Kevin Kelly had the cover story in the Times Magazine this week, and it has my hackles up a bit.

Basically, Scan This Book! is 10 pages of blatherings about how search engines will soon allow us to create a vast interconnected stores of all human knowledge ever created. Blah blah blah.

Two big problems:

One. This is just a bit too Wired Magazine crica 1996 for me. I'm having bad flashbacks.

Two. Much of his argument rests on a clumsy sleight of hand that we just can't give him a pass on. The key paragraph is here:

A text, a melody, a picture or a story succeeds best if it is connected to as many ideas and other works as possible. Ideally, over time a work becomes so entangled in a culture that it appears to be inseparable from it, in the way that the Bible, Shakespeare's plays, "Cinderella" and the Mona Lisa are inseparable from ours. This tendency for creative ideas to infiltrate other works is great news for culture. In fact, this commingling of creations is culture.

Now, I understand that it would be very convenient for this to be true if I were writing a technophillic puff piece for Wired, er, the NYT Magazine. But I'm sorry, it simply is not true. And I won't even bother to point out the fact that none of the works he even cites have any footnotes.

We consider cultural works to be 'great' precisely to the extent that they can dissolve those linkages. This is what we mean when we say they are timeless - that they don't need to carry the baggage of all those links across the decades and centuries in order for them to have meaning to us now.

All those linkages in Google will give lit-film-art-history majors something to argue about but most of us just want to read a book. At the beach. Without batteries. Google isn't going to change that. Mark my words.

Of Sun Tzu's <i>The Art of War</i>, one critic <a href='http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195014766/ref=pd_rhf_p_2/102-0284776-9221776?v=glance&s=books&no=*' target='_blank'>writes</a>:

<table border='0' cellpadding='8'><tr><td bgcolor='#EEEEEE'><img src="http://g-images.amazon.com/images/G/01/x-locale/common/customer-reviews/stars-1-0.gif" width=64 height=12 border=0 alt="1 out of 5 stars"><u>Ok but not relevant!</u>, June 5, 2003<br><table cellspacing=0 cellpadding=0><tr><td><font face=verdana,arial,helvetica size=-1> </font></td><td><font face=verdana,arial,helvetica size=-1> Reviewer: A reader</font></td></tr></table>
I guess all in all it was alright but I can't see any use for the information. It took me several days to read because I just couldn't get into it. I liked Shogun much better.
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My girlfriend saw this comic at the bookstore last week and bought it for me, thinking I would like it. She was right. It is an autobiography of a woman growing up in Iran during the revolution to overthrow the Shah and the subsequent war with Iraq. Told with charmingly simple black-and-white artwork, the story is both funny and gripping. I couldn't put this one down.

The critical reviews on the jacket draw the inevitable comparison to Maus. To the extent that they both lend dry humor and wit to a heartbreaking story, that comparison is probably fair. Persepolis is different, though, in that it does not focus on a perilous story in dangerous times; rather, it shows how political and cultural upheaval gradually encroach on a middle-class existence that most Americans would otherwise find very familiar.

The publishing of this book is obviously very timely, as it reminds one that many people living in the 'axis of evil' are no different from the average westerner. In Persepolis, we see Iranians going to college, driving to work, buying records and shopping in supermarkets. It's power is in depicting revolution and war as intrusions on such mundane and familiar settings. It demonstrates that the main thing that differentiates a country like Iran from the west is the presence of a vast, impoverished and poorly-educated underclass that is easily swayed by charismatic religious fanatics.

Er, that does sound different, right?