For those of you in the greater Boston area, it’s time again for the MIT Press Dock Sale:

DAY: Saturday & Sunday
DATE: October 20th & 21st, 2007
TIME: 10:00am to 7:00pm
LOCATION: MIT E38, 292 Main Street, Cambridge (map)

“Elected officials laugh when a butcher, presented with a pig, wastes the squeal.” – Achewood, June 13.

The Media Line reports that the International Criminal Court (ICC) “announced on May 2 it found reasonable grounds to believe that former Sudanese minister of Darfur Affairs Ahmad Haroun, and leader of the Janjaweed Arab fighters, ‘Ali Qusheib, were responsible for a series of crimes against humanity in Darfur, western Sudan.” You can look at the ICC documentation regarding Darfur online: http://www.icc-cpi.int/cases/Darfur.html; the warrants for Haroun and Qusheib, as well as the decision to issue the warrants, are available as part of the documentation for Case ICC-01/04-01/06.

There’s been a conference on campus this weekend, Witnessing Genocide: Representation and Responsibility, and I went to a few of the events (unfortunately work got in the away of attending the whole thing). It was enlightening and worthwhile, so I thought I’d share a few reflections here. The three keynotes that I saw were by Samantha Power, Barbie Zelizer, and Nicholas Kristof (Jerry Fowler was the fourth main speaker, and I was sorry that I missed it). To get the snark out of the way, Prof. Zelizer’s talk wasn’t so hot, in part (and this is petty, but it really bothered me) because she repeatedly misused “less” and “fewer”, but mainly because it was an academic talk that seemed more about how she could say things about photographs than it was about conveying to her audience something important regarding images of genocide. I’m hardly a shrinking flower when it comes to academic-speak, but she talked for an hour about slippage and synecdoche without really going anywhere. I think she was getting at the way photojournalists have adopted visual tropes when dealing with genocide that date to the Holocaust, and that these tropes are limiting journalism’s ability to bear witness to genocide.

Samantha Power spoke on Saturday and I’m very sorry that I didn’t take notes, so I won’t be able to reproduce her main points. I will say, somewhat as an aside, that she was passionate, smart, goofy, and easily the best speaker I’ve seen. Her talk was “Can Genocide Be Stopped in an Age of Terror?” and I was very impressed by her candid discussion of the structural/institutional barriers that get in the way of acting on genocide – she has a lucid understanding of how politics works, in Washington and elsewhere, and made a number of pragmatic suggestions about how to work through those barriers to raise awareness of genocide and make something happen politically. In general, she wants there to be healthy and active political pressure groups about human rights and/or genocide awareness. (Nerdy aside: Dominick LaCapra was at the conference and he asked Ms. Power a question in such a way that I knew he had been reading Agamben, especially The Open: Man and Animal; I think W.G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction has also been on his bedside table).

Nicholas Kristof spoke tonight to a packed house (Power’s talk also required an overflow room). His presentation was very impassioned and definitely organized to move the audience to both a greater awareness of the tragedy going on in Darfur and, hopefully, to some kind of action. He told a number of stories about his experiences in Sudan, most augmented by pictures that were just heartbreaking. I really hope that he was successful, and there was definitely a feeling in the room, at the end, of some form of determination.

So what now? As a librarian, I kind of wish we’d been more involved in the whole symposium, even if only to put together a “further reading” list for the symposium website. I’m not sure what to recommend, other than to say that anyone who wants to know more about genocide in the world today should read any of Samantha Power’s numerous articles in magazines (here’s an online version of Dying in Darfur from The New Yorker), or look at her book A Problem from Hell. Also, Nick Kristof writes frequently about Darfur for The New York Times, so take a look at his op-ed home page (linked to above) and read what he has to say. He mentioned the website Save Darfur, so I would encourage all of you to take a look at the site and, at the very least, fill out the form to let our President know that you’d like something more done to help put an end to all of the killing in Darfur.

UPDATE (5/1): Telling Stories has a good overview of Kristof’s talk. There’s also a webcast from Berkeley called A Crisis in Human Rights: Genocide in Darfur and Beyond.

I’m going to stop blogging for a while, maybe longer.

Before I head out, I want to share a Louis MacNeice poem. When I took Irish Lit (and for years after), I thought MacNeice rather boring – he was some dude who came after Yeats and before the much more exciting poets of the 60s-80s. Jesus, was I wrong. Reading his work now, I can’t believe that I didn’t notice how rhythmically tight his poems are, or hear the voice of someone stuck between worlds and trying to find his place. MacNeice has written some beautiful love poems (“The Sunlight in the Garden” is oft-collected) and some great political ones (“Neutrality” has these amazing closing lines: “But then look eastward from your heart, there bulks / A continent, close, dark, as archetypal sin, / While to the west off your own shores the mackerel / Are fat – on the flesh of your kin.”). The poem I’ve chosen to share with you is taken from Louis MacNeice: Poems selected by Michael Longley.

Thalassa

Run out the boat, my broken comrades;
Let the old seaweed crack, the surge
Burgeon oblivious of the last
Embarkation of feckless men,
Let every adverse force converge -
Here we must needs embark again.

Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades;
Let each horizon tilt and lurch -
You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church -
But let your poison be your cure.

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

From beSpacific:

CRS Director Daniel P. Mullohan issued a memo to all CRS staff, entitled Distribution of CRS Products to Non-Congressionals [PDF], stating that “prior approval should now be required at the division or office level before products are distributed to members of the public…effectively immediately.”

There’s context for this at Secrecy News:

With some frequency, CRS analysts contact FAS with requests for information or documents. [...] We haven’t been shy about requesting information or documents in return. And both sides seem to have benefitted.

“More important, Congress has benefitted,” a staffer said. But now such working relationships may be jeopardized.

I’m currently living out the great American dream: a cross-country road trip. I was going to go through Colorado/Utah heading up to Oregon via the northern route, but the latest installment of Winter Weather meant I had to travel further south and take I-40 west. Tonight, I’m just outside of Oklahoma City.

Last night, my first on the road, I was in Tennessee and couldn’t sleep so I sat up watching TV, including Charlie Rose. He was interviewing Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel. It was generally interesting – it’s always fun to learn more about the tech industry – but I was struck (perhaps for no real reason) by the discussion of the digital divide. Barrett noted that there were four parts to closing the divide:

• increase access by decreasing the cost of PCs
• improve connectivity and make it broadband (he talked about broadband towers in India and how he felt that dial-up was not sufficient access)
• content has to be localized – local languages but also content that is interesting to local groups
• education – people need to be trained to use computers effectively (and provide localized content; my note: education also is what allows people to create content rather than be provided with content)

Barrett then talked about his work with the United Nations, noting that the three central content areas (for global ICT development) are health, education, and economic development.

Nothing deep here, but I had fleeting, late-night thoughts about the relevance for OA of Barrett’s digital divide discussion.

It’s more or less official now, so I can announce that I’ve accepted a position at the University of Oregon as the History & Medieval Studies Librarian (much to the disappointment of the Annoyed Librarian) and I’ll be moving out to Oregon and starting my new job in early January.

They don’t blog at Oregon, so I’m trying to figure out what to do about my “work” blog, History News. I’m thinking about setting up another WordPress blog where I can post history info – reviews, article alerts, that sort of thing – with categories for a number of areas (U.S., Europe, Middle East, etc.), so that I can push appropriate content to my new faculty (as well as to anyone else who might be interested). I originally thought about converting this blog to serve in a new capacity, but there’s too much weird stuff here already, so it seems best to start something new.

UPDATE (12/8): I’ve created a new blog, History News: http://historynews.wordpress.com  .  It will be an outlet for history-related academic news: interesting articles, calls for papers, links to book reviews, that sort of thing.

For readers who may be in the Boston area (or looking for an excuse to head to Boston), MIT Press is having a large book sale this Saturday & Sunday (October 21-22).  Details are available from the MIT PressLog.

I subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds from Project MUSE in order to keep up with both history and library scholarship (and to see what’s going on in other areas of interest) and happened to notice a trend with the feeds to which I subscribe – the library-related feeds have way more subscribers in Bloglines than the history-related feeds.  A few examples:

• Libraries and the Cultural Record – 15 subscribers
• Library Trends – 23 subscribers
•  portal: libraries and the academy – 43 subscribers
• Reviews in American History – 6 subscribers
• Journal of World History – 1 subscriber
• Eighteenth-Century Studies – 4 subscribers
• Past & Present – 4 subscribers

That’s a pretty major difference.  One might even see it as a trend.  Obviously, this does not approach any sort of thorough empirical study, but it certainly seems like librarians are way more up on (and interested in) RSS feeds than the scholarly faculty whom we serve.