Tuesday 27 June, 2006

All the knowledge in the world?

John Updike is distressed by the fall of the bookshop and book. It's an interesting article in which he talks, with some despair about the increasing pressure on authors to perform. 'As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book -- a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.' When Cory Doctorow lectured out here a couple of months ago he spoke, with much greater enthusiasm, about the 'charismatic'. That is, the artist who performed their work, much as wandering minstrels did centuries ago. (In reducing what he said to that, I am not doing justice to what was an extremely interesting lecture. Doctorow is also an editor of Boing Boing.)

Also interesting - while being in total opposition to Updike - is the (very long) article embedded in Updike's by Kevin Kelly. It's on the Google digital library project. 'The dream is an old one: to have in one place all knowledge, past and present. All books, all documents, all conceptual works, in all languages. It is a familiar hope, in part because long ago we briefly built such a library. The great library at Alexandria, constructed around 300 B.C., was designed to hold all the scrolls circulating in the known world. . . '

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