October 2006 Archives

I've been spending the last three weeks reading "Swann's Way" for my literature seminar, and, I have to admit, I didn't quite read the whole thing. Yes, it's incredibly well written. But it's also really, really tiring to read. I've taken more naps in the last three weeks than I have since nursery school. I'm happy to be putting it aside for something else.

It seems I have a poor track record with some of the long, great novels of history. I am currently half-way through both "Anna Karenina" and "Moby Dick." But, in my defense, I have also recently read "Crime and Punishment" and Beckett's incredibly dense (but brilliant) "Molloy." I suppose I could have lied and said I read "Swann's Way" cover to cover, but really, what would be the point of this book blog then? I'm not actually writing this for YOUR benefit, it's for my own personal use. In fact, why are you even reading this.

One other note: Recently I realized that I've been putting all my book titles in quotes, which is actually incorrect. Short stories, poems, essays, etc. are all things that go in quotes. Book titles should actually be underlined. But I don't like underlines. So you'll just have to adjust.

I'm not as much of a zombie fanatic as I used to be - mainly because I've gotten it out of my system. (If all goes well a zombie-themed short story of mine will be appearing in an anthology sometime in the next 6-12 months, but we'll talk more of that at a later time.) Regardless, my attention has been grabbed by a new book by the author of the excellent non-fictional manual, "The Zombie Survival Guide." This time Max Brooks (son of Mel Brooks) recounts a fictitious (?) oral history of the zombie/human war in "World War Z."

I first saw this book while wandering Barnes & Noble with my girlfriend. It was erroneously placed on the "New Fiction" table, and at her urging I moved the stack to the "Current Events" table. She is very indulgent of my obsessions.

I'm starting to think that Google's unofficial slogan, "Do No Evil," is eventually going to cause them a PR problem (if it isn't already). So far Google has been fairly unblemished in terms of corporate vilification. Aside from a few clever jabs (such as this article from The Onion) and a brief outcry when people thought they were going to be reading user e-mail, most criticism hasn't yet entered mainstream consciousness. But as they grow in size and scope there will be more and more of it. And suddenly "Do No Evil" is going to become a constant pain.

Despite popular consensus, I believe most companies do NOT go into business in order to "do evil." During the late nineties the tech world was pretty much in agreement that Bill Gates was a bad person, even though just a few years earlier the tech world had loved Bill Gates for taking on IBM, the previous evil-company incarnate. The point is that when a company grows to a certain size, whether via a general distrust in corporations or some kind of laser-focused jealousy, regardless of that company's intentions, people start to suspect it of being secretly (or, in Microsoft's case, unsecretly) evil. And, like it or not, Google is at (or beyond) that point. They can no longer buy up other companies and release new free utilities and have everyone exclaim, "Google is the best! They have my best interests at heart!" Frankly, they've gotten away with that kind of response a lot longer than most.

When the tide changes, and the mainstream media and culture responds more cautiously (if not negatively) to new moves by Google (such as, perhaps, their latest push to not just own all your data but also all the documents you create) they are going to discover every single negative article and web comic and political cartoon poking fun at "Do No Evil." In fact, do a Google search on "Google do no evil" and after a couple of links to Google's corporate philosophy you'll find the rest are all questioning the motto.

Now, to be clear, I'm not claiming that Google is doing evil. I think they're just a company trying to grow and earn money by providing real value to consumers and being a good global citizen. But it doesn't matter if that's true, because big companies are seen as evil. So now Google has a choice to make:

1. Stick with the motto "Do No Evil" and have every critic constantly mock it and poke fun at it and question it and use it as a symbol of Google's supposed hypocrisy and call it a lie and essentially increase the level of general criticism every time Google does anything.

2. Drop the motto, which would be like admitting that they've decided to start doing evil.

A friend of mine works at AOL and he asked me to try out a new "snaggable" module. I am in no way endorsing AOL Video, aside from saying that it is AWESOME! But, also, just in case my friends or relatives from any of the following companies are reading, I would like to say the following video services are also awesome: Microsoft, Google, and Apple! All AWESOME!!!

I've read pretty much every story in Mavis Gallant's collection, "Paris Stories," despite the instructions in her afterward: "Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait." I would have followed her advice (not because I didn't like the stories - but because that's how I normally read story collections) except I went on a trip to Austin and I forgot to bring a second book.

Anyway, I'd never read or even heard of Mavis Gallant before, but I really enjoyed her writing. She writes serious work but there's always a hint of the farcical lingering there, especially in the multiple stories about the cantakerous old writer named Grippes. She does a lot of introspective and eloquent exposition, which sometimes I dislike, but in her case it's the kind of focus on themes that pleases me. In my literature class I didn't have much to say about her writing (which - trust me - is unusual for me) and I'm not sure why that is. But for some reason, even though I enjoyed her work, it didn't really move me to speak for or against or about it.