I’m very thankful that the internet exists. I was searching for literary essays and/or criticisms on John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse in preparation for writing a independent reading project paper for AP English. I first tried a dry search in Google and found those typical ‘plagerize-me’ essay sites which were of no help to me. But ah, I exclaim, Google just came out with their scholar journal search function, and so I trudged over for a search: nothing revelant.
But of course, I was far from defeated because, you see, I had an important trump card: a VPN through Carnegie Mellon University :). Yes, that’s true. Before my account at CMU expired, I created a VPN that, as I suspected, did not expire. Eh? What is a VPN? You ask. Well, I answer: A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. Essentially, it allows your computer to become part of a network through the internet without actually being physically wired (routers, hubs, ethernet cables) to the network. In other words, your computer that is connected to the network via VPN has an IP address from that network.
Why is this great? You ask. Well, many universities and colleges buy subscriptions to journals through their IP block. Therefore, if you are accessing the journals on the campus transparently without a login, but once you are off campus, the journals cost money to read. In fact, articles usually cost around $20 each!
So I went literature journal searching. I initially used Project MUSE for searching since it seems to have the largest collection of modern literature journals. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any revelant articles despite running many searches. I was a bit disappointed here and a little concerned. Lost in the Funhouse is supposedly wided used in college so I expected many essays about it.
Finally, I came across JSTOR which in its huge archives was able to pull up 4 good critical essays about LITF. Four clicks. Four PDFs. Life is good.
At that point, I had this horrible vision where the internet didn’t exist and I had to spend about two whole days running between and inside libraries to search through hundreds of journals for mentions of LITF. Very, very scary.
Thank you JSTOR! I love VPNing, I can access tons of scientific journals too :).
8 Comments
Ah, the joys of having a father who works at a university with a decent research library. I now have a whole stack of books with articles on Slaughterhouse 5.
I just finished one-third of my book, Catch-22, and I am loving it. I am just intimidated by the paper that we have to write. Anyways, happy holidays Mike, hope you had a good Thanksgiving.
Aw, Catch-22. I was going to read that but Steph stole it from me. So now I’m reading a postmodernist book which I can barely understand. Thanks Felix, and I hope you had a good Thanksgiving.
Catch-22 is really boring. I’m reading it in my spare time (”what’s that?!” asks Mike) and I totally can’t get into it. I’m in chapter 2 or something, and I can’t even remember which character is which. Blah.
I wish I could understand your post, Mike, but there are a zillion abbreviations ^^;
Ack, sorry, double post…
Lol, don’t worry, double posts are removed with the click of a button.
If someone double posted on my site, I would ban him or her.
jk