Posts by Caleb D'Anvers
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We had been sick for months: recurring 'flu symptoms; fatigue; general malaise. We blamed it on adjusting to a new germ environment and a particularly harsh first British winter. Then, a few days ago, a notice went up on the lift in our apartment building: "waterborne pathogen alert." It turns out our numpty property management company didn't know or care about checking water quality regularly, and the building's water storage tanks had got into a real state. When the local water authority saw the microbial results, they totally freaked and forbade any of us to use the water (which, of course, we'd been drinking for months) without boiling it first. Now the local council's involved, there are engineers running around the corridors as I type, and it's a bit of a scandal. I had had no idea North Buckinghamshire was a Third World Country.
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Hard News: Budget 2011: While you wait, in reply to BlairMacca,
It really used to grind my gears when friends of mine whose parents had multi million dollar farms would be getting full student allowances ...
Uh, yeah. My (then) best friend at University had a property-developer father who operated a similar set of tax dodges. This was back in the '90s, so the benefit to him in terms of allowance was only something like $88 a week, but the whole process seemed so craven and dishonest that it made me finally realize that said friend and I had divergent moral values and it was perhaps time I moved on. I believe he now manages a multi-billion-dollar investment fund at a major insurance company in the City of London ...
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Also, Sally Neighbour is suggesting that the accusation that Hicks went to Timor (for which there is no evidence) stems from the Americans' confusing him with another would-be Australian jihadist, Matthew Stewart, who served with the Australian Army in Timor in the late '90s.
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(Australian would-be jihadist David Hicks' file is fascinating for different reasons: assuming he told his interrogators something like the truth, he was able to simply to turn up in Kosovo, East Timor, Pakistan, Afghanistan, present himself for military training -- and meet very senior Al Qaeda officials.)
This morning's Australian suggests that Hicks simply told the Americans what they wanted to hear to secure his release from camp. At the very least, he can argue that any statements he made were obtained under "duress," to use the parlance of our times:
In response to the claim in the dossier that Mr Hicks "admitted" to being a member of al-Qa'ida, [Hicks's wife] said: "Any and all statements were obtained under torture, this is why he was not taken through a regularly constituted court. In the final military commissions hearing, David's legal team submitted what is called the Alford Plea. This is a US-based plea in which an accused person can agree to plead guilty whilst maintaining innocence. David has always maintained his innocence and strongly denies that he was involved with any terrorist organisations - he did what he had to do to come home."
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Music, then
#nowplaying [2]:New tracks from 50 Foot Wave (that's Kristin Hersh's punky side-project, btw). Spiky.
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John Armstrong: a key skill for students and academics working in the humanities is the development of self-awareness. Acknowledging your own shit is a useful first step to acknowledging everyone else's.
Just driving by to acknowledge the truth of this. There's something about having to read and synthesize vast quantities of interpretation that helps develop ... discursive empathy? A realization that your own words won't be the last to be written on a subject, no matter how good you might think you are? An acknowedgement that ideas are three (four?) dimensional, and that people necessarily view them from different perspectives, according to their situatedness in place and time?
It seems to me that these ways of reading and writing are not so available to those who have been educated in the STEM disciplines, with consequences that are rather visible on this thread.
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Thanks, Jolisa! I'll email you a copy of the paper when I get into my office tomorrow morning.
Yeah, I was pretty keen to include as much "paratext" as I could when digitizing these novels. So that included publishers' catalogues, if those were in the same binding as the main text, and anything tipped in as well. Since a lot of the books we digitized came from the Horace Fildes collection at VUW, and Fildes (good bibliographer that he was) annotated and extra-illustrated his books with useful information, it made sense to include those textual extensions as part of the digital edition. I only wish that we had the time and resources to finish what we started. But this is the ongoing, quiet tragedy of the digital humanities. Sigh.
One of the exciting things about e-books, for me, is the chance to rediscover all sorts of treasures as these rare old gems, once digitized, become magically available.
Oh, absolutely. I was just thinking about this today, actually. I'm writing a conference paper at the moment about some early 20th-century marginalia, and it's amazing how much I was able to find out about the annotator from simple Google Books searches. Connections and leads that would have been completely invisible before the internet are now, as you say, just magically there. For a book historian, it's like manna from heaven.
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Loved this, thanks Jolisa. You mention 19th-century sensation novels: one of the great things about the internet and digitization is that it can open up the forgotten canons of the past. We can now, at the click of a button, compare contemporary New Zealand literature with NZ novels in their 19th-century settler phase. [Full disclosure: the Nineteenth-Century New Zealand Novels project was my baby, back in my NZETC/digitization days. Anyway.]
There's a lot of awful, cringeworthy dross there, but some lost gems, too. Like H. B. Marriott Watson's Web of the Spider, which is a pretty good Rider Haggard facsimile with pace, atmosphere, and a genuinely complex attitude to the problems of colonization. It seems to me this stuff is no less "New Zealand literature" than contemporary novels, and deserves excavation. I've got a piece on gothic themes in these novels coming out soon in Journal of New Zealand Literature which I'd be pleased to send to anyone who's interested ...
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I must admit I am uncomfortable seeing people minimize theft from a damaged house, whether it is light fittings or anything else.
Really? What I'm uncomfortable with the the implicit return to Victorian "values" that this whole episode suggests. The deliberate choice to take a strict interpretation of property laws as a means of social control, in other words. It's not really that different from the use of transportation as a punishment for petty theft in the nineteenth century.
If you take a close look at what "Lee" and Laws are calling for, it's not just "throwing the book" at looters; it's permanent institutionalization for the likes of Arie. A return to the concept of the asylum/workhouse. That's where the paedophile analogy comes from. And it's explicitly what "Lee" is calling for here:
because of his disability, he should not be put in a mainstream prison for sure. What should be done with him is definitely keep him in custody. Do not let the guy out.
In the context of the theft of a light fitting from a demolition site, this makes no sense at all. But if we're talking about the return of a system of permanent sequestering and institutionalization of the "different," then it makes all the sense in the world, unfortunately. There's an absolute craving out there in social-conservative circles (not just in NZ, but here in the UK, too) for the moral certainties of the Victorian age, and this is what Laws and co. are gesturing at.
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It's so depressingly predictable to see the Nats implementing a bit of disaster capitalism on the back on the earthquake. "It's an emergency, right? We all have to make sacrifices, OK? Oh, except for the highest income earners and the blessed business sector."