When librarians turn to the dark side…

I thought all librarians were perfect saints, champions of goodness and openness, and then I read that the New York Public Library had banned Goodnight Moon for decades, because of the fact that an influential librarian, Anne Carroll Moore, didn’t like it. She apparently thought children’s books ought to have a “once upon a time” feel to them, and she was the Authority in charge of deciding what children should like.

Anne Carroll Moore was not a fan of Margaret Wise Brown’s work. Brown, with her Bank Street training, was “looking at the mind of a child, operating at the level that a child understands,” says Bird. “She was trying to get down on their level, whereas Anne Carroll Moore placed herself above the children’s level, handing what she viewed as the best of the best down to them.”

Yet Goodnight Moon is a book I read repeatedly to my kids, to the point where we wore it out and had to buy multiple copies. Just this week, I saw my granddaughter carry a copy to my wife and demand that she read it. She’s 15 months old. I can’t even imagine why a librarian would block stocking such a sweet, innocent story. Moore was apparently progressive in other ways, but I just don’t get it.

Then I read this little aside about Margaret Wise Brown.

So no one was pressuring the NYPL to stock the book, least of all Brown, who died in 1952. (Recovering from surgery for an ovarian cyst in a hospital in France, she playfully kicked her leg up, cancan-style, to show a nurse how well she was feeling; the action dislodged an embolism from a vein in her leg, which traveled to her brain, killing her nearly instantly.)

Huh. Should I go out of my way to tell my granddaughter that story? Should I wait until she’s old enough to no longer be quite so attached to Goodnight Moon before she learns about reality? Am I now policing the content she is allowed to see? I could probably turn her into a little Goth girl if I made it a point to tell her how the authors of all her favorite children’s books died.

I am home again, unfortunately

I left my darling granddaughter this morning to come home. Why? Because someone has to take care of the cat.

I walked in the door to discover that, while I was away, she had puked in the entryway. She puked in the kitchen. She puked in the hallway. She puked all over the comfy chair in the living room. She puked in the bathroom. She puked in my office. She puked in my slippers. As soon as I opened the door, she was so grateful that she darted outside, into the snowy, -15°C weather, and didn’t want to come in.

So I left her there.

She was scratching at the door 5 minutes later, and I relented. But I considered letting her have a night out in nasty weather!

Here she is, not looking at all guilty.

It’s OK. I’m renaming her Princess Pukes-A-Lot.

Now I have to spend my evening scrubbing everything.

You know, spiders are much less disgusting than cats. If only I could convince my wife…

Death to Facebook!

I’m giving notice: I’m abandoning Facebook in two weeks, on the 25th of January. I usually put a link to anything I write here (including this post!) on Facebook, but I won’t be doing that anymore. I’ve maintained my Facebook account mainly to keep in touch with family and friends, but even that has been poisoned with saturating levels of targeted ads and stupid paid ads. Facebook is the Fox News of social media, leeching off my interest in social contact to sell soap and provide a platform for bots and trolls to thrive.

Then I read about how Facebook lies to drain money out of the people that use its services.

“In order to beat YouTube, Facebook faked incredible viewership numbers, so [CollegeHumor] pivoted to FB,” former CollegeHumor writer Adam Conover presciently tweeted last October. “So did Funny or Die, many others. The result: A once-thriving online comedy industry was decimated.”

Facebook agreed to pay $40 million last year to settle a lawsuit after advertisers sued the social media giant for inflating video metrics by up to 900 percent. But many former CollegeHumor staffers blamed the pivot to Facebook, which couldn’t deliver on its advertising promises, for the previously successful company’s collapse. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.

“The slow (and then quick) death of CollegeHumor, Funny or Die, and your other favorite online comedy sites was not an accident,” Conover tweeted Wednesday. “It was the result of Facebook’s deliberate effort to kill the indie video industry, in part by massively falsifying viewer data.”

Or this, from 2018.

Comedian Luisa Omielan thinks so. “Facebook, to me, is becoming unusable as an artist or a creative,” she says. Three years ago, a video of Omielan’s standup went viral on the social platform, and has now racked up 41m views. “The algorithm wasn’t as intense as it is now,” she says. “When I first started standup, I created a page for comedy, and initially it was fine, I’d post about a gig and it would reach my audiences. Now, they [Facebook] limit any post of mine about anything comedy-related, so it might be seen by, like, 100 people when I’ve got over 200,000 people following my page.”

With a post’s reach being stifled, users are encouraged to “boost” their content, with Facebook charging the creator to show their post to more fans of their page. “That video that got 45m views? I don’t get any revenue from that,” says Omielan. “Yet Facebook gets revenue from me because I have to boost things to promote it within my own page.”

Nothing against Omielan personally, but Facebook is charging people to have their stuff shoved in my face? Not interested. The Holy Algorithm is just plain bad, too — I once looked up some microscopy gear that I couldn’t afford out of curiosity, and for months I was constantly dunned with ads for stuff there was no way I’d ever buy, that I was aware of after I’d already looked it up, and had dismissed long ago. Also, don’t look up PVC elbow joints or the Internet will decide you’re a plumber. None of that helps me at all, but it does allow Facebook to turn to microscopy companies or plumbing supply houses and promise oodles of eyeballs if only they’d pony up some cash. It’s a scam, and we’re all contributing to it. So I’m out.

The change is not because I’m a grumpy misanthrope who hates interacting with people online, but because Facebook is such a crappy medium for doing that. If you want to keep in touch, there are still plenty of ways to do that:

I’m @pzmyers on Mastodon.

I’m pzmyers on MeWe.

I’m pzmyers on Instagram.

I’m @pzmyers on Twitter.

I’m pzmyers#2563 on Discord.

(I sense a pattern here.)

We’re also beginning to set up a Discord server for Freethoughtblogs as a whole.

And of course, Freethoughtblogs is not going away.

Hello from Longmont, CO

Hey, I’m visiting my granddaughter for a few days — she gave me a shy smile last night, so we’re off to a great start — and we have a busy day ahead of us, entertaining and being entertained by the child, but I also noticed their garage is a promising place to look for spiders, and the temperature is so much warmer than Minnesota that I’ll have to explore outside, too.

I’ll probably post pictures later. You’ll have to take bets on whether they are of adorable giggling baby, or of spiders. Which would you prefer?

I’m a military father, where’s my free chardonnay?

Psst, wanna see some gross privilege? How about a military spouse who thinks restaurants should give her free wine for her service?

Once, at my grandmother’s house long long ago, I found an old piece of paper with a couple of blue stars on it. She told me that had been posted on her window in WWII, because she had one son in the Navy in the Pacific, and another serving in the army in Germany. She never asked for free wine.

I guess this military spouse 😀 should have given her some advice.

T.S. Eliot trembled in fear

Here’s a good opening to a story that makes me want to read more.

So my dear friend and podcast soulmate, Whiskey Jenny, recently made casual reference to “the TS Eliot batshittery,” and when we asked for more details, she sent a link that I will share with you shortly. First, some context: TS Eliot once had an… affair? with a woman named Emily Hale, over the course of which he exchanged many, many letters with her. He destroyed all her letters to him. She saved all his letters to her, and she donated them to Princeton with the stipulation that they should not be opened until 2020. I learned about this many years ago, and my imagination was captured by what it must be like to be a scholar of TS Eliot. Imagine knowing that over a thousand personal letters existed, written by the object of your study-slash-ardor, and that you could not have access to them until 2020. Wow.

Imagine being TS Eliot, learning in 1956 that a thousand of his old love letters were archived and scheduled to be released to scholars in 2020. Imagine…wait a minute. Isn’t it odd that he wrote a thousand letters to Emily Hale, and then abruptly turned around and married a different woman, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, about whom he later writes of their time together as “nightmare agony of my seventeen years”, and that the only thing worse would have been marrying Emily Hale? And then when Vivienne died, he turned around and married a third woman, Esmé Valerie Fletcher? Eliot was concerned that the passion expressed in those letters was, I suspect, stuff so embarrassing that Eliot wrote a preemptive letter explaining himself that had to be released at the same time as Hale’s letters. He sounds desperate to protect a legacy that he thought would be compromised by the contents, so he has to disparage the woman.

The letters seem to be about what you’d expect: passionate declarations of eternal love from a poet.

“You have made me perfectly happy: that is, happier than I have ever been in my life; the only kind of happiness now possible for the rest of my life is now with me; and though it is the kind of happiness which is identical with my deepest loss and sorrow, it is a kind of supernatural ecstasy.”

He continued: “I tried to pretend that my love for you was dead, though I could only do so by pretending myself that my heart was dead; at any rate, I resigned myself to celibate old age.”

Describing himself to be in a “kind of emotional fever”, by December he confessed that “the pain is more acute, but it is a pain which in the circumstances I would not be without”.

The only thing terrible in it all seems to be Eliot’s later letter, which is embarrassing in how pompous he is about shooting down the contents of the adoring letters he wrote to that ghastly-after-the-fact woman. He would have been better off adding nothing.

By the way, the volume of letters isn’t so surprising. There was a year before our marriage when my wife-to-be and I lived apart, in Seattle and Eugene respectively, and I wrote lots of letters, maybe once or twice a week. This was before email, you know, and when long distance phone calls cost a fortune, so yes, we actually wrote physical letters on paper and put a stamp on them and sent them off. Also, no word processing, no printers, they were all hand-written. That was only about 40 or so years ago, kids.

Alas, I hope you aren’t waiting to see them appear in the Princeton library in 2040, because she burned them all.