Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to webweaver,
Completely brilliant - I've never heard that version before. Thanks for sharing! Still giggling at it.
No problem. I pretty much lost it the first time I heard it, too. And that was before my train commute took me through Watford Junction on a regular basis ...
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I find National's sudden interest in the issues somewhat touching, if disingenuous. It all reminds me a little of this:
"The sky doesn't matter. It's the issues"
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Hard News: A week being a long time in politics, in reply to Jackie Clark,
Yeah. I was too young really to know why my parents hated Muldoon so much. But every time I talk to my Dad over the phone in Christchurch, he tells me it's like living in Muldoon World 2.0 down there. And I believe him.
And if the phrase "unbridled power" really were uttered during The Conversation, well, you have to wonder.
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Perhaps if the NZ news media had been a little less supine and a little more willing to critique "nice guy John" back in 2007 and 2008, they wouldn't be in this position now. Bullies can't function without enablers, after all.
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I know what we can do to stop Winston! We can distract him with a full-length mirror!
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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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Hard News: Dropping the Bomber, in reply to Rich Lock,
Goff could do a lot worse right now than turn up on the beaches and make the appropriate noises.
The sound of waves? Seagull impressions? A one-man, karaoke version of "Pet Sounds"? Considering his position in the polls right now, I guess anything's worth a shot.
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Hard News: Dropping the Bomber, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So I'm going for his appearance ... there must be some fundamental feature about his face that speaks to the primate brain and says "trust this man"
Really? He looks like a plucked takahe.
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Might help if genre fiction wasn't so damn full of pseudonyms and a long history of women "dragging up" to get published, or taken seriously
Or the opposite, which is the long tradition of men (for whatever reason) writing books as women, which has been going on since at least the eighteenth century. John Mullan's written accessibly about this. And K. K. Ruthven, well, less accessibly, but in an Australasian context, at least.
On another note entirely, I notice that Paul Lewis has tweeted this discussion, so hopefully it's getting a few more sets of northern-hemisphere eyes today.
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Hard News: Here's one I prepared earlier, in reply to DexterX,
You know, that's easily the best description of what's happened in our building that I've seen. You want to come and be our property manager?