Intelligence work is hard. I get that. But I would think that anybody who gets referred to both CIA and FBI might be more important than whether I take off my shoes when I fly.
**How Florentine history sounds to an art historian**:
blah blah blah Medici blah blah Botticelli blah blah art blah blah
sculpture blah Michelangelo
**How Florentine history sounds to historians**:
blah blah coup blah blah blah Medici blah blah uprising blah blah
conditierri blah Julius II blah blah
“Just play the goddamned fugue by itself.”
A two-part program which included:
There was some chatter behind me about the brutality of putting a new piece on the program with one of Beethoven’s best. The consensus was that if it’s going to last as a piece of quartet repertoire it’d have to do that eventually anyway. The quote above is also from them, after the concluding Great Fugue.
Rohde’s Treatises were in the modern style where everything seems short and sharp and harsh, and the instruments appear to be playing at cross-purposes. The effect is disconcerting, which is probably part of the point.
I don’t think I’d ever heard the Beethoven piece either, so both were premieres for me. It’s very nice, and very lyrical. It comes in six movements which on first hearing don’t appear to bear much resemblance to each other. And it concluded with the Great Fugue, which Beethoven’s publisher reacted to originally by making him write something more pedestrian.
A very pleasant evening, and sold out for twenty dollars a ticket on a Saturday night.
Works for academic libraries, too.
On white board.
Just say no to QR codes.
Another angle on last week’s post about Adria Richards is this week’s allegations about Michael Arrington. A former girlfriend reported he physically abused her. Gawker reports further.
If you follow the link in the title and read the comments you will discover that the man’s reputation is much more important to most of the commenters than investigating the truth of the claims.
I learned about Lewis’s Law this week, too. “The comments on any post on feminism justify feminism.”
“For example, in serving as a hub, Harvard plans to make available to the DPLA by the time of its launch 243 medieval manuscripts; 5,741 rare Latin American pamphlets; 3,628 daguerreotypes, along with the first photographs of the moon and of African-born slaves; 502 chapbooks and “penny dreadfuls” about sensational crimes, a popular genre of literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and 420 trial narratives from cases involving marriage and sexuality. Harvard expects to provide a great deal more in the following months, notably in fields such as music, cartography, zoology, and colonial history. Other libraries, archives, and museums will contribute still more material from their collections. The total number of items available in all formats on April 18 will be between two and three million.”
The National Digital Public Library Is Launched! by Robert Darnton | The New York Review of Books
Harvard is opening up its junk drawer and calling it the Digital Public Library of America,
“This is some seriously crazy shit. None of what he’s talking about is within a hundred miles of anything relevant to the gay marriage question. It’s just weird, confused, old-person bitterness, mixed in with the usual obnoxious conservative delusions – like the way fiscal irresponsibility is always poor people buying wide-screen TVs on credit, and never teams of Ivy Leaguers at places like Lehman Brothers running up trillion-dollar balance sheets at 40-1 leverage.”
In honor of the cooking binge I’ve been on lately, I offer this from my archives.
Poet Food.
I have rarely so comprehensively disagreed with anything. Starting by comparing himself to Cassandra, Scruton compares gay marriage, the Arab Spring, and other things to the irrationality which led to World War II. And then appears to blame the twentieth century on Marxists.
Here’s a brief outline of what happened at PyCon and on the web earlier this week.
There’s a good summary here on Ars Technica: “How dongle jokes got two people fired”. And a widely cited reaction here: “Adria Richards, PyCon, and How We All Lost”
That’s what happened. I’m trying to wrap my head around the commentary on it. Most of the tech websites that I read have covered this in detail this week. They’ve done a good job with it. It’s the comments on the posts that have me thrown for a loop. I have never seen such a virulent display of sexism, ignorance, and unexamined privilege. And sure, there will be trolls on any controversy. But every place I’ve held my nose and looked at the comments they have been twenty to one dismissive of the woman’s position if not outright hostile. Repeating the same “it’s not a problem, why didn’t she just ask nicely” bullshit. I gotta say, I often don’t speak up about things that bother me because I’m worried people might be mean to me. And I’ve never had a death threat, or a rape threat, or a threat to destroy my business. If any of those were remotely possible I’d pretty much want to bring some friends with me if I were going to compain. Richardson did the digital equivalent of that by posting the picture to her Twitter followers.
Like Blum, I was at the Wordcamp Boston talk Richards gave in 2010 complaining about porn imagery in another presenter’s talk. It was theatrical, and a little overblown (I thought), and more than a little self-promotional. But it struck me as a reasonable use of unconference time: to draw attention to a real problem in the tech community using the tools of that tech community. It’s a valid activist tactic, and threatens no one.
Here’s the thing for me. The self-referential ugliness of almost all of the comments on the sites that are my home on the web makes me ill. And it’s not trolls bringing the ugly, because there are hundreds of responses to posts like this on The Verge “The Thug Mentality”. I am not OK with that environment.
It doesn’t matter whether Richards overreacted. Nothing she did warrants threats on her life, her body, or her property.
My thanks to Jason Snell and rjmarsan, a Verge commenter who you can see going toe-to-toe with almost everybody else in the comments on the The “Thug Mentality” post. For reminding me it’s not OK to ignore it and hope it goes away.
The lack of sympathy in my Twitter stream for women in tech and how isolated they feel is not surprising, but saddening. Shame on you.
— Jason Snell (@jsnell) March 21, 2013
