explodedlibrary.info

charitable reading and Sheila Kohler's response

A few months ago there was this charitable reading idea going through the librar* blogosphere. When somebody writes something that you find insulting or offensive, the best reaction is to pause, take a step back and try to find if there's a more charitable way of interpreting these words or if it's possible that the words have been taken out of context or allowing for the possibility that the person has misspoke.

It all sounds very reasonable, but it's not so easy to actually do after reading so insulting that you wish there was a way of invoking the wrath of the blogosphere against the perpetrator.

When I first read Sheila Kohler's remarks about bloggers reviewing books, I admit that I was quite annoyed. Oh no, I thought, here's another elitist Michael Gorman or Blaise Cronin. If I was a more active blogger, I might have written about it right then, fanning the flames of this controversy. But I did end up pausing and that's when I remembered the charitable reading idea, which prompted me to write to Sheila Kohler, telling her how people were reacting to her words and asking if she really believed that. I just thought it would be really sad if she alienated a lot of people based on a misunderstanding.

I wasn't expecting a reply to my email, but a couple of days afterwards Sheila Kohler did write back, telling me that she hadn't intended to offend anyone, she wrote, "I'm sure there are literary bloggers--brilliant bloggers, bloggers who have read more than I have."

She asked if I might be able to mention this statement about bloggers:

I respect their opinions and that I'm delighted when anyone reads and writes about books. I'm certain they play a very important part in all of this. My words were unfortunate, I now see, but my intentions were only to celebrate books in the most useful and constructive way. I wanted to honour all of those who make literature their livelihood and who spend long hours reading and studying books,  putting them in context with those great writers who have come before us and those who will carry the torch. I was trying to help those who were losing their important jobs, those pages which keep our books alive.   Would you post this to the bloggers many of whom I admire and who have written about my work in a generous and constructive and thoughtful way. Indeed, one of my wonderful students from City College,  Maud Newton, is a terrific blogger for whom I have nothing but respect.  Sheila Kohler.

Just for the record, I have no connection with Sheila Kohler. I haven't even read any of her books. I'm not so naive to think or hope that these words will resolve the current debate on the role and future of literary criticism in the mainstream media.

music in sweatshops, music for sweating

An interesting co-incidence just happened. I had just finished reading Naomi Klein's book, No Logo.

"[A] select group of corporations has been attempting to free itself from the corporeal world of commodities, manufacturing and products to exist on another plane. Anyone can manufacture a product, they reason ... Such menial tasks, therefore, can and should be farmed out to contractors and subcontractors whose only concern is filling the order on time ... Headquarters, meanwhile, is free to focus on the real business at hand - creating a corporate mythology powerful enough to infuse meaning into these raw products just by signing its name. [Klein, N. (2000). No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No Jobs. London: Flamingo, p. 22]

This is one of the central themes of the book. It looks at how companies like Nike, to name one obvious example, positioned itself not just as a maker of shoes but as a sports company with a mission to "enhance people's lives through sports and fitness."

The book later explored how the inevitable consequence of this ideology was the development of sweatshop factories in developing countries. Naomi Klein describes the brand-name multinationals as:

[V]ery picky customers, with specific instructions about made-to-order designs, materials, delivery dates and, most important, the need for rock-bottom prices. But what they are not interested in is the burdensome logistics of how those prices got so low; building factories, buying machinery and budgeting for labor have all been lobbed squarely into somebody else's court. (p. 202, author's italics)

The book then reviews some of the sweatshop scandals which erupted in the late 1990s.  The strength of corporate brands was also its achilles heel which could be exploited by juxtaposing the brand's image with the conditions in which the product is made. How could a company supposedly dedicated to enhancing people's lives through sports and fitness charge $120 for a pair of shoes which cost them $5 in conditions such as these

Workers fined if they refuse to work overtime; overtime rate not paid; ... humiliation, screaming, some corporal punishment; arbitrary fining of pregnant women and older (25 years old and up) women; fines if talking at work; approximately 10 children in the sewing section; most workers have never heard of Nike's Code of Conduct. (p. 474)

Eventually most companies caught up in these scandals apologized, and enacted voluntary codes of conduct to stamp out these abuses. All along they have wanted to change the topic, to stop us from talking about how their products are made.

I think that to a certain extent, they succeeded. Sweatshops and abusive labour practices by these companies seems old news now. I wonder, is that because the problem has really been fixed, as I'm sure that the PR departments of these corporations would all claim, or did they eventually succeed in changing the topic of conversation back to why they're such cool companies and why we would want to buy their things.

Tonight's not the night for me to look into whether things really have improved or not, but I am definitely curious to explore more recent works on this topic. Now, to return to my coincidence.

I finished reading No Logo tonight on the train. Shortly after arriving home, I noticed the Nike swoosh logo in the iTunes Music Store~. Nike is making music for sports and exercise now.

Think of this 45-minute continuous electronic music mix as a soundtrack for sport. It follows the arc of a typical distance run, carrying you through an easy warm-up, increasing in pitch as you start to own the road, peaking with a high-energy pay off and then coming back down to earth for a well-deserved cool-down.

The interesting thing is that Nike is using a similar production model for its music as it does with its shoes. Commission somebody else to create the music and use the brand to sell it. In this instance, the artist is known - James Murphy / LCD Soundsystem. If this idea takes off, I'm sure that gradually the identity of the artist will become less important when compared with the brand.

Corporate-created music reminded me of something from my own experience of working in a multinational. During my time at the Vodafone call centre, the company introduced Radio Vodafone (if I recall the name correctly after these two years). It was a selection of upbeat songs intermixed with the occasional Vodafone ad and corporate propaganda. It played at an unusual volume. Not so loud that it would distract from phone conversations or that you would really start listening to it, but not so soft that you couldn't hear it at all. It was always there in the background. Later on I learned that it was designed to increase our productivity and morale.

i <3 atomized texts

Time to put into practice what I was writing about a couple of posts ago.

Michael Gorman has just annoyed me again (via Librarian in Black), but I’m not going to write about him. Instead I want to write about why I think that atomized information is mostly a good thing.

As a blogger, I am used to having my writing atomized. Blogs are designed to be atomized. Some posts are more popular than others. Some sections of posts are more popular and are atomized when quoted in isolation from the rest of the post.

If I cared to study the matter more systematically I could probably see some ideas and themes developing since I started this blog almost 3 years ago. But it’s not really that important. Otherwise, I would demand that all my new readers begin with my very first post and read every one in chronological order before they were ready for the stuff I’m writing now. The very thought is ludicrous.

Of course there is a huge difference between unfinished and unfixed blogs and books that were written as a single unit. It would be an understatement to say that authors go to a great deal of trouble in arranging the content of their books. Atomization – ripping a few relevant paragraphs or sentences or words from these finished edifices – undoes all of that work. It wouldn’t surprise me if some authors aren’t comfortable with this. To that I say, the intentions of the author are irrelevant. I don’t want to go any more post-modern than this, but a text gains its meaning from how it is interpreted and read, not from the intentions of its author.

NYT on electronic literature

From "Call me e-mail: the novel unfolds digitally", Adam Baer, New York Times (April 15, 2004)

"My younger employees say they don't have time to read books and instead focus on e-mail and Web writing," he [Eric Brown, creator of DEN] said. "There's this huge group of readers in our office - a communications company! - and they're reading snips and pieces.
...
A small community of so-called hypertext writers, many of them affiliated with academia, have been publishing more experimental work in online journals like The Iowa Review Web (www.uiowa.edu/~iareview) and BeeHive (beehive.temporalimage.com) for more than a decade. Such writing includes texts with animation and works created by using rules and random processes to generate something different for each reader.
...
What will take electronic literature to the next level, Mr. Wardrip-Fruin suggested, are multimedia projects involving so many inventive procedures that they cannot be reproduced or mimicked on paper. "Think of the textual analogue to video games," he said. "You can't really capture the way a video game works by printing it out; that's what will have to happen with electronic literature for it to become popular."

P.S. Now that the New York Times is making it very difficult to view older articles for free, I will be a lot more sparing in my links to them, and will only provide them with some excerpt.

This Modern World on dangerous reference books

I don't have anything new to say on the topic of almanacs, but I wanted to link to This Modern World's take on this absurdity.

It makes me wonder - by dignifying the suspicion about almanacs etc. with a response, am I playing into the hands of those who cast these aspersions? It's hard to know, but I think that one of the few defences against the Bush Administration's Big Lie tactic is for many people to challenge the falsehood early, loudly and unambiguously.

poetry and prose published on the web at three candles

This isn't something that I usually write about here, but I just found out that a friend and co-worker of mine has had three of her poems published on three candles. The last time I looked for creative writing being published on the web, I was quite overwhelmed by the number of sites. But I assume that three candles is worth a look, because my friend is very discerning about where she sends her work, and they had the good taste to publish her.

so almanacs are dangerous books, are they?

This business about almanacs being viewed as suspicious is quite surreal. I don't know whether to laugh at the stupidity of the idea or cry because they actually seem to be serious abut it.

There is good coverage of this at LISNews. But I first read about this in the LiveJournal libraries community.

Amazed at the geekiness of today's law students

Don't get me wrong - this is a good thing. Unless you're a Tolkien fan or have studied Contract law, you probably won't find this link to be funny. I'm both and even found the voluminous comments worth a read.

my experience with eBooks - at home and at work

This Slashdot discussion about bn.com's decision to discontinue selling eBooks reminded me to write about my own experience with eBooks.

First, my experience of eBooks at work. About a year ago, my library started subscribing to netLibrary's eBook collection. These titles are now catalogued, and I come across them from time to time in my reference work. The downside is the somewhat cumbersome individual registration process, complete with another username and password to remember. The upside is that once this has been completed, library users can login and use available eBooks anywhere with an internet connection, 24/7.

Still, even when the initial registration has been completed, accessing an eBook from a library catalogue is a multi-step process.
- Select the link within the library catalogue to view the eBook in netLibrary
- Login to netLibrary
- Decide whether you just want to browse the book briefly or "check it out" for a longer period (during which time, other users can't check out the book - obviously an anachronistic concession to copyright law)

Unless your internet connection is really slow, all of the above is still probably faster than pulling a book from the library shelves.

netLibrary has several enhancements for the eBook medium. It allows you to search the full-text of the book for search terms. This is particularly nice for reference librarians who might be trying to find whether a particular book mentions a particular issue. A good printed index is better than most search engines any day, and fortunately, if a book does have an index, you can browse through it on netLibrary. netLibrary also allows you to make bookmarks and notes in the books that you are reading.

I have noticed that some netLibrary books can be viewed natively within the browser, while other titles can only be viewed via the Adobe Reader. I don't know if this is because of DRM (Digital Rights Management), but it is far more cumbersome and difficult to view titles within the Adobe Reader. Also, the variation here is disconcerting.

I have tried printing a couple of pages from a netLibrary book and didn't have any problems. So on the whole, the netLibrary collection of books is a helpful addition to our library's collection. netLibrary's law collection is not huge, but it does contain a lot of Nolo legal self-help titles which my academic library doesn't get a lot of, but which are useful to recommend to pro se people. One concern that I have about netLibrary is that although it's a decent enough collection, it's homogenous. There is little room for customizing a library's netLibrary collection. I worry that as library budgets are cut, which tends to happen, cash-strapped libraries might rely more on their netLibrary collection (which is also quite cost effective for the library) as opposed to their print collections which are chosen locally. The danger is that library collections, like bookshops, will become too homogenized and centralized.

I'd now like to mention my experiences reading an eBook at home on the Adobe Reader. This has been my first experience with eBooks at home. Until the recent release of the Adobe Reader, no eBook readers were available for Mac OS X users. I downloaded two eBook versions of Nineteenth Century novels from Amazon. They were much cheaper than the print editions - only around $2-3. I am not interested in buying eBooks unless I get a substantial discount!

There were a few hoops involved in getting past Adobe's much-reviled DRM, but it wasn't as bad as I thought it might be. Of course, I haven't yet tried to move my eBooks to a different computer, so I haven't really felt the claws of the DRM personally.

So I'm now reading Charles Dicken's Dombey and Son on my iBook via the Adobe Reader. This book is over a thousand pages long. I thought that it would be strange and difficult to read a novel like this as an eBook. Actually, in some ways it's more comfortable. I can lie in bed with the iBook on my chest and have the Adobe Reader automatically scroll at a slow speed which matches my reading. This saves me from a lot of scrolling and I can easily vary the speed if I need to. If I'm feeling particularly lazy, I can have the iBook read the book aloud to me. Admittedly, computer-generated voices are still quite nasty and very expressionless. It's also nice to be able to change the size of the text, and highlight pages and make notes without damaging the book. As a librarian, I have a major and irrational hang-up about marking up my own personal copies of books.

I think that eBooks have a lot of potential and I hope that they can work out. One of their biggest attractions for me is that they can reduce the growth of my bulky and heavy printed book collection. (It's so easy to accumulate books, and if I move back to Tasmania, I'm going to have a huge freight bill to move it)

If eBooks ever going to take off, they'll need to overcome these three hurdles. Cost - eBooks must be significantly cheaper than printed books. Although I bought Dombey and Son and Anna Karenina cheaply - this was for the most generic bare-bones Amazon.com eBook edition. I should also be able to buy an eBook of a Penguin edition with a critically acclaimed translation and introduction for only a little bit more. Content - People need to get into the habit of reading eBooks. This won't happen until it's the rule and not the exception that all new titles are published as eBooks. DRM - This must be easy to set up and unintrusive for the average reader. DRM which makes it difficult for consumers to keep their purchased content as they upgrade their hardware or software, or backup their purchases will keep people away from eBooks.

The only reason why DRM exists is because the content providers don't trust their customers. In this case, Adobe doesn't trust Adobe Reader users not to upload their eBooks onto a web site where anybody could download them for free, or make them available to the world on peer-to-peer file sharing services. I think that content owners have a legitimate concern here. But the thing is that trust is a two-way street. For consumers to buy-into eBooks, they need to trust that they're not paying money for something that will disappear in a year or two - or whenever the content owners happen to feel miserly. So how can content owners say to consumers, "trust us that your eBooks will not disappear because of a computer problem or one of our whims" when it's clear that they don't trust consumers at all?