The Invisible Library

So, it turns out that the kid arrested for writing a Zombie story, didn’t in fact include any zombies in the story. He did however, arrange to acquire stolen weapons and ammunition and write a scene describing people being shot. Then he lied to the press about the details. Thanks, William Poole for making me, and a lot of other people sensitive to free speech issues, feel like fucking tools. Now, the next time someone does have their creativity stifled unjustly, we’ll have to work extra hard to justify our defense of them, all the while shouting, “I don’t see any Zombies here!”

The King of Zembla pointed me to this conversation at Swans.com between Joe Bageant, Phil Rockstroh and John Steppling. Some rather bright fellows, I must say, wondering aloud about the world around us. It’s long, fraught with introspection and a vocabulary as vast as the night. I highly recommend it. An excerpt, to drive you there:

…Reading requires empathy and, again, eros. The rising of the cosmic johnson of joyous excess and potentially depth-engendering intimacies — not the spurious dick of Thanatos that corporatism wags in our faces. Death has always been with us — though in recent times he’s hired a PR firm to disguise his age-old agenda. The mere sight of his true face depresses sales potential in nearly every demographic group. You see: The sight of too many flag draped coffins will ruin the profit potential of a very lucrative war. Too much reading of poetry and literature could destroy the pharmaceutical industry. What would Paxil do to Bryronic yearning…to Whitmanesque eros…to Blakean numinosity?

English as She is Spoke, by Jose de Fonesca and Pedro Carolino.

In the mid nineteenth century, hoping to cash in on the craze for language phrase books for travelers, da Fonesca decided to fill a much needed gap and write a book translating common words and phrases from Portuguese to English. That he spoke not a word of English was not a hindrance. The intrepid da Fonesca had at his disposal a Portuguese to French phrase book and a French to English dictionary. The result is one of the strangest, most unintentionally hilarious books ever written, in which we learn how to “Craunch the marmoset,” and that ,”All hairs dresser are newsmonger.”

First, a little site maintenance: I’ve been meaning to add this link for a week or more but life’s been hectic. Better late than never though: the site feed is now active for all you atom subscribers out there (over on the sidebar, under Familial Blogs). Also, continuing my Open Source Evangelism, I’ve added a button at the bottom of the page, linking to OpenOffice.org, a fantastic, free alternative to the corrupt behemoth and child bone marrow-sucking spawn that calls itself the MS Office Suite. I’ve been using Open Office for about a week now on my office computer and just downloaded it for my laptop. It has everything that MS Office has, just not as clunky and not subject to the whimsical maintenance schedule of a corporate puppy kicker. It even reads your old Word Doc, Excel, and Power Point format documents and can save in those formats as well. Open office is very user friendly, with a much more intuitive interface than MS Office, in my opinion. So, check it out. It’s free, which means if you no likey, you no loose any money.

Now, the meat of the matter:

I’ve been wanting to write a follow up on last week’s kerfluffle, ALA President-Elect Michael Gorman versus the Blog People. Doesn’t that sound like an old 50’s sci-fi movie? The tweedy librarian with the thick glasses who saves civilisation from the mush mouthed, pin headed Techno Geeks from planet Blog, who are bent on replacing all complicated books featuring long words with short, pithy posts, probably about Paris Hilton, or their cats.

The problem, as I eluded too last week, is the fact that Dr. Gorman doesn’t know his audience. He wrote a screed decrying the proliferation of blogs, the digitization of public domain books by Google, (the scourge of the Old School Librarian) and the general decline of Western Civilization as we knew it, about ten years ago. Like many librarians of the previous generation, President Gorman isn’t very comfortable with computers. He uses them, even writes articles on how he thinks they should be used and can be useful. But he doesn’t trust them. Of course, what this generation of librarians is learning, is that you don’t have to trust computers. They are tools, and will do what you want them to, if you take the time to learn how to use them efficiently. You shouldn’t put trust in an inanimate object because computers, cars and dishwashers, as shiny, complex and lively as we like to think they are, are really nothing more than just fancy hammers and saws. No one is suggesting we trust them to do anything. But to distrust them is to fall into the Animistic Fallacy, to presuppose that a computer or any other machine (or inanimate object) has a life force, and one that might oppose you if you don’t stroke it and whisper encouragements into it’s USB port. One wonders if President Gorman casts disparaging glances at his salt shaker or distrusts his fork.

We all fall prey to the Animistic Fallacy from time to time. It’s a hardwired concept, one that creeps around in our genes and sneaks up on us in the middle of the night, or when confronted by something unfamiliar. That shadowy thing in the corner, is it out to get us? Do we eat it? Fuck it? Chase it away before it spoils our crops?

Well, not to worry, we Blog People aren’t out to get you. In fact, we want to help. Don’t let our crass vocabulary or extravagant, middle brow lingo fool you. Bloggers, at least us crazy liberal ones, have the same goals as librarians: providing access to information. Whether it’s by commenting on current events, ranting about the state of the world, or just trying to get people to read our novel in progress, blogging, like being a librarian, is all about information and providing people with a way to access it. Blogs aren’t a threat and neither is Google. They’re simply tools, like the old card catalog you miss so much used to be. They’re just easier to get to.

Update: Judith Berman hits the topic from a different angle (changing trends in SF publishing):

The Internet is perhaps the best symbol of everything disquieting to boomers (and their elders) about the present, including the generational divide with respect to technology. This divide is the subject of the old joke about the 8-year-old being the one who programs the family VCR. Part of what the joke expresses is the fear that members of the younger generation, at ease with all new technology, are growing up strangers to their parents.

With this posting I celebrate my blog self, completely, utterly, and proudly. Should any ALA president find a photo of my friend’s cat anti-intellectual, he’s just outta the loop and didn’t get the memo.

Teshup is my pin up, of a kind. Teshup and I share a friend who’s in Turkey, and I miss our mutual friend a lot.

To all the cats in the world, I love you.

Anyone else find it ironic that an author known for her Vampire novels is writing a book about Jesus? Probably not.

Yesterday in Maryland it was 72 and sunny. Today, it is 33 and snowing. But global warming is just a myth, you understand. This sort of dramatic weather change is perfectly natural for the 8th of March.

Hello, again, everyone.

Three things: Good news, bad news, and “the consolation of philosophy”. The good news first.

I have to thank Keith and E. A couple of years ago they introduced me to a little movie called Donnie Darko. They knew that I would be drawn to the themes of time travel and (let’s call it) Loophole Causality, because it’s the kind of thing K. and I used to love to discuss at Barnes and Noble when we should have been working. Even though it took me a few viewings to grasp, as near as I could, the actual plot, every one was worth it. It’s a movie that is friendly to subjectivity, and it’s the kind of thing I like. If you haven’t seen it, I’m not going to go into the details of the plot. Without spoiling anything: In the story, Donnie faces the possibility that he can greater serve humanity–and certainly his family and friends–by being, let’s just say, absent.

Now the bad news:

Hunter S. Thompson, as most readers of this blog probably already know, killed himself last week at his Woody Creek, Co. compound, sitting in his writing chair at his typewriter, a glass of Chivas Regal at his side and a single word written in the center of a page of stationary: “Counselor.” I couldn’t venture to say what that means, and it’s not the point, anyway. What I selfishly want to say is that Hunter was a hero of mine. What he did, I think, was to be fiercely loyal to the hardest Truths while taking the flimsy, Perceived Truths and dressing them up in monster suits and silly dresses. Which, if you think about it, is both wise and ballsy. Hunter Thompson was, to me, a modern American embodiment of my favorite literary character. He was a Mercutio. If Hemingway, long his idol, was brave Romeo running headlong at Apparent Reality with his sword thrust out blindly, Hunter was Mercutio, getting in there close, jabbing and weaving (like another Thompson hero, Muhammed Ali), making little nicks in the armor, and all the while making snarky commentary with a respectful–but perilously close–distance.

Consolation of Philosophy: (Apologies, Boethius, wherever you are.)

I was thinking about Hunter S. Thompson last night as I watched the recently released Donnie Darko Director’s Cut. Without really spoiling much, we can say this: Donnie has to remove himself from his environment in order to have the the most powerful effect on it. It has become apparent that it is no longer an environment he can survive in and, more, one which he can offer some degree of relief with his absence. Hunter, apparently facing serious health issues (including, at least to some degree, physical dependence on others) also seems to have thought that his time–his relevance–was done. The night before he killed himself, he was given an expensive Italian scarf by his son and daughter-in-law. He performed a ritual exchange and gave his son a medal formerly owned by Oscar Zeta Acosta. You get the impression, reading him, that Hunter was not a man to mistake or undervalue ritual. It seems as if he knew–or perhaps after that night he decided that it was best to end with such a beautiful memory fresh in his mind. At any rate, it seems to have been a conscious decision and on his own schedule.

Whether or not you can ever justify suicide–for any reason–is not the discussion here. The intersection of this fantastical movie about time-travel and this real-life American writer, it occurs to me, is that Hunter Thompson’s personality was so large that it is better suited to the parameters of Legend. His influence can range out beyond any physical limitation, now. No more will people ask “Where is he now?” or say “Well, his writing’s not what it used to be”. His relevance now, in a very real sense, transcends the temporal. And not just in his writing. People who knew Hunter will continue to tell stories of his surprising and disarming behavior to their children, and those stories will get passed down in an oral tradition that probably outweighs, in influence, anything that ever went through the New York Times bestseller list. This kind of longevity, let’s call it, effects people in a way that a spirit limited by time and place never could. In this way, Hunter Stockton Thompson is a real-life Donnie Darko. His spirit–his writing and his life and his enduring legacy of thoughtful dissent–will continue to affect person after person in ways probably too miniscule to notice and too numerous, collectively, to count.

Spreading inspiration and influence from a locus outside of time, Hunter will continue to be a ‘counselor’ to all of us, and we, if we listen, can all be the better for it.

Res Ipsa Loquitur