Aug 14, 2004

Noted Here and There ...

by Cliopatria

In case you haven't seen it, read Ronnie Dugger's long-promised, blockbuster article on computerized voting,"How They Could Steal the Election This Time", in The Nation. My fellow Republicans need to understand that the stench of election fraud this time around is a covenant-breaker.

Geitner Simmons calls attention to two posts at Regions of Mind about how the Pulitzer Prize winning Polish novelist, Henry Sienkiewitz, was influenced by his travels in the American West; and a third about how the United States accommodated Louisiana's Spanish and French heritage. Simmons especially calls attention to the responses by Nathanael at Rhine River, who wrote about the influence of Sienkiewitz on modern literature; and compared the United States's assimilation of Louisiana to the contemporary Prussian annexation of the Rhineland. As Simmons said, these are important indicators of the kind of immediate intellectual exchange that blogging enables. We both recommend Rhine River as a fascinating history site, with strong visual appeal.

Siris, which we've just added to the blogroll at Cliopatria, actually has rules for what is blogrolled over there. The discriminating philosopher says:"Political blogging is the parasitic scum of the blogosphere." I was just bottom-feeding, when I recommended Dugger's article, but I meant it!

Thanks be to all goodness, Naomi Chana has breathed life back into Baraita.

Finally, Brian Ulrich observes that"... you know you're a grad student in history when you set your books down to check out and a visible cloud of dust emerges from one of them." He reminds me of the professor of European intellectual history who spoke of our job-related injuries. He was working quietly one day in his library carrel, when a bound volume of the London Times fell on his head. Maybe you have to have seen what a bound volume of the London Times looks like to appreciate that one.

More Comments:

Jonathan Dresner - 8/15/2004

. . . was the headline in my newspaper this morning. Ironically, of course, they were trying to highlight Hawaiian success in getting electronic voting accessible in all precincts.

The subhead was "Not to Worry: Paper Ballots Will Be Used" and the election commission spokesperson tried to pooh-pooh fears of hacking and fraud.

Jonathan Dresner - 8/14/2004

You should try working in a tropical environment sometime. Our head librarian said, when she got here, that she'd never had to find a solution to moldy microfilm before.... and she's from Florida!

Sharon Howard - 8/14/2004

And then there's the issue of archival filth. Not pornography, but real physical black stuff - court rolls and files are terrible for this - that transfers itself cheerfully onto your hands, clothes (don't wear pale trousers), equipment. And the dust that goes up the nose (everybody sneezes in archival reading rooms...). Yuk, yuk, yuk.

Ralph E. Luker - 8/14/2004

I suppose it is one of those things where life is made easier and safer for us by microfilm and e-copies; but I suspect we all know that there's nothing that quite takes the place of the feel of an original document. So long as it's not on your head or in your lap!

Miriam Elizabeth Burstein - 8/14/2004

One of the most dismaying (but, retrospectively, in an entertaining way) experiences at the British Library involved an elephant folio of eighteenth-century broadsides. Even turning the pages took some effort. And I couldn't budge the book when it came time to return it to the desk, seeing as how it weighed almost as much as I did...