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Do you listen to music while reading? Does this change if you’re reading in or out of your house? Do you have a preference of music for such occasions?
I occasionally do but probably less than 25 percent of the time. Whether I do so out of the house depends on the setting. Thus, on airplanes I almost always listen to music whereas outdoors or someplace else I generally do not.
At home, my wife may have the radio or stereo on and I can generally tune right out of that. If I do intend to listen to music while reading, I tend to listen to jazz. Songs with lyrics have more of a tendency to distract the “word part” of my brain. Jazz seems to slide right into the “music part” of my brain while leaving the “word part” free to do its own thing. I’m guessing I can filter out songs, DJ talk and ads from the radio because it isn’t anything my brain picked to listen to.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music
Aldous Huxley, Music at Night and Other Essays
Bulletin Board
Thanks to Valerie for calling this one of her favorite book blogs during BBAW. I’m not only honored but proud of one of the reasons she cited: “off-the-beaten path book picks.”
I’ve also begun contributing book reviews at Blogger News Network for a change of pace.
Blog Headlines of the Week
Dan Brown swaps pseudohistory for pseudoscience
Ebooks will make authors soulless, just like their product
Interweb Stuff I Liked This Week
The Journalist and the Murderers
Lawsuit to defend Stalin divides Russia
Bookish Linkage
Osama’s reading list for America.
The shortlist for the best of the National Book Awards in fiction will be announced Monday and the winner will be determined by vote.
SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson takes a look at British science fiction has eight British SF writers for flash fiction on the world 100 years from now.
Nonbookish Linkage
If you printed the entire Internet you’re starting several thousand years too late — and will need many more thousand to read it.
Proof once again that far too many people aren’t paying attention. Forty-two percent of Americans believe “what is good for Wall Street is good for America.”
And proof once again that a lot of people are just plain nuts. Thirty-five percent of New Jersey conservatives think President Obama might be the Anti-Christ.
An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.
Mahatma Gandhi, Young India, June 25, 1931
A talk by author Ellen Hopkins, who also wrote this year’s Banned Books Week Manifesto, at a Norman, Okla., middle school was reportedly cancelled after the school district superintendent received a complaint from a parent, who also filed a challenge seeking removal of one of Hopkins’ books from the school’s library. Irony is just too nice and polite a term for this.
Maybe Denmark isn’t as liberal as its tourism ads would make you think. The Danish Supreme Court has ruled an unemployed man who won about $38,000 playing poker online had to surrender his winnings. The reason? It was his only income and Danish law forbids earning a living through gambling.
Holland must be getting tired of tourists. “The Dutch government plans to introduce a national marijuana pass, available only to Dutch nationals over 18 years of age, under a program that would ban foreigners from visiting ‘coffee shops’ (marijuana cafes).”
Gee, I don’t know if I’d want to irritate him: Hulk Hogan sues a law firm claiming it charged him more than $1 million in legal fees when his insurance company would have provided an attorney at no cost.
Do you give the guy credit for thinking outside the box? Federal tax court tells lawyer money he paid to prostitutes is not deductible as a medical expense.
Who needs Judge Judy when you can go online to Instant Jury? Oh, that’s right. It doesn’t get your face on TV. (Via.)
It is well know that on every questsion the lawyers are about equally divided … and were we to act but in cases where no contrary opinion of a lawyer can behad, we should never act.
Thomas Jefferson, The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 11
Science fiction — excuse me, speculative fiction — loves series. For whatever reason, readers — and evidently authors — can’t get enough of particular worlds or characters. And just as Margaret Atwood distances her fiction from science fiction, she may be taking the concept of a series in a different direction.
 Atwood’s latest novel, The Year of the Flood, is neither a prequel nor a sequel to her novel Oryx and Crake. Yet not only does The Year of the Flood often take place contemporaneously with events in and involve some of the main characters from Oryx and Crake, it approaches its end where the earlier novel itself ended.
Both novels deal with an unspecified apocalyptic event (the “Waterless Flood” in the latest) that produced a biological disaster. Most humans have died off as a result of a pandemic plague. The difference here is perspective. Oryx and Crake told of individuals who grew up on the privileged side of a society with an extreme dichotomy between rich and poor. They lived in the compounds of huge multinational corporations that essentially ran the country. The Year of the Flood is told by two former members of a eco/animal rights/vegan/religious organization called God’s Gardeners. Mentioned in Oryx and Crake, the Gardeners live communally in the “pleeblands” and are simply viewed as religious weirdos by most of the regular residents. The two women — Toby and Ren — tell how they survived the apocalypse, not knowing if anyone else did, and detail their individual stories prior to the collapse of society.
To help the reader more easily grasp the ethos and aims of God’s Gardeners, Atwood opens almost all of the book’s 14 sections with a sermon by Adam One, the leader of the group, and every one is preceded by lyrics from a song from the Gardeners “Oral Hymnbook.” excerpt from a hymn sung by the members. (The hymns have now actually been recorded and are being performed during stops on Atwood’s book tour.) The hymns, sermons and “saints” the group celebrates — Rachel Carson, Euell Gibbons, Al Gore, Dian Fossey and E.F. Schumacher among them — provide a device by which to educate the reader on the group while still allowing Ren and Toby to carry the heart of the story.
Ren, who survives because she is in an isolation section of the upscale nightclub/sex club she works in when the plague breaks out, comes to the Gardeners as a child with her mother. Her mother left her husband and the safety of one of the corporate compounds to live with her lover, a Gardener. Ren does return to the compound and her story introduces us to the significant characters from the first novel. Toby, meanwhile, is one of Ren’s teachers with the Gardeners. She takes refuge with the organization to escape a sadist gangster who employed her at SecretBurgers, appropriately named because no one is really quite sure where the protein that goes into the burgers comes from. Her story provides greater backdrop on life in the middle and lower classes before the Waterless Flood. She manages to survive the plague because she left the Gardeners when her refuge there was discovered and began working with a new appearance and a new identity at the AnooYoo Spa. The stories of Ren and Toby largely follow different tracks until near the end, when they leave their hiding places and encounter each other in the post-apocalyptic world.
Ren comes off as more passionate and energetic than others in the story. While Toby is smart and cunning she still seems to have what psychologists would call a flat affect, although perhaps that might be expected from the psychological impact of a highly fatal pandemic. Both are better drawn than most of the other characters. We never really understand what it is about Adam One that makes him the leader of an organization like the Gardeners. Zeb, Ren’s mother’s lover and who eventually heads a splinter group, comes off more like a mysterious swashbuckler. All in all, the people here are not as believable or as convincing as those in her remarkable The Handmaid’s Tale. What is most disappointing, though, is how Atwood brings Ren and Toby — and other characters — together near the end of the book. The coincidences so strain credulity that they border on a deus ex machina.
Atwood deserves praise for the world in which both The Year of the Flood and Oryx and Crake is set. It certainly accords with her view that speculative fiction explores the consequences of technology and what it means to be human, as well as the fact that “we have a better idea about how to make hell on earth than we do about how to make heaven.” But while she has given us plenty to ponder and enough unanswered questions that warrants further exploration of this world, it at times feels as if the Waterless Flood has swept away, or at least severely damaged, the level of pathos and passion of the characters in that world.
What am I living for and what am I dying for are the same question.
Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
Although saying it was adopting “no hard and fast rule,” the South Dakota Supreme Court has upheld an order granting a new trial in a case where a juror did a Google search on a defendant two months before being called for jury duty and happened to mention the search during jury deliberations.
In Russo v. Takata Corp., a man I’ll simply call S.F. received a jury summons for the lawsuit. As I detailed in an earlier post he wondered what Takata did and performed two Google searches on the company from his home computer. Some two months later, he happened to be picked to serve on the jury in the wrongful death and personal injury case, which claimed seatbelts Takata manufactured were negligently designed. Jurors were not specifically asked about internet searches during jury selection and S.F. did not mention it.
About four and a half to five hours into jury deliberations, though, another juror asked out loud whether Takata had ever been sued. S.F. responded that he had done a Google search and learned that Takata manufactured seatbelts and airbags but didn’t find any lawsuits during his search. Another juror told S.F. “in a loud and stern voice” that jurors weren’t supposed to consider outside information. Although S.F. tried to retract what he had said, at least three other jurors overheard the exchange and knew what he said. The jury foreman was not asked to do anything about the comments and the exchange wasn’t reported to the trial court.
The jury returned a verdict for Tanaka. Later learning of the discussion during deliberations, the plaintiffs sought a new trial on the grounds S.F shouldnot have mentioned the information. The trial judge agreed and granted the motion. It is that decision the Supreme Court affirmed.
Most of the Court’s decision deals with the legal standards for challenging jury verdicts and discusses extrinsic and intrinsic information and the question of prejudice in such situations. Suffice it to say that while jurors are allowed to bring their own general knowledge to a case, they’re not supposed to bring specific knowledge. The Supreme Court said the latter included knowledge “which is factual or legal in nature and obtained due to jury service on a specific trial from sources other than the evidence admitted at trial.” (Emphasis in Court’s opinion.) It said what S.F. learned in his Google searches was such information and, given evidence at trial, was relevant to the issues.
In a footnote, the Court acknowledged the jury summons said those receiving it should not “seek out evidence regarding this case.” At the same time, it noted that statement was not necessarily clear. It suggested trial courts “consider using simpler and more direct language in the summons to indicate that no information about the case or the parties should be sought out by any means, including via computer searches.” At bottom, though, while the Court said it agreed Tanaka was entitled to a new trial, it also said “we announce no hard and fast rule that all such types of internet research by a juror prior to trial without notice to the court and counsel automatically doom a jury’s verdict.” Instead, it said that because the trial judge is present throughout the trial, they are in the best position to assess whether there was extraneous material that prejudiced the jury and their decision must be clearly erroneous or an abuse of discretion.
Thus, South Dakota will have no bright line rule about potential jurors doing internet research. Each case and each instance is necessarily going to be different and the potential impact different. Moreover, this case did not involve a juror who used the internet in relation to the case during the course of trial or deliberations. The upside is that the decision is likely to make South Dakota trial courts and lawyers more cognizant of including questions about internet searches or even Facebook or Twitter when selecting a jury.
Yep, that interweb thingy can be problematic.
The potential for inaccuracies and [the internet’s] wide availability also support [jury selection] questions designed to identify any jurors who may have accessed information about the parties on the internet.
Russo v. Takata Corp.
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