Lending Out Books

I was wandering through the COOP the other day with my friend Scott and picked up Garrison Keillor’s compilation of poems, “Good Poems”. In general I dislike the idea poetry collections, as poems are meant to be drank by the reader, and books of poetry carried around and treated like the precious pieces they are. Carrying around someone else’s favorite poems seems to be putting too much faith in that person, and giving too little to the organic process, that serendipity of creating a collection of poems that is personal. They’re always full of gems, though, and here’s one, for all those of us who give to love a bit too quickly:

Lending Out Books by Hal Sirowitz

You’re always giving, my therapist said.
You have to learn how to take. Whenever
you meet a woman, the first thing you do
is lend her your books. You think she’ll
have to see you again in order to return them.
But what happens is, she doesn’t have the time
to read them, & she’s afraid if she sees you again
you’ll expect her to talk about them, & will
want to lend her even more. So she
cancels the date. You end up losing
a lot of books. You should borrow hers.

Internet filtering and the “slope of the freedom curve”

When the OpenNet Initiative started writing “Access Denied” a little over a year ago, the writers were challenged to consider how the data on what governments are blocking their citizens from reading and posting on the Internet is impacting “the slope of the freedom curve”. At the book release party on Friday, Charlie Nesson brought up the question of whether we can look at government blocking behavior to color in the picture of 1) what governments proactively don’t want people to see and 2) what people are already doing that the government is trying/failing to stop.

In the field of History, there is a set of accepted historiographical methodology that looks at laws proscribed to past societies, in an attempt to understand what people are actually doing. The assumption is that if there’s a law against it, people are (or, if enforcement was good enough, were) doing it. Could looking at filtering behavior color in the recent picture, and connect it to past study?  How much of filtering is proactive, and blocking thing society doesn’t want anyway, like child porn, and how much is reactive?  And how do we, as researchers, tell the difference?