The Invisible Library

Updated below.

Michael Gorman, self appointed Poobah of the Kranky Old Geezers of the Library World * has a new rant up about how the Internet and blogs are making us stupid at, of all places, the Britannica Blog. He starts off with a straw man so huge, the denizens of a small island off the coast of Scotland have already gathered around it, stuffed it with Edward Woodward and are fetching the torches as we speak:

The life of the mind in the age of Web 2.0 suffers, in many ways, from an increase in credulity and an associated flight from expertise. Bloggers are called “citizen journalists”; alternatives to Western medicine are increasingly popular, though we can thank our stars there is no discernable “citizen surgeon” movement; millions of Americans are believers in Biblical inerrancy—the belief that every word in the Bible is both true and the literal word of God, something that, among other things, pits faith against carbon dating; and, scientific truths on such matters as medical research, accepted by all mainstream scientists, are rejected by substantial numbers of citizens and many in politics.

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s Dr. Nathan Null, “a White House Situational Science Adviser,” tells us that: “Situational science is about respecting both sides of a scientific argument, not just the one supported by facts.” This is satire, of course, but hardly too broad in a time when school boards aim “intelligent design” (creationism with lipstick on) at the minds of schoolchildren and powerful interests deny the very existence of catastrophic human-caused global climate change. These are evidence of a tide of credulity and misinformation that can only be countered by a culture of respect for authenticity and expertise in all scholarly, research, and educational endeavors.

For a man opposed to Burst Culture, he sure doesn’t waste time with any long winded preambles. But take a gander at that frame: it’s so gaudy it should be around a Da Vinci painting. “Citizen Journalists” (us bloggers) are in the same category as Barber Surgeons, Flat Earthers and Creationists. Nice, huh? How he thinks Bloggers or the Internet are to blame for Intelligent Design/Creationism or the popularity of Alternative Medicine is a mystery, one he doesn’t bother to explain. These have been around far longer than the Internet, as long as his beloved “Expert Culture” has, if not longer. If the freekin’ Enlightenment didn’t drive them away what makes him think the Internet can? Or that it should?

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Ronald Moore at the BSG Blog comments on the Saprano’s finale kerfluffle:

For weeks, the speculation has centered around a simplistic black and white question for a show that revelled in never providing monochromatic answers: would Tony live or die? The prosaic nature of the question and its anticipated answer was itself was the most disappointing thing about the lead-up to the finale. Either Tony was going to get whacked, or he wouldn’t. “The Sopranos” would end with either the bitter little pill of the “bad” guy finally getting what he’s got coming or with the vaguely false relief of family affirmed and life goes on.

Instead, Chase managed to do the unthinkable, the unbelievable and the unprecedented: he yanked us out of their lives without any resolution whatsoever. We were torn away from Tony, Carmella, AJ, Meadow, Paulie, Sil and the all the rest without any idea what happens to them tomorrow or even later that same evening. In real life, when you lose contact with someone, you seldom if ever have the satisfaction of knowing how the myriad threads of their lives resolved themselves. They are removed from your circle of knowledge and yet their lives go on unbeknownst to you in ways you can only imagine. The Sopranos are gone from our lives, but their lives go on without resolution, much like ours. None of us have tidy, revelatory endings that are the culmination of our “story arcs” and neither will they.

Having never been a Saprano’s fan, I don’t have the emotional involvement in the finale that some people have. But I am invested in the outcome of Battlestar Galactica, because for us Sci-fi nerds, it’s our Saparano’s and I’m curious as to how Ronald Moore will end the series. Also, as a writer, I’m interested in how other writers handle the little technical details that come with storytelling. Endings are hard and deciding at what point to fade out, walk into the sunset or just cut to black is just as important as that first sentence or opening scene. I’m also a big fan of ambiguity and ambiguous endings.  Sometimes the horse throws a shoe, the hero and heroine loose interest in one another, and neither the empire nor the rebellion wins, they just keep on fighting. That’s life and art should reflect life whenever possible.

Tony Millionaire has also reviewed Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not great. I like his review better.

With the seventh Harry Potter book and fifth movie about to premier, there’s no shortage of Harry Potter Hysteria (HPH) to be had. This is baffling to us librarians, Harry Potter fans, or anyone with two brain cells to rub together as HPH clearly just so much Satanic Panic with a new coat of paint. So, the claims of witchcraft and Satanic initiation are clearly a cock and bull story, but what is the real motivation behind banning Harry Potter books? It could be part of the Evangelical movement’s more general disregard for worldly knowledge, book learning and anything fun. But I think it’s more specific than that. I think there is a real threat to the religious worldview in the Harry Potter books, it just isn’t Satanic in nature but secular.*

While His Dark Materials and even the Lord of The Rings are also on the Evangelical shit list, Harry Potter has become the whipping boy for their fears of a secular culture. The Harry Potter Books and films show how one can fight evil without resorting to superstitious rituals or relying on religious authority. It’s just a boy and his friends, learning to develop their inborn talents (sometimes doing so against the wishes of authority figures) to save the world. And that scares the shit out of the Religious Right. No wonder they don’t want their kids to read these books, as they will grow up to think that they can fight evil and change the world for the better without appeals to higher powers or relying on a daddy figure (because he’s dead, after all), but just by invoking the magic of hard work, friendship and cooperation and sometimes breaking the rules. Harry Potter encourages children to be rebellious, self reliant and to distrust elders, because they may not have their best interests in mind. Which is why they will go down in history as the best books, ever.

According to Omar at Orgtheory, only 73.6% of Americans believe in Heliocentrism. While this may be upsetting, we should rejoice in the fact that, according to Kieran Healy over at Crooked Timber, more people than that are down with interracial dating (83%). Kieran goes on to point out what a marvel it is that the numbers are so high for interracial dating, seeing as how it’s only been forty years since Loving vs. Virginia and there are still people (mostly elderly dinosaurs) who are again’ it. There’s no excuse however for that Heliocentrism number. We’ve known Heliocentrism to be true mathematically and astronomically for more than three centuries and we proved it empirically more than forty years ago.

So, for anyone out there still harboring a bit of doubt: yes, the Earth does revolve around the sun. This isn’t one of those questionable theories like gravity or evolution or electromagnetism, where there’s still a little wiggle room (we’re only 99.998 percent sure about those three). We know Heliocentrism is a fact because we’ve been to the motherfucking moon, people. You can’t build a rocket and go to the moon on it if Heliocentrism is false. It just won’t work. And as big a fan as I am of Interracial relationships (being in one) I’d gladly swap those numbers, if just so that I’ll be able to sleep at night knowing that almost a quarter of my fellow countrymen aren’t concerned that the leprechauns that hold them down to the surface of the Earth aren’t going to bite them in their sleep.

I don’t often agree with Christopher Hitchens. His midlife flight from Trotskyism has, in many ways, turned him into a cranky reactionary, siding with Neocons when occasion suits him and generally being contrarian for the sake of pissing people off. Which is fine, the world needs it’s contrarians and I don’t have to agree with a man entirely to recognize when he is making sense. Which is why I’m glad he put the gin bottle down long enough to write God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.

Firstly, you probably won’t discover too many new pieces of information here, though I did learn a few things about how the Koran was edited together that were new to me. But Hitchen’s offers a much needed complementary view to atheism in general and Atheist writing in particular. The unavoidable comparisons to Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins are made in just about every review of Hitchens’ book I’ve read and they probably will form a sort of unofficial atheist trilogy. Where Harris comes at the problem of faith and belief in god form the point of view of a philosopher and Dawkins tackles it from the perspective of a scientist, Hitchens offers us the much needed insight of a journalist and man of letters.

It’s this literary perspective that is most necessary to help encourage skepticism and disbelief to spread among the general public. Far too often, atheists are seen as cold, calculating rationalists, robot men who have amputated the limb of faith and are lacking in something vital, all in the pursuit of reason. Hitchens does a service in showing that disbelief is not the result of prolonged exposure to rare intellectual isotopes but the natural and organic process of simply living in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. Atheism and skepticism has a long and glorious tradition, rooted in Enlightenment values of free thought, unrestrained inquiry and above all imagination. Some of the greatest writers and thinkers of the last three centuries have been men and women without faith. These are not freaks and outsiders, hammering away at the foundation of Western Civilization. They are they architects of our culture. Showing that the Bible is just shoddy literature, with very human (and often bloody) fingerprints all over it will go a long way towards undermining its authority as an unimpeachable resource, one to be eyed with the critics skeptic eye than the true believer’s blind faith.

So, Ray Bradbury now says that his famous anti-censorship novel, Fahrenheit 451 isn’t actually about censorship, but how TV rots your brains and pop-culture is the torch lit under literature’s legacy. Or some such nonsense.

Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, is now supposed to be about the evils of Television, a device not widely available until the mid nineteen fifties? Man, he really was ahead of the curve, wasn’t he? So how’s that Martian colony coming along?
As I said over at Making light, The man’s 87 years old. If he has any hills left to go over, their little ones at best, maybe speed bumps.

A novel, like a child, becomes it’s own entity once it leaves your desk and enters the world, bound and printed for everyone to read and decide what it means for themselves. What he wanted it to mean while he was writing it fifty years ago is different then what it meant when he finished it, which is different from what it means now. He had a say in the first instance, an opinion in the second but the third instance is completely out of his hands.

It’s our book now, Mr. Bradbury. Thanks for writing it but we’ll take it form here.

It’s recently come to the attention of my wife and I that our music collection is not organized correctly. We have more than 13,000 songs in our iTunes Library, classified into 28 genres, which is a pretty representative collection, providing us with just enough categories to be able to arrange things meaningfully without it getting too complicated. Except, somehow it has, and this has a lot to do with the vagaries of cataloging in general. Our main problem is in deciding what performer or group goes in what genre. You’d think this would be straight forward but you’d be wrong.

Take for example our selection of the Cure. We have pretty much everything they’ve ever recorded. But where does it go? Rock? Alternative? Pop? 80’s? They aren’t traditional rock (a category I think should be reserved for your basic, straight ahead guitar based music, like Led Zeppelin or the Doors or the Beatles– but only mid to late Beatles as early Beatles is clearly pop. See where this gets confusing?)

As for the Cure, we do have an 80’s genre, which isn’t a real genre but a catch all for anything that came out during the New Wave, Post Punk era. But as the Cure were formed in the late seventies and are still recording and touring today, they span four decades so calling them 80’s just doesn’t fly. We could just say screw it and put them in Alternative, but what does Alternative even mean? These days, bands are just as likely to release albums on the Internet, which is as alternative as you can get from the Big Labels, but that doesn’t mean a Big Label, medium label or even small label won’t release the album as well. And with the mainstreaming of the Alt sound, the category just doesn’t mean anything, except as a non-genre label for everything that doesn’t fit neatly into Rock or Pop.

And the problem with Pop is really what got us into this mess in the first place. A friend of ours is getting ready for a cross country drive, moving back to Oregon and wanted some music for the road. So, naturally we said sure, come on over and we’ll burn you a disc of whatever you want. She wanted something upbeat and poppy to keep her and her boyfriend awake on the road. But My wife’s idea of pop music differs wildly form that of, well, everyone else in the world. Our Pop category covers Belle and Sebastian and Leonard Cohen. The Beach Boys and Amiee Mann. We don’t listen to Poppy Pop Pop music, like Boy Bands or Britney Spears, so our Pop selection veers wildly toward the upbeat alt scene. Except for Mr. Cohen who, as anyone even half familiar with his music will attest, is not even remotely what you’d call upbeat. But there he is, rubbing elbows with the Shins, Modest Mouse and The Postal Service.

We could move Leonard to Jazz, but our Jazz leans heavily towards the Swing/Crooner style. If we’re in the mood to listen to the swinging sound of the Squirrel Nut Zippers and Billie Holiday, we don’t want to put it on shuffle and end up with an ear full of So Long, Marianne. We do have a Chanson genre, which is basically French ballads in a cabaret style which might work bu then who says, “You know what I’m in the mood for? Melancholy French Cabaret Music. And Leonard Cohen.”

Oh, it’s all so confusing.