Real Unreal and Realer etc.

It's not clear that ejournals are cheaper or ebooks for that matter.  While 
the open source journal is finding its place,  the traditional journal 
publishers still maintain a lock down on refereed  activities particularly 
in the sciences.  The pricing for these e-publications is more expensive 
for larger institutions than the paper.  (Another way to look at that is to 
say the larger places had an advantage in the past times paper 
medium.)  The costing tends to be made in terms of head count for 
e-materials. Even with consortiums larger places find library budgets 
strained with e-costs.  I am told that the situation of "free access" is 
precarious with corporate control of information ever looming.  I for one 
don't believe that Google's or MS's digitalization plans for out of and in 
copyright materials include free access.  Launch a browser now from a 
non-unversity server and see how far you get with many of the academic sources.

Anyway it would seem that Poundians and McLuhanians might converge on the 
goal of down with the dialectic and up with the ideogramic.

" The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram 
principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18th Century. 
The 18th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy — 
the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB 
relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to 
deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A."

McLuhan to Pound Dec., 1948


At 01:33 PM 11/20/2006 -0600, you wrote:
>Carrol:
>I agree, I agree! And Pound deserved every dime he got from royalties
>while alive. It's the mortmain effect I quarrel with. Tom
>
>On Nov 20, 2006, at 1:16 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>Tom White wrote:
>>>
>>>Have to a little object to Professors Kibler's implication that an
>>>ejournal is not real. I fear it's realer than a paper one, because it
>>>at once comes under the omniverous maw of Google etc. and is
>>>retrievable at will all over the world, it appears without fee.
>>>Imagine how long it would have taken me, if all there were today were
>>>paper journals, to read (note: FREE) Peter Dale Scott's extraordinary
>>>history poem, "A Ballad of Drugs and 9/11." I just googled for
>>>"flashpoint Scott" and got 300,000 hits; Peter's poem in flashpoint
>>>was at the top of the first page. Woweee. Tom White
>>
>>What is "real" depends to some extent on context. I'm retired and can
>>afford to agree with Tom here. But I can imagine that for an untenured
>>assistant professor (perhaps with a couple of kids already) "real"
>>would
>>mean whatever gave him/her a chance to survive!
>>
>>Carrol