Wild trampings and the Great Tim Ernst

Some of us know Tim Ernst as that great wild thing of Arkansas' Ozarks. The man who steps from mountain top to mountain top, photographing marvelous things and writing the finest trail guides yet to be written in the English language. The man who puts mile markers on trails, and lets you know, in tenths of miles, how far it is to the next reliable water source.


And the area of the country his trail goes through is without a doubt one of the finest, and the trail one of the least traveled in America. At any rate, National Geographic just published a writeup on the Ozark Highlands Trail, and you can read it all here: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/ozark-trail/white-text

Being For the Benefit of Mr. Byte

I don't know whether any of you heard this, but Google has announced that it will scan and make publicly available the archives of most newspapers world-wide, beginning with The New York Times and The Washington Post and ending, this side of the Atlantic, with America's oldest still in-print newspaper, the The Quebec Chronicle-Telegraph (started in 1764). The scans will basically replace microfilm, you can access them for free from anywhere, and they'll be searchable.

At the risk of offending my Luddite fan base, I think this is a good thing, much like Google's earlier project of digitizing books.

Personally, I hate reading books on computers and am not at all a fan of e-books and the like. Count on me to buy the hard copy as long as they still make them. But the book project had an unintended consequence that really brought home to me the value of this kind of thing.

When Google started their book scanning project, they scanned pretty much all books they could find. This created a big uproar in publishing because authors obviously wanted to be paid for their work, and Google's offering is free. The publishers won. Because of copyright laws, Google can't make the full text of any book available that are still under copyright protection. Right now that would be anything published after 1933 and/or anything that writers who published before then renewed the copyrights on.

And here come the good news: Instead, Google has been focusing on scanning old books, especially from the 19th century into the 19-teens. And that means that for my academic projects, which delve back into major sources from the 1750s through 1890s that maybe three libraries in the world have a copy of and that I could never get my hands on without traveling to Prague or Budapest or London or or Vienna or Berlin (I know, darn) or at least Cambdrige, Mass., I now have the option of reading those books... on my laptop, thirty seconds after I found out I needed to look at them.

And that, my friends, even with its regrettable side-effects and limitations, is pretty darn great.

Chick Lit Forever!

Don't worry. I still hate romance novels. I still disdain fem lit. I still think Darcy is a girl, and Bridget Jones would have done better if she had kept her diary to herself. And I only read Gossip Girl so I can be ahead of the T.V. show... And you know why? It's not because I'm a chauvinist. I mean, not only. It's because George Eliot herself said I should, and I don't dare disagree with her.

Her essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists" is hilarious, and it still applies to almost every book in the genre, as well as most movies of the romantic comedy variety. Nobody who endeavors to teach, critique, or even chat about scribblings by the decorative sex can afford not to have read it. So do. You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll wish it weren't so true. And you can blame your prejudices on me. Best of all worlds.