Library 2.0 Manifesto

I ran across this Librarians's 2.0 manifesto. It's great! Favorite passages:

• I will avoid requiring users to see things in librarians' terms but rather will shape services to reflect users' preferences and expectations.
• I will lobby for an open catalog that provides personalized, interactive features that users expect in online information environments.
• I will let go of previous practices if there is a better way to do things now, even if these practices once seemed so great.
• I will lobby for an open catalog that provides personalized, interactive features that users expect in online information environments.

Read the whole thing here.

Today spoonreader; tomorrow -- Oprah!

So I was thumbing through the most recent issue of O, The Oprah Magazine. (Yes, I am a proud reader!) And what do I find but David Foster Wallace's compelling commencement address that I blogged about back in January! At the time, I opined, "I fervently hope David Foster Wallace finds a way to get it published as an essay. It's about the importance of what we choose to think about. It's great, great stuff."
The new Oprah issue isn't yet on her web site, I will update this post when it is.
To quote from his essay again:

Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliche about quote the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many cliches, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.

UPDATE: The essay is not on the Oprah web site, but you can see more about the December issue here.

Little Children, the movie

I don't usually write about movies, even when they're based on books. First, there are too many; it would turn this book blog into a movie blog. Second, books are usually better than the movie, and there's no sense in repeating that over and over. But I'm optimistic about the movie of Little Children, based on the book by Tom Perrotta. I thought the book was a compelling little novel mining rare territory -- boredom and self-obsession in contemporary suburban family life. Movies are pretty comfortable with this landscape (see American Beauty, Edward Scissorhands and The Truman Show, to name but a few). So it will be interesting to see what results.
Here's a bit from a review in the Los Angeles Times. The reviewer seems to differ from me and agree with me in a few ways:

"Little Children" is one of those rare films that transcends its source material. Firmly rooted in the present and in our current frame of mind -- a time and frame of mind that few artists have shown interest in really exploring--— the movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.

Read the whole review here. Perrotta also wrote Election, which was turned into a movie -- a biting satire of the high school student council starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon.
And while I'm going all multi-media on you, I will point out that my favorite band, The Shins, has a new website that shows the band members hanging out at the library. Cool!

The Looming Tower

The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 is an exceptional book about the historical background of the 9/11 attackers. It explains in details why they did what did what they did, what their motivations were, what their strategies were, how the moved around the world and organized the attack. The main focus is on Osama bin Laden and the history of his ideology. It is marvelously concrete and detailed.
Before I read this book, Osama bin Laden always seemed to me more like a movie villain, like Darth Vader from Star Wars or Sarumaun from Lord of the Rings. Now he seems much more real, which is of course a bit scarier. The ideology these guys operate with is truly frightening.
There's a dialogue on Slate between the book's author Lawrence Wright and his fellow journalist Steve Coll. Coll summarizes the book so well I'll simply quote him here:

The book opens with an account of the influential Egyptian Islamist writer Sayid Qutb's radicalizing experiences in America during the late 1940s, when he was a young man far from home. It then develops biographical portraits of the young Ayman Zawahiri and the young Osama Bin Laden, who both read Qutb ardently. The book follows the pair to Afghanistan during the 1980s and tracks the origins and formation of al-Qaida during the anti-Soviet war. The evolution of the group after it was forced into exile in Sudan during the early 1990s, and then returned to Afghanistan, in 1996, is blended with reporting about the FBI agents who were assigned to understand and pursue al-Qaida. The book follows all these strands of narrative to Sept. 11 and then to Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora the following December.

Read the whole dialogue here.