A Great Hollywood Writer is Dead - A long, long post to bring us trekkies up to speed . .

Subtitle =
"There were T.V. scriptwriters around before Gene Roddenberry; there were Big Studios before Paramount Pictures.")

Screen & Script T.V. Writer Died on Saturday

'"I Love Lucy' writer Bob Carroll dies"

By JOHN ROGERS
Associated Press Writer

NOTA BENE: Blogaulaire - Bob Carroll worked with some of Hollywood's greats. He was there at the beginning of television, as vaudeville morphed into the electronic media.

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Bob Carroll Jr., a pioneering television writer who worked on all of Lucille Ball's TV shows, including "I Love Lucy," has died. He was 87.

Carroll, who had been in failing health for the past month, died Saturday, family friend and fellow TV writer Thomas Watson told The Associated Press on Monday.

. . . This B ackground Piece provided by browsing around . . .

When the show moved to television in 1953, Ball took her writers with her, changing the name to "I Love Lucy" and adding real-life husband Desi Arnaz to the cast.

Carroll and Pugh went on to work on every episode of the long-running show, Watson said, as well as many episodes of "The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour," "The Lucy Show," "Here's Lucy" and "Life With Lucy." The latter show went off the air in 1986, three years before Ball's death.

Many of the shows had essentially the same premise: Lucy gets involved in some routine function and, often through well-intentioned deviousness coupled with incredible clumsiness, manages to turn it into a pratfall-filled disaster.

Carroll and (Madelyn Pugh) Davis also collaborated on several other projects, including the 1968 film "Yours, Mine and Ours" and the Arnaz-produced sitcom "The Mothers-In-Law."

© 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

----------------------BELOW SEE: The Museum of Broadcast Communications

Desi Arnaz with Lucille Ball


DESI (Desiderio Alberto, III) ARNAZ. Born in Santiago, Cuba, 2 March 1917. Attended Colegio Delores, Jesuit Preparatory School, Santiago, Cuba. United States Medical Corps., 1943-45. Married (1) Lucille Ball, 30 November 1940 (divorced, 1960), children: Lucie Desiree, Desiderio Alberto, IV (Desi, Jr.). Began entertainment career as singer, with Xavier Cugat Band, 1935-36; formed own band at The Conga Club, Miami, Florida, 1938, height of the "conga craze"; Broadway musical debut, Too Many Girls, 1939; RKO film version of the musical, 1940; music director for the Bob Hope radio show, 1946-47; performed with Ball in radio show, My Favorite Husband, 1947-50; produced pilot for I Love Lucy with own funds, 1951; performed as Ricky Ricardo, I Love Lucy, 1951-57; president and co-founder, Desilu Productions, 1951-62. Recipient: Best Performance of the Month, Photoplay Magazine, 1943, for Bataan.

Died in Del Mar, California 2 December 1986.

TELEVISION

1951-57 I Love Lucy (actor, producer)
1958-60 Westinghouse Playhouse (producer)
1962-65, 67 The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (actor, producer)

FILMS

Too Many Girls (1940); Father Takes a Wife (1941); The Navy Comes Through (1942); Four Jacks and a Jill (1942); Bataan (1943); Holiday in Havana (1949); Cuban Pete (1950); The Long, Long Trailer (1954); Forever Darling (1956); The Escape Artist (1982).

PUBLICATIONS

A Book by Arnaz Desi. New York: William Morrow, 1976.

BOOKS: FURTHER READING

Anderson, Christopher. Hollywood/TV. Austin, Texas: The University of Texas Press, 1994.

Andrews, Bart. The "I Love Lucy" Book. New York: Doubleday, 1985.
(for sale on this CPE site)

Andrews, Bart, and Thomas J. Watson. Loving Lucy. New York: St. Martin's, 1980.

Brady, Kathleen. Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball. New York: Hyperion, 1994.

Firmat, Gustavo Perez. Life On the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Harris, Warren G. Lucy & Desi: The Legendary Love Story of Television's Most Famous Couple. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Higham, Charles. Lucy: The Life of Lucille Ball. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

Sanders, Coyne Steven, and Tom Gilbert. Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. New York: Morrow 1993.

Schatz, Thomas. "Desilu, I Love Lucy, and the Rise of Network TV." In, Thompson, Robert, and Gary Burns, editors, Making Television: Authorship and the Production Process. New York: Praeger, 1990.

Desi Arnaz

(H)e was one of Hollywood's most perceptive, and powerful, producers in television's early years. His shrewd business skills and his realization of particular combinations of the television's technological and cultural connections enabled him to develop aspects of the medium that remain central to its economic and cultural force.

(In the early 1940s) Lucy and Desi set out on a nation-wide stage tour to designed to gauge public reaction to their working together in a comedy act. CBS was im-pressed with the positive public response to the couple as well as with a sample script for a TV series developed by the writers from My Favorite Husband.

The basics were there, including Desi as Ricky Ricardo, a struggling band leader, and Lucille as Lucy, a housewife with little talent but a giant yearning to break into show business. This homey battle-of-the-sexes premise for the show convinced the network that viewers could relate, and a pilot version of the program impressed the Philip Morris Company, which agreed to sponsor thirty-nine programs for the 1951-52 season on the CBS network Monday nights at 9:00 P.M

The Desilu Empire

Desilu logo as it showed in the ending credits of Star Trek. Desilu was a production company formed in 1951 by Lucille Ball and her husband, Desi Arnaz. The success of the television show "I Love Lucy" enabled Desilu to grow and expand, producing such programs as The Andy Griffith Show. (The downtown Mayberry set was sometimes later used for location shots for Star Trek.)

After the breakup of the Ball-Arnaz marriage Desilu remained successful. In 1961, Ball bought out Arnaz and became the first woman ever to run a major Hollywood studio. Desilu later brought forth shows like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. Her success continued unabatedly until 1967 when Ball sold Desilu to Gulf+Western which merged it with its other production company (the studio's next-door neighbor), Paramount.

The name "Desilu" comes from Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball. Desilu had a first-refusal agreement with CBS, which is why Star Trek was first pitched to that network. When CBS passed on the show, NBC was then approached.

The World's Largest Studio

From Memory Alpha, the free Star Trek reference.
(Redirected from Desilu Studios) via Anwers Com (A. C. ripped it from Wikipedia and gave proper credit.)

Carroll discussed the fact that he and his writing partner Pugh do not receive ANY compensation for the I Love Lucy re-runs, as would be standard for writers today. He has, however, kept his sense of humor over the situation telling a reporter: "Do you think I'd be sitting here if I'd had residuals?" Carroll asked. "I'd have flown you down to Cuba for this interview if I had."

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 30 January

from Justin Wintle

"Old trees are hollow inside; old men see things clearly."

. . (120) Chinese

We Call Our Bus Patty Patchwork

//sarcasm//
This application may not have much bandwidth but it moves faster in P2P downloads than the legacy site servers in its class.

It's like distributed computing using a needle and thread for modular interface configuration. //END SARCASM//

Two quilting buddies in southeastern Iowa wanted to open a quilting shop but couldn't decide in which town to settle. So they bought a bus for $1,200 and took their fabric on the road.

All this commercial linking in crazy-quilt patterns could spread virally, who knows?

Two quilting buddies in southeastern Iowa wanted to open a quilting shop but couldn't decide in which town to settle. So they bought a bus for $1,200 and took their fabric on the road.


More than two years ago, quilting buddies Gay Murphy and Kris Kelderman were pondering the idea of owning a quilting store when they retired.

"Being in rural Iowa, it was kind of hard to think of a place to put a quilting shop," said Murphy, 43, who lives in Eddyville, in southeastern Iowa. Kelderman, 52, is from nearby Kirkville.

That's when Murphy's childhood memories of visiting mobile libraries while living in Des Moines** sparked the idea: How about a quilt shop on wheels?

Their business, Patchwork Peddlers, has been on the move since January 2005, delivering quilting supplies to customers in rural Iowa. They also regularly park at the Hy-Vee parking lot in Albia on Mondays, and at the Hy-Vee in Ottumwa on Tuesdays.

The two women have also taken their green 1984 Ford Bluebird bus to visit quilt guilds in the state, as well as in Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri and Minnesota.

"We call our bus Patty Patchwork," Murphy said.

** - Blogaulaire: 'Been there, done that; glad it inspired someone.' And I was paid 69 cents an hour to travel with and reshelve the mobile library - not bad for a 14-year-old kid at the time. Not as good as caddying, but better than delivering newspapers.

pps: //edit added// The more I think about this Des Moines Register article, the more questions I have. Murphy and Kelderman retire 'kinda yung' wouldn't you say? So I wonder from what employment each 'retired'. Plus, they landed a damn good set of wheels for the price if they can buzz around eastern Iowa every week and go to quilt guilds from Oklahoma to Minnesota whenever they please.

A book-bus that is or was at one time operated by a non-profit group once came to a conference and book sale I attended. The vehicle was very special because it was modified to hold handcrafted chapbooks to promote the work of poets and artisans. So the load was very much lighter than with most mobile lending libraries. If anyone here know more about this, please post a link in your comment. I'll see what I can find on this end. Already, the first day it is posted, this article has proved to be very popular - several hits from interested persons.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 29 January

from Justin Wintle

"A man's breast is the best wallet for his troubles."

. . (116) Japanese

Table-Top Imaging of Books Kept Blogaulaire Busy

Yesterday I did not post to my blog 'cuz I banged out 157 photo shots of books. Once I have my homemade diffusion screen 'tent' set up, once the tripod, lights and backdrop is in place, I blaze away at snapping the shutter and slapping the books in the 'saddle' to have their portrait taken.

Why So Many Books?

It was to upload an image, eventually, to the meta vendor sites where a bookseller friend has listed her entire 14,500 book inventory. Livres Bronx Books is not far from where I live, so it is easy for me to set up there or on my own table at home (and schlock the books back and forth).

Yesterday, it was partly a dry-run, partly my own books which my friend may upload on her site as reimbursement for my work, and partly her books. But don't worry, I'm not setting up to image all fourteen-and-a-half thousand books she's got. Some of those have been on-line nearly 10 years. They're dead pulp. Ready for some 25-cent or 50-cent bin out on the sidewalk (come spring, come summer) in front of her shop. (But SHE knows not to ask what I think she should do. You don't want to go there either, nor see the sparks fly . . so we'll just drop that hot potato, okay?)

As well, yesterday and early this am I registered with flickr and started uploading images as a public archive. I have not decided where I want to take those collections yet. Until I do, I'll make book-related photos public, ditto some of the urban imagery that I will share with the sites UER and Walking Turcot Yard, and make the rest private - to share on a needs-to-see basis.

Oh, I forgot to mention that another friend has opened a wool and fabric shop is St. Jean sur Richelieu. Actually she bought out the former owner. My daughter takes her newborn over to the wool and knitting boutique some days and the 'regulars' are getting to know my grandchild. I wish it was closer to where I live (it is in fact 25 km to the south). But maybe I'll relent on my 'simplicity' and buy another (the latest) in that long line of clunkers I've owned since the $50 Chevy with dual carbs (1957) which I shared with a grad student back when. I wasn't a driver in '57, that's for sure. So I'll let YOU guess how old it was. We kept a quarter barrel of motor oil - I swear, a barrel with a pump - on the back seat . . that Chev burned so much oil! Now that we are so globally warmed, I . . . 'Don't mourn, organize!' I already said that above.

Helen Hill Memorial Website Media Mention

Family, friends and fellow community and cinema activists have been contributing to the pages on the webpage that links to this post's title.

The number of articles, website references and bloggers who have had something to say about the murder of Hill more than 3 weeks ago in NOLA is astounding. That someone makes the effort to pull those links together is commendable. Helen herself, I'll bet, if in her lifetime all that news coverage had highlighted her volunteer work teaching and feeding and offering support to pre- and post-Katrina residents of the Delta Region and New Orleans . . well people like Helen tend to just throw that stuff away so they can get on to the next challenge.

One focus of her impact on other people doing good volunteer work was in encouraging people in Halifax to pitch in after the flooding of NOLA. And when she lived there she influenced cinematographers to find community themes for creative experimentation with documentary film. If we started with the tens of blog posts listed on the HelenHill Org 'articles' page, it would be possible to document what it takes to pull one small community together. Was it Food Not Bombs that helped mobilize Halifax volunteers? Was it the filmmakers? Was it one individual?

In any case, thanks to the people who pulled those links together. Hopefully there will be some follow-up study and help us remember the motto: 'Don't Mourn, Organize!'

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 28 January

from Justin Wintle

"It is not every day that a delicious rice-cake falls into the open mouth."

. . (110) Japanese

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 26 January

from Justin Wintle

"A thousand drinks with a true friend are not enough; half a sentence with an enemy is too much."

. . (102) Chinese

Encyclopedic Archives, Books and Image Libraries : Combinations Bigger than Google

Today Blogaulaire discovered two compendia tools being compiled and hosted at the University of Sherbrooke, here in Québec. The Bilan du Siècle and the Perspective Monde are searchable archives that are like textual and visual electronic encyclopedias. If I were a reference librarian working in Québec, I would have links to both on my desktop always at the ready.

Links to both sites are on the homepage of the Faculté des lettres et sciences.




A list of the images in the archives for Bilan du Siècle is HERE. You don't need your high school French to read images.

When you browse to Perspective Monde, notice the button at the top of the page for ENGLISH and you will access the micropedia sections that have been translated.

This brings me to the issue of digital libraries.

In the proper hands, it is fantastic to have documents available in a library and on the Internet for viewing on a monitor. However, the real work and brain muscle goes into putting the documents into a search tree with worthwhile structure and commentary. Then it is important to provide labels and short, topical article entries, illustrations and tables, if what is made searchable is intended for anyone other than an advanced scholar in his or her specialised field of research.

The Sherbrooke archive source: HERE



The team at the University of Sherbrooke should be praised for what they have digitized, annotated and made searchable on line. The articles and timelines, just to mention two features I stumbled upon, are well done. (I hope some of you readers will look into this. I also hope that the work has been translated into English.)

I do not think anybody working for Google is competent to accomplish the same thing. Blogaulaire is not saying that Google ever claimed that they are competent at such scholarly, educational enterprises. But many, many people are creating buzz and momentum such that Google becomes the 800-pound gorilla that crushes all the competent cage mates (the real librarians and scholarly writers) up against the bars and out of the metaphoric zoo!

There is a huge, looming problem here. There is a threat on the horizon if anybody in their right mind EVER places confidence in Google or another private corporation and pays them to take on the sort of archival and electronic publishing projects that are currently the mandate of institutionally recognised teams, such as this one, that Blogaulaire just discovered.

Why bring Google into this?

This is all about the 'Google scans the world' issue as blogger J Godsey so tersely puts it on her blog Bibliophile Bullpen.

On another blog we are about to cite below, the matter is headlined in the post title and quote we are also about to cite. Links and credits also follow.

The Digital Battle For Our Literary Heritage: The Internet Archive vs. Google


From: Book Patrol


By Michael Lieberman - Antiquarian Bookseller
From his blog on the website of the Seattle newspaper The Post Intelligencer .

Michael Lieberman also has a personal blog by the same title where you find fewer enhancements like images and less emphasis on running human interest feature articles.

QUOTE

If Google wants to digitize the collections of private institutions by all means go ahead but to venture into the realm of digitizing the content of public institutions (remember University libraries are public institutions) is a slippery slope that unfortunately we have started to slide down.

We need to do all we can to stop this digital freight train. The message is simple. For profit companies cannot digitize the content of public institutions or public libraries.

Let the Internet Archive take care of digitizing the treasures of our public institutions and libraries. We can set aside a portion of the budget for the Library of Congress (a current supporter) and the Smithsonian Institution if need be or how about a 1% digital archive tax on every new computer purchased.

The point is we need to get creative here. Fast.

We need to buy back the rights that were sold to Google (at a premium of course) and go about doing this the right way.

END QUOTE

Lieberman's post is worth blogging in extenso. And thank you, Michael Lieberman, for crediting CPE for finding one of the source articles you link in your post.


Lately two of my posts here have been 'ripped' by both electronic and print media without so much as giving Cheap Priceless Editions eve a credit line! Thanks for the one you ran on Book Patrol, sincerely.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 25 January

"It is easier to acquire great lands than it is to find a true brother ."

. . (97) Chinese

Book Patrol: A Haven for Book Lovers

There is almost always something interesting to read in the Pacific Northwest's blogger's bookshop run by this guy at Book Patrol.

Both CPE's post title and the linked article title below will take you over there to finish reading this piece. (There is an image as well.) And be sure to visit all the LINKS to your right on the sidebar here.

Any time you want to search to see what a book is selling for on the Internet, type in one or more lines in the box above and click. It's that easy!

'New and Used' an exhibit of photographs by Marc Joseph:

"Opening today in The Cooley Gallery at Reed College in Portland, Oregon is the U.S. debut of 'New and Used' an exhibit of photographs by Marc Joseph. Joseph traveled across America photographing 'the spaces and objects of independent book and record stores'. Steidl has recently published these photos in the book version of 'New and Used'. "

Keeping current on news about digital bookmaking

A KEYWORD 'CHEAT SHEET' for your own web crawl with hints, links and keywords to 'stay current' by searching for the e-book revolution manifesto.


I just linked over to slashdot.

A handful of regular posters over at slashdot.org have been scrutinizing news sources to decide whether Google is 'enjoying' success or failure in their touted Digitised Reading Revolution.

All the commenting and posting over there that I looked at was about this new sagaof Google entering the field of e-books while forging several partnerships with universities. Google is beginning to create vast digital libraries for these academic clients. (There are still lawsuits pending over these projects. The plaintifs, apparently, are some the the US's biggest book publishers.)

Google is being sued for an intent to engage in copyright violations by American publishing companies. Bitain's flagship publishing company Oxford) is NOT suing for divorce from Google, however; quite the contrary.

So far, this controversy is all about scanning library books.

On several other fronts, the Oxford University Press is working hand-in-glove with Google on commercial stuff like putting a Spanish dictionary on the iPod(TM). The terrain has become difficult to negotiate for casual onlookers out strolling the landscape of publishing. The paths fork and divide, some are probably dead-ends. The issue becomes complicated and contradictory.

It is at times like these - with 'dead tree' publishers facing challenges right and left - that we 'needs read' informed people's blog posts and online comments to discover what, if any analysis makes sense. The case is not yet in.

Blogaulaire offers help with a few keyword tools for your own Internet searches and for crawling the web on a news aggregator, if you use one.

Meme Theme = An e-book on my iPod'"is like an MP3 for the eyes"

- said with a sigh :)
Here are some keywords for search strings (some are meme themes) that you can search for on Technocrati, Yahoo, or the Google Blog Search option):
"book +" "search service", scan, digitize, searchable, + "library collections" +,"digital libraries", "Evan Schnittman", "book downloads" +, "Ralph Oman".

Other keywords that help zoom in on the topic are: nettamere (a regular slashdot poster) and "Google Print Program".


A QUOTE
from Elinor Mills
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: October 24, 2005

The Print Program has two components, one for publishers and one for libraries. Under the Google Publisher Program, the company is working with book publishers to make titles searchable and easy to purchase. The search result pages include advertisements if publishers want them, and most of the revenue goes to the publishers, Google said.

The controversial part of the Print Program, which has prompted two lawsuits so far, is the Print Library Project. Under the Library Project, the search giant is scanning, digitizing and making searchable parts or all of the collections from Stanford University, Harvard University, Oxford University, the University of Michigan and The New York Public Library.

from "Google's battle over library books
As the search giant pushes ahead with its book-scanning project, publishers are crying copyright foul, not fair use.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 24 January

from Justin Wintle

"Anyone who owns just three ounces of flour should never have to depend on his wife's family ."

. . (89) Japanese

Notes on blogs and the new media revolution

by liza
(14 November 2006 - personal blog
on culturekitchen's site)

NOTE: CPE will be adding the main page link to the blog culturekitchen on our blogroll list in the right-hand sidebar.

We were struck by an interesting piece found at CK. If there is consistent interest shown by my readers (if people use the link), I will keep looking for stuff to blog over from the site.

Opening her post she wrote: "Tonight I have the opportunity to talk about blogs, feminism and the Web 2.0 revolution at Barnard University's Center for Research on Women."---------------------------------------------

. . . the idea of feminism as a politics of the "personal turned public". The main idea of "Las tretas del debil" is that Power is not about fixed dialectical opositions : Strong vs. Weak. Power is a process of making spaces for expression. When Ludmer writes how, this explains women writer's preference for smaller literary genres like letters, autobiographies and diaries. Styles on the margins of literary and non-literary writing, called also reality-based writing, you can see how blogs would fit nicely into the category of minor litertures where personal realities are used as power machines.

Ludmer's article owes a huge debt to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 30). Compared to amount of pages these guys produced for their magnus opus, Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Kafka would seem like a piddling of a little book. I believe though it is perfect for our discussion of blogs because it synthesizes the theory and praxis of becoming minor they developed in their mammoth collaboration. In turn, the concept of becoming minor explains the current upheaval created by bloggers and it points to their possibility as power machines.

A ‘minor literature’ is political, collective, revolutionary, and even spatial —deterritorializing one terrain as it maps another.
According to Deleuze and Guattari, the ‘minor literature’ maps the passage of this deterritorialization; as such, it is a literature of the people; as such, it is also thoroughly political. “The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the conditions of a collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern”.

A Note from culturekitchen

culturekitchen is a community blog aimed at cultural creatives who believe progressive activism starts in the kitchen, the bedroom, the home, the wallet. It is open for all who believe the decline of progressive and libertarian values have set us back as a democratic nation.

culturekitchen is published by Liza Sabater. It's one of the top progressive and feminist blogs in the United States.

--------------------------------------------------
culturekitchen

"A snark and gravitas-filled publication focused on arts, culture, politics and technology."

Published by Liza Sabater
with various other writers


We reserve the right to 'hunt you down and slap you upside the head' if you reprint or rebroadcast our content for-profit and without our consent.

Creative Commons Licenses are cool as long as you share alike.

- (emphasis added by Blogaulaire)

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 23 January

from Justin Wintle

"It takes three years before a peach tree bears fruit, but a widow is only a widow for one year ."

. . (89) Japanese

We Hesitate to Bring This Audio Program to Your Attention

It would force you to download a new multimedia studio complex.

I had to struggle several hours recently because the crew here (moi) strayed from the path of voluntary simplicity. Itried to download too much BloatWare playing with audio and game downloads for your blogging enjoyment.

We can look down our noses (but rarely do) at the REAL videogame and MP3 junkies. But we look up to them, at least the ones here in Montréal.

The reason we don't look DOWN at these addicts is because the big operators, the pros, have taken residence here over the past decade and they are HQ'd in the finest of some 6 or 8 of the tallest buildings along The Main (St. Lawrence Street). So in terms of these leading-edge game coders, to look at them at all we have to look UP -- WAY UP above the 6th floor :)

But here at CPE we play games as well, when not solving all the world's problems writing our flowing prose.

Games we like are mahjong, solitaire in the Windows plain vanilla flavor, Go, Scrabble, dominoes and strategy board games with four players. Not too much electronics, but often on a computer. Sometimes on a real table with real human 'warm-body' competition.

Today, though, I had to reload new copies of old games that we erased because they had become too addictive to accomplish anything else. (I tried to find whatever was out there for free.) Some 'law' about 'you get what you (don't) pay for' kicked in . . .
. . . so two thirds of the downloads we tried were total bloatware, taking over the computer and going online to rack up scores -- and even stupider nonsense.(Later I will share one address that offers fine, slim versions of nice games - but I'm not certain how to get them in English (though advertised as bilingual) and I just take the French stuff as it comes. I will check that out later to blog on it.

The more serious project that was so rudely interrupted by bloatware relates to my idea of sharing audio files on this blog. You could be convinced, I think, that listening to performance poets and even dead poets (including T. S. Eliot) is fun and educational.

Audio literary performances for enhancing the reading experience, not replacing printed books, can and should be a powerful niche that online publishers should explore. Enhancements, both visual and auditory, not substitution on a monitor screen, is a better fit than a big move into e-books for reading on plasma screens or tiny cell phones.

Trying to listen to bookmarked readings I have, I was surprisingly obliged, for the first time in months, to upgrade RealPlayer to hear the stuff that used to work on older versions of software. The download took forever. And then it took over the computer.

How? By forcing, I'm not joking, by forcing Firefox Mozilla down the same line with the newer version of RealPlayer (TM).

Although I have nothing against Firefox's Mozilla browser, I do not want it. Not now anyhow. But NOW I certainly have something against RealPlayer - for all the bloat and for trying to jam a new browser down my throat.

Finally, if anyone knows a more user-friendly way to share a few audio clips for poetry readings through this blog, let me know. I would like all this to be much simpler for every single user and not pressure anyone to face a bloated download like we juat did. I would like it to be a mere click away.

Why isn't there something that runs straight off the blog for sound files?

Perhaps all of us should choose the leanest, simplest audio player (one that comes with the operating system) instead of stuff that imitates a broadcast station's studio monitor all jam-packed into a tiny corner of the screen as the sound screams out of the speakers.

Come on, Linux freaks, have your go at convincing of Open Source approaches.

Post your Comments.

I am nearly ready to take the Linux plunge (one more time)!

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 22 January

from Justin Wintle

"Same fox, same hole."

. . (87) Japanese

The Book Business has a Symbiotic Relation with Your Local Newsprint Media

Today I read The Montreal Gazette looking outside the Books 'Section K' to see if other, more 'newsy' pieces mentioned trade fiction or non-fiction titles.

In several different sections (I want to say 'cahiers' because that is how the French newspapers Le Devoir and La Presse and Le Journal de Montréal are divided) . . well, in various parts and pages I found numerous articles that mentioned 'so-and-so, author of . . .'. I even ran across whole feature pieces outside the Books section where it amounted to an author interview.

Sports jocks write books. Journalists write books. Gossip columnists are authors.

Any regular reader of a newspaper will feel driven to go check out or buy this or that book if they want to find out more about the people covered in the paper or to research facts and ideas that make headlines.

The conclusion is obvious, unless you think that radio and television also reference books as much as newsprint media. Do you think they highlight people who write books? I mean the most popular media. It bears looking into, because, if not . . .

A decline in the circulation of newspapers, or concentration of the news in the hands of media groups who make most of their money from cable and broadcast media, could be the biggest threat to the book trade.

Think about it. Blogaulaire and other boys and girls on blogs harp about digitized books. You could start to see Google as a big threatening ogre that will gobble the bookstores and the publishers in one gulp. But maybe the big ogre, if there is one, is the THING out there that is gobbling up the daily newspapers!

CLICK on the title for one example of a news article that is about a TRADE TITLE.

Trials, Attacks, Murders : Writers Are Victimized by Hysteria in Turkey

Immediately upon receiving news that Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink was shot and killed Friday, The Associated Press released a a timeline that shows that writers are the primary target of the state in Turkey today.

We see immediately when we review the past year's series of trials for such crimes as "insulting Turkishness" that Turkish citizens are being whipped up against Armenian-Turks -- especially against the intellectuals who defend civic and ethnic rights and who respect the 'facts of history'.

When Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, was shot and killed last Friday, 19 January 2007 in Istanbul, it was the culmination of state sanctioned and courtroom orchestrated 'hate crimes', not an isolated murder.

See below as well. After I blog the timeline I link to another piece at Open Democracy's website, from one year ago., It was written when the trials became international news.

Hrant Dink was the judicial target. In 2006, novelist Orhan Pamuk went almost straight from his own show trial to Stockholm, Sweden to receive his Nobel Prize in Literature.
(Both the English and French versions of Pamuk's novel "Snow" are growing in popularity and are selling well in Montreal bookstores today.

In Turkey, a Year of Attacks and Trials

Jan 19th 2007
By The Associated Press

(AP) - _ Jan. 19, 2007
Hrant Dink, editor of the Turkish-Armenian newspaper Agos, is slain by a gunman in Istanbul.

_ Dec. 19, 2006: Writer Ipek Calislar acquitted of insulting Turkey's founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in a biography in which she said Ataturk dressed as a woman to escape an assassination attempt.

After the timeline lists other "show trials", the AP editor traces the victimisation of writers back over 12 months (almost to the exact date one year ago). The date was
"Jan. 23, 2006: when the Turkish court droped charges of "insulting Turkishness" against author Orhan Pamuk (on a technicality).

"Pamuk was charged after discussing the deaths of Armenians in Turkey with a Swiss newspaper. He won the Nobel Prize for literature later in the year."

Orhan Pamuk and Turkey’s future

Daria Vaisman
1 - 12 - 2006

The reception of Orhan Pamuk's Nobel award in Turkey is charged with the political tensions inside the country and in its relationship with Europe, says Daria Vaisman.

Pamuk himself is at the centre of the controversy. It was he who he told the Swiss newspaper Tages Anzeige in February 2005 that "30,000 Kurds and a million Armenians were killed in these lands, and nobody but me dares to talk about it" (comments which made Pamuk the most prominent target of the notorious "insult law" cases, in which individuals have been charged with "denigrating Turkishness"). Although Pamuk's case was eventually dismissed on a technicality, other writers - among them Hrant Dink, Elif Shafak, and Murat Belge - have since been tried under the same law.

The Dragon's Almanac 2007 - 21 January

from Justin Wintle

"In the heavens, thunder; down on earth, the maternal uncle."

. . (82) Chinese