Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:55 PM

I hate abstracting.
That is all.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:30 AM

Don't have time to write too much -- I'm feeling very overloaded with homework, and I start work on Monday. Ian's been writing a lot here, here and here about the seders we've gone to. [I was working on a much longer post about some of the different rituals and my feelings towards this in particular, but I simply don't have time at the moment to give it justice.]

BTW, as those of you on LJ may have noticed, my RSS feed spontaneously fixed itself and started syndicating again. Or, rather, LJ decided to start reading my feed again. I don't know why; I didn't change anything, but it's working again so I won't complain too much.

In political news, judges are verbally slapping down Dick Cheney and John Ashcroft. No legal decisions against either yet, but we can keep hoping!

I've got a bunch more links regarding the Iraqi museum/libraries, but don't have the energy to blog about them now. A teeny bit of good library/archive news, via BookSlut: Historians have found the original transcript of the Oscar Wilde libel trial!
More mocking of the ALA website (which I mentioned in the last paragraphs here and here) via LACK, in this entry and the one immediately beneath. [Added slightly later: Today's Librarian.net has loads more links critiquing the site redesign.]

And I'll conclude with a fun survey I've seen floating around the blogosphere:

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:20 PM

Oh <bleep>: I just saw two posts in a row on rec.arts.sf.fandom that made me swear aloud at the implications. This administration (1) did nothing to protect the Ministry for Religious Affairs, resulting in the destruction of thousands of Qurans, many of them illuminated and hand written, several 1,000 years old, (2) is condoning plans by evangelical Christian groups to conduct missionary work in post-war Iraq. [Stridently anti-Islam preacher Franklin Graham will address the Pentagon this weekend, despite Muslim objections.]

Look at the message these two send: destroying Muslim holy books and converting them to Christianity? Ann Coulter and Osama must be gloating at the worldwide religious war this may spark.

As Randolph Fritz wrote, "Allow me to congratulate W. Bush--he may have discovered something that Shia and Sunni Islam can agree on. Or, as Ian put it, he promised to be a uniter, not a divider.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:55 PM

Several quick tidbits. First of all, does anybody understand Blogger and/or XML who can tell my why LiveJournal will no longer read my XML feed?? This is really annoying me, but I don't have the time to figure it out.

This got buried in my previous post, but here's a letter you can fax or mail your Senators urging them to take action to investigate the events surrounding the destruction, recover what can be, and take steps to prevent future incidents. If you wish to call them, don't forget the the Congressional toll free switchboard at 1- 800-839-5276. If you want to send a fax (which may be received better than phone or email) I found an old site listing email addresses to Senators' phone numbers. It's an old list (106th Congress, and now we're in the 108th) but I contacted mine through this and it worked!

Regarding Iraq in general, CalPundit writes about the irony of right-wingers considering human rights to be an exclusively conservative issue, given it was Jimmy Carter "who first introduced the idea that respect for human rights should be a cornerstone of American foreign policy," an idea that many conservatives mocked. In a similar vein, here's Hesiod on the hypocrisy of right-wingers concern for human rights before and after the war.
"Freedom is untidy," indeed.

As far as Americans' rights are concerned, a couple days ago, I mentioned the passage of the RAVE Act. For those new to the term, Salon provides a good overview, as does the Drug Policy Alliance.

I haven't had time to write up a more detailed explanation of the FISA court system yet, but one of Ashcroft's allies is trying to further expand its reach. Currently, FISA -- which can approve surveillance warrants and subpoenas and has much lower requirements for than standard courts -- only covers agents linked to foreign powers. This proposal might remove this restriction, opening it up to solo operators -- and pretty much anybody! This is bad, people!
Fortunately, one of the key House Republicans isn't happy with Ashcroft's reach and refusal to answer questions so may block further expansion.

One bright spot in all this comes from Supreme Court Justice Breyer, saying things that shouldn't be newsworthy: "The Constitution always matters, perhaps particularly so in times of emergency." He also mentioned the Alien & Sedition Acts, Lincoln's suspension of habeas corpus, the internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and called them all mistakes. [via Warblogging.com, TalkLeft, and SCOTUSBlog.]

Finally, the "robustly liberal" town of Arcata, California, has passed a law making it illegal for city officials to comply with the USA PATRIOT Act. They acknowledge the law probably won't stand up in court, but wanted to take a stronger stand than a mere resolution. (via Warblogging.com)

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:20 AM

When I read articles about the thousand year old Korans that perished in the fires in Iraq, the cynic in me can't help but wonder whether this government would've taken more care if they were told ancient Bibles might be endangered. I was somewhat surprised to see the photos of the Torah collection and am rather relieved to hear that at least some of those escaped intact.

Two archaeologists noted another lost treasure in the looted museum:

Mesopotamia's best known literary composition, the Epic of Gilgamesh, comes to us in 11 bashed-up tablets excavated in an Assyrian royal library at Nineveh in the 19th century. Shortly before the Gulf War, another, slightly later library was found at the southern Mesopotamian site of Sippar. The tablets from this collection were said to contain some of the missing pieces of Gilgamesh, but they were never fully studied and published. It is now unlikely they ever will be.

From a tourism site, a prewar look at the Iraq Mueum and its trearures. (via K-Mac) If there was some magical way I could give my life and restore the Iraqi libraries and museums, I would do so.

When talking about this destruction, many people have referred to Ramadan, the story in Neil Gaiman's Sandman issue 50 (reprinted in the graphic novel Fables & Reflections). But for me, I keep hearing an unrelated quote in Melissa Scott & Lisa Barnett's Elizabethan fantasy, Armor of Light: "You are a poet, a brilliant one. You of all men know beauty, and who to mourn its loss." If I had the money, I'd commission as many artists as I knew to make art inspired by the lost artifacts. I'd hire authors to write stories and essays commemorating it (heck, I think some of the ones from Making Light are publishable as-is). I'd compile these into an anthology to sell with proceeds going towards repurchasing looted artefacts and whatever was needed to recover the collection. I'd auction off the originals towards the same goal. Hmm... While I don't have the wherewithal to do this on my own, maybe I'll put this bug in a few other people's ears and see if anything can happen...

BTW, there are other ways our chicken....hawk administration has failed our troops: Mail hasn't been getting through. Some folks haven't received any mail in two months, and it's not just front-line troops, but those stationed in Kuwait. The Weekly Standard calls it "what looks like unbelievable incompetence and a lack of concern for the ordinary fighting man on the part of the rear echelon--and CENTCOM itself." I mean, the closest I've been to war was as a regular viewer of M*A*S*H when I was younger, but even I grasp the importance of mail call to the soldiers. Eediots!

Postscript: The title of this post comes from Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1817 poem, Ozymandius.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:10 AM

Grumble I don't know what's going on, but suddenly LiveJournal is giving "(Parse error) Error Message: no element found at line 1, column 0, byte -1" on my syndicated feed. I don't see any difference compared either to my earlier XML files or to others generated by Blogger that LJ is processing correctly. Anyway, on to the latest news:

• Two informative articles on the Prez from TAP: One calling him the most dangerous president ever, the other exposing him as a Liar, Liar.
• As seen on Ruminate This, Rantavision has written an Open letter to the Democratic party and an Open letter to Ralph Nader (and the Greens)
• SF authors are protesting the USA PATRIOT Act
• I don't know why, but the USA PATRIOT Act and its effects on libraries resurfaced as a major news story last week. Coverage included New York Times, Slashdot (as usual, it's worth reading the highest-ranked comments), Washington Post, Village Voice and many smaller papers printed editorials and columns. Nothing specific has changed, but hopefully people are finally becoming aware.
• Also, Dan Gillmor has written a foreboding essay on the Act and other recent legislation, titled Why we may never regain the liberties that we've lost
• And it looks like a disregard for history and libraries run in the family. For months I've been following the story of Jeb Bush's campaign to close and privatize the Florida State Library. Here's a good overview of the issue.

I don't know why, but as much as it horrifies me, I can't stop reading about the Iraqi museum/library devastation. In some respects, I feel a need to witness the enormity of it and thus can't avert my eyes. And I keep learning something new:

Okay, that's all from Iraq for the moment
I'll conclude on a lighter note with some entertaining videos I've seen recently:

• Tom Lehrer's Elements animated in Flash (via Janet Miles)
• An astronaut demonstrates high tea in zero gravity (via Lady Crumpet)
• An utterly astonishing 2 minute long Rube Goldberg device made entirely of Honda parts and an article on how they made it (606 takes, no computer graphics) (via Joe Decker; an indirect link since there are several mirrors)

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:15 AM

If you are, the rest of this post has more details. [If you're not, just take a look at the new MBTA trip planning site and read the final paragraph on my impending withdrawal from the social scene.]

Well, the company is about 3 1/4 miles from my house -- less than a ten minute drive. For now, plans are for Ian to drive me to and from work, though some pleasant afternoon I'll probably try the walk. [Given the way our neighbors are so diligent (not!) about shoveling their sidewalks in the winter, I think I could only walk the route in fair weather.] Somewhat unfortunately, I don't ride a bike (or scooters, skateboards or the like). However, this would be the perfect commute for a Segway, (if anyone had the $5000 to spare). And if necessary, there are some roundabout bus routes beteween here and there that might be feasible.
[BTW, I've been meaning to post about this for a while now: The MBTA has just implemented a new trip planning site that's incredibly good. It calculates routes between any two points you specify, based upon time of day you want to leave or arrive and how far you're willing to walk. It even has the bus and T schedules embedded, so it can tell you what time to leave and how long the trip will take. I'm very impressed.]

It's a small company -- about 50 employees. That's comparable in size to the Organizer group, which was a real close-knit team. And all the people I've met have been extraordinarily nice. I'm looking forward to this.

The job is external technical support. In some respects, this may be a step back, but it's a tiny one. [Read this NYTimes Magazine article to see how bad the job market is. I'm worried about this summer when there won't be jobs for teen workers because more advanced candidates have been filling the lower-level positions. But I digress] Besides, the company makes fascinating products, and I'm looking forward to learning about them in-depth. [My professor last night was gushing about some of the features that set it beyond normal non-bibliographic database programs.] With a company so small, I may get to stick my fingers in a lot of pies, including my old disciplines. Especially since I think it was my broader experience that won me the job. [The posting was for Technical Support Representative, Level I, but the offer letter hired me at Level II.]

I don't know offhand what else to add at the moment. I start work next Monday, and will probably have lots more to say after that.

One thing all this does mean is that I will have a lot less time to work on schoolwork. And I've still got massive amounts of work left to complete on my final project (due May 5) which is worth 40% of my grade. I've already decided that I'll have to do homework for the first two days of Pesach, and I will probably turn very antisocial for the next several weeks, just working at job and school and minimizing other commitments, in order to get everything done that needs to.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:59 PM

I just wanted to make sure to post this now, so my observant Jewish readers see this before Pesach. Last year, I discovered a marvelous site: the Omer (Simpson) calendar. The site has all the Omer prayers, day-by-day, with cutesy Simpsons artwork. Last year was also the first year that I hadn't missed counting a single night of the Omer (I think our past record has been about two nights) and the credit goes to this website.

For those reading this who don't know what the heck I'm talking about, I'll quote JewFaq's explanation:

According to the Torah, Jews are obligated to count the days from the second night of Passover to the day before Shavu'ot, seven full weeks. This period is known as the Counting of the Omer. An omer is a unit of measure. On the second day of Passover, in the days of the Temple, an omer of barley was cut down and brought to the Temple as an offering.

Every night, from the second night of Passover to the night before Shavu'ot, we recite a blessing and state the count of the omer in both weeks and days. So on the 16th day, you would say "Today is sixteen days, which is two weeks and two days of the Omer."

The counting is intended to remind us of the link between Passover, which commemorates the Exodus, and Shavu'ot, which commemorates the giving of the Torah. It reminds us that the redemption from slavery was not complete until we received the Torah.

And as Shavu'ot is approaching, I'm wondering if anyone else in the Boston area wants to make plans. Again quoting JewFaq, "It is customary to stay up the entire first night of Shavu'ot and study Torah, then pray as early as possible in the morning. This tradition is known as Tikkun Leil. Well, last year at Shavuot, I had the idea of a ShavuaCon or "Tik-Con Leil" to discuss Torah from a SF perspective. We have these debates informally at every con I go to, from mikvaot on spaceships to scheduling holidays on Martian calendars, but there's never enough time. So how about holding more formal study sessions where we can actually bring the reference books? Anybody else interested in this?

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:30 PM

Well, they've moved from the museums to the libraries. I've been seeing various stories all day from numerous places around Iraq:

From the Times of London:

The moment British troops pull out of one base, the mobs are in. Three hours after the Scots Dragoon Guards left a technical college earlier this week to push further into the city centre, teenage gangs had cleaned it out.

Yesterday, Captain Alex Matheson walked around the language library of Basra University, decorated with posters of Shakespeare and with thousands of English books, all of which he fears will perish when his men move on to their next base later today: "We cant bear to leave it to the mobs, but what can we do?"

This morning's librarian.net linked to reports of the vandalism at Basra, where people hurled books to the floor in order to steal the bookshelves and fixtures, and something blew a hole in the ceiling.

Another news story reports: Mosul's university library, celebrated for its ancient manuscripts, was sacked, despite appeals from the minarets of the city's mosques for people to stop destroying their own town.

And tonight, from the BBC: "The entire contents of Iraq's national library and archives are reported to have been burned down, destroying priceless records of the country's history."

Maybe some of the looted materials will be recovered, although they'll be less valuable (scientifically and historically) without the records. But destroyed and damaged material may be lost forever.

The discussion is still going strong in Teresa Nielsen Hayden's journal about the museums, and I continue to recommend it.
Body and Soul has more about the libraries.

Added later: The Washington Post has a good story on the museum destruction with info on what curators did beforehand to protect artifacts, details of the destruction, and what our troops have been doing. [We've got a whole company of Marines guarding the Oil Ministry, so that's secure, even if nothing else was protected or saved!]

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:55 AM

You may have guessed from my oblique hints on Wednesday and Friday, but I've got a new job! My nearly year-long saga of unemployment is almost over, and I'm entering a new stage. Don't want to say too much at this point (for reasons I'll explain in a moment) but it's for a company specializing in library software -- the perfect combination of my previous work experience and my academic studies.

I've signed and turned in the acceptance letters and other agreements. [I was waiting for everything to be signed, sealed, and at least moderately irrevocable before posting about it.] Next Monday will be my first day of work. Given the radical change this involves, I actually did a tarot reading on the matter, and you can read about the results here.

And now I have to consider something else -- blogging while employed. Last December, a Washington Post article gave a good overview of the issue, including stories of workers being fired and lawyers being called out. Fortunately, I'm aware of these matters ahead of time and brought them up with my future manager before they become a problem, in order to hash out the policy ahead of time.

Complicating these are the facts that this is not an anonymous or pseudonymous weblog, and unlike LiveJournal, I don't have the option of limiting who can read entries. It's also tough because despite my forays into newsblogging, this remains primarily a personal journal where I write about what's on my mind... And a full-time job will certainly occupy my mind for at least 40 hours a week. I don't know if it'd be possible to stay absolutely mum on the topic. In the past, I've used LiveJournal to get advice on some jobhunting issues, but I don't like the idea of keeping two separate journals. Part of my reason for keeping a journal was to put all this in one place -- a Lis-central, as it were.

As I see it, I can divide the risk into to groups of readers: (1) company outsiders and (2) company insiders.

Issue 1 relates to what outsiders find out about the company based on my writing. My competitive intelligence class gave me a good grounding in trade secrets law. Even the most innocuous of comments may give competitors insight into a company's future plans. For that reason, I think I'm going to make it a personal policy not to mention the name of my employer here in this journal. That has its pros and cons. On the positive side, I could hypothetically say that I'm in training for a new product without revealing to the world that the company has a new product. On the downside, that means if I really like something, I can't praise or pitch it to friends and potential customers. Also, it might still be possible for people to put two and two together and figure out where I'm working.

Issue 2 is more complicated. My employer and coworkers know about my website, since I used it as an example of my HTML skills. It's certainly reasonable to assume that they have or will discover my weblog, though I don't know who (if any) might become regular readers. Part of what made me a good designer/quality engineer was my ability to foresee worst-case scenarios. And the number of potential pitfalls is staggering. A coworker takes offense at something I write -- my sense of humor and political stances aren't always mainstream. Or maybe something I say at work contradicts something written in the blog -- I express ambivalence about some assignment or fall prey to that old sitcom canard of being caught going out on a sick day...

I do believe that everyone is entitled to a private life away from work, but when I blog about that private life someplace where coworkers can see, that can get trickier. Maybe migrating this away from personal journalling and back towards link-sharing and issue-based blogging is the better option... I don't know yet.

Any other bloggers care to share their tips in dealing with these issues?

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:25 PM

Continuing from my previous post, more evidence of our government and military's shameful neglect of our human heritage, courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor:

"I took my white underpants off and put them on a stick and ran up the street to the US Marines," says archaeologist Mohsin Kadun. "I asked them - no, begged them - to help me preserve our treasures, but they would not drive down the street."

The article goes on to provide more details that the military was warned well in advance that this would happen.

A group of scholars, conservators, and collectors, including MacGuire Gibson of the University of Chicago, the leading US researcher in Mesopotamian archaeology, drew up a list for the Pentagon of more than 4,000 crucial Iraqi museums, monuments, and archaeological digs, urging commanders to spare them. "The museum was at the top of that list," Dr. Gibson says. ... But US forces apparently made no plans for defending it against plunder.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden has found an article in "the conservative, Murdoch-owned, pro-war London Times" which says coalition forces actually encouraged looting as policy to "send a powerful message that the old guard is truly finished.

I'll conclude by pointing to more beautiful writerly words, courtesy of Bluejo.

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:30 PM

This makes me sick. I was browsing around, and found this warning from before the war (red text is my emphasis):

SEVENTY THOUSAND CUNEIFORM TABLES AT RISK IN BAGHDAD
(AGI) - Rome, Italy, Mar. 26 - The archeological finds in Baghdad's Museum could be destroyed by the bombing. This was announced by Antonio Invernizzi from Turin's University, head of the Italian School of Archeology in the Iraqi town. During a meeting on the protection of cultural heritage in crisis areas, Invernizzi underlined that Baghdad's Museum is placed near the bombed zone and not far from the railway station and the Iraqi radio's head quarters. The fights to control Baghdad - he added - will be fierce and represent a great risk for the physical integrity of the Museum, but the situation after the war will be even more dangerous if the Museum is not managed properly." A recent inventory spoke about 70 thousand and 150 thousand cuneiform tables from the Sumerian civilisation, which tell us about schools, the first wheel, the firs two-houses parliament, astronomy, mathematics, science, the first social reforms, the first library, that is all the aspect of modern society that Sumerian well Knew. Many of the clay tables were not translated yet. (AGI)

Looking further, I can find numerous other articles from last month warning of the risk to irreplaceable artifacts that would come with looting. National Geographic has a lengthy story. The San Francisco Chronicle and New York Times specifically mention Pentagon and Department of Defense being informed of these concerns. Hundreds of scholars signed a declaration demanding protection for Iraq's museums and archaeological sites. A House Resolution was even filed in Congress, "urging all governments involved in the military action against Iraq to work to take all reasonable measures to avoid damage to the cultural antiquities in Iraq."

They knew. They knew and they did nothing. And even after the looting began, they did little. The New York Times reports:

Mr. Muhammad [an archaeologist] said that he had found an American Abrams tank in Museum Square, about 300 yards away, and that five marines had followed him back into the museum and opened fire above the looters' heads. That drove several thousand of the marauders out of the museum complex in minutes, he said, but when the tank crewmen left about 30 minutes later, the looters returned.

"I asked them to bring their tank inside the museum grounds," he said. "But they refused and left. About half an hour later, the looters were back, and they threatened to kill me, or to tell the Americans that I am a spy for Saddam Hussein's intelligence, so that the Americans would kill me. So I was frightened, and I went home."

As I've been discovering, professional writers say it best, and the words of Teresa Nielsen Hayden and its comments are well worth reading. I particularly recommend Jo Walton's comments.

Tom Spencer also has some well-written thoughts on the incompetence and moral bankruptcy of the Bush administration to permit such anarchy and lawlessness. More on this from DailyKos and Body and Soul.

By the way, while Iraq has been dominating the news, Congress this week passed the RAVE Act (which declares glow sticks and massage oil are drug paraphernalia and penalizes venue owners if any customers use drugs on the premises) and the Feeney Amendment that prevents judges from using their discretion to reduce overly-harsh sentences -- something even Rehnquist says could do "serious harm". Both provisions were bundled into the kind of feel-good bill (AMBER Alert) which makes a great sound-byte attack against anyone who opposed it, so naturally it passed overwhelmingly. Meanwhile, Bush nominated another pair of right-wing zealots to the judiciary (Pryor has been trying to make vibrators illegal, punishable by hefty fines and hard labor, Hughes doesn't believe conception can come from rapes).

Interesting Times recently shared a chilling quote, which I'm coming to understand more and more: "You know, all our lives we have blamed our parents and our parents' generation for allowing Hitler to gain control. Now we're beginning to see how powerless they must have felt to stop what was happening all around them." I really do understand.

These are sad, sad, times indeed.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:35 PM

As Scotsman George MacDonald Fraser wrote in his The Hollywood History of the World:

How did the cinema fail so signally with Mary Queen of Scots? Even without the romantic mist which surrounds her, she is surely still one of the most filmable women in history. A beautiful teenage widow, six feet and red-haired, queen of two countries and pretender to a third, transported from the gayest, most sophisticated court in Europe to a gloomy, northern kingdom, married to a jealous consort whose good looks mask a repulsive nature, forced to watch the murder of a handsom courtier who may or may not have been her lover, conspiring (?) to have her husband blown up and strangled, marrying his murderer, losing her throne in bloody battle, putting herself in the power of a rival queen, conspiring in captivity, and finally being beheaded while her little pet dog scampers off the scaffold . . . Shakespeare, Daphne du Maurier, and Hollywood combined would not have dared to invent her. Perhaps she is one of those historic figures whose reality simply outstrips normal dramatic convention.

Although I disagree with some of the particulars of Fraser's summary regarding Mary's culpability, he's got the gist of it right.

This quote has been on my mind as I've been reading Alison Weir's Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. I'm nearing the end of the book, and the further I get into this, the more convinced I become that Mary's life isn't filmable. The interpersonal entanglements are incomprehensibly complex. There are no heroes, only villains and victims, and no happy endings for anyone likeable. It's tragedy in an operatic scale, and I could visualize this story as an opera. I saw the musical Chess recently, which also ends unhappily, and some of those songs have started running through my head as parallels.

Mary really was a tragic figure. In the space of one year: she got pregnant, her marriage fell apart, one of her closest friends was murdered in front of her by people she thought were her allies, she suffered "protracted and exceptionally painful" labor, fell so ill she thought she might die, became aware of plots against her life by (among others) her husband, saw her efforts to dissolve the marriage blocked by politics, and finally her husband was killed violently a few hours after she left his side, such that she believed she was also a target. That all happened in one year. [Added later: Ian reminded me to point out that she was also only 24 years old at the time.] Is it any wonder that at this point she had a probable nervous breakdown?

Unfortunately, her life only got worse from there. The men who she instructed to find the killers were the plotters behind the murder, so she was roundly criticized for not tracking down her husband's killers and rumors began to fly that she might've done it herself. Her most senior and trusted official was the chief suspect. He was also an ambitious man and kidnapped her, raped her, and forced her to marry him (partly on the grounds that she may have become pregnant). This completely demolished her credibility, and she was soon imprisoned, deposed, and eventually executed.

Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley details an incredibly thorough and complex story, filled with shifting alliances and deceptions and plots. If you want a lighter version of the story, take a look at Jane Yolen's Queen's Own Fool, a YA novel about several years of Mary's life, from her jester's point of view. It's a good book, hewing very closely to the facts. Yolen even has a webpage on what aspects were fictional -- and the answer is not much.

Anyway, that's what's on my mind at the moment. Anybody else care to speculate on either the filmability of Mary's story or the plausibility of the alternate history I was working out? Or, any other fans of Tudor/Stuart history care to recommend further worthwhile reading or just want to discuss other topics regarding the period? As you may have noticed, I enjoy this point in history, and would love the excuse to talk more about it.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:25 AM

When I was looking for the quotes to conclude my USA PATRIOT Act update, I also found this one, which I find particularly... descriptive of my attitudes:

"Libraries have always been home to me. They have seemed not inhibiting, not scary, but veritable lighthouses of Utopian order and generosity amid the clutter and ignorance and selfishness of so much of the life that is lived in this world."
           -- Robert Hughes

As folks reading this may know, my feelings towards libraries go beyond this. I've written about this over and over again, in many different ways, and what I said then still holds true but still feels insufficient. Libraries instill in me a feeling of hominess, but without the stress of undone chores that I get while actually at home. When I'm in a library, I feel incredibly drawn to browse the shelves, flip through the titles, curl up in a cozy chair and just read and ignore the passage of time. Wandering the stacks fills me with such excitement. So many avenues to explore, so much potential. I feel covetous of the knowledge -- I don't want to own the books, just read them, but sadly I know I'll never have enough time for them all. Sometimes, when I'm in a library, I find myself looking for places to hide, wondering if it would be possible to hole up somewhere unnoticed while the staff locks up for the evening so I could spend the night alone amidst the books, slipping out again after the library reopens in the morning with nobody the wiser. I think that's been a fantasy of mine since childhood, when I saw a film about kids hiding out in a museum. Ah, well...

And, on an entirely different note, I was recently reading George MacDonald Fraser's The Hollywood History of the World, which is chock full of witty bon mots. I was particularly amused by this paragraph, about the 1945 book Forever Amber:

The book was a huge bestseller, daring for forty years ago, which is to say coy by today's standards, and it paved the way for countelss inferior imitations set in a fantasy world anywhere between the Middle Ages and the Crimea, in which gypsy wenches were branded for poaching at Glasgow Assizes (sic), Victorian landlords exercised the droit de seigneur, and voluptuous heroines of humble birth went through legions of rakes, cavaliers, pirates, slavers, dukes, maniacs, and Highland chiefs (who ravished them as a preliminary to the wedding haggis) and other assorted lovers on their way to a title, commercial empire, or the king's bedroom. 'Forever Amber,' as I remember, was well researched in a sound historical framework, but its fictional heroine and plot had an enormous influence on pseudo-historical fiction writing which, to judge from American paperback stalls, still continues, and the film no doubt encouraged the trend.

Yeah, I think I've read some of those books. In some cases, the heroine is a hero trying to make his way through the world and save his virtuous sister/mother/girlfriend from evil men's clutches along the way. But I've certainly made numerous visits to that pseudo-historical fantasy world he describes. I think that's why I purposely select for books in non-medieval historical settings, to avoid those familiar haunts...

Finally, I have to share these photos of a newborn kitten somebody found and has been nursing. Awwwww! Idn't it adorable? Or, as my friend Jeff would say, Kawaii!. It's probably a good thing for us that Boopsie is ragingly jealous of any other cats, so I can't give into temptation and get me another one.
Added April 19: The kitten has died, killed by a family dog. Squeamish and sensitive types may not want to view the final photographs.