As Much Chaos As We Can Stand

Cognitive Surplus:
Creativity and generosity in a connected age
by Clay Shirky
Penguin, 2010
242 pgs.

I have finally finished reading Clay Shirky's phenomenal new book Cognitive Surplus and I have been blown away by it from beginning to end. Shirky, a professor at NYU, explores how the default settings inherent in social media software are driving not only how we connect with each other, but about the kinds of massive projects that we can create if we spend even just a modicum of our free time (time usually spent watching television) contributing to them.

The depth of this book is difficult to summarize, but let me give it a shot.

Each of us has an amount of time, thanks to the labor struggles of the twentieth century, with which we can do what we will (our cognitive surplus, i.e. leftover brain time). With the advent of television we slowly became consumers of a passive media environment, so much so that many of us watched enough television that it could be considered equivalent to having a part time job. This wasn't because we necessarily wanted to be couch potatoes, but this was the environment we had. It was a default pattern, not necessarily a desired state of being.

With the introduction of the internet we began developing a different pattern of social behavior toward our media. From the creation of ASCII art as a humble little creative endeavor in early emails we have progressed to an era where we can create our own original videos and share them with the entire world. Beyond even that we have also grown to the point where massive, globally shared projects, like Wikipedia are made possible by the dedicated efforts of millions of people spending time creating content instead of being a passive receptacle of pre-packaged media.

What drives us to create and share things like lolcats, fan fiction and YouTube videos, or to participate in large scale protests or create alternative news reporting outlets?

Shirky's answer: we have the means and opportunity to do so, for free, and the software that has been designed to support these structures promotes an environment of creating and sharing. These things have always been going on, but the ability to share our personal creative works, or to participate in a mutually creative and supportive environment has just not been available at this scale ever before. We all know people who wrote fan stories of their favorite television show, or who went to conventions and shared their hobbies with each other. Social media allows us to not only find those people who share our interests, however bizarre they may be, but to engage in them with an unprecedented level of speed and freedom, thus nurturing subcultures to greater heights.

Beyond the level of subcultures we have begun to develop massive multi-user created systems that have a great deal of civic value. Projects like developing open source software like Linux or Apache, creating articles for Wikipedia or reporting news on Ushahidi have become invaluable resources to society. These works could not have been done without the ability to connect disparate people who have a shared ethic, vision and need via social media.

The long term view of how the internet is shaping our society has yet to be seen, and the examples he provides of similar revolutions in communications show that one can never really predict where we will be fifty or a hundred years from now. What Shirky does provide however is a bit of a roadmap outlining what factors lead to successful social media environments, and an excellent review of how far we've come in just a few short years.

This was one of the most engrossing reads I've had in quite a long time. Fun, informative, and a great amount of positive speculation about the internet. I strongly recommend it, not just for people who have internet wonkery as an interest, but for pretty much anyone who has a deep love for culture. The stories are thought provoking, funny, scary and over all brilliant.

Check it out!

Big Girls Do Cry

Big Girls Do Cry
Carl Weber
Dafina Books, 2010

The ladies of the BGBC--that's the Big Girl Book Club--are back for another round of adventures in Carl Weber's Big Girls Do Cry. The only requirements for membership are a love of reading and being a size 14 or larger. The sequel to Something on the Side, Big Girls Do Cry picks up with the story of Egypt and her crazy (and I don't mean that in a good way) sister Isis. Egypt has relocated to Richmond, Virginia, from New York with her husband Rashad ... the same Rashad that Isis dated for over 10 years before her sister Egypt married him.

Egypt fears that her marriage could be coming to an end because she's not able to have children. Fortunately, Isis, who lives with Egypt and Rashad, steps up to be a surrogate mother. But between her last suicide attempt, which was spurred by her heartache over the married playboy Tony, and losing Rashad to her sister, Isis is struggling to get her life together. And for some reason, she wants Tony back.

New club member Loraine, who is also Egypt's boss, seems to have everything going for herself: She's president of her own public relations firm, and is in the running to be president of her sorority. She just has to keep her sorors from finding out about her cheating husband. Jerome, the only male member of the BGBC, is Loraine's openly gay best friend. He is proud of the way he lives his life--loving and leaving his partners--until the day he leaves the wrong one and all hell breaks loose.

Lots a'drama, but a good read. But hey the drama is not over just yet: Catch up with Loraine and Jerome and the other members of the Big Girl Book Club in part two, Torn Between Two Lovers.

And if you want even more drama, check out other books by Carl Weber, such as Up To Know Good and So You Call Yourself a Man. Or visit his website, http://www.carlweber.net/.

Wicked Awesome

Horns
by Joe Hill
William Morrow, (c) 2010

Recently I had the misfortune of being terribly sick, layed up in bed and feeling awful. That said, I was incredibly lucky that I had, mere days before, checked out Joe Hill's latest novel Horns. Had I not been in bed for an entire day I would have not had the luxury of reading the entirety of this book in one sitting, and I would have had to steal every spare moment here and there to dive back into the book and find out what happened next.

And let me explain just one other thing, for a librarian, I'm not a terribly fast reader. I read at the speed of spoken conversations, which is amazingly slow compared to many of my colleagues. For me to actually blaze through a novel as quickly as I did, means that it was a relentless onslaught of reading from morning to night.

I could absolutely not put this book down.

Horns follows the life of Ignatius Perrish. He is the son and brother to famous musicians, as well as being the prime suspect in the brutal murder of his former fiance Merrin. It seemed that all those troubles were behind him, until he wakes up one morning with two large knots on the side of his head. It's clear that they are horns, but he has no idea why. What he quickly learns is that under the power of the horns people will reveal their darkest truths to him, beginning with his live-in girlfriend Glenna who immediately confesses that she wants to make herself repulsive to him because she can't bear to tell him to get out of her life. And that's just within the first ten pages.

What follows is an ever deepening look into the differences between the face we show the world and the thousand things we wish we could say to one another save for propriety. Hill asks a lot of intriguing questions about lies, omissions and truth; what we say to people versus what people hear; what we say and what we mean and the blurry lines between good and evil. Not only that, but it's wrapped in the most deeply intertwined writing where every element of the story fits neatly into every other. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Horns is that it doesn't really fit into any easily defined category. While sure, there are elements of fantasy or horror, I wouldn't say that it's either of those things. It's just a great story.

I would strongly encourage anyone who read Joe Hill's short story collection 20th Century Ghosts to get this latest novel. I admit that I wasn't that thrilled with his first novel Heart Shaped Box, but I gave 20th a shot and it was absolutely brilliant work. Horns fits right in with some of those great pieces, particularly You Will Hear the Locust Sing which blends Kafka's Metamorphosis with school violence. In both stories the reason for the transformation is very unclear, but the power that it awakens in the character leads to some of the most intriguing metaphors.

So, check out the book, carve out a day, sit down and read from morning 'til night. You'll be glad you did.

Prepare to Meet Your Dome!

Under the Dome
by Stephen King
New York : Scribner, 2009

Stephen King's newest novel, Under the Dome, is probably the best thing he's written this decade. In the very near future, the town of Chester's Mill is suddenly and inexplicably cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible, impenetrable dome. There is no warning, and several people (and one unfortunate woodchuck) suffer the consequences immediately. For everyone else, the horror escalates rapidly as one thing after another goes wrong; the town's propane supply is mysteriously short, the most powerful politician in town becomes increasingly despotic, and the sky begins to darken, slowly but inexorably.

In the tradition of Needful Things and Tommyknockers, Under the Dome features King's signature style of ensemble casts. Though the story closely follows a handful of characters, the whole town is placed, as it were, under the microscope. Also, like most of King's writing, the horror and tragedy stem from basic human emotions and responses more than on any supernatural malevolence. Though the Dome has created a terrible situation, it is ultimately the actions of the townsfolk which drive the hellish pace of the story; and it is hellish.

Though bulky and somewhat recycled (is there any small town in Maine safe from annihilation?), the story is paced beautifully. There are no lulls in the action, and there are several scenes, including the climactic ending, which truly filled me with dread. One of the best things about this particular story is its horrible inevitability, and while there are some surprises, it is even worse knowing what's going to happen, and watching it still happen anyway.

The best part of this story is its thorough modernity. Under the Dome does not ignore the changing nature of communications technology, and in fact relies on it in several places to advance the plot. The media and military know about what's happening; in fact, the whole world knows, and must watch as the reader watches with sick fascination as calamities descend on Chester's Mill. They helplessly watch as the town shows signs of climate-change in miniature, rape becomes an epidemic, and the drug-culture literally blows up in their faces. If the dome is a trap, it is also a funhouse mirror, reflecting the times in stark relief.

The New New Post Post Cyberpunk Bonanza

Makers
by Cory Doctorow
New York : Tor, 2009.

I have been hearing Cory Doctorow's name in various contexts for a few years, now. As a fan of cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk, how could I not have? Yet I never read his work until now. With no clue what to look for, I was happily surprised by Makers.

The book, which was serialized by Tor before its actual publication, bears the cute tag-line, "a Novel of the Whirlwind Changes to Come", and so it seems to be. beginning in a future so near you actually don't know it's not right now, the story follows an economic, technological and social trajectory into a future which wouldn't make half as much sense if you weren't right there to see it. The genius of the story is that, if you have any working knowledge of recent history, that's exactly how the last hundred-and-change years have gone. In some ways, Doctorow's future is more believable because of its retrospective qualities. Another side effect of the story's modern origin is the giddy hilarity that accompanies its creations; good satire hurts so good because of its dreadful familiarity. Makers achieves this with the same flair and foresighted hilarity of Bruce Sterling's Distraction, or William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

Reading this book caused a litany of vocabulary words to create themselves in my head, a cluster of blog tags waiting to be born. Postmodern came up a lot, but then post-postmodern could equally apply. Ana-Randian, anarcho-libertarian, post-post-postfeminist, neorealist, techno-comedy, none of them necessarily apply, but all of them came from my instinctive need to create some simple descriptors for this literary equivalent of the portmanteau. Try it - you'll find yourself bathing in the salty waters of Doctorow's compelling ambiguity.

That said, I couldn't help but wonder about the suspiciously familiar main characters, and (perhaps not so strangely) self-referential philosophies of the "makers" whose lives are the center of the book. Many of the themes in Makers, including the use of Disney as a foil and example of dizzyingly vast corporate monstrocity, are reminiscent of Doctorow's other projects. Not that I mind. Neal Stephenson is my favorite author, and he does it all the time.

Sci-Fi Review - Anathem

In Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle, Neal Stephenson spun tales of operatic immensity, balanced by hyper-modern sensibilities and an uncanny knack for not simply telling, but creating the future. In Anathem, Stephenson simultaneously lampoons and pays homage to the philosophical tradition, and its relationship with the rest of the world. Like all of his works (with the possible exception of Snow Crash), this book is a tome. At 935 densely packed pages, it's pretty heavy reading, but if you have the patience to unravel the story, it's very much worth the effort.

The protagonist of the story, Fra Erasmus, is a part of the "Concent of Saunt Edhar", a monastic sanctuary for philosophers and theoreticians who have withdrawn from the "saecular" world of religion and applied sciences. The avout who dwell in the concent are isolated by degrees between "tenners", "hundreders" and "thousanders" - the number of years between periods of contact with the Extramuros for each Order. If this paragraph confuses you, you may want to go with something a little lighter. If it intrigues you, I promise, the story will go on to titillate and satisfy your baser intellectual urges.

Anathem is a deeply allegorical story, taking place in a world which is the intellectual mirror of our own. Half the fun in reading it is in deciphering the subtle references, in unlocking the code in which the book is written. Conversations often take the form of codified dialectic, in the western philosophical tradition, and a good number of the "historical figures" from the book are directly derived from that tradition. Philosophy buffs will get a kick out of some of Stephenson's more oblique references and quirky references to recognizable schools of thought.

Complimenting the intellectual grandiosity of the book is the adventure story at its heart. Like most of Stephenson's books, there is a love story at the center of this tale, which manages to transcend the details and put them into perspective. In every one of Neal Stephenson's books, there is a core of (more or less) fixed characters. The most vital of these is the hero's girl - the one who gives him an anchor, keeping him from being set adrift by his own story. She is pragmatic, emotionally conscious, occasionally mysterious and always challenging, but most important, she brings out the best in him.

Horror Review - The Vampire of Ropraz

In The Vampire of Ropraz, Jacques Chessex explores the power of myth and superstition in the cold, bitter countryside of Vaud, Switzerland in the early 20th Century. The book is translated eloquently from its original French by W. Donald Wilson, but loses none of its stark poeticism.

The title of this book could have multiple meanings. In one sense, it refers to the hero (and villain) of the story, Charles-Augustin Favez. Favez is accused of a series of grizzly crimes involving the desecration and mutilation of the bodies of three recently-buried young women in the area. In another sense, the Vampire is Ropraz, for the real focus of the story is not on the twisted stable-boy Favez, but the twisted society from which he emerges, calling out for his blood regardless of innocence or guilt. Finally, it could represent the 'woman in white' who visits Favez during his confinement to satisfy her own terrible needs.

Favez' guilt or innocence is incidental to the story; just because he is a scapegoat, after all, doesn't mean that he didn't do it. Instead, the important point to draw from the novel is the way society reacts to what they believe is the truth, or wish to be the truth. The most satisfying aspect of this book was, paradoxically, its opacity. There is no clear answer, no explanation, no vindication. The whole point is, rather, the obscurity and desolation of an obscure and desolate people in a cold wasteland of petty superstitions and subtle derangement.

Horror Review - IT

The best monster stories are never really about the monster. In The Thing, the creature is a wall between the characters, forcing them into paranoia and isolation as they realize they can no longer trust one another. Frankenstein has been interpreted as a tale of postpartum depression. IT continues this tradition, and takes the concept a step further. As with most of Stephen King's early novels, the true horror in the story is not in the lovecraftian, ancient nightmare creature that sleeps beneath the earth, waking every thirty years to eat children and feast on fear; no, in this story the truly horrifying acts are committed by the common folk who live in the fictional town of Derry, Maine.

Through the novel, all of the characters repeatedly come back to a single refrain - "something is wrong in Derry." In the face of racism, homophobia, poverty, repression, anti-Semitism, physical abuse and a host of psychological disorders ranging from sociopathy to PTSD, the monster is almost tangential. Though the characters attribute this wrongness to the monster beneath the town center, the horrifying events which take place there throughout the history of the town need no supernatural cause; in fact, it could be argued that when the creature (dressed as Pennywise the Dancing Clown) is present for the various massacres and atrocities in town, it is there not as an instigator, but to feed on the residue of what was already there to be had. The monster's needs require minimal cultivation at best.

It is no surprise then that the seven children who finally fight the monster are so readily able to do so, and to do so again as adults. By the time they reach their climactic confrontation with It, they almost seem as comfortable in its presence as in that of other human beings, and it is telling that through the book they chose to spend their time in the Barrens, the abandoned, miniature wasteland where the city's sewers break to the surface, which is also the entrance to It's lair. The monster might eat them, but compared to their own lives it was the lesser of two evils.

Another trope of Stephen King's stories is his trademark brand of happy ending, and the undercurrent of positivity which is often lost on casual readers. Like the characters in Needful Things, The Stand, Insomnia and 'Salem's Lot, the heroes of IT find secret strengths within themselves and in their relationships with each other. Terror, in King's world, is fought with laughter, and despair with hope. As they come to believe in the evil mysteries around them, so too do they discover a countermagic within themselves, and every hero has a talisman. This is perhaps more readily apparent in IT, because the monster is so blatanty allegorical, and the children are more readily able to transcend common sense. Faith is essential to the Stephen King mythos, and the rest is window dressing.

Death by Black Hole

Neil De Grasse Tyson has come out with a great collection of essays on astrophyisical subjects. Tyson is a very entertaining scientist who creates concrete pictures of astronomical ideas, depicting abstract issues as they bear on the senses. He also has a great sense of humor and knows how to extend our sense of reality through science. The best thing he does is show how the scientific mind works. In his most famous essay, " Death by Black Hole" placed in this compilation, Tyson tries to describe what it would be like to be drawn into a black hole from a personal and scientific point of view. He goes into detail about how your body would be stretched when entering the black hole (spagettification) and in so doing describes the physical processes that would distort the body. Tyson makes these difficult concepts of physics understandable. In another essay, Tyson discusses the ends of the world, plural, showing how the universe will slowly disperse and cool. He also considers the role of chaos in the functioning of the solar system despite the phyical laws it follows and he considers the role of antimatter in maintaining the balance of the universe. He is a very lively and interesting writer who can make science an attractive subject for almost anyone. This is a good read.

Horror Review - Renfield: Slave of Dracula!

In the spirit of Halloween, this week we highlight a fantastic new twist on one of the seminal works of 19th century gothic horror - Dracula.

With Renfield, Barbara Hambly further explores the tormented story of Dracula's mad minion. Hambly shows the story through the maniac's eyes: his sick obsession with flies and spiders; his connection to the evil Count; the dreams that plague him in the night, and the terrible events that left him raving in the streets of London. Too, we see the man's deepest, most secret motivation - the loving wife and daughter whose whereabouts he must keep from his Master at all costs, even as he falls deeper under the monster's dark power, seeking to make it his own.

As with the original tale, the narrative is a mosaic of disparate pieces - an amalgam of third person prose, journal entries, letters and newspaper clippings. The story of Renfield takes place simultaneously with the events of Dracula, and even includes relevant excerpts from Stoker's novel. Yet Ms. Hambly still manages to create a story that is both original and suspensful: though we know the story of Dracula as deeply as any in the popular mythos, this tale is as terrifying as if it had never been told before. Each character is beholden to his own torment, and Barbara Hambly deftly draws us into their personal horror with a sense of helpless inevitability.

If you are looking for something to bring you into the spirit of the season, this is the book for you.

Eats, Shoots & Leaves - review

For anyone who cringes every time they see a sign for 'fresh' fruit; for anyone terrified by the effect of txt msgng on the English language; for anyone still brave enough to (correctly) use the colon, semicolon and parenthesis - Eats, Shoots and Leaves is the book for you!

Fed up with illiterate grocery-store signs, movie titles and Gertrude Stein, Lynne Truss decided that it was time to make the case for proper punctuation. One by one, she takes us into the history of each mark, its uses (both modern and outmoded) and misuses. Peppered with examples which are often hysterical and sometimes horrifying, Ms. Truss points out the very real reasons why it is important to maintain a decent grasp of grammar.

In all, I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an equal love of language and laughter.

*It is also a perfect read for anyone about to take on the NaNoWriMo challenge.

Comics For Adults

I'm sure you're all aware that we've got Spider-Man and Batman, but what about stuff for adults? Here are a few phenomenal titles in our collection for mature readers.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

Labeling Fun Home as "A Family Tragi-Comic" is completely appropriate. This memoir is a detailed examination of Bechdel's life, her growing up, her awakening to her own sexuality, and the revelation about her father's secret life as a closeted homosexual. Awkward, funny, literate, touching, and absolutely brilliant. Everyone should read this book. And if my enthusiasm for the book isn't reason enough it's also won a TON of awards.




Me and the Devil Blues by Akira Hiramoto

King of the Blues, Robert Johnson, is a shadowy figure in music history. Not much is known about his life, and very few pictures of him even exist. But the legends surrounding him are vast. Hiramoto's work draws on those legends and turns them into a fantastic, dark narrative about a man who made a deal with the devil and became one of the most influential figures in music history. A whopping tome, about three times the size of your average manga, it actually took me two days to read it. But I was engrossed in it utterly. And this is only volume 1!

Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tatsumi

Tatsumi's work helped to create a different strain of comics in Japan known at "Gekiga." "Gekiga," a phrase coined by Tatsumi, means "dramatic pictures." This is in reaction to the phrase coined by Hokusai "manga," "amusing pictures." Tatsumi's work is challenging. He deals with people and situations that are uncomfortable and compromising. Many of the characters are older men who have lost their sexual prowess, their jobs, their will to live... I would compare Tatsumi's work to the films of Todd Solondz like "Welcome to the Dollhouse" and "Happiness," where the characters are deeply flawed, outcasts, living lives frought with contemplation of their loneliness and despair. Beautiful and heartbreaking.

Sci-fi Review - Pandemonium

Daryl Gregory's debut novel, Pandemonium, is a fantastic mash-up of classic high-concept science fiction and pop-culture satire. By turns comic and introspective (and often both at once), the story explores the collective unconscious and the nature of the relationship between archetypes and the cultures that create them. Gregory's writing style is refreshingly current, witty and self-aware. He not only acknowledges, but includes his influences in the text itself, folding pioneers of speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick and A. E. Van Vogt into the story itself. The result is as unique as it is well-crafted.

The story takes place in a world suspiciously similar to our own, with one glaring difference - since the 1940's, people across the world have become victims of demonic possession. Innocent men, women and children are taken seemingly at random by a series of entities known only by their implacable actions and obsessions; the Truth stalks and kills liars, the Little Angel (always a little girl) walks the halls of hospitals, dispensing death with a kiss. Theories abound about what the demons really are, what they represent, and how best to deal with them.

Del Pierce was a boy when he was taken by the Hellion, an entity with a lethal case of ADHD. With love and patience, his family drove the demon out. Now it's back, and as an adult Del must search for a way to stop the demon before it takes complete control. With the help of an angry Irish nun, a Creature from a Black Lagoon and a pair of aging Jungian psychotherapists, Del goes on a quest both literally and figuratively to find a cure. Along the way he will find the source of himself and his demon counterpart, and be surprised by both.

Pandemonium makes a lot of unspoken promises. By incurring the name of Philip K. Dick (indeed, by making him a character), it is expected that this novel will test our basic assumptions about life and identity. It is also expected that we will find something new in its pages, and be kept guessing until the very end. Finally, with all of the pop-culture references, there ought to be some fresh reflections about the world we live in. Daryl Gregory delivers on all of these points, and the result is a highly pleasurable experience.

Book Talk: Gargantuan

Gargantuan
by Maggie Estep
Three Rivers Press, 2004

Let me begin by confessing that I am completely in love with Maggie Estep. I first fell in love with her when she was performing on MTV spoken word shows as part of the NuYoRican Poets Cafe. I bought her spoken word album No More Mister Nice Girl about 4 times. I remember her face in black and white calling for "a thousand radiant grandmothers leaping from planes proclaiming themselves queen of the wild frontier." Infatuation, obsession... Well, yeah. Totally.

This is the first novel I've ever read by her though. As I mentioned (at length) I'm way more familiar with her as a slam poet. But let me tell you, this was an awesome novel.

Ruby Murphy is an unusual woman, with unusual friends, and an unusual life. Though she ostensibly works at the Coney Island museum she is deeply, madly in love with the New York race tracks, Belmont and Aqueduct. She's estranged from her boyfriend, Ed Burke an FBI man investigating the seedy side of racing in Florida, and now she's shacking up with a horse jockey named Attila Johnson. Well, Attila's done some shady things, pulling back horses and losing races on purpose, and now that he wants to go legit someone's out to kill him. Between Ruby and her friend Big Sal, they're trying to figure out who's trying to off this guy, while making sure he doesn't actually get killed. The ending is SO incredibly good. Scary, freaky good.

Gargantuan is book three in a series of novels about her race-track loving, mystery solving heroine Ruby Murphy. It's obvious that you're supposed to read these novels in order, since there's very little in the way of back story for any of the characters. So, picking up book three wasn't necessarily the best thing, but it's not the end of the world either. Gargantuan is a great book on its own. One of the more interesting bits of the book, and probably of the other Ruby Murphy mystery series, is that the story is told in a revolving first person. There is no omniscient narrator, but rather you hear the story in the voices of all the major characters, including the killer. It's really fantastic, and each character is written in such a way as to make their voices uniquely their own. You know exactly who you're reading, and it's a really wonderful way to experience these characters.

I would totally recommend this book to people who are fans of mystery novels, though this is not your average solving a murder mystery book, and especially to people who are madly in love with horses and race tracks. She really understands the feel of people who go to the races, who work at the races, and who love horses. That love of the track is poured into nearly every single page of this book, and her passion is evident.