Time to Get Reading...

My long winter break has come to an end, and school has begun again. I fear this means I won't be making regular posts here for a while. Altogether, my professors have assigned more than two-dozen textbooks this semester. It's a good thing that I like to read.

Despite the excessive classwork, I hope to continue writing here occasionally over the next several weeks. There are plenty of leftover topics buzzing about in my head from last month that haven't been written up, and if I don't have time to pursue things unrelated to school, I may try to adapt a few of my class projects this semester into posts here—provided that I can make them reasonably interesting. At the very least, you're bound to see a few samples of what I do in my new creative writing course. All updates, however, will be rather few and far between.

If you haven't already, you might want to subscribe to the Acceity RSS feed with your favorite aggregator (Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo!, or whatever) so that you are sure to get updates soon after they're made. That way, you won't have to check this site day after weary day wondering when the next post will come. In the meantime, thanks for reading, and hopefully I'll be back with something new to think about before too long.

Snowy Railroad Crossing at Rolette & Water Streets

I stand at a quiet intersection on a cold winter morning. This is the corner of Rolette & Water Streets on St. Feriole Island in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. In front of me lie the half-abandoned tracks of the Wisconsin & Southern Railroad. Behind me sits the frozen Mississippi River. Around me are snow-filled parks and a few isolated buildings. I am the only person in sight.

There are more people here in summer. Tourists come to the riverside then, and so do the locals. They come to boat or to fish, to picnic or to stroll, to see the sights or to escape the city. They aren't here now. It's too cold, too early, too distant, too quiet. What would one do, except shiver? The tavern on the opposite corner opens in the afternoon, a few might come then. Mostly, though, this is a place of icy silence.

A hundred or more years ago, it would have bustled with commotion.

The street where I stand now was then a railyard, the scene before me would have held homes and businesses, the river behind me would have been obscured from sight by docks and warehouses. This place was then a hub of motion, especially in the summer, when it saw not just trains and carriages, but ferries and barges, and eventually even the town's first airplane landing.

Detail of an 1870 Bird's Eye Illustration of Prairie du Chien. The spot where I now stand is shown near the center of this view, where Rolette Street intersects what was then a railyard. Buildings shown include the Dousman House Hotel, lower left; the Diamond Jo Warehouse on the waterfront; and the Railroad Grain Elevator, upper right.

The railroad was first completed to Prairie du Chien in 1857, connecting the Mississippi River here to Lake Michigan in Milwaukee. Fittingly, the rail company was called the Milwaukee & Mississippi. It's tracks originally ended at Lowertown—roughly that section of Prairie du Chien south of Wells Street—but in the early 1860s, the railroad moved its facilities north to this site, where the river was deeper and shipping easier. So began a rush of construction as the railroad company built a rail-yard, a depot, a large grain elevator, and a crowning luxury hotel called the Railroad House—renamed the Dousman House Hotel after 1868.

The Diamond Jo steamboat line also built here in the 1860s. It's new facility, a riverfront warehouse, permitted boats to load and unload cargo directly between the river and the rails.

With the onset of such commerce, the quiet village that had existed at Prairie du Chien since the 1780s also burst into a rapid expansion. New homes and businesses sprung up around the depot, and the neighborhood thrived. For decades this would be a hub of transportation. Goods and livestock were sent up and down the river. Grain poured in from the plains of Iowa and Minnesota on its way to feed eastern cities. Settlers came in the other direction, rushing towards new homes in the west. Everything here was about moving, about going places, about technology and speed. The sound was of steam engines and jostling crowds, the smell was of burning coal.

Today, the only sound is the wind, and the only smell is the snow.

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Whilst traipsing about the Internet, I occasionally discover websites that impress my sensibilities but that fail to impress themselves upon my memory. This is always unfortunate. When I try to relocate these sites, my searches often fall hopelessly short. It makes me feel like the prince who had nothing but a glass slipper by which to find the girl who stole his heart at the ball. Weeks, months, or years pass with no success, and often I completely forget these sites that had so enthralled me. Sometimes, however, I happen upon a lost website again in a chance encounter. Such a reunification, while it doesn't quite permit me to live happily ever after, is still usually rather satisfying. It was by just this kind of chance encounter that I recently rediscovered the site I want to share with you today.

LibriVox.org is a website that offers free audio recordings of classical literature and public domain texts. The project was founded in 2005, it's non-profit and advertising-free, and the audiobooks it offers are recorded by volunteers from around the world. The large and growing catalog of recordings includes works by such fashionable authors as Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, Oscar Wilde, John Milton, Mark Twain and William Shakespeare—among many others. You can download the audio books as mp3s, or as patent-free and technologically superior Ogg Vorbis files.

Since LibriVox relies on disparate volunteers to produce its recordings, the narration quality varies a lot from book to book and chapter to chapter. Nonetheless, the few speakers I've heard so far had clear diction and easily read with enough dramatic flair to keep my interest. If you think you could do a better job of reading, don't forget that you can volunteer to record books for the site too! I would happily contribute to this project myself if I only had a quiet place to read uninterrupted.

Anyway, I'm very happy to have found this site again. I love to read, but I find that while school is on I am too busy reading for class to ever read for pleasure—I'd have time, I suppose, but not the energy. LibriVox is the perfect solution: it's free, it's online, and audiobooks let me delve into literature for pleasure while giving my eyes a rest after a long session of reading for school. If your situation is similar, I hope you'll give this site a try. Alternatively, old favorite Project Gutenberg is still there for those who prefer just the text. Either way, there's no longer any excuse to keep from experiencing those great old books you've always been meaning to read!

Free audiobooks: LibriVox
Free e-texts: Project Gutenberg

I learned a few weeks ago that PC Magazine, a periodical to which I have long subscribed, will no longer be delivered to my door. The magazine has ceased printing. It will still be published, but only online. I'm not especially bothered. It's certainly a bit sad to lose a magazine that shaped my attitude towards computers to the extent that I'm blogging at my own website today. Still, I'm subscribed to other magazines; my mailbox won't be empty. Besides, I have to acknowledge that I get most of my computing knowledge online now anyway.

The cause of PC Magazine's transformation is simple, and though it might seem appropriate for a magazine about computers to go all-digital, the real reason has less to do with innovation than it does with cost. A digital publication is far less expensive to produce than an ink and paper one, and PC Magazine's parent company, Ziff Davis Media, declared bankruptcy last spring. The reasons cited were declining subscriptions and lost advertising revenue. This isn't just one isolated magazine publisher falling to the wayside, however. The whole print media industry seems to be in the midst of a dramatic transformation.

Take the Christian Science Monitor, a paper well known for its independent focus on international issues. The Monitor reached its one hundredth anniversary last year only to announce in October that is planning to cease daily publication this spring. A weekly edition of the newspaper will still be printed, but daily reports will only be available online after April 2009.

Consider also the Detroit Free Press, the nation's twentieth largest newspaper by circulation, which declared in December that it will cease home-delivery of its daily papers early this year. The daily will still be available at newsstands and online, but home deliveries will only be made on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Why is this happening? "Economics," answers a FAQ page at the paper's website. "Advertising, including classified, is down. Costs are up. We are changing our model in order to survive in a world that has changed."

A look at newspaper publishers' share prices shows how dire their economic situation is. The Detroit Free Press is published by Gannett, the nation's largest newspaper company, which also owns the USA Today and Wisconsin papers like the Green Bay Press-Gazette and Appleton Post-Crescent. It's share price was $59.63 on January 9, 2007. Two years later, on January 9, 2009, it stood at $8.59—an 85.6% decline.

Lee Enterprises, an Iowa-based national conglomerate whose local papers include the Wisconsin State Journal and La Crosse Tribune, has seen its shares fall from $30.32 to $0.53 over the same time frame. That's a decline of 98.3%.

Similarly, shares in the McClatchy Company have dropped from $41.09 to $1.47 during this two-year span, a decline of 96.4%. McClatchy's newspapers around the country include the Miami Herald and Sacremento Bee.

Most strikingly, the Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, declared bankruptcy this December. Only one year before, it had been purchased by investor Sam Zell for $34.00 per share—a total price tag then of $8.2 billion.

What's killing print media?

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Having nothing to say is an interesting phenomenon. It's a sensation I'm rather familiar with, being a very taciturn sort myself. Even so, it's not something I've really thought about much before, so I'm not sure I understand it well. What's really happening when people seem to have nothing to say? It can't be strictly true, can it? People are always thinking, so my guess is that people always have something to say. Whether or not they think they have something to say, however, must be a function of whether or not they judge their thoughts to be worth saying. This is a subjective decision, of course, influenced by all kinds of variables: relevancy, quality, audience, interest, concern for consequences. And many of these variables are subjective factors themselves. Having nothing to say, then, isn't really a condition. It's a judgment, a decree, a statement of will. To announce "I have nothing to say" is, quite simply, to resolve so.

I wonder how often this resolution is conscious, and how often not? Certainly people think about what to say on many occasions, but not always. Some people blither on endlessly without once pausing to consider whether they need or ought to say what they do, and others lock away every thought without even being struck by the notion that certain ideas might be voiced. These people aren't making conscious decisions. They've just fallen into habit, I suppose, and so formed an automated say-it-or-not policy after years of psychological conditioning. So this is a resolution made consciously and unconsciously, every day perhaps. There are always people talking and always people not talking, and at every moment each of these could be doing the opposite. What triggers one to do one thing and one to do another? Do the people who talk the most really have the most to say? Or is it rather the ones who talk least whose minds most teem with thoughts squirming to be let go? I've no idea. I have nothing to say.