Reading lists

Ah, I love the Books of the Year outpouring on the internet. Here are a few goodies:

New York Times 100 Notable Books

The Guardian's Books of the Year

The New Statesman's Books of the Year

Bus stops

In the vein of abandoned, polar-bear infested workers' barracks, I now bring you Soviet bustops, including this beauty

which reminds me strongly of the Ratana temple at Ratana Pa

and Rua Kenana's meeting house and church at Maungapohatu

Images: 
Photograph of a Soviet bus stop by Christopher Herwig from How to be a Retronaut
Ratana temple. Godber, Albert Percy, 1875-1949 :Collection of albums, prints and negatives. Ref: 1/2-018648-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23113205 
Bourne, George, 1875-1924. Rua Kenana Hepetipa's wooden circular courthouse and meeting house at Maungapohatu. Godber, Albert Percy, 1875-1949 :Collection of albums, prints and negatives. Ref: APG-1679-1/2-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23131313

What Middletown Reads

I am curious about the hands that books have travelled through. I am sad we no longer have due dates stamped into library books. I liked knowing that the book I had selected had been a popular as a pretty debutante for the first year after it arrived in the library, but had since then sat for twenty forlorn years in its place on the shelf, waiting for me to claim it.

At primary school, I could trace books back through their issue slips - when you're nine, the kids who had moved on to high school become like mythic beings. Taking out a book that they had once read was like a connection to adulthood, a promise that I too would soon don a navy blue uniform and stay on the bus into town after the little kids got off.

Today, I believe most libraries discard borrowers records, as a privacy matter. But one collection of small town American borrowers records - from turn-of-the-19th-century Muncie, Indiana, have been digitised and made available online.

In a terrific article on Slate, John Plotz covers what researchers are digging up from the ledgers:

For example, they discovered that fewer than 38 percent of Muncie patrons were blue-collar, though more than 60 percent of Muncie’s families were blue-collar. They also discovered that blue-collar families were significantly more likely to have multiple library cards than white-collar families. With little spare cash to buy books—and with few forms of affordable daily entertainment—the single book permitted out on each card frequently was not enough for a blue-collar family with several avid readers. Blue-collar borrowers were also more likely to borrow classics, or older books, while white-collar readers gravitated to the latest fashionable books: Felsenstein and Connolly speculate this may reflect the availability of older books in the houses of wealthier patrons.

Plotz's essay is more than just your typical data crunching+insight.  It's also the story of how he tries to re-live the reading life of Muncie teenager Louis Bloom, and his searching out of Bloom's descendants. It's a lovely and fascinating article, and perfect for a weekend read.

NPR's Infinite Player

You know how every so often something comes along, and you're like, YES! That is exactly what I've been looking for?

Today I am LOVING NPR's experimental web app Infinite Player. There's a great explanation of the app on the Nieman Labs site. Basically, it presents a random mix of NPR pieces, designed bring that serendipity of just switching on the radio & listening to what it gives you to the web. It's a contrast to seeking out and listening to podcasts ('intentional listening'): every piece I've heard so far has been under five minutes long, so there's no annoyance if you zone out for a moment, or tune in a bit late; you're not overly invested, so you can move on.

At the moment, all you can do on the app is play, pause, refresh and igive an item a thumbs up or thumbs down to indicate your interest and teach the app about your tastes. It's brilliantly simple, and it was chucked out there in a sprint and a half.

One of the first stories Infinite Player threw up for me was about a guy who used 'Moneyball' style data analysis to win at Jeopardy. In half an hour I've heard about electric cars, cheese making, shortages in ADHD medication, something doomy about Obama and the economy, and criticisms of the latest Honda Civic. It's been joyous.

Of course, I've gone straight into feature bloat. I want other stations and other podcasts in there. I want a link so I can tweet and email stories to people. But wow - three weeks for this level of delight. That's all kinds of awesome.

Crowdsourcing an Yvonne Todd catalogue

Go on, you know you want to ...

What the ...

This weekend I finished Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life. I've written something of a review over at Goodreads, but my single favourite finding in 416 pages was discovering that no-one seems sure what colour Dickens' eyes were:

they were reported variously as dark brown, dark glittering black, clear blue, 'not blue', distinct clear hazel, 'large effeminate eyes', clear grey, green-grey, dark slaty blue - with a little orange line surrounding the pupil - and even, by a cautious observer, as 'nondescript'.

Admirable

Adam Gopnik is probably my favourite New Yorker writer, and his Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life was one of my favourite books in recent years. I'm not going gangbusters over reading his new book (The Table Comes First: Family, France, and the Meaning of Food) but boy, does the guy give good interview on the promotional trail. This interview with ZYZZYVA is the best so far, and includes gems like:

To me a great piece is a sequence of memorable sentences. And I know that’s a sort of limiting thing. Maybe that’s why I can’t write effective narratives! But for me a wonderful epigrammatic sentence, an effective aphorism, that for me is like seeing a pregnant woman, it’s the perfectly shaped thing, pregnant sentences.

And then paragraph structure fascinates me, too. One of the things that drives me nuts when I’m reading even good academic writing is that nobody seems to have ever heard that sentence variation is a vital part of writing. These are people who are perfectly competent in every other ways, but every sentence is the same shape.

In the end though, you either can produce surprising, beautiful sentences or you can’t. Without that, all the erudition and intelligence in the world is not going to make any difference. For me, yes, a piece works when I can say that there are six good sentences in it. And a piece that does not have any good sentence is not worth reading. Now, having said that, of course I struggle over weeks and pull my hair to work on the structure, to make it logical, and move paragraphs around so that the sequence flows. All that stuff matters, too. But if I am answering honestly, yes, it’s the sentence that matters.

Recommendations, please

Life has eased back a bit, and as a result I've started thinking ahead to Christmas and, as ever, my Christmas reading list.

I've got a growing stack of fiction (ranging from my first stab at George R. R. Martin through to Muriel Spark) but my non-fiction is looking very thin. So I thought I'd throw it open here: what should I read over summer?

To provide some guidance, here are some books I've particularly enjoyed over the past two years:

Michael Lewis's Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - how the Oakland Athletics used hard numbers to build  winning baseball team

Robert Graves's Goodbye to all that - his searing memoir of childhood and World War I

Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - the story of the woman from whom the HeLa cells were drawn

Sarah Bakewell's How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer - a marvellously constructed study of the first essayist.

Lisa Jardine's Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory - how ideas, politics, people, power and money flowed between England and Holland in the 17th century

Siddartha Mukkerjee's The Emperor of All Maladies - a history of cancer

Adam Gopnik's Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life - takes a coincidence (the two men were born on the same day) and turns it into a thoughtful take on two exhaustively documented lives

H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team and a Dream - a heartbreaking look at Texan high school football

Nick Lane's Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution - a witty and occasionally mindblowing book, and thankfully not The Greatest Show on Earth

Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - a vastly enjoyable study of the point before art and science began to divide.

Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands - a thing of intelligent beauty

Lauren Redniss's Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie - a thing of beautiful intelligence

Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw's Why Does E=mc^2?: And Why Should We Care? - a kindly written introduction to the theory of general relativity, which had me for absolute minutes on end feeling like I actually understood it.

So, what should I read this summer?

Goodbye, Seb

Seb Chan has posted the news that he's leaving the Powerhouse Museum for the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

Seb has been a massive influence on me, personally and professionally. His work, and more importantly, his outreach at the Powerhouse brought the international digital cultural sector's attention to this part of the world, and New Zealand and Australia's cultural institutions have flourished in that time.

You can't pin all the changes down to one person, of course, but you also can't deny that Seb's combination of energy, data-driven innovation and sheer generosity of spirit has made it all that bit easier to push our own organisations forward in the digital world. Thanks Seb, travel safely, and I hope we see you down here again soon.

p.s. you probably all follow Seb's writing at Fresh and New(er), where he's going to keep posting; you might not know though about Small Stories, his delightful blog about books he's reading to his kids.  Highly recommended.

The Big Irony

From the occasional reviews series: Lev Grossman's The Magicians.

..........

Laura Miller described Erin Morgensten's (rather sickly sounding) The Night Circus as 'the first Etsy novel'. That might make Lev Grossman's The Magicians and The Magician King into Narnia for Boing Boing readers.

The Magician King is a quest story, written for an audience that's not just familiar with every Harry Potter meme, but with knowyourmeme.com as well. I think of Grossman's tone as 21st century hardboiled; it's every bit as quotable, but also every bit as relentless, as Raymond Chandler. Here's a representative sample:

She always righted herself in the end, with the help of the dandy new shrink, a woman this time, and her dandy 450 milligrams of Wellbutrin and 30 milligrams of Lexapro daily, and her dandy new online support group for the depressed.

Actually, the support group really was pretty dandy. It was something special. It was founded by a woman who'd worked successively at Apple, and then Microsoft, and then Google. She blazed a glittering arc in the firmament at each firm for about four or five years, piling up tranches of stock options, before she rolled neurochemical snake eyes and a bout of clinical depression knocked her out of the sky. By the time Google was done with her she was forty-four and had her fuck-you money in the bank. So she retired early and started Free Trader Beowulf instead.

Free Trader Beowulf - you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it. FTB was an online support group for depressed people. But not your common run of depressed people. Oh, no.

To get in the door you first had to show them your prescriptions. They wanted credentials, solid ones. A bunch of nerds like this, they didn't want to hear your whining, and they didn't want to read your poems - sorry, Jack - or look at your doomy watercolours. This crowd wasn't soft-core. If you were depressed, they wanted to see the hard stuff, a diagnosis from an actual psychiatrist and hard-core chemical-on-neuron action. And if you were rocking double-neurochemical-penetration, like Julia was, all the better.

As much as I enjoyed The Magicians - felt like I was reading a palimpsest of every bit of lovable and scary fantasy I've ever read, supplemented by every bit Grossman has read - now the magic's starting to fade a little. The writing's still crisp, but the story is less compelling, the allusions less amusing, the inventiveness not quite as sparkling.

The book ends with a set-up to turn this duo into a trilogy. I kind of hope Grossman bucks this and does something totally different next.

Beyond access

My term on the National Digital Forum board is drawing to a close (I finish up after the NDF conference later this month).

It's a bit of an end of an era for me - I see it as part of the six year journey I've been on since I started work at the National Library in January 2006. Although I left in the middle of last year, working at the Library had a huge impact on me. For the past six years, I've spent a great deal of time thinking about cultural institutions and their collections.

I think about what these institutions stand for, and why they exist. I think about who they serve (or what they serve - I have this fuzzy, not particularly well articulated theory that collecting is part of creating history, whether or not anyone ever puts what is collected into a history). I think about how people interact and engage with the institutions and their collections. With our collections, when you really think about it.

Working on things like the National Library's Flickr Commons account and the @NLNZ twitter account reinforced for me not only that, thanks to the web, collections have moved beyond the physical places they're stored into the unlimited world, but that the role of researching and sorting and presenting these collections have moved beyond curators and historians and into the hands of anyone with a search box and a link to share around.

We've come a long way in the decade or so since cultural institutions started digitising their collection items and putting them online. But we haven't gone quite far enough. I still want more. I want more freedom to play with collections. In particular, I want more freedom to play with items that are out of copyright and ready to move back into the creative melting pot.

I was prompted to think about this again tonight when I read about the launch of Mixel, an iPad app that lets people grab images from around the web, remix them into collages and share them around. As one of the founders, Khoi Vinh, writes:

... we chose collage for a very important reason: it makes art easy. Photos, the component pieces of every collage, are among the most social and viral content on the Web, and allowing people to combine them into new, highly specific expressions of who they are and what they’re interested in is powerful. Collage also has a wonderfully accessible quality; few people are comfortable with a brush or a drawing implement, but almost everyone is comfortable cutting up images and recombining them in new, expressive, surprising or hilarious ways. We all used to do this as kids

When I see things like this

and this

and this

all I want to do is share them. And I can, thanks to the new statement on the National Library's Beta website:

You can copy this item for personal use, share it, and post it on a blog or website. It cannot be used commercially without permission, please ask us for advice. If reproducing this item, please maintain the integrity of the image (i.e. don't crop, recolour or overprint it), and ensure the following credit accompanies it

What I want now is the next bit. I want to start playing. I want to give them another life, like Mixel is doing:

Mixel keeps track of every piece of every collage, regardless of who uses it or how it’s been cropped. That means, in a sense, that the image pieces within Mixel have a social life of their own. Anyone can borrow or re-use any other piece; you’re free to peruse all the collages (we call them “mixels”) and pick up literally any piece and use it in your own mixel. If you don’t like the crop, the full, unedited original is stored on the server, so you can open it back up in an instant and cut out just the parts you like. Mixel can even show you everywhere else a particular image has been used, so you can follow it throughout the network to see how other people have cropped it and combined it with other elements.

I know we need to respect copyright, attribution, donors' original intentions, and the makers of these works themselves. But I honestly think it's what we need to make happen if we want to move from being providers of things that people enjoy and look at, and become providers of things people love and use. 


Introducing Mixel for iPad from Mixel App on Vimeo.

Images, from top 
Total eclipse of the sun. Ref: 1/2-051134-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22516232 
Young boy on a rocking horse. Harding, William James, 1826-1899 :Negatives of Wanganui district. Ref: 1/4-008595-G. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/22853575 
Taieri Pet at Middlemarch. Whites Aviation Ltd :Photographs. Ref: WA-28295-F. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. http://beta.natlib.govt.nz/records/23232388 

Full disclosure - although I no longer work at the Library, the company I work for has a long relationship with the Library and we've worked together on the Beta site. Also, I realise the Whites Aviation photo is most likely not out of copyright - I just like it.

Picks

Today on the radio I'm going to be previewing the visual arts line-up at next year's NZ International Festival of Arts. I was struck in 2010 by how much more Wellington's public galleries seem to be aligning their programming to the Festival than in previous years*, and that seems to be true of 2011 as well.

Te Papa is timing a refresh of 'Collecting Contemporary' for the start of the Festival, which will feature works by Karl Fritsch, Francis Upritchard and Martino Gamper from Gesamtkunsthandwerk, currently my 2011 show of the year.

City Gallery is unveiling 'The Obstinate Object: Contemporary NZ Sculpture', featuring new, recent and older work, including the single piece I am already most excited about seeing, Don Driver's Ritual**, which I've never seen in the flesh.

The Adam is showing series by four photographers: Kohei Yoshiyuki, Fiona Amundsen, John Lake and Simon Starling. I saw Starling's Autoxylopyrocycloboros (the work that will be at the Adam) at the Power Plant in Toronto in 2008, and was struck by how much Starling's practice reminds me of Michael Stevenson.

And the Dowse is showing Mexican artist Theresa Margolles' In the Air from 2003 alongside a new work commissioned for her visit to New Zealand. Margolles is my pick for the Festival. In the Air is very simple, on first glance (and glancing contact) - bubbles blown out into a gallery space that pop as they hit hard surfaces or land on wandering visitors.

The charge comes when you discover that the bubbles are blown using water that was previously used to wash down bodies - victims of violent crimes, drug overdoses, traffic accidents - in the Mexico City morgue. Even though the water has been sterilised, it still carries that taint of death and decay, turning the innocent bubbles into a somewhat grisly memento mori - a role they've played in Western painting for centuries.

It's the combination of the simplicity and the big reveal that I think will captivate people about this work. [My one concern is that there won't be enough bubbles to make the room seem fairytale like - please let there be enough bubbles.] Like Janet Cardiff's Forty-Part Motet - in my opinion the hit of the 2010 visual arts line-up - it's not a work you have to work hard to get. It's easily explained, but also easily experienced. I might sound like I'm being dismissive, but I'm actually being admiring; this kind of succinctness, of distillation, of directness, is relatively rare in contemporary art, but magical (or at the very least reaction-provoking) for the viewer, whatever their level of gallery-going experience.


*It's just as well I've never been an Angry Young Person, because that sentence makes me feel about forty.  
** Yeah - I'm most excited about the oldest work in the show. I was truly never an Angry Young Person.