Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:25 PM

Trying to get away from the frustrations of "hard news" and technical difficulties (mail problems that are making my job applications bounce) by delving into the past. After wanting to read it for over a year, I finally got ahold of the book King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire by Bergeron (reviewed here).

Now for those who may be new to all this, King James was queer. Maybe he was bi, since he did his duty by his wife and fathered numerous children, but he had many many flings with male "favorites." I've written about this before, and continue to recommend Michael Young's book King James and the history of homosexuality (which I need to get my own copy of sooner or later). At any rate, this book focuses on primary sources by providing the full text of the extant correspondence between James and his lovers (along with some discourses on general letter-writing in period). And, I'll confess some of it is kind of creepy.

In 1623, King James was 56 years old. His son (Charles, age 23) and his lover (James' lover, not Charles': George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, age 31, nicknamed "Steenie") went on a diplomatic mission to Spain. When King James wrote letters to them both, he addressed them to My sweet boys. However, other letters he wrote to My only sweet and dear child. No, those weren't the letters to his son; that's how he wrote to his lover. What really gets me is the letter to James from both men. They sign it:

Your Majesty's most humble and obedient son and servant,
Charles,
Your Majesty's most humble slave and dog,
Steenie

Now, honestly, that's how Villiers signs most of his letters (addressing them with some variation of "Dear Dad and Gossip") but the juxtaposition of the two phrases really feels awkward. James really did have a dysfunctional family (read Bergeron's other book, Royal family, royal lovers: King James of England and Scotland for more details on this). In his letters to King James, Villiers often refers to Charles as "Baby Charles" even though Charles is (a) twenty-three, (b) planning his wedding, and (c) barely seven years younger than Villiers.

Anyway, I don't know that I'll read the book all the way through -- most of the letters are about pretty boring diplomatic business -- but I find some of the details fascinating. [Although I understand that it pussyfoots around the whole sexual issue, maybe I'll read Roger Lockyer's Buckingham, the life and political career of George Villiers, first Duke of Buckingham, 1592-1628 next. Though I saw Elizabeth I : the competition for representation at the library, and that intrigues as well. And I've also started The boy king : Edward VI and the protestant reformation, so we'll see where that goes. Have I mentioned recently how much I love libraries?

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:30 PM

I know it's been a while since I've posted, but I just haven't felt like newsblogging for a while. I keep seeing articles and posts, and copy the URLs for later recall, but I just don't feel like blogging about them right now.

I keep thinking about history, and how there are certain points when studying history when you watch the chain of events and want to yell "Don't you see what's going on around you! If you only looked up and could see the signs now, you could prevent so many problems!" Well, that's how I feel now. Not only do I see the signs around me, I can even predict how the dominos are going to topple. Bush's plans for the Mideast are only going to make people in the region angrier against the US and increase the risk of terrorist retribution against us and Israel. And we're throwing away our national reputation and international goodwill left and right. I'm not saying appeasement, but there are ways to take out our enemies without being so antagonistic.

I don't want to Godwin, but I wonder whether this is how Germans felt as Hitler took power. Each new law chiseling away a little more freedom, but maybe it won't be so bad because dayenu the government wouldn't push for more. It can't happen here! Meanwhile some people are screaming against the impending abyss, and nobody is listening.

That's what it feels like when I read the news or the blogosphere. The light at the end of the tunnel looks like an onrushing train, yet everyone seems to be treating our cries of warning as if we were Chicken Littles or boys who cried wolf. We're the frog in the water that's being gradually boiled to death. I'm beginning to understand why Cassandra went mad. It's damned frustrating. I don't like reading about it, and I don't particularly want to spend the time it takes to analyze it for others.

The other day, I had an interesting conversation with a classmate. She was asking my opinion of a recent Long Bet: "In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site."

Frankly, I don't think that will happen. There are some news stories, such as the recent protest marches in NYC and around the world, that are enhanced by first-person narratives. But for the most part, blogs are pointers to other news stories, sometimes on other blogs, but eventually to the major papers or networks. Often the blogs supplement these stories, pointing out items that are undercovered and occasionally doing further research that actually changes the story, but in the end, it all comes back to what's in the mainstream press.

I don't see that there's anything bad with this. In his book Interface culture, Steven Johnson talks about metamedia and the growing use of and need for filters. In brief, there's too much information out there for us to process it all. So, we turn to trusted intermediaries to filter it for us. Maybe your filter is the newspaper or a particular program or cable station. Perhaps it's just a trusted friend who says "hey, did you hear..." That's the purpose I see blogs fulfilling. The other day, I was curious about what was going on in the Supreme Court, because I hadn't heard anything in the news in a while. So, I went to SCOTUSblog. Then I went to the site that would've been my first choice even last year, Yahoo! Full Coverage. If I want to find out information about librarianship, articles on which are few and far between in the mainstream press, I check Librarian.net or LISnews. There's nothing wrong with these. And, when it comes right down to it, what's the difference between these sites and something like ShakespeareAuthorship.com aside from the frequency of updates?

What the blogs will do, particularly now that Google purchased Pyra, is enable Google to give better, faster relevance ranking to its Google News without having to spider, since it will have access to Blogger's backend database. In history classes, we learn about how historically newspapers were much more biased than they are now. Even in a two-newspaper town like Boston, the Globe and Herald aren't that far apart editorially, and still try to give the gloss of being unbiased in their news coverage. I think we're going away from that and back to the earlier style. And I'm talking about broadcast journalism, newspapers and blogs as the filters. There's nothing wrong with that, but I don't think that will put blogs above NYT and CNN in Google's results.

Which again brings me back to the question of what I'm doing with this blog. Nobody's paying me to newsblog (although many blogs do now have tipjars, I haven't yet gone that route). I like to think I'm doing a service; I've always been one to point out interesting news stories to other people, but with so many other bloggers, I wonder whether I'm making a difference in anybody's lives with this or if I'm only writing for myself. That's not necessarily a bad thing. One of the (many) reasons I'm blogging is to refresh my own memory about these things. But if that's all I'm doing, then I don't have to spend quite so much time writing the entries, and I can merely provide a list of links without commentary.

So, with all that said, this morning I spent some time reading about Mister Rogers. I was never that attached to his show -- I was always more of a Sesame Street/Electric Company kind of kid. Still, after reading the tributes and profiles (this one in Esquire is one of the best) and can't help but feel touched. The show's website on PBS Kids.org even has a special section for neighbors of all ages, with some really good advice. Today, this one stuck out at me:

When I was a child and would see scary things on the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."

Certainly looking for the helpers in the news might make me feel more optimistic, and might help differentiate my take on the news from everyone else's. Still I wonder, am I helping by sharing my filter on the news?

It's definitely something I've got to think about. I've still got a huge backload of links I've compiled over the last week that I intended to blog, but which may be growing stale. In the meantime, I strongly recommend these other blogs: Talking Points (one of the first and always on top), Atrios, Oliver Willis, Daily KOS, TalkLeft, Electrolite, Interesting Times, Altercation, Dan Kennedy's Media Log, This Modern World, Body and Soul, Thinking it Through, Road to Surfdom, with Blogdex for a quick overview as to which links are hottest in the blogosphere as a whole. [There are many other news sites I read (like I said, this isn't necessarily easy or quick) but these are all top notch. And I'm sure the moment I post this, I'll think of three more that I forgot to put in this top tier. Apologies in advance.]

And, I think I'll spend the weekend thinking and reading.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:15 AM

Today is MoveOn.org's Virtual March on Washington. Call your Senators or send a free fax to express your opposition to the war. You can also view the antiwar room to see how the day is going (it's kinda fun to see the states light up as call after call gets made).

I've got lots more news stuff I've been meaning to blog, but I'm spending the day on campus to catch up on school work (yes, I did manage to turn in that paper on time; the database I needed came up at about 11 PM Sunday. I put in an all-nighter, and got quite far. Although I got professorial permission in the morning to turn the paper in late, I had done enough that I decided I didn't want the paper hanging over my head any longer and managed to finish it in time. So, Yaay! Go me!

Oh, heck, one news story on Segways. Take a look at the hypocrisy demonstrated by this quote by a Segway vice president: "One of the reasons Dean moved to New Hampshire was he loved the 'live free or die' motto. Keep government out. But to make this technology widely available, we need government help." In other words, libertarian until he needs something and then he'll move heaven and earth to get government aid for his pet projects.

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:26 PM

Nyarg! So, the first half of my paper is supposed to compare two online indexing services covering similar topics from a professor-provided list. I'm maybe a third of the way done and now one of the databases is down. There really isn't another index on the list of appropriately comparable subject matter that I can switch to, and I don't want to throw out all my work and pick another two this late in the game. As I said, Argh! [The second part of the assignment is to compare a subject gateway with the two indices. I can't even start that until I've finished the first part, and I'm blocked on that due to technical difficulties.]