A Modest Construct

¶ Appetite for Self-Destruction

Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age by Steve Knopper: Publisher: Soft Skull Press; Year: 2009; Pages: 320

Unless you’ve been in a cave, on Mars, with your eyes closed and your hands over your years, you’ve heard of the spate of recent lawsuits brought against alleged copyright infringers, who use peer-to-peer software like (then) Kazaa and (now) Bittorrent to share digital copies of music and movies, and who have aroused the ire of the RIAA and MPAA, respectively.

There’s really no getting around the fact that this amounts to theft (the term “piracy”, actually, gives it a gloss of sex appeal); you can say what you’d like about the near-zero marginal cost of digital goods, the criminal practices of the publishing industry, the economics of an information age, and success of Trent Reznor and Radiohead, etc. At its core, the issue is still one of users acquiring copyrighted goods to which they have no legal right; make no mistake: artists and actors and the technical workers who support them should be receive compensation for the work the produce, and that consumers who refuse to pay for these goods are ultimately hurting themselves, because they will staunch the flow of the media they consume.

§6930 · February 25, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, nonfiction, reviews

¶ What the Dog Saw

What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell: Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; Year: 2009; Pages: 410

I’ve read all three of Malcolm Gladwell’s previous books before; in order from most to least recent, there’s Outliers, Blink, and The Tipping Point. I’ve said in each review that I believe Gladwell’s books have generally improved as a function of time; as a columnist, his ability to adapt to a longer form of writing (where his point must be sustained for several hundred pages without diverting into obscurity) has evolved noticeably with practice.

But Gladwell has been writing for the New Yorker for about fifteen years now, and in that time amassed a much larger collection of short (the word here is relative) pieces than he has larger themed works. In a move designed both to make money (I’m sure) as well as disseminate his best work to those without the benefit of access to the New Yorker‘s last fifteen years worth of archives, Gladwell collected his favorite pieces from that rag into a big, this time without concern for an overarching theme. It’s a collection of essays, though given Gladwell’s polished narrative style, it feels often more like a compendium of short stories by a particularly pedantic fabulist.

§6920 · February 18, 2011 · 1 comment · Tags: Book Reviews, books, nonfiction, reviews, science, sociology

¶ Our Man in Havana

Our Man in Havana by Graham Greene: Publisher: Penguin; Year: 1958/2007; Pages: 256

It was Christopher Hitchens that sparked my interest in Graham Greene; I read his introduction to a new edition of Greene’s The Orient Express in Hitchens’ 2004 collected essays, Love, Poverty, and War. Even more recently, Hitchens lent his pen to Penguin’s new publication of Our Man in Havana, one of Greene’s well-known “comedic” novels (as distinct from his “serious” novels like The End of the Affair, a distinction made by Hitchens himself). As I recently had the opportunity to give the book a try, I couldn’t pass it up.

§6889 · February 13, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, fiction, politics, reviews

¶ A Case of Conscience

A Case of Conscience by James Blish: Publisher: Del Rey; Year: 1958/2000; Pages: 256

Science fiction has a tendency to ignore religion; this may have stemmed from its early Enlightenment-style emphasis on rationality, or it may have been sheer laziness, since predicting how some of our oldest cultural institutions would fare years into the (often dystopian) future is difficult at best.

There are notable exceptions to this, and the situation has gotten better as the years wind on and the genre refines itself. Writers aren’t always nice to religion, but they’ve generally stopped ignoring it as a force for (or resistance to) change. But even in scifi’s early days, there were some writers who not only included organized religion in their stories, but actually centered the plots on it. Most frequently cited is Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. But just a scant year before Miller published his first and last novel, another titan of the early science fiction scene, James Blish, published A Case of Conscience, whose protagonist(?) is a Jesuit priest.

§6893 · February 8, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: Book Reviews, books, fiction, politics, religion, reviews, science fiction

¶ Wednesday’s Word: prodigal

prodigal: adj. wastefully extravagant.

“Prodigal” may be one of the most frequently misused words in the English language, and it’s all the Bible’s fault. Because the Bible is a rich part of the western world’s literary tradition, even for people who are not believers, the story of the “prodigal son” (Luke 15:11-32), or at least the phrase “prodigal son” has entered into our cultural consciousness in reference to someone who goes away and eventually returns home. Which is, of course, not at all what it means.

In fact, the phrase “prodigal son” doesn’t even exist in the original texts, but English translations of the Bible favored chapter headings, at which point “The Prodigal Son” began to appear on the above passage; you can see it at work in the Douay-Rheims Bible, for instance. For those who aren’t familiar with the story, here it is.

§6910 · February 2, 2011 · (No comments) · Tags: linguistics, Wednesday's Word