oedipus' online complexes

two weeks ago -- due to an involuntary attack of "assal horizontology", as diagnosed by Doctor Nick Riviera -- or is it three weeks, or more, by now? according to this file's datestamp, i began composition on 9 june 2007... in any event, it gave me the time and lack of distractions to not only finish Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, which i had been reading exclusively since february, but was able to also polish off:

1) Stiff: The Extraordinary Lives of Human Cadavers, by Mary Roach [unabridged; 7 hours, 59 minutes]

Roach first came to attention as a writer for an online magazine, and it shows; aside from its constant flippant asides, and its nod-and-a-wink approach to the reader, Stiff is an otherwise fascinating book about what happens with donated human cadavers, from anatomy classes, to refresher courses for plastic surgeons, to test crash dummies [the problem with real test crash dummies is that they don't measure the internal bruising that only a cadaver can provide], to contributing to forensic knowledge by rotting in a facility run by the University of Tennessee

2) Assassination Vacation, by Sarah Vowell [7 hours, 19 minutes]

Vowell's study of nineteenth century assassins and the presidents they assassinated -- as always, indiosyncratic, impeccably researched, and insightful

3) Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community and War, by , by Nathaniel Philbrick [unabridged, 12 hours and 43 minutes]

an excellent, but misleadingly named, historical work, as its subject concerns the affects the impact of the arrival of the Mayflower and the founding of Plymouth Plantation had on indigenous politics and inter-tribal relations. Mayflower is, however, a very precise and thurough recounting of the roots, reasons, and ever-shifting rationales that led to what anglo-americans refer to as King Phillip's War (1675-1676), and the ever-shifting alliances of convenience and necessity that characterized that conflict, rather than the journey of the Mayflower, and the day-to-day lives of the men and women who weathered the first 20 years of settlement at Plymouth Plantation. Instead, Philbrick focuses upon the children of the Mayflower generation, their attempts at the expansion of english settlement, their shifting relationship with the area's indigenous inhabitants, the impact it had on relationships between the area's indigenous inhabitants, and the conscious decision of the second generation of Pilgrims to begin, in earnest, the systematic attempt to exterminate indiginous americans which has characterizes, and still stains, american history

4) In the Wake of Madness: The Murderous Voyage of the Whaleship Sharon, by Joan Druett [unabridged; 6 hours 16 minutes]

the history of the whaler Sharon is one of the strangest maritime stories of the nineteenth or any century, and yet there is almost no popular or collective memory of the extremely strange fate of the USS Sharon. i would have expected a shanty or two to emerge from the incident, but perhaps it cut too close to too many bones at the time...

5) The Pirate Hunter: The True Story of Captain William Kidd, by Richard Zacks [unabridged; 18 hours and 27 minutes]

i have two pirate-obsessed nephews (one who lives part of the year in the Florida Keys, near the Dry Tortugas, and is an avid scuba diver) so i'm boning up on my own piratical knowledge; oh, for a copy of Daniel Defoe's massive, and endlessly entertaining, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the most notorious Pyrates, volumes 1 & 2 (1724), which i've only encountered unabridged in libraries (from which, as an historian and bibliophile, i am loathe to steal) and antiquarian bookshops, categorized under the heading: "too expensive and too well secured for your likes"; there is an edited version available from Dover Press and a digitalized image of parts of the book at Google's BookSearch

confession: i read this book in the interim between finishing Against the Day and posting this blogsplat...

and, due to its having clonked me on the head the other day whilst i was attempting to retrieve a pill from underneath the bookshelf next to my bed, i realized that i had read another book earlier this year, before starting in on reading Against the Day from cover to cover: The Scratch of a Pen: 1763 and the Transformation of North America, part of Oxford University Press' Pivitol Moments in American History by Colin G. Calloway [unabridged audio version from Tantor Media], which, i would strongly recommend to anyone, even anyone with absolutely no interest in anglo-american colonial history, not merely because Calloway's style is precise and compelling, but because the outcome of the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the Seven Years' War (what we yanks call the "French and Indian War"), changed forever the course of the early modern empires of England, France and Spain, as well as setting the stage for american claims to all of the land between the Atlantic Ocean and the west bank of the Mississippi, thus ensuring that, from its remote northern sources to the Gulf of Mexico, the mississippi would become an american, and not a spanish, controlled river, thus affecting the fates of six nation-states (great britain, france, portugal, spain, those northernmost north american territories, which would eventually become canada, and the not-quite-naescent united states), as well as that of innumerable indigenous peoples in north america...

so this brings my total so far this year to 18 completed books. (warning: i'm a professionally trained medievalist, not a mathematician!) i'm still part of the way -- or most of the way, in some cases -- through the backlog of books that abutted against Against the Day:

• Julius Ceasar: A Military Biography, by J.F.C. Fuller
• The Roman Way, by Edith Goodwin
• The Chronicles of Clovis, by Saki (HH Munro)
• Many Masks: The Life of Frank Lloyd Wright, by Brendon Gill (NLS: 27227)
• Fables for the Frivolous, by Guy Wetmore Carry
• The Iraq Study Group Report [unabridged audio edition]
• Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice, by James Branch Cabell
• Lincoln's Prose (no editor or compiler listed)

and still intend to read the following, which i have either come across -- or, in the case of NLS books, been randomly sent to me -- since putting every book i was reading on hold in order to read Against the Day straight through without any other literary innterruptions... before succumbing to pynchonia, i had already built up quite a queue of works to read before the year's out, which is ever growing, expanding and evolving... so, here's as current a list of books whose metaphoric covers i have yet to open, but are on my "to read" shelf, listed here in approximate alphabetic order:

1. A Commonwealth of Theives: The Improbable Birth of Australia, by Thomas Keneally [unabridged; 12 hours and 26 minutes]
   • there is a common refrain i've heard from australians (especially from one in particular), that the difference between australia and the united states is that the u.s. was founded by religious fanatics, whilst australia was populated with english convicts... so, it was with relief that i heard the statistics given in A Commonwealth of Theives that, before 1780, there was a vast influx of convicts into the more sparselly populated american colonies... i had always defended the u.s. by pointing out that (a) the first settlement in british north america was very much an economic venture, that (b) at the time of the american revolution, there were more german-language papers in the colony of pennsylvania than english ones; and that (c) the state of georgia was founded precisely as a reformatory, albeit permenant, penal colony, but i had little no idea just how many colonial americans were transplanted english felons
2. Bobby Fischer Goes to War: How the Soviets Lost the Most Extraordinary Chess Match, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow [unabridged Harper Audiobook; 11 hours 45 minutes]
3. Does A Frog Have A Soul? And of What Nature Is That Soul, Supposing It to Exist?, by T. H. Huxley (1870)
4. God and the State, by Mihkial Bakunin
   • i've only read God and the State in french translation, and -- several lifetimes ago, whilst an undergraduate at university, in russian, a language in which i was once nearly fluent whilst still in grade school, but which atrophied -- due to a lack of anyone to speak with on a regular basis -- into a reading knowledge, but which was rekindled at university, only to atrophy until i started editing papers by a russian academic, whom i had met [virtually -- we have never met in person] through one of my best friends, a dutchman, whilst the former was a visiting professor at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam only, like a reverse lazarus, to be displaced by all i've learnt about computers since becoming umbilically connected to one...
5. The Language of God, by Francis S. Collins
6. The Map That Changed the World, by one of today's best narrative historians, Simon Winchester
7. The Pirate Coast: Thomas Jefferson, The First Marines, and the Secret Mission of 1805, by Richard Zacks [unabridged; 13 hours, 51 minutes]
8. Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different, by Gordon Wood, the reigning dean of eighteenth-century american history [unabridged Penguin Audiobook]
9. Thirteen Moons, by Charles Frazier [unabridged on 13 CDs; approximate running time 10 hours]
   • the latest novel by the winner of the 1997 National Book Award for Literature for Cold Mountain, a work which i have neither read nor witnessed as a movie adaptation... this was a christmas gift...
10. The Way of All Flesh, by Samuel Butler [NLS RC: 57204]
11. A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami [Naxos AudioBooks, unabridged; 9 hours 39 minutes]
12. Ten Days in a Madhouse, by Nellie Bly
13. Death in Venice and Other Tales , by Thomas Mann (translated from the German by Joachim Neugroschel) [NLS RC: 60162]

i am a long way from 52...

Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic (RFB&D) has announced, that - effective 1 july 2007 - it will cease distribution of recorded material on audio cassettes, and will, thereafter, distribute materials in Digital Talking Book (DTB) format only.

Now, this sounds like a step forward for those of us dependent upon audiobooks to avoid illiteracy, and the granularity of the DTB format is undeniably superior to the gross navigational cues available via audio cassette when one is in fast forward or rewind mode, but...

you knew there'd be a but, didn't you?

here's the problem: in order to play Digital Talking Books, one needs a Digital Talking Book player. the same was true of the older, audio cassette format; for copyright protection reasons, RFB&D audio cassettes played at a different speed than normal audio cassettes, and used the stereo tracks on an audio cassette to deliver 4 seperate streams, so as to fit the maximum number of information on each cassette. gross section marking (sometimes by page, more often by chapter) was accomplished through the use of "a beep, audible when your player is in Rewind or FastForward mode". Most of RFB&D's client base already had a specially adapted audio cassette player, sent to them when they were enrolled in the National Library Service for the Blind & Physically Handicapped (NLS). NLS doesn't plan on "going digital" until 2009, as they are currently testing the default digital talking book player which will be distributed to NLS patrons, to ensure its usability (not just for "the blind" but also for those with limited mobility, limited coordination, and/or neuropathy), portability, and structural integrity (that is, ensuring that if it is dropped, it will still function).

most individuals use their NLS distributed cassette players (which feel - and, i've been told - look like they were manufactured by PlaySkool) in order to listen to both NLS-distributed materials and RFB&D-distributed material, the point being that - by virtue of having been enrolled in NLS - most blind individuals receive an adapted cassette player from NLS before becoming a member of RFB&D, so when one did receive cassettes from RFB&D, one had a specially adapted player at hand upon which to listen to an RFB&D audio recording.

there are digital talking book players on the market, but the market at which they are targeted constitutes a fraction of one percent of the USA's population, seventy to seventy-five percent of whom are unemployed. one such portable DTB player is the incredible BookPort, manufactured by American Printing House for the Blind (APH), whose price tag is $395. doesn't sound like much, until one remembers that 70 to 75 percent of those for whom the BookPort would be a godsend, rely on government assistance just to keep a roof over their heads, and hope that there'll be enough left for food, medication, etc.

putting the onus on RFB&D users to "Go Digital" at their own expense, sounds like an undue burden, doesn't it?

and, to add insult to injustice, in order to use RFB&D distributed materials, one needs to pay a user fee of nearly almost $10 (US) for a decryption key, so that one can access RFB&D's digital talking books.

thankfully, there are computer-based solutions, namely software Digital Talking Book players, some of which are actually freeware or shareware, the software solution, however, defeats one of the purposes of digitalization: namely, portability and ease of use.

and what of RFB&D's back-catalog of recordings? one of the unique aspects of RFB&D is (or, at least, is supposed to be) that they record materials upon request, no matter how obscure the subject matter, and when that recording is made, the entire text of the work being read - including page information, appendecies, the bibliography and the source notes - is included, in order to make attrubutions, citations, and page references possible; RFB&D is intended to assist the blind and dyslexic in their studies, work, and any and every other aspect of life. it provides books in toto, unlike NLS, whose focus is more narrative, and - like commercial audiobooks - do not include footnotes, endnotes, nor bilbiography. thus, it hit me like a thunderbolt from the sky, when my screen reader, in the course of reading RFB&D's Go Digital FAQ, i heard the following:

4. Is RFB&D planning to convert its entire library to digital?

No. RFB&D's team of librarians has done extensive research and taken steps to ensure that all of our most-requested, highest circulating titles are already recorded digitally. Also, member requests over the past few years have complemented our market research efforts to help us build an extensive library of books that we have already converted analog to digital. In addition, RFB&D is investigating retaining a portion of our analog library for distribution upon request in a simplified digital format that would not have the same navigation enhancements as RFB&D's AudioPlus books. In some cases, the quality of some of the analog formats that are archived make conversion impossible.

having listened to more than a few DTBs converted from analog, i can assure you that - even titles recorded as analog audio books, as recently as 4 years ago - begin with a disclaimer to the effect that, since this was converted from an analog source, attempting direct access to a page by its number, may not result in bringing the reader to the requested page. oh, and lest i forget, there is also the disclaimer asking the listener to disregard any instructions about changing sides, tracks, or cassettes...

now that's gross, in every sense of the word...

it is as if a librarian, at the dawn of printing, decided that, not only would all new works be published by printing press solely, but that only a select portion of the library's vast and varied holdings of manuscripts would be converted into the new, ubiquitous printed format, whilst the rest of the manuscripts are abandoned as fodder for silverfish, the rats, and the library's ravenous fireplaces and furnaces...

no wonder the DTB format doesn't include a way to directly access prefaces and introductions, which - at least in english - are conventionally numbered using roman numerals...