Category: Burningbird

Books

The seductiveness of books

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 7, 2003

Mike Golby and I have known each other online for such a long time – I can’t even remember when I first read him, and he first read me. The similarities we share make a piquant counter-point to the differences.

We don’t always agree, but among the many topics we do agree on is our love of books, and the importance of access to them. Mike recently talked about Blog Africa and this organizations efforts to increase Internet access across Africa, something to be applauded. But both he and I would rather see more of a global effort to provide open and adequate libraries than free email:

Many will tell you Africa needs books a damned side more than it needs a Net unable to do more than carry e-mail. Our libraries, where they exist (and this is locally), are under funded. Their budgets are non-existent. New books? Fuggedaboudit. In countries where books – of any kind – are considered a luxury, what chance connectivity? The cost of books is my chief expense for spending so much on being linked to the Web.

It’s in the nature of our new global economy that we foster illiteracy and ignorance. In a world run by technology, the less people know of the cause of their poverty, the better. Institutional economics is, by nature, a conservative discipline. Managed and promoted by conservative ideologues, it’s better served by people incapable of thinking for themselves. Books and the education they give are known for the trouble they bring.

I wrote in comments at Mike’s that if everyone had access to an open and well stocked library and the ability to read, most of the world’s problems would go away. But then I look at my own stack of books that I’ve gathered together to spend December reading (or re-reading in the case of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”):

“Unless”, by Carol Sheilds, recommended by Yule Heibel
“Moral politics : what conservatives know that liberals don’t “, by George Lakoff, recommended in comments
“Metaphors we Live By”, also by George Lakoff, mentioned by Joe Duemer
“The Floating Girl”, by Sujata Massey, mentioned at a weblog (can’t remember where)
“The Dark Valley: A Panorma of the 1930’s” by Brendon Piers, mentioned in a weblog posting by Jonathon Delacour
“Stranger Shores” and “White Writing” by J.M. Coetzee, author recommended by Farrago and Mike Golby
“Let us Now Praise Famous Men”, James Agee and Walker Evans, recommended by Jonathon, as well as Sheila Lennon
“The Secret Life of Bees”, by Sue Monk Kidd, recommended by Elaine, I believe
and
“Barran Ground” and “The Woman Within”, by Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow, pointed out by link in an email.

My reading for the last year has been someone mentioning a book and me using my Library’s online system to have it pulled from whatever branch and sent to mine. And if I can’t find a book in the city library system, I also have a card for the County library system, and all of these libraries have inter-library loan access to other systems. I have free and easy access to virtually most books I could ever want to read.

(Except for Dorothea Brande’s, Becoming a Writer. I’ve been looking for this in library systems for months.)

Now let’s look at some of the dates these books were last checked out. Oh, not the popular current ones such as “Unless”, “Secret Life of Bees”, and “The Floating Girl” – but the less famous ones, the quiet ones.

The last time “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” was checked out was December of last year. I was the person who checked it out. “The Dark Valley”? That goes back to May of 2002. Now Coetzee just won the Nobel Prize in Literature and you would think his work would be in demand, but “White Writing” was last checked out in 2001, and “Stranger Shores”, had never been checked out by anyone until me.

A well stocked library won’t make a bit of difference if people don’t or won’t take the time to read. According to Dave Rogers even if they did, it may not make a difference. Daring to “poke the dog” by quoting him:

Never before have we had the ready, easy access to the thoughts of great minds that we do today. Presumably, people even read it! Yet we still bicker about the “anger industry” and mock the people we disagree with, and justify ourselves and demonize our opponents. If all we needed to do was “read” to “learn,” shouldn’t we be living in Utopia about now? Why are there so many different self-help books out there?

I absolutely and unequivocally despise self-help books, so I can’t answer Dave’s question, but me thinks it’s rhetorical anyway.

Having access to libraries and reading important books by great writers is not going to result in change in our society if all we do is ‘read’ and then not respond differently in how we live our life, based on that reading. Consuming all those books on my list won’t do me a bit of good other than to perhaps impress people with how ‘well-read’ I am, unless I come away from the reading a different, hopefully better, person and act accordingly.

Good writing entertains, enlightens, enriches us, and brings us closer to (pick one) a) God, b) ourselves, c) our significant others, d) our foes, or or e) all of the above. But great writing in the hands of an open mind partnered with an active spirit, well, it’s better than a kick in the butt.

If I’ve read Dave correctly, we have to act on what we read; we have to work to make the world better, we can’t just read about it and congratulate ourselves on our literary achievements. Additionally, we can’t depend on technology to make the difference for us, either:

My point is, by focusing any attention on technology as some means of facilitating learning, or “changing everything” as some answer to anything, simply continues to obscure the real goddamn point. It’s as if we seem to think that once we have achieved the right technology, somehow our minds will be liberated and we’ll be able to “know” all these great things. When it has absolutely, positively, without question, NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with TECHNOLOGY. You need exactly NO technology to start asking yourself the kinds of questions you need to be asking yourself.

WHEN, in God’s name, are you going to start? When you’ve perfected your technology? When you’ve read enough weblogs? When your bandwidth is wider? When gender bias goes away? When a democrat is back in the White House? When you’ve “simplified” your life? What life? You think you’re alive? How do you friggin’ well know?

I could be flippant and say I know I’m alive because I wouldn’t dream up this sore mouth, but Dave’s point is extremely well made – we could wait for external events to happen from now until the dawn of time, and read every book written, and make sure everyone in the world has a blog and an RSS feed – but change begins within.

Trust me, I know these things.

(And now I’ve managed to bring the views of three passionate writers into one essay. This page will self-destruct in a ball of fire in five minutes.)

Writing

Biting fair

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 6, 2003

Sheila has been linking to and writing about some wonderful stuff lately. For instance, she links to this article about a story that implodes the myth that American IT workers are so much more costly than using offshore workers. I wonder how many other companies are offshoring their work without even once taking a glance around to see the hungry workers in this country.

Just because CEOs are overpaid, doesn’t mean the rest of us are.

But there was another article earlier, Words that cut that really caught my attention. It’s about the story that rock critic Jim Washburn wrote expressing his regrets at taking a cheap shot at Steve Goodman. Sheila wrote:

It may have sounded bright and clever at the time, but for the rest of his life Washburn will wince at the memory of his cheap putdown of a man who mattered.

Doc also talked about this , and his early days as a fresh young journalist covering accidents. But he believes that’s why things are different in weblogging:

What strikes me about Washburn’s piece, however, is that there is still a sense of distance – one that’s very different than the one we sense here on the Net, where what we write is syndicated immediately into countless news aggregators, where every reader is an email or an instant message away, and where a high percentage of readers are also writers. There may be a sense of physical distance, but that’s about the only kind. There’s immediacy here. It’s personal, even if we only know the blogger as, say, Brian at bmoeasy. With a few notable exceptions, this sense of proximity, of sharing an almost (though not quite) social space, has an effect on manners. That’s why I believe, on the whole, that we’re a bit more civil here.

Doc is a remarkably positive person, and I do admire his ability to always see the glass half full when it comes to weblogging. However, spending any time out among the political weblogs quickly demonstrates that civility can, at times, be more scarce than women techs working with RSS or Atom.

I agree with both Sheila and Doc that being biting wit can just as easily bite the source as the target. But I’m not sure that there isn’t a time and a place for sarcasm, satire, or superciliousness. I think the key is to use such verbal techniques deliberately, and to always aim high.

When talking about his actions in slagging Steve Goodman, Washburn wrote:

People can drop dead at any time, and that’s no reason to gild their talents. But it should make us more cognizant of what we write, and whether we do it to be truthful or because being snide might make you look cool

Good advice, but more than that, though, is I think you have to exercise a sense of fairness. Just as we were taught in school not to pick on people smaller than us, we shouldn’t exercise our own biting wit at the expense of people who have less clout then ourselves.

Just Shelley

Glass half full kind of day

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 5, 2003

I am feeling particularly verbose today. Sun’s shining after several days of cloudy weather and it feels good coming in through the window. Zoe is stretched out on the desk next to me, turning her stomach to the sun like the brazen little hussy she is, every once in a while looking at me out of her green and orange eyes as if to say, “Don’t you wish you could have a pretty belly like mine?”

I’m playing with some old slides today, and listening to some fine music while I’m doing it. I’ve been in a mood for nicely ripe music lately – Petula Clark, the Supremes, Shangri-Las, Angels, Jan and Dean. I know that none of you will admit to listening to anything other than Bob Dylan or James Taylor, but I’m shameless – I love that wonderful old and funky rock n’ roll. Sitting in the sun, fooling around with old photos, and listening to good tunes with my sugar kitty next to me – sweet.

(What say, Jeneane – shall we boogie? We’ll get our home girls to join in.)

Speaking of contentment and home girls, I have enjoyed, immensely, the responses to the Blogs with best Female Spirit essay – especially from the nominated writers who took the awards in the, well, spirit in which they were intended.

And I have a funny for you – type the words ‘miserable failure’ into Google and push the “I feel lucky” button. (Found at Sam’s)

Writing

Unix Power Tools in Japanese

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 3, 2003

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The Unix Power Tools 3rd edition book I helped organize and co-author for O’Reilly was just published in Japanese, in a form of writing I believe is called Kanji but I’m not an expert in Japanese.

Previously, I’ve had books published in Russian (Dynamic HTML) and Spanish as well as Portuguese and I believe German (Developing ASP Components), but this is the first book in Japanese, and I’m very pleased with it.

Japanese writing is so very pretty, but it’s most fascinating seeing the mix of English and Japanese when a phrase is incountered that has no Kanji equivalent. Technical books must play absolute havoc in this regard.

My appreciations to the O’Reilly office in Japan for sending me my own copy of the book.

Photography Weather Writing

It’s not a doorway

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date December 2, 2003

I have been reading about the snowstorm in New England, and hearing about snowfalls of several feet, which can take forever to recover from in cities; especially Boston with its narrow streets and parked cars. However, Boston is only three miles long and unless you’re heading across the river to Harvard, you can walk to work. In a couple of hours or so.

The snowstorm that struck the Midwest and the Northeast passed us by and we’ve had mild temperatures. Of course, it’s only a matter of time before we get hit, but we’ll take the mild weather and the beautiful sunsets for now.

However, we can’t have snow without a little poetry, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow agrees with me:

Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.

Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
The grief it feels.

This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.

“Snow-Flakes”

Easier to find poetry about snow than about sunsets, as I found when I looked about. Other than:

Red sky in the morning,
sailor take warning.
Red sky at night,
sailor’s delight.

I think its because sunsets have their own beauty and anything to do with them — poetry, painting, or photography — is a given and a bit of a cheat. But I’ll take the cheat for now.

Of course, the sunset figures prominently into our fiction, particularly westerns. Cowboys would always ride off into the sunset when they’ve saved the day, which I thought was stupid.

I mean think about it: they ride in, get shot up, go against the bad guys 2 to 1, overcome against all odds, and just when the farmer’s daughter cries out, “My hero”, and we presume is feeling mighty grateful, the idiots ride off into the sunset.

I bet the horse had more sex. No wonder there’s no poetry about sunsets.

That’s not completely true, there are poems about sunsets. Emily Dickinson wrote a couple — she wrote on everything it seems — and I rather liked, “The Sunset Stopped on Cottages”:

The Sunset stopped on Cottages
Where Sunset hence must be
For treason not of His, but Life’s,
Gone Westerly, Today –

The Sunset stopped on Cottages
Where Morning just begun –
What difference, after all, Thou mak’st
Thou supercilious Sun?

Tired of sunsets yet? Just be glad I didn’t publish the other ten photos I took tonight, because the sky did put on a lovely show. I grabbed my camera and ran down outside, fighting my cat at the door — me out, her in — before standing out on the deck in bare feet snapping pictures.

The neighbors are used to it: they think I’m nuts, and maybe I am. Am I of age to be eccentric yet?

Oh who cares. I spend too much time worrying about what people think of me when they see me puttering about, and most likely they don’t think of me at all (which is very liberating, let me say).

The sky is pretty and so are the trees, but yes I do need new subjects, which means I’ll have to go look for them. New things to write about, too. Good.

And on that note, I’ll end with JRR Tolkien:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.