etc.

“… the military don’t burn books any more: they sell them to the paper manufacturers. The paper companies shred them, pulp them and put them back on the market for consumption. It is not true that Marx, Freud or Piaget are unavailable to the public. In book form they are not. But they are in the form of serviettes.”

-Eduardo Galeano

There has been a lot of peace/anti-war sentiment on the campus I work at over the past few months. And, in keeping with the general campus tradition of creating media that can be both sensitive and hard-hitting, there have been a number of displays, posters, stickers, and banners that have caught my eye. A lot of the material I’ve seen has been poignant, astute and creative, yet due to its ephemeral nature has such a limited lifespan, so I started collecting what I could and I now have a formidable pile of pamphlets, posters, stickers and such. So I’ve decided that this pile will become a small archive. If similar media on a campus near you has caught your attention, feel free to contribute to the archive by sending the images my way. I will also be photographing the stuff that won’t fit onto my flatbed (displays, banners, etc.), so photographs are OK too.

Note: Your submission should be small enough to view on an average monitor with minimal scrolling. I’m not restricting pixels, but if I have to edit the dimensions of any submission, I’m reserving the right to do so. Thanks.

31.03.03 update: Ever since I started collecting leaflets on campus, I’ve been preoccupied with the leaflets that are being dropped over Iraq and how much I’d love to get my hands on a couple of those (for purely archival purposes). Well I haven’t quite managed to get my hands on any, but I have been feasting my eyes on these.

• One of the neat things about working in a library is that you get first right of refusal on withdrawals. Last summer I scooped up a few travel guides (all 2001s!) and today I am going home with a sweet little volume called Driff’s Guide to All the Secondhand and Antiquarian Bookshops in Britain. A 1984 imprint, but still.
• If you have contributed to or simply enjoyed the Mirror Project in the past, consider a donation to help with operating costs that threaten to pull them under.
• I was all excited about Where is Raed? when I first saw it on Tuesday [via Textism]: the lucidity of the commentary, the immediacy of the reporting, the historical value of it all, the notion that it is a primary narrative that should be preserved (I hope those archives are there to stay). But when I went home and told Michael about it, his reaction was less enthusiastic than mine. He’s a skeptic on a good day and a cynic on a bad one, and that is by no means a criticism. He said: “how do you know he’s in Baghdad? How do you know what his motivations are?” Others have considered this too. Why didn’t I? It’s almost like I believe in an unwritten code of honesty among bloggers (to a reasonable degree), even though I’m suitably critical about everything else I read, online or not. Still, I have no evidence that his motivations are disreputable, so I’m going to keep reading for now.
• Conservative politics in Canada angers me for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is attitudes like this. In the interest of civility, I should probably wait at least one hour before writing that letter.

I was surprised at how much of this book had to do with business and products and selling stuff. I went in thinking it was more about the life cycle of an idea, which it sort of deals with, but Gladwell certainly does use a lot of corporate examples. The tipping point is “that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behaviour crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire” and Gladwell does a great job of guiding the reader through the process from cradle to grave, literally and figuratively. He first became interested in the concept when he was covering the AIDS epidemic for the Washington Post, when he became intrigued with the work of epidemiologists and the way they regarded that point in time when an epidemic reaches critical mass, which in epidemiology, is called “the tipping point” (AIDS “tipped” in 1982). It’s an interesting concept and Gladwell provides a really thorough treatment of it, although I appreciated his elucidation on the cultural/sociological cases and occurences more than the product/consumer ones.

published 1995, read 18.03.03
This is a collection of papers given at a symposium in Essen, Germany in 1995. Given that date, it is one of the earlier publications that explores the impact of the Internet on librarianship and the volume positively buzzes with many of the catchwords of the time, when librarians were becoming nervously excited about being called “information engineers” or “information architects” and of course, “cybrarians”. The excitement of the paradigm shift that was taking place at the time, and the impact of that shift on your average librarian is very evident in this book, and it made me think about whether those expectations have panned out or not. Still, I’m glad I read it because a lot of the papers are still very current, a few of the questions raised have yet to be addressed, and an ongoing dialogue would be fruitful for these I think. One in particular about technology failing the profession and librarians failing librarianship was particularly provocative, even though I didn’t agree with all of it. In the final analysis, this book provides an interesting look at some of the early thinking on how the whole information explosion would impact the work of information professionals.

They tell me that lost comments will be restored through an imminent “resync”, and I’m still tinkering with my end of the server, the painful loading time is less consistent, but still problematic. I’m moving to LISHost in April because my current host continues to piss me off on a frighteningly regular basis. Their cheap, cheap, cheap hosting rate was the reason I decided to go with them in the first place, and at the time you could access their support via a clunky but fast online console. But they’ve changed all that and for all intents and purposes you can only get in touch with them through email now, with no response time guaranteed unless you pay for premium support. Bad business anyone? I’d be happy to pay more for less if it came to that (I’ll actually be getting a lot more for a little bit more at LISHost) if it means dealing with a person with a conscience. I can be infintitely more patient and accomodating with real people than with big faceless corporations that have, you know, zero accountability.

The snow is melting furiously, which is good but not great, especially if you live below ground in a 93 year-old house. In the past we’ve had floods in the furnace room (across from us), in the laundry room (adjacent to us), on the landing (outside our door), and only one minor leak in our actual living space which happened during the thaw of April 2001, the month we moved in, when Michael came home to a fearless puddle of unknown origin on our sisal rug. Unknown because it seemed to have seeped in from below, not through any discernible fissures or crevices even though we have plenty of fissures and crevices we could have blamed it on. However, nothing since and for this we’re thankful, but still wary.

Entirely unrelated but clever is this.

Things have been running painfully slow around here over the past few days. And Haloscan is tweaking their server again. And some comments seem to have disappeared. So all is not well at the me pages right now, nor will it be for a day or two. I’m investigating.

The only interesting thing about this book is the cover because human anatomy is very cool. The rest of the book is less interesting. It’s about a delinquent called Victor Mancini, and Victor is sort of stuck supporting his mother, also a delinquent, who lives in an old-age home that costs Victors thousands of dollars a month. So Victor has figured out a surefire scam to get random strangers to give him money: he goes to restaurants, chokes on a bit of food, gets saved by someone who, as a result of being his saviour, feels a certain responsibility for him (which is an interesting sociological comment) and sends him cards and more importantly, cash. And the delinquency doesn’t stop there, Victor is also a nymphomaniac who gets all of his action at sexual addiction recovery workshops. This is the first Palahniuk book I’ve read, but I get the impression that all his characters are on the fringe (I did see Fight Club), and that he enjoys getting into the savage, grisly details of these characters. And I would be fine with that; I enjoy fringe types, I have no problem with grisly details, and sexual deviance doesn’t offend me. I just found this book boring.