Generalising

Another old book on books, this time from Project Gutenberg:

The Enemies of Books, by William Blades [1888]

It breaks down the various threats to the survival of books by topic (fire, water, neglect, vermin, collectors, children…) and then lists a succession of anecdotes about collections destroyed in this way. Surprisingly interesting, in some cases, if a bit depressing; it’s interesting to know what has been lost over the years but is still known about. I wrote last month about the monastic libraries being dissolved at the Reformation; here is a contemporary writing about what happened to their contents:

A greate nombre of them whyche purchased those superstycyouse mansyons reserved of those librarye bookes some to serve their jakes, some to scoure theyr candelstyckes, and some to rubbe theyr bootes. Some they solde to the grossers and sope sellers, and some they sent over see to y^e booke bynders, not in small nombre, but at tymes whole shyppes full, to y^e wonderynge of foren nacyons. Yea y^e Universytees of thys realme are not alle clere in thys detestable fact. But cursed is that bellye whyche seketh to be fedde with suche ungodlye gaynes, and so depelye shameth hys natural conterye.

I knowe a merchant manne, whych shall at thys tyme be namelesse, that boughte y^e contentes of two noble lybraryes for forty shyllynges pryce: a shame it is to be spoken. Thys stuffe hathe heoccupyed in y^e stede of greye paper, by y^e space of more than these ten yeares, and yet he bathe store ynoughe for as manye years to come. A prodygyous example is thys, and to be abhorred of all men whyche love theyr nacyon as they shoulde do. The monkes kepte them undre dust, y^e ydle-headed prestes regarded them not, theyr latter owners have most shamefully abused them, and y^e covetouse merchantes have solde them away into foren nacyons for moneye

On Friday, wandering through town after my haircut, I dropped into a butcher’s to buy a few sausages, or a bit of pork, or something. I came out with a rabbit.

I am not entirely sure how this happened. Still, never say die. What can you do with a rabbit? We thought for a bit, and decided on stewing. After consulting with the usual oracles (thanks, Ewan), this is what we came up with:

Ingredients:

• One rabbit, skinned and cleaned and rendered visibly less fluffy

• Several slices of bacon
• A handful of carrots, an onion, some garlic
• A bottle of cider
• Honey, some dried mixed herbs (or fresh thyme & bay, if you have it), salt, pepper
• A large casserole dish, with lid, and an oven at ~120 degrees

First, start the bacon frying; when it’s lightly done, decant into casserole, and start on the onion and garlic ditto.

Meanwhile, prepare the rabbit. (…I suppose there are people who don’t want to read this…)

End result : one pile of rabbit meat (small), one skeleton fit for stock or feeding to any carnivorous animals you have around the house (small), one sense of achievement (medium). I don’t know if you can actually feed rabbit bones to small carnivorous animals, so you might need to check that bit first. Or bury it in the garden, dig it up in a year, and present it to a small child who wants to be a vet.

Anyway, when we went into surgery the bacon, onions and garlic were lightly sizzling. Decant them into the casserole, leaving the fat in the pan, and then fry your rabbit with enthusiasm. Get it nice and golden, and in it goes too. Chop the carrots into lumps, and in they go; add a couple of spoonfuls of honey, the herbs, salt, pepper, stir it all around. Top off with enough cider to cover it all; if you’ve not enough, then a little warm water to suit. (If you’ve too much, have a drink. Thirsty work.)

Pop it all in the oven at about 120 degrees for about two hours. (A little warmer or a little longer won’t hurt at all, of course). Serve with rice or bread or potatoes – something solid and absorbent. Serves two to four depending on whether you remembered to eat lunch.

Next experiment: do it with wine. Rabbit in red wine does sound delightful…

I have just discovered a new blog: Geek Feminism. What a fabulous idea, sayeth I – it’s a great mish-mash of women in science, women in engineering, women in Star Trek fandom, women in all of those and more, and how their experiences are different from men’s experience, and how geek culture can be viewed through feminist eyes.

I’ve been reading back through the archives, and just read this post: On geekitude, hierarchy and being a snob. It’s a interesting post in itself, and worth reading, but there’s an insight in it that I don’t think the author gives the weight it deserves, so I’m going to talk about it. It goes like this:

I think that what I do is easy. Simple as falling off a log. Anyone could do it. Yeah, I know a lot of things that allow me to do what I do, but they’re just things you could learn if you took the time.

Now the eagle-eyed among you can spot imposter syndrome a mile off, and while I know in a vague intellectual sense that I must be at least competent at what I do – otherwise, why would universities have admitted me to study it and organisations have employed me to do it? – it’s an astonishingly hard thing to internalise. And particularly, particularly for women. Women who are told all the time that math is hard, and that excellence is not for them.

Now it is true that if you knew what I knew, if you had read the same books, you’d realise how easy some of my daily tasks are. But, notes the author, but an expert also confidently says, “No. That’s far harder than you realize.”

I’ve never thought of that before. But I know when someone says something about my field – usually, “But why don’t you just sue them?” or “But surely that’s illegal?” – that is patently stupid. I can prove the negative. And I can know something because of my feel for what I do – because of my abilities, training and instincts, and not (just) because I’ve read a lot of textbooks.

So maybe I’m not terrible at what I do. Maybe I’m as good at it as the rest of the world thinks I am. And if I am, imposter of imposters, maybe you are too.

I am a native Hindi speaker.

This is both factually accurate and entirely misleading. My parents are native Hindi speakers (well, one has it for a mother tongue and the other has it almost), and until I was five I spoke nothing else. Then, of course, the usual story – I learnt English fast, it displaced my Hindi almost as fast, pretty soon I was speaking English at home, etc., etc.

Nowadays I’m luckier than some and I haven’t forgotten it entirely, but my grammar is shaky and my vocabulary more so, and in a lot of ways it’s stalled at the five-year-old level. (I suspect this would have changed if I’d been educated in the language, but of course I wasn’t. I have at some point or another been formally taught English, French, Spanish, Italian, Welsh and Latin, but not a word in my original tongue.)

I learned how to read and write Devanagari script around ten years ago, and while it’s also at a five-year-old level, it means I can at least muddle my way through a dictionary. I have therefore decided that it’s never too late to have a happy childhood, and am going to use the dictionary to Learn Words. They are going to be Excitin’ Words. (In all seriousness – I lack the vocabulary, in Hindi, to function as an adult. “Water”, “sleep”, “house”, “tree”, “cold” – I’m fine with those. “Law”, “government”, “engineering”, “history” – any abstract noun or two-syllable adjective is beyond me. How do you address a lack this significant? By picking pages at random out of the dictionary!)

Today’s words:

लघुगणक (laghuganak) – “logarithm”. Why anyone would ever need this in conversation is beyond me, but that is what the dictionary provides. (So does Wikipedia!)

रदर्शनी (radarshan) – “fair”, as in a World’s Fair or expo. A fair that you go to eat candy-floss at is a mela, मेला.

मछली की जनता (machli ki junta) – which is not three words, and may not even be right. In my defence, “shoal” is one word in the English half of the dictionary, and one does often refer to shoals of fish is one is in the habit of discussing such things. However, in Hindi we apparently use a construction that translates to “the general public of fish”.

…I don’t even know. But, look, I learned words today! I shall update as and when I learn more.

(Also, one day I will learn IAST transliteration, but today is not that day. Please bear with me.)

From a Glasgow bookseller writing to The Bookman in February 1895:

…some publishers are doing their utmost to ruin the trade by selling to the drapers, who buy large quantities at reduced prices

(The “drapers” were, of course, the large general retailers. By the 1890s, the term was about as exact as calling Sainsbury’s a grocers.)

That was not the only complaint that could have been lifted straight from last week’s Bookseller. This one from 1905 -

…[the Bookman] was quite relieved to note that recently published children’s books, though dangerously full of humour, were not so absurdly grotesque as in recent years.

Both quotes are from Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by “The Bookman”, 1891-1906 (2001) [JSTOR], a study of the most popular books sold in Britain at the turn of the century. (There were no bestseller lists per se at the time – the bulk of the article was an attempt to retractively construct one based on returns from booksellers. It is sobering how many of them are completely forgotten…)

Front page, top centre, of yesterday’s Telegraph, a large colour photograph of a man and a woman, with the prominent title “Premier League boss’s brothel visit”.

It takes until the middle of the text underneath – there’s no caption as such, and it’s below the fold – to clarify that this is him “pictured with his wife” rather than, say, photographic evidence for the story. Not the most well-thought-out move, there.

A couple of interesting blog posts on the BBC – part 1, part 2 – about a recent set of crime statistics publicised by the Conservatives.

The basic gist of the Conservative claim is that violent crime is vastly increased over the past decade; the basic problem is that the method of recording violent crime changed in the middle of the period, to a much more “permissive” approach, where police were obliged to record a complaint rather than dismissing it. Which, unsurprisingly, tends to lead to a lot more reported crime, without actually saying anything about the underlying crime rates.

I suppose in an ideal world Labour would be running a campaign of “Do you really want to be governed by people who can’t read printed warnings on graphs?”, but sadly all we’ll get is a bit of he-said-she-said over the next two weeks and a few more people will be left beliving that the country is a far scarier place now than it ever was.

Verified by Visa and MasterCard SecureCode: or, How Not to Design Authentication. [via]

This is a very interesting paper; it confirms most of the basic misgivings I’ve had about the 3D Secure model of online card approval. (Basically: it’s not that it’s inherently not very secure, although it is, it’s that it encourages people to be overly trusting of weird middleman attempts to get financial information. I mean… a frame pops up, which shows no obvious signs of whether or not it’s secure, coming from a domain which has no obvious connection to the card provider, registered in another country…)

This is a collection of short stories: four or five stand-alones, and then three connected stories at the end that together are about novella-length.

On the whole, this is very familiar territory. Believe me, I wrote that sentence intending no pun whatsoever; the “unaccustomed earth” of the title is the immigrant’s land, both a new world and the New World, and in Lahiri’s case, it is invariably Boston and New England. Her immigrants arrive on the eastern seaboard from Calcutta, another coastal city, and they speak Bengali, and they become professors at Harvard and MIT. They are simply, evocatively depicted, the details of their lives lovingly and, in my limited experience of the same narrative, accurately rendered. Lahiri’s style is always, always engaging, the simplicity of it turning from mundanity to devastation in a quiet sequence of sentences.

And each story is, alone, both lovely and deeply affecting – the title story gives us a young mother being visited by her father after some time apart, and how he plants her a garden; “Only Goodness” is an unflinching look at how easy it is to destroy a family; the linked Hema and Kaushik stories track a son’s life after his mother dies young – but it’s taken all together that they start to worry me. These familes, their stories, they have two things in common: they are immigrants from India, settling themselves down on that unaccustomed earth, and they are unhappy. Each story has that awful, echoing, hollow sense of loss, with time taken over the lines and caverns of that empty space, care taken to describe the ubiquity of that despair. Here is what worries me. Lahiri’s protagonists marry in her stories, some in arranged marriages, some marrying white Americans, and all are loveless and unloved. Some lose their families to death and to distance, and there is no redemption for them, either. There is always a sense that something, somewhere, is irreparably breaking. I ask not for the saccharine happy ending, but for the notion, however obliquely expressed, that there is hope for the Indian disaspora, that all is not lost at the moment of leaving – and this is not something I can find, here.

Perhaps it really is the author’s opinion, that the immigrant experience is fundamentally a heartbreak, and in that case this is an honest book – but it is neither happy, nor hopeful, and I hope that it is not true.

In an interesting move, Amazon (.com, anyway) recently pulled a large number of books published by Macmillan, or its imprints; this was a reaction to a dispute over how to establish the sale & distribution conditions for ebooks.

(Basically: two big players having a game of chicken, and someone is blinking a bit later than usual. It caused… some entirely justified outcry from the people caught in the middle.)

Charlie Stross has an interesting explanation about the two duelling models of the publishing supply chain here – basically, Amazon trying to grab a slice of the cake that previously went to the publishers.