Musing's musings

So many books, so little time

It's no surprise to my regular readers that I love books. Kind of an occupational hazard for anybody in any of my fields of study, though I had the addiction long before I got to school.

So I was pleased to find this meme over at Andrea's. It's a list of books that users of Library Thing most frequently mark as "unread." (And methinks I may have to check out Library Thing sometime when I have some time. The idea of being able to get my library cataloged and have a record of it stored someplace where it could be retrieved in case of disaster is appealing.)

You play this game by putting titles that you've read in boldface, underlining the ones you had to read in school, and italicizing books you've started but haven't finished. Put an asterisk (*) beside books you liked and would read again (or have already) or would recommend to others. Follow me below the fold for my list.

Another book meme

Via Brian at Incertus, another book meme. Here's how it works:

• look up page 123 in the nearest book
• look for the fifth sentence
• then post the three sentences that follow that fifth sentence on page 123.

Well, the nearest book would be the one I had in my hand when I read Brian's post, which is Christopher Leslie Brown's Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). Page 123, which I had just read perhaps 15 minutes before I stumbled across this meme, comes from Chapter 2, titled "The Politics of Slavery." Here are the requisite sentences:

"[quoting Edmund Burke]...Freedom to them is not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and privilege." "In such a people," he concluded, "the haughtiness of domination combines with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible."

Because the prevalence of slave ownership distinguished the American colonies from the British Isles and because slave ownership seemed to explain why some North American colonists were inclined to reject imperial authority, slaveowners received particular abuse from those British commentators unhappy about the emerging divide between American rebels and the British government.

Cry havoc!

OK, we can skip the part about letting slip the dogs of war. But do get out your pens and stationery, or fire up your e-mail clients. It's time to make some noise!

Here's why. The Hedgemony has just presented Congress with a ginormous, bloated budget request for Fiscal Year 2009. The bottom line? Three point one terabucks, or $3.1 trillion (with a "t"). It's loaded down with all the usual Bu$hevik specials: tax cuts for the hyper-wealthy, corporate welfare galore, weapons systems that even the Pentagon doesn't want or know what to do with, and all the usual boondoggles.

Apparently stricken with a fit of conscience (or something) over all the red ink his budget contains (to the tune of about $400 billion in deficit spending--and that's before we put the soaring costs of Bush's wars into the mix, by the way, so effectively double that), the Boy Who's Almost Done Being King has announced his intention to slash or eliminate funding for 151 federal programs. About a third of those programs are educational in nature. (That sound you just heard was caused by irony meters around the world wrapping their needles around their pins as they went off the scale at the thought of a man who could famously inquire, during his first presidential campaign, "Is our children learning?" deciding to cut funding for education.)

One of the programs targeted for elimination is the Inexpensive Book Distribution Program, an initiative of Reading is FUNdamental. For a paltry $25.5 million a year, the book distribution program gives out 16 million books a year to nearly 5 million children and their families around the country, in an attempt to encourage them to read. In a world where fewer and fewer adults ever crack another book after they finish their education, I'd say anything we can do to put books in the hands of kids who want to read them is a good thing. And at a cost of about a buck and a half per book, it's cheap at ten times the price.

I'm old enough to remember when RIF got started back in 1975. I didn't need their services growing up, but that doesn't mean I don't think they're vital. As a librarian and bibliophile, as an educator and an educated man with a personal library of more than 2,000 volumes, and as an American citizen, every bone in my body cries out at this outrageous action. RIF has been continuously funded by every president since Tricky Dicky, and now our "edumacashun" president and the husband of an "ex-librarian" wants to end it, just so his buddies in the boardrooms don't have to forego one latte a week.

So let's get on the horn, folks. Tell your friends and family. Tell your congress-critters (RIF has an action site up if you want some help). Tell your blogging buddies. And let's get those funds put back in the budget, pronto.

(Hat-tip to GoldnI.)

No wonder they can't catch terrorists

Apparently they're too busy looking for reading tips:

The U.S. government is collecting electronic records on the travel habits of millions of Americans who fly, drive or take cruises abroad, retaining data on the persons with whom they travel or plan to stay, the personal items they carry during their journeys, and even the books that travelers have carried, according to documents obtained by a group of civil liberties advocates and statements by government officials.

The personal travel records are meant to be stored for as long as 15 years, as part of the Department of Homeland Security's effort to assess the security threat posed by all travelers entering the country. Officials say the records, which are analyzed by the department's Automated Targeting System, help border officials distinguish potential terrorists from innocent people entering the country.

The book thing is what seems to have been getting the most attention around the blogosphere, but I think the rest of the article is far more important. For one thing, having been through quite a few airports (and a couple of customs barriers) in the past year, I frankly doubt that federal agents have either the time or the resources to paw through people's luggage on any kind of a regular basis. Unless they're actually riffling through checked baggage before they allow it to be loaded, they'd have no way of knowing what books most travelers are carrying, as books are transparent to X-rays. (I know: I've carried quite a few of them through quite a few TSA checkpoints.)

Plus, air travel reached record levels this summer, rebounding after several years of decreased volume in the aftermath of the Day That Changed Everything^TM. Airlines, airports, and the TSA itself, on the other hand, either seem not to have noticed the ever-growing flood of people pouring in to avail themselves of their services, or really don't care anymore--because staffing levels have either declined or, at best, remained steady. It already takes a good 25-30 minutes, in my experience, to make it through the security lines at most airports. Taking the time to riffle through everyone's carry-on luggage to look at what sorts of "subversive" materials they might be carrying would effectively double or triple that wait time--and probably quintuple the number of complaints received about the holdups.

It's no skin off my nose if TSA want to see what I'm reading. Chances are good that they wouldn't even understand the titles of a lot of what I carry through airports, since it tends to be academic tomes--and often in foreign languages. I draw the line, however, at suggesting that what someone reads is any real indication of his or her inclination toward terrorism or the overthrow of the U.S. government.

For example, I know a member of our faculty who researches the effects of psychotropic drugs. In his hands, a "book on marijuana," such as the one referenced in the WaPo story linked to above, might mean nothing more than the routine conduct of his academic research. In the same way, I regularly buy, check out of libraries, and carry around with me, books on ethnic cleansing, genocide, fascism, Nazism, and authoritarianism: because I'm an historian, and these are some of the things I study in depth. Doesn't mean I'm planning to emulate anything that I read about.

In fact, when you get right down to it, nobody in her right mind would ever expect such a data-collection enterprise to turn up a real terrorist, unless the terrorist in question were truly stupid--and those are the ones we don't have to worry about. The ones we want the TSA and Homeland Security to catch are the smart ones, the ones that actually have a chance of carrying out their plans. But they are too smart to be caught walking through an airport security check, or crossing an international border, with anything that might potentially reveal their intentions. It would be wonderful if all terrorists were required by some obscure bylaw to carry with them at all times a copy of Terrorism for Dummies (conveniently in English, of course, the better to catch the attention of our sniveling servants who can barely manage to be coherent in one language, let alone two or three)--but that will never happen.

Meanwhile, as they attempt to keep track of People Who Might Cause Them Trouble, our government is quite likely to be missing the people they really ought to be watching. And of course, in order to piece together just who might be likely to give them trouble, the government has to collect far more data than it would like for us to know about, to keep it for far longer than they've promised they would, and to look at it and manipulate it in ways they promised they wouldn't. This should surprise no one--and outrage everyone.

Funny, this doesn't look like the Opernplatz

Let this be a lesson to you, Messrs. Bush, Bennett, Falwell, Dobson, Robertson, Frist, Hastert, et aliae. This is the kind of thing that happens when you insist on demonizing people who are gay and lesbian as second-class citizens and less-than-fully human beings:

Chicago police are investigating a fire in a Chicago Public Library branch on the North Side that damaged about 100 books, most of them in the gay and lesbian collection.

According to library staff, around 90 books of the approximately 1,000 in the branch library's gay and lesbian collection were damaged in the fire, as were about 10 books from the African-American history collection. The damaged materials will be replaced, which puts the city of Chicago at least one step ahead of this crowd from 60-odd years ago:

(Image courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration. Photograph #68984.)

That's not the picture I wanted, but it shows the same event: the burning of "un-German" books in the Opernplatz in Berlin on 10 May, 1933. Among the books tossed on the bonfire that evening were the entire research collection of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (Institute for the Study of Sexuality), the first-ever collection of books and materials devoted primarily to homosexuality.

Perhaps those in power who are inclined to make political hay out of the denigration of their fellow Americans who just happen to be gay or lesbian should be reminded of what Heinrich Heine wrote in 1821, words that ring just as true today, nearly a century and a half later:

Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.

Wherever they burn books, they'll end up burning people as well.

--Heinrich Heine, Almansor

Then there's also this quote, from someone those allegedly fine and upstanding Republican men I named earlier all claim to revere:

καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐρεῖ αὐτοῖς· ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐφ' ὅσον ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων, ἐμοι ἐποιήσατε.

Then the Ruler will answer and say to them: "Amen I tell you, as often as you did this to one of the least of these my brothers or my sisters, you did it to me."

--Matthew 25:40, my translation

Persecution ninnies redux

Oh, those poor persecuted conservatives tighty-righty wingnuts. They just can't get no respect from nobody. WingNut Daily (of course I'm not going to link there!) is currently pissing and whining about a tsimmes at the Mansfield campus of The Ohio State University.

The WingNut Daily (so take what follows with copious amounts of sodium chloride--and a holy water chaser, if you're so inclined), is shocked--shocked, I tell you!--that Scott Savage, a reference librarian at the campus, is under investigation for having dared to recommend a few conservative books as required reading for incoming freshmen students. Now, given that ConWebBlog (the source of the linked story, above) states that nobody at WND bothered to contact anybody at the campus to get the details, I have a sneaking suspicion that there's more to this tsimmes than meets the eye. And because all reputable universities don't release the details of internal investigations while they are still underway, I doubt we're going to get much in the way of hard data for some time to come.

The wingnuts allege that the librarian, whom they describe as a "pious Ohio Quaker who drives to his job in a horse and buggy" and as a "'plain Christian' ... [who] eschew[s] modern technology to a large extent," was disturbed by the alleged leftist bias of several of the books recommended by the faculty for inclusion on the freshman required reading list for next fall's incoming class. So he offered a few suggestions of his own, including a book by someone named Kupelian entitled The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised as Freedom. Again according to the WND account, several gay professors (they insist on using scare quotes around that word, but I'm not going to copy them for obvious reasons) then filed charges of sexual harassment against Savage. After some conservative legal group sent the university a "cease and desist letter" at the end of March, the faculty voted 21-0 (with nine abstentions) to go forward with the investigation.

No wonder I'm warped

So the tighty righties are at it again:

COLUMBIA, Mo. (AP) - A central Missouri high school drama teacher whose spring play was canceled after complaints about tawdry content in one of her previous productions will resign rather than face a possible firing.

"It became too much to not be able to speak my mind or defend my students without fear or retribution,'' said Fulton High School teacher Wendy DeVore.

DeVore's students were to perform Arthur Miller's "The Crucible,'' a drama set during the 17th Century Salem witch trials.

But after a handful of Callaway Christian Church members complained about scenes in the fall musical "Grease'' that showed teens smoking, drinking and kissing, Superintendent Mark Enderle told DeVore to find a more family-friendly substitute.

DeVore chose Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream,'' a classic romantic comedy with its own dicey subject matter, including suicide, rape and losing one's virginity.

DeVore, 31, a six-year veteran teacher, said administrators told her that her annual contract might not be renewed.

"Maybe I need to find a school that's a better match,'' she said.

Or maybe people in the United States need to get a fucking clue and throw the theocrats out of office. These people control both houses of Congress, the White House, whole swathes of the federal judiciary, and far more local government entities--including school boards--than I like to think about. Yet as Mustang Bobby noted earlier today, to hear them talk you'd think they were "...two steps away from being thrown into concentration camps by the baby-killers, the secular humanists, and the queers."

That's stretching it a bit

This story in tomorrow's edition of the Guardian claims that Dumbyanocchio's "holiday reading list packs a punch." Three titles were cited: Mark Kurlansky's Salt: A World History, Edvard Radzinsky's Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar, and John M. Barry's The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History.

I've not read any of the three, but I'm reasonably familiar with Radzinsky's work in history, having just finished his new biography of Stalin a few weeks ago, and having devoured his account of the last days of Nicholas II virtually as soon as it came out in the United States. Radzinsky is an OK historian, but his college work was in drama, and his books read more like novels than textbooks. So no bonus points for Bush on that front.

The salt book is circa 500 pages long in paperback, but it's put out by Penguin--not normally known for wasting its time on dry academic tomes. The Library Journal's review posted at Barnes & Noble calls Kurlansky's style easy and readable. Barry's book about the 1918 flu pandemic is also from Penguin, and is nearly 600 pages long, but a customer review at B&N said he was able to get through it in a couple of weeks, but also said that one section could easily be entitled "Influenza for Dummies."

So I'll give Peter Osnos, who told the Los Angeles Times that "[t]here's nothing on [Bush's] list that is a beach read, or even a busman's holiday," partial credit. But at least from what I can gather without actually having read any of the three books in question, there's also nothing on that list that would give the average college student (or even a bright high schooler) much trouble. It's not like he's taking on Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu or War and Peace. Hell, it's not even Pride and Prejudice (which I'm due to re-read soon). I'll probably grab the Radzinsky one of these days when I'm not up to my eyeballs in exam preparations and homework. And maybe the one on salt, too.

On the other hand, if Bush wants to read something about influenza, I'd rather he grab a few briefing books from the Department of Health and Human Services, and the World Health Organization's projections on avian flu in Asia. Let him study up on the probability that we're overdue for another 1918-style pandemic, and that we may have another shortage of flu vaccine this year. History is important, to be sure (I have to say that!). But I'd rather the preznit be worrying about what's looming on the horizon as we look in the other direction--toward the future.

Puttin' it on my un-wish list

It seems the Virgin Ben is out hawking his new book. I'm not usually the sort to comment on a book that I haven't read (and, in this case, have no intention of reading), but I'm making an exception for this one.

Entitled Porn Generation: How Social Liberalism is Corrupting Our Future, it appears to be exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from Regnery (Pushing Right-Wing Extremism Since 1947). From the publisher's blurb:

In fact, pornography has become such a part of normal life in 21st century America that many teens and twenty-somethings have had no more important influence. They are the porn generation, where life’s expectations come from Mouseketeer pop tarts, Victoria’s Secret, Internet titillation, and condom-flogging sex education.

Gee, I didn't realize that Pop Tarts came in a Mousketeer flavor. And sex ed teaches condom-flogging these days? Damn, I guess I must have missed that part of the lecture when I was a teen. All we got was the basic biology and, for us guys, a couple of scare films on the dangers of venereal diseases. (This was back in the days before we referred to them as STDs, and when AIDS wasn't even on the horizon--which, I realize, is dating me quite a bit.)

A new book meme

So NTodd has this new book meme thingy going on, and rather than point at five people to take it on, he's opened it up to anybody who wants to participate. Never being one to turn down just about anything having to do with books, I'm happy to report for duty.

1. Number of books you own. I haven't even tried to count them lately, but I know I was close to a thousand when I last did a full count--and that would have been close to 10 years ago. So my best guesstimate would be somewhere between 1500 and 2000. I know I have more books than anything else.
2. Last book bought. Depends on how you define "last" and "bought." I just put in an order to Barnes & Noble a couple of days ago for the textbooks I'll need for my reading seminar starting in August. There were nine of them: King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction; Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire; Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India; Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World; The Plains Sioux and U. S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee; Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763; and Colonialism : A Theoretical Overview. But if you want to count books actually in my possession, that would have to be a batch I got at Borders a few weeks back: Traudl Junge, Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary; John Cornwell, Hitler's Scientists; Robert Heinlein, For Us, the Living; and Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.
3. Last book I read. The last one I've finished was Traudl Junge's Until the Final Hour. I'm currently reading a couple of dozen, in various stages of completion and activity.
4. Five books that mean a lot to me. Damn, I can only pick five? Lemme see...
   1. Miklos Nyiszli, Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account. This little book, which I discovered decades ago as a teen-ager, is probably what sparked my interest in being a modern European historian who specializes in the Second World War, because we need to make sure people don't forget that shit like this happened.
   2. Patricia Keneally-Morrison's Keltiad books. I was introduced to this series by a friend 15 years ago or thereabouts, and I've been addicted to it ever since. Celts from Ireland and Scotland and Wales and elsewhere, under pressure from the advances of Christianity under St. Patrick, escape to the stars and take their magical and scientific heritage with them. They are "rediscovered," some three millennia later, by their cousins from Earth, and really cool things happen. Sci-fi mixed with magic is a tough combination to beat, at least for me.
   3. Katherine Kurtz's Deryni novels. A friend of mine introduced them to me in college, and I always check the fantasy shelf at any bookstore I go into, just in case there's a new one out. Kurtz has a master's in medieval history, and lets her historical knowledge inform the world she's created. It's also hard not to see in her Deryni, a race of people despised for their ability to perform magic, a parallel to the discrimination and hatred encountered by gay people in today's world. At least that's how I look at it.
   4. Aristophanes, Lysistrata. One of the best damn war plays ever written, and one of the first comedies I ever translated from the Greek.
   5. Andrew Greeley, White Smoke. A corking great read, for one, and the way I would have liked the conclave to have come out when they were voting on a replacement for John Paul II. More's the pity that the cardinals didn't vote in real life the way they did in Fr. Greeley's book.

I'm also going to steal NTodd's means of tapping people to carry on this meme. If you're a bibliophile and you're reading this, feel free to answer in comments. Or, if you have a blog of your own, post your answer there and give this post a trackback.

Over to you!