Egoism
Individualism
Sovereignty
Splendor

(These ideas are explicated in this sloppy manifesto)

 
The gifts of the profits...

From today's New York Times, via Drudge:

Google, the operator of the world's most popular Internet search service, plans to announce an agreement today with some of the nation's leading research libraries and Oxford University to begin converting their holdings into digital files that would be freely searchable over the Web.

It may be only a step on a long road toward the long-predicted global virtual library. But the collaboration of Google and research institutions that also include Harvard, the University of Michigan, Stanford and the New York Public Library is a major stride in an ambitious Internet effort by various parties. The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world's books, scholarly papers and special collections.

Google - newly wealthy from its stock offering last summer - has agreed to underwrite the projects being announced today while also adding its own technical abilities to the task of scanning and digitizing tens of thousands of pages a day at each library.

Although Google executives declined to comment on its technology or the cost of the undertaking, others involved estimate the figure at $10 for each of the more than 15 million books and other documents covered in the agreements. Librarians involved predict the project could take at least a decade.

Because the Google agreements are not exclusive, the pacts are almost certain to touch off a race with other major Internet search providers like Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo. Like Google, they might seek the right to offer online access to library materials in return for selling advertising, while libraries would receive corporate help in digitizing their collections for their own institutional uses.

'Within two decades, most of the world's knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today,' said Michael A. Keller, Stanford University's head librarian.

A few years ago I worked on a series of scans from The Interlinear Horace, a version of the the poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus resequenced into an English-normal word order for intermediate students of Latin. At the time, I lamented the incipient and all-but-inevitable loss of that book, not because it is not a great achievement, but simply because too few people know of or care about its greatness. Of the many wonders of the internet, the most wonderful is that any local few anywhere can become a global many, and, as I said at the time of a net-propagated version of the book, "Vetted, linked and mirrored around the globe, the Interlinear Horace could be a monument to Quintus Horatius Flaccus more lasting than bronze."

Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have long vowed to make all of the world's information accessible to anyone with a Web browser. The agreements to be announced today will put them a few steps closer to that goal - at least in terms of the English-language portion of the world's information. Mr. Page said yesterday that the project traced to the roots of Google, which he and Mr. Brin founded in 1998 after taking a leave from a graduate computer science program at Stanford where they worked on a "digital libraries" project. "What we first discussed at Stanford is now becoming practical," Mr. Page said.

Google's notion is a truly amazingly wonderful thing, a true milestone in the ascent of man. I deeply despise the kind of indiscriminate charity undertaken by the likes of people like Bill Gates, a niggardly largesse devised to bribe away the resentments of the vicious. But this is the kind of great acheivement only great wealth can achieve, and this is the kind of irreplaceable gift to all of humanity that only great-spirited men of merit can grant. The best gift of Google is Google itself, and it does so much for me and you and everyone because they are doing it for money. They are doing this much more for us for money, too, and that is so much more valuable than anything anyone could do in mere charity.
posted by Greg Swann at 6:24 AM

 
Oh, and Carol King's "Tapestry" is only the second-biggest-selling catalog title in history...

Both Beck and Sabotta have rent-a-rants spinning off this wretched wrowl by William Tucker at The American Spectator, but I can't discern in either a comment about the music under discussion.

But: Tucker himself is a dysthete, at best. His taste is hopelessly childish, but there's no accounting for that. But his knowledge of rock 'n' roll--as a pop art form and more importantly as a business--is entirely absent.

You see, Bob Dylan isn't very important to pop because he only created folk-rock, country-rock, rock itself and heavy metal (via Jimmy Page). He doesn't amount to much because he legitimated the idea of the singer-songwriter, freeing the likes of Neil Diamond and Carol King (who herself doesn't amount to much) from the hokey tyranny of Tin Pan Alley's pandering to the zit-afflicted. It's hardly of moment that Bob Dylan created or revivified dozens of careers, and there is zero significance to the fact that he may be the most covered songwriter in human history. Most importantly, it matters nothing at all that his entire catalog of work (plus many, many bootlegs) has been continuously available throughout his entire forty-year career--through multiple media revolutions--a huge number of consistently hugely profitable catalog titles.

Who is better than Bob Dylan? Practically everybody. Tucker cites Little Richard, Fats Domino, Bill Haley, The Everly Brothers, Sam Cooke, among many, many others. If you will trouble yourself to go to your favorite record store and collect every unique title you can find by each of those artists, then carry your collection over to the the Bob Dylan section of the store, you will be able to see for yourself just how unimportant, relatively speaking, Bob Dylan is to pop.

If you give a gander to the Billboard Top 100 for 1965, you will be able to determine just how unimportant "Like a Rolling Stone" was in its time. How could a song that revolutionized absolutely everything in pop hope to stand up to the artistic genius of, say, Dion and the Belmonts?

This has nothing to do with taste. This is objectively measurable fact, both Bob Dylan's influence on other pop acts and his longstanding, undisputed bankability. And it is certainly possible to quibble with lists like Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. For example, I would put The Who's "My Generation" at number two, not number eleven. But no thoughtful person, evidently exempting Tucker, can doubt that "Like a Rolling Stone" belongs at number one.

(And not to put too fine a point on it, but evidently Tucker doesn't know: The song is personal, not political.)

Like a Rolling Stone

by Bob Dylan (this transcription is from bobdylan.com)

Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn't you?
People'd call, say, "Beware doll, you're bound to fall"
You thought they were all kiddin' you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hangin' out
Now you don't talk so loud
Now you don't seem so proud
About having to be scrounging for your next meal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You've gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it
And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you're gonna have to get used to it
You said you'd never compromise
With the mystery tramp, but now you realize
He's not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain't no good
You shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you
You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

Princess on the steeple and all the pretty people
They're drinkin', thinkin' that they got it made
Exchanging all kinds of precious gifts and things
But you'd better lift your diamond ring, you'd better pawn it babe
You used to be so amused
At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used
Go to him now, he calls you, you can't refuse
When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal.

How does it feel
How does it feel
To be on your own
With no direction home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?

posted by Greg Swann at 10:21 PM

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