1 January Glenn Greenwald, excellent as he usually is, on the Fourth Amendment going bye-bye--though perhaps a discussion of how the War on Drugs has played a more-gradual role in this process is needed... If only those apparently lacking the literary skills needed to read complex sentences defended the Fourth Amendment to the same extent that they defend what they see in the Second Amendment... G O P and Feinstein Join to Fulfill Obama's Demand for Renewed Warrantless Eavesdropping Other articles that effectively summarize a great deal of information on recent civil-liberties controversies include: David Carr's Blurred Line Between Espionage and Truth at the New York Times; Cora Currier's Sealing Loose Lips: Charting Obama's Crackdown on Leaks at Pro Publica; Noah Feldman's Obama Team's Al-Awlaki Memo Furthered Bush Legacy at Bloomberg; Jesselyn Radack's The Truth About Espionage Act Prosecution Against Whistleblower John Kiriakou at Daily Kos; [update] Marisa Taylor and Jonathan S Landy's Obama's Crackdown Views Leaks as Aiding Enemies at McClatchy and Greenwald's Finally: Hear Bradley Manning in His Own Voice. 2 January Since this past summer, I've been reading the books and essays offering their authors' lists of the "great books"--generally of Western civilization, but several include literature spanning the entire globe. I want to compile, and quantify in some fashion, these varied canons, or rather those which cover all of literary history. Plenty of shorter lists, whether they are Western-centric or not, confine themselves to recent history, especially the Twentieth Century. Only about twenty authors, newspapers, organizations, et al. (that I have found so far) have created all-encompassing lists. Several of them do not designate the literary works included as the greatest or best--they are vaguer in their recommendation; they are included nonetheless. The difficulty of quantifying these lists comes from the lack of uniformity among the type of literary works included, even within a particular list. For the most part, distinct works are listed: poems, novels, histories, short stories, novellas, etc. Varied collections of works, though, are often listed: the complete works of an author, a series of novels, or--most confusing--undefined selected works. Therefore, an entry--let's call it--in a list of, say, 100 works, could itself be 20 works; and thus a list of 100 works becomes 119. The other problem that has emerged comes from the multiple titles used for older works, especially those of unknown date or authorship. The librarian in me wants to distinguish between uniform titles and varied formal and informal titles. The title of certain works has been a matter of dispute, most notably perhaps The Arabian Nights vs. The Thousand and One Nights. 3 January The project organizing "great books" lists serves as a crash course in literary history for me: I majored in History in college. Growing up in a house with frequent political discussions and screenings of C N N's Crossfire (Michael Kinsley era) but being myself rather averse to numbers and what I would come to call Social Studies (not what you took in middle school, but a term superior to Social Science) History became my discipline of choice. It made sense of the politics that were always here, in my life, myself--not realizing that most children did not receive such rigid indoctrination, instead the common ignorance of Americans regarding their nation's history. Alas, in the long run, History made such sense of contemporary politics and U S history that I left it behind too. Thanks, but no thanks. If money was no object, I'd go back to college and major in English, and add in more Philosophy, Religion, Art History, and Music courses. At the time, I would not have been able to handle such a rigorous education. Perhaps I could now. 4 January The U K magazine Sound on Sound has published these excellent 'Classic Tracks' essays but it's hard to get them listed on a single page, because the designers of their web site, like most web developers, couldn't care less about making information accessible. For the time being, this approach (somewhat) works: https://www.soundonsound.com/search/all/classic%252Btracks Reading the Wikipedia entry on the magazine makes me less surprised at the high quality of these articles. Sound on Sound seems to be a superior publication in its field (perhaps the U S magazine Tape Op, launched in 1996, was inspired by Sound by Sound, which debuted in 1985). 5 January Looking at pictures of an older New York city has become a meme, if you will, on our "social" media (which media are not social?) especially pictures from the 1980's. This resource from the Municipal Archives is the best overall: Photo Gallery 6 January Publishers Weekly, and probably many other reviewers, have called the series, The Graphic Canon, the event of the year (really two years; the third volume is coming soon) in the realm of comic/ graphic/ sequential literature. Why not the event of the year(s) in publishing in general? Granted, my enthusiasm comes because I had been reading "great books"/ canon-forming studies while not being aware of this project, so it came as a pleasant surprise. Let's consider, though, how remarkable it is. It does not just offer its own list of great works of literature, moreover specifically referring to them as a canon, which many of our "great books" compilers have declined to do. It also offers excerpts from those books--those excerpts being interpretations of the works in a new medium. Having gotten partially through reading the first and second volumes, I'm impressed. I'm not well-read enough in graphic literature to assess the quality of the new, visual parts of the works selected; many of them seem astounding, though, and the variety among the selections leaves me amused just by flipping pages. 7 January see worldswideweb.com 8 January The lighter side of history: the 1980's: The 80's Movies Rewind 9 January see worldswideweb.com 10 January see worldswideweb.com 11 January This blog responds to my new web site, The World's Wide Web. It also helps distract me after a year of working off-and-on, in some periods a few hours daily, on compiling the lists featured there. The Introduction tells you most of what you need to know. Many of the posts here, such as those about music publications, includes sites linked-to at the World's Wide Web but also traverse territory not covered there. The World's Wide Web also serves as a wry commentary on my completing a Master's degree in librarianship at Rutgers. Indeed, it began while I was experimenting with C S S in a class there, fifteen years after teaching myself basic H T M L. Then again, it also serves, alongside the Links page at Sweet Pea, as my web "bookmarks". 12 January see worldswideweb.com 13 January The imperialist mindset: if you don't love your nation, leave it. Only hate other nations. Anyone in those hated other nations who didn't leave before we bombed them obviously didn't hate their nation (if they did, they would've left) so they deserved the bombing. 14 January see worldswideweb.com 15 January Thanks to a brief article about his suicide at Slate (The Brilliant Life and Tragic Death of Aaron Schwartz), I've been enjoying the several annual reviews of books posted by the late Aaron Schwartz. Millions supposedly suffer from depression; few have been pointlessly prosecuted by zealous lawyers. Lawrence Lessig's article (Prosecutor as Bully) sums up this situation well. I'd add, his legal case emerged around the same time that the national government began its assault on Wiki Leaks. What can we say of such power-madness on the part of individuals many still have the audacity (and hope, indeed) to portray as liberal or progressive? http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/books2011 16 January Finally listening to Earth's Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I, soon to get the second part. Led by its only constant member, Dylan Carlson, the band has gone through two stages: the first, in the 1990's, concentrating on drones; the second, since the early Aughts, still lets loose plenty of drones, but they're pulsating in the background (on these newer albums, for example, played by a cellist) alongside subtle rhythmic backing from the bassist and drummer. Repetitive guitar parts (slowly repetitive) are in the foreground. The music becomes a regular part of your environment, like electrical wires, undulating as they're pulled up then let loose to hang again. Little features change. 17 January The lighter side of history: the 1990's: Blame Nirvana: The 40 Weirdest Post-Nevermind Major Label Albums 18 January Robert Teeter's Great Books Lists offers transcriptions of most of the "great books" lists published since they become common in the late Nineteenth Century. Moreover, his page for what has been deemed the earliest list, Sir John Lubbock's, links to W B Carnochan's article, 'Where Did Great Books Come From Anyway?', published in the Stanford Humanities Review in 1998. This article clarifies the complicated publishing history of Lubbock's list, makes note of another list not included at Teeter's site, and provides the context for the inchoate rise of these kinds of lists, which would not reach their peak of influence until after the Second World War with Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins's set The Great Books of the Western World. As Carnochan relates, Lubbock included a shorter list in a lecture at the Working Men's College in London, January 1886; this list, "sorted into categories," was included in the Pall Mall Gazette dated January 11. Several lists constructed in response to Lubbock's followed in the same periodical [see 9 September post]. In turn, Lubbock's lecture and a longer List of 100 Books were published in the February issue of the Contemporary Review as 'On the Pleasure of Reading'. Having photo-copied the article from that U K publication (which stopped printing new issues at the end of 2012--they're hoping to continue online), I've found that the "complete" list actually had 98 entries. (No matter how you count these complex entries, I cannot fathom how the author or editors came up with the tally of 100 unless one of them miscounted at some point.) The use of the word, entry, is better because, as I noted in an earlier post, no matter if the list creator calls it a list of books, he is often not listing books, but rather poems, essays, and short stories originally published in periodicals or anthologies; and sometimes he lists multiple books for a single number in the list. For example, "Shakespeare" appears in Lubbock's Contemporary Review list at one place, while two Dickens novels appear in another. Three essays by Pope occupy a place, as do "Scott's novels." Teeter's site transcribes an 1896 version of Lubbock's list. His list also makes note of works that were deleted and added for a version of the list included in the 1930 edition of Lubbock's book The Pleasures of Life. Later, I will try to find the 1930 version of the list [alas... see 4 September post] (indeed, all the "great books" lists) for a post at this blog so that the number of entries is clearly presented alongside the number of novels, poems, essays, etc., as well as the number of entries that consist only of authors' names or vague collections of works, such as Bacon's essays, and excerpts, such as "The Koran (portions of)." http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtlubbock.html 19 January Craig Lieske died yesterday. He served as a leader--de facto I'd say, but perhaps it was more formal--of Garbage Island, an improvising noisy Rock ensemble that has been an institution in the Athens music scene for more than a decade. When I moved back to Athens in 2004 after spending most of the previous three years in Madison, Wisconsin, Garbage Island had even become fairly popular. In recent years, with performances fewer and farther between, the crowds were back to their regular small numbers. Their music would have required an expert producer to translate to record; I'm not sure the band members would've wanted that anyway. The live performance mattered most. "You had to be there," as they'll say. Two, sometimes three, drummers; lots of guitars; at certain points in its history, vocals and synthesizers added to the dense mix as well. My only problem with their gigs came when I strained to hear Craig's contributions. He seemed to take on more of a rhythm role, but I wanted to hear him. I always did. He was an excellent improvisor, solo or collective. Three trios: Desk Pussy, Diet Rock Star, and Echo Canyon, forming a progression from free-form experimentation to instrumental Rock, provide more than you need to know of Craig's abilities as a leader of fellow players; an organizer of musical gatherings including a one-day festival at the Athens Institute of Contemporary Art (ATHICA) in 2005, weekly series as happened this past August at the Flicker Theatre and Bar, and countless ad hoc groupings; and a master intellectual in bringing disparate cultural paths, both abstract and human, together. He played so often that we all took him for granted. He fostered action, movement--that is, making music instead of talking about it. In turn, those he compelled into artistry could return to their thoughts and other activities, arguably without a proper understanding of the ideas that had motivated Craig. Find two individuals in the Athens music scene who can't stand each other, and they will almost surely both respect Craig and what he accomplished. I haven't even mentioned the jobs he held at the 40 Watt Club and with the Drive-by Truckers at which so many got the privilege to know him. Because, in the long run, as more live recordings surface (and--if we're lucky--some of his writings as well) his music will take its proper place as a major facet of Athens music. For now, listen to selections recorded by Sloan Simpson from his web site Southern Shelter: http://www.southernshelter.com/category/craig-lieske/ http://www.southernshelter.com/category/diet-rock-star/ http://www.southernshelter.com/category/echo-canyon/ http://www.southernshelter.com/category/garbage-island/ 20 January In the Volume 1 of Great Books of the Western World, entitled The Great Conversation: The Substance of a Liberal Education, the co-editor of the series, Robert Hutchins, writes, "We believe that the reduction of the citizen to an object of propaganda, private and public, is one of the greatest dangers of democracy." He adds, "The reiteration of slogans, the distortion of the news, the great storm of propaganda that beats upon the citizen twenty-four hours a day all his life long mean either that democracy must fall a prey to the loudest and most persistent propagandists or that the people must save themselves by strengthening their minds so that they can appraise the issues for themselves" (p. xiii). If Hutchins had omitted the word, "private," this passage would seem to be in step with the standard "Cold War liberalism" of the time it was published. Indeed, if he had been writing just four years earlier (1948 instead of 1952) he can't help but wonder if the urge, the temptation, to see Communism as the principal, if not only, threat to democracy left standing after the defeat of the Nazis would have lead him to omit that word. But with the anti-Communism of the Truman administration, Americans for Democratic Action (A D A), and the purgers of the C I O having lead to national popularity for Douglas MacArthur and Joseph McCarthy, and with the nation having been lead by absolute anti-Communism (except Yugoslavia--nevermind that!) into a misguided war in Korea, the mainstream of liberalism was in retreat. So we have this passage above, where I surmise that advertising is akin to propaganda, and private industry aims to manipulate our opinions in the same way Communists and Fascists do. This author, the kind who has been dismissed by countless others in the decades since as a proponent of "dead white men" and outmoded educational standards, expresses a radicalism of thought and ideology utterly alien to our present-day televisual-screen addicts, our Mac-men zombie pod people. Or, rather, it is radical not so much in its intellectual content, but in what it suggests regarding our daily lives. Our indifference to the negative effect of advertising on our minds, and our growing obsessive viewing of televisual entertainment (now often transmitted via computers and phones), is seen in a harsh light: a willful obliteration of the self, of our personal space and ultimately our literacy. The simplest, basest desires are linked to happiness and satisfaction while the demands of rationality and wisdom are dismissed as restrictive standards imposed by others, creating precisely the classist, corporatist form of authoritarian mind control Americans once fought against. 21 January As suggested before, each list of "great books" needs to be reviewed to see just how many books are listed, plus the number of non-books: poems, essays, and short stories published in periodicals or anthologies; excerpts of books; and even books originally published serially in periodicals. However, a book that was originally published serially, but always with the intention of being published as a whole and considered by its author to be a single work, is still counted as a book. Robert Kanigel's Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury: A Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books, published in 1998 by Bancroft Press, at first seems like one of the simpler lists. It gets complicated, though, when he lists Plato's Dialogues, of which several are considered not to have been written by Plato, or to be especially significant. Kanigel does not state clearly which of the Dialogues he considers best. Kanigel has divided the list into thematic sections. The names of these sections and the nos. of the literary works (as listed at this list's Greater Books page) are as follows: 'On Everyone's List of Literary Classics' (nos. 1-12); 'Books on Many a List for Burning: Heretics, Subversives, Demagogues' (a-no. 18); 'Books That Shaped the Western World' (nos. 19-27); 'Making Hard Work Easy: The Great Popularizers' (nos. 28-36); 'Not Robinson Crusoe, Not Brave New World: Lesser Known Classics' (nos. 37-43); 'Lighter Fare: Good Reads, Best Sellers (nos. 44-51); '"But I Know What I Like": On Aesthetics and Style' (nos. 52-56); 'One-of-a-Kinds' (nos. 57-65); 'The Realm of the Spirit' (nos. 66-74) Look Homeward, Angel By Thomas Wolfe First published in 1929 The Portrait of a Lady By Henry James First published in 1881 As I Lay Dying By William Faulkner First published in 1930 Wuthering Heights By Emily BrontÎ First published in 1847 Kim By Rudyard Kipling First published in 1901 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland By Lewis Carroll First published in 1865 Justine By Lawrence Durrell First published in 1957 Oliver Twist By Charles Dickens First published in 1838 Pride and Prejudice By Jane Austen First published in 1813 A Passage to India By E M Forster First published in 1924 My ¡ntonia By Willa Cather First published in 1918 Madame Bovary By Gustave Flaubert First published in 1857 Stories By Dorothy Parker First collected in book form, 1942 [The first "collected stories" was actually published in 1939 as Here Lies: The Collected Stories; the stories had been originally published in the New Yorker and other periodicals, and in the collections Laments for the Living, 1930, and After Such Pleasures..., 1933] The Prince By NiccolÚ Machiavelli First published in 1537 The Devil's Dictionary By Ambrose Bierce First published in 1906 Mein Kampf By Adolf Hitler First published in 1925 Nana By …mile Zola First published in 1880 Ten Days That Shook the World By John Reed First published in 1919 Native Son By Richard Wright First published in 1940 Essays By Michel de Montaigne First appeared in 1580 The Dialogues By Plato Written in the fourth century B C An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations By Adam Smith First published in 1776 An Essay on the Principle of Population By Thomas Malthus First published in 1798 The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire By Edward Gibbon First published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788 The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life By Charles Darwin First published in 1859 The Histories By Herodotus Written in the fifth century B C The Federalist Papers By Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay First appeared in 1787 The Annals of Imperial Rome By Tacitus First appeared circa 100 A D The Peloponnesian War By Thucydides Written circa 404 B C Democracy in America By Alexis de Tocqueville First published in 1835 Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s By Frederick Lewis Allen First published in 1931 Microbe Hunters By Paul de Kruif First published in 1926 Selected Works By Marcus Tullius Cicero First appeared between 60 and 44 B C Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilization By Margaret Mead First published in 1928 The Outermost House By Henry Beston First published in 1928 The Amiable Baltimoreans By Francis F Beirne First published in 1951 What to Listen for in Music By Aaron Copland First published in 1939 Gods, Graves, and Scholars By C W Ceram First published in 1951 The Stress of Life By Hans Selye First published in 1956 The Greek Way to Western Civilization By Edith Hamilton First published in 1930 A Journal of the Plague Year By Daniel Defoe First published in 1722 The Doors of Perception By Aldous Huxley First published in 1954 Elective Affinities By Johann Wolfgang von Goethe First published in 1809 Homage to Catalonia By George Orwell First published in 1938 Civilization and Its Discontents By Sigmund Freud First published in 1930 Arrowsmith By Sinclair Lewis First published in 1925 Roughing It By Mark Twain First published in 1873 A Study in Scarlet By Arthur Conan Doyle First published in 1887 The Song of Hiawatha By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow First published in 1855 The Rise of David Levinsky By Abraham Cahan First published in 1917 Java Head By Joseph Hergesheimer First published in 1918 Mr. Pottermack's Oversight By R Austin Freeman First published in 1930 A Bell for Adano By John Hersey First published in 1944 The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury First published in 1950 Gentleman's Agreement By Laura Z Hobson First appeared in 1947 The Ten Books of Architecture By Vitruvius Written circa 25 B C The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors By Giorgio Vasari First published in 1550, revised and enlarged in 1568 The Seven Lamps of Architecture By John Ruskin First published in 1849 The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form By Kenneth Clark First published in 1956 The Elements of Style By William Strunk, Jr. and E B White Earliest edition, by Strunk alone, appeared in 1918 First joint edition appeared in 1959 A Room of One's Own By Virginia Woolf First published in 1929 The American Language: An Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States By H L Mencken First published in 1919 Revisions and supplements through 1948 The Little Prince By Antoine de Saint ExupÈry First published in 1943 The Education of Henry Adams By Henry Adams First published in 1918, after a private printing in 1906 Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions By Edwin A Abbott First published in 1884 Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston First published in 1937 A Mathematician's Apology By G H Hardy First published in 1940 My Life By Isadora Duncan First published in 1927 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions By Thomas S Kuhn First appeared in 1962 Gilgamesh Babylonian epic dating to as early as the third millennium B C Confessions By Saint Augustine First appeared in 398 A D The Golem By Gustave Meyrink First published in 1915 The Razor's Edge By W Somerset Maugham First published in 1944 The Seven Storey Mountain By Thomas Merton First published in 1948 Death Be Not Proud By John Gunther First published in 1949 Ecclesiastes From the Old Testament Lost Horizon By James Hilton First published in 1933 Bhagavad Gita ("Song of God") Sanskrit poem probably written between 500 and 200 B C Night By Elie Wiesel First published in 1958 The Varieties of Religious Experience By William James First published in 1902 22 January Among the great sites I first discovered while creating The World's Wide Web is Good Short Novels, not least because of the following piece differentiating among short novels, novellas, novelettes, and short stories: How Short Is a Short Novel? 23 January I begin with the following bias: periodicals, both print and online, that cover what we could call lowbrow or mainstream culture are nonetheless significant to our culture to a greater extent than books, films, or music we would consider lowbrow or mainstream. That is, I'd rather read National Enquirer or People than watch American Idol or Pirates of the Caribbean. Why? Perhaps, because even one interested in all kinds of culture still prefers to sample certain kinds in small amounts, second-hand. The periodical allows this; arguably, "general interest" publications like Time or Esquire at times offer a selection of topics broad enough to satisfy, if not please, even the sheltered academic or cynical intellectual. When you delve into the massive number of periodicals, though, this situation turns upside down. Each professional association, most academic subdisciplines, and many museums have their own publication; certain kinds of products, like guns, "home theater" equipment, and cars, have numerous magazines devoted to them. In the highbrow world of book reviews and long-form journalism, one expects to get a broad view of the subjects at hand. Many books are reviewed, complicated subjects are summarized concisely. But the great mass of periodicals give the opposite: they take you to the particular, the remote, without helping you back out. The initial plan for this first year of The World's Wide Web: after going online at the start of the new year, updates would only be made biannually: June 1 and December 31--that is, formally uploaded to the site. The actual additions would be made gradually, making an update log that would also go up on those two dates. I've delayed that arrangement, until January 31. First of all, as I've learned from doing my "anthology-in-progress" Sweet Pea, once any web page one has been working on for a long period of time goes online, or is about to go online due to a self-imposed deadline, one's attention to the details of the text, if not images and other media, increases dramatically. With the pressure of others, however tiny a number, looking on--and, in turn, me being able suddenly to step back and see the work more objectively--mistakes and omissions that have been made become clear. The errors corrected and clarifications made, the tightening of the page's organization, in turn led to a realization that the periodicals section of The World's Wide Web, though massive, has some minor holes that could be fixed by a visit to any university library. Granted, the periodicals I learn of there might actually point to academic and professional associations, rather than their drab magazines and newsletters; either way, they'll make for additions to the site. The process of becoming more aware of the many periodicals, especially those of high literary quality, has only made want to read books more. Books seem like so much less of a waste of time. Limiting myself only to a few publications, in print (favorites like Bookforum, the London Review of Books, the Nation) is still too much--nevermind what's available free of charge at web sites. That's not to say that books, especially the assembly-line-like productions of university presses and self-publishing companies, do not at times deserve the same dismissal. In this society we live in, the filtering process can take as much time as the reading itself. 24 January Are we so cruel to celebrities because, being unable to ignore the beautiful, we hope they'll also be profound, and when they're not cannot help but be angry? Take as an example Whitney Houston, who paved the way for Mariah Carey and Celine Dion: singers with technical proficiency--great range--who we must admire. Alas, they're only admired for that skill. Houston knew that. Wouldn't you drug yourself into a stupor every night if millions were telling you how worthless you are? Worthless, that is, compared to your voice. With the exaggerated use of Auto-Tune, singers claim a modicum of self-respect by mocking the demand for proper equally-tempered vocals. These numerous little rebellions against the popular-music paradigm that replaced Rock in the 1980's only suggest how imprisoned these artists are. So as we celebrate the birthdays of friends, have no doubt we'll still have plenty of deathdays to celebrate as well, for our celebrity enemies. 25 January Compelling series of articles about "Big Data"... The End of Theory 26 January Listen to The Dream Scene. https://soundcloud.com/thedreamscene 27 January Among the "great books" list-makers, Frederick W Farrar first used the term as his title: as Carnochan's article notes, 'Great Books' was a series of articles for the Sunday Magazine. The book version of those articles thankfully was reissued in 1972, so not only does my local university library have a copy, but it's in pristine condition. What's most revealing--and amusing--about Farrar's list is that it's not much of a list at all: three authors and two works. Lubbock's list of 100 entries, at least as Carnochan sees it, started the tradition of longish lists of the world's greatest works of literature, especially because of the numerous responding lists that followed the publication of the first version of Lubbock's in the Pall Mall Gazette. However, besides Charles W Eliot's Harvard Classics series, the early Twentieth Century does not seem to have left behind lists that are still read today. Apparently one would need to do extensive research to find them. As we'll see, "great books" lists did not become common--or, rather, reach a point where readers had an excessive number to choose from--until the 1980's. Here's Farrar's list, such as it is. It is included here because of its significance in the development of the "great books" concept; for the time being, it does not count toward the final master list because it does not extend back to ancient times. John Bunyan Shakespeare Dante [discussing the Divine Comedy only] Milton The Imitation of Christ Farrar's essays prove to be of interest to contemporary readers almost immediately. The second paragraph of the introductory piece states: "The multiplication of books in these days is almost beyond calculation. [...] The output of fiction is so astonishingly large that we cannot but wonder who are the readers of the numberless ephemeral volumes that appear and 'perish like the summer fly'. [...] There are thousands of other books which, though they are useful and profitable for a time, and accomplish their intended purpose, are then naturally superseded. For such literary productions their authors never expected more than a brief existence. Yet they have not been published to no purpose. They fall like the dead leaves of autumn; but just as the dead leaves have not lived in vain, since they serve to enrich the soil into which they perish, so the thoughts of myriads of men, though they possess no germ of immortality, do in their limited degree furnish a contribution, however infinitesimal, to the intellectual life of each successive generation." One-hundred-fifteen years later, this passage still rings true. 28 January Nightclubbing, a series of video footage and articles at the Local East Village Blog from the New York Times: http://localeastvillage.com/category/nightclubbing/ 29 January The kind of site you only come across when you're writing a term paper... Retro Media: Memory (and Memories) Lost 30 January see worldswideweb.com 31 January Would its U S counterparts Rolling Stone and Spin attempt such a list? Not likely. 100 Best Tracks of the 1950s