Nicholson Baker's curiosity

I try to link to everything by or about Nicholson Baker, including his recent reviewof Auletta's book about Google and this fine verbiage from Snarkmarket that sums up what makes Baker great; it's that big ol' curiosity.

"And it’s notable because so many of the spot-on assessments of new media, cul­ture and technology have come, lately, from Nicholson Baker. Nicholson Baker on Wikipedia. Nicholson Baker on the Kindle. He’s neither a booster nor a troll; he seems to approach it all with curiosity—the curiosity of an actual user, no small thing—and amusement. And he’s always surprising. This is Nicholson Baker, the guy who wrote about “the assault on paper.” And he’s “fond of Google”? Why, sure. He’s a thinker, not a pundit; a working brain, not a billboard hawking the same idea, over and over."

U.S Code free online

from Open Jurist

Introducing the United States Code on OpenJurist

OpenJurist is growing! You can now access the United States Code on OpenJurist. Our integration is not complete yet, but the US Code is available so we wanted to make it accessible. Please let us know what you think by emailing us here: openjurist - at - gmail - dot - com. It will take Google a little while to make it searchable, but in the mean time if you know the section you need you can navigate your way there.

Find the United States Code, here: http://openjurist.org/united-states-code

Spreadsheet fiction

The Millions has posted an update (for 2009) on Frank Kovarik's interesting New Yorker fiction spreadsheet data.
See also Kovarik's blog (not confined to literature) "Corresponding Fractions"

Cartoonify yourself!

This ad keeps turning up all over the place....or is it something about my web-behavior that's attracting it? On many levels, it captures nicely what the social web is all about. Get with it and cartoonify yourelf! Make it real!

The year in translation

Three percent "a resource for international literature at the University of Rochester" and named after the oft-cited statistic (first established by Bowker) that only 3% of books published in the U.S. are translations, offers an overview of the year in translation, including a 2009 translation spreadsheet of the original fiction and poetry translations released in the U.S. during 2009.

In translations by country of origin, France tops the list, accounting for 32, or 9.2%, of 348 translations, while Spanish is the most translated language with 59 titles. 11 Norwegian titles in translation were released in the U.S. market in 2009 - the same number as lil'old Russia (lots of space and people, but evidently lacking in significant writers and literary tradition) and 1 more than measly China.

Three percent more than suggests that translations are a measure of a reading nations' insularity: The motivating force behind the website is the view that reading literature from other countries is vital to maintaining a vibrant book culture and to increasing the exchange of ideas among cultures. In this age of globalization, one of the best ways to preserve the uniqueness of cultures is through the translation and appreciation of international literary works. To remain among the world’s best educated readers, English speakers must have access to the world’s great literatures. It is a historical truism and will always remain the case that some of the best books ever written were written in a language other than English. 

According to statistics compiled by the Norwegian publishers association  279 adult fiction titles were translated into Norwegian in 2008, along with 333 titles for children.  In both categories, the number of translations exceeded the number of original Norwegian titles (275 and 233 respectively). Naturally, translations will be comparatively more numerous in nations of minor languages, but these are still striking figures: 279 titles for a population of under 5 million, as compared with 348 translations for a U.S. population of more than 300 million.

Free Technology for Teachers

I woke from troubled sleep this morning berating myself for neglecting to nominate the superb Free Technology for Teachers for the Edublogs 2009 awards. Rushed over to see if it was too late, which it was, but no matter...many others confirmed my excellent judgment and voted Free Technology for Teachers as the best individual educational blog for 2009. Congratulations!

The worst books

Pleased to see Vernon God Little picking up several endorsements in this contest by The Guardian.

How Google works

I always suspected the secret behind Google was  something like this.

Preview new NYPL site

A video showing the new NYPL site (and three cheers for the absence of music!)

Access myLibrary for iPhone

The iPhone/GPS app AccessMyLibrary from Gale will point you to libraries within a 10-mile radius of your location. (libraries that do not subscribe to a Gale product are not shown, however). You can then select a library and obtain access to all its Gale electronic resources. You can also use this app to find the address or to contact the[Gale subscribing] library in your area directly. See a thorough review/explanation at Resource Shelf.

The new digital future

A nice nosegay of stuff on the new digital future at Bookforum.

Empowering the peanut gallery

Alan Jacobs at Text Patterns makes the brazen claim that concentration and distraction are incompatible entities. Actually that thought had occurred to me also, but I wrote it off to old age. Jacobs provides some good references on this topic, and his post is followed by a string of interesting comments. The Chronicle of Higher Education discussed this phenomenon recently in  Teaching with Twitter: Not for the Faint of Heart - which is actually more about occupational health than higher education. In the video below, an enthusiastic faculty member notes that he now hears from students who were once to shy to speak up in class; once again, technology levels the playing field, this time taking away that unfair advantage formerly enjoyed by  ventriloquists. See also my earlier post  about backchanneling.

An outstanding Christmas decoration

A truly outstanding Christmas decoration! And testimony by the anonymous prankster about the response to this lifesize yuletide ornament (read it at Traveling Librarian) inspires faith in the goodness of mankind!

Letters of Note

What an attractive and interesting blog Letters of Note is! Here's the "about" blurb:

Letters of Note is an attempt to gather and sort fascinating letters, postcards, telegrams, faxes, and memos. Scans/photos where possible. Fakes will be sneered at. Updated every weekday.

Translation

For those interested in translations and the art of translation, The Quarterly Conversation has assembled "Translate this book"

We’ve talked to some of the top translators into English working today; we’ve talked to publishers big and small; we’ve talked to agents, journalists, and foreign-language authors. We’ve asked them all for the best books that still aren’t in English. And have they responded. They’ve told us TRANSLATE THIS BOOK!, and now we pass that on to you.

Google real time search

A few months ago, Google introduced a new feature that lets you limit search results to items added during the past 24 hours. Now they've also added a "latest" feature, that lets you filter down to items added during the past minutes and seconds. Very cool, and a useful supplement to Twitter and realtime search engines. Here's a demo video - without narration, but with annoying music, so turn your speaker off  (why do so many videos come with this kind of useless music?  Silence is golden.)

Distant Librarian and Edublog Awards

Thanks to Meredith Farkas for proposing the Distant Librarian blog for the 2009 Edublog Awards, thereby bringing it - and them - to my attention!

New Google product out of beta

Moving boldly into new territory, Google rolls out important product in Vietnam (from Funny Potato blog)

A translation mystery, solved I think

There's an oddity in Louise and Aylmer Maude's translation of Anna Karenina that has puzzled me for some time. The passage in question is Part I, chapter 16, third paragraph, about Vronsky falling in love with Kitty in Moscow. Most translators  have something like this:  (from Constance Garnett's translation)
 "In Moscow, he had for the first time felt, after his luxurious and coarse life in Petersburg..." etc.

A newer translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhinsky is similar.."In Moscow, after the luxurious and coarse life of Petersburg, he had" and so on.

And Google Translate renders it like this:
In Moscow, the first time he experienced after a luxurious and coarse Petersburg life, the beauty of intimacy with a charming and innocent girl who fell in love. (Not bad!!!)

But then we come to Louise and Aylmer Maud's translation:
 "In Moscow, after this luxurious course of Petersburg life, he experienced" etc.

A Russian interepreter hearing the English homonyms "coarse" and "course" might conceivably confuse them, but here we're talking about a translation from Russian into English.  Is there a Russian homograph (word with same spelling, different meaning, like "bark") or  heteronym (word that has common spelling but different meaning and pronunciation, e.g  invalid and invalid) that could account for this gaffe? My Russian speaking friends said no, and having no further ideas, I tucked it away in my big store of things to wonder about.

Then last week I stumbled upon Jeffrey Trachtenberg's article Translating Tolstoy in the Wall Street Journal, about the translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. I decided to send Trachtenberg a note about this little conundrum, and he graciously responded by directing me to David Remnick's fascinating 2005 New Yorker article "The Translation Wars" which discusses more generally the challenges of translating Russian, the famous feud between Nabokov and Wilson, and some of the translators (including Pevear and Vohlokinsky) and their translations. One detail in particular, about Constance Garnett's production line methods, grabbed my attention: She hired a secretary, who read the Russian text to her aloud; Garnett would dictate back in English.

Eureka, this is precisely the kind of method that could twist "coarse" into "course."  And although this was about Garnett and her secretary (who got the passage right), it is not implausible that the Maudes might have engaged in the same kind of mischief. I can think of no other explanation.

p.s. - in Russian, in case someone might have a better explanation, the passage looks like this:

В Москве в первый раз он испытал, после роскошной и грубой
петербургской жизни, прелесть сближения со светскою милою и невинною
девушкой, которая полюбила

Non-librarians speak up for libraries; launch of ReadKiddoRead

Radical patron provides a summary of recent advocacy for libraries by non-librarians, including this bit:

Nov 6 Author James Patterson advocates for libraries at a national conference for school librarians. “It’s time for librarians to start making a lot more noise,” Patterson told the packed crowd. “School libraries are not a luxury, they are a necessity.”
Additionally, Patterson and a team of publishing consultants launch a new literacy website, ReadKiddoRead that beats library sites hands-down for content, discoverability and advocacy messaging.

Where stories come from

Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel writes charmingly in the Guardian about where stories come.

More on snakes: Man caught red-handed trying to steal Giant Anaconda

Man caught red-handed trying to steal Giant Anaconda!

This week is Geography Awareness Week!

National Geographic's MyWonderfulWorld  celebrates Geography Awareness Week,  a prelude to next month's more comprehensive National Awareness Month. Geography Awareness Week was  established by Presidential Proclamation in 1987. This year, to kick it off, "National Geographic invited all 100 U.S. Senators to draw a map of their home state from memory and to label at least three important places. Here's the gallery of maps from the brave Senators who took the challenge.The maps reveal home-state pride, personal history, and even some geographic humor."  So far, only 11 Senators have risen to the challenge...the rest were perhaps intimidated by Al Franken's performance at the Minnesota State Fair...

More on the smell of books

I've blogged previously about this ingenious spray for Kindle and other hand-held devices, but for those who want to know more about the research that lies behind household items like these, here's the abstract of a recent paper that appeared in Analytical Chemistry

Material Degradomics: On the Smell of Old Books
Matija Strli*†, Jacob Thomas‡, Tanja Trafela§, Linda Csfalvayov†, Irena Kralj Cigi§, Jana Kolar and May Cassar†
Centre for Sustainable Heritage, The Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, University College London, Gower Street (Torrington Place site), London, United Kingdom WCIE 6BT, Tate, Millbank, London, United Kingdom SW1P 4RG, Faculty of Chemistry and Chemical Technology, University of Ljubljana, Akereva 5, Ljubljana, Slovenia SI-1000, and Morana RTD d.o.o., Oslica 1b, Ivanna Gorica, Slovenia SI-1295
Anal. Chem., 2009, 81 (20), pp 8617–8622
DOI: 10.1021/ac9016049
Publication Date (Web): September 17, 2009
Copyright © 2009 American Chemical Society

We successfully transferred and applied -omics concepts to the study of material degradation, in particular historic paper. The main volatile degradation products of paper, constituting the particular “smell of old books”, were determined using headspace analysis after a 24 h predegradation procedure. Using supervised and unsupervised methods of multivariate data analysis, we were able to quantitatively correlate volatile degradation products with properties important for the preservation of historic paper: rosin, lignin and carbonyl group content, degree of polymerization of cellulose, and paper acidity. On the basis of volatile degradic footprinting, we identified degradation markers for rosin and lignin in paper and investigated their effect on degradation. Apart from the known volatile paper degradation products acetic acid and furfural, we also put forward a number of other compounds of potential interest, most notably lipid peroxidation products. The nondestructive approach can be used for rapid identification of degraded historic objects on the basis of the volatile degradation products emitted by degrading paper.

Outtasight

OuttaSight is a lightweight Windows desktop utility that hides running application windows to un-clutter the desktop, quickly hide private work, or secure your applications while you’re away from your computer. Read all about it at MakeUseOf Very handy!

Venomous snakes

You're probably not obsessively interested in venomous snakes and animals, but I am, and was delighted to discover - in connection with my daughter's travels to South America - the Armed Forces Pest Management Board (AFPMB)Living Hazards Database. Wow!!! Includes a "venomous animals by country" list.

Psychedelic baseball, 1970

A charming and hilarious animation about psychedelic pitcher Dock Ellis...(boingboing)

Boing Boing on craziness

How excellent that the widely-read Boing Boing is not only promoting Richard Hofstaedter's must-read essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" but even quoting one of my favorite passages, the one about the scientific pedantry of the true believer's language and "the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows." That, mercifully, is one thing that people of other faiths normally don't bore us with, e.g exactly how their respective prophets worked their miracles.

Little Professor and bookless libraries

The Little Professor concludes that books in a library are a good thing.

Spreadsheet fiction

If you've ever been asked for a spreadsheet of all the short stories that have appeared in BASS (Best American Short Stories) 1978-2008, Jake has already obliged . More about best American short stories by the numbers at The Millions. And if your interest is New Yorker Fiction 2003-2008 by the numbers, there's a spreadsheet for that too, courtesy of Frank. See also analysis at The Millions.