Weibel Lines

BOOK REVIEW: The Inheritance of Loss

Kiran Desai's Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss is an elliptical tale looping backward and forward through the twentieth century, India, New York, Cambridge, the legacy of British imperialism, class tensions, and the age-old distrust of other.

The story takes place in Kalimpong, a peninsular extrusion of India into the surrounds of Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan (I don't know the boundary history of the area, but it sure looks suspicious on the map).  A retired judge, his granddaughter, her tutor, the cook, his son, and myriad supporting characters all struggle for stability and dignity in a time and place short of both.  Shifting sands of political conflicts leave everyone struggling for footing, amplifying mistrust and prejudice. Loss is the currency common to all.  Early on, we find Sai, the orphaned granddaughter and harbinger of love and hope, in the company of the embittered judge and his cook, contemplating coming of age alone:

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? ...love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment.

So is the tone of the narrative established.  Even as Sai awakens to possibility, the countryside of disenfranchised awake to political discontent.  Timid belligerence erupting and met with authoritarian brutishness that, of course, spreads with the virtue of vengeance in every ethnic direction.  Gyan, Sai's Nepalese tutor, is swept into the maw of this malice, and his and Sai's chaste and budding love is set in opposition to betrayal and reluctant militancy.

The hapless cook has only his indenture to the judge, and his son in the limbo of illegals in New York on which to hang his life's expectations (well, that and his still). The judge's stern cruelty is facade to alienation that fills the interstices of contempt for his homeland, the condescension of imperial culture, and his isolation that is their product.

Desai's language is vivid and incisive. In a passage on the mindless escalation of violence:

This was how history moved, the slow build, the quick burn, and in an incoherence, the leaping both backward and forward, swallowing the young into old hate.  The space between life and death, in the end, too small to measure.

Sounds terribly familiar.  In a description of the cook, fleeing a riot:

Clawing at his heart as if it were a door was his panic--a scrabbling rodent creature.

And unsurprising testament to the human capacity for acceptance of anything:

While residents were shocked by the violence, they were also often surprised by the mundaneness of it all.  Discovered the extent of perversity that the heart is capable of as they sat at home with nothing to do, and found that it was possible, faced with unimaginable evil, for a human being to grow bored, yawn, be absorbed by the problem of a missing sock....

Desai displays a convincing understanding of the 'old hates' that make marionettes of her characters, and have them twitching at the flames of flashing insurrections. Yet, it was hard to find my way into the lives of these characters.  Desai is a clinical expositor of culture and human nature rather more than a narrator of lives that draw us in (as for example, does Hosseni in The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns).  There is little to be hopeful about in her descriptions, but one is left with some confidence in the whys and wherefores.

I could find solace of hope in only two acts of free will in this book.  One, an acceptance of heart and determination of mind, and the other so daring and futile as to buttress our belief in the commonplace of courage.  Perhaps she is an optimist after all.
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public conveyance in Jaipur, 2004

BOOK REVIEW: A Thousand Splendid Suns

Enamored as I am by the beauty of Persian carpets, I recall when I first saw patterns of shoulder-fired antiaircraft weapons bringing down Soviet aircraft on the hand knotted fields of Afghani carpets.  The juxtaposition of violence and triumph and death in the soft sheen of brilliant dyes and painstaking knotted history is poignant indeed.  I thought about buying one.

The resolution of the narrative of Khaled Hosseni's A Thousand Splendid Suns is far greater, of course, and vivid with hand-crafted love.  This novel follows in the successful steps of Kite Runner, and more than one person said to me of Suns... 'good, but perhaps not as good as Kite Runner.'  I'm not sure I agree.  Both books express a love and longing for a peaceful Afghanistan.  Each is full of tragedy, and brimming with passions, virulent and tender.   Each exposes, even dissects, brutalities and tragedies next to which most experiences in the western world pale.

Hosseni is not gentle with the injustices of Afghani culture.  I've read enough real and fictional accounts of executions in Ghazi Stadium to make me feel like I could find the exits.  But his facility with human emotion conveys as richly the beauty and dignity of Afghanis, and are potent antidotes to the smugness endemic to our own culture.  Hosseni's stories of curdled innocence, brutal domination, and endurance... always endurance... are laced with the promise of redemption (a promise occasionally even redeemed). And, too, an alchemy of dull hatred turned to brilliant, unalloyed love.

The story is inevitably intertwined with our own history in the region, an arrogance of self interest that plays still on our political and moral stages.  The recent movie Charlie Wilson's War pandered to a view we'd like to nurture... a comfortable picture of how we almost did it right in the region... if only we'd gone the extra mile....  I have to say, I liked the movie, even as niggling suspicions tugged at the edges of credulity.  Want a different view?  Try the blog post An Imperialist Comedy.  Sounds a lot more plausible to me, even if it isn't as much fun.  But I digress.

Hosseni takes us, finally, back to a Kabul of schools and reemerging tolerance, undergoing a kind of urban redemption.  But we know the story doesn't end there.  The fools that ransacked the Kabul Museum and dynamited the Budhas are afoot still, even as the fools in Washington talk of the War in Afghanistan that must be won.  We will learn anew what so many have learned of self determination in ancient places.  Hosseni's lush narratives remind us there is more than ideology (and oil) at stake.  I wouldn't dare buy one of those carpets now.  No sense tempting the gods of irony.
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A wagon wallah in Jaipur, India, not so very far from those same Splendid Suns (2004)

Book Review: Boyd: The fighter pilot who changed the art of war

This biography by Robert Coram chronicles a little-appreciated facet of military history, at the center of which is a character so unlikely as to be nearly unbelievable. John Boyd was a scrappy, contentious pilot of lamentable personal habits and single-minded tenacity that carried him through 45 years of military associations from enlisted man to fighter pilot-cum-mathematician, re-maker of fighter pilot tactics, aircraft design and testing, and finally, author of the most original thinking in warfare in the century.

For all this, one might imagine this iconoclast to be widely acclaimed and lauded by his brothers in arms, but in fact John Boyd made so many enemies that he and his ‘Acolytes’ were cast out as pariahs by the majority of those in the military power structure he served. Still, the strength of his ideas compelled grudging respect that survived his chest-poking of generals and flailing cigar gesticulations that on more than one occasion resulted in smoldering neckties and inflamed egos of superior officers.

His pugnacity might best be summed up in an admonition against the careerism he felt poisoned military decision making…”You can be somebody or do something, but not both.” His unflinching dedication to service of country would not permit him to back away from unpleasant or inconvenient truth, and he relished the battles with generals as much as flying against the MIGs of his combat days. His ideas and ideals attracted an unlikely coterie of loyal supporters and allies who became known as the Reformers in the Pentagon.

Unhappily, the successes were precious few against trillions of dollars in wasteful spending on weapon systems that underperformed, or failed to perform at all, while overrunning budgets, the size of which is the sole measure of success in the military industrial complex. Donald Rumsfeld’s offensive blundering about ‘going to war with the army you have rather than the one you want’ is particularly chilling viewed in the light of the military we paid for at the behest of generations of self-serving be-starred bureaucrats in the Building. This book will not ease your sleep or gird your sense of security (in case you might still harbor such), and it can only haunt those who have lost loved ones in conflicts of the past half century.

Boyd and his acolytes paid for their dedication in the currency of foundered advancement, constant contention, and bitter, never-ending battles with those who should have embraced their cause. The costs to his family were similarly severe, unhappy tolls of neglect and estrangement over many years of obsession.

Still, there is much to inspire, amuse, and astonish in these pages, as well as great back-story on events that many will recall from decades of news about Pentagon procurement debacles and weapon system scandals. Be forewarned… it is worse and more shameful than sensible people can imagine.

His ideas survive (apparently largely, but not wholly, un-credited) in modern warfare tactics, but also in aircraft design, business processes, and even in the approach to fighting the entrenched bureaucracies he battled his entire career. Boyd himself observed that guerrillas often prevail in battle, but seldom go home to victory parades. His achievements were known to few and acknowledged be fewer still while living, and are unlikely to be widely appreciated in death. But his legacy survives to inspire others for whom the tension between morality and warfare is a manageable paradox. I’m guessing this book has an avid following among young military leaders today, and if so, perhaps some will avoid the hardening of the priorities that seem to chronically infect our national military decision making.

I’m grateful to my son, Mathias, for bringing this book to my attention.

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The Gershwin Tunnel connecting the B and C concourses at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago.  It seems to be from a more whimsical era of air travel, but still makes me smile (August, 2007)

Book Review: The Alchemist

The Alchemist is a pantheistic parable.  Paulo Coelho’s most popular work has a charming simplicity about it, embodied in the notion that we all have a Personal Legend, a destiny of dreams accessible only via the paths of courage and passion. That our hearts speak in a Universal Language most fluently to children (and drunkards and the elderly) is a common enough theme in literature. Coelho makes his case through a naïve Andalusian shepherd who is willing to risk his life to follow a dream strengthened in credibility by recurrence and the intercession of Melchizedek, King of Salem (not for nothing is Coelho called an occultist, though simple spiritualist is probably closer to the mark).  There's nothing cultish here... just supernatural realism churned with the sort of advice we're inclined to give our children and not follow ourselves... and a willingness to see and follow omens.

In Coelho's view, the burdens of adult life steal destiny from us, replacing it with the false gods of comfort and illusory security. The Language of the World, of the heart, of all things in their singular identities is accessible, but only through courage and passion, and the taking of risks these attributes enable.

God revealed his secrets easily to all his creatures… things have to be transmitted this way [person to person] because they were made up from pure life, and this kind of life cannot be captured in pictures or words.

The Alchemist is a more serious work than, say, Peter Pan, but they have in common the evocation of belief that is itself of value, irrespective of its ‘reality’. Fate is fate, but it is inclined to be dormant without courageous belief leavened with passion. Together, they support a transformative self-fulfillment that creates new futures.  For all this seriousness, I found a good deal of Monty Pythonian whimsy in this slim volume as well.  Altogether a satisfying read.  My only complaint? It wasn't long enough... I had to start Zahir before i fell asleep on the dark path over the Amazon.  More on that soon.

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Image: The Brazillian Congress, 07-07-07

Book Review: My War -- Killing Time in Iraq

Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq came to my attention through Paul Jones' lecture at OCLC in May. Paul is chair of the Blooker Prize selection committee that chooses the best books-that-began-life-as-blogs. Colby's book won the prize.  As a parent of a Marine, I'll read most anything that illuminates the day-to-day of life in America's biggest foreign policy debacle... well... maybe ever.

Buzzell is an unlikely man of letters.  A disproportionate number of his happen to be "F". Prior to joining the Army, his major investment in his future involved skateboarding, and at 26, his enlistment was as much as anything an escape from a future of dead-end data entry jobs.  He drank a lot of beer, and then recruiter's Koolaid, and next thing you know he's in Mosul.

His stories of humdrum will ring true to anyone with even passing familiarity with military life, and that credibility punctuates the power of his descriptions of events that most of us (thankfully) will never be able to judge from first-hand experience.

Buzzell is far from unread.  He quotes liberally from a diverse cross-section of literature.  As a fellow facebooker (Brenda Petays) wrote about this book:

My favorite quote is where Buzzell quotes battalion commander Lombatton who quotes Marcus Aurelius: "Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly. What doesn't transmit light creates is own darkness."

This is a must read if you have someone in Iraq or who might be. Or maybe even if you just want to know what its like for an American soldier serving in Iraq. It is witty, profane, evocative and just plain entertaining. The author became an unwitting celebrity for his natural style and up front description. His MOS is the 240 machine gun and humor piercing irony. An interesting case of someone whose life is probably far better off for the war, and has turned his advantage to a network-effect benefit for the rest of us. It isn't great literature, but it is terrific narrative.
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Image: The foyer of the newly opened Marine Corps Museum in Quantico, Virginia.  See more at http://www.flickr.com/photos/weibel-lines/sets/72157594479322602/

BOOK REVIEW: The Long Road Home: A Story of War and Family

There are many genres in the literature of warfare. If your interest in this literature lies in the immediacy of personal experience, then you’ll be familiar with some of the touchstone works associated with recent conflicts. We were Soldiers, Once, and Young describes the battle of Ia Drang, arguably a turning point of the American experience of Vietnam.  Blackhawk Down reprises the moment-by-moment developments of the Mogadishu debacle that changed American foreign policy for a decade. Never mind who started it, who is right, who is wrong--these books are about what happened to real people facing and inflicting death.

In The Long Road Home, Martha Raddatz brings us a timely contribution to this literature, describing a battle that in many minds signifies the turning point from a post Mission Accomplished peacekeeping assignment to a full-blown guerrilla insurgency. No polemics, no politics. Simply, A story of war and family.

This account of the first day of the battle for Sadr City conveys a strong sense of the professionalism, emotions, dilemmas, mistakes, and pure, unalloyed terror of the fog of battle-- a story as old as warfare, and as new as email in a war zone. Can anyone imagine riding in an exposed, open truck without armor, through a continuous gauntlet of thousands of AK-47-wielding Mahdi militia, shooting from windows, rooftops, and alleyways? How about twice?  How about three times? Thus unfolded a day that began with sewage-truck escort duty and ended with the deaths of 8 US soldiers, dozens of other American casualties, and some 500 Iraqi dead. Is it possible to grasp the choice of being overrun and killed, or firing into a mob advancing behind a shield of women and children?

Raddatz brings these people to us in vivid relief against the background of their families back home, who are an integral part of the story. The arrival on your doorstep of uniformed messengers of death is an abstraction to everyone in our culture except that tiny minority of Americans who have loved-ones in a war zone.

The Iraq war is waged largely without cost to the average American (other than the price of gasoline and mounting collective debt). We pay for it (that is, borrow for it) off the books, and most of us go about our lives without direct contact with the tragic agonies of the Americans and Iraqis who pay the human costs.

There was a time when even to evoke the names of the dead was considered unpatriotic (recall the controversy of Ted Koppel’s reading of the names of the fallen on television some time back). As the public has come to understand this conflict as a quagmire and an intractable sectarian civil war, support has waned, but still, we mostly just avert our gaze.

This book introduces the warriors and their families for whom the Iraq war is a defining feature of life (and sometimes death) each and every day. Casey Sheehan was one of them, in-country only days before his death. Michael Mitchell died at the end of his tour, one day before he would have left for home. Both volunteered for a rescue mission for comrades in harm's way.

Viewers of the Nightly News on PBS see the names and faces of each soldier who dies in Iraq or Afghanistan for 5 seconds, “in silence, as their deaths are confirmed and their pictures are made available.”  Viewing all of them at this stage of the war would take about 5 hours.  Spend 10, and read this book, and you’ll turn the final page with an intimacy with courage and grief that is an important, and largely absent, part of the public discourse on the Iraq war.

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Image: Spring flowers in a Clintonville yard (May, 2007)

Tertulia (Book Review: Living to Tell the Tale)

Gabriel García Márquez must certainly be on any shortlist of the best of the writers of the past century.  My own favorite of his books, Love in the Time of Cholera, was for me a vivid experience that has defied my sieve-like memory.  Rich, romantic images, full of vigor and disregardful of the risks of love, glow in my recollection of this wonderful book.  For all this, his memoir, Living to Tell the Tale, aged on my bookshelf for some time before making its way into my carry-on bag a couple weeks ago. Reading it is to understand that the phantasmagorical is part and parcel of the upbringing he lived so richly in his native Columbia.

It is easy to associate the Columbia of today with the unpleasantness of crime and chemical compulsions, but Márquez' Columbia was obsessed with the written word:

It is difficult to imagine the degree to which people lived in the shadow of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of being, a fireball that went everywhere on its own.

One of Columbia's poet luminaries from the 19th century, José Asunción Silva, shot himself at age 31, according to Márquez,

through the circle that his doctor had painted for him with a swab of iodine over his heart.

But it was undoubtedly their communal lives in a turbulent society, not their dramatic deaths, that gave the literati of Columbia their special richness.  Márquez repeatedly alludes to the tertulia of his literary upbringing... as explained by the translator, Edith Grossman,

a regular, informal gathering for conversation; it can take place in a cafe or someone's home.

The term recalls my own fond experiences of the Allegro Cafe and the Third Place Books Pub in Seattle.  Social discourse is impoverished without such... perhaps even unsustainable.

If we are to believe the rich truths of this memoir, his books are as much written by his family and era as by his own hand. The wonderful, mystical story of Cholera is in part the story of the grand and tenacious love of his parents, full of ardor, determination, and passion that lasted their lives, and lives still in his books.  Page after page of this memoir forced me to remind myself that it is ostensibly non-fiction rather than Márquez' imagineering. Or perhaps it is both. 

Of his own chaste coming of age, at an impromptu dance, he writes:

In an instant I became conscious of my body with a clarity of instincts that I have never felt again, and that I dare to recall as an exquisite death.

If you associate Márquez with magic, it is perhaps because the distance between magic and reality was not so great in the Columbia of his youth. Exorcisms and the phantasms that flew from them, conjurations, passions, violence, and upheaval are plentiful and convincing.  As he writes about a faun having boarded a streetcar on which he rode:

...the essential thing for me was not if the faun were real, but that I had lived the experience as if he were.

So, perhaps it is simply that, in the words of his Dr. Barboza: “Children’s lies are signs of great talent.”

I choose to believe every one of them.

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Image: The Reichstag dome is answer to Pei's pyramids at Le Lourve, and the Sony Center is as dramatic as any modern architecture I have seen.  Berlin is a forward-leaning city that seems to face up to its past even as it forges the most modern cityscape of Europe.  Having a latte in Starbucks on the eastern side of the Brandenburg Gate brings home how much the world has changed even since 1989.

I wish to gratefully acknowledge the gentle nudgings of a number of my readers who allege having missed my posts in the quietude since my return from the Emerald City to Columbus.  I confess to a case of SLD* complicated by two long trips, a bout of flu, and general reorientation.

*Seasonal Lassitude Disorder

National Children's Book Week

This week is National Children's Book Week, and in as much as Marguerite is a serious fan of such,  I asked her if she would be my guest blogger for the event. Her contribution follows:

Tar Beach by Faith Ringgold (New York: Crown Publishers, 1991)

I have often thought that anyone who had no particular reason to browse the children’s section of the public library was missing an opportunity to discover an absolute treasure of wonderful books, many of which I would describe as “not for children only.” Included in this sub-genre are books that are essentially brief memoirs of the author’s childhood, books that tell fascinating and often little known stories from the pages of history, books that are illustrated by acclaimed works of art, and books that are examples of writing that conveys ideas, feelings, and information in creative, sometimes quirky, and often inspiring language.  Tar Beach is one of my favorite examples.

Tar Beach began as a story quilt, a piece of fabric art that now hangs in New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Reproductions from the quilt are the illustrations for the children’s book.  Both tell the story of a young girl and her family who seek respite from the summer heat of their New York City apartment by joining their neighbors on Tar Beach, the roof of their apartment building.  After a delicious-looking picnic supper, the adults play cards while the little girl, entranced by the lights of the George Washington Bridge beckoning in the distance, drifts of to sleep and dreams of flying over that bridge that her own daddy, an ironworker, helped to build, wearing its string of lights like a necklace.  She dreams, too, of flying over the union house her daddy also helped to build, even though he couldn’t join the union because of his black and Indian ancestry, and she dreams of a life where her daddy always has a job, and her family can have ice cream for dessert every night.

I was originally drawn to this book for sentimental reasons, as I, too, spent many a summer night in my early years on my own family’s tar beach, not too far from the George Washington Bridge.  But I became fascinated by the art work, by the very idea, first of all, that a quilt could tell a story, and then that the art work of the quilt could be used to illustrate a picture book.  I have since discovered many other children’s books illustrated with fabric art.  Briefly, here are three wonderful examples. 

In Memories of Survival by Esther Nisenthal Krinitz and Bernice Steinhardt (New York: Hyperion Books for Children, 2005), Krinitz uses her skills of embroidery to tell the heart rending story of her survival of the Nazi occupation of her Polish home town. 

In The Whispering Cloth: A Refugee’s Story by Pegi Deitz Shea (Honesdale, PA: Boyds Mills Press, 1995), as a young Hmong girl learns the traditional art of making story cloths, she also finds the means of telling the story of her parents’ death, a story too painful for words.

Quilt of States: Piecing Together America, written by Adrienne Yorinks and 50 librarians across the nation, with quilts by Adrienne Yorinks (Washington D.C: National Geographic, 2005), literally depicts the growth of the United States, quilt piece by quilt piece, as each state is added to the original thirteen colonies.  Brief descriptions of each state’s early history, contributed by librarians from each state, add intriguing bits of information to this lovely work of art. 

I could go on, but I hope that mention of these few titles will entice you to take a closer look at the many wonderful books sitting on the shelves of the children’s collection that are definitely “not for children only."

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Image: Graffiti in the Cafe Allegro necessary

Air Fare

I returned from a 10 day sojourn in Mexico last night… a successful Dublin Core conference in Manzanillo, and a side trip to give a talk (in concert with my colleague Eric Childress) to UNAM librarians in Mexico City.   UNAM is Mexico's largest University, and is rising fast in rankings of  global universities. 

I experienced a personal first on my trip home. In this age of airline security and incessant ID checks, Continental Airlines managed to board an entire family of non-english-speaking passengers headed for LA… on my flight to Seattle.  Points off for Continental… the pilot’s announcement of our return to the gate carried a distinct edge of annoyance towards the passengers, rather than owning up to an obvious company screw-up. This sandwiched between two canned ‘safety’ briefings which included corporate boasting about what a high quality product they deliver.  Uh huh.

We returned to re-LA-gate them, and picked up some Seattle stragglers who had missed the earlier boarding opportunity, so it was at least a nice bonus for those folks. Other weather-related delays made for a late homecoming, but all such foolishness rolls off a traveler’s back with the right collection of reading matter (and good headphones to keep CNN and cell phones out of one’s ears).

My literary diversions for this trip:

Sin Killer
Larry McMurtry

A fluffy pioneer tale by everyone’s favorite modern writer of Westerns. No Lonesome Dove, this first-of-a-series nonetheless delivers nostalgic pleasure of unlikely times past. If movies can be made for TV, certainly books can be written for airplanes, and perhaps this was Larry’s intent. Three Stars for engaging characters, scenes you’d like to imagine might even have happened, and evocative images of the great wild west.

Saving Fish From Drowning
Amy Tan

Amy Tan is a reliable guide through particular channels of our multi-cultural society, and this novel of unexpected side trips is a thoughtful commentary on cultural excursions. She provides an engaging backdrop and warm caricatures of people you’ve probably known. A quirky collection of fellow travelers embarks on a fateful guided tour to Myanmar-the-new-Burma! that takes place in the aftermath of the mysterious death of the tour planner. Conveniently, the recently-dead tour leader narrates the book from her position of omniscient limbo, waiting to learn her own karmic fate.

Tan manages to poke fun at most everyone and every event in her narrative, despots to dalliance, all the while thoughtfully exploring our responsibilities for and to one another. It works on both an individual and cultural level. Karma takes a bruising in early slapstick that sets a tone of comedic errors and cultural violations. But serious issues unfold, and as the story developed I found myself caring what happened to this motley collection of wayfarers, and hoping for a less-than-fully-deserved redemption. I’m happy to join Tan’s cultural tours any day. Three and a half stars.

The Great Stink
Clare Clark

Synesthesia is a term for sensory cross-over: experiencing sound in the visual cortex being the prominent popular manifestation, popularized in Disney’s Fantasia and in the widespread sensory experimentation of the Leary years. Clare Clark’s first novel raises the bar for literary synesthesia, giving the reader a vivid olfactory and tactile sense of the often harsh environs of Victorian London—and making you like it. Her lyrical prose embraces self-mutilation, post-Crimean-war stress disorder, love of dogs, fear of rats, Victorian jurisprudence, and the survival of love in the face of martyred honour. And what story of Victorian drama would be complete without a good hanging?

Cameo appearances by (actual) unsung heroes of one of the most ambitious civil engineering projects of modern history left me wanting to know more about what happens under our feet, and the people who make it work (though, I’m happy to leave it’s olfactory apprehension a vicarious one). Two things that stand out from a visit to the Forum in Rome include the wagon ruts carved in the stone over long periods of chariots turning a particular corner, and the cloaca maximus, parts of which still function in the Roman sewer system today. Clare Clark’s images of the London sewer system will take a place on that same memory shelf.  Ain't infrastructure grand?

Her vivid tale brings alive an era and ethos wrapped in a gripping story that had me at once reading faster and wishing I could slow down and draw out the pleasure of her prose. All this, and an education in sewage systems! I found myself thinking of Sebastian Faulk’s Birdsong as I read this book – another literary juxtaposition of unspeakable horror and exquisite devotion. Both are lyrical and evocative, projecting experience of the senses and of the heart that are recognizably authentic and masterfully well-crafted. Clark is an accomplished historian, and it shows. Her artistry is at times breathtaking, and she’s no slouch at story telling, either.  If the measure of good literature is the ability to change one’s heart rate, this book qualifies. Four Stars.
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Image: The Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City is an overwhelming overview of Central American culture.  Admission is free on Sundays, and it seemed that a significant proportion of Mexico City's 22 million citizens were taking advantage (the living part of the rich exhibits).  Wonderful stuff.

Neutrality is over-rated

Traditional notions of surrogacy in the library world revolve around catalog records – a neutral distillation of attributes intended to support discovery and management. In the age of the Amazoogles, richness of linking and community-generated surrogates play a welcome role in discovery and evaluation. Several interesting issues emerge from this shift.

Surrogates as first class objects

I’ve alluded to the importance of this in a previous post.  It is part of the perspective shift that is, I believe, fundamental to the transition from Library 1.0 to Library 2.0 thinking.

Neutral surrogates as opposed to evaluative surrogates

Librarians have traditionally positioned themselves in a neutral role… above the ideological fray of content. I think this is as much artifact as intent. A bib record should be a neutral inventory of attributes, and to the extent that the catalog was central to our service, that neutrality served well. Of course, Libraries have long offered reader advisories. Nancy Pearl, Seattle's (the country’s?) best-known librarian (anyone seen a James Billington shushing Action Figure lately?) has acquired a national reputation as a voice of reading.

We have entered the era of recommender services to assist in our every consumer selection. The best example of this in the Library  space is Amazon – the reviews are widely read and eagerly written, and the marketing data (people who bought this, also bought that…) is valuable indeed.  Library Thing has, through the application of now well-understood social collaboration techniques, has introduced a similar functionality that is independent of book purchase.

Which is more valuable as a finding aid? A catalog record or a review? One focuses on discovery, and the other on suitability. But within the everything-indexed context of the Web, both are important, and the distinction blurs.  There is a case to be made for library-mediated evaluative surrogates coexisting cheek-by-jowl with traditional cataloging records.

What about an Amazon-library system mashup?  Just what Amit Gupta has offered (brought to my attention in Lorcan Dempsey's Blog).  All very interesting co-evolution, but what I really wanted to do was show off the Nancy Pearl Action Figure (deluxe Version).  Small Parts. Not suitable for children under 3 or those without a library card.  Who needs Jane Austen, anyway?