A link to an AdAge video broadcast where the Google CEO responds to the Nicholas Carr article that was featured here on the blog a couple of weeks ago titled Adult ADHD and the decline of the book as “media”. The basic summary of Schmidt’s response: “it’s the same thing people said about TV forty years ago and we are smarter than ever”.
I am obsessed more than ever about the book as an “unplugging” from *all* electronic media and the value that ritual may offer us over the next 100 years.
Of course I am prejudiced b/c we are in the book business, but there is something therapeutic about what paper (no, not e-paper) does to my eyes if I can muster enough mental discipline to not be distracted in the first five minutes. Call me old school. I also still like taking hikes in the woods.
What I wanted was Steak. What I got was Tilapia. Although not as spectacularly colored next to the haricot vert (a green string bean with French attitude) that would accompany it; the price was too good to pass up. So this led me to wonder- are rising food costs changing the way we eat? I don’t remember eating Tilapia as a child, yet to be sure, it graces the plates of my family often enough to be mentioned.
In honor of our delicious (and affordable) friends- the BookHound offers you ‘How to Cook Fish‘, by Myrtle Reed. Fish- it’s what’s for dinner. And what has been for dinner since this beauty was published back in the late 19th century!
Chock full of little yummies, this’ll give you a fab retort when everyone is standing around whining, ‘what’s for dinner?’ In a snap, you can tell them that they can choose one of TWENTY FIVE different ways to have their whitefish. Seriously.
Fan of eel? Lucky- you have forty-five recipes at your disposal!
Pretty soon- you’ll forget all about that filet mignon, and head straight for your local fishmonger.
You know what they say…’Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime”…give a man ‘How to Cook Fish’, and he’ll soon have a party in his mouth.
Documenting the American South (DocSouth) includes eleven thematic collections of primary sources for the study of southern history, literature, and culture. These are arranged below in alphabetical order. Click on any collection to access an index of materials limited to that collection. To view an index of all materials in this digital library choose “Authors,” “Titles,” or “Subjects” from the navigation bar at the top of this page. Some materials are cross-referenced in multiple collections.
Syriana is arguably one of the best political films to be released in the past decade. As George Clooney has said: “I make Ocean’s Thirteen for the studio, they let me make Syriana - quid pro quo”. Below is a trailer of the film (for those who have not seen it, or just want to remember a little about it) and a link to the classic “Travels in Syria and Holy Land” by John Lewis Burckhardt published in 1822.
Reading the original texts describing the region during the 19th and early 20th centuries provides an additional layer of understanding and Burckhardt was an amazing explorer and traveler offering a unique cultural perspective in his work.
TRAVELS IN SYRIA AND THE HOLY LAND by John Lewis Burkhardt
After studying in Leipzig and at the University of Göttingen he visited England in the summer of 1806, carrying a letter of introduction from the naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach to Sir Joseph Banks, who, with the other members of the African Association,accepted his offer in 1809 to launch an expedition to discover the source of the River Niger. Upon acceptance Burckhardt planned to travel to the Levant in order to study Arabic, in the belief that his journey to Africa would be facilitated if he was accepted to be as a Muslim.
As preparation Burckhardt briefly studied Arabic at the University of Cambridge and prepared for his rigorous career as an explorer by wandering bareheaded in the English countryside during a heatwave, subsisting on vegetables and water, and sleeping on the bare ground.
Burckhardt left England in March 1809 for Malta, whence he proceeded, in the following autumn, to Aleppo, Syria in order to perfect his Arabic and study Islamic Law. In order to obtain a better knowledge of oriental life he disguised himself as a Muslim, and took the name of Sheikh Ibrahim Ibn Abdallah. There is some indication that his conversion to Islam may have been sincere, although his family denies this.
After two years passed in the Levant he had thoroughly mastered Arabic, and had acquired such accurate knowledge of the Qur’an, and of the commentaries upon its religion and laws, that after a critical examination the most learned Muslims entertained no doubt of his being really what he professed to be, a learned doctor of their law.
During his residence in Syria, Burckhardt visited Palmyra, Damascus, Lebanon and made a series of other exploratory trips in the region. One of these trips, in what is now modern-day Jordan, resulted in his
‘discovery’ of the extensive and unique ruins of Petra which had been undiscovered for nearly a millennium. Unsatisfied with the magnitude of this discovery he was determined to carry on with his
original aim to uncover the source of the River Niger. Thus he in 1812 went to Cairo with the intention of joining a caravan to Fezzan, in Libya.
Burckhardt temporarily abandoned this goal to travel up the Nile as far as Dar Mahass; and then, finding it impossible to penetrate westward, he made a journey through the Nubian desert in the character of a poor Syrian merchant, passing by Berber and Shendi to Suakin, on the Red Sea, whence he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca by way of Jidda. At Mecca he stayed three months and afterwards visited Medina.
After enduring privations and sufferings of the severest kind, he returned to Cairo in June 1815 in a state of great exhaustion; but in the spring of 1816 he travelled to Mount Sinai, whence he returned to Cairo in June, and there again made preparations for his intended journey to Fezzan. Several hindrances prevented his
prosecuting this intention, and finally, in April 1817, when the long-expected caravan prepared to depart, he was seized by dysentery and died on the 15th of October. He had from time to time carefully transmitted to England his journals and notes, and a copious series of letters, so very few details of his journeys have been lost. He bequeathed his collection of 800 vols. of oriental manuscripts to the library of Cambridge University.
‘Locating a novel, short story, or poem without knowing its title or author can be very difficult. This guide is intended to help readers identify a literary work when they know only its plot or subject, or other textual information such as a character’s name, a line of poetry, or a unique word or phrase.”‘
If the recent Algae Bloom drama [real article, parody article] in China’s preparation for the upcoming Olympics is any indication of what is in store - it will be interesting to see how the media portrays the Land of the Dragon as it takes center stage later this Summer. In the American media storyscape China is part villain, part friend, part ally, part mystery…but something we are all interested in immensly.
For those erudite or curious sports fans looking for some historical context there are plenty of original texts available to get a first hand account of China pre-communism, pre-globalization and pre-just about anything we currently know about China today. Here are a couple of choice selections from the archives to help you bone up before the torch is lit and the athletes take to the field, pool, archery range, etc. etc.
A History of China
By Wolfram Eberhard
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Wolfram Eberhard, a professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of California at Berkeley focused on Western, Central and Eastern Asian societies. He made his first journey to China in 1934. He traveled through regions of China collecting folklore, studying temples and dissecting the Chinese culture. Occasionally, his first wife Alide (née Roemer), who sometimes coauthored with him and helped him with editing and translating into English. Eberhard travelled across northern China to Sian,the sacred mountain Hua-shan, T’ai-yuan, and the Yun-kang caves at Ta-t’ung. His interviews with Taoist priests on Hua-shan were the basis for the text of a book coauthored with Hedda Hammer Morrison, Hua Shun, the Taoist Sacred Mountain in West China (1974).
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Margaret Ernestine Burton (1885-1969) was an American missionary who traveled to China and Japan in 1909.
“During a stay of some months in China in the year of 1909 I had an opportunity to see something of the educational work for women and to meet several of the educated women of that interesting country. I was greatly impressed both by the excellent work done by the students in the schools and by the useful efficient lives of those who had completed their course of study.”
A couple of excerpts from a great article by Nicholas Carr I read in The Atlantic flying to American Library Association show in Anaheim last week (yes, on paper…). The article is discussing how “gathering information” online is changing our brains in a way unprecedented in history thus far.
“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
—-
“As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”
—–
“We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.
* (illustration from Bouncing Stars Artist Journal)
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A link to an AdAge video broadcast where the Google CEO responds to the Nicholas Carr article that was featured here on the blog a couple of weeks ago titled Adult ADHD and the decline of the book as “media”. The basic summary of Schmidt’s response: “it’s the same thing people said about TV forty years ago and we are smarter than ever”.
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