The Invisible Library

Have you ever wondered what it would have sounded like if Bob Marley had covered the Pixies? How About Frank Sinatra? Sure you have.

It’s all over the net but if you haven’t seen it yet, watch the video of Stephen Colbert ripping the Bush Adminsitration and their lapdog Press a new one at the White House correspondents dinner. It’s pure comic genius with a dash of truthiness.

The Cat and Girl Book is upon us! Oh, drown your ephemeral woes in biting wit! Drink Paint! Snark! Bask and join us, the Future Corpses of America.

Over at Making Light, Theresa Nielsen Hayden brings to light one of those fleeting internet phenomena, a piece of self published Star Wars Fanfic. For sale on Amazon. Another Hope, is being sold by it’s frighteningly clueless author, Lori Jareo. In her “Author Interview” (which I suspect is her asking herself questions) we find this little gem:

Q: Having set Another Hope in an already existing universe, I find myself wondering if there was any concern on your part regarding copyrights?

No, because I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.

My jaw has gone all slack at the gaping stupidity. Luckily, John Scalzi has all the salient criticism about how some one, especially someone purportedly an editor for their very own poetry publishing house should know better than to think this is just peachy and won’t George Lucas just get a kick out of it:

This would be bad enough if this woman were just some clueless person letting off some Mary Sue steam and then getting the idea that, gosh, this could be a real live book, but in fact Ms. Jareo purports to be a professional editor — which is to say she really has no excuse. In her interview Ms. Jareo mentions something along the line of “George Lucas says as long as no one is making a profit, tributes are wonderful,” but I think she rather seriously misapprehends what Lucas almost certainly means here. Leaving aside the fact that even if Lucas tolerates a little geekery on the down-low, he’s still fully invested in his copyrights and can enforce them at will and at whim, there’s the issue of scale. Geeking out with little stories of Yoda and Chewbacca on the Wookiee Planet on a personal Web site that’s visited by your friends is one thing. Publishing an unauthorized Star Wars novel via your publishing company and putting it up for sale on Amazon (not to mention Barnesandnoble.com and Powells.com) is really quite another.

I’ve said before I think fanfic is generally a positive thing for any science fiction universe, but I don’t think being a fan means you suddenly have a license to be stupid. Publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online is just plain stupid, and publishing your fanfic novel and selling it online when you’re theoretically a professional editor is just about as stupid as you can get without actually receiving head trauma from a tauntaun. If Ms. Jareo is lucky, she’ll only get smacked with a Cease and Desist order from Lucas. If she’s not lucky — say, Lucas wants to provide a cautionary example to ambitious-to-the-point-of-oblivious fanficcers everywhere — she and her company are going to get their asses sued, and given the blatant and obvious and self-incriminating copyright violations here, she should be thankful if she gets out of it without all of her assets, and the assets of her publishing company, encased in carbonite.

As it stands I think it’s worth it to start a pool on how long it takes for Ms. Jareo’s book to get pulled from Amazon. I’ll say this next Monday by 3pm Pacific. Any one else want to bet?

My wife’s friend Lynne, who works at the Library of Congress sent us a link to this blog by homeless paranoid, Peter Bis. Now, I’m no psychiatrist but I’m pretty sure this guy is a low grade paranoid schizophrenic, judging form the rambling essays, the primary subject of which is him, Peter Bis and what the CIA/Vatican/Mafia has done/is doing to him.

It’s a fascinating glimpse inside a dented mind, featuring conspiracies involving plasma beings from Saturn, international cooperation between disparate and desperate organizations that would require treaties and laws so Machiavellian and convoluted as to have only been dreamed up by a crazy man, or the Karl Rove and a van de Graff generator. The Egyptians are, of course involved. How? Well, see that’s what’s so fascinating here. One of the things I noticed when reading through some of these essays is how the subject and object of Mr. Bis’s theories are the same: himself. It’s all ego (in the Freudian way, not the generic pop psychological way). External forces conspiring to do harm to one man, and going to any length to do so.

While we may all feel like crazy people talking conspiracy theories when it comes to the Bush administration, this guy lives inside such a fantasy world. It’s absolutely real to him. This isn’t the intricate mad satire of the gang at Fafblog, but genuine incoherent rambling.

I think one of the reasons that I’m so fascinated by it (besides my general fondness for crackpots and conspiracy theories) is the breadth of imagination involved in creating this world. It’s as rich and finely detailed as Dune or Lord of the Rings, but without the coherent narrative or sense that a satisfying conclusion, happy or sad, could ever even be possible. Imagine if the quest to destroy the One Ring never ended. Another band of Orcs is always and forever just over the next hill. Infinite lands lay always between you and Mount Doom and the Ring attracts increasingly demented and single minded villains, some masquerading as everybody you’ve ever met, but wearing ill-fitting masks and smelling of sulfur and brimstone.

I don’t envy the man’s worldview and wouldn’t wish to live inside his head for any length of time but the fact that he has chosen to try and convey what it’s like for him to live is important, if only so we can better understand the tangled corridors of the human brain a little better.

For about two years now, I’ve been wanting to read City of Saints and Madmen, by Jeff VanderMeer. Normally, I would just go to Amazon (or the above linked publisher) and try to find the earliest hardback edition, and dig in. The problem is, their are several editions, some out of print, others almost so, all with different amounts of material between the covers. See, the book is a collection of interrelated short stories and novellas, to which the author keeps adding new stories. Which is great but hard for me to get ahold of when there’s no definitive edition. Well, back in March, on his blog, Mr. VanderMeer announced that Tor had just released what he assured us in comments was the definitive edition. In the UK. It won’t be out here in the US until Spring ‘06. So, I had resigned myself to having to wait a whole nother year to read what, by now has been blown up in my imagination as a compelling mystery. Who are the gray caps? What’s the deal with that squid?

Then, about two weeks ago, Mr. VanderMeer posted on his blog a link to the website of Clair Weaver, who is handling publicity of the UK release of the book. I followed the link, more out of curiosity to see what a publicists website would look like than anything, and was surprised to find, at the bottom of the page, an email link that said in quiet, understated British fashion, that if we’d like to receive a review copy of the book, just send her an email. So I did.

I said that I was a librarian who reviewed books on his blog and often made unsolicited recommendations to passing strangers, who often ran away, glancing nervously over their shoulder at the strange man dressed all in black throwing books at them. Or something to that effect.

I figured, at worst, I’d be ignored as just some schmuck with a blog. At best, I’d receive a free copy of a much desired book, and from the UK, no less. I received a n email message the following day, thanking me for my interest and letting me know that the book would be mailed out to me shortly. In fact, in arrived here in Savannah the day before I did.

And now that I’m done with Grad School, I have the time to sit back and read a lengthy volume of strange, interrelated stories and write a review about it here. Watch this space.

“Scientology is rooted in strict scientific principles, such as the measurement of engrams in the brain by the E-Meter,” Kurz said. “Scientology uses strictly scientific methodologies to undo the damage done 75 million years ago by the Galactic Confederation’s evil warlord Xenu�we offer our preclear followers procedures to erase overts in the reactive mind. Conversely, Fictionology is essentially just a bunch of make-believe nonsense.”

Hollywood actor David McSavage, who converted to Fictionology last year, attempted to explain.

“Scientology can only offer data, such as how an Operating Thetan can control matter, energy, space, and time with pure thought alone,” McSavage said. “But truly spiritual people don’t care about data, especially those seeking an escape from very real physical, mental, or emotional problems.”

(Via)

After traveling the world, fighting monsters, saving damsels, drinking rough men under the table, defying the very Gods themselves (and gaining a Masters Degree in Library Science in the process), I have returned home at last.

I’ll probably write more about Grad School when I have sufficient distance between it and me but for now, I’ll say simply that I learned much, forgot some and have become a better and more knowledgeable person because of the experience. And I’m never leaving my wife for this long, again.

I’m on the road to Georgia. Be back Thursday.

Is Wikipedia the real Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? Paul Boutin at Slate seems to think so:

The parallels between The Hitchhiker’s Guide (as found in Adams’ original BBC radio series and novels) and Wikipedia are so striking, it’s a wonder that the author’s rabid fans don’t think he invented time travel. Since its editor was perennially out to lunch, the Guide was amended “by any passing stranger who happened to wander into the empty offices on an afternoon and saw something worth doing.” This anonymous group effort ends up outselling Encyclopedia Galactica even though “it has many omissions and contains much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate.”

It’s a humorous idea, I admit. It’s also wildly inacurate. I’ve just recently finished a comprehensive case study of Wikipedia and while it’s not perfect and does have some holes, I can’t really get behind a criticism made by an author who doesn’t even know how big Wikipedia really is. Boutin says, “Wikipedia, with more than 1 million entries in at least 10 languages, is the mother of all wikis…” That sounds sort of impressive. However, Wikipedia actually contains 1.5 million articles (over 540,000 in English) and is available in 195 languages, 92 of which are actively edited. I know these well guarded secrets because I spent two minutes looking for them. But Boutin’s criticism doesn’t end with just inaccurate facts that even hasty research could correct. He follows these up with gross generalizations of Wikipedia’s collaborators:

Don’t expect Wikipedia to change your life, though, unless you’ve secretly longed to be an encyclopedia editor. Just because you give everyone read and write permissions doesn’t mean everyone will use them. Wiki lovers argue that they are collaborative, self-correcting, living documents that evolve to hold the sum of all the knowledge of their users. But, like blogging, editing the Net’s encyclopedia appeals to a small, enthusiastic demographic.

There are over 6000 active Wikipedians, all over the world. They are computer programmers, yes. Nerds, of course. But they are also librarians, painters, writers, and teachers. And while 6000 is small compared to the the population of the Internet, they far outnumber the dozen or so specialists who compile the Encyclopedia Britanica. But these are professional nerds, rather than merely enthusiastic amateurs, so we must respect their slow, and highly specialized knowledge base, which does not begin to take in the breadth or depth of human knowledge. Otherwise, we all might contribute to our own information gathering and learn how to do research ourselves. And where would that get us?

As Steve Eley said on a recent thread over at Making light: “If the Internet had cars and motorcycles a la Snow Crash, mine might have a bumper sticker which reads “IT TAKES EXACTLY AS LONG TO EDIT WIKIPEDIA AS IT DOES TO COMPLAIN ABOUT IT ELSEWHERE.”

Or you could get paid by Microsoft to piss on it because it isn’t up to your rigourously inaccurate standards. Your choice.