He sets out the basics of how publishers are screwing over public libraries, mentions the Five Laws of Library Science, tells some stories of punk interlibrary loan, ends on an inspiring note, and has many tasty quotes along the way, such as:
If you listen to podcasts, or watch YouTube videos, which I bet some of you do, you will hear someone occasionally say something along the lines of, I’m a lawyer but I’m not your lawyer. Or, I’m a therapist but I’m not your therapist. Librarians are different.
Or:
I’m not saying that because I want you to support the library. Folks, your taxes paid for the library. You’re supporting the library. You may as well go use it. It’s one of the few places where you can go use the things you paid for. You paid for the cop cars, go drive one, see how it works.
In the “Jukebox” column in the November 2024 issue of British music magazine The Wire, Margaret Chardiet (who performs as Pharmakon, and once opened for the band Swans, which is fronted by Michael Gira), says, “Michael Gira is the James Brown of industrial. He’s very much a band leader, and he’s like: ‘follow my cue’ and ‘we’re doing this like this, in this moment’ and his band has to know exactly what he’s thinking and feeling.”
You could do a good surrealist game, a variation of Exquisite Corpse, by having three people make up two names and noun, then combining them this way. Doug Ford is the Tintoretto of sandwiches. Clara Schumann is the Phil Silvers of vexillology.
I never miss an episode of BBC Radio 6 Music’s Freak Zone Playlist, a one-hour selection picked by a different person (or sometimes group) each week. A couple of weeks ago was the 2024 Oram Awards Special hosted by Karen Sutton, who ran the Oram Awards: “a platform to elevate the work and voices of women and gender non-conforming artists innovating in sound, music and related technology.”
Daphne Oram (source: Wikipedia)
There’s a lot of good music in the hour, but I was particularly struck by the two pieces by Daphne Oram, for whom the award is named. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t know of her, but she was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, though she soon left to work on her Oramics composition system. This is amazing stuff, and I bought Oramics on Bandcamp to start to get to know her work. See the Daphne Oram Trust for much more, and “How Daphne Oram’s Oramics machine paved the way for the modern DAW” from Future Music magazine earlier this year.
The Wikipedia article mentions a BBC Radio 3 documentary about Oram: Wee Have Also Sound-Houses (sadly not available for listening at time of writing). There’s a footnote saying it’s a quote from Francis Bacon (the one from the 1600s), from his incomplete novel New Atlantis. Modernized, the full paragraph goes:
We have also sound-houses, where we practise and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. We have harmony which you have not, of quarter-sounds and lesser slides of sounds. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have; with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet. We represent small sounds as great and deep, likewise great sounds extenuate and sharp; we make divers tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices and notes of beasts and birds. We have certain helps which, set to the ear, do further the hearing greatly; we have also divers strange and artificial echoes, reflecting the voice many times, and, as it were, tossing it; and some that give back the voice louder than it came, some shriller and some deeper; yea, some rendering the voice, differing in the letters or articulate sound from that they receive. We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
Oram liked this and apparently quoted it often, including in her book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, which is in the collection of the library where I work and which I will borrow tomorrow. What an astounding quote. I’m delighted by all these discoveries. All this from one hour of radio!
We have all means to convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.
UPDATE (16 October 2024): Below is the original quote as taken from Oram’s book, where it is an appendix on p. 128 (London: Galliard Paperbacks, 1972).
Wee have also Sound-houses, wher wee practise and demonstrate all Sounds, and their Generation. Wee have Harmonies which you have not, of Quarter-Sounds, and lesser Slides of Sounds. Diverse Instruments of Musick likewise to you unknowne, some sweeter then any you have; Together with Bells and Rings that are dainty and sweet. Wee represent Small Sounds as Great and Deepe; Likewise Great Sounds, Extenuate and Sharpe; Wee make diverse Tremblings and Warblings of Sounds, which in their Originall are Entire. Wee represent and imitate all Articulate Sounds and Letters, and the Voices and Notes of Beasts and Birds. Wee have certaine Helps, which sett to the Eare doe further the Hearing greatly. Wee have also diverse Strange and Artificiall Eccho’s, Reflecting the Voice many times, and as it were Tossing it: And some that give back the Voice Lowder then it come, some Shriller, and some Deeper; Yea some rendring the Voice, Differing in the Letters or Articulate Sound, from that they receyve. Wee have also meanes to convey Sounds in Trunks and Pipes, in strange Lines and Distances.
I saw a John Berger quote recently and tracked it down to “Drawn to That Moment,” collected in Berger on Drawing, edited by Jim Savage (Aghabullogue, Ireland: Occasional Press, 2005). This is on p. 71.
To draw is to look, examining the structure of appearances. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree-being-looked-at) not only takes minutes or hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking. Within the instant of the sight of a tree is established a life-experience. This is how the act of drawing refuses the process of disappearances and proposes the simultaneity of a multitude of moments.
The sentence I saw quoted was this, a gem I isolate for its beauty: “A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree-being-looked-at.”
(No library in Canada had this book, and I got it through interlibrary loan from Rice University in Texas. Resource sharing departments are wonderful.)
Over the summer I read The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen, and I highly recommend it to anyone who regularly keeps notes, even if not on paper. I keep my work notes digitally (in Org), which is the best system for me in my work, but for everything else I use paper. Whatever your methods, The Notebook is full of interesting examples that will give you ideas about how you can keep your own notes. If you don’t use paper, it may convince you to try: there are many mental and memorial advantages to using paper over a screen, as Allen discusses.
Cover of The Notebook
This is a popular book, not a scholarly one, but it is well researched and will lead the curious reader on to many intriguing sources. Allen writes in a lively, engaging way. Aside from notebook users, anyone interested in stationery, documentation or the history of scholarship should also look at it, but it has wide appeal. (If you know someone is particular about their pens and pencils or where they write things down, this will be a great present for them—but make sure they don’t already have it, because many stationery lovers stay current.)
Reading this got me using a notebook again. Years ago I moved to notepads where I would jot down quick notes and ideas (I like Rhodia paper), or sheets of paper I would later file, but now I’m back to using a notebook and I wish I’d been using one all along. I’m documenting things, grappling with ideas and showing my work as I go, gluing in snippets from magazines, writing in quotes from books, doing sketches, and more. I’ve missed having a notebook at hand, and it’s a delight to flip through it whenever I want. It will be nice one day to have a whole shelf full I can review.
The notebook I like
I tried out a few different notebooks (not a Moleskine, the artificiality of which Allen documents) and settled on a sketchbook from Above Ground Art Supplies here in Toronto. The size is right, the binding is sturdy, and the paper has a bit of tooth and can take not only fountains pen ink but light washes when sketching.
The Notebook is filled with examples, but it is not exhaustive. A review by Henry Hitchings in the TLS no. 6292 (03 November 2023) said:
Other maestros of the notebook who come to mind are Beethoven, Einstein, Thomas Edison and Antonio Gramsci—the last two of whom Allen doesn’t mention. His account never pretends to be comprehensive, and the emphasis is on groundbreaking uses of notebooks rather than on their most felicitous deployment, but I was struck by the absence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Franz Kafka and Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey Madan, Katherine Mansfield, Northrop Frye and Samuel Beckett.
Hitchings mentions that Allen does not draw on the work of Matthew Daniel Eddy, who I will investigate, but there are many sources in the notes and bibliography that bear looking up. I read The Reckoning by Jacob Soll thanks to Allen, and will soon go on to The Information Master, about Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
The person I really missed was Harriet M. Welsch from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic children’s novel Harriet the Spy. Surely she did more than anyone else to get children to keep notebooks—and keep them private.
But Allen can’t include everything. What he does cover spans hundreds of years and is rich with interesting, rewarding and inspiring examples of how people have written things down.
Over the summer I read Ross King’s Defiant Spirits: The Modernist Revolution of the Group of Seven (2010), which is an excellent book on the Group. It really brings the individuals to life: too often now they are made out to be an undifferentiated mass of seven (or ten men) who all did the same thing, but of course they were each different. I think the one I’d most like to meet is J.E.H. MacDonald, who seemed to have an awful lot of fun. “My religion is the Arts and Letters Club,” he said.
A quote from chapter 35 of The Duke’s Children (my copy is the new expanded edition) by Anthony Trollope. The Duke of Omnium is talking with a few other men after a small dinner party. Silverbridge, his son (known by a courtesy title), offers a thought about the House of Commons.
“I hear men say that it isn’t quite what it used to be,” said Silverbridge.
“Nothing will ever be quite what it used to be. There will always be changes.”
A Mastodon note last night (I still can’t bring myself to say “toot”) from @teledyn@mstdn.ca pointed out the HTTP Observatory, which “enhances web security by analyzing compliance with best security practices.” You put in a URL and it gives you a score on the site’s security, with tips on how to make it better.
I put in this site and got 65/100. With a bit of work I got to 115/100! I was pretty pleased about that. Then I discovered I had broken some small things because the settings were too restrictive. I fixed that and now I get 125/100!
Here are some notes about that, in case it’s useful to me in the future or anyone else before then. Note: I am no expert, I’m not even a web developer any more. I’m just a person running a static web site built with Jekyll who hacked on some HTTP headers.
Headers
Header information is normally used by your browser to understand what it should do with the web page content that follows. It’s rarely of interest to people unless they’re doing something technical. If you run curl --head https://www.miskatonic.org you can see only the headers for this site, which look like this:
(No cookies are set because there are no cookies. There is also no logging. I know nothing about anyone who looks at this site.)
Everything up to Content-Length is generated by the web server, which here is Apache hosted on Pair. Everything after that is set by me. Here’s a rundown. Browse Practical security implementation guides for more about all this.
X-Clacks-Overhead
Header set X-Clacks-Overhead "GNU Terry Pratchett"
(This is how I set the header in the .htaccess file where I can configure things. You might set it differently in your situation.)
This remembers Terry Pratchett. See X-Clacks-Overhead. This has nothing to do with security; I just think Terry Pratchett is one of the greatest writers of the last fifty years.
Now, I don’t have any JavaScript running on my site, so it’s not going to be a problem. Well, I don’t have any of my own JavaScript, but I do sometimes embed a YouTube video, such as in this post about Molly White’s Become a Wikipedian in 30 Minutes video. To make that work I have to have that special frame-src configuration.
As I understand it, default-src being ‘self’ means that by default, while looking at this site the browser should only load resources from this site, unless otherwise specified. Having style-src as ‘unsafe-inline’ means I can set CSS inline, specifying font-size: smaller right in a web page. It should be in a CSS file, and maybe I’ll fix that one day, but I’m not going to fuss about it right now. In media-src there’s an extra data: that says it’s all right to load media (such as images) that are specified right in the HTML with a data URL. I had to add this to do away with a warning, which confused me because I never load any media this way. Maybe I’ll figure it out later.
Using Firefox’s developer tools was a huge help in figuring all this out. I’d load the site, hit Ctrl-Shift I to pop it up, go to the Console, and reload over and over as I tweaked settings. (Whether or not JavaScript was enabled changed things, so test with it off and on. Privacy settings and add-ons may also affect things.)
This isn’t as tightly locked down as it could be, but it’s much better than it was before.
X-Frame-Options
Header set X-Frame-Options DENY
X-Frame-Options helps prevent clickjacking, as does the frame-ancestors setting above. This option is obsolete, but so what.
Referrer-Policy
Header set Referrer-Policy no-referrer
With this Referrer-Policy setting, if someone follows a link from my site to another there is no header passed along telling the destination site that they came from here. This could be needed in some situations, but not here.
X-Content-Type-Options
Header set X-Content-Type-Options nosniff
X-Content-Type-Options tells the browser “not to load scripts and stylesheets unless the server indicates the correct MIME type.” It’s nosniff because it stops the browser from content sniffing.
Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy
Header set Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy same-origin
Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy “lets websites and applications opt-in to protection against vulnerabilities related to certain cross-origin requests.” Setting it to same-origin means “limits resource access to requests coming from the same origin. This is recommended for URLs that reply with sensitive user information or private APIs.” I’m not doing anything that even needs to worry about this, so I set it to the most secure option, because it will never matter.
Strict-Transport-Security is an important one: it says that the site should only ever be accessed with HTTPS. The age setting is in seconds, and it equals one year. I don’t know if it matters any more, but you can add your domain to the HSTS Preload List as well.
Miskatonic University Press
