Philobiblon

Like pretty well everyone in Britain who has any interest in news, I’d wager, I’ve read the New York Times story about the recent alleged bomb plots that was theoretically barred from British readers (for reasons of the contempt of court law).

Should you not be in that category, you’ll know all you need to know if I say that it looked remarkably like the opening speech for the prosecution is likely to sound. (Gosh, I wonder how the Times got that?)

But there is one quote from it that I’ll share, possibly the most important, and it doesn’t carry any risk of contempt proceedings:

“In retrospect,” said Michael A. Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counterterrorism in the New York Police Department, “there may have been too much hyperventilating going on.”

Remember, that lipstick could be deadly!

Seriously, it has provoked much discussion about the British contempt law, which basically means that once someone has been charged, the evidence against them can not be reported for fear of prejudicing the jury. Undoubtedly in the age of worldwide media, unpoliceable blogs etc, this has its absurdities, but I’d still rather that than the American alternative, where the mere whisper of suspicion is frequently reported as though it were an open and shut case already decided by a jury. (As evidenced by the recent JonBenet Ramsey hysteria.)

Over on Blogcritics I’ve posted a little musing on the decision by Google Books to start posting complete books for download. It’s early days yet – they’re only doing books from the early 19th-century or before, but it is a potentially enormous step towards, as I say on BC – ending the “information drought” in which the human race has lived up to now.

At present, however, I don’t think there’s any listing of the books available – if you hear of one I’d like to know about it.

Here’s the Google release about the project, which does list a few – but if you find other listings please tell me about them.

A small step forward – Colombia’s first legal abortion (now allowed in cases of rape, incest, the mother’s life being in danger or severe malformation) has been performed. And you couldn’t think of a stronger case for the procedure – an 11-year-old incest victim.

The Catholic Church, however, has of course gone ballistic, threatening to excommunicate the doctors who performed the procedure. Because being humane, showing humanity, is of course well beyond its ken, and it no doubt fears the same sort of loss of control it has experienced in modern-day Ireland.

In an ideal world, human cultures would change at an equal rate to the environment in which they operate. Of course, that doesn’t happen. Cultures can continue to operate against all logic – and politicians can continue to operate within these cultures, making patently irrational decisions. That’s what happening with the correctly labelled obesity “epidemic”. More than 20 per cent of adults and a very high proportion of children will be obese by 2010, the latest figures suggest. Yet still Patricia Hewitt is trying to say this is a personal problem. That’s an awful lot of personal problems.

Well here’s my tale of how I, more-or-less, stopped myself heading down the path towards middle-aged obesity on which I was set, like so many others, as a child. For when I was small, my parents struggled to get by. When my mother went shopping, she bought the cheapest bulk items available – “No name” supermarket brands of cereal, of tinned meat and similar. She mightn’t quite have thought about getting the most calories for every cent, but that was the framework.

“Luxury” items were high-fat and empty of nutrition – chocolate, ice-cream, crisps. Fruit and vegetables were high risk – they might go off; as a poor cook what she did with them mightn’t be a success. She didn’t know how to judge what items were ripe or good – no one had ever shown her.

Because food was in some sense a luxury, she treated herself, and me, when things went wrong, with food – comfort eating. My increasingly round shape was dismissed as mere “puppy fat”, “healthy growth”, “nothing to worry about”. As I entered my teens at some level I knew that was wrong, but I also found comforting eating a great crutch through the pains of adolescence, and there was an element of self-harm in it – if I was fat, I wouldn’t have to deal with that whole business about boys…

Food was comfort, it was necessary fuel to be shovelled in, it was not something to be savoured, appreciated, tasted. Luckily, along the way, I had the occasional accidental exposure to good food – the Indonesian-language teacher at school had an Indonesian wife who cooked us chicken satay: the peanut sauce was a revelation. But that was an odd shock in a diet of leathery meat, fake mashed potato and frozen peas.
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Once again anti-terror resources are used to good purpose – in New York attacking the Critical Mass bicycle ride: swooping up cyclists then trying to find something to charge them with – like having their back light attached to their body not their bicycle. A threat to civilisation as we know it!

That’s what 600 million in Asia live on – then again 250 million have got out of that situation (although many of those probably only just).

The percentage of people living on $1 a day in South Asia, which includes India and Bangladesh, dropped to 28.4 percent in 2003 from 40.9 percent in 1990, the report said. In East Asia, which includes China, it fell to 14.9 percent from 31.2 percent.

There’s no gender breakdown in those figures, but I suspect women would be significantly over-represented.

A simple billing: the first woman to bicycle around the world was a Jewish mother from Boston. And in what looks like a very thick wool skirt, and on a bicycle that I bet weighed a tonne.

Keeping to the sporting theme, a great idea: a scheme to provide girls in Ethiopia with running shoes, which should also help them stay in school and avoid early marriage.

The weekend’s Guardian reports that “English newspapers gave away 54m DVDs in the first quarter of this year, roughly as many as were bought in the shops”. The best estimate I’ve seen is that each new reader so attracted (often for that one week only) costs the papers several pounds. And of course most of those DVDs will sooner or later – and probably sooner, end up clogging the nation’s landfills. How long before a DVD rots back into the earth? I dread to think.

Excellent piece in The Times this morning about the fact that 600,000, give or take the odd hundred thousand, citizens of new EU states, have come to Britain and almost all found jobs, while having almost no effect on British unemployment. I think of it from the situation of about seven or eight years ago, when the fuss was about the influx of people from the Balkans. The Bosnian car-washer, slaving all hours of the day and night for little pay and going back to the room he shares with two others is not taking away the job of the ex-coal miner from the north with his family home and children. They simply exist in different economies. Ditto the young female Polish care-worker.

The interesting question is how many of the Poles and others are going to stay. Most of the anecdotal evidence suggests that they think they are only here for a few years, but of course they might be wrong. And since the UK government crazily keeps no track of people leaving the country, it will be a long time before that is clear.

This is why, for those not following the story, the figure is so vague. First of all the initial statistic relies on data collected only from those seeking a job – the self-employed (all those Polish plumbers) are not counted at all. Secondly, no one knows how many of the initial registrees have got homesick, not found a job, or otherwise have decided to go home.

Having lived there for quite a while, I think that not much can surprise me about the cultural differences in attitudes to sex matters between West and East, but I’d never heard of having striptease at funerals before.

I interviewed the comic Tuo Xian who was one of the first organizers of strip shows in Taiwan. The performance of striptease at funerals, but also at real estate promotions and other occasion, started some 20 years ago and peaked during the mid-80s.

(From a discussion at H-Asia.)

An interesting portrayal of the household of Charles I on the eve of the Civil War:

“… it comprised as much as 1800 people. Some of these were given bed and board, others received what was called ‘bourge of court’, which included bread, ale, firewood and candles. The court also suppored hordes of nobles, princes, ambassadors and other state visitors, who all resided in it with their households, such as Henrietta’s mother Marie de Medici, and her entourage…. Supporting the household accounted for more than 40% of royal expenditure. …

The queen had her own household, which included a full kitchen staff, a keeper of the sweet coffers [probably a popular job, I'd suggest!] a laundress and a starcher, and a seamstress. There were over 180, not including the stables staff.”

From The English Civil War: A People’s History by Diane Purkiss, HarperPress, 2006.

What strikes me about this is just how chaotic everyday life must have been in such circumstances. A nightmare should you have been responsible for “security”, as we’d now call it. Sure access to the royal inner chambers would have been tightly controlled, but when the king or queen wanted to go hunting, or otherwise “out” they’d have had to pass through these outer throngs.

Having a clean-up of the desk – which has to happen every month or so, when the archaeological layers threaten to descend into chaos – I stumbled across the handout from a session at the Literary London conference that I had neglected to record, but that certainly deserves a bit of attention.

It was with the artist Christian Nold, who uses the technology of lie detectors (which of course sense stress, not “lies”) to create maps of London showing where people’s stress levels rise as they walk the streets. Participants are then invited to annotate the 3D maps with explanations of what caused their reaction – creating a personal but also social recreation of a moment in space and time.

It is described as bio-mapping and the inventor descibes it as visualising “our subtle relationship between the emotional world and the extrenal world”.

The theoretical discussion contained something of course of the Situationists dérive, something of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, and something of Peter Ackroyd’s views of London’s effects on crowds, that it “channelled the energies of its citizens into the crooked chape of its lanes and thoroughfares, rendering them ever more fierce and desperate”. (Not actually a view of London with which I concur.)

But the maps produced has a very physical reality – the stress measured in black walls that grow high as stress grows.

The “cyborg memory” was my label – for that’s in fact what each map is.