Moving to a new platform

I've moved my blog over to WordPress, because I think I like the features they offer better.

Here is the URL for my new blog, Textual Frigate: http://textualfrigate.wordpress.com
And here's the feed, for those of you who are reading this via RSS: http://textualfrigate.wordpress.com/feed/

Rainbows End, part II, and Double Fold, by Nicholson Baker

It's a very disconcerting experience to be reading a work of science fiction, and then to read a nonfiction book that confirms one of the more outlandish plot points of the novel. In Rainbows End, Vinge writes that the company that digitized the contents of the UCSD Library will have a monopoly on the information for a certain amount of time simply because they changed the format and control the access to the reformated information.

In Double Fold, Nicholson Baker reveals that something similar happened to American newspapers. Libraries often preserve newspaper by having it filmed. But then, if a library wants a copy of an older newspaper, they have to pay a company like Heritage Microfilm to send them a copy. Very few libraries have the wherewithal to preserve their own newspapers in their original format. Plus, a lot of libraries that did have copies got rid of the paper in favor of the film because it's thought that the film will last longer. For a lot of titles, I'm sure that the microfilm companies have a monopoly on the information.

I've had to read Double Fold for a preservation class I'm taking this summer and, I have to say, it's probably the most vehement work I've ever read about libraries. Baker gets really hot under the collar about certain things, and I don't think I've ever seen name calling in a book about libraries either.

Strange Coincidences

How bizarre is it that a journal about death and bereavement is published by a company based in Amityville, New York?

And people think that scholarly journals are boring. Tcha.

Am I getting Wikified?

The other night I was taking a look at some of the new reference books that have come into the library. One was the Encyclopedia of Intelligence and Counterintelligence. The other one was the Supernatural fiction writers : contemporary fantasy and horror. As I flipped through the Intelligence book, which was published in 2005, my fingers kind of itched to update some of the information, especially the dates. And for the Supernatural writers, I kept wanting to flip around in the text and read about the authors mentioned in the articles about writers I've already read. When I you spent a lot of time just reading things on Wikipedia, you start to miss your instant cross references. I bounce from topic to topic so much that I have to admire people like A.J. Jacobs, who can resist the temptation to skip around and just read an encyclopedia through in order.

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge

Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge, is definitely going to join the short list of books that freaked me out when I read them, along with The Stand and 1984. Rainbows End is a novel set in the not-too-distant future and, while I don't buy how all the technology has developed--in this world, the Internet and multimedia technology are ubiquitous and most people spend most of their day plugged in--I don't think Vinge is all that far off.

As I read this, I felt that that plot was less interesting than seeing this alternate future play out. The plot involves an odd assortment of characters trying to thwart the development of mind-control technology. The puppet master characters, who were pulling all the strings, did their job in such a way that it was hard to see how everything was going to come together or even what was going on.

But what really interested me was the plot elements that involved the Geisel Library at the University of California at San Diego. Having been employed at libraries for many years, I've seen the growing demand for digital materials, for journals to go online, for old books to get scanned and posted online, and so on. In Vinge's future, the digitization projects have gone farther. But the way that books are digitized here causes the destruction of the books themselves. That was a disturbing chapter for me, given that I geek out at book exhibits and tear up at the sight of book burnings.

I can envision a world where the libraries are totally online, but I don't know if me and the other book lovers could ever give up our tangible texts.

The Physician's Tale, by Ann Benson

I've finished the series (as far as it's written), and about all I have to say about the series is, "Huh." Even though I finished all three books, I feel pretty underwhelmed. This last book, The Physician's Tale, finishes up all the loss ends from the previous books. Kate reunites with her son and adopted father. Janie and her family built a new life in a decimated former United States. I get the feeling, though, that Benson is setting the stage for future books.

Unfortunately, the excellent plot mirroring Benson set up in The Plague Tales is almost completely gone now. And that was one of the things I really enjoyed about this series. Plus, it seems to me that Benson is squandering her set ups. As I've said before, Benson sets up a lot of fascinating catastrophes that almost never happen. And, now that I know that, it's hard to get worked up about anything.

I think that if Benson writes another book in this series, I might just let it go without reading it.

Ink and Blood

The Museum of Idaho is hosting a traveling exhibit called Ink and Blood, which is sort of a combination history of printing and history of the Bible. And I hate to say it, but I totally geeked out at the Museum. I couldn't help myself, I was surrounded by very old books--some of them very famous books. I spent most of my two hours there trying to control myself from boring my mother silly by nattering on about how alphabets evolved, how the English language has evolved, St. Helena's tour of the Holy Land, Chinese printing techniques contrasted with Gutenberg's methods, misprinted Bibles and what happened to the printers, and reading out loud from the various books on display.

I am truly a terrible museum geek.

Some of the artifacts that awed me:

• Dead Sea Scroll fragments--these were particularly awing. They're in special darkened cases, and you can see the fragments by pushing a button that'll turn a light on for 10 seconds.
  
• A copy of a Tyndale Bible
• A copy of the Wicked Bible and the Breeches Bible: I spent several minutes in front of these cases trying to snicker discretely.
  
• A copy of Foxe's Book of Martyr's
• Erasmus' parallel New Testament
• Three Books of Hours, beautifully illuminated
• Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German
  

Check out the Exhibit Artifacts page to see some of the books and text fragments that they have on display.

A lot of exhibit was dedicated to attempts to translate the Bible into the vernacular. Today, Bibles are produced in just about every language that has a written version. But 650 some odd years ago, people like William Tyndale were violently put to death for daring to translate the Bible into their own language.

I also got to see a replica of a Gutenberg press in action. There was a short, fifteen minute talk about the invention of movable type and then a volunteer got to turn the screw and print a couple of pages (lucky guy!).

This exhibit is moving on in May. If you haven't gone and you're in the area, I really recommend it.

Regrunt with a Hat Trick

In my last two desk shifts I've been asked about:

• Icelandic volcanoes. But he only wanted enough information to write a 3-4 page paper. And he couldn't remember the exact name of the volcano he wanted.
• Slavery in South Carolina in the 1830s. Some times students come in with really narrow topics and are frustrated that they can't find a book on them. They don't realize that most books in our catalog are often not searchable at the chapter level. Half of the battle in teaching students to do research is getting them to think about how information is organized. (That and how Boolean works. I've been using a linguistics analogy that seems to be working pretty well.)
• Bilingual education.
• Erasers. A student needed a big eraser. Unfortunately, we only have pencil erasers.
  

And this morning, I did a reference hat trick. I helped a single student who had three distinct questions--which only gets me a single tick on the reference sheet, natch. This student asked about:

• The story of Red Riding Hood as a means of social control
• Evolution and speciation
• What people are doing in the US to help lower the divorce rate

Plus, the student's instructor sent their students over to look for a single book and both our copies are now checked out. Do our faculty not know about course reserves?

Burning Road, by Ann Benson

When you read a fantasy series, you can often expect plot arcs that span across books. I wasn't expecting that when I picked up Benson's historical and medical series, but it's starting to look like this series has multi-book plot arcs. When I wrote about The Plague Tales, I wrote that I was disappointed that I didn't get the disaster I was expecting. It looks like that disaster is finally happening in book two, Burning Road.

In Burning Road, the historical plot jumps about ten years and takes place during the Jacquerie Rebellion of 1358. The current plot seems like it's taking place only a few months after the events of The Plague Tales. Instead of the plots mirroring each other, with both doctors trying to fight outbreaks of bubonic plague, these plots don't mesh nearly as well in this book. The historical plot follows Alejandro and his adopted daughter's struggles to survive in the extremely volatile political climate of post-plague France. The modern plot is frankly bizarre, with Janie Crowe trying to uncover a very disturbing cover-up involving some illegal genetics work and then running into a second epidemic of drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

It's kind of strange to have gotten two books into a series and still have no real idea where it's all going. I'm wondering if Benson is one of those authors who sits down to write without an outline, in spite of the amount of structure these books have in terms of plot mirroring.

The Plague Tales, by Ann Benson

Have you ever read a book that you're interested in, and you have the feeling that, any page now, it's going to get really good? I felt that way through most of The Plague Tales, by Ann Benson. I was at one of the public libraries trying to find a copy of Magic Study (see previous post), when I came across The Physician's Tale, by Ann Benson. When I got home, I realized that I'd picked up book three of a series. Fortunately, I happened to have the first two books in my picked-it-up-a-while-ago-haven't-actually-read-it pile.

The Plague Tale follows the lives of two fictional doctors who are dealing with outbreaks of bubonic plague, also known as the Black Death. One of the doctors is a Jew in disguise who has to protect the English royal family from the plague. The second doctor is a modern surgeon who lives in a not-to-distant future where most bacterial diseases have become completely drug resistant.

To me, this sounds like a really good, terrifying read. Unfortunately, the plot that I was imagining never happened. The catastrophes that I was expecting to happen in the modern plot thread never happened. The medieval plot, barring a few mystical weirdnesses, did live up to its promise. I have hopes for the sequels. After reading the book jacket for The Physician's Tale, I think that something big might finally happen in that book.

The modern plot thread brings up a funny plot problem for me. This is going to require a little bit of set up, so bear with me. Othello is one of my favorite plays by Shakespeare, but every time I read or see the play, I feel like yelling at the characters "Don't listen to Iago!" A lot of the tragedy of the play could have been prevented if the characters had trusted each other and figured out that Iago was a twisted little stick who spoke nothing but lies.

By contrast, the main characters of The Plague Tales manage to thwart the bad guy and save the world well before the plague outbreak gets out of control. It's not that I want to see millions of fictional characters die horrible from a mutated version of the plague, but this book could have been absolutely enthralling if that had happened. I just felt let down after all the build up.

I've moved on to the second book, Burning Road. I'm hoping that the modern surgeon plot thread will mature and get better.