Several months ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed piece concerned about "dirty" YA books. Periodically, there is a push for some kind of ratings system, as with movie (and we all know how well that has worked.)
Most of the comments address the practicality of a rating system yet there are several assumptions behind any rating systems that bear challenging:
1. That all individuals of a certain age respond similarly to the same stimuli;
2. That content that is offensive is harmful; and
3. That we all agree which content is harmful, i.e. sex=violence=bad words in its effect.
I suggest that each of these assumptions upon which the desire for a ratings system rests is false. My rationale for each.
1. The YA category should never have been created in the first place. YA creates a false impression of “safety” even though the age group considered YA covers vastly differing ages. There is a huge difference in maturity between a 14-year-old and a 17-year-old under the best of circumstances, yet there are some very immature 20-year-olds. YA assumes a monolithic set of assumptions about a very diverse group.
2. Does reading the f-word cause harm? (Is anyone really fooled by using f**k instead of, well, you know.) Does reading about an abortion cause harm? Does reading about a shooting cause harm? There is no evidence that it does. Are these things offensive? Perhaps, but the decision to be offended rests with each individual. I may decide not to be offended by something you consider terribly offensive. Your desire to suppress, categorize, or limit what *I* want to read or what *I* want my children to read is simply not your right.
3. Most of the ratings systems seem aimed at “foul” language and/or sex with little attention being paid to violence. That reflects a particular religious preference and you certainly have every right to control what your own children read but you should be involved with their learning anyway and stop trying to coerce others into adopting your own value system. Each parent has the responsibility to oversee his/her children’s moral development, but freaking out if your child is exposed to an antithetical value provides a learning opportunity, not one for suppression.
Cross posted in the comments at http://www.thepassivevoice.com/09/2012/ya-books-ratings-and-publisher-arrogance-shh-its-about-the/
Original Wall Street Journal piece at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html
Another good response at http://io9.com/5809588/why-the-wall-street-journal-is-wrong-about-young-adult-books
Sunday, September 30, 2012
Friday, September 28, 2012
Amazon Asks Court to Throw Out Apple App Store Lawsuit - The Digital Reader
Amazon Asks Court to Throw Out Apple App Store Lawsuit - The Digital Reader:
"But it seems like Apple has turned its focus from innovation to litigation lately. All these lawsuits smack of rules lawyerism—take advantage of every possible opportunity to sue a competitor and slow them down, because you can. It’s sad that this is the direction the company has taken. But at the same time, I have to admit it would be foolish in the extreme to try to pretend this isn’t the way that big business has always worked."
'via Blog this'
"But it seems like Apple has turned its focus from innovation to litigation lately. All these lawsuits smack of rules lawyerism—take advantage of every possible opportunity to sue a competitor and slow them down, because you can. It’s sad that this is the direction the company has taken. But at the same time, I have to admit it would be foolish in the extreme to try to pretend this isn’t the way that big business has always worked."
'via Blog this'
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of The Coffin Trail: A Lake District Mystery
Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of The Coffin Trail: A Lake District Mystery:
Daniel Kind and his new girlfriend have decided to leave their jobs and move to the country, to a country house that Daniel's childhood friend had lived in. Barrie, an autistic child, had been accused of the murder of a young woman whose body had been found on an old, archaeological sacrifice stone. Barrie could never be brought to trial because he had died that same night of the murder by falling down a ravine.
Some lovely descriptive passages. One of my favorites was his homage to bookstores: He found it without difficulty, one of half a dozen small businesses grouped around a large yard. Most of the units produced and sold crafts of one sort or another: wall hangings decorated with Lakeland themes, pottery and wooden gifts, hand-made greetings cards, and teddy bears with large, beseeching eyes. The bookshop occupied a section of a converted mill, the rear of which overlooked a weir. Rain was rattling on the gravel and although Daniel ran from his car, his sweatshirt was soaked by the time he was inside. The rich aroma of Kenyan coffee blended with the smell of old books and he recognised the andante movement of Hanson’s Romantic Symphony coming from discreet speakers near the entrance. The front part of the lower floor was devoted to fiction and the rear to the café, which spilled out on to an elevated area of decking from which on a fine day customers could sit out and watch the beck rushing by.
Some reviewers have downgraded the book because they didn't like the characters. I'm not quite sure what they might think of Jim Thompson's or the Ripley books. I don't have that perspective. I don't need to like the characters, only to find them interesting. They are here. Admittedly some of the coincidences were a bit unlikely, e.g., that DCI Hannah Scarlett should have been Daniel Kind's father's sergeant.
BTW, one of the joys of reading on a Kindle is the instant dictionary feature. I had no idea what a "beck" and a "weir" were. Respectively, they are "a brook, especially a swiftly running stream with steep banks" and "a low dam that is built across a river to raise the water level, divert the water, or control its flow." Both parochial northern England definitions. Nice words.
Daniel Kind and his new girlfriend have decided to leave their jobs and move to the country, to a country house that Daniel's childhood friend had lived in. Barrie, an autistic child, had been accused of the murder of a young woman whose body had been found on an old, archaeological sacrifice stone. Barrie could never be brought to trial because he had died that same night of the murder by falling down a ravine.
Some lovely descriptive passages. One of my favorites was his homage to bookstores: He found it without difficulty, one of half a dozen small businesses grouped around a large yard. Most of the units produced and sold crafts of one sort or another: wall hangings decorated with Lakeland themes, pottery and wooden gifts, hand-made greetings cards, and teddy bears with large, beseeching eyes. The bookshop occupied a section of a converted mill, the rear of which overlooked a weir. Rain was rattling on the gravel and although Daniel ran from his car, his sweatshirt was soaked by the time he was inside. The rich aroma of Kenyan coffee blended with the smell of old books and he recognised the andante movement of Hanson’s Romantic Symphony coming from discreet speakers near the entrance. The front part of the lower floor was devoted to fiction and the rear to the café, which spilled out on to an elevated area of decking from which on a fine day customers could sit out and watch the beck rushing by.
Some reviewers have downgraded the book because they didn't like the characters. I'm not quite sure what they might think of Jim Thompson's or the Ripley books. I don't have that perspective. I don't need to like the characters, only to find them interesting. They are here. Admittedly some of the coincidences were a bit unlikely, e.g., that DCI Hannah Scarlett should have been Daniel Kind's father's sergeant.
BTW, one of the joys of reading on a Kindle is the instant dictionary feature. I had no idea what a "beck" and a "weir" were. Respectively, they are "a brook, especially a swiftly running stream with steep banks" and "a low dam that is built across a river to raise the water level, divert the water, or control its flow." Both parochial northern England definitions. Nice words.
Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin
Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin:
In high school, being a somewhat sanctimonious little shit and having become entranced by the romance of archeology, I naturally stumbled over the career of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit whose works challenged some of the more orthodox views of the Catholic Church. He was particularly interested in the interaction and synergistic relationship of the spiritual with matter. Reviewers of other books about Teilhard have suggested it was his interest in evolution that pissed off the church; I think it was his forays into theology that resulted in his several exiles.
While fascinating, this overly hagiographic biography stumbles frequently into adoration. The author — founding member of the Teilhard Centre in London — is a woman, perhaps significant, given the importance of several women to Pere Teilhard during his life. With Lucile, for example, he conducted a twenty-year correspondence that reflected his desire to help her spiritually, yet “at another level these most personal, most intimate letters speak of a depth and intensity of love as never before in Teilhard’s life.” Hmmmm. Lucile for her part, “longed for a fuller giving, a complete union, not only spiritual love and friendship. . .” Teilhard’s letters in response to her longing suggest he never succumbed. Well, maybe.
As a child growing up in the Auvergne, he had always sought treasures “that were incorruptible and would last.” He remembered years later being devastated when his mother threw some curls she had cut of his hair into the fire, and he saw them consumed. He had learned he was perishable. He began collecting things he thought would last — rocks replacing metal when he saw how iron would rust away.
This epiphany led to a lifelong passion for fossils. It’s the more striking then that the war would not affect him more. . . In fact, his war essays contained the seeds of most of his more fully ideas that came later. They did seek a reinterpretation of Christianity, “the need for a new image of God, the quest for a practically engaged spirituality appropriate to the needs of a contemporary world.” His vision of mankind as one, “sharing a common origin and destiny in spite of all its diversity and diversions.”
His vision of mankind as universal and one was a pervasive strain running through his thought and writings. That his writing was continually suppressed and prevented from being published by his Catholic superiors understandable but troubling to one who sees no
need for orthodoxy. (More evidence of the hagiographic nature of the book is that the Index does not appear in the book’s index, despite its mention in several places.)
I have often been accused of an optimistic outlook on things, indeed, making candy out of excrement, so to speak, but Teilhard makes me look like a piker. In China, doing fossil research, amidst the Japanese atrocities in China and seeing extraordinary extremes of hunger and
poverty, he managed to “maintain such an attitude of hope and deep belief in the future of humanity.”
[book:The Phenomenon of Man|232567], perhaps his summative work, was finished after his return to China in 1940 following a sojourn in France and America. In it he attempts to answer the question of the significance “of the human being within the vast cosmic process of evolution.” A copy finally made its way to Rome in 1945, and he was disappointed to hear that permission to publish had been withheld. The book “demonstrates how the rise of evolution is an immense movement through time from the development of the atom to the molecule and cell to different forms of life and to human beings with greater diversity. This movement exemplifies how the development of ever greater structural complexity leads in turn to an ever greater ‘within’ of things, and increase in consciousness and reflection.” The ultimate result of the development of a more collective human consciousness is the appearance of a “super-consciousness” and “ultra-human,” which he calls the “Omega point,” i.e., God.
Even Teilhard was not immune to doubt, and he wrote toward the end of his life: “How is it, then, that as I look around me, still dazzled by
what I have seen, I find that I am almost the only person of my kind [what did he mean by kind, here? Priest or human?:], the only one to
have seen? . . . How, most of all, can it be that ‘when I come down from the mountain’ and in spite of the glorious vision I still retain, I find that I am so little a better man, so little at peace, so incapable of expressing my actions, and thus adequately communicating to others, the wonderful unity that I feel encompassing me? Is there, in fact, a Universal Christ, is there a Divine Milieu? Or am I, after all, simply the dupe of a mirage in my own mind? I often ask myself that question.” To which I might respond, does it really matter?
Teilhard was a fascinating man who was clearly dedicated to his beliefs and the Church. Despite the book's adulatory nature, one senses the inner turmoil and struggle faced by Teilhard as he sought to make sense out of the universe.
'via Blog this'
In high school, being a somewhat sanctimonious little shit and having become entranced by the romance of archeology, I naturally stumbled over the career of Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit whose works challenged some of the more orthodox views of the Catholic Church. He was particularly interested in the interaction and synergistic relationship of the spiritual with matter. Reviewers of other books about Teilhard have suggested it was his interest in evolution that pissed off the church; I think it was his forays into theology that resulted in his several exiles.
While fascinating, this overly hagiographic biography stumbles frequently into adoration. The author — founding member of the Teilhard Centre in London — is a woman, perhaps significant, given the importance of several women to Pere Teilhard during his life. With Lucile, for example, he conducted a twenty-year correspondence that reflected his desire to help her spiritually, yet “at another level these most personal, most intimate letters speak of a depth and intensity of love as never before in Teilhard’s life.” Hmmmm. Lucile for her part, “longed for a fuller giving, a complete union, not only spiritual love and friendship. . .” Teilhard’s letters in response to her longing suggest he never succumbed. Well, maybe.
As a child growing up in the Auvergne, he had always sought treasures “that were incorruptible and would last.” He remembered years later being devastated when his mother threw some curls she had cut of his hair into the fire, and he saw them consumed. He had learned he was perishable. He began collecting things he thought would last — rocks replacing metal when he saw how iron would rust away.
This epiphany led to a lifelong passion for fossils. It’s the more striking then that the war would not affect him more. . . In fact, his war essays contained the seeds of most of his more fully ideas that came later. They did seek a reinterpretation of Christianity, “the need for a new image of God, the quest for a practically engaged spirituality appropriate to the needs of a contemporary world.” His vision of mankind as one, “sharing a common origin and destiny in spite of all its diversity and diversions.”
His vision of mankind as universal and one was a pervasive strain running through his thought and writings. That his writing was continually suppressed and prevented from being published by his Catholic superiors understandable but troubling to one who sees no
need for orthodoxy. (More evidence of the hagiographic nature of the book is that the Index does not appear in the book’s index, despite its mention in several places.)
I have often been accused of an optimistic outlook on things, indeed, making candy out of excrement, so to speak, but Teilhard makes me look like a piker. In China, doing fossil research, amidst the Japanese atrocities in China and seeing extraordinary extremes of hunger and
poverty, he managed to “maintain such an attitude of hope and deep belief in the future of humanity.”
[book:The Phenomenon of Man|232567], perhaps his summative work, was finished after his return to China in 1940 following a sojourn in France and America. In it he attempts to answer the question of the significance “of the human being within the vast cosmic process of evolution.” A copy finally made its way to Rome in 1945, and he was disappointed to hear that permission to publish had been withheld. The book “demonstrates how the rise of evolution is an immense movement through time from the development of the atom to the molecule and cell to different forms of life and to human beings with greater diversity. This movement exemplifies how the development of ever greater structural complexity leads in turn to an ever greater ‘within’ of things, and increase in consciousness and reflection.” The ultimate result of the development of a more collective human consciousness is the appearance of a “super-consciousness” and “ultra-human,” which he calls the “Omega point,” i.e., God.
Even Teilhard was not immune to doubt, and he wrote toward the end of his life: “How is it, then, that as I look around me, still dazzled by
what I have seen, I find that I am almost the only person of my kind [what did he mean by kind, here? Priest or human?:], the only one to
have seen? . . . How, most of all, can it be that ‘when I come down from the mountain’ and in spite of the glorious vision I still retain, I find that I am so little a better man, so little at peace, so incapable of expressing my actions, and thus adequately communicating to others, the wonderful unity that I feel encompassing me? Is there, in fact, a Universal Christ, is there a Divine Milieu? Or am I, after all, simply the dupe of a mirage in my own mind? I often ask myself that question.” To which I might respond, does it really matter?
Teilhard was a fascinating man who was clearly dedicated to his beliefs and the Church. Despite the book's adulatory nature, one senses the inner turmoil and struggle faced by Teilhard as he sought to make sense out of the universe.
'via Blog this'
Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Buried Prey
Goodreads | Eric_W Welch (Forreston, IL)'s review of Buried Prey:
Finally Sandford returns to the focus on investigation which he does well. While late in the series, this book takes us back to Davenport's very early days as a cop, and it's one of the better books, since the emphasis is on investigation.
While a block of old buildings is being torn down as part of a redevelopment project, the skeletons of two girls are dug up while working on the foundation for a new building. That triggers Davenport's memory back many years before, when he was a uniform cop, two young girls disappeared. Driven to both find evidence of the girls and to track down the "perp" and to get noticed by the brass so he can get out of uniform, Lucas works 24/7 chasing down every possible lead, but they consistently run up against dead ends. And the girls are never found. The one major suspect is tracked down, but - well you'll have to find out for yourself which suspect I reference.
Fast forward to the present and the skeletons, Lucas, despite that it's a Minneapolis Police case, with renewed energy, starts his own re-investigation. It's the hunt that provides interest for me and the killer in Buried Prey is especially devious which makes the chase that much more interesting. It's when Sandford starts in on the peripheral personal relationships that I have difficulty controlling my snooze control and anti-barf mechanisms. But then Richard Ferrone's narration brings it back.
Finally Sandford returns to the focus on investigation which he does well. While late in the series, this book takes us back to Davenport's very early days as a cop, and it's one of the better books, since the emphasis is on investigation.
While a block of old buildings is being torn down as part of a redevelopment project, the skeletons of two girls are dug up while working on the foundation for a new building. That triggers Davenport's memory back many years before, when he was a uniform cop, two young girls disappeared. Driven to both find evidence of the girls and to track down the "perp" and to get noticed by the brass so he can get out of uniform, Lucas works 24/7 chasing down every possible lead, but they consistently run up against dead ends. And the girls are never found. The one major suspect is tracked down, but - well you'll have to find out for yourself which suspect I reference.
Fast forward to the present and the skeletons, Lucas, despite that it's a Minneapolis Police case, with renewed energy, starts his own re-investigation. It's the hunt that provides interest for me and the killer in Buried Prey is especially devious which makes the chase that much more interesting. It's when Sandford starts in on the peripheral personal relationships that I have difficulty controlling my snooze control and anti-barf mechanisms. But then Richard Ferrone's narration brings it back.
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