This is why print books are still valuable. They are their own mnemonic devices.

At any rate, some of the half-price things they sell at Half-Price Whatever-you-want are video games; they’re mostly boxed versions of casual games that digital cool kids like you and I already downloaded and played through a year ago. One of these games is Diner Dash, which I have fond memories of, since: 1) I really enjoyed it; and 2) I wrote a review of it a long, long time ago. (Well, it feels like a long time ago — it’s been a busy four years.)

Anyway, I’m walking past this “collector’s edition” of Diner Dash, and one of the blurbs on the box catches my eye: “A Momentary Escape From Your Dreary 9-5.”

“Hey,” I think to myself. “That sounds like something I would– waaaait a minute!” The blurb doesn’t just sound like one I would write, but is, in fact, the one I did write for PopMatters.

My words are being used to shill warmed-up video game leftovers. That’s kind of awesome!

It makes me think: If I’d gone down a different road four years ago and kept writing about games instead of making them, would I be the Jeffrey Lyons of the gaming industry by now?

The next thing I knew, I was tearing through my entire collection of books, entering ISBN numbers into LibraryThing’s data entry form (which is very smooth to use) as fast as my meager ten-key skills would allow. I think I have all of the books in my apartment in the system now — at least I hope I do, because I’ve already dug into the back corners of my closets to find the stuff in cold storage, and if there are any deeper, darker nooks that I’ve hidden books in, then I just don’t think I’m ever going to find them again.

While keying in my books was a pleasant, if slightly manic way to spend a Saturday morning (as well as a good opportunity to give my bookshelves a desperately needed dusting), I can’t say I’m particularly enthusiastic about going back through all 300+ entries and tagging them, even though LibraryThing’s tags are much more successful than, say, Amazon’s.

Tags serve two main purposes for their users: retrieving your own stuff and discovering new stuff (presumably through others’ tags). Retrieval isn’t much of an issue for me in LibraryThing: Since I went to the trouble of acquiring all the books in my collection, and have even gone so far as to read most of them, I don’t need a whole lot of help finding the name of a book I already own in the way that I need help sifting through my morass of bookmarks in del.icio.us. Tagging doesn’t pay off as richly with books as it does with bookmarks.

Tagging for discovery works wonderfully on a site like Flickr, where photos are all unique (no two people take the same photograph) and have very little other metadata to tie them together. Tags allow people to create groupings and add meaning to each other’s pictures, and provides an opportunity for surprises amidst the links. It doesn’t pay off as richly on a site like Last.fm, where lots of people listen to the same songs, which allows for a more interesting way of connecting things. By simply looking at the music you listen to, seeing who else listens to that music, and seeing what other music they listen to, Last.fm can build a network of songs for you that’s both an accurate predictor of your tastes and an avenue for constant surprises. Of course, Amazon has done the same thing with books for years with their “customers who bought this also bought…” feature.

At any rate, it turns out that LibraryThing does this sort of tagless networking just fine, and I’m already finding things I’m going to have to add to my “to read” list. On top of that, the UnSuggester (basically the negative of all the suggestion mechanisms I’ve been talking about) is a constant source of delightful mismatches.

To be honest, though, I don’t actually read all that much.

While that’s happening, the newly-rebuilt Central Library will be having its grand reopening. It may be our only chance to see the place before the entire library system runs out of money and closes down, so get it while it’s hot.

And finally: what better way to relax after a long day of shopping and booking than with a massive urban pillow fight?

(For those of you who don’t live in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, sorry for the Minnesota-centric post. As a consolation gift, here’s a link to Cute Overload!)

In Hou Hsiao-hsien’s film Café Lumiére, people don’t say much of anything at all. Everyone has an opinion about Yoko’s rather blithe announcement that she’s pregnant, but no one says much of anything about it. It’s one of those movies you actually have to watch in order to watch, where you can’t just let it play on the TV while you do other things. Words are hard to come by in the film, but it finds other ways to let you know what its characters are thinking about. Yoko’s father never says a word about her pregnancy, and she, and we, understand exactly what he means. Images of clocks float in and out of the frame, time passing by, slowly, inexorably. In the final scene, Yoko and her friend Hajime stand amidst a knot of passing trains, letting the sounds of the city wash over them, letting their internal states remain a secret.

It’s amazing how many different ways there are for people to not communicate with each other, and how many different things “not communicate” can mean.

In Assassination Vacation, Vowell plays a cross-country “Six Degrees of Separation” game with the first three presidents to leave office by unnatural causes: Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley. Her buckshot travelogue is not simply a guide to historical tourist attractions, nor is it a straight-up history with some thoughtful anecdotes tossed in to lead into and out of chapters. As she drags a series of patient friends and relatives to a series of historical sites both celebrated (the Lincoln Memorial) and not (the median of a residential street in Buffalo) in search of stories and souvenirs, Vowell weaves the presidential together with the personal.

People, places, and things that merit little more than a footnote in the grand narrative of history — Samuel Mudd, the doctor who treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken ankle as he fled Ford’s Theatre; Arcata, a college town in California that prominently features a statue of William McKinley for what it turns out is no particular reason at all; James Garfield himself, who did little more in his abbreviated term than try (and fail) to avoid getting swept up in intra-party factionalism — are given more than their fair share of space in Vowell’s book, not because they’re especially important to us, but because in the process of researching and visiting and writing about them, they clearly become important to her. A statue of an actor in New York, parallels between the wars of 1898 and 2005, a president who’d rather read Austen than give speeches — all these things serve to humanize history, to make it specific rather than general.

Vowell writes about a speech Frederick Douglass made at the Freedman’s Memorial in Washington, D.C.:

Douglass is actually trying to remember Lincoln, what he did, what he said, how he changed. The problem with the fog of history, with the way the taboo against speaking ill of the dead tends to edit memorials down to saying nothing more than the deceased subject’s name, is that all the specifics get washed away, leaving behind some universal nobody.

There are two ways of breaking through this “fog of history.” One is the detailed biography, the exhaustive listing of everything a person said or did. The other, more accessible way, is Vowell’s way, the tracing of connections between past and present, between them and us, between James Garfield and Sarah Vowell and Josh Lee. The rather awkward side effect of this is that the reader gets to know Vowell as well as (or better than) he or she gets to know Garfield. The even more awkward side effect of the side effect is that the reader is at great risk of developing a little crush on the author.

I mean, when I’m trawling the shelves at Magers and Quinn and see an old copy of Fowler’s Modern English Usage sitting on the shelf, I think to myself, “who wouldn’t want that for Christmas?!” And then I answer, without much difficulty: “Everyone but me.” And then I go back to racking my brains for ideas of things that normal humans might enjoy receiving. After I’ve bought the Fowler for myself, of course. It turns out the person I’m best at buying gifts for is me.

The second part of the book is a little sketchier in its arguments. Johnson notes that IQ scores in America have steadily risen over the last 50 years, across a wide range of demographic axes (race, gender, etc.), and speculates that a part of this rise can be attributed to the increasing complexity of pop culture. But as Johnson concedes, IQ is hardly the best or only indicator of intelligence, and besides, verifying a correlation between media consumption and IQ scores seems like a pretty impossible task. Johnson also avoids questions of values and morality in media, which, especially with the whole Hot Coffee brouhaha that’s making the rounds, seems to be the front on which most of the fights over popular media are being fought these days. Still, one book can’t claim to answer all the questions, and Everything Bad does make a compelling case for its main argument (and it’s a smooth, enjoyable read to boot), so I’m not going to complain much.

Next on my reading list: James Paul Gee’s influential book on games and learning, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. And if anyone has any other reading recommendations in the “pop culture is good” category, please, send them my way.

As a collection of random thoughts, Difficult Questions is great, but as a book, it leaves a lot to be desired. The editors made a conscious decision to avoid doing intrusive things like, y’know, editing. They didn’t bother to fix poor phrasing and grammatical errors in the text; in some cases, the awkward phrasing is intentional, but many of the replies read like hastily-written e-mails (which they undoubtedly were). Even worse, answers are grouped by question, but beyond that, they’re intentionally unordered, even dis-ordered; no attempt is made to help the reader find connections or trends among the responses. While the editors offer introductions to each section that explain what they were trying to get at with their questions, they don’t go to the effort of really looking at the answers and trying to synthesize anything from them.

In their introduction, Newman and Simons defend this hands-off editing style as an attempt to “afford equal weight to each and every answer, each and every contributor, no matter what, no matter who” (16). This seems disingenuous. Nearly all of their contributors are prominent and prolific writers in one form or another — in fact, one of the pleasures to be found in reading the book is noticing how consistent the responses from Gonzalo Frasca or Jeff Minter or Mia Consalvo are with what you’ve come to expect from reading their other writings — so it’s not like they’re giving voice to some neglected, underrepresented subculture here. What does this book provide that we can’t already get by going to the individual respondents’ web sites?

The potential of Difficult Questions — as a book rather than a message board or a blog-meme/chain-letter — lies in the way it brings all these thinkers together in a form that can persist beyond linkrot. With its fragmented, decontextualized style and its resistance to synthetic thought, however, it’s going to be a frustrating book to come back to in five, or 10, or 20 years, when I want to remember what the gaming landscape was like in the mid-00s.

You know the old proverb that goes something like “if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must go off by the third?” I have a corollary that applies to historical novels: “if a book’s first page consists of a family tree, every name must be learned and forgotten by the reader before the end.” The family tree in question here is that of the English royal family during the Wars of the Roses. The mystery to be solved is that of Richard III and the murder of his two nephews. Laid up in bed with a busted leg, Scotland Yarder Alan Grant is driven (more by boredom than anything else) to play armchair detective and examine the common belief that Richard killed his nephews in order to clear a path to the throne for himself.

What’s interesting about the novel isn’t what Grant discovers about the murder or the Lancasters or Yorks or Plantagenets (I’ve already forgotten all the names in that family tree), but what he discovers about the production of history. Despite the fact that everyone knows that Richard had his nephews offed — it’s in Shakespeare, for crying out loud — Grant becomes increasingly distressed at the complete lack of evidence implicating the king. As the book progresses, Grant discovers an unsettling fact about history: a lot of it just isn’t true. Gossip and hearsay spread and worm their way into history books, eventually trumping actual facts, becoming “a completely untrue story grown to legend while the men who knew it to be untrue looked on and said nothing.”

I’m counting on my fingers, and realizing that a sizable percentage of this weblog’s regular readers are trained and/or practicing historians; the unreliability of received knowledge is probably old news to y’all, and in that case, thanks for humoring me. At any rate, The Daughter of Time is a nice, breezy read; any book that manages to attack weighty historical questions in the form of an armchair detective novel without getting thoroughly bogged down in logy dialogue deserves some credit.