The Invisible Library

Colleen Mandor thinks Harry Potter Must Live:

I’m going to make a stand here and maybe some folks will consider me a colossal sap for feeling this way, but the Harry Potter books are written for children and I think that children, especially 21st century children, deserve a happy ending every now and again. Rowling says there need to be more deaths so readers will realize they are dealing with “pure evil”. Well, I think we all figured out the bad guy was really bad when we read that he killed Harry’s parents or uses Ginny Weasley with intentions to kill her or kills Cedric or causes Sirius Black to die in battle or Dumbledore to die or even horribly uses poor Draco (a brat but not necessarily on his way to total evilhood until pushed over the edge by parents and Voldemort) and on and on.

We get it Rowling - trust me - everyone who reads these books gets the bit about evil.

So why do more major characters have to sacrifice themselves in order for Rowling to feel like she’s gotten her point? And more than that, why do children have to experience death at the youngest age (even in their literature) in order to grow up right? Why do we all have to be exposed to it as early as possible? Why do we have to understand that one day our parents will be gone, our friends might be in horrendous accidents, cancer will come, airplanes will crash, it all will end sadly or badly or both.

Why do we have to accept this at the age of 8?

[…] Some of us still need happy endings, you see.

Good does win sometimes, it does beat the bad guys, it does come out on top. And I can’t help but think that if Rowling kills off Harry it won’t be because it’s best for the story but because she has a message she wants to get across and she will use him to do it. In fact, I can’t help but think that she will be taking the easy way out and letting down her fans in the process if all the dire predictions about Harry come to pass.

But honestly, don’t we get enough death and destruction without it reaching into all our favorite books as well? (If you need to cry and rage at the world just go read Old Yeller.) And Harry Potter means the world to so many kids - so very very very many kids. Why teach them the harshest kind of lesson just to make a point (and make a bunch of adult critics happy?). Why can’t Rowling be truly brave and let Harry and his friends live? Why can’t she be bold and give them a happily ever after?

Link via Bookslut

Phil Maynard at the Guardian Blog thinks Harry Potter Must Die:

Ever since young lips were set a-wobbling by the demise of Dumbledore in HP6 (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) it seemed likely that the mighty author’s pen would strike further blows in the seventh and clinching episode (expected next year).

And so it seems: JK Rowling has let slip that the final chapter of the saga contains the deaths of more than one major character, stoking rumours that Potter himself may be bumped off.

The rumours alone of Potter’s demise, whether or not exaggerated, will be enough to bring the issue of mortality firmly on to the breakfast table where it will further loom over many a school run in the coming weeks and hype-filled months.

Children have to learn to deal with death sooner or later, it’s the reason they have hamsters for pets. Or so it was once explained to me one tearful morning when Hammy wasn’t on his wheel.

Link via Bookslut

Something is happening at the Library of Congress and Thomas Mann, Reference Librarian in the Library of Congress Main Reading Room wants to know what. He’s written an essay (PDF) outlining the shape of cataloguing procedures at the LC. And they don’t look very good:

There is substantive evidence, provided by patterns of statements both from LC  management and from the sources it relies on, that the Library of Congress is striving mightily to  get out of the business of providing systematic access to a large collections of printed books  through the provision of LC Subject Headings (in an online catalog that is not merged with  Google) and through the provision of subject-categorized shelving of actual volumes arranged  according to the LC Classification system. It sees the digitization of book collections being  essentially accomplished completely by Google’s Book Search project (and some others), in spite  of copyright restrictions. It also envisions keyword searching of these digitized book texts, with  computer-algorithm “relevance ranking” of the results (and Amazon-type reader-preference  tracking) as being adequate to meet the new goal of research libraries, which is simply to provide  something delivered quickly and remotely to “the user.” Questions regarding the quality of  resources made available on the Internet are all to be answered simply by digitizing everything–in  spite of copyright restrictions and in spite of the fact that Internet search mechanisms cannot find  the quality material, or adequately segregate it from the mountains of chaff, through keyword and  user-tracking softwares.

Now, none of these things is necessarily wrong by themselves. If the LC had decided to incorporate folksonomy and page ranking on top of the services they already offer, that would be one thing. But they aren’t. The powers that be at the LC have decided that the Google Model is good enough for everyone, including other libraries. Regardless of the fact that they’ve been presented studies showing that library researchers want the ability to browse actual books and sort through indexed records, not just Google for surface level info.

While all of this may sound a little technical, it’s part of a larger pattern. The LC higher ups, specifically Deanna Marcum, the Associate Librarian for Library Services, claim that they’re just trying to meet user needs, while staying within the boundaries of shrinking budgets. Fair enough. But why are the budgets shrinking so much that the LC has to cut services? And why, in the face of plenty of information to the contrary, has Deanna Marcum, decided that the Google Model will do just fine?

I know from inside sources that the LC has a hiring freeze on. That means that when librarians retire or move on, they aren’t hiring replacements, just assigning the workflow to the few librarians still there. This means one librarian attempting to do the work of two, sometimes three or more. Programs are being cut and services rigged to be either automated or maintained by bots and IT.

It’s no secret that President Bush is no friend of books. Some may even describe him as a functional illiterate man-child waging a personal war against the English language and any knowledge that wasn’t plucked out of thin air by late bronze age sheep herders. The GOP in general has, for decades, tried to kill federal arts programs and now it would seem that they’ve decided the world’s most advanced society doesn’t really need all them books anyway. And, as usual, they ply the same old tactics: starving programs to death, acting bewildered when they fail and then cutting them entirely. (Does Haliburton have an IT devision? Bet they do.)

This doesn’t mean that Dr. Marcum is another Heckuvajob Brownie. She could just be a useful tool. An enthusiastic supporter of emerging technology put in a position to reshape the Library of Congress in an exciting new way that just happens not to really help matters but may in fact make things worse at an already strained institution.

Futurama will return to TV. Comedy Central has picked up the rights to air all the old episodes, plus new episodes to be created.

The second dumbest thing Fox ever did was cancel Futurama.* What did they think, that the Simpsons would last forever? It’s already lingered well past its sell-by date and should have gone into syndication immortality years ago. Perhaps once the Simpsons Movie comes along, they’ll le the show go off the air and save those of us who grew up with it the horror of watching it turn into a mediocre parody of itself. Futurama was going to be the inheritor of the Simpson’s genius. But Fox, never imaginative enough to look too hard into the future, couldn’t see that. luckily, the folks at Comedy Central can.

PZ Myers attempts to answer the age old question: just what kind of scientist is Batman anyway?

Be sure to read the comments.

The horror.

I was a little hard on Stephen Hawking last week but only because I except better form one of the most brilliant men on the planet. Better, like this:

HONG KONG (AP) - Famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking said Thursday that the late Pope John Paul II once told scientists they should not study the beginning of the universe because it was the work of God.

The British author _ who wrote the best-seller “A Brief History of Time” _ said that the pope made the comments at a cosmology conference at the Vatican.

Hawking, who didn’t say when the meeting was held, quoted the pope as saying, “It’s OK to study the universe and where it began. But we should not enquire into the beginning itself because that was the moment of creation and the work of God.”

The scientist then joked during a lecture in Hong Kong, “I was glad he didn’t realize I had presented a paper at the conference suggesting how the universe began. I didn’t fancy the thought of being handed over to the Inquisition like Galileo.”

We’ve come along way in a few short centuries. Today, a brilliant scientist can joke about being fed to the Inquisition by an obtuse man in a funny hat, rather than fear that the current Pope (formerly the head of the Inquisition) would actually tie him to the rack and break out the anal pear.

But some things never change. It’s the 21st century and we still have Pope for one thing. For another, people still listen to that gassy windbag as if his lunatic rantings about sky fairies and the moral implications of masturbating were anything but backward superstition. But three pips for Dr. Hawking for not backing down and going ahead with his fantastically important research, even if (and especially if) it honks off some dipshit in a fancy dress who believes the sky is falling.

BBC News:

An artist’s sculpture has been rejected by the Royal Academy of Arts which has instead opted to display the wooden support it was put on.

David Hensel, 64, from East Grinstead, West Sussex, was told the laughing head would be part of the summer exhibition.

But at a preview he found that just a piece of wood intended to support the head was on display on the plinth.

The Academy said the judging panel assumed the two pieces were separate and decided the support was better.

You can follow the link to see pictures of both the sculpture and the plinth.

Now, there’s several way to look at this story (but then, isn’t there always when modern art is involved?): either it was a cock up of mythic proportions— imagine, the philistines are running the show over there at the Royal Academy and don’t even know their own asses form a plinth— or, it was just a mix up, the judges were told that the plinth was a separate piece and judged it accordingly, weighing it’s aesthetic merits against those of the 10,000 or so other entries, and found the laughing head wanting in comparison to it’s base.

Of course, at some point regardless of which view you take, you have to realise that the Lord High Curators of Artistic Merit for all of Bloody England chose a block of wood over an actual object recognizable as a work of sculpture. There is no other use for a discrete laughing head. It serves no possible purpose except an artistic one, while a block of wood has infinite possible uses. We could then say that the judges were merely signifying that they are for the infinite in art, rather than the singular. Or rather, they’re all a bunch of dingbats.

Link via Crooked Timber.