An Essay In Sunday’s NY Times by Rachel Donadio says literary fiction has always been wonderfully ill suited to the very industry that sustains it. Like an elegant but impoverished aristocrat married to a nouveau riche spouse, it has long been subsidized by mass-market fiction and by nonfiction ripped from the headlines. One supplies the cachet, the others the cash.
These days literary fiction has to contend with two factors that are increasingly central to the publishing process: timing and volume.
May 2006
Mei Mei
Title: Mei Mei (ISBN:0811847349)
Book Description
The Chinese believe an unseen red thread joins those in this life who are destined to connect. For photographer Richard Bowen, that thread led him to China’s state-run welfare institutions, where there are thousands of children, primarily girls, growing up without families to take care of them. Mei Mei presents a poignant glimpse of just a few of these remarkable children. Composed against neutral backgrounds, these portraits capture the girls’ inner lives, away from their often bleak surroundings. The images show an almost endless range of expressions: small faces filled with longing and hope, joy and sadness, humor and mischief, defiance and despair. Through the camera’s eye these young children are no longer orphans, but individuals whose personalities are as vital, distinct, and beautiful as any mother’s child. When that unique human being comes into focus, the connection is made and the red thread becomes visible. And once seen, the bond can never be broken.
About the Author
Richard Bowen, with his wife and other adoptive parents, founded Half the Sky Foundation, which seeks to enrich the lives of children living in Chinese orphanages. A director and producer in film and television, he lives in Berkeley, California. Karin Evans, a journalist and the author of The Lost Daughters of China , is the mother of two girls from China and serves on the board of Half the Sky. Amy Tan is an internationally acclaimed author of many books, most recently The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings . On one of her many trips to China from her home in San Francisco, she toured an orphanage and saw firsthand the positive effect of Half the Sky’s work.
Kids outsmart Web filters
One From CNet on those darn kids. Nowadays, an increasing number of teenagers are setting up proxies on home PCs to sidestep school filtering traps, in addition to using free proxies set up on the Web, according to technologists at schools and at content-filtering technology providers.
Proxies are just one of many tricks that kids use to break locks put on forbidden material–a pursuit of almost any young generation. As more schools place tight controls on PCs to stop kids from file-sharing, instant messaging, social networking or looking at undesirable material online, the kids are getting more clever, tech experts say.
Fair Use – – On The Media
NPR has a show called “On the Media”
These two stories are on todays show.
Story #1 –Fair Use Follies
Simply put, “fair use” is a legal principle that allows copyrighted material to be used without permission from or payment to the owner. But a recent symposium on the subject at New York University demonstrated just how difficult it is to know what constitutes fair. And in the meantime, many creative types are left in the lurch. Amy Sewell, producer of the documentary “Mad Hot Ballroom”, shares some war stories with Brooke.
Story #2 –Cloudy and Fair
Fordham University law professor Hugh Hansen is an advocate of strong copyright laws. But even he concedes that for low-budget filmmakers, copyright can be more of a burden than a blessing. Brooke speaks with him and with Duke law professor James Boyle, who thinks copyright holders have ushered in a “permission culture” that ignores the laws governing fair use.
At their website it is possible to listen to individual stories without having to listen to the entire program.
I highly recommend that you listen to both stories. Story #1 angered me because of the way copyright was being used. Story #2 really helped to put things in perspective.
The book is dead. Long live the book.
Anonymous Patron writes “BuzzMachine: The book is dead. Long live the book. But the book is an outmoded means of communicating information. And efforts to update it are hampered because, cuturally, we give undue reverence to the form for the form’s sake. Publish or perish, that’s the highest call of our intellectual elite. But any medium that defines itself as a medium is in trouble: newspapers, broadcast TV, broadcast radio, and books. They are all faced with new and better means of doing what they do without regard to the limitations of any one medium.”
Online Testing Patent ReExamined By Patent Office
http://search-engines-WEB.com/ writes “.
From infozine.com
At the request of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will reexamine a controversial patent for online test-taking from Test.com.
EFF filed the reexamination request because the extremely broad patent claims to cover almost all methods of online testing. Test.com has used this patent to demand payments from universities with distance education programs that give tests online. But EFF, in conjunction with Theodore C. McCullough of the Lemaire Patent Law Firm, showed that Test.com was not the first to come up with this testing method — IntraLearn Software Corporation had been marketing an online test-taking system long before Test.com filed its patent request.”
New FGI Discussions: May 22, 2006
This week found our guest blogger Cindi Wolff and our regular Free Government Information volunteers posting the following stories:
Cindi’s postings:
Volunteer postings:
- Pt. 4: Nonlawyer’s journey through Title 44: Classified list of Government publications for selection by depositories. – Daniel
- Warning of privatization of information from Humanities Scholars – James A.
As always we hope that you will stop by and join our conversation.
If you haven’t already, please vote in our poll on archiving gov’t e-docs at http://freegovinfo.info/node/476. We’ve got 85 votes and nine comments, and we’d like to see all 229 depository libraries who gave a positive response to question 65 to weigh in.
No FDSys related activity has been observed either at the main FDSys site or at their blog, which has been dormant since January. If someone from GPO knows whether the blog at http://fdsys.blogspot .com has been officially abandoned, I’d appreciate hearing from them.
If you use Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) or some other RSS reader, consider subscribing to the FGI Feed at
http://freegovinfo.info/blog/feed to get FGI stories as they are posted.
Laura’s List
birdie writes “You’re probably not on “Laura’s List”.
It’s a new book by the first lady, which lists the 57 titles for children and adults that was previously published for free on this White House site; now it’s been expanded and can be had the price of $14.95. More from the Dallas Morning News.”
Library 2.0 and Privacy
An Anonymous Patron writes “Rory Litwin at Library Juice brings up the dilemma of privacy vs. Library 2.0.
“If we value reader privacy to the extent that we always have, I think it’s clear that our experiments with Library 2.0 services will have uncomfortable limitations. This is probably going to lead many librarians to say that privacy is not as important a consideration as it once was. They will say that the Millennial generation doesn’t have the same expectations of libraries in terms of privacy that older generations do, and that we should simply adjust.
So does he mean that the Library 2.0 people are all about collaboration and the Library 1.0 people are all about contemplation? Read the whole thing.“
Blind Librarian Leads the Way
Filipino Librarian writes “Can the blind lead the blind? Well, this blind librarian helps the blind to read. ‘Shining through in world of darkness’ by Margaux C. Ortiz (Philippine Daily Inquirer, 21 May 2006) chronicles Maria Lea Vilvar’s journey from being a sighted girl afraid of the dark to a blind librarian who inspires others like her to go beyond their physical impairments. More…“
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