Words are Weeds

This Sunday in the New York Times:

clipped from www.nytimes.com

 

The item that caught my attention was about Chiquita Brands International (formerly known as the United Fruit Company). According to the item, Chiquita was "fined $25 million to settle charges that it illegally paid a right-wing militia to protect its banana plantations in Colombia." "Behind the News" didn't provide the most satisfactory explanation:

"Much of the countryside is beyond government control, and it is not unusual for foreign companies operating there to buy protection from shady groups."

Is the reader supposed to accept this explanation because it's common knowledge that part of the world is violent? Would it have been all right if Chiquita bought protection, but not from "drug-dealing terrorists"? But what kind of "shady groups" would pose a threat to a fruit plantation? Competitors? Unions, perhaps?

The Chiquita Web site is rife with irony and historical revisionism.

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"Dying is pointless. You have to know how to disappear." More on the disappearance of Jean Baudrillard...

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I have mixed feelings about the writing in the New York Times. Sometimes the articles are unbelievably bad, like an article that appeared a few weeks back in their Week in Review section. Written by Helene Cooper, we were asked to consider whether a "Spanish Civil War" scenario as an ending for Iraq would be that bad. One of the major problems was that her account of the Spanish Civil War left out basic historical facts to the point of distortion. (Also see Joseph Palermo's "Worst Historical Thumbnail Ever.") According to her description, this is a "best case" scenario because the Spanish Civil War in the end was contained to that country and did not spill out over the borders (though she acknowledges the death toll was considerable.) A rather cold-blooded assessment in my opinion, but that's not the worst thing about the article. In her account of the Spanish Civil War, she fails to mention that it ended with Spain in the grip of dictator Francisco Franco for almost forty years. That's a significant omission, don't you think? And I take it to heart since most of my father's family still lives in Spain and felt the effects of both the war and the dictatorship that followed. Also of note is that Cooper's account was awfully close to the Wikipedia entry on the subject. Reading the article really made me wonder what was going on at the New York Times. Why do they hire reporters who are either stupendously ignorant or won't bother to conduct basic research? Are their editors asleep at the switch? And this is the "paper of record"? It's the most egregious example I've run across in a while, but many articles I read in that paper tend to be a little thin in terms of their analysis, whether it's historical, or economic or sociological.

But in today's Sunday paper I found not just one, but two, articles that were rich in their analysis and very nicely written:

Katie Hafner's "History, Digitized and Abridged," on the complexities of digitizing collections of historical records, such as the National Steinbeck Center's collection of papers and memorabilia from the life and work of John Steinbeck. The article points the many gaps in currently available digitized collections, the complexities of finding funding and other resources to digitize what we have, and the effects of copyright. Hafner points out that we've gotten to a point where we expect virtually everything to be available in digital form, but this is far from the case, and historians (both amateur and professional) may forget about important artifacts that are only available through a visit to a library or museum. (Maybe Ms. Cooper could take a field trip to NYU's Tamiment Library, where she can peruse the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. )

An in the Arts section, Larry Rohter writes about Gilberto Gil's second career as the Brazilian minister of culture: "Gilberto Gil Hears the Future: Some Rights Reserved." Gil is going to speak about music and intellectual property at the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference this Wednesday. Apparently one of Gil's first acts as culture minister was to create an alliance between Brazil and the Creative Commons project. From this article I learned about Gil's career, music as a cultural force in Brazil, and alternatives to current intellectual property laws and practices.

Articles like these make my subscription worthwhile.

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I scored big points this Christmas when I gave Tom a subscription to LibraryThing, a social book cataloging Web site. For $25 you can get a lifetime membership that allows you to catalog an unlimited number of books. For another $15 you can purchase a CueCat, a little cat-shaped scanner that reads barcodes and pulls the information in from Amazon.com and other databases. With Librarything you can look at other people's catalogs, leave them comments, join groups, create tags for your entries, write book reviews and generally geek out with other bookworms. Even if you stay in your own catalog you can have hours of fun looking at your author cloud or perusing your collection in book cover view (the database pulls those in). The site generates statistics for your catalog--you can find out which other users share your books, and how many, either in raw or weighted terms. My favorite feature is "You and None Other" which shows other users who share exactly one book with you.

Tom spent the days after Christmas scanning in his books (about 1400 of them) and had so much fun he scanned in all of mine (about 560). It took a few late nights, but he finished before the new year. One day we logged in and found the same new user on the share list for each of our catalogs. The username looked familiar, and when we went to look at the catalog, we figured out that it belonged to a friend who now is in graduate school in California. We could actually see his catalog grow in real time as he added books. We later found out that a mutual friend of ours e-mailed him about LibraryThing, and he was so excited he didn't bother to reply--he rushed over to the site, bought his membership and started creating his catalog right there on the spot.

Shortly after my catalog was complete I read Walter Benjamin's "Unpacking My Library," in which he talks about the pleasures of collecting. The pleasures of collecting books are very different from the pleasures of reading them, and the collector is a species apart from other people who buy books. A beach vacation might not have much attraction for the book collector, who is happiest going from bookstore to bookstore in a new city. Acquiring new books for a collection can require some sleuthing; sometimes there is disappointment, sometimes the surprise of a great find. As the title "Unpacking My Library" suggests, the essay begins at a particular moment when Benjamin's books are scattered about, not yet sitting neatly on their shelves. Benjamin explains that the book collector moves between chaos and disorder, and that "every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." As you unpack your books you remember, but not simply the contents of the book. You might also remember the moment you acquired it, or the time during which you read it. And of course there is the pleasure of rediscovery, coming across a book you forgot you even owned.

Benjamin also says that when he was young he was quite strict about which books would be included in his library. Until he understood the significance of collecting books, he would only include in his library books that he actually had read. I thought about this while reviewing my own LibraryThing catalog--I wondered if it was fair to include books that I owned but never got around to reading, or if it would be all right to include books I had read but no longer owned. And while Tom played thingamabrarian (that's an actual term) I found that I had to keep an eye on him. Right after he finished scanning in all of my books I discovered that he had been a little selective--a few of my science fiction books were missing. He's not a science fiction fan and apparently didn't want to be associated with one, either. Apparently, in the age of MySpace, your book collection helps create a persona that all the world can judge.

I recently bought a small bookcase because as you might imagine, we really needed the storage space. (I love books but hate it when they take over every horizontal surface.) We decided to move our art books there. Now, the art books section in our house is unusual because it represents one of the few places where we have combined our book collections. Long ago we merged our CD collections, and even share iTunes, but each of our book collections are shelved in separate spaces and we have lots of duplicates (108, to be exact).

Reshelving the art books made me remember...I remembered some books I hadn't looked at in years, and I also remembered the sight of Tom sitting there with stacks of books, scanning them in, first to his catalog and then moving on to mine. I started to wonder. So I went to Librarything and found out not only that art books were missing from my catalog, but had been scanned into his catalog. A book about Soviet propaganda porcelain that I picked up after seeing the exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, years before we even met! A book about American Colonial painting that I used as part of my research during my master's program! And it wasn't just art books--missing from my catalog, but in his, was Gunter Grass' novel The Flounder, a book I've been trying to get him to read for years without success. So apparently LibraryThing not only allows you to create an online persona, it can lead to acts of identity theft. And maybe couples counseling.

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