In Which We Write Letters: Stop SOPA

via

Anna here. This post is cross-posted at the feminist librarian.


Depending on your level of involvement in things internet-political and techy, you may or may not be aware of the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) now making its way through congress. Introduced by representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), this bill mandates widespread monitoring of internet activity and has the potential to cause the internets as we know them to be fundamentally altered as blogs and other social networking sites are shut down for supposed acts "piracy." You can read more about the act at the Organization for Transformative Works, TechCrunch, and the American Library Association. The letter Hanna and I sent to our representatives is heavily cribbed from the ALA talking points.

Find your U.S. Representative here. 

Find your U.S. Senators here.

---

18 December 2011

Dear Representative Capuano,

As librarians, bloggers, and registered voters in Allston, Massachusetts, we are writing to ask you to vote against the proposed Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), H.R. 3261.

This bill, if it becomes law, will cause a widespread “chilling effect” on use of the Internet for commerce, communication, and participation in democratic society. The bill strikes at copyright protections currently granted to libraries and educational institutions by creating the possibility of criminal persecution of institutions and institutional representatives. for online streaming and other use of online resources in library and classroom space. SOPA's requirements to monitor internet traffic violate free speech and privacy protections and may create new forms of government surveillance of private activities within and outside the United States. The predicted consequences of SOPA are far-reaching. If passed, the potential for new jobs, innovative new ventures, and economic growth will be stifled.

Citizen engagement in online spaces depends on the ability to share and discuss a wide variety of media content across multiple social networking and other Internet platforms. SOPA will effectively shut down the vibrant creativity and vital political discourse that has been made possible by the World Wide Web. On behalf of ourselves, our online community of bloggers, and our library patrons, we ask you to vote against H.R. 3261, and support alternative ways for protecting legitimate copyright interests online.

Sincerely,

Anna J. Cook & Hanna E. Clutterbuck

Bricks in the Wall

I don't normally write about politics or current events because, honestly, I sometimes don't keep up with my news feeds for days at a time and there are many other people on the Internetz who cover that role far better than I ever could. Why duplicate what you can't either replicate or improve on?

But the first thing I checked this morning was the Guardian's live news feed of riot coverage and I was checking last night's live feed until a few minutes before I went to bed last night and what the fuck, people.

The parallel that comes to mind for me, inevitably, is Ireland and Northern Ireland in particular (because I spent about 10 years studying the IRA and three years writing a master's thesis about nationalism and Bobby Sands). All I could think every time I read a news story coming out of England on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning was, "Now London knows what it feels like to be Belfast." And that's just awful.

Did we not see this happen in Belfast in the '70s often enough that we needed to rerun it for kicks in London in the '10s? David Cameron's statement from this morning is, like so much of what comes out of his mouth, Margaret Thatcher redux: We will put more police on the streets. We will arrest lots of people. We will speed up the criminal courts. We will protect the law-abiding. We will restore order.

Would you like to know how bad it can get while order is being restored? It can get pretty fucking bad. It can turn into a major fucking nightmare.If you'd like to know how bad it can get, google "Diplock courts" (non-jury courts with a single judge) and try reading some Tim Pat Coogan or Padraig O'Malley or Kevin J. Kelley on Ireland of the '60s and '70s (Coogan is probably the most readable but also the most biased of the three). If you'd prefer first person narratives, try Richard O'Rawe's Blanketmen. Young men and women were arrested, detained at Her Majesty's pleasure, and binned up sometimes for years at a time for nothing more meaningful than being on the wrong street at the wrong time. Or being in a group. Or being out at a pub. Or -- and this is my favorite -- having the wrong last name. That's a good one, isn't it?

Do we really need to do this all again to prove that it was a bad idea the first time? Let me say it the short way: Demonising People Is A Bad Idea. (It doesn't make a catchy acronym but you can't have everything.) All it does is make them demonise you right back. There are at least 225+ years of Irish history to make this point and lots and lots and lots of dead people along the way.

Violence meets violence and gets more violent. At the minute, it's smash and burn looting and, yes, that's awful; yes, it should stop; yes, anyone hurting someone else should be punished. But if you drop 16,000 police officers on the streets instead of 10,000, how will that help? More uniforms to resent, to be scared of, to hate, to be angry at because the young people in these communities -- and plenty of the older people, I imagine -- don't see them as protectors. They're the bad guys, the ones who come and break up your party, or take away your friends, or stop you on the street because you're the wrong color or wearing the wrong jacket or the wrong shoes or in the wrong place.

A whole generation of Irish young men -- no longer young now -- could explain precisely how this dance goes. It doesn't end with a pleasantly stolen midnight kiss. It ends with dead people and resentment being built into the next generation of historical narratives that define "us" against "them" and set the stage for the next go-round whenever the provocation occurs.

The terminology of battle is already being used in the reporting and the Tweeting and liveblogging coming out of the injured areas; the phrase "war zone" is being tossed around. Businesses are boarding up, shutting down, closing "for the day." Some terrible language is being tossed around about the rioters.

I don't think that this one set of events will turn London into a divided city or a city armed against itself (it already is that), but it could lead to some very, very nasty things. Using precedent as a guide, we could look at the "peace wall" in Belfast or the tradition of having a bowl of water and a towel in your front hall for anyone -- literally, anyone -- who had been tear-gassed by the armed forces (police or Army) and might need first aid.

The Met is to be commended for not having asked for more serious gear in the wake of must be three nightmarish nights; their admission that plastic bullets may be used tonight is not a confidence-inducing one. Plastic bullets kill people and more uniforms on the streets won't fix the problem; yes, it might sit on its head and squash it out of existence for the time being, long enough for Cameron to take the credit for having "restored order" and get out of office -- but it will only pop up again and again and again.

This is Thatcherism coming home to roost. This is 20+ years of willful blindness on the part of successive administrations to the real, live, angry problems out there.

There's a great short piece from Tariq Ali on the London Review blog this morning that makes all the points I want to make except better and in more measured English:

Why is it that the same areas always erupt first, whatever the cause? Pure accident? Might it have something to do with race and class and institutionalised poverty and the sheer grimness of everyday life? The coalition politicians (including new New Labour, who might well sign up to a national government if the recession continues apace) with their petrified ideologies can’t say that because all three parties are equally responsible for the crisis. They made the mess.

They privilege the wealthy. They let it be known that judges and magistrates should set an example by giving punitive sentences to protesters found with peashooters. They never seriously question why no policeman is ever prosecuted for the 1000-plus deaths in custody since 1990.

One of my friends referred to this blog post as being about my "disappointment." Surprisingly, I am disappointed. I am distressed and unhappy and I wish there was something more concrete I could do than sit here and write a blog post making elaborate historical parallels. So I'm going to take a lesson from Stephen Fry here; in response to the awfulness in England yesterday, he tweeted 10 charities in need of donations; here's the link to the #riotcleanup tag in Twitter and the Facebook group and a Wiki.

Rage Dump

enough yogic herbal hyper-empathy. he slaughtered us. orphaned little kids. who are we, really, to deny him his martyr's heaven? a win win.
We got the last true remaining monster of the 20th century - a gruesome slice of humanity - and bam! It's red vs blue again
To all news reports about Osama unarmed, not resisting, etc. I don't care if he was naked & tied to a chair, shoot the frakker. Thx Seals!

In case you're wondering, the preceeding are three tweets from folks I follow -- big shocker here -- on Twitter for whom I used to have considerably more respect.

I have deleted their names and any retweet information because I hope that one day at some point in the future, I will be able to forgive them for this. Maybe even forget that they did it.

I really didn't think that anything could lower my opinion of the mentality of the American public when acting as a group any lower than it already is but just like a good horror movie, as soon as you think you've killed the boogey-man -- bam! Back in your face.

And this has been an absolutely atrocious week for me -- I'll admit it. I either have the flu or the head cold from hell; I've missed all my hours at one job and all my hours but one day at the other. I have accomplished nothing except the filling of many Trader Joe's paper bags with used tissues, the consumption of a lot of tea or TJ's Yuzu citrus stuff, and a lot of cat-cuddling. I'm tired and achey and depressed and the good weather outside is really just making me want to close all the blinds and hide on the couch.

And there are street parties because a man was executed. I don't care what the mother-fucker did: in the end, we executed him. And what led up to it is a series of unpleasant activities culminating in the violation of another nation's sovereignty that I don't really want to think about right now because the stupidity and the shortsightedness and the viciousness and the lack of either foresight or historical hindsight make me dizzy with anger. I don't believe that can ever have been justified or right or even a reasoned act. This is sheer revenge-laden viciousness and the reaction is nauseating.

I'm not being very yogic or Buddhist about this right now. I did, in my fever-laden snooze this week, sometimes think I could write a post in that spirit.

But mostly I want to grab people who write things like these heaven-forsaken tweets above by the scruff of the neck and shake them until their fucking teeth rattle. This is not how you behave, people. This is behavior that rivals Fred Phelps for sheer disgust and, believe me, it is going to take many years of dedicated metta meditation before I could put Mr. Phelps in the appropriate category.

And that attitude on my part isn't helping.

So I'm going to go and brush my cat and help my girlfriend rearrange her books and drink some green tea and sweep my living room and try to get through my day as calmly and empathetically as I can.

Even if it means feeling compassion for people I would really rather see going down for the third time in the middle of the Charles.

Because I wouldn't. I don't want them to die; I didn't want him to die. I would like them to wake up magically tomorrow morning and think, "Oh, my God. What have I been doing? Did I go crazy? Well, enough of that -- lets go volunteer at an animal shelter." Or words to that effect. It would have been nice if the same thing had happened to bin Laden. It didn't and now it never can.

P.S. If you want more reasoned, thoughtful reactions to this, I suggest you check out thoughts on the death of a man or Ramblings on the death of Osama bin Laden.

random items

as you read this, i will (most likely) be at a new england historical association session in burlington, vt. i'm not presenting at this conference so my ego is safe; i just get to sit back, relax, and enjoy what everyone else has to say. and then cross my fingers and hope that the restaurants i remember as being good are still good so that anna and i don't have to wander around too much looking for somewhere to eat!

this is, of course, assuming that we get there at all -- i keep getting weather update alerts (from my mother, mostly) telling me about all the horrible things that are due to happen in the next 24-36 hours.

anyway, there are a few things i've got starred on my greader list that i wanted to put up here in case anyone else found them interesting, too.

hillary clinton was in belfast this past week. i haven't had time to go looking for any irish coverage of her talks, but there is some coverage from the guardian here. i've never been wildly impressed by hillary clinton, honestly; if a clinton had to continue to be involved in the government on an international level, i would've voted for her husband, but no-one asked me. in this case, i think her talk -- at least the excerpts i've seen -- sounded more condescending than friendly or helpful: "okay, kids, if you all learn to play together real nice, we'll give you some candy!" in this case, the candy being international investment by american corporations in northern ireland. just in case you can't get your own banks to fail on time, let the americans show you how to do it!

as a sidelight, there was also a report this morning of another car bomb in belfast. i doubt it has anything to do with clinton's visit, but there it is.

also this week was an "anniversary" of an attempt by the ira to bomb the grand hotel in brighton 25 years ago -- at the time, a political conference was being held there. if i remember rightly, the actual aim of the bomb was to kill margaret thatcher. no comment but anyway, they missed thatcher, killed four other people. the article here discusses the odd relationship that has built up between the ira bomber, patrick magee, and the daughter of one of the men killed as well as loosely commenting on the aftermath of the bombing itself. what gets me is the last sentence or two:

After all Patrick Magee couldn't bring himself to say sorry for the suffering he caused either.

"Pat, I find that quite hard," said Berry. She emerges as the bigger person.

my only thought on reading this the first time -- and i've read it several times since and i think it will find a home in the conclusion to my thesis -- was, 'well, no, of course he won't apologise. what did you expect?' if you're waiting for a hearts-and-flowers-style apology from a still-living ira paramilitary, complete with bended knee and hand on heart, i'd suggest you're going to be waiting a long damned time.

and this i saw this morning and couldn't quite believe: apparently a judge in louisiana totally missed the odd supreme court case or two in his legal training, like, say, "loving v. virginina." small details!

on a less political note, apparently vampires and zombies also reflect a "sexual divide" in mainstream culture. (and, while we're at it, does anyone want to have a stab at explaining what "post-scifi" might mean?)well, damn. apparently i don't like 28 days later and resident evil after all -- i actually like twilight. who knew! and i haven't even read/seen it. i've tried to put together a more reasonable comment on this article but i just can't. it makes me boggle -- i probably would have put this guy's book on the list to read had i not read this first. but, y'know, i have david wellington's 99 coffins on hand and, really, anyone who wants to snog one of his vampires needs their head examining. (and don't forget wellington's ongoing 30 [free] stories in 30 days at dailylit.com!)

if you're looking for a reason to make a list, i found this via imdb.com: what movies have you "rolled the dice" to see?

for those of you waiting with bated breath for the appearance of this ebooks blog i keep talking about, paper not included will be starting up sometime in the next few weeks; we're busily trying to work out stylesheet and other such-like formal issues on the discussion board.

i got sucked in by the "new books" shelves at the coolidge corner library the other day, so instead of walking out with two books which had been the plan (robert w. chambers's the king in yellow and patrick messert's literature of the occult which is less exciting than it sounds), i walked out with four, including dark places and prospero lost which has gorgeous cover art -- as well as a highly complimentary blurb from kage baker. i'm also looking forward to finishing wellington's 99 coffins this weekend and to the arrival of jonathan maberry's bad moon rising at the library so i can finish that series. more 5-cent book reviews in a few weeks!

and, as a final note, i offer this video clip (only the first 8 minutes of a longer show, sadly) from a charity "children in need" concert -- you've always wanted to see david tennant work a crowd, haven't you?

Doctor Who - A Celebration
Uploaded by frankzaatar. -

this can't be good

not the sort of thing i usually blog about but the guardian article covering why it has been gagged from reporting activities in parliament is quite funny from a kind of catch-22 perspective: i.e., not very funny at all really and i quote:

"Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found."

if a question is asked in the commons and nobody hears it, was it really asked?

the spectator has some good commentary on the whole issue over here and the guardian has some further coverage this morning. it seems that a question is being tabled in the commons about the question which can't be discussed. how's that going to go for a parliamentary debate?! are they going to have to refer to "Question X"? "The Question Which Must Not Be Named"?

edit: stephen fry is claiming victory via twittersphere but for whatever reason, the gag order is rescinded.

"i'm out of it for a little while and everyone gets delusions..."

okay, i really do have zero (0) time to be blogging this week because i have a draft of a thesis section due friday and the little fucker is just refusing to sit down and co-operate and be written.

but.

during my daily sifting of rss feeds and websites that i look at every morning, i caught this blogger's rant about the l.a. times and san diego comic con. and i thought, "gosh. what the hell can the l.a. times have done that's so bad? and comic con? aren't they pretty much niftyness on a stick?"

(and i have to admit i also thought, "wow, it's a bad week to be a newspaper ending in the word 'times', because the london times got forced to out some poor blogger from the lancashire police force and the judge in the case is affected with loony virus." possibly more deadly than h1n1. there's also a really good reaction to the case verdict back there at that link you just passed.)

anyway. not the point. ahem.

i clicked into the link, read it, and thought things, well, things that i won't write here because they are very profane and, as the internets might describe it, "nsfw." mostly i thought, "what the fuck? aren't we all over this now, children? why, oh, why are we going back to the dark days of the late '80s? i thought we were all over this 'girls only like scifi with hot guys in it' crap. aren't we? c'mon, guys -- aren't we?"

and so, because i like io9.com -- unlike ign.com which, after the absolutely insane contest they chose to co-sponsor can just "bite my shiny metal ass" -- i clicked into the link of their article.

after a few minutes spent in taking the glory of the quotes they chose to excerpt from the times, i swallowed about half my cup of coffee, hung grimly on to the second half, and clicked into the primary source as it were.

let me say first off that anywhere there are squealing twilight fans, i will not be. i haven't read the books; i haven't seen the movies; i plan to remedy neither of those defects. the fans scare me, honestly, and i feel i've heard and read quite enough about them; i'm not a ya librarian; and i have a long reading/viewing list already (which does include true blood, because it was recommended to me). even michael sheen, wonderful though he is, will not bring me to watch the new twilight movie.

there are 23 pages of this rubbish starting off with a long paragraph about all the male celebrities currently considered attractive who may -- or may not -- be present. it's set up like a slideshow: publicity photos -- for the most part -- captioned with little snippets by bloggers from sites like zap2it.com, and latimes.com. and just for the record, i have no desire to do jake gyllenhaal's laundry. none. at all. i assume he can either hire someone or buy a washing machine.

take, for example, this representative piece of text illustrating a still from the upcoming film version of the time-traveller's wife:

"Picture the wonderful sappiness of "The Notebook," replace Ryan Gosling with equally appealing Eric Bana, and inject a different hapless conflict to keep him from Rachel McAdams. In this case, Bana's character's got a gene that causes him to leap through time without the wife. Oh yes, bring on the bittersweet tears."

thank you for informing me neatly and succinctly that i should avoid this movie at all costs. when's 9 coming out again?

while i am pleased to see that alex o'loughlin found work post-moonlight and that sounds like a movie i will see, this

"What more do you need than the hunkiest Aussie to ever play the undead ... alive and in the flesh? And as long as he uses his real accent, he can talk all about this murder mystery set in Antarctica. Male lead Gabriel Macht isn't too shabby either."

really just doesn't sell it for me and i feel bad for o'loughlin being described in these terms. he's better than that and the review reduces him to his physique, much as the snippet on prince of persia and the one on benicio del toro in the wolfman reduces gyllenhaal and del toro to theirs. a shame in all cases since all three men deserve better.

i really got bogged down around slide 10 or so after i was told that the only reason i would go to see tim burton's new alice in wonderland was because johnny depp was in it. lovely photo to illustrate a totally moronic point. the photos which don't actually have the caption text suggesting the male actor in question will be mobbed like the beatles by female fans are for children's movies -- where the wild things are, toy story 3 -- which suggest that women will be interested in these either because they can take their kids or because they're fluffy, happy fun; or they're looking for a chicklit/flick-style experience with a witches of eastwick adaptation that sounds like charmed-redux. (if you miss charmed, go rent the dvds. better yet, watch early buffy. better yet, watch firefly, farscape, or torchwood. don't thank me; it's all part of the service.)

did it ever occur to anyone writing this rubbish to check with an actual female person who was actually going to the con and ask why she -- or they! find a group! make some friends! -- were actually going? i mean, i'm sure people -- of all genders, sexes, or personal convictions -- show up because jake gyllenhaal is hot or alex o'loughlin has a cute accent, but i'm equally sure that more people show up because they want to hear about the shows or the movies or the books or the comics. that being, y'know, the point of the thing.

the con didn't sell out because brad pitt might show up to push a quentin tarantino movie.

clearing out the irritations of a long day...

...by blogging. therapeutic, right? far better than plotting how to do damage to the town office of the miniscule town i went to high school in. demands for money should be both carefully timed and, ideally, not phrased as though the recipient is a blithering idiot and this one was neither of those things.

anyway, the amusing thing about this article, "in defense of distraction" by sam anderson is that i did have to follow the advice he gives in the first paragraph. i had, in fact, forgotten a brief but important email i had to send to a friend so i went and did it and then returned to read the rest of the article with, it has to be said, two interruptions to deal with other emails. which is fair, i think. i don't think the article covers anything particularly groundbreaking in terms of internet distraction -- or other kinds of distraction, for that matter -- but mr. anderson writes well and he makes some interesting points although i'm not sure if his conclusion is that great; it seems kind of like a cop-out to "the internet generation is just different. woooo." and it works as an interesting counterpoint to the bishop of paisley's outburst against twitter.

i sent jeremy clarkson's article about the honda insight to my mother because she and my father are talking about getting a new car. not that i seriously think they will buy a hybrid -- and if nothing else, the insight is far too low to work on our gravel road without getting the bottom torn out of it regularly -- but because clarkson writes excellent snark, describing the car as "Biblically terrible" at one point. this is quality snarking, guys.

i've watched the trailer for the road a couple of times now in the hopes that i will become more convinced. but it just isn't happening. the book is awesome; i read it in one sitting last summer after wandering across it in the bpl's immensely date-flexible "new fiction" section and thinking, "what the hell." great stuff -- really; but you should probably wait for a nice cheerful sunny day before you read it, make sure you have a kitten (or puppy, if your tastes swing that way) close to hand, and maybe some alcohol to go with it because it is not cheerful. not even a little bit. the closest thing to cheer that you can really find in it is that not quite everyone dies. although this is a pretty good thing, i have to say. anyway, just in case you haven't seen this video nineteen times already, i'm putting it here, too, just so i can consider it again later:



i was still tired enough before work this morning that, having arrived about half an hour early as usual (it's either that or be ten minutes late), when i wandered over to the guardian website to check out the uk headlines, the picture of john barrowman leading this article completely baffled me for a minute. now of course i'm linking the article because john barrowman is awesome and i'm marking time 'til torchwood season 3 but i also don't really dare check out much of the text of the article due to fear of spoilers. still, i don't doubt that any re-staging of la cage aux folles will be improved by his presence!

lastly, a dailyom post from a month or so back that i find helpful.

random linkness

i'm posting this article by victor keegan from the guardian largely because of the conversation we had in my preservation class the other day. the topic of the day was, theoretically, reformatting. really, most of the class was taken up with two things: microfilm and arguing about digitization. our professor is, somewhat unexpectedly, an absolute and total devotee of digitizing everything in sight because "that's what patrons expect."

i have to admit, i had to bite my tongue to keep from commenting, "well, they can expect it all they want."

our professor was bound and determined that everyone expected everything to be digital all the time and we should really face up to this fact and do--- something. i'm not quite sure what he wanted us to do -- even just in terms of the class -- but he definitely expected something.

one of the other students and i tried rather gingerly to point out that maybe the expectations for digital collections were different depending on what field you were in and what kind of work you were doing -- and that didn't get us very far, but it slowed him down a little. since he seemed to be basing a lot of his argument, at least for the day, on the fact that students pull the bulk of their sources from online databases and the like, i wasn't all that convinced. again a little tongue-biting was involved to keep from saying, "well, of course. we're lazy and busy and you let us get away with it. what do you expect? i would never think of trying to pull that for my history work. shall we have a discussion about differing expectations in differing fields?"

anyway, the actual article i wanted to post is this: victor keegan writing about e-readers for books. the picture alone makes it worthwhile to click in.

in the interests of tossing up a few more interesting things midweek, here's an article i haven't had time to read through fully about the new world digital library. which may seem ironic in light of my summary of class-time yesterday, but i'm okay with irony this morning. or perhaps just too tired to avoid it!

i also found roy foster's review of a new history of the 1916 easter rising. the new history looks quite interesting and i've added it to my goodreads list so, y'know, in eight months or a year or so, i'll remember to read it! but this review is also delightful because foster calmly and seriously uses the tardis as a metaphor for the dublin post office.

and a xan brooks article about re-viewing films. i recently tried to re-view a film i've never had much time for, silence of the lambs, and found i didn't have time for it for a variety of excellent reasons and gave up about 40 minutes in.

and, as an a/v treat although i have mostly already discussed this with my friends who i know are doctor who fans, the trailer for the first of the david tennant post-season 4 specials:



it aired in britain on saturday -- so far no sign of it on dvd, although i hope it will only be a matter of months!

history is a soap opera

because i know -- or strongly suspect -- that there are at least three excellent historians who happen to be female who glance at this blog now and then, i thought y'all might be interested in this link i saw on the guardian this morning. according to david starkey, women historians turn history into a soap opera. our work is substandard and we take emphasis off the real movers and shakers who are, clearly, powerful white men. i wish i were mocking his argument by making it sound stupider than it is but, sadly, i'm not.

honestly, the first thing i thought when i read this -- other than, "wow, he really is as much of a jerk as he sounds in his books" which i've never been able to read although i have tried -- was, "but, mr. starkey sir, history is often a soap opera all on its own. it needs no help from anyone of any gender." i mean, seriously. i spend about half to three-quarters of my time these days considering the situation of a bunch of incarcerated (for a wide variety of reasons spanning the range from murder to being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong name) 18-30 year old men who voluntarily gave up washing, clothes, and, a few of them, eating in order to prove a point. to prove a point. and they kept at it even when it was blindingly obvious to the passing idiot on the street that they wouldn't win! there was no hope in hell of them winning! but they did it anyway! you cannot make shit like this up!

and, really, any historian of tudor england has no room to argue about soap operas. whether you centre-stage henry or his wives, the whole thing is just one great big proto-episode of coronation street. personally, i think part of starkey's miff comes from the fact that he pouted loudly and publicly about the lack of historical accuracy of the tudors and nobody cared.

he had some good points. the screenwriters combined characters, compressed time, simplified events, simplified character -- all on a fairly minor level but enough to be a bit disconcerting if you suddenly realise that three different people have suddenly become the same person. or even if you happen to think that anyone who really behaved with the complete lack of political know-how thomas more (jeremy northam) displays in the series would have been lucky to survive a fortnight, let alone years. but the bones of the events are there and, given the nature of the televisual universe, i think starkey's pet subject got off lightly. would he have been happier had it gotten the deadwood treatment? more historically accurate, yes; probably fewer sales for his books, though, which did get a contact "high" off the series, as did several other well-known tudor historians, at least one of whom is (gasp!) female. (gosh. what will we do.) in any case, not so many people are going to rush out to buy pop histories -- which are what he writes, lets face it, and rather argumentatively in my opinion -- having been shown henry unshaven, rarely washed, rarely in court dress, aggressive, acquisitive, egotistic, self-centred, in a grubby, ill-lit, rubbish-filled castle populated largely by people who look about ten times worse than he does.

but, if nothing else, at this point in time, quibbles about female historians and the "damage" we do to "real" history are ridiculous. i don't think anyone's arguing seriously that henry is unimportant or that work on him is being hurt by work done on his wives -- or on more or suffolk or anyone else in his court. how can you really seriously set your face against a broader reconstruction of events? and it isn't like any of this is taking his job away from him -- i'm pretty sure that, unfortunately enough, his reputation and his ability to do multi-part bbc documentaries more or less on demand is pretty solid. 

"remember the atrocity committed against us before which forgives the atrocity we are about to commit today! hurray!"

so interestingly enough i was thinking the other day about writing a post about the use of emotive language in the writing of irish history. specifically i've noticed that historians -- and i'm using this term to cover, as you might say, a multitude of sins from memoirists to journalists to professional academics to passing people who just thought, "what the hell - i can write about that!" -- tend to use the phrase "shot dead" rather than "killed," "murdered," or simply "shot."

and then look at this! a splinter group of the ira -- the actual original ira must be so long gone now -- goes and proves my point: two soldiers killed at antrim army base. "shot dead." right there. guardian coverage. while they were accepting a pizza delivery. and two of the delivery guys got shot, too, but not killed. (at least last i knew -- no-one seems to be too bothered about them.)

anyway, this isn't the post about that because i haven't really finished thinking about it yet. this is more of a post to comment on the fact that, suddenly, there's present-day coverage of my thesis topic.

most of the news commentators i've read have been saying things like, "but it's been so quiet here -- what the hell!" (except -- you know -- in more formal language than that.) even ian paisley's son has made a comment to that effect -- which is really odd, because i was expecting him to come out fulminating the same old orange rubbish that his dad spouts at every opportunity and, so far, he's been remarkably restrained. points to him. 

really what all this "but it's been so quiet!" translates to for me at this point is that something has been bubbling away quietly for at least the past, oh, say, fifteen years? and everyone's been ignoring it or hoping it would go away. which is probably true. what they're now calling "dissident" republicans -- the guys who used to just be "gunmen," "provies," "provos," or, occasionally, "terrorists" or "guerrillas" back in the day -- were never happy with the truces that were called in the '80s or '90s. they were never happy with the good friday peace agreement. they fought the international observers in the late '90s -- not literally, admittedly, but still. they dug in their heels when it came to dumping arms. and one of these groups, the real ira who has claimed the shooting deaths of the two soldiers, were the ones who bombed the bus in omagh in 1998. frankly, i'm still surprised that more people haven't tried to kill martin mcguinness or gerry adams as traitors to the cause. my guess would be that, despite their protestations to the contrary, they both still know enough names and enough doors to knock on to keep themselves from a messy death.

in any case, the present little explosion seems to have been tipped off, or at least immediately predated, by the announcement that the british military would be sending in undercover forces to northern ireland. most people saw this as an admission that there was something going seriously wrong somewhere and "conventional" forces weren't enough to get at it. martin mcguinness almost immediately put out a press release to say he thought it was a bad idea (i can't track down this article any more; if anyone sees it around, would you please send me a link?); i agree. if nothing else, if you're going to do it, don't fucking make an international announcement about it. how many policemen do you want shot? do you still think the irish can't read?

and this morning -- i've begun checking my news feeds with more trepidation than i've felt for a long time -- there was a bbc report of a policeman was shot and killed while responding to a call for help. who wants to sign up for the force, kids! being a cop in northern ireland has to be one of the top 10 worst jobs you can get in the u.k. 

the really fun thing is that all the rhetoric being used by the politicians commenting on the events -- from the head of the police force, sir hugh orde, to gordon brown, to gerry adams and ian paisley -- would sound totally familiar to any irish nationalist from the 1890s: these are the actions of a dissident group; they don't represent the feelings of the majority; we must respect the feelings of the population... this must sound dishearteningly familiar to anyone who lived in northern ireland, or even passed through it and read a newspaper, between 1969 and 1990. this isn't a new response; despite claims to the contrary, this is the same old response trotted out yet again. lets see if it works this time!

(the subject line, by the way, is poorly quoted from memory from a terry pratchett discworld novel. it's a line he uses more than once. i think i might be cribbing it this time from... jingo maybe? or possibly fifth elephant.)

the definition of irony

the first time i saw this headline, i thought, "oh, how nice. darnton's standing up for freedom of access. go him."

and then i went away.

and i thought about it.

and i thought, "gosh. how many times have i been in widener and thought--- wait. i've been in widener once. to pick up photocopies. for my professor. and i needed two forms of i.d. to get into the basement. they almost never do ill. they don't do consortia (that i know of). they barely do the neighborly thing of letting faculty of other colleges use their collections (unless you're some hot shit like niall ferguson or simon schama in which case they'll be all over you). you practically have to run over broken glass (and make some friendly faculty member at your own institution do it, too) to get six days a year of access as a graduate student. possibly they should look to their own access issues before bitching about other people's."

(i should note here that my quibbles with the harvard library system are largely with widener and their absolutely ridiculous access policies. the harvard special collections and archives are more than charming -- nice librarians, beautiful facilities, great collections, and, if you go to houghton on friday morning, they give you coffee and scones!)

where's beth when you need her?

i have to say, i'm disappointed in the u.k. this morning. the home office has denied entry into the country to, as the guardian describes him, a "far-right dutch mp" who was coming to london to be present at the house of lords screening of a short film he has made. he came to england before, last fall, but this time the home office feels he will be a threat to "community harmony" (what a phrase) and has banned him. after he touched down in heathrow, no less.

the film is probably horrible; it sounds it. apparently geert feels the koran is a "fascist" book and is responsible for all sorts of nasty things and has made the film to prove his point. 17 minutes of anti-islamic drivel sounds like the kindest description anyone could give of it. but.

bouncing him out of the country -- especially after letting him land -- seems like an awful idea. geert has said that the u.k. government look like cowards for banning him and, while i don't think they look quite that bad, they certainly look slightly orwellian. where was the home office's concern for "community harmony" during the last round of race riots in the north? or when that young brazilian electrian was shot in the tube? i think any sane person would have to be aware that mainland britain -- to say nothing of northern ireland or the republic although i could -- is not one big happy multiracial family. they're better than they were, but this just looks as though they put the appearance of being united before the actuality which is a poor idea. (as a note, the peer responsible for the invitation in the first place said that the screening would go ahead anyway. so, really, this whole thing seems a bit pointless. i don't think even the house of lords are, to a man/woman, daft enough to take this seriously. i mean, mosley's not in the lords, is he?)

there. i'm done now.

and for something far cooler looking, have a flip through michael bosanko's slide show. his light paintings involve the use of a torch and a digital camera set on long exposure (and various bits of wales).

something nice for the end of the week

there's nothing like job security: library loans on the rise in the u.s., although technically this article says nothing about visits to archives being on the rise so maybe it's an even 50/50 "win some/lose some" situation!

i like the little chunk of obama's ala speech, too, although i think at this point in time pretty much any news article on anything at all has to feature some kind of quotation from some speech he's made, preferably within the last six months, full points if it's from the inauguration. seriously. i read articles yesterday about britain's public school system and they quoted obama. it wasn't quite entirely irrelevant, but it was really close! i can only assume there was some editor somewhere in london leaning over his desk, saying, "people love this guy! quote him! it'll get the hits up! we have to keep our stats higher than the sun!"

oh, and if you really have nothing at all to do this weekend and an aching desire to make that "to read" list enormous, check this out: the guardian's 1000 novels project. i'm not exactly certain how they've picked the novels in question but somehow or other they have divined a list of 1000 novels -- divided neatly by genre -- that they feel should be common knowledge. i don't know if the list addresses issues like non-english novels, novels in translation, etc., etc. the main page just says:

"Over seven days our writers recommend the best books to read about crime, war, fantasy, travel, science fiction, family and love. Don't agree with their choices? Series editor Philip Oltermann will be blogging on Saturday; come back and tell him why not."

i haven't spent a lot of time here 'cause, well, i had other things to do this week like go to work and sleep, but the lists look interesting if nothing else -- always good for a "but, hey, what about---" moment.

wtf

okay, it's really early (for a holiday monday, 8.30 is early!) and i know i don't deal well when it's early, but i just saw this on neil gaiman's twitter feed and he has it referenced as "This Is A Wrong Thing." right now, i can't come up with any better commentary on it other than it seems like the kind of thing that starts out from totally the right motives -- keep kids healthy -- and ends up doing something entirely lunatic -- removing books from libraries: new law could keep books off shelves.

i tried to find anything on this at the ala website but as of...8.55 a.m., the website was really very busted. i'll try again later.

saturday morning again

miraculous how it just keeps comin' round, huh?

sir john mortimer, the writer of rumpole, summer's lease, the titmuss novels, journey round my father, and, not last or least, the original screen adaptation of brideshead revisited (jeremy irons, anthony andrews, nicholas grace, laurence olivier, etc., etc.) died this week. i can't help feeling it's a little ridiculous to feel sad over the death of someone i've never met but, on the other hand, i also can't help feeling that a certain voice of sanity has left england as well as an excellent writer. if you haven't read any of the above -- or, in the case of brideshead, summer's lease, or rumpole -- seen them, i suggest an addition to the ol' netflix queue and library list.

librarians -- or archivists -- rarely get to lay the smackdown. only in the movies do we generally get to tote around weapons of mass destruction (in the form of books, of course), swing through forests, or try to track down demons; mostly in the real world we even try not to shush people too much. i think this is all to the good, but, on the other hand, i can't help getting a real sense of satisfaction out of the verdict in the trial of farhad hakimzadah in london.

the first headlines i saw on this story were from last november's guardian. approximately 150 rare and/or unique books in the british library's collection had been vandalized -- pages sliced out, maps missing, etc. -- over the space of a few years. the librarians worked with the police -- and their own reading room records and the like (use statistics to fight crime!) -- to figure out what was going on and tracked the entire problem down to hakimzadah. lord love the british, they immediately took him to court for it for vandalism and, basically, irreparable damage to international cultural heritage items. if you click through into the story above, there's a partial list of some of the volumes he went through and some of them are just heartbreaking -- and they can never be the same again. even with the sliced-out maps, pages, indices, whatever returned, the books can't be fixed to be the same. the informational value will be the same -- for the books that had all their missing parts found and if those missing parts are still undamaged, legible, etc. and i don't know whether they did find all the missing pages -- but the experience of using them will never be the same for any researcher after hakimzadah.

within the last two days, the trial has concluded and the verdict handed down -- the library gets to claim about three hundred thousand pounds in damages (plus the return of the items, obviously) and hakimzadah goes to jail for two years -- plus paying legal costs, restitution, so on and so forth. (the two links above are to two very similar stories, by the way; i just included them both for the sake of completion.) apparently, hakimzadah pleaded that he had a psychological "compulsion" to steal from the library to perfect his own personal collection. apparently hakimzadah had also stolen from the bodleian (which has to be pretty pissed it didn't notice what was going on -- i see no note of whether their items are returned or paid for) and previously from the royal asiatic society which let him off if he paid for the mutilated and lost items.

now, hakimzadah, as far as i can see, has absolutely no excuse for what he did. he was a topline academic, access to research collections across the world for basically anything he might need to get his hands on outside, maybe, of the vatican archives which i hear are a pain to get into. he had money to buy more or less anything he wanted for his own collection which was, so the article said, the fourth best in his field in the world.

so we don't really get to play with the book of the dead, or the language of the birds, or the nine gates of the kingdom of shadows (which is okay by me!), but do not mess with our stuff.