“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
-Steve Jobs
Don’t I know you?
by Karen Shepard
FICTION – A mystery/thriller set in 1976 Manhattan about a woman, Gina Engel, who is murdered in her own apartment and discovered by her 12-year-old son Stephen. He narrates the first part of the story as he deals with his grief and tries to piece together anything he might know about the killer while his whole world turns upside down. The narrative is picked up by two women with seemingly remote connections to the crime, who drop puzzle pieces into place over the next decade about the identity of the murderer. From Amazon.com: “Shepard’s vision of how a murder’s effect reverberates outward inspires us to understand the limitations of intimate knowledge and the extraordinary capacities of the people we think we know best, even as it shows us how we repair those bonds and prepare ourselves to go on.”
It a very quick read, (I finished it in an afternoon) but not a throw-away mass-market thriller. It’s gripping and when you finally figure out whodunnit (probably) you walk away both satisfied and disturbed.
No Place to Hide: Behind the Scenes of Our Emerging Surveillance Society
By Robert O’Harrow, Jr.
NON-FICTION – Washington Post reporter Robert O’Harrow, Jr. delves into the world of data-collection and surveillance, and puts together a frightening and disheartening portrait of who is gathering personal information about you and why. I started to compile a big list of all the players and how they’re connected, but it was too long and too confusing to be clear without creating a big information flow diagram.
The basics are these: companies you do business with (cell phone companies, grocery stores, banks, internet providers, credit card companies) are gathering vast amounts of information about you, and storing it in databases. The data they’re gathering is far beyond what you’d expect them to keep — where you go, what you purchase, how fast you drive, the digital imprint of your voice, facial recognition, the names of your friends and family, the price of your home, when you deposit your checks and pay your bills, fingerprints, DNA and other bio-data.
These companies are not only using this data to market to you, they’re selling it to other companies that are data brokers, and they’re making the information available to the government at almost every level (state, local, federal). The data brokers in turn sell the information to other companies, or they let the government have access to it — often to look for terrorists, but increasingly to pursue other criminal investigation, and to try to anticipate if you “might” commit a crime — and that speculation might be quite wild in nature.
Decades ago, people used to worry about the FBI having a “file” on them. Now, every single American — from your two-month old child to your eighty-year-old grandmother — has a government file.
Using the vast storehouses of data, the companies and the government have built data-mining software and artificial intelligence software that sifts through the data looking for anomalies and flagging items of interest. There are no laws about how these programs are written, what they look for, or how they tag or label you when they’ve analyzed your data, so you’re basically guilty until proven innocent in the eyes of this software. This was what scared me most — I used to never worry about data collection, because I figured no one would ever have time to sift through the data. It would take a team of five people to keep track of what I do all day. But this software eliminates that need — you have a team of robots following you around. Unfortunately, due to the insufficiencies in their programming, they’re somewhat retarded robots.
The data gathered about you could be riddled with errors — typographic errors, mistaken identities, other people’s inaccurate subjective judgments (I might be labeled a “liberal extremist” for example) and because you have no access to it, or idea what information is being collected, you have no recourse about correcting problems that might later affect you. O’Harrow lists example after example of people who have pursued and tried to correct mistakes about their identities that led to credit problems, flags on no-fly lists, insurance losses, criminal investigations, etc., only to have the bad data pop back up after being corrected again and again, because the information is passed back and forth from so many data collection agencies.
In addition, these data collection centers are extremely porous and insecure — anyone and everyone could have access to them. O’Harrow also recounts list after list of abuse of personal data, by the employees of companies that collect it, by the data brokers selling it, by government officials at all levels. People are accessing the data for personal use — to stalk attractive women, to hunt down ex-partners for revenge, to using in political campaigns, to sell the information on the black market, to commit burglaries and assaults and securities frauds. They’re also using data in ways far beyond what was intended when it was gathered.
The laws regarding data gathering, storage, data-mining and security are decades behind current technology, so there’s no accountability or recourse. There’s very little regulation of who has access to your personal data, what they use it for, and how you can control it. I kept hoping throughout the book for some light at the end of the tunnel — for O’Harrow to provide some examples of organizations who are pursuing laws to regulate all these databases of information, but there was precious little.
After reading “Our Town” and watching An Inconvenient Truth, this book was a bit too much for me to take, frankly. I think that the only real solace I have is that in the next five years Greenland and Antarctica are going to have a catastrophic meltdown, the sea level will rise 20 feet, and 160 million people around the world will die — then the government will have bigger problems to deal with than wondering about where I bought my toothpaste, and if that means I’m a terrorist.
UPDATE: Ironically, as soon as I posted this review, it was datamined. Nice.
Via the Consumerist, this incredibly funny quote:
Now, I am NOT trying to bash homosexuals and I am not a bigot; however, I feel homosexuality is morally wrong and should not be “promoted” as what is the norm for society.
Shorter: “I am not a basher or a bigot, however, I am a basher and a bigot.”
I haven’t much time to write a coherent review of each of these books, so I’m going to crib from Amazon to describe the plots. Sorry for that….
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
“… Mitchell’s third novel weaves history, science, suspense, humor and pathos through six separate but loosely related narratives…. this latest foray relies on a kaleidoscopic plot structure that showcases the author’s stylistic virtuosity. Each of the narratives is set in a different time and place, each is written in a different prose style, each is broken off mid-action and brought to conclusion in the second half of the book. Among the volume’s most engaging story lines is a witty 1930s-era chronicle, via letters, of a young musician’s effort to become an amanuensis for a renowned, blind composer and a hilarious account of a modern-day vanity publisher who is institutionalized by a stroke and plans a madcap escape in order to return to his literary empire (such as it is).”
As clever as the nested, interwoven stories were, I wasn’t completely engaged while I read them, and I ended the book disappointed. It’s a neat literary trick, and I admit a nice commentary on the human condition — despite the differences in the stories, the conceits and foibles of humankind are the same throughout, ultimately leading to the end of civilization — but it was an awfully disheartening story to read.
The Whole World Over
by Julia Glass
“In her second rich, subtle novel, Glass reveals how the past impinges on the present, and how small incidents of fate and chance determine the future. Greenie Duquette has a small bakery in Manhattan’s West Village that supplies pastries to restaurants, including that of her genial gay friend Walter. When Walter recommends Greenie to the governor of New Mexico, she seizes the chance to become the Southwesterner’s pastry chef and to take a break from her marriage to Alan Glazier, a psychiatrist with hidden issues.”
It’s rare to read a mainstream novel that treats gay characters in a real, sympathetic way as fully-realized human beings and not plot points or commentary on the heterosexual narrative, and I really loved this book for that reason. Her characters are very richly drawn, which is also one of the things I love in fiction. There are times when character’s motivations seemed to shift with no concrete explanation, but not so much that the quality of the story was lost. In all it was a relatively light but pleasing book.
A selection from Stacyann Chin’s speech at the Opening Ceremonies of the Gay Games (this was the part I love so much):
I don’t know why
but the term lesbian just seems so
confrontational to me
why can’t you people just say you date
other people?
Again I say nothing
tongue and courage tied with fear
I am at once livid
ashamed and paralyzed
by the neo-conservatism
breeding malicious amongst us
Gay
Lesbian
Bisexual
Transgender
Ally
Questioning
Two spirit
Non-gender conforming—every year we add a new letter
our community is happily expanding beyond the scope
of the dream stonewall sparked within us
yet everyday
I become more afraid to say black
or lesbian
or woman—everyday
under the pretense of unity I swallow something I should have said
about the epidemic of AIDS in Africa
or the violence against teenage-girls in East New York
or the mortality rate of young boys on the south-side of Chicago
even in friendly conversation
I get the bell hooks-ian urge
to kill mother-fuckers who say stupid shit to me
all day
bitter branches of things I cannot say out loud
sprout deviant from my neck
fuck you-you-fucking-racist-sexist-turd
fuck you for wanting to talk about homophobia
while you exploit the desperation of undocumented immigrants
to clean your hallways
bathe your children and cook your dinner
for less than you and I spend on our tax deductible lunch!
I want to scream
all oppression is connected you dick!
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” — George Orwell
I blogged a link yesterday to a site of “Non-Errors” in English — discussion of some language rules that the site argues are not really valid rules of language today.
The link is making the rounds of popular blog sites, which is how I picked up on it. I sent it to Stephanie, who is my definitive source for all grammar and editing, (being a well-educated editor with a great editor salary for a publishing company and connoisseur of the English language) for her thoughts. Here’s what she had to say:
I think he’s a little hard on split infinitives; for some reason I don’t have a problem with them unless they aren’t clear. I think there’s more to the between/among distinction than he says. The IDG style guide mentions that it matters whether a one-to-one relationship is meant. Our style guides have always specified the over/more than and since/because distinctions, and although I’m certainly not as strict as some, I’m not as permissive as he is. I’m not convinced that “regime” and “regimen” are synonyms — I’ve never heard of a “dietary regime.” Titled vs. entitled — in terms of a book, entitled means “given a title,” and that, to me, happens once. I don’t have the OED, so I can’t see what sense Chaucer used it in.
I, Robot
Isaac Asimov
The classic sci-fi set of short stories by Asimov about Robots and their relationship to man. Asmimov sets out the famous “Three Laws of Robotics” that have influenced much science fiction writing since the stories were originally published in the 1940’s in sci-fi magazines, and then collected in this book published in 1950. I haven’t seen the Will Smith movie of the same name, yet, but from what I understand, it’s quite different than the Asimov stories and is only “influenced by.”
1. A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
Interesting that the stories, written in the 1940s, are set in 1996-2006 or so. Their expectations of technological advances are beyond what we’ve accomplished, but at the same time fail to anticipate some of our technology — like the internet. The influence of these stories on all science fiction that came after is fascinating; they really are the foundation for everything from Terminator to Battlestar Galactica, to dystopian fantasies of post-apocalypse futures.
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection
by Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon produces a melancholy Sherlock Holmes homage, portraying the Victorian age hero at the end of his life in 1944 Sussex, having retired from London to keep bees in the quiet countryside. Holmes gets caught up in the mystery of a lost parrot and a young mute Jewish refugee boy who was rescued from Hitler’s path.
Black Swan Green
David Mitchell
Mitchell’s fourth novel veers away from the complex literary structures of his previous work, to portray a simple but profound narrative of a 13-year-old boy’s life over the course of 13 months — one story each month, describing Jason Taylor’s struggle with a speech impediment, navigation of the complex social structures at his school, his interest in girls, exploration of the town and woods around his home, and the break up of his parents marriage.
“Equality is not a concept. It’s not something we should be striving for. It’s a necessity. Equality’s like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women. The misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who is confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.” – Joss Whedon.