Welcome to our podcast! Looks like this is your first time here - you may want to subscribe to ourRSS feed - it'll keep you up to date with our latest shows. Thanks for dropping by - and don't be a stranger!

Does Country Music reflect the history of the people?  On Litopia After Dark this week we discuss a new book by Dana Jennings called Sing Me Back Home. Also, that buzzword of the ’90s - multitasking. New research suggests that it accomplishes very little.  And how Google is making us all stupid.  After all that we take a short nap before recommending our favourite links of the week.

On the panel this week are Dave Bartram, Donna Ballman and John Quirke.  And in the Ustream chatroom 7.30pm GMT we sang “Drop kick me Jesus through the Goal Posts of Life”… in harmony.  Next week we’re choosing a better song - join us.

Links mentioned in the show:-

Jonathan Yardley on the Washingtonpost.com…

Dana Jennings was born in the fall of 1957 to 17-year-old parents who had married only eight days earlier. “The first thing they bought of any consequence was a gray and white Sylvania record player” on which they listened to songs from “a squat glistering stack of 45 rpm records” and the two long-playing albums they owned: “Rock and Rollin’ with Fats Domino” and “Johnny Cash with His Hot and Blue Guitar.” These albums “became my nursery rhymes,” Jennings writes. To this day “the behind-the-beat rhythm and blues of Fats Domino and his Crescent City brethren still thrill me, but it was Johnny Cash who marked me for life. My Gothic hick childhood began with that record; Cash’s music steeled me for a dirt-poor world of tar-paper shacks, backwoods Grendels (my relations), and freight-train seduction.”

If you’re thinking this took place in Tennessee or Mississippi, think again. Jennings was born in rural New Hampshire and grew up in Kingston, a town of fewer than 1,000 residents. The local accent was Yankee cracker, but it was cracker all the same, and the music people listened to was played and sung by the likes of Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Acuff, Ferlin Husky, Loretta Lynn, Lefty Frizzell, the Carter Family, Bob Wills, Merle Haggard and the greatest of them all, Hank Williams. “The myth,” Jennings says, “is that country music is purely a white, rural, and Southern art,” whereas the reality is that “country musicians come from all over,” from California (Merle Haggard) to Nova Scotia (Hank Snow) and just about all stops in between. Country music of what Jennings accurately calls the “golden age of twang” isn’t about Dixie, though there’s plenty of Dixie in it. It’s about country.

Christine Rosen in The New Atlantis…

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence. “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.”

Dr. Edward Hallowell, a Massachusetts-based psychiatrist who specializes in the treatment of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder and has written a book with the self-explanatory title CrazyBusy, has been offering therapies to combat extreme multitasking for years; in his book he calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.” In a 2005 article, he described a new condition, “Attention Deficit Trait,” which he claims is rampant in the business world. ADT is “purely a response to the hyperkinetic environment in which we live,” writes Hallowell, and its hallmark symptoms mimic those of ADD. “Never in history has the human brain been asked to track so many data points,” Hallowell argues, and this challenge “can be controlled only by creatively engineering one’s environment and one’s emotional and physical health.” Limiting multitasking is essential.

Multitasking on Wikipedia

Nicholas Carr on The Atlantic.com…

“Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going-so far as I can tell-but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

How to Nap in the Boston Globe…

Recommended Links this week…

From Dave: The New York Times - What is the matter with the Modern Boy? An insightful article from 1916 about the psychology of boys which holds true today.

From Donna: Her own fabulous blog, The Write Report where she gathers links of all the news from the world of writing and publishing.  And Vulpes Libris - a collective of foxes who love to talk about books.

From John: Two excellent resources for research.  HM Prisons Website and an A-Z of all the breweries in Holland and all the best pubs in Amsterdam.

Tags: getting published, publishers