Shall I Get Rid of Some of My Books?

Now heaven help me, I looked in my bookcase for something I might move out of my house, and didn't I start READING the cursed addictive things! A booklet called "Naming: poems by 8 women," published in Oregon in 1976, fell open at "I HAVE ALWAYS WANTED TO MARRY AN ARTIST," by Carol Erdman. The writer daydreams of living in creative clutter, "oozing rainbows through the honeymud between our toes." I have to keep that, I haven't read all the poems yet. I might want to read them again. Then I wondered if I really need books acquired when I was researching background for writing a short story or child's book about my mother's childhood in Muinish, in Galway Bay. I pulled out "Our Like Will Not Be There Again," a collection of essays on interviews of older people in the West of Ireland, by Lawrence Millman. That opened at "Listenin' Was a Great Thing Once," about a man who had forgotten his father's stories, until he was stuck for weeks in a hospital. He remembered story after story as he told them to sick and fretful patients, who forgot for a while to feel pain. Well, I have to read more of the essays now, don't I? Only this week I pulled out a slender hardback by May Sarton, "Joanna and Ulysses," published in 1963, and isn't it speaking straight to my heart on the same subject as "Artists' Journey," by Julia Cameron, which a group of us have been studying for months? "Somewhere deep down inside her there was a being who was not the dutiful daughter she had forced herself to become. She felt she had earned a commitment to this being, the painter, because although she had no illusion about the value of what she did, painting could, she felt, become a way of finding out what she really thought about things, where she was now, at thirty." Of course, she did have an illusion. She supposed her paintings were not good. My precious, precious books! How I neglect you for years, yet cling with strength to the great good in you when I meet you again.

Books I'm Reading/Recently Read

The Bag Lady Papers/Penney
The Future of Islam/Esposito
Making a Literary Life/See
Dufy/Hunter
Dufy/Werner
The History of Love/Krauss
All I Want for Christmas is a Vampire
Recovering/Sarton
Blade Dancer/Viehl
Becoming Naturally Therapeutic/Small
Visibly Muslim/Tarlo
The Hypochondriacs/Dillon
Art: A Crash Course/Freeman
Huntsman What Quarry/Millay
Edvard Munch/Gossett

NPR provides me with some eclectic book recommendations. Some of these I read in depth; others I read the introduction, one or two chapters of interest, and skim the rest. When my sister the English professor recommends a book, I usually find it and read carefully. Some books I've owned for decades and continue to hold my attention.

Scapegoats

I recommend History on Trial. Deborah E. Lipstadt is Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Emory University. I haven't read her book yet: History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving [Ecco 2005]. David Irving had sued the professor for libel, for calling him a holocaust denier. She won. I'm sorry to say that I didn't recognize either name. My reaction to newspaper stories about people denying that the Holocaust ever happened has been a bafflement. I dismiss them as nuts. That does not stop the damage they can do.

In the book I liked so much by May Sarton, The Education of Harriet Hatfield, some people in the neighborhood react to her new bookstore with a lot of grumbling about "pornography" and "lesbians" and "we don't want her kind here." This quickly escalates to vandalism, threats, and violence. The atmosphere of permission to hate and harm promotes criminal action. Harriet's standing her ground wins respect, and helps others.

"...When they came for the Jews, we did nothing.....When they came for us, there was no one left to do anything."

The Power of Free?

In The Long Tail, Chris Anderson says, "Understand the power of free...one of the most powerful features of digital markets is that they put free within reach; because their costs are near zero, their prices can be, too. Already, one of the most common business models on the Internet, from Skype to Yahoo! Mail, is to attract lots of users with a free service and convince some of them to upgrade to a subscription-based 'premium' service that adds higher quality or better features. Because digital services are so cheap to offer, the free customers cost the company so little that it can afford to convert only a tiny fraction of them to paying customers." (p. 223)

I think that the costs can be near zero only after considerable investment in startup for labor and advertising. Startup can take months and years, so there must be money to support the effort for some time. Alternatively, the labor can be unpaid and the equipment can be the personal property of the entrepeneurs, who keep their day jobs.

Internet services can stimulate physical services. Buying and selling on eBay has caused an explosion in mail and parcel delivery services. eBay always charged fees to sellers, but this has proved affordable for quite a few businesses and individuals. I wonder, what is the proportion of successful to unsuccessful sellers?

Returning to the theme of free services, I used to check SciFi.com regularly to read new and classic SF stories at no cost. The site is connected to a television channel, and its reviews of films, books and other products stimulates sales of those items. I'm more likely now to check recent interviews with authors, as well as reviews. I might base a decision to see a movie partly on SciFi's review, or be reminded of a book and look on Amazon or ExLibris or Abebooks for an inexpensive copy. Multiply my modest spending by a million viewers, add the big spenders, and the free service deserves to be paid by advertisers.

The wonderful world of the Web and the Internet is not exactly without cost. Where is all this electricity coming from? Mostly from oil and coal, I find. What does it contribute to environmental challenges? Lots and lots of heat, damming of streams, noxious minerals in discarded electronic equipment.

I think rejection of Anderson's economics of abundance arises from misunderstanding. It cannot be extended to all of the existing global economics.

What can be extended globally is free access to information and communication. That goal requires social and political implementation.