I didn’t intend to take a week off from posting but the holidays, combined with Finals have seriously devoured any time I have to do just about anything. To make it up to you, here’s Lucy, in the grips of a catnip high.
Following up on my post about the NEA’s Reading at Risk report, I ran across this fantastic idea by John Halbo:
The NEA could buy: cultural DNA. The NEA could plausibly do, on a larger scale, what it has done with the Paris Review. Pay to have culture set free.
Basically, he suggests that the NEA should aquire from the Library of Congress all the cultural material that has come out into the public domain and purchase from the rightful copyright owners the rights to a lot of other cheap material that is financially unsuccessful but culturally important and provide it free on line. John Halbo got the idea from the Paris Review’s DNA of Literature project, a huge collection of interviews with more than 300 20th century authors that has just been posted.
The BBC Archives are doing something along this line and I think it’s a fabulous idea. It would provide a way for the NEA to do something practical that would at the very least take steps to curb some of the more egregious problems pointed out in the Reading at Risk report.
The only problem I see, is that the NEA library is woefully understaffed and underfunded. I’ve visited the NEA Library and interviewed the sole librarian there. They have no electronic database in place yet and no manpower to put one there. Their budget has not increased one cent in at least five years.
To follow his suggestion would require the NEA to quadruple (if not multiply by a factor of ten) it’s library holdings and staff. That does not come cheep, especially in an era when library staff and budgets are being cut. Staffing alone would cost half a million, and add into that a new library building and electronic database, IT support and the whole library infrastructure and your talking about a price tag in the tens of millions. Pocket change when compared to the Defense Budget but outlandish when looked at as a flat budget increase for, of all things, the NEA.
An idea like this would have been feasible under President Gore or President Kerry but since Congress just approved the purchase of a new yacht for Bush, I think we all know that this administration’s goals are not in the realm of making cultural DNA available to all. Still, it’s an idea to keep under our hat and bring out when Blue America succeeds and we finally have the breathing room to enact progressive changes, without having to worry about appeasing skittish soccer moms and other assorted mouthbreathers in Red America.
Cory Doctorow reviews Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle:
The historicity of these books is borderline alarming. Stephenson has researched so many goddamned interesting factoids about pirates, the birth off the monetary system, natural philosophy, alchemy, the court of the Sun King, the functioning of London’s ancient prisons, the nature of sewage disposal in early metropolises, and many other diverse subjects that you can practically open the books to any page and find five cool trivia questions to baffle your friends with on e.g. long plane trips.
I’m about 250 pages through the first volume, Quicksilver and am looking forward to one day reading the whole trilogy, once Grad School is done and I can devote the time needed to fully emerse myself in these books. 2700 pages is a lot and each one is densely packed with information but they are worth the time and effort, especially if you have even a passing interest in the history of science. The Baroque Cycle is the Geek Ulysses, only unlike Ulysses, it’s actually fun to read.
Wouldn’t it be something if it turned out that Chalabi, the Iraqi turncoat who was selling intel to Iran was actually an Al Quieda sleeper? I’m just throwing out a weird what if here, but let’s try this on for size:
Bin Laden and his Al Quieda network plant loyal Jihadists in undercover positions in Iraq, Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and all over the Middle East where they will have the ear of some American Intel gatherers. They feed bad intel to these Americans, knowing full well that they our leaders are eager for an excuse, any excuse at all to invade a country. It’s subtle. It’s devious. And it serves their purposes: Why do they have to kill themselves blowing up cars and crashing airplanes when they can get us to invade whatever country they want us to, piss off everybody, thus swelling their ranks?
I’m not saying this is the case. Such conspiracy theories work well in silly movies and spy novels. But if I’ve thought of this, then perhaps Someone else has as well. But we have to ask ourselves, why?
What do they get out of pissing off everyone and sharply dividing the world into Us vs. Them? Simple. They get the Clash of Civilizations both sides, Neocon and Jihadist, so desperately wants.
Kevin and I attended a presentation on campus yesterday for the NEA’s Reading at Risk report. This report, which was released over the summer, made a flapdoodle over the dramatic claim that literary reading has declined by 10% in the last decade overall, and 28% among young readers.
Frankly, my first impression, back in July, when I first heard about this, was to dismiss it outright. We’re bombarded by these idiotic Government Studies all the time (hello, Mr. Starr Report, how are you today?) and they typically turn out to be porno fantasies wrapped in Beaurou speak and all tied up in a frantic little bows. After attending the panel discussion, I’ve amended this attitude somewhat. I still think the research is flawed, but they make a fair point just the same. This messy contradiction of views is probably why you haven’t heard much about the Report, as it’s not exactly something that can easily be digested into cute little soundbites for the mouthbreathers watching Fox News. Which, is part of the problem.
The major flaw in this study is that the term Literary Reading is not very well defined, and this is done on purpose. They don’t want to mess around in the age old argument over what “is” Literature and so leave it open for interpretation. They do give the usual examples: Novels, short stories, poems, plays, magazines, etc. and it’s in this etc. that we run into problems. For some reason, they define attending plays and opera as reading, but leave out comic books and Graphic Novels. The rep from the NEA gave the standard biased disclaimer, that if you think a Graphic Novel is a literary work, you’ll take this into consideration when answering the question. And sure, Operas are often in French, Italian or German and involve a lot of reading of subtitles but so do foreign movies. One of the panelists brought this point up and suggested that we should include movie watching as reading if we’re going to include plays (because honestly, how many people read Angels in America when you could have watched it on HBO?). While we were all rolling that little gem around in our heads, he went on to suggest that we should include New Media, like Blogs, which I agreed with, and video games, which I thought was the dumbest thing I’d heard in three Tuesdays.
So am I a snob? Reading Blogs is literary but engaging in vast, interactive online role playing is not? Yeah. I am a snob. Because playing role playing games and watching TV isn’t fucking reading! It may be creative. It may be entertaining. But playing Grand Theft Auto, San Andreas does not rank on the same level as watching Kenneth Branagh’s production of Hamlet or reading The Handmaid’s Tale. Hell, it doesn’t even rank as high as reading some drek by Stephen King and watching Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet!
So yes, people are reading less, watching TV and playing video games more and we’re the worse for it. Because, as the poet on the panel meekly stated, an ill informed citizenry makes for something less than Democracy. But it’s not like the NEA really has any suggestions on how to fix this problem. Not that I or anyone should expect them to. They’re a government agency. They just wring their hands and cluck their tongues and hope that they won’t have their budget cut by President Kill Again just so we can afford to build one more bomb to drop on Iran.
Short of a revolutionary idea like putting the money we spend on making war into education instead, there won’t be a reversal of this trend in reading– critical, entertaining or otherwise, any time soon. And I wouldn’t hold my breath expecting the GOP to do anything about it either. They may not have invented the idea of staying in power by keeping people dumb, afraid and uninformed but they sure have exploited it in the most savvy manner.
Update: John Halbo over at Crooked Timber has a great post that starts where I leave off and goes in a far more positive direction, challenging your word power and knowledge of comic books. Well worth the read.
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
– H.L. Mencken, July 26, 1920, in The Evening Sun
Thanks to my lovely wife, Elvira
I’ve just downloaded the Kleptones, A Night at the Hip Hopera, a brilliant mashup that combines the music of Queen with Ferris Bueller clips, the Beastie Boys, and, well, just about everything cool there is. It’s being distributed free at a veriety of places online which is, of course, illegal and Disney, which owns the rights to all of Queen’s music1 is sending cease and desist orders to people who provide links. So it won’t be available for much longer. So get out your iPods, and download this modern masterpiece before it’s too late!
Download A Night at the Hip Hopera by the Kleptones at Klepshimi’s mp3 blog.
Read the rest of the story at (and find alternative links) at Boing Boing
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1. How weird is that?
Guardian UK, via Neil Gaiman:
Mortality has proved only a partial impediment to the romantic fiction industry built up by Dame Barbara Cartland during her 99-year life. Four years after her death, two new Cartland novels trickled on to the market yesterday. And there are 158 more to come, at the rate of one a month - enough to satisfy her admirers for about 13 years.
I wish I could write a novel every 18 days. No, wait. I don’t. I’ll settle for spending four years on one and I promise, no “Love” in the title and no romance, which is probably why it’s taking so long. That and Grad School. Everything is Grad School’s fault.
You’ve probably seen those Little Yellow Ribbon Magnets on the backs of cars all over town (I saw approximately 58,000 of them today on my way back to Maryland). In theory, they let the world (or the soccer mom behind you, at the very least) know that you, the driver, Support Our Troops. Except they don’t. Not really. LYRMs don’t tell the world that support the troops. They tell the world that you support President Kill Again’s war. You support the troops, not with LYRMs, but with your actions and your deeds. By writing your congresscritter or Representative and demanding that BushCo. ends it’s silly and tragic adventure, or at the very least, appropriates enough money to provide the troops with armor, hazard pay and benefits. if that’s too Activist for you, you could try this little idea, from Teresa Nielsen Hayden et al:
The number ONE request at Walter Reed hospital is phone cards. Because the priority of our government is to continue tax cuts for the likes of Paris Hilton, the government doesn’t pay LD phone charges and these guys, many of them amputees, are rationing their calls home.
Many will be there throughout the holidays.
Remember that most are from poor families. It is disgusting that they cannot keep in touch with family after what they have been asked to sacrifice for BushCo; especially this time of year.
Support the troops-cuz BushCo doesn’t. Send phone cards of any amount to:
Medical Family Assistance Center
Walter Reed Medical Center
6900 Georgia Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20307-5001They say they need an “endless” supply of these-any amount even $5 is greatly appreciated.
Pass it on.
