German Joys

The Tragic Demise of Library.nu

Christopher Kelty on the shutdown of library.nu:

 Last week a website called "library.nu" disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly Gigapedia) had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free. 

And not just any books - not romance novels or the latest best-sellers - but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities.

The texts ranged from so-called "orphan works" (out-of-print, but still copyrighted) to recent issues; from poorly scanned to expertly ripped; from English to German to French to Spanish to Russian, with the occasional Japanese or Chinese text. It was a remarkable effort of collective connoisseurship. Even the pornography was scholarly: guidebooks and scholarly books about the pornography industry. For a criminal underground site to be mercifully free of pornography must alone count as a triumph of civilisation.

To the publishing industry, this event was a victory in the campaign to bring the unruly internet under some much-needed discipline. To many other people - namely the users of the site - it was met with anger, sadness and fatalism. But who were these sad criminals, these barbarians at the gates ready to bring our information economy to its knees? 

They are students and scholars, from every corner of the planet.

Pirating to learn

The world, it should not come as a surprise, is filled with people who want desperately to learn. This is what our world should be filled with. This is what scholars work hard to create: a world of reading, learning, thinking and scholarship. The users of library.nu were would-be scholars: those in the outer atmosphere of learning who wanted to know, argue, dispute, experiment and write just as those in the universities do.

Maybe they were students once, but went on to find jobs and found families. We made them in some cases - we gave them a four-year taste of the life of the mind before sending them on their way with unsupportable loans. In other cases, they made themselves, by hook or by crook.

So what does the shutdown of library.nu mean? The publishers think it is a great success in the war on piracy; that it will lead to more revenue and more control over who buys what, if not who reads what. The pirates - the people who create and run such sites - think that shutting down library.nu will only lead to a thousand more sites, stronger and better than before.

But both are missing the point: the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry. It cannot be, not with the current business models and the prices. The users of library.nu - these barbarians at the gate of the publishing industry and the university - are legion.

They live all over the world, but especially in Latin and South America, in China, in Eastern Europe, in Africa and in India. It's hard to get accurate numbers, but any perusal of the tweets mentioning library.nu or the comments on blog posts about it reveal that the main users of the site are the global middle class. They are not the truly poor, they are not slum-denizens or rural poor - but nonetheless they do not have much money. They are the real 99 per cent (as compared to the Euro-American 1 per cent).

...

Why doesn't the publishing industry want these consumers? For one thing, the US and European book-buying libraries have been willing pay the prices necessary to keep the industry happy - and not just happy, in many cases obscenely profitable.

Rather than provide our work at cheap enough prices that anyone in the world might purchase, they have taken the opposite route - making the prices higher and higher until only very rich institutions can afford them. Scholarly publishers have made the trade-off between offering a very low price to a very large market or a very high price to a very small market.

But here is the rub: books and their scholars are the losers in this trade-off - especially cutting edge research from the best institutions in the world. The publishing industry we have today cannot - or will not - deliver our books to this enormous global market of people who desperately want to read them.

Instead, they print a handful of copies - less than 100, often - and sell them to libraries for hundreds of dollars each. When they do offer digital versions, they are so wrapped up in restrictions and encumbrances and licencing terms as to make using them supremely frustrating. 

To make matters worse, our university libraries can no longer afford to buy these books and journals; and our few bookstores are no longer willing to carry them. So the result is that most of our best scholarship is being shot into some publisher's black hole where it will never escape. That is, until library.nu and its successors make it available. 

What these sites represent most clearly is a viable route towards education and learning for vast numbers of people around the world. The question it raises is: on which side of this battle do European and American scholars want to be?

I hope the judges in Munich are happy. The loss of library.nu is a serious blow to millions of people. The site was dedicated to sharing scholarly books, not bestsellers or music or videos. It was the way budding doctors, engineers, and sociologists all over the world could get access to the latest research, which otherwise would have been completely out of reach. If you visit the libraries of crowded state-run universities in the developing world, you generally see stack after stack of hopelessly outdated, yellowing books that are of no use to anyone. In fact, if you visit many German university libraries, you'll see the same thing.

Of course, allowing anyone to download books for free is not a long-term strategy. But considering academic publishers' opaque and often nonsensical pricing policies (Exhibit A could be the absurdly high price of my book), library.nu was an absolute necessity for worldwide learning. Academic publishers are routinely increasing the prices of their books and databases at a time when most university budgets are tighter than ever.

And, of course, there's going to be another library.nu somewhere soon. If you're doing research, you have three choices: (1) go without access to an expensive, important book because there's no accessible physical copy of it in your country; (2) wait for 2-3 weeks for it to arrive from interlibrary loan, or (3) get instant access to the very latest edition of the entire book in 20 seconds. In the form of a searchable .pdf. There is no contest. The demand for option #3 will soon kill off options 1 and 2 completely.

Of course, publishers could take advantage of this demand if they were willing to experiment with new business models and take some risks. But so far, it looks like they're relying on the courts to stand athwart history, yelling 'Stop!' -- something German courts, in particular, are only too eager to do (g). So the choice is, as it so often is, between exploitation and piracy. Of course, a better solution is to make the books available online for a reasonable fee, with discounts and concessions for libraries and students in developing countries. I'm not holding my breath.

Oh, and in the interest of full disclosure, I've visited library.nu several times, as have probably about 75% of all professors and students. And my book was available on the website, as well. I didn't put it there, but I also had no problem with it being there.

How Right-Wing is Christian Kracht?

The Kid in Berlin, whose blog I am happy to have just stumbled across, has a piece on the Diez-Kracht affair. George Diez, one of the Spiegel's critics, has recently written a long take-down of Swiss writer Christian Kracht. Diez accuses Kracht of harboring right-wing sympathies based on his latest novel Imperium (g) (which involves an oddball German exile founding a colony in the South Seas in the 19th century) and, perhaps more interestingly, on Kracht's correspondence with American artists David Woodard (g). Of course, this being Germany, the Diez article is not online.

More background from the Kid.

Of course, the setting of the novel means Kracht has to depict racist mindsets - and yet Diez for one is troubled by the intransparency of the narrator's standpoint. This writer, he says, has a fascination with dictatorships and evil but never quite reveals where he stands on the issue, while it occupies a growing place in his writing.

But it's on the last of the article's four pages that Diez cuts to the quick. Because here he turns to Kracht's friend David Woodard. The two of them last year published a compendium of their email correspondence, which was generally reviewed with bored shrugs. Perhaps the weight of all that communication dulled the reviewers' senses, because some of the quotes Diez obviously underlined at the time are hair-raising. The two of them admiringly bandy about names of right-wing populists and out-and-out Nazis and - this is the important bit - discuss the Paraguayan Aryan settlement Nueva Germania. You can read about Woodard's involvement in this community in a 2005 article in the San Francisco Chronicle. You can also see on this website that Woodard was working on a novel - I can only assume on the same subject - that was supposed to be published by Blumenbar Verlag in 2009. It was not. I'd be interested to find out why not.

Is it a coincidence that Kracht chose a very similar subject for Imperium? Certainly it reflects the two men's common fascination with German oddballs who set up colonies in far-flung places, only to fail. Of course Diez can't do much more than ask similar questions himself, the writing being extremely slippery. And that's one reason why I've never read Kracht's work. Incidentally, his non-fiction book The Ministry of Truth, depicting Kim Jong Il's North Korea, is available in English, published by Feral House, a US publisher with an apparent and perhaps fitting part-focus on occultism, serial killers, Nazism, "exposing Muslim fundamentalism" and dictatorships. Other authors they publish include Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a. the Unabomber. The disclaimer reads: "Feral House does not support or justify Kaczynski's crimes, nor does the author receive royalties or compensation for this book. It is this publisher’s mission, as well as a foundation of the First Amendment, to allow the reader the ability to discern the value of any document." Many of the images on the publisher's website would be banned under German law.

You should definitely click on the link to the San Francisco Chronicle in the excerpt above. To make sure you do, here it is again.

Hitchens Had his Ups and Downs

I loved Hitchens' books in the 1980s -- the prose was lithe and jaunty, and they had the best indices since The Stuffed Owl. The entry for Margaret Thatcher contained a long list of sub-entries including, if I recall correctly, "ignition of hair of." His reportage from the Middle East or Central American was often brilliant, and I think this is what will last of his work. Kevin Drum identifies the flaws with his recent polemics pretty well:

As a writer, he was all over the map. His prodigious memory was, indeed, prodigious, and he was capable of brilliance. And yet, quite aside from his subject material, I never much warmed to him. His writing contained provocation aplenty, but far too much of it, I thought, was tediously bloated, a few hundred words of dashed off substance wrapped around many more hundred words of tired reminiscences, random bile, and frustratingly circuitous filler. It certainly wasn't unreadable, and sometimes it produced a charm of sorts, but mostly it neither persuaded nor even really entertained on any kind of sustained basis.

He began going off the rails, if you ask me, in the 90s. I never understood Hitchens' obsession with the Clintons. I could understand his dislike of/lack of respect for them, but it always seemed to me that Hitchens' ire was ludicrously disproportionate to their sins. And then came his intemperate reaction to 9/11 and thrusting advocacy of the Iraq war. The two temptations of the public intellectual: a desire to be near to power (which is different from a desire to wield influence), and a fascination with vicarious violence. We usually associate this sort of moral blindness with Continental intellectuals, but, it turns out, Englishman can catch this virus too. Of course, Hitchens could also be pathetically self-aggrandizing in print, especially after he became rich and famous, but I find that pretty forgivable. For the last decade, though, he was trying much too hard to be a new Orwell, but latched onto the wrong cause.

 What Hitchens did, pretty brilliantly, was find a niche in the USA in the 1980s. This is my theory, at least: he came to the US and realized that political and public discourse in that country tended to the bland, superficial, and pious. Too many mainstream American commentators were simply afraid of giving offense to various groups deemed out-of-bounds, and wrapped their opinions in layers of mealy-mouthed gauze. The American tradition of journalistic 'objectivity' and horse-race coverage contributed to this insipid discourse. When American commentators did take up a cause, they tended to straight-ahead "Not in My America!" moral outrage, not deft subversion.

Hitchens quickly realized that he towered over most of his American counterparts intellectually, and was also, unlike them, willing to call a spade a spade: Ronald Reagan was an intermittently delusional moron, Margaret Thatcher was a bigoted fake, Jerry Falwell and his ilk sinister frauds (and their followers pathetic dupes), Henry Kissinger a war criminal. Hitchens mercilessly, joyfully skewered his targets, blending 1/4 genuine outrage with 3/4 gleeful, unabashed, often-snobbish delight. This was what American intellectuals, with a few possible exceptions, could never master. Sure, they could attack Ronald Reagan, but the attacks were ploddingly earnest howls of outrage. Hitchens attacked Ronald Reagan and had lots of fun doing it, and the fun was infectious. This sort of gleeful, rambunctious, I-don't -just-not-care-if-you're-offended-I'd-be-insulted-if-you-weren't tone is something really only the English can get away with. Yet millions of Americans find it fascinating, as I did back in the 1980s. And to me, there's something bracingly honest about political discourse in the UK to this day.

When he was in this mode, and especially when he was combining it with reportage, Hitchens was at his best, and that was fiendishly good. That's what I'll remember him for. And the fact that he continued writing until the very end.

 

"Miniature female nudes, most with swelled abdomens, immersed or wading in fluids and oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules"

Yale's Beinecke Library has scanned in and put online the entire Voynich manuscipt, a book written in a yet-to-be deciphered text whose contents are as follows:

Based on the subject matter of the drawings, the contents of the manuscript falls into six sections: 1) botanicals containing drawings of 113 unidentified plant species; 2) astronomical and astrological drawings including astral charts with radiating circles, suns and moons, Zodiac symbols such as fish (Pisces), a bull (Taurus), and an archer (Sagittarius), nude females emerging from pipes or chimneys, and courtly figures; 3) a biological section containing a myriad of drawings of miniature female nudes, most with swelled abdomens, immersed or wading in fluids and oddly interacting with interconnecting tubes and capsules; 4) an elaborate array of nine cosmological medallions, many drawn across several folded folios and depicting possible geographical forms; 5) pharmaceutical drawings of over 100 different species of medicinal herbs and roots portrayed with jars or vessels in red, blue, or green, and 6) continuous pages of text, possibly recipes, with star-like flowers marking each entry in the margins.

My Talented Friends

A friend of mine who is a semi-professional photographer has just started sharing some of his photos on flickr here:

Another one of my friends, John Carter Wood of Obscene Desserts, has just started a blog about his book The Most Remarkable Woman in England: Poison, Celebrity and the Trials of Beatrice Pace (Manchester University Press, 2012). I had the pleasure of reading an early draft of the book, which is a fascinating history of a poisoning case that gripped England during the 1920s: Did Beatrice Pace slowly murder her husband with arsenic? John's book is written in crisp, accessible prose and studded with priceless quotations from contemporary news reports and court documents. It has as many plot twists as any detective story, and also casts fascinating sidelights on everything from early forensic science to press ethics to the status of women in inter-war England. Highly recommended!

The Wild West of Free Speech

From Boing Boing comes this result of a Freedom of Information Act request to the U.S. government for FBI files on Loompanics, a U.S.-based distributor of books about smuggling, explosives, drug production, political activism, and other spicy subjects. The West German police were not amused to find out that someone in West Germany had ordered the books "Total Resistance", "Psychedelic Chemistry" and "CIA Improvised Sabotage Devices" to be sent to Germany, and suspected that the materials would be used to foment 'dissension'.

The files, acquired by Government Attic, a website that specializes in obtaining access to U.S. government documents, show (.pdf) that the FBI dutifully followed up on the request by their German cousins, but were unable to help them, since it's legal to publish books describing and advocating illegal activity in the U.S. I'm sure the Germans were disappointed.

Drowning in Alien Bric-a-Brac

Tim Parks has some interesting thoughts on why Jonathan Franzan is so popular in Europe:

Franzen ... could hardly be more loudly American, and to come to him right after [reading Swiss author Peter] Stamm is to see how different are the roads to celebrity for the Swiss author and the American. While Stamm’s characters come free, or bereft, of any social or political context, Franzen’s often seem barely distinguishable from a dense background cluttered with product names, detailed history and geography, linguistic tics, dress habits, and so on, all described with a mixture of irony and disdain, an assumption of superiority and distance, that I immediately found myself uncomfortable with.

***

For the American reader there is the pleasure of recognizing the interiors Franzen so meticulously describes. Not so for the Italian, or German, or Frenchman, who simply struggles through lists of alien bric-a-brac. We might say that if the Swiss Stamm, to attract an international public, has been obliged to write about everyman for everyone everywhere, Franzen, thanks to the size of America’s internal market, but also to the huge pull the country exercises on the world’s imagination, can write about Americans for Americans (which is no doubt as it should be) and nevertheless expect to be read worldwide.

...It’s one thing for the Americans to hype and canonize one of their favorite authors, but why do the Europeans buy into it? Ever anxious that they need to understand America, fascinated by its glamor and power, Europeans are perhaps attracted to those American novels that explain everything: Roth’s American Pastoral, DeLillo’s Underworld. More than a novel by an American they want The Great American Novel. But of course Europeans also resent American world hegemony and feel (still and no doubt wrongly) superior culturally.

Freedom has this characteristic: Franzen appears to get all his energy, all his identity, from simultaneously evoking and disdaining America, explaining it (its gaucheness mostly) and rejecting it; his stories invariably offer characters engaging in the American world, finding themselves tainted and debased by it, then at last coming to their Franzenesque “corrected” senses and withdrawing from it. Blinded by this or that ambition, they come to grief because they lack knowledge, they lack awareness. Thus the importance of so much information. Unlike his characters, Franzen knows everything, is aware of everything, and aware above all that redemption lies in withdrawal from the American public scene. What message could be more welcome to Europeans? The more you know about America, which we need to do, the more you turn away from it, which we enjoy.

A Writer's Greatest Compliment

Strolling through Istanbul is the sort of book you continue reading after you've left Istanbul, because you stumble upon gems like the following, during the book's leisurely description of Dolmabahce Palace (p. 422):

Evliya [Turkish chronicler Evliya Celebi] goes on to tell one of his astonishing stories about his unpredictable friend, Murat IV: "Sultan Murat IV happened once to be reading at Dolmabahce the satirical word Sohami of Nefii Efendi, when the lightning struck the ground near him: being terrified he threw the book into the sea, and then gave orders to Bayram Pasha to strangle the author Nefii Efendi."

A Summary of My Book

For those few remaining holdouts who haven't read my book yet, William W. Berry III of the University of Mississippi School of Law has recently uploaded a paper to SSRN that includes (among other things) a good summary of my main arguments. I haven't read the whole thing yet, so I don't yet know Berry's take, but I thought I'd put a link up all the same.

An Open Letter to Lonely Planet About Gay Sex Tourists

Whenever I travel, I usually bring a Lonely Planet along. Now, Lonely Planet is not the be-all and end-all of travel guides.  (The best guide for Istanbul, by the way, is Strolling Through Istanbul by Hilary Sumner-Boyd and John Freely.) But LP guides are sturdily made, the writing is crisp and opinionated, the maps and layout make sense, and Lonely Planet knows its audience -- the educated Western bourgeoisie -- very well.

 

Plus, it's interesting to see how the Lonely Planeteers negotiate cultural differences. They denounce faux-folk performances put on for the kinds of tourists who travel in buses, but tread very gingerly when addressing the, shall we say, problematic aspects of the nation being visited. You have to know Lonely Planet's code -- they will never tell you that a certain native delicacy will ruin your digestion for days, or that a popular theater is infested with rats. Not in so many words, at least. But they will drop carefully-worded hints, often couched in adorable Aussie slang like '"skerrick" and "snaffle". Decoding them belongs to the fun of reading LP guides.

 

There's also the matter of the double-standard that I've found in many LP guides: the difference in treatment between gays who might want to indulge in anonymous and/or paid sex when they travel and straights who do so.

 

First, some background. I came of age in the late 1980s, and early 1990s, the heyday of the quaint movement among the college-educated classes of certain Western nations known as "political correctness."  One aspect of political correctness was that members of privileged classes were encouraged to turn a blind eye toward certain unsavory conduct engaged in by members of the less-privileged orders. Gays had a special license to speak openly about various aspects of their intimate lives without encountering disapproval or scorn. Loose talk of cruising, scoring, hanky codes, felching, going bareback, etc. was considered de rigueur among certain out gays. You had to confront The Man with your full being and demand that he respect you.

 

Gay pride parades were cavalcades of the most bizarre perversion, but, as a polite progressive,  you certainly weren't allowed to wrinkle your nose at the topless biker lesbians, novelty cock rings, or gyrating leather bears without being denounced as "intolerant". (On a similar note, you were required to chalk up the crass materialism of lots of rap music solely to self-conscious parody, or to rap artists' sublimated yearning to enjoy the privileges of prosperity that had so long been denied their ancestors.) Thus, if you saw a parade float in which hairy bears led skinny young twinks around on all fours in studded dog collars, you were required to bite your tongue, or half-heartedly proclaim it a bold step forward for proud out living. A parade float featuring middle-aged men leading young women around naked would, of course, have you dialing '911' on the nearest payphone (remember, this was the 90s).

 

Those days are long past. Eventually, gingerly, Western societies began to say: "Hey, we're tolerant and open and all that, but really, we don't want to know about the weird stuff you do in the bedroom." And gays themselves also got the message that quite literally parading around the more bizarre aspects of one of their sexual subcultures might not be very helpful. Especially with the rise of the gay-marriage movement, it's now become the done thing to treat being gay as rather ho-hum. Turns out most of 'em actually want to get mortgages and have nice office jobs just like the breeders! Gingerly, you can even begin to see even open-minded straights criticizing certain perhaps somewhat morally questionable activities that gays (also) engage in, such as anonymous darkroom sex and rent boys. Previously, this was something only gays or conservatives could do.

 

That all seems to have passed Lonely Planet by: its sexual mores are still so 1993. Take the Lonely Planet Guide to Istanbul. If you were a straight man looking to find paid sex in Istanbul (and no, although straight, I'm not here for sex tourism, unless you count the statues of Kybele - grrr!), you will find not a single sentence about it whatsoever, except for one brief, passing mention in the 'Dangers & Annoyances' (!) section, which advises you that the 'red light district' in Aksaray/Laleli is known for pickpocketing. The tone is so ginger that I can imagine the contentious editorial meeting about whether they should even mention where the red light district is located, lest some greasy-mouthed male tourist decide to stray over there and prey on some unsuspecting, doe-eyed Turkish female prostitutes.

 

But if you're gay and coming to Istanbul, Lonely Planet rolls out the pink carpet! They feature a long interview with a gay activist, and detailed recommendations for gay clubs and bathhouses. The book notes that you have to be careful: homosexuality is only tolerated in Turkey, it's not legal. Alas, darkrooms and 'naughty nooks' are unknown in Istanbul gay clubs, so that if your "cruising" is successful (yes, they use that word), you'll have to consummate any action in private. With regret, the gay activist informs us, the only "public sex" available is in a seedy cinema or "furtive flings in dark alleys." The recommendations for gay baths go even further. About one, LP raves: "An added attraction is the stable of 14 hunky, delicious masseurs who take you into the private cubicles for a massage -- be sure to negotiate the price and service parameters clearly. Note: what goes on here should remain here."

 

Hey Lonely Planet: I don't want to burst your bubble, but that activity you were describing in the Istanbul bathhouse is paying for sex, and that's prostitution! What you're doing is telling gay men where to go to engage in illegal prostitution! So if you're telling gay men where to go for some paid sex, then why not tell straight men, too? After all, there might be some really funky, cool establishments that offer an authentic 'Turkish bordello' experience that might be of interest to straight male travelers. You could even do what Lonely Planet is renowned for, which is steering well-funded Western travelers away from the most grotty and exploitative sides of tourism, to the more (relatively) sustainable and authentic.

 

Yet there's not a single word about any heterosexual paid-sex establishments, whether nasty or decent. This is also true of every Lonely Planet guide I've read for European cities -- or for any place on the planet. Heterosexual prostitution is regarded as seedy and grim, and is either never mentioned at all, or only with a lot of finger-wagging about human trafficking, diseases, economic power imbalances and organized crime. Visiting a bordello in Cologne, Vienna, or Budapest (each of which features large, professionally-run whorehouses like this) is never treated as a fun diversion after a hard day wandering the historical sites. These places aren't even mentioned. The only time you'll ever learn of the existence of a bordello from a LP guide is if it's been converted -- into a trendy new gay bar!

 

Now, Lonely Planet might respond: We don't think prostitution is an appropriate tourist activity. It encourages young people to sell their bodies for money. It exploits power imbalances. It can spread disease. And anyway, if someone really wants information about it, he can always go to the Internet.

 

I think that about covers the bases. Those are all pretty good reasons to not mention prostitution at all in your tour guides, and if that were your decision, I would respect it. Yet don't all those rationales also apply to homosexual prostitution? Doesn't that also potentially involve disease, economic imbalances, etc? Then why are there studiously nonjudgmental tips about Turkish bathhouse catamites furnished in Lonely Planet guides?

 

I say, Lonely Planet, that what's good for the goose is good for the philanderer. Either all paid sex is always wrong, in which case you shouldn't help wealthy Australian businessmen locate "delicious" young Turkish masseurs, or you recognize buying sex as a travel activity for everyone who might be interested in that sort of thing -- including straight men and desperate housewives. This is, of course, not to say that you have to endorse anything sleazy -- be your respectable bourgeois self, and highlight only those establishments that conduct their business in a (relatively) responsible fashion. And that feature some of the local color as well!

 

How about it, LP? Are you ready to update your sexual mores to a post-PC era? Or will it be 1993 forever, down under?