Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:00 AM

I want to be reading Reinventing Shakespeare, rather than anything I'm supposed to be doing. The book is distracting me, even though it's out of sight in my bag at the other end of my desk...

I am such a geek -- other people's textbooks are my addictive pleasure reading...

Posted by Lis Riba at 1:10 AM

So I've been staying up far too late soaking up Reinventing Shakespeare, when I get to a section about the pamphlet wars in the late 1690s/early 1700s. [Largely similar to the debates via pamphlet in the Elizabethan, Jacobean and 1st Charles reigns, if you're familiar with any of those.]

So-and-so publishes a pamphlet about X to which three other people take objection and publish their own pamphlets on the subject, which the first author simply must respond to in a fresh pamphlet as a few new writers join the fray, and so on and so on.

And suddenly, I thought: the pamphletsphere!

Only goes to show, the more things change, the more they stay the same. The technology and terminology advance, making the old forms inaccessible and letting people think we're doing something novel, but it's just human nature.
[This morning, everybody was flaming Sullivan for missing something obvious in his critique of Marshall. I noticed Sully responded to at least one blog already, because it already refuted the correction...]

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:25 PM

I hope Ms. Emmett is either being misquoted or was speaking incredibly narrowly in this article on efforts to legalize polygamy:

Andrea Moore Emmett, president of the Utah chapter of NOW, agrees with [Dani Eyer, of the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah] that the nuclear family has changed. "But to understand polygamous relationships, you have to understand cult dynamics. In every case of polygamy, human rights are being violated - education is denied to young girls, marriages are forced, incest and physical abuse are practiced."

While some places that practice polygamy can have such problems, I know enough healthy poly relationships among consensual adults to distrust such a sweeping statement without qualifiers or further evidence. [What's the comment about universals invariably being false, because it only takes one exception to disprove?]

After writing the above but before posting it, I ran down to the library before it closed for the night. Intended to go last night, but keep forgetting they shut the doors early on Wednesdays, and I desperately wanted to get fresh books before the weekend. [Plus return 2 videos that I didn't want to leave in the drop box in this kind of cold.]

Picked up five new books:

• Nicholas Cooke from my Marlowe in fiction list
• The year's best science fiction : fifteenth annual for a single short story that's also on my Marlowe list
• Maria Fitzherbert : the secret wife of George IV -- I tried watching Madness of King George last weekend (one of the videos I returned tonight), but only got about an hour into it before I couldn't stand to watch the humiliating "medical" treatments any further. But the way it presented the Prince Regent gave me a possible in to reading about the Hanoverians, so I'm going to try this one.
• Trojan horses: saving the classics from conservatives -- the smallest book in my bag, this is one I tried reading last year but couldn't quite get into.
• Reinventing Shakespeare, a cultural history, from the Restoration to the present, which I've been meaning to read for over a decade and may finally be in the right mindset for.

And I still have three other titles out -- Leopard in exile (waiting for Ian to finish it), Shakespeare's spy (which I haven't been able to get into, despite enjoying the previous two books in the series) and Food: a culinary history -- and three more titles on reserve (though I may remove and re-add them, since they don't appear to be moving)

Now I just have to figure out which books to bring with me for lunch tomorrow (since most of them are quite heavy).

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:30 PM

Courtesy of Spike, I just found the new ad with Britney Spears, Pink and Beyonce Knowles. Given its length (three minutes) I presume it's intended for the Super Bowl. [Looking for information on the official Queen website, it was originally intended for the Super Bowl, but with no reasons given, the company has decided not to air it in the United States.]

At any rate...
Ugh. Pink's opening scream of "We Will We Will Rock You!" at the 1:10 mark is downright painful to hear!

Other than that initial screech, the rest of the song isn't mangled too badly. Somewhat fortunately, WWRY has been manhandled enough by sports fans in every possible venue, that covering it isn't as much of a travesty as it could've been. [Had they covered something like "Who wants to live forever" or "Show must go on", heads might have to roll. Fortunately, most of my favorite Queen tracks are rarities rather than singles, so are probably safe from cover artists.]

I have absolutely no clue what story the video is supposed to convey. The most I've been able to come up with is that everybody covets the cola. At the 1:39 mark, I did notice Roger Taylor sitting in the stands banging a drum with Brian May sitting beside him.

The Queen site says they also worked with the pop stars in recording this cover. I just hope they made beaucoup bucks off of this...

I'm curious why it's not airing in the US. On the other hand, the Super Bowl ad campaign they've planned to replace it sounds terrific: featuring youths who have been targetted by the RIAA for music downloads (with salaries helping the kids' legal bills) and using a Green Day cover of "I fought the law." [via Hiawatha Bray]

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:50 AM

You know, after a couple weeks of below-zero weather, 25° Farenheit starts to feel downright balmy. [Or else, I'm going downright barmy; one of the two...]

I'll confess, I'm starting to get somewhat worried about the resonances between this season's Angel and previous work by current series producer, Ben Edlund. I've already remarked about an episode involving ninjas and an enemy described as "nigh-invulnerable." But, well, don't click this link until after you've seen last night's episode, because it contains some serious spoilers, but doesn't this strike you as similar?
I'm starting to wonder whether we'll see talking capybaras or flying moth costumes anytime soon...

Still vaguely working on answers to neven's request for best arguments for opposing G.W. Bush, when economist Brad DeLong words one of them much better than I:

And that's just one of the reasons why I so vehemently oppose Bush and his administration. But, since the quote just showed up in my web wanderings, I figured I should share it now, while it's fresh.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:30 PM

Just finished The School of night; 16th book completed so far this year. A little too literary for my tastes -- it's all a voyage of self-discovery of a really petty little man, who happens to be obsessed with Shakespeare and the School of Night. The lead character is a wishy-washy nobody loser, and other than curiousity for how he'd resolve the authorship issue (and an open question whether this belongs on my Marlowe in fiction list), really rather dull now that I've emerged.

At any rate, checked my account within the local library network (as part of teaching myself HTML forms, I created a personal home page which will log me into the OPAC at the push of a button). And I exclaimed aloud "Oh, <book> will be overdue in forty minutes!" Checked a box and pressed another button. "Never mind. I just renewed it." My husband complimented me on the close call and suggested I blog it, which I am doing now.

And now I seem to be hunting for something else to read. I currently have nine books out from the library. I have finished four of them (two I'm keeping out so Ian can read). I've skimmed through two of the others enough to know I'm not going to read them, and another one is more an anthology reference book that I'm picking through piecemeal. Interesting, but not pleasure reading. That leaves two more fiction titles, neither of which terribly grabbed me upon first flip through...

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:59 PM

Shh! Don't tell NASA!

The Spirit Rover has her own LiveJournal. It's so sweet. Let me just quote for you the latest entries:

It's just so cute; reminds me of some of the people on my own Friend List...

Posted by Lis Riba at 4:10 PM

I am so tickled by today's Brian McGrory column that it's hard to winnow it down to fair use excerpts. I wish I could just repost it in its entirety, it does such a good job summarizing what's been wrong with recent mainstream political coverage.

Voters, come in, please. Take a seat. We need to have a little talk.

Listen, you've done some great work over the years, you really have. The entire country owes you a huge debt of thanks. But on behalf of the news media, the Washington pundits, various powerbrokers, assorted columnists, and esteemed talking heads, I have some news that it doesn't give me any pleasure to give.

You're fired.

No, I know, it seems abrupt, but it really isn't. We've been thinking about this since we caught you having that illicit fling with John McCain. The bottom line is, you're unreliable, and this electoral system needs to be fixed.

Do you have any idea how many millions of dollars we spend on polls? We have national polls, state polls, tracking polls, rolling polls, rolling tracking polls, tracking rolling polls. And when we use irrefutable science to determine exactly who wins what race and why, you willfully ignore the memo. So there's the problem: You're not paying enough attention, and I don't mean to the boring candidates. To us.

It goes on in this vein, and is well worth reading. Meanwhile, Norman of Pacific Heights shares an example from last night's CNN, where analysts spent an hour talking about polls and horceracing and when it came to the issues, said:

Similarly, TalkLeft points out that "Out of the 96 questions that [Diane] Sawyer asked [Howard Dean], 90 were about personality and temperament and only six were even vaguely about issues; virtually all 96 were hostile and negative. When Dean tried to move the discussion to matters of substance, Sawyer inevitably pushed it back to negative fluff."

How can we get news out of the entertainment division and back into the business of informing citizens so we can best carry out our responsibilities of governing this nation by electing the best candidates.

I'll conclude with another clip from McGrory, because it just seems so apt:

How do you think all this makes us feel in the news business? Well, I'll tell you exactly how it makes us feel: jittery. We're up here in New Hampshire long past the time when we like to call things done, and you keep getting in the way. Dean's down, Dean's up. Kerry's surging, Kerry's sliding. Who do you think you are, waiting until Primary Day to make up your mind?

Now we've got million-dollar-a-year analysts on national television hedging their bets. What gives you the right? And some people are starting to think this thing might go one primary, one caucus at a time, until a candidate wins enough delegates. Obviously, the system's broken and needs to be fixed.
<snip>
[O]n caucus day and Primary Day, we'll have a new mantra, something a little more appropriate for the Information Age: "We Report, We Decide." And nobody gets in our way.

Posted by Lis Riba at 12:25 PM

When you call in sick to work, do you mention the reasons? [Feel like I'm coming down with a cold; Might be something I ate...] If you're a manager or somebody to whom people call in sick, do you want explanation?

If the condition is cramps, do you mention that, or is it TMI? Does it make a difference whether the person you're calling into is male or female?

It's just that calling in sick over cramps feels odd to me. Generally, I only need about half-a-day out for them, and then I'm fine and show no outward symptoms. Most other ailments, one comes back to the office and it's fairly obvious that there was something wrong -- maybe one is hoarse or still sniffling, but coworkers can see that you weren't faking it. But when calling in over cramps, I worry that coworkers will think that I was just lazy and sleeping late or something.

Also, I'm still open to suggestions of favorite home remedies for cramps because two maximum strength Midol and two shots of liquor and applied heat did not help as much or as quickly as they should...

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:25 PM

The Newsweek article on adults reading YA books says:

[M]aybe grown-ups like children's entertainment simply because it's better than their own. Since writers can't fall back on sex, romance or profanity, the storytelling has to be dramatic and clear. Critic Francis Spufford, who reread all his childhood favorites while writing his memoir, "The Child That Books Built," believes that kids' books fill a need for compelling stories currently missing in adult fiction. He blames modernism for encouraging experimentation at the expense of a sound narrative. "What's happening now is a return to the story in its strongest sense, to the primal excitement of wanting to know what happens next," he says.

Ain't that the truth. [Ian pointed out this is also a strength of genre fiction over the more literary varieties.] The School of night begins in a most exciting manner, with the lead character stealing some recently-discovered notebooks thought to have belonged to Thomas Hariot and beginning to (literally) decipher them.

Then the story takes a massive leap back into this meandering biography of the lead character, going all the way back to his childhood. I'm currently on page 72 (out of nearly 300) -- I think he's now twenty years before the theft -- hoping the story picks up soon (or I find another book to capture my attention).

At any rate, as in Chasing Shakespeares, The School of night is about one man's (why is the conflicted scholar always male?) escape from the orthodoxy through examining the authorship question.

So far, an argument made on page 25 seems to be the primary avenue for doubting Shakespeare's authorship. To quote:

That question is raised often in authorship debates -- to be such a writer, he must also have been a reader. So where were his books?

So far, in this novel, the answer seems to be that somebody else -- someone with a grand library -- must've authored the plays.

But, as I'm going on, I'm coming up with a much simpler solution.

Shakespeare retired from London back to Stratford in 1611, at which point he wrote his will. That makes me wonder if he might've been ill. [He died five years later.] And my purely off-the cuff hypothesis is that Shakespeare's eyes went bad. My mother always warned me about reading in low light; Shakespeare spent decades writing by candlelight (and I've seen comparisons of candles to gaslights to lightbulbs -- candles are dim!). Vision problems or blindness would prevent him from reading anyway, so why not pre-emptively sell the books in London (where they'd garner a better price than out in the boonies) to pay for medical expenses?

This is purely guesswork on my part, not backed up by any evidence nor much research, but it seems just as plausible and certainly simpler than challenging the identity of the author...

Am I ruining anybody's fun by thinking along these lines?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:30 PM

Thanks to the denizens of HLAS, I have got the full text to Tamer Tamed, the contemporary sequel to Taming of the Shrew that I wrote about last week.

Although several articles used what they suggested were quotes from the play, I was wary of reusing them because they sounded just too modern in attitude and I thought they might be the work of a modern adaptation. But just get a load of these lines from the epilog:

Way to go, Fletcher!

Meanwhile, I've found two other recent blog posts, by PinkDreamPoppies and neven, that I really want to devote long amounts of time to consideration and response. I have some ideas, but I don't have that kind of time... [If you wish to respond to neven, please first read this note he appended later.]

[Oh, and get a load of this thread for yet another example of why I love my husband so.]

Grr/Sigh... So someone anonymous on LJ set out on a one-person crusade against NC-17 fanfiction and created a blacklist. The person sparked some intersting discussion, a few rants, a lot of derision and mockery, and several parody sites. Eventually (after the person decided to delete existing comments and disable future comments) everyone decided the person was a troll and to just ignore hir.

Well, the person responsible for this community has just issued an ultimatum:

We believe everyone is responsible for the social welfare of children online and that website owners can easily provide adult authentication access for free or for a fee to adults.
There are no excuses. We have come to a decision that we will give websites two weeks to comply with COPA or we will report them to a federal agency that we have sought advice from.

I really don't want to give this person any more attention than they've already got. Most of hir targets are other LiveJournal users, although the person also mentions going after Fiction Alley and the Nimbus 2005 conference. I have no clue who the person has talked to or what actions they plan to take. But anybody on the list might want to take a few precautions.

My gut-level response is that this person will go after ISPs, as the weakest link, and try to threaten them into removing your material. I'd recommend backing up your site, if you haven't got a recent backup on hand. It's probably also a good idea to pre-emptively contact your ISP to warn them this may be coming. Meanwhile, I know I've got free speech advocates and librarians reading this, so any further advice for someone defending from a COPA threat would be most appreciated. There are many works of excellent artistic and literary merit included in this broad brush, and to shut these sites down would hurt a lot of people for little benefit.

Posted by Lis Riba at 5:30 PM

Unsurprisingly, the Arisia panel on Beta Reading included a number of complaints about poor spelling and grammar.

We didn't want the panel to bog down by questions of "What are they teaching in schools these days?" (as C.S. Lewis wrote) so somebody mentioned plans to found a new community to discuss these issues, and thus edurants was born.

It's still new and relatively small so postings have been sparse, but if you enjoy what I write, I suspect that you'll appreciate edurants as well.

What follows is my first post to the community:

Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways because parents complained their children might be ridiculed for not making the list. And lawyers thought that displaying good work might violate privacy laws against releasing academic information without permission. The article mentions some school districts are considering going so far as to cancel spelling bees.

I was an honor roll student in high school, and among the top students, I think the competition was a good thing and gave us something measurable to strive for. [I no longer remember my exact class rank, but I was within the top 5% of a graduating class of over 500 students. I didn't care so much about the exact number or who was above or below me, but staying within that percentile seemed a reasonable and challenging goal.]

I was also part of the academic team (quiz bowl) my senior year. It was a small team, but I don't remember anybody being turned away (not many people were interested to begin with), and it pit school against school like other sports, leading to more intermural competition than problems amongst my fellow students. [I actually have an athletic letter for my participation.] And if spelling bees and quiz bowls are bad for the self esteem of those who don't make the teams, then what about school sports, which seem to be sacred in this culture?

I agree that things should be done in a way not to embarrass poorer students or put further obstacles in their paths, but these steps sound like they'll do more harm in bringing down the best than good in elevating the rest.

Posted by Lis Riba at 3:30 PM

Want a laugh?

It's a bit late, but this response to the State of the Union cracked me up. You'll probably have to have seen Buffy Season 3 to get the joke...

Spent much of the weekend listening to the Dean remixes. Amusing, and some are actually rather good. I'm just surprised nobody's yet redone Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell." As a child, we had an old Atari game called "Yar's Revenge" that I'm surprised nobody's tried to ape.

Avedon Carol quotes Hal O'Brien on military support for the Republicans come the 2004 election:

Put it to you this way. A joke I heard from an NCO buddy of mine in the Army:

   Q: What's the difference between Dubya and Jane Fonda?
   A: Hey, at least Jane went to Vietnam!

[Perhaps there's more reason to get paranoid over the inherent insecurity of the military's new Internet-based absentee voting system and the administration's completely dismissive response...]

Beware of the dog!

This week's local newspaper notes:

You can tell the police log is real, because there is no way we could actually make this stuff up. Someone actually did call in Saturday morning to say their dog's foot was stuck in another dog's bum -- that's the technical term used by the dispatcher.
 If we had made it up, we'd know how and why. Alas, it's a mystery to us.

Also in the local paper... Longtime readers may remember that last year, I thought I saw a bald eagle overhead. Well, this week a bald eagle was spotted at Ell Pond (apparently munching on dead goose) and somebody managed to get a photograph of the bird on the front page. The paper quotes a local birder who "said he has seen the eaagle in the area a few times this week." But that makes it quite likely that what I saw last December was in fact a bald eagle. As I said at the time, Wow.

Looking for something to read, I picked up The School of night -- a contemporary novel addressing the authorship question -- at the library on Saturday. I was amused to find a Post-It note inside the front cover listing three other books -- other recent novels about Shakespeare and all of which I have already read (A Mystery of errors, The Slaying of the shrew, and Chasing Shakespeares). When I got it home, it turned out there was a second Post-It under the first, listing more titles, neither of which I've read. [Alias Shakespeare Sobran, Joseph, and Isler Alan The Prince of W. End Ave] This tells me that (a) another library user has similar interests to mine, but (b) thanks to USAPAT privacy, I have no way of contacting him or her to share further suggestions or return the favor...

Speaking of librarianship, Seth Finkelstein raises an excellent point.

Google-bombing, as I think of it, demonstrates the conflict between *popularity* and *authority* for search engines.
<snip>
It's an illustration of many people repeating something (popularity) for purposes of having it accepted as meaningful (authority). This leads to obvious concerns as to just how much neutral authority can be corrupted by partisan popularity (note this assumes for the sake of discussion that course there's a neutral authority in the first place - a very arguable assumption).

I'm toying with expanding upon this notion with quotes from Tocqueville (how Americans tend to confer more authority upon the majority than is perhaps healthy or true) and Heinlein ("Democracy is based on the assumption that a million men are wiser than one man. How's that again?") and comments that if majority opinion were always correct, then Titanic is a better film than Citizen Kane and lasers work by focusing sound waves [*]. But I've been through this before.

Many people believe that with a fast web connection and Google, they no longer need libraries. Remember this Colin Powell quote? "I no longer have any encyclopedias, any dictionaries, or any reference materials anywhere in my office, whatsoever, I don't need them. I've stopped using all reference materials because you don't need it. All you need is a search engine."

Aside from the lack of authority control on the Internet, the difficulty of determining whether a source is reputable or not, the new trend of Google-bombing, particularly for political purposes, makes the Internet more difficult for novice searchers. This further demonstrates the need for skilled, professional librarians. And maybe we ought to point this out before society writes us off as obsolete!

The Leaky Cauldron shares yet another article on why adults read kidlit. I've blogged this kind of thing before, as have they, but I rather like this turn of phrase that accurately sums up one of the appeals the genre holds for me:

"[M]aybe grown-ups like children's entertainment simply because it's better than their own. Since writers can't fall back on sex, romance or profanity, the storytelling has to be dramatic and clear."

This is so true. As I've written elsewhere, YA books can and often do have sex, violence and strong language -- but it's not gratuitous. If it's there, it's there for a reason. Which makes those elements all the stronger and more powerful. [This Usenet post contains further reasons I enjoy YA fiction.]

That's about all for now, although I'm sure I'll think of something else the moment after I post.

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:50 AM

Much of what I have to say relates to food today. That's what I get for writing over my lunch hour, I guess...

By the end of the day Friday, I was feeling rather stressed. [In short, I spent over three hours on the phone with one customer, plus additional time researching and composing a final email summarizing our work. A dealer had been talking repeatedly with support the previous day, but I was the lucky one to take her call in the morning. Not only was it a complex issue, but she was calling from a noisy server room.] I wanted comfort food. Initially, I had been thinking Cobb salad, but shortly after getting home I read this silly transcript of the President's remarks (yes, that is whitehouse.gov and not any of the parody sites) and got in a mood for ribs. [See, for all they call him a figurehead, the president wields surprising influence!] We went to Bison County in Waltham. The baby back ribs looked good, but they only served them as a full rack, and I knew a half-rack was more than enough food for me. And since we keep kosher within the house, I couldn't really bring the leftovers home. But I didn't want to waste food, either. I thought maybe I'd seek out somebody homeless and offer them the other half-rack. So I sliced the uneaten ribs apart enough that they could be eaten by hand, had them wrapped up, and put them in the back seat of the car. [It was colder than refrigeration out there.]

I spent much of Saturday running errands. As the car began to warm in the afternoon, the smell of the ribs made me hungry, and began to think more selfish thoughts about them. My second-to-last stop was at the Cambridge Public Library, where I saw a man who looked homeless (I know the folly of stereotyping by appearance, but there you go) huddled in the foyer, drinking from a plastic milk jug and munching on a bagel. I'll confess to wavering slightly in my own hunger, but decided his need was probably greater than mine, and headed back to the library with the styrofoam container of ribs.

Turns out, he was vegetarian, but he thanked me profusely anyway. I thought about driving around Harvard Square and looking for other homeless people to offer them to, but in the end I went home and ate them myself (sitting on the staircase in front of our apartment so I wouldn't bring it into our apartment), but I was moderately amused at how it turned out. As Ian pointed out when I told him, (a) I only committed to offering the leftovers to the homeless, which I did, not finding or forcing someone to accept, and (b)

There seem to be a number of food-related stories in this week's news: