones – Borges
Allegra Maude Goldman - Edith Konecky (precocious Jewish girl growing up in Brooklyn)
Little Women - Alcott
•
-Twelfth Night because of what it says about sadness
-Yeats complete poems because it's Yeats complete poems
-Frannie and Zooey because it's comforting
-Waiting for Godot because I didn't realize that people talk different than they think
-War and Peace because if it were the only book in the world that would be fine
-The ecclesiastes part of the bible and some of the psalms
-The Lives of the Great Composers because it shows that good artists can come out of any era of history
-Reflections in a Golden Eye because it is possible to explain a certain aspect of the human psyche so exactly that there is no other way to explain it
-Winnie the Pooh because of what it says about anxiety
-The Aenied because I had to read the fucking thing in latin and the words are out of order
-Rimbaud's complete poems because he STOPPED writing when he was 24
-Sickness unto death because of what it taught me about sex
-To Kill a Mockingbird because it actually isn't cheesy
-Bonjour Tristesse becuase it was written out of revenge
-A Moveable feast because it taught me how to travel and because it's so mean
-Dubliners because every playwright has to read that
•
1) Geanology of Morals (F. Nietszche)
2) Being in Time (Heidegger)
3) Wasteland (Eliot)
4) Crime and Punishment (Dosto)
•
The Origin of Species – Darwin
Dr. Dolittle – Hugh Lofting
A Book of Nonsense – Edward Lear
•
Your questions got me thinking about certain books over the years. I stand by my earlier claim that it was the totality of many many books that did the job on me. But, still, there were a few, especially some very early ones that got me thinking one way and not another.

For example, the first adult book I read all the way through -- maybe at age 4 -- was my father's copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology. I originally read it because I had gotten interested in the ancient Greeks (he was quite interested). But the last part of the book contained Norse myths and these were in some cases similar to the Greek ones. This got me to realize that these were just stories and needed more than claims to back them up. This helped tremendously in resisting the Bible during later attempts to force this on me.

Another early book was a long one, also my Dad's, Breasted's Ancient Times, maybe read at age 6 or 7. Again, I originally started reading it because I though ancient (and "lost") civilizations were cool (and loved the different architectures, etc.). But, I started to realize that human beings are driven to similar forms under similar conditions, etc. This led me to Anthropology later on.

A Life Magazine on the Holocaust (published in 1945, but I saw in in 1947 at age 7) completely horrified me, and made me afraid of adults to this day (and rightly so). This was likely one of the earliest insights and shocks that motivated my later long standing interests in helping children to think better than most adults do today.

Willi Ley's Rockets, Missiles and Space Travel around age 8 had a big effect. One memory from this book was the strange idea that you couldn't just aim a rocket at the planet you wanted to go to, but had to create an orbit for the rocket that would cause it and the planet to meet many months in the future. I can't quite explain why this had such a big effect on me.

Science fiction, especially of Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, etc., had a huge effect, and got me to read many deeper books, like Korzybski's Science and Sanity.

To have a conversation with a professor who didn't like grad students but did like McLuhan, I spent the better part of the summer of 67 really understanding Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media. This was one of the biggest most useful shocks I got from a book.

Marvin Minsky's Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines had a great effect on getting me to think more mathematically about computing (maybe 1968), and this led to McCarthy's metadefinition of LISP in the LISP 1.5 Manual (a book of sorts), which was the key to really inventing objects "right".

Posted by at 05:06 PM | Comments (18)
tags: Thought Experiments , book , books , culture , ebooks , history_of_the_book , literature , print_culture , reading