Daily Thoughts 01/16/2012

Portrait of French poet, journalist and writer, Anatole France, 1906 [picture] / Anders Zorn
1906.


Daily Thoughts 01/16/2012

I spent some time updating the Twitter and Facebook accounts of the Mount Vernon Public Library.

I also finished reading Distrust That Particular Flavor by William Gibson.  William Gibson is known for having coined the term cyberspace.  This makes him very influential with all things internet.  He often writes about how people interact with computers. This includes digital film and virtual reality.   He has a wonderfully cosmopolitan feel to his wirting.  The essays are set in Vancouver, San Francisco, San Diego, Singapore, and other cities.  This makes the writing sophisticated.  The essays in this book are very short two to three pages.  For me this is just the right length.


Today is Martin Luther King Jr's Day of Service.  Many people today are doing service to help others in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.



Day of Service Honors Martin Luther King Jr. from CNN
http://www.cnn.com/2012/01/16/us/mlk-day/index.html


My first hold came in for an electonic book.  I downloaded it to my Kindle for PC program.  For some reason, I had a little bit of trouble transferring it to my Kindle Touch, I have an older PC which did not recognize the new device.

The electronic book was This Changes Everything Occupy Wall Street and the 99% Movement, Edited by Sarah Van Gelder of Yes! Magazine.  The book is quite short 88 pages.  I also believe it does not quite represent the different viewpoints of Occupy Wall Street.  It is more like a snapshot of parts of the movement.  There were definite exaggerations with figures.

We learn that Adbusters planned the first protest as a protest against Wall Street involvement with government on September 17, 2011.  I question Sarah Van Gelder's statement that Adbusters is anti-capitalist, they are more focused on being against large publicly traded businesses, not against small business.  The initial protests seemed to be focused on separating big business from big government.

I also found Sarah Van Gelder's focus on drawing from foreign sources for the cause of the movement to be not completely accurate.  Saying that the protest came out of the Arab Spring and European economic protests is only part of the story.  2600 which is a hacker movement provided large amounts of computing power to Occupy Wall Street.  Also the forclosure crisis drove large parts of the movement.

I am not a huge fan of the general assembly idea. I think Occupy Wall Street has moved well beyond the 1960s.  I think that some of the traditions being described are not just anarchist, they are about more recent movements focsued on participatory government. This was not even touched on in This Changes Everything. If you take the time, the reader will find a strong Brazilian influence in Occupy Wall Street, especially emanating from places like Porto Alegre in Brazil.  Another element which is glossed over is the concept of the "electronic commons" or shared civic spaces available through the use of computers.  The people who are runing the Occupy Wall Street sites seem to have a very strong grasp of this.  They also seem to be able to use social media to reinforce this very well.

The one thing I found to be very interesting was the end of the book which focused on describing solutions to the problems of housing, economic contraction, and jobs.  Before this book, I had heard very little about how to solve the United States economic problems from Occupy Wall Street.  This book writes about solutions.  It reminds us that the United States belongs to its citizens.  It also reminds us that there are limits to speculation and tax havens.

I liked reading the book, but found it to be much too short, not inclusive enough, and too slanted.  There should have been more about the different groups that participated including unions, church groups, and nonprofit groups.  I also think it did not discuss many of the issues deeply enough.  There was not enough about the forclosure crisis, the student loan crisis, the bank bailouts, and environmental issues that drove many people to come support the movement.

There is a clear message that we need to reinvest in communities.  Part of this is asking people to put their money in local banks, buy from local businesses, and fund community investment in local government.  There are also demands for less outsourcing of jobs overseas, closing overseas tax havens, and breakup of monopoly businesses.  This is what was good about this book.

I also found that there was not enough about the intellectual underpinnings of the Occupy Wall Street movement.  There was nothing on the Occupy Wall Street Library, Cornel West, or the various writers, poets, and artists that supported the movement.

Hopefully, there will be a more complete book coming out soon on Occupy Wall Street.



Web Bits

The Coming War on General Computation by Cory Doctorow
https://github.com/jwise/28c3-doctorow/blob/master/transcript.md

Daily Thoughts 10/21/2010 (William Gibson, The Art of Nonconformity)

Morning perusal, 1916, Oil On Canvas, Antonio Parreiras

Daily Thoughts 10/21/2010

On the train to work, I finished reading Difficult Personalities A Practical Guide to Managing The Hurtful Behavior of Others (and Maybe Your Own) by Helen McGrath, Ph.D. and Hazel Edwards, MEd.  It is about difficult personality types and different ways to interact with them.  The author draws a lot from the DSM-IV.  It is a hard book to read, because it often is quite direct about how to deal with difficulties.

The article The Library of the Future Today by Barbie E. Keiser in the periodical Searcher on October 2010 is truly excellent.  It describes how information is changing and ways to think about how the functions of librarians is changing.  It is focusing on a user centered model where librarians focus on the information needs of the people coming in instead of primarily as a source to store and retrieve physical materials.

I put the book Djibouti by Elmore Leonard on hold.  I like the idea of reading a novel about modern day pirates in Somalia.

I spent more time going through the order journals.  Two books caught my attention; Advantage How American Innovation Can Overcome the Asian Challenge by Adam Segal and Destined For Failure: American Prosperity in the Age of Bailouts by Nicholas Sanchez and Others.  Both of these books address something which American policymakers are not talking about much;  innovation and new ideas from industry and getting Americans to produce more on its own shores. 

I spent a lot of time today reading through order journals.  We also had a meeting discussing our November gala for fundraising and different events we could have for fundraising during the next year.

On the way home, I started reading The Art of Non-Conformity Set Your Own Rules Live The Life You Want and Change The World by Chris Guillebeau.  This is not a new set of ideas more of a way to collect together a number of strategies for change and personal freedom.  He follows the philosophy of full freedom to make decisions in his life.  This has a little bit of the feeling of Jonathan Swift or Richard Burton.  I did two of the visualization exercises in the second part of the book;  imagine what your perfect day would be like and write down your most important goals.  This kind of free association often touches on other things because it is about change.

It reminded me a bit of William Gibson's article in the Wall Street Journal, The Future of the Book.  http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2010/09/06/william-gibson-on-the-future-of-book-publishing/  It would be interesting to see a print on demand machine that would print a hardcover book with low acid paper.  I would take it further with some other ideas.  Make the book out of 100% recycled material with plant based inks and design the printer so it was cradle to cradle; easy to repair, easy to upgrade, highly efficient with low energy use, and able to dismantle and recycle all the parts.

The Bigend Trilogy-- Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History by William Gibson

The Bigend Trilogy-- Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History by William Gibson

The uniting character in all three novels is Hubertus Bigend. He is not the main character. All of the books are about special projects contracted by Blue Ant, Bigend's company to find secrets. Secrets are the essence of cool to Hubertus Bigend.  His advertising company and viral marketing company Blue Ant, searches for cool things; thus he is often after secrets.  In the novels, the Blue Ant figurine even contains a listening device.  Bigend creates the backdrop for the stories.

Each book uses the concept of steganography, finding secret things in the larger pattern of things.  Cayce Pollard in Pattern Recognition must find a hidden producer of video clips.  What is ultimately interesting is that Bigend uses the secrets for marketing purposes.  In Zero History, we learn the video clips in Pattern Recognition are used to sell shoes.  Hollis Henry in Spook Country seeks to find a hidden shipping container.  This leads to cool technology also used for marketing called localive art.  In Zero History, Hollis Henry must track down a secret brand which is an article of military clothing.  This is of course is sold by Hubertus Bigend because military clothing sets the fashion of the street.  I rather like the idea that secrets sell.

The backdrop of the stories is a post 9/11/2001 world where change is accelerating.  Things happen so quickly it becomes hard to recognize the world of a week ago.   The cold war has ended and espionage has moved into the corporate boardroom with various loose factions vying for control.  We get to see this in the novels.  There is a kind of hidden war that is about directing peoples attention.  Reading the books together exposes a pattern in the writing.  In the first book, Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard steps into the shadowy post soviet world of the business oligarchs in Moscow.  Many of them are ex-kgb.  In the second book, Spook Country, Milgrim, interacts with two organizations, one a right wing christian conspiracy, and another a family of operatives that have left Cuba to go into business for themselves.  In the third book, Hollis Henry deals with both corporate espionage and a shadowy military contractor who is trying to go into business for himself after operating in various third world countries. This creates a very different kind of story about secrets.

The action takes place in hotels, factories, shipyards, art spaces, bars; places at the edges of every day life that are easy to miss.  The characters who thread themselves through the story would be easy to walk by and not notice in New York, Moscow, or Tokyo.  Voytek who sells antique calculators, and Inchmale who was part of the Curfew make for excellent background characters that help create the setting.  The descriptions of the backgrounds have a baroque quality to them that are often quite intricate.  It is a juxtaposition of fashion, technology, and every day objects; tweed jackets, tortoise shell glasses, zx81 calculators, GPS, cell phones, 501 Jeans, and other objects mix into a time frame that seems to head toward evening and night.

In each book, as the secrets are revealed, the characters emerge more as themselves.  This is best expressed in how Milgrim moves from being a drug addled captive to being sober and deeply indebted to Hubertus Bigend.  Also, the characters have their goals fulfilled.  Voytek starts seeking out zx81 calculators in Pattern Recognition for his art exhibit and is directly helped by Hollis Henry to build the final exhibit in Zero History.  All of the main characters hired by Hubertus are  indebted to him.  A lot of this debt is focused on medical help.  Milgrim is helped in a  Swiss drug clinic and Garreth has his leg reconstructed.

Some people view Hubertus Bigend as being immoral on many levels.  I find him quite moral, but often hiding it behind other ulterior motives like profit.  He actively moves against a right wing military organization in Zero History, and prevents a right wing organization from getting its money in Spook Country.  He also arranges two people to be cured of their medical problems.

This trilogy is well worth reading.  When I read Zero History, I realized I could not adequately write about it as a single book when I found there were two other books in the series.  Because the publication of the books was spaced so far apart, it was not obvious that they were a trilogy at first.  Pattern Recognition was written in 2003, Spook Country was written in 2007, and Zero History was written in 2010.  There is a very different feel to them when you read them one after another in a series.  You get to see how the characters change as secrets are revealed.

Daily Thoughts 9/21/2010 (Coraline, Pattern Recognition)

Why books are always better than movies? Paranormal levitation made with the free software Gimp, 27, September 27, 2009, Massimo Barbieri, Gnu Free Documentation License 1.2http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Why_books_are_always_better_than_movies.jpg


 
Daily Thoughts 9/21/2010 

I read some more of Pattern Recognition this morning.  I also put Spook Country on hold which I will reread once I am done reading Pattern Recognition. Pattern Recognition reminds us that the world changes so fast now, that it is hard to recognize things in a short time period.  I read a bit more Pattern Recognition on the train home.  Somehow, William Gibson manages to fuse fashion, thriller, and near future technology into a unique mish mash in all three books.

I also read some more of Self Esteem by Matthew McKay, Ph.D.  I read the book, but did not finish completing the exercises spread throughout the book.  I have already done severald exercises on shoulds, wants, self assessment, and cognitive distortions.  They are quite interesting.  I still have to do some visualization, meditation, and self-hypnosis exercises.  The book has a lot of material in it.

I got invited to a book signing on October 17, 2010 by a local poet for the book "Blood Beats In Four Square Miles" An Anthology of Poetry. Hopefully, it should create an opportunity to work on doing a poetry reading series at the library.

We did a display for the book, Play Me a Song by Barbara Jo-Lucchine Kruczek.  She sent us photographs of big band musicians and some articles from the local paper, The Daily Argus on her father, Philip Lucchine, who was a composer for big band music.  All of it will go to the local history room when the display is over.

The business resources list is up on the library website now.  I am waiting for them to put up the new library website soon.

I also confirmed that I am going to the Ebooks meetup this Friday.  I think it will be an interesting and useful experience.

Tonight, I finished watching Coraline. I like most all of Neil Gaiman's writing.  This is a short piece on him talking about Coraline.



Web Bits
An animated Neil Gaiman is going to star in the children's show Arthur doing a book signing. http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/09/an-animated-neil-gaiman-to-guest-star-on-arthur/

Daily Thoughts 9/20/2010 (Pattern Recogntion, Coraline)

Luca della Robbia, Priscian, or the Grammar (1437-1439). Marble panel from the North side, lower basement of the bell tower of Florence, Italy. Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.

Daily Thoughts 9/20/2010

Today has been a quiet day.  I picked up a copy of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson to read so I can finish reading the trilogy of books.  It will fill in so I can understand Zero History a little better.  



We just had pins assigned to our library cards to increase security.  This happened yesterday which makes things a bit interesting today.  There were a few questions about how it worked.



We also finished creating the business resources list for the library.  We are printing it as a flyer and posting it as a webpage.  It was originally created in publisher.  We create a lot of our documents and flyers in publisher.  A gentleman came by today to look at our community room.  It can seat 49 people. We are having some business programs tomorrow.

On the train home, I read some of Pattern Recognition by William Gibson.  It helped me get a better grasp of the series featuring Hubertus Bigend.  Hubertus Bigend is not the main character in the book.  He kind is the theme behind the story.  All of the books, Spook Country (2003), Pattern Recognition (2007), and Zero History (2010) are very intricately detailed and can stand as separate works. In fact, there is an odd quality to them because unlike most series, they were published several years apart.  The complexity of the writing is very clear.  There is a lot of detail which can be very distracting but makes sense when you compare all of the three books together.  I am just beginning to get a sense of how this detail works.  On P.76 of Pattern Recognition, there is a quote from the writing which kind of explains how the books are very different when compared together, "Steganography is about concealing information by spreading it throughout other information. At present I know little else about it."

I also watched some more of Coraline.  I am almost finished watching the film.  I very much like the message of the animated film.  It is about being true to yourself even when giving up yourself is very enticing.  The animation is superb.  I especially liked the cat and the circus mice.  They are my favorite parts of the movie.