Barbara Walters censors her own audio book

Book Jacket Time Magazine reports that, despite the Knopf promotional material (“Here, too, are her relationships with men — in and out of her marriages…”), the audio verson of the memoirs of prominent journalist and apparent roundheel Barbara Walters completely omits the two chapters from the printed book in which she discusses her extramarital affairs. Apparently the decision to omit was made by Walters herself. But was there any other reason anyone wanted to read–or listen–to this book? Caveat emptor, audio-book-buyers!

What are original editions worth?

At nearby Margaret Clapp Library at Wellesley College, students have been able to pore over the 1566 printing of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres.  It’s the third such “threshold work” for science-the Library has first printings of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica-in the Wellesley collection.  Reading about this acquisition made me think: How different is the experience of reading a first or second printing?  Does more power lie in the text, or the book? What sort of impact does it have on a student’s study? 

The Dower House

Book Jacket of Dower House I finished reading The Dower House by Annabel Davis-Goff, part of my TBR 2008 challenge.  Even though I’ve enjoyed all the books I’ve read as part of it, I’m starting to get a little irked by it-it feels a bit like I’ve turned reading into a to-do list.  (I’ve finished several more of the books, and I still need to review them). The Dower House is a beautifully descriptive book that focuses on Molly Hassard’s coming of age in the unique, privileged and fading world of the Anglo-Irish.  (In terms of this book, these are Protestant gentry of English heritage, but they live in Ireland, not Northern Ireland.)  It’s primarily set in the 1950’s and it’s Molly’s elegy for an unsustainable lifestyle.  It’s a world she loves, and is willing to devote her life to, even as it crumbles.  The Dower House is also a love story, and a record of eccentric, aristocratic family life, like the Mitfords. I actually found a good number of parallels between The Dower House and Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love.  Molly is a sympathetic protagonist, and that kept me interested in this novel.  Davis-Goff is also a talented descriptive writer who creates a lush and glamorous setting.  It’s not a very long novel, and I’d recommend picking it up over summer vacation.

Library Liberty

The library, with a partially respectful nod to the SC’s recent partial protection of Habeas Corpus, might be the last functional democratic institution around. Serves the demos, check. Equality, check. Transparency, check. Meritocratic, check. You get the point. But, check this. Librarians subvert, like founding fathers but different imperials and less with the slavery and Caucasian patriarchy. They actually care about information and an informed, civil society, that is, news. I mean real news: the stuff that “they” don’t want you to know, and not the standard gossip columns, celeb reviews, and adverts that are sold between commercials at 6, 10 and now at 11 as well. News about the restriction of news just doesn’t seem to make it on the telly so much. Back to the librarians. The American Library Association has a commando called the Intellectual Freedom Committee. Unlike most committees, this one doesn’t suck. Instead, it puts out a Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom–a real news source. You just probably never heard of it because it is a real news source and thus non-profitable and sometimes embarrassing to the point of being anti-profitable and thus democratic. This library has this title in current periodicals @ Z1.N7400 or for you Law folks out there, click here to get started. This is just one little tidbit of the system busting stuff that lives in the Library. Don’t tell anyone, because if the word gets out, the rules might change and information might not flow anymore…say in something called the Patriot Act…

New Journalism?

Rebecca’s post and its ideas about how the ways we read and think may be changing led me to want to share a recent article about how journalism is changing in these ways too.  It focuses specifically on the figure of media blogger Jim Romensko, and it’s written by Howell Raines. One quote really stuck out to me:
Newspaper publishers assumed that even if the printing press disappeared, the internet would still have an insatiable need for their basic product-verified facts, hierarchically arranged by importance. But Romenesko’s rapid growth showed that even newsrooms are part of the emerging market for an unprocessed sprawl of information, delivered immediately and with as few filters as possible between the fingertips of one laptop user and the eyeballs of another. In short, it’s not technology per se that’s killing newspapers; it’s plummeting demand for quality information.
What do you think? Sometimes I worry that I too, have developed a taste for new, unverified and immediate information-I feel panicked by the thought that something hugely significant could be happening that I have no idea of, but I must find out about it right away.  Or do you think that Raines has a biased (and possibly bitter) view? Roy Harris, author of Pulitzer’s Gold spoke about the history of public service journalism this spring, as part of the Library’s Meet the Author Series.  He specifically talks about Howell Raines, Gerald Boyd and the Jason Blair scandal.