Hard News: Occupy: Don't call it a protest
311 Responses
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DexterX, in reply to
Suppress the Occupy movement and make no meaningful reform and the next response will be a pendulum swing to the Red Army Faction, mark my words.
I hope it doesn't become a bonfire of hate or swing as far as you suggest.
The powers of the police and the state in the USA are pretty scary.
The Bastion Point protestors were forcibly removed - if NZ had the "technology" back then as in pepper spray then yes it would have gone that way rather than just dragging people off.
The difference between the mid 1970s and now is that I don't feel there is the drive in government to provide what I would call social equity or to address a deep injustice by setting the things right. Which is what has largely been attempted with the Waitiangi Tribunal. In saying that I feel the same is true for both major parties - Labour and the foreshore issue – yes lets extinguish a ppty right at law for Maori to win and election that they didn’t win.
The Occupy movement in the states is perhaps in the same place as those wanting to bring an end to entrenched and legislated racism in America in the 1950s and 1960s.
I hope the occupy movement perseveres.
Two things that are nonsense are Bernard Hickey’s list and people saying to the Occupy movement that they don’t speak for 99% of us. This misses the point – I am the 99% - I am part of the group that aren’t the 1% that are the problem.
Since I am talking about social equity I will say that after the 9 years of Labour it is surprising – not – how little the lot of workers has been enhanced or protected at law – it is surprising how little National have to roll back – before they roll out “the big agenda” in their next term.
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Yeah, the wholesale destruction of book holdings in academia at the moment is something that everyone in the field is vaguely aware of, but no-one really talks much about. Just the night before last, a colleague was telling me how her French university library is discarding great wads of 19th- and early 20th-century fiction. Because regulations prevent the library selling these second-hand, they're going straight into skips. Said colleague says she's found some really rare and notable items just sitting outside, waiting to go into landfill.
My own university library is obsessed with its digital collections to the seeming exclusion of its physical book holdings. In fact, they want to become an e-library only in the medium to long term. Books are so expensive to house, apparently, and not enough staff use the physical collections. The problem with this is that the library has traditionally relied on donations and second-hand purchases to build up its collections, particularly of older books. So there are some really interesting -- even notable -- association and annotated books just sitting out on the shelves. Shelf-browsing there last year, I came across a prodigiously annotated copy of the diaries of the Islamist and dandy Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, marked up in about 1920. A bit of research into the annotator turned up a really interesting set of connections with early 20th-century British socialism, and I ended up writing a conference paper on it. I'm actually a little nervous about returning the book to the library now, in case it goes "walkabout."
As a book historian, this really worries me:. Too many modern library managers have next to no interest in provenance or the history of particular copies of books and so valuable historical evidence -- glimpses into the ordinary lived experience of readers -- goes into skips every day.
And it's not just books: last week I got an email from an archivist at a not-at-all-obscure British university, offering me some mid-20th-century diaries and notebooks that were being de-accessioned. They'd been part of the holdings for 40-odd years, but now pressures of space were inching them closer to the bin.
It's a real concern. A large part of the problem is that libraries, archives, and institutions have been pressured to give up their own storage space and contract with third-party, offsite storage providers. Who then proceed to put up their fees every year to effectively rent back these institutions' archives to them, encouraging finance divisions to see these things as unfortunate costs, rather than irreplaceable sites of institutional and cultural memory.
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"Knowlege Economy"
A business growth model based on the economical use of knowledge. As in: use what you've got. You were not or are not going to get any more.
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Alastair Thompson, in reply to
I know I'm a child of the 60s and I find this whole global movement pretty heartening but there definitely is something very positive and happy about the Wellington Occupy, as if a lot of gentle little elves have come to visit, and as a result the city is somehow blessed.
My thoughts precisely.
Re the FTA discussion it was fascinating to see in the PREFU that Chinese Exports are expected to grow from 4% of exports to 14% of exports (roughly) between now and 2015 while US bound exports are forecast to halve over the same period in terms of their importance. Makes you wonder why we are pursuing an FTA with the US at all. Also makes you wonder how fast our exports to China are currently growing - it must be very very fast.
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Ross Mason, in reply to
What is wrong with 50 years between readings?
I had great delight a few years ago as the locals - again - were fighting to keep the Pinehaven Library open. At the Upper Hutt Rotary annual book sale I bought - for $1 - the biography of Murray Gelman (Physics Nobel Prize winner). This had the UH Library stamps all through it and one person had taken it out in the two (!!) years since it was bought. I took the opportunity to give it back to the Mayor at the public meeting as my contribution to ensuring my fellow Upper Huttites had access to it again. The librarian wriggled on his chair.
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Kumara Republic, in reply to
The Occupy movement in the states is perhaps in the same place as those wanting to bring an end to entrenched and legislated racism in America in the 1950s and 1960s.
France in May 1968 also comes to mind somewhat. The Gendarmerie's use of excessive force only hardened the resolve of the protesters, who ended up losing the battle, but in the long run winning the culture war.
"Oh but what can a poor boy do
Except to sing in a rock and roll band
'Cause in sleepy Kiwiland
There's just no place for a street fighting man..." -
Islander, in reply to
eah, the wholesale destruction of book holdings in academia at the moment is something that everyone in the field is vaguely aware of, but no-one really talks much about. Just the night before last, a colleague was telling me how her French university library is discarding great wads of 19th- and early 20th-century fiction. Because regulations prevent the library selling these second-hand, they're going straight into skips. Said colleague says she's found some really rare and notable items just sitting outside, waiting to go into landfill.
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Islander, in reply to
I was trying to reply to this- but doesnt really any addition eh?
ARRRAGH -
Carol Stewart, in reply to
I'm with you, Islander. AAAARRRRGGGH is right. I'm a bit sad about the unseemly haste to abandon physical books in favour of digital collections, ebooks etc. I belong to a book group that specialises in science books and they are moving to Kindles next year - mostly because of costs. I can't say it's a development I am warming to.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Fahrenheit 451... and bad circulation
Because regulations prevent the library selling these second-hand, they're going straight into skips. Said colleague says she's found some really rare and notable items just sitting outside, waiting to go into landfill.
And this is from institutions that extol logic and learning?
Wanton book destruction should be a crime, if they can't legally sell them they should give them away or make them available to other libraries - maybe people need to create community of interest libraries either in one place or by shared access.
Gapfiller's little fridge-based exchange library in Chchch is a great public initiative, I just put another two cartons of books in it yesterday... -
I found a 20ft skip bin full to the brim outside the University of Auckland's Tamaki library the other day. Basically, they'd pretty much decided to throw out everything published before 1980, and most things published pre 1990.
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
LOVE Joan Aiken. Fortunately for my children my parents kept every book they ever purchased.... so my wee ones started with Arabel and Mortimer and moved onto Dido & the Wolves etc..... I loved her in the 70s and 80s & they love her now. Books have lives longer than ours, if we would only let them stay on shelves for people to find.
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
NOOOO! that's terrible. In Richard Zimler's The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon, there is a beautiful description of the Jewish scribe/bookseller family's treatment of books - all of the books they encounter are treated as if they are holy - and a disposed of book is buried with ritual and mourning. That's how I feel about books. I'll read them on my ipad but a book I love will need to be repurchased as a paper edition - for marginalia, for inscription, for the smell of the paper and the feel of the book in my hands.
Given most of my adult life has involved tracking down obscure texts in order to read them and write about them (a task much easier now thanks to digitisation) I am horrified that creating digital libraries seems to now replace books rather than complement them!
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Yeah, the wholesale destruction of book holdings in academia at the moment is something that everyone in the field is vaguely aware of, but no-one really talks much about.
Giovanni wrote an interesting post about it last year: Marked for Deselection - about Victoria University library.
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When anyone tells you the public sector is not being disassembled under this government of incompetent bean-counters, remember things like this. Cost of everything, value of nothing..
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JacksonP, in reply to
In Richard Zimler's The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
Great book. The Angelic Darkness also. Must track down some more of his.
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Okay, so what we have here is a fairly clear description of the wholesale destruction of irreplaceable cultural treasures by barbarians. Now, as a group of intelligent, capable, concerned citizens, civilised people, what can we do about it?
Obviously, the first thing is to highlight the problem, let the barbarians know they can’t just quietly carry on, and take preventive measures to protect what’s left. Any librarians with ideas on how to do that?
Storage space is a real problem, one that can't be wished away, so is the cost of maintaining a collection that's hardly ever used. How do we preserve what needs to be preserved without crippling the institutions preserving them?
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Carol Stewart, in reply to
Me too, Kate. The Wolves of Willoughby Chase series was a big part of my childhood. There's so much pleasure in discovering not just one book but an entire series by a wonderful author, isn't there? I''m pleased that my little lad, who has a distinct taste for the historical and the quirky, has taken to them. The illustrations by Pat Marriott are genius too. And the glorious names! Miss Slighcarp! Aunt Tribulation!
I think only Phillip Pullman has come close to her in originality and style and general wondrousness. -
Anyone else missing the book blogs? Anyone?
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Oh, and the thing about books published after 1990. People sometimes think that newer is always better than older and that development is a linear track from ‘worse’ to ‘better’.
Any halfway decent student of art history will tell you that the notion of unidirectional cultural progress is a myth.
Publishers, even high quality non-fiction publishers, have had to brutally cut costs to survive. Once upon a time, when you had your manuscript accepted, you could expect that it’d be carefully edited and proofed, have all its facts meticulously checked, and an index properly prepared.
(Authors who're a bit too used to this process can get a bit deluded. I've heard tell of an author who objected to any editing: 'But I'm an award-winning author, for my prose style!' It had to be pointed out that the award was for the prose style of the edited text, not that of the raw manuscript. A good editor should leave no trace, so even the author thinks that's what was originally written.)
Now, these are all highly skilled jobs (especially indexing) that can only be very poorly automated. Running a spellchecker is no substitute for proofing, and no author can adequately edit their own work. Automatically generated indexes are worse than useless.
What’s a poor publisher to do? There’s an old saying in publishing circles: ‘Fast, cheap, accurate – pick any two.’ If you want cheap and accurate, it won’t be fast, so most publishers go for fast and cheap. Cos it’s that or not publish the book at all.
And then there’s electronic vs print publishing. Various promoters want to push electronic publishing. It’s so cheap! It’s so non-linear and hip and shiny and new and progressive. And it’s how people want to read nowadays.
It’s also dodgy as fuck.
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What are the regulations preventing reselling of university library books? If they must be de-accessioned it is a pity they couldn't be donated to an event like the Downtown Ministry's annual book fair, and be snapped up by people who would appreciate them.
Some of us are having a little political letter writing event tomorrow in Wellington to advocate legislation for keeping public libraries free so that local bodies can't attack them, and it would be good for some more details so we can mention this travesty as well.
(Outside Wellington City library, in a sheltered spot, 11am-2pm for those interested.) -
Kate Hannah, in reply to
Love it! yes, let's work together to protect our taonga!
By my desk I have, on a faded yellow post-it, the line from that tortured soul Kakfa: a book must be an ice-axe for the frozen sea within us. On the other side of my office, on the shelves, I have various ice-axes. Sebald's Austerlitz, Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. All of Potok. Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just. (It's my work office, so my books here are my genocide texts - because that's how I roll). Their physical presence is a talisman to me, a reminder of what I am writing and why. "Books are created from holy letters. Just as angels are, according to some. Viewed from this perspectives - through a window of kabbalah if you like - an angel is nothing but a book given heavenly form...given wings, to use a common metaphor." (Zimler, The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon)
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
Pullman has certainly been a big hit in our house - Mr 9 is also a huge Rick Riordan fan - not as elegantly crafted as Aiken or Pullman but the mix of mythology and action and history very compelling. There's nothing that warms the cockles of this mother's heart quite as much as watching one of the kids read obsessively for days beacuse they have a great book. Miss 7 loves old books, preferably leather bound with engraving, and we scour op shops for beautiful editions of old classics for her to add to her collection. She's reading Nurse Matilda, Edward Ardizzone at present in a gorgeous 1950s edition - and is amazed that it's the story of Nanny McPhee ....
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Kate Hannah, in reply to
Oh and the other big hit - with all my kids - my old and tattered copy of The Silver Sword. War, escape, reunion - what more could you want in a story? I have read it aloud to all three of them, and we have it as an audiobook. (I'm now making the link to why I write about imagining the past - particularly the Holocaust - could it be my youthful exposure to The Silver Sword?)
http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/book/9780099439493?redirected=true&gclid=CITpuKuCiqwCFdAEQAod8hf4qg
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
Love it! yes, let’s work together to protect our taonga!
A syncretic Cult of the Book perhaps? Librarians, archivists, historians, artists, writers, editors, but above all readers.
(Just in case you were wondering, ‘readers’ includes all users of books. All of my painter friends have large personal libraries. I’m unusual in that I sometimes even read the words in mine rather than sticking to reading the pictures. I can't think of anyone who just uses the internet, but I could be wrong. And they're not just art books either. Painters tend to have eclectic books and wide-ranging interests.)
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