July 2004

Aleksandar Hemon has written a review of over at Slate. He calls it the worst book he has ever voluntarily read. He says he wrote this review because this scribbling is that it is exactly what you end up with if publishing and fiction writing become a pursuit of cheap hipness and movie rights.

“Perhaps it should be encouraging to young writers to know they are running out of cool authors in New York, so they have to import them from Switzerland. Or to witness that the democratic ideal inherent in literature—everybody has something to say—has reached its limit in Wagner’s case: It is no longer necessary to be able to write in order to be a writer.“

An Anonymous Patron writes “The HoustonChronicle.com Reports A new group has formed to address the selection and placement of books at the Montgomery County Memorial Library System, and it is targeting 120 works aimed at children and young adults.

Among those are Silly Duck by Harvey Fierstein, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky, Deal With It! by Esther Drill and Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez.”

This Press Release pointed the way to www.theidealists.co.nz, A new website depicting a group of hip, diverse individuals, as action-heroes, aims to get exuberant, energetic and fun loving people to apply for a job in a new library opening in Botany Town Centre.

joanatnoshame sent over The checkout line — or the check-you-out line? from salon.com.

By embracing RFID, librarians have raised the ire of civil libertarians who have long looked askance at the technology. They find it alarming that librarians, who are normally among society’s staunchest defenders of intellectual freedom and First Amendment values, are contributing to the electronic erosion of privacy. You’ll need to subscribe or watch a brief ad and get a free day pass.

Zorro7 writes “A paid subscription political-economic online newsletter I subscribe to called “Al Martin Raw” last week made a rather startling announcement, from a librarian-standpoint. After summarizing the July 8th Patriot Acts’ reaffirmation of the part of the act that allows the feds to snoop on your library book borrowing habits and book-buying habits, he says this: “As it relates to booksellers, it further authorizes the FBI to force booksellers to turn over a list to the FBI of all book titles that they may be selling and all book titles that their customers may have requested. This was the part that was very controversial to librarians and others concerned about the vast power of this; in that it effectively gives government the ability not only to monitor what people read but to use that monitoring system as a basis for declaring people to be seditious or otherwise targeting citizens for special investigation.” But hat’s nothing:
it gets much more interesting.
He continues, “It’s interesting to note some of the books that are on the FBI’s so-called potentially seditious list. They include Presidential historian Dr. Michael Beschloss’s book on Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution. That was reported on FSTV, which went through a list of books. Many of the books considered seditious are books that detail citizens’ rights and liberties under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Then he mentions that Ashcroft said they merely were looking to find people checking out bomb-making books, etc, which, says Martin, “was completely false.”

But here’s the REALLY interesting, pay dirt quote from the article:

Zorro7 writes “A paid subscription political-economic online newsletter I subscribe to called “Al Martin Raw” last week made a rather startling announcement, from a librarian-standpoint. After summarizing the July 8th Patriot Acts’ reaffirmation of the part of the act that allows the feds to snoop on your library book borrowing habits and book-buying habits, he says this: “As it relates to booksellers, it further authorizes the FBI to force booksellers to turn over a list to the FBI of all book titles that they may be selling and all book titles that their customers may have requested. This was the part that was very controversial to librarians and others concerned about the vast power of this; in that it effectively gives government the ability not only to monitor what people read but to use that monitoring system as a basis for declaring people to be seditious or otherwise targeting citizens for special investigation.” But hat’s nothing:
it gets much more interesting.
He continues, “It’s interesting to note some of the books that are on the FBI’s so-called potentially seditious list. They include Presidential historian Dr. Michael Beschloss’s book on Thomas Jefferson and the Constitution. That was reported on FSTV, which went through a list of books. Many of the books considered seditious are books that detail citizens’ rights and liberties under the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.” Then he mentions that Ashcroft said they merely were looking to find people checking out bomb-making books, etc, which, says Martin, “was completely false.”

But here’s the REALLY interesting, pay dirt quote from the article: “Did you know that there are 874 titles now on the FBI’s so-called Watch List under this amendment – and none of those books have anything to do with how to construct a bomb, or how to blow anything up, or how to sabotage anything? They are books which explain your constitutional rights and liberties, your rights under the Bill of Rights as a US citizen, expose the misdeeds of the Bushonian Cabal, and also books that explain certain court precedents in the past, or certain fictional books that reveal so-called classified information regarding illegal covert activities of the US government in the past.”

Now I’m a librarian, for many years, and so I decide it would be worthwhile to email Martin to request the source of this list of the 874 books he is referring to above, since I could not find anything via Google. It seems many people who subscribe to his newsletter emailed him the same question. Here’s his reply, made in today’s newsletter: “People have asked about the books that have been put on the watch list by the FBI, and what I say, is that’s why people subscribe to Al Martin Raw.com. Because these 874 titles are classified and therefore are not accessible by Google, which seems to be counted as the lazy man’s research these days. Not only that, but because of Al Martin Raw.com’s intimate knowledge of government agencies, we can point out the ways in which they attempt to hide information. How I found the information was on a very arcane website maintained by something called The Office of Strategic Analysis, which doesn’t even look like a government website. As a matter of fact, it isn’t even in the United States — yet it is.
To even get to it, you have to go onto the Office of Information Awareness. Then you have to go into what’s called the password or the key code section, wherein you have to enter your government code, which is issued by the FBI; you have to have the number code of the month in order to proceed further. Actually, you can get in — if you have access to the FBI’s security code passbooks, because they’re the ones that actually have them printed, which have hundreds and hundreds of codes in them. They’re printed every month, and the codes change every month. These are codes that are used to gain entry into, not necessarily restricted government websites, but websites that are frankly arcane, that are shadowy, that don’t even look like government websites. (Of course , we do not have such a book)”

Anyway, if anyone has access to the site at “The Office of Strategic Analysis,” perhaps you have access to it and share with us the 878 titles on the FBI watch list?

Here’s Martin’s site, which has biographical information on him – he’s a turncoat from the Republicans, and has worked for the feds as well as a stock broker, and he’s not a kook, from what I can tell, and his newsletter are very information-rich:

http://www.almartinraw.com/

It seems he’s gotten somebody in the government very angry, as he says today, “Readers should be advised that the Al Martin Raw general counsel has received a communication from the Department of Justice informing us that the secret National Security Court, contained within the rotted bowels of the Department of Justice, has determined that certain contents of the Al Martin Raw.com website is in violation of Statute 432 of the National Security Acts of 1949-50; and that, in fact, the Department of Justice was undertaking action to block access to AlMartinRaw.com on publicly owned computer terminals.” These acts have to do with “sedition.” He adds, “This came to my attention, not only by notification from the Department of Justice, but in my weekly radio show with Tony Trupiano, wherein one of my subscribers, a professor at the University of California in Berkeley, informed me that this campus was blocking access to Al Martin Raw.com. I have subsequently become aware that this blocking is system-wide within the University of California, since another subscriber at UC Irvine has also confirmed this fact.” “Publically-owned” of course, means libraries.

Very strange; there’s no porn or anybody’s credit card numbers on his site, yet they block him. Things are getting stranger and stranger…”

Walter Skold writes “The noisy herd of Donkeys assembled in Boston this week are being fed the same kind of “enhanced truths” from Beantown that jaded voters expect to hear from politicians these days.
In spiffy subway ads paid for by Boston 2004, Inc., signed by Mayor Thomas Menino, and created pro-bono by Arnold Worldwide advertising, the host city makes several false claims, the first being that Boston is the home of America’s first public library.

Being from Pennsylvania originally, where another ex-Bostonian, Benjamin Franklin, created the first shareholder library in 1731 (which relied on dues, not taxes or town vote), I was immediately skeptical of this claim.

So I contacted the Peterborough, New Hampshire library, which is considered by most library historians as the first public lending library in the US.