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While not the typical Puget News fare, this was just too good to pass up and was making the rounds of some of my climbing friends.

I’ve done quite a bit of climbing throughout the years but I’ve never risked my life just getting to the climbing area. This video shows a completely hairball path to a famous climbing area in Spain. Billy goats and rock climbers only!

Sara Lloyd has published a wonderful and informative manifesto about the place of publishers in a rapidly changing reading landscape. It’s an absolute “must-read” for anyone involved in the production of written content (bloggers, authors, publishers, and marketers alike). There’s enough information here to feed a lot of different blog posts so don’t be surprised if you see me turning back to this one with some frequency.

Publishers – and, importantly, authors - will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks.

If you have a few minutes today, give it a read and then post a comment telling me what interested you or what you’d like for me to follow up on in more detail. I’ll be happy to dig down into anything here.

Easy Links to all 6 parts of the manifesto:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5
6. Part 6

An award winning article regarding the physics of violin acoustics and the mysteries of the “Stradivarius sound.” A very compelling read that makes me want to learn to play violin - showing it as a complex and sensual instrument while breaking some of the mystical taboos associated with the greatest instruments.

Every violin, whether a Stradivarius or the cheapest factory-made copy, has a distinctive “voice” of its own. Just as any musician can immediately recognize the difference between Domingo and Pavarotti singing the same operatic aria, so a skilled violinist can distinguish between different qualities in the sound produced by individual Stradivari or Guarneri violins. The challenge for scientists is to characterize such differences by physical measurements. Indeed, over the last century and a half, many famous physicists have been intrigued by the workings of the violin, with Helmholtz, Savart and Raman all making vital contributions.

Article originally discovered via this post over at Signal vs. Noise.

Living in the countryside of Northern California when I was about 12, going through some of the things my parents had stuffed into my large bedroom closet because their own large bedroom closet was stuffed to overflowing, I discovered a boxed set of 5 Vonnegut books from the 70s - my dad’s books. The covers were gaudy comic-book like things with lurid female imagery and so I asked my dad about them. His response was that they were “books for adults,” they had “complex themes,” and I “probably wouldn’t like them.” Of course that set my mind’s course upon immediately ripping through them all. I quickly tossed whatever Dragonlance novel I was reading at the time and read straight through “Slaughterhouse Five,” “Cat’s Cradle,” and “Breakfast of Champions.”

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At 8,000 euros I’m going to have to call this one “unnecessary.”

Try going to the Seattle Library on a rainy or a cold day and counting the number of homeless people taking refuge there. This points to a huge problem. These people need help beyond finding temporary shelter in our public structures. In Seattle, our new library cost more than $165 million and yet we have not found a better way to take care of our mentally ill and chronically homeless populations than to let them inside in the morning, monitor them for behavioral issues, and then clear them every night.

Former assistant director of the Salt Lake City Public Library system, Chip Ward, has written an outstanding piece called “How The Public Library Became Heartbreak Hotel” (found via a short pointer piece at LibraryJournal.com) for the Atlantic Free Press, in a column called Hard Truths for Hard Times. This is a fascinating read and it touches on some real loopholes and ineffectiveness in our policies to deal with the mentally ill. I strongly recommend you take a few minutes to read it.

Although the public may not have caught on, ask any urban library administrator in the nation where the chronically homeless go during the day and he or she will tell you about the struggles of America’s public librarians to cope with their unwanted and unappreciated role as the daytime guardians of the down and out. In our public libraries, the outcasts are inside.

The library wrestles with where to draw the line on odor. The law is unclear. An aggressive patron in New Jersey successfully sued a public library for banning him because of his body odor. That decision has had a chilling effect on public libraries ever since. When library users complain about the odor of transients, librarians usually respond that there isn’t much they can do about it. Lately, libraries are learning to write policies on odor that are more specific and so can be defended in court, but such rules are still hard to enforce because smell is such a subjective thing — and humiliating someone by telling him he stinks is an awkward experience that librarians prefer to avoid. None of this was covered in library school.

The cost of this mad system is staggering. Cities that have tracked chronically homeless people for the police, jail, clinic, paramedic, emergency room, and other hospital services they require, estimate that a typical transient can cost taxpayers between $20,000 and $150,000 a year. You could not design a more expensive, wasteful, or ineffective way to provide healthcare to individuals who live on the street than by having librarians like me dispense it through paramedics and emergency rooms. For one thing, fragmented, episodic care consistently fails, no matter how many times delivered. It is not only immoral to ignore people who are suffering illness in our midst, it’s downright stupid public policy. We do not spend too little on the problems of the mentally disabled homeless, as is often assumed, instead we spend extravagantly but foolishly.

What do you think about a culture that abandons suffering people and expects them to fend for themselves on the street, then criminalizes them for expressing the symptoms of illnesses they cannot control? We pay lip service to this tragedy — then look away fast. As a library administrator, I hear the public express annoyance more often than not: “What are they doing in here?” “Can’t you control them?” Annoyance is the cousin of arrogance, not shame.

Watching “Novel Reflections on the American Dream” (link to trailer | website), a new documentary on PBS, is an illuminating two hour experience which steps through 7 great American novels and how they’ve each confronted the subject of American idealism and pushed our perceptions of what it means to be “self-made.” Delving into issues of class, racism, feminism, politics, and soul-searching, this documentary is not to be missed.

I’m a little ashamed to say that I’ve only read 2 of these books, “Seize the Day” and “The Great Gatsby.” I definitely intend to get to “The Grapes of Wrath” one of these days. Any others I shouldn’t miss?

1. 

“Sister Carrie,” Theodore Dreiser

2. 

“The House of Mirth,” Edith Wharton

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I have always thought that Lucius Shepard writes like a G. G. Marquez. You have a very distinct and clear idea of the characters and the setting. You can almost smell the sweltering heat of the dying Louisiana town where the story takes place. And just like many of Marquez’ works, there is a lot of mysticism intermixed with reality where, in the end, you come to the belief that magic and the real world are intermixed, that if we were just in the right place (wrong place) at the right time we too might get wrapped up in a fairytale or tragedy.

The story revolves around a bargain the town of Grail made with the “Good Gray Man”. Every generation they must promise a Midsummer Queen to him. The bargain they made is for all the town’s bad luck to be drawn onto the Midsummer Queen. But I don’t know if they got what they’ve bargained for, because it appears that, perhaps, they get no luck at all good or bad.

The story centers on Jack Mustaine, an outsider and how he is entwined in the story, cast as the hero or is that the jester…Will he rescue Vida Dumars, the current Queen? And what is his larger part in the story?

The people know that Jack might be the one who breaks the spell: they warn him, they help, they hinder. It’s a true suspense story that could end in many ways. I’ll let you read it and enjoy the ending yourself.

Great book, and one I will certainly read again.

p.s. I’ve read most of his works. I can recommend this as a great introduction to his writing and would follow it up with The Jaguar Hunter.

I had a delightful evening at Elliott Bay listening to former UW professor, current Harvard professor, noted translator of Murakami’s works, and author, Jay Rubin. He was here in support of his new work, Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition).

Rubin started the event by talking for a little while about Akutagawa and the meaning of “Rashomon,” probing the audience for our perceptions of the word. Having just read the beginning of the book and sort of knowing the answer, I thought it would be cheating to pipe up, but another reader did chime in with the perception of a gate (indeed, Rashomon is a particular gate in Kyoto) and Rubin responded “you know too much.” I think what he was trying to kickoff the conversation with was the idea that the Western perception of Rashomon is entirely based on the Kurosawa film of the same name. People in the West undoubtedly think of Rashomon in significantly different terms than the Japanese, who have grown up with these stories as part of their cultural consciousness.

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Ross is a friend who has frequently helped me work on this blog (for which I am indebted). While I’ve always known he was in the Pacific Northwest Ballet, I had no idea you could buy a DVD performance of Midsummer Night’s Dream issued by the BBC. How cool is that?

Anyone want to have a Ross Yearsley party at my house? We can invite him and make fun of his tights (I always assume there are tights involved in ballet but perhaps that’s not the case).