Coworkers today, knowing of my deep interest in football supporter culture, asked me what I thought of what happened in Egypt yesterday, where 70+ people were killed in violence in Port Said after a match in which al-Masri defeated visitors al-Ahly 3–1. I meekly responded that the football pitch is often a proxy for the society around it, since nothing I had read so far about the violence sounded right. Violence on that scale at a football match—I’m thinking of Heysel and Hillsborough—features vital extenuating circumstances that move the catastrophe beyond a question of “hooliganism” or something similar that is as easy to excuse as it is to pathologize (and, in fact, the former relies on the latter).
I’m not even a semi-pro on Egypt or Egyptian football. But I do remember reading about how ultras groups had participated in the street protests (and been crucial to the organization of said) against the Mubarak regime. This makes perfect sense. Ultras can boast of two main characteristics that help in these endeavors, despite their often apolitical official positions: top-notch organization and deep knowledge of police tactics. It’s not surprising that the Cairo ultras groups—those supporting al-Ahly and those supporting their bitter rivals Zamalek—have long-standing beef with the Egyptian police, and that as recently as last week the al-Ahly ultras were using the space of the stadium to air their grievances against the post-revolutionary Egyptian state, which remains a far cry from the democratic fantasies of Tahrir only a year removed.
Perfectionatic gives details on the problems with the account of yesterday’s violence as an act of hooliganism. This blog post has already featured on Soccer Politics and deserves a wide audience.
So as a non-expert, what more can I add? As anyone who has talked to me at length about my ideas regarding supporter culture (or has read what I have written about it) may recall, the willing participation in the collective mass object of the ultras group of a (democracy?) of (liberal) political atoms—individual agents—suggests a means of thinking political action differently in our current moment. Ultras are often criticized with vocabulary identical to that used to criticize other, more obviously political contemporary actors, like Anonymous and #Occupy: “inarticulate,” “inconsistent,” “uncertain.” But these collective objects are also, to some extent, effective.
The Zamalek and al-Ahly ultras may not have caused or led the protests in Tahrir, but their role was important, as was their continued support of their democracy-minded neighbors, as one can see in this video of Zamalek’s Ultras White Knights:
Look at the signage. Even with no Arabic, one can notice the old Libyan flags, at least one Tunisian flag, V’s logo from V for Vendetta. “We rule Egypt,” “No way back,” “25 January,” and so on.
An object (the ultras) is made up of (and yet independent of) constitutive objects (the supporters) held together at the moment by the internal relations of the larger object, which include the larger object’s history as an object, and its intelligence regarding other objects (the state, Cairo, the abilities of its member objects). That fact is undeniable, and it’s a source of political hope. The ultras object’s organization and its knowledge of police tactics make it a powerful opponent against the arm of governmental violence.1
Ultras definitionally don’t have politics with which I agree—to presuppose that all ultras objects have monolithic (or consistent, or articulate, etc.!) political leanings would be foolish, as the ontology on which their existence depends does not have a preexisting politics. But ultras groups (and Anonymous, and #Occupy) show that it is conceivable for objects as political actors that are more than the (silenced, discouraged) “voters” that we have come to associate with contemporary (neoliberal) democracy.
As I finish this up, it seems that ultras (and their supporters) are marching (and being injured by Egyptian police) in Cairo. This story, and its consequences, are not yet finished.
- I appreciate the irony here that Graham Harman, on whose philosophy much of this depends, teaches in Cairo. In his initial comments on his blog about the violence, he writes “Please do not be lured into thinking that this was just a hooliganism incident gone terribly awry. 79 are dead, virtually all of them from among the al-Ahly fans, who as a group happen to be ardent revolutionaries. In my email conversations with people back in Cairo, I haven’t heard from one person who thinks this was anything but organized.” [↩]
Tags: al-Ahly, Egypt, football, object-oriented ontology, soccer, ultras, Zamalek
It’s tough to read through the sneering contempt shown by the journalist, but lrytas.lt is reporting that Algirdas Paleckis was found innocent of denying Soviet atrocities. The court found that Paleckis’s comments were an opinion, and therefore protected. Then the journalist, in a non sequitur, reminds us of who Paleckis’s grandfather was. I’ve already covered the details of the case and my reaction to it, so I won’t repeat that here.
I will, however, remind readers that it doesn’t matter what you think of Paleckis as a person or of his ideas. He was tried under a terrible law and deserved our support.
Tags: Algirdas Paleckis, Communists, January Events, lrytas.lt, nationalism, Sausio įvykiai, Socialistinis liaudies frontas
— Le vieux Paris n’est plus (la forme d’une ville
Change plus vite, hélas! que le cœur d’un mortel
Escúchela, la ciudad respirando
These men love Paris too much to raze it.
In honor of an article I had run in The Classical, “Paris is Earning,” I watched Paris brûle-t-il ? earlier this week. The 1966 movie, with a screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and Gore Vidal, is a bizarre piece of work.1 Though it’s rather obviously (and unashamedly) a piece of pro-French propaganda—no cheese-eating surrender monkeys, these!—the central role played by the city itself was rather startling, though obviously signalled by both the title and the plot:
The Germans are under orders to burn Paris to the ground. Can the French stop them in time?
Opening at the Wolfsschantze, Paris is first mentioned by Hitler, who brings General von Choltitz before him to tell him that he’s now in charge of Paris and that Paris cannot—will not—be liberated by the Allies. Should it come to that, von Choltitz is under orders to burn Paris to the ground. Von Choltitz agrees, and we cut immediately to the title sequence beginning with a shot of the Arc de triomphe.
When von Choltitz later refers back to his interaction when discussing the dire situation in Paris with the bonvivant Swedish consul Raoul Nordling (played by Orson Welles), he points out that he could tell that Hitler had gone mad judging from the fact that Hitler insisted that the city be razed, even if it did not help the war effort. No matter what, the city is to be destroyed.
Yet, on the other hand, there’s a similar mania on the part of von Choltitz and Nordling. Von Choltitz stalls as long as he can before ordering explosives put in every bridge and in several landmarks around the city.2 Nordling talks to him earlier in the movie and explains that if von Choltitz calls in an airstrike against the Préfecture de Police that the French have occupied on Île de la Cité, and if one of the bombs misses its target, which it will, Notre Dame will be destroyed. Von Choltitz is almost at the point of tears, frustratedly shouting that he must obey the orders he was given by the Führer.
Once the general agrees to the cease-fire, Nordling lights him a cigarette. “History will be grateful to you,” he says, blowing out the match, “for having saved a… very beautiful city.”
What these three men are doing, and what the movie does throughout, is treat Paris as some kind of ontological entity that can be conceived of as a single thing with which one has a relationship of some sort. Paris isn’t buildings, it’s not people, it’s not the 48 (or whatever) bridges that von Choltitz has set to blow up. That is, it is obviously all those things, but it is also some network of unknown internal relations between these constituitive objects that then turns it into its own object. And the men are absolutely not self-conscious or metaphorical about how they interact with this object called Paris.
“He’s already got a date, but I don’t!”
The above epigraphs come from a more poetic tradition, perhaps, than dialogue in movies. But the point here is that these men in the movie are not speaking metaphorically. To them Paris exists as a thing to save, to defend, or to raze. Welles plays Nordling as a sort of man just on the verge (maybe I’m being kind) of a gluttonous piglet suckling at the Parisian teat. He’s either talking about food (when he is petitioned to help a woman free her political prisoner husband from jail, he does so largely since he remembers fondly the trout mousse he ate with them once) or he’s eating, like when he greedily eyes the various tortes on von Choltitz’s table and starts helping himself to them, while hearing von Choltitz’s confession of insubordination in the name of saving Paris. But the way it plays out is that he lives and dies for what Paris has offered him and his waistband during his posting. The man loves Paris.
Even more notable is Sergeant Warren’s reaction. Played by Anthony Perkins, the young American is completely stunned that he will have a chance to see Paris. He asks his companion about the geography of the city, eager to make sure he knows on which side of the Seine the Eiffel Tower is.
Though he foreshadows his own death by coining the aphorism “See Paris and die,” while he rolls into the city, a woman hops into his lap and says she has been waiting four years for him to come to her. He replies that the US has only been in the war for three. They kiss, but he’s suddenly distracted. His buddy pulls the woman away, guessing why Warren’s face is frozen. He sees the Eiffel Tower.
The four years the woman has been waiting cannot compare with his earlier “I never thought in a thousand years that I’d get to see Paris!”
This is not anthropomorphizing. Paris is not a substitute for the woman in a simplistic, humanist way, in which his relationship is somehow pathological and wrong. Sergeant Warren is simply moving through and object-oriented ontology, and it’s the object of Paris that affects him most profoundly. And when the camera cuts to give us Warren’s view, we are also invited to be affected by Paris via the synecdoche of the Eiffel Tower. And it works. The movie caused an affect in me for the object of Paris that I did not expect.
Paris, possibly more than most cities, lends itself to an easy and clean objectification like this, to being considered as an ontological entity capable of competing with, say, a woman for a man’s attention, or of being so despicable to deserve destruction at any cost. If “Paris movie” isn’t a genre, it certainly could be.3 And it’s a genre that reproduces itself in the fantasies of nearly every American (and probably far beyond Americans…) who comes here as a tourist.
But for the tourist, Paris is a set of practices, either experienced or performed, along with some kind of local interaction with constitutive objects within Paris. What I mean is that Paris becomes “going to the Louvre” or “having a coffee at a bistro” or “complaining about the smell” or “buying a croissant at CDG as a souvenir.” In Paris brûle-t-il ? it’s precisely the point that it’s not a set of practices or constitutive objects that require saving, love, destruction, or protection. Nowhere is the call for Paris to be saved made in terms of “protecting the Parisian way of life.”
It’s just Paris. No more, no less.
- The DVD I had gave me the choice of audio in French or English. But it looks like the movie was filmed with original audio both in English and in French (and in German). So if I have English audio, I can hear Kirk Douglas and Orson Welles with their normal voices, but the French have dubbed voices. Or the opposite happens. Gert Fröbe, who plays one of the most central characters in the movie, is certainly dubbed by someone else into French. It sounds like it’s his voice in the English version (Fröbe is better known to American audiences as Auric Goldfinger), but even that seems dubbed. Considering the opening scene is all in German in the French version, and in English except for the scene with Hitler in the English version, which is, for some reason, kept in German, things are confusing. Weird, but, well, whatever. The Sixties. [↩]
- The movie in general, but this scene in particular, makes for some fun rounds of “spot the landmark!” “There’s the Hémicycle!” Etc. When I saw the lion at Denfert-Rochereau, I was confused, until I figured the Catacombs would soon make an appearance. And they did. [↩]
- I lied earlier. Part of why I watched this movie was also since had plans broken to see Charade, which is my favorite Paris movie (so far), at the Le Desperado theater on Tuesday night. This was a consolation of sorts. [↩]
Tags: affect, Anthony Perkins, France, Nazis, object-oriented ontology, Orson Welles, Paris, realism
Twitter blew up over the new year because, apparently, among other texts, Ulysses finally made it into the public domain in the EU. And there’s a copy of it on Project Gutenberg. Despite what I saw that some were saying, I have been using that electronic version of the novel for a while now to power my absolutely useless “25 random lines from Ulysses” page that I describe here.
What really matters, though, is that I couldn’t sleep last night from too much Diet Coke, and I was too out of it to do regular, real work. So I dreamt up this idea of having a Molly Bloom twitter bot randomly tweeting lines from the final episode of the novel. The pieces fit together in my head while staring at the ceiling in bed, and I spent much of today writing it.
So now I can unveil @MollyBloombot. If you @ the bot (I cannot quite call it “her,” because I created it, and my vestigial essentialism is uncomfortable about the trope of males creating female avatars online and in modernist novels) and say “random,” you will get a random stream of text. If you say “word” followed by some kind of word, the bot will tweet you back a line featuring that word. If the word is not in the text, the bot will try to guess a similar word based on the Metaphone algorithm. If it fails, the bot will get dreamily flustered. The same happens if you just @ it all kinds of jibberish.
If you @ it “info,” it will tell you about this post. If you @ it “help,” it will tell you what I just wrote.
If you follow the bot, it will (eventually) follow you back. Following it might be fun, since it .@s its string responses, meaning you can see what kinds of things people are asking it to tweet about as well as seeing what kinds of random tweets get generated.
If you ask it about a word that it finds, it’ll send a second tweet, not .@’ed, just to you describing a little about the instance of the word you chose.
Finally, it’s a bit poky, but, really, what else could you expect?
The bot is written in ruby and interacts with Twitter via chatterbot. The Metaphone algorithm comes from the text gem.
Tags: humanities computing, James Joyce, Molly Bloom, ruby, twitter, ulysses
[I expanded and updated this on 21 December 2011, to organize the argument better and provide more background.]
News has broken over the past week about the uncertain fate of Algirdas Paleckis, the head of the Socialist People’s Front, a party in Lithuania. Speaking on the radio in November of last year, he talked about what are known as the “January Events,” which include the shooting of protestors by the TV Tower in Vilnius. Paleckis asked about who was actually at the tower and then said, “saviškiai šaudė į savus”—“our own were shooting at our own” or “like was shooting at like.”
For this comment, he has been charged under 170-2 of the Lithuanian Penal Code—a clause enacted in 2010 which makes it a crime to “publicly endorse,” “deny,” or “coarsely belittle” both Soviet and Nazi German crimes as well as the the aggressions of 1990–1991.
Last week, however, the government put off their decision on the matter, allegedly because of documents that were not translated from Russian in time. These documents, pertaining to the January Events, may vindicate what Paleckis said. His party, however, suggests that the government is eager to bury their decision—due 30 December—under news regarding the holidays, especially now that it has gotten a bit of international play.
Even if you use the same words to describe Paleckis as you did his grandfather—”Moscow’s ass-licker,” Russian agent, buffoon whose vanity is flattered by the KGB to provoke the Lithuanian state—his fate is a troubling one for three reasons.
1. The law sucks
I’m still enough into the Enlightenment to be in favor of free speech laws, but even past that, the law Paleckis is accused of breaking is a complete disaster of jurisprudence. First, it codifies explicitly the legal equivalence of Soviet and Nazi German crimes. I’ve written enough about that in the past. Second, the language describing the events of 1990–1991 is completely mealymouthed. I’m scared to even attempt a translation.
Finally, this fancy law obfuscates the existence of the Holocaust. It only alludes to it first as a “genocide” that has been recognized as such by the EU and then again as a “genocide” against “inhabitants of the Lithuanian Republic.” This isn’t euphemism; this is an offensive game of playing equivalences, the far right fantasy of “Dual Genocide”: the Holocaust, the argument is read by me, doesn’t need to be mentioned since it wasn’t the only genocide in Lithuania. The Lithuanians also suffered!
If you aren’t convinced by my arguments, Dovid Katz makes a more liberal (even invoking Voltaire) case for defending Paleckis’s right to free speech, regardless of its contents. Katz also links to Leonidas Donskis, who writes about “concept inflation” in terms of “genocide” and Lithuania’s eagerness to “criminalise discussion,” which is wholly anti-democratic. Donskis even calls out Western European democracies who have similar speech laws regarding denying the Holocaust, so this isn’t a case of simply piling on poor, little Lithuania.
Simply put, if you believe in free speech, you believe that Paleckis should have his charges dropped—not potentially spend a year in prison (after having his sentence suspended for two years, effectively silencing him).
2. Paleckis did not “deny” the shootings
This is more of a delicate matter, and for it, I rely on the phrase that has rung out and is repeated in the press: “like was shooting at like.”1 This statement is empirically correct even if we accept the official version of the events. For example, the case could be made that everyone present was still a Soviet citizen—this is surely the position Moscow took, in warning Lithuanians of the “bourgeois dictatorship” that would follow independence.2 Soviet citizens (soldiers of the Red Army / KGB forces) fired upon Soviet citizens of the Lithuanian SSR.
Even more foolishly: human beings shot at human beings.
This isn’t lawerly slipperiness. This is a point about ontology. The only way “like was shooting at like” can be considered a “denial” is if we consider that the difference between the shooters and the victims is so stark that they are different ontological entities, sharing nearly no commonality between them. Opfer vs. Täter, in the most childish manichean game of cops and robbers (or partisans and communists, as we used to play as kids) imaginable.
Paleckis had language specialists come in to prove that he was merely expressing his opinion, and not denying anything. In my opinion, it does not even come down to that. The parts quoted in the press are philosophically not a denial, and it would require the mentality of a playground bully to see it otherwise.3
3. Can there be a non-nationalist history of Lithuania?
What Paleckis is after, per his provocation, is a reckoning and inquiry into the January Events. It is absolutely the case that at the time, Moscow denied opening fire on the protestors. It is also absolutely the case that eyewitness reports and testimony gathered at the time—which is, I imagine, what these documents requiring translation are—conflict with the state’s version of events. As Balsas printed, in discussing the Paleckis case, some Sąjūdis members felt that bloodshed was needed to unify the movement. Others present at the tower or watching from nearby testified at having seen gun flashes from rooftops, where there were no Soviet soldiers. And apparently the ballistics findings of the bodies suggest that it was not (entirely) Soviets shooting, as they include weapons from the start of the 20th Century.
So it’s unclear. Even as the 20th anniversary of the events creeps up, the state has shown a lack of interest in pursuing these uncertainties. Paleckis’s father, an MEP, in scolding his son for saying what he did, says that discussion of the events should be left to witnesses to discuss “openly, in detail, and objectively, and not the new generation, supported by the tales of others.” That’s exactly the kind of discussion that the current law has made impossible. Who will stand up and say “I saw Lithuanians open fire,” if they know they could be hauled off to jail just for saying it? Paleckis’s brother, a journalist, brags about his own closeness to the action, as he was “already working as a journalist.” The “insanities” Paleckis is repeating, he continues, already bubbled up during the bloody night itself, told by “overthrowers” like Soviet soldiers. In other words, even by his own admission, the events on the ground were immediately uncertain, but, in his opinion, no inquiry is required because those providing uncertainty are, conveniently, all unreliable.
And this is the problem here. Revising the state history requires taking seriously people the state has already deemed unfit to bear witness, holders of unreliable testimony. The fact that the state (and especially the long shadow of Sąjūdis which is cast over the entire political apparatus) benefits from the state’s version of events is never—and now can never—be questioned.
I have no idea what happened that night 20 years ago. I was at home, probably doing homework or whatever it is that studious freshmen in high school do on Saturday evenings. Shortly after the events—maybe even the next day—I recall participating in a protest, probably at the USSR consulate in New York City, where each of the 14 people who was killed that night was memorialized. The sign youthful, nationalist me carried, ironically, read “Литовская Свиня,” as a sort of resistance and recuperation of the belittling of Lithuanians at the hands of the Soviet state.
And yet now, the Lithuanian government is acting like the swine from the sign I carried, greedily gobbling up all claims on historical legitimacy and silencing dissent.
Lithuania is afraid of looking back at its history. That’s shameful, but expected. No state likes to roll out its darkest moments and parade them about. But Lithuania does a state like the US one better; it criminalizes the efforts of others to see what hides in those darkest moments.
- Though the law does not cover simply denials, in the media he is accused of “denial,” so I’ll focus on that. [↩]
- Moscow’s prescience is for a different post. [↩]
- It may, of course, be the case that he said more on the radio, and I’ll get to that, but so perhaps newspapers were disinclined to reprint it, fearing their own scalps. See how stupid this is? [↩]
Tags: Algirdas Paleckis, Balsas, Communists, Dovid Katz, Holocaust, January Events, Leonidas Donskis, nationalism, Nazis, Sausio įvykiai, Socialistinis liaudies frontas
Branson ain’t gonna fight no war for you.
Given that class rules everything around me, I knew that Downton Abbey would be like a drug, and I watched the first series last spring in one sitting. While upstairs/downstairs plots always fascinate me for obvious reasons, Downton Abbey had the added appeal of presenting us a family in decline as aristocratic privilege gives way to a new, uncertain (but we know: capitalist) form of privilege.
[In what follows, the assumption is that the reader has seen the first series. Though I spoil a bit of the second series (there is a war; it affects the house), it’s only to make general points completely predictable from the first series.]
Of the more exciting ways in which the show demonstrates the slipping grip of the aristocracy is in the cross-class/cross-nation relationship (or lack thereof, because of its cross-class component) between Lady Sybil and Tom Branson, the Irish chauffeur who proudly proclaims in the first series that not only is he a socialist, but he has plans that go beyond driving around the young ladies of the house. He reads from the Granthams’ library and is a good match for the increasingly restless Sybil, who fancies herself a political activist in the closing episodes of the first series.
Given Branson’s character, then, it’s obvious that he would be very, very much against the war that has been the focus of the first three episodes of the second series (currently airing in the UK). He wryly remarks early on to someone that he is already in uniform, conflating national service with the industry of Service—the industry within which half of the cast works—and he does not share his coworkers’ eagerness to enlist or sad regret over the inability to serve.
Being against the Great War, it is important to remember, was a valid and not uncommon position, especially on the political left of the time. The objections, though, were not about war as such; it wasn’t just pacifists against it. The war was considered a capitalist war, a war fought to enrich J. P. Morgan, a war that cynically appealed to the workers’ nationalist feeling in order to make them go to war against their fellow workers. The Second International, of course, collapsed because of the inability to keep the socialists united around the revolutionary goals of overthrowing capitalism. As the socialists at the Zimmerwald conference in 1915 proclaimed:
Irrespective of the truth as to the direct responsibility for the outbreak of the war, one thing is certain. The war which has produced this chaos is the outcome of imperialism, of the attempt on the part of the capitalist classes of each nation, to foster their greed for profit by the exploitation of human labor and of the natural treasures of the entire globe.
So the question of Branson’s position regarding the war is paved for him by this tradition of proletarian objection to the belligerence and exploitation by the capitalist imperialists.
But what do we get in Downton Abbey? The third episode, which covers July 1917, makes Branson out as some kind of naif. Excited about the July Days in Russia, Branson is apprehensive about Kerensky and calls for Lenin to assert more power. He demands a people’s revolution. But his coworkers are, naturally, worried for the Romanovs, who are imprisoned in the Alexander Palace. Anna suggests they will all be shot, to serve as an example. Branson then ironically responds, “Give them some credit. This is a new dawn, a new age of government. No one wants to start it with the murder of a bunch of young girls.”1
Later in the episode, during a conversation about the war with Branson, Sybil, trying to understand his feelings, exclaims, “Why do you have to be angry all the time? I know we were not at our best in Ireland—” Branson takes the bait and admonishes her for considering his cousin’s being shot in the street by an English officer for possibly looking like a rebel as being “not at our best.” Now, suddenly, Branson’s protest of the war is no longer about keeping the working classes united against a capitalist imperialist war, but, rather, as an opportunity to settle scores from the Easter Rising.2
The considerate and optimistic socialist, over the course of not even ten minutes of screen time, becomes, first, a naive idealist in the face of the audience’s implicit anti-communism, and, second, a confused nationalist, no different from his English coworkers who eagerly enlist to support their own homeland. He is against the war because it is the English fighting it, not because it is a war fought by exploited workers for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. The distinction is subtle, but important, and Downton Abbey blew it. Considering the end of the episode, it will be interesting to see how Branson gets rehabilitated into a position of sufficient servility to continue on at the house.
I hardly expect a fun costume drama that revolves around an inheritance plot to get leftist politics even close to right. The nature of an inheritance plot, in which uncovered birthright or marriage solve the conflict, means that there will be satellite love plots and family intrigues throughout, so it is no surprise that we get them in abundance. Branson, then, is brought in more as a love interest for Sybil. She admires his verve and his political commitment, though she’s, at the absolute best, a liberal. It would be interesting (although cliché) to see her become a revolutionary, but if the story is willing to sell Branson short, to present him as a confused dreamer, then I doubt they will bother to make Sybil a sympathetic (or credible) revolutionary.
Still, again, it is an opportunity missed. Most of my knowledge of the anti-war sentiment comes out of my own wheelhouse: contemporary US fiction as well as historical fiction from the 1930s that discusses the war. Dos Passos’s U.S.A. only gives glancing shots at the war in 1919: the cynicism and resentment bubbles up in the profiles, but not in the narrative, which is primarily made up of men and women in service. On the other hand, we do get the narrative of Ben Compton, who is arrested for his anti-war activities. So perhaps I’m expecting too much from show: maybe the anti-war element that existed in the US (and France and Germany) was not as apparent in England, making Branson out to be an outlier.
- The youngest grand duchess to be executed, Anastasia, was 17. I’m not sure that counts as “young girl.” [↩]
- The Rising was, coincidentally, a plot point in this Sunday’s Boardwalk Empire, as well. [↩]
Tags: capitalism, class, Downton Abbey, inheritance, John Dos Passos, Lenin, marriage, Russian Revolution, Second International
Great news: Vélib’, the Parisian bicycle-sharing system I have previously described in detail and mapped, had a huge revamp of its website last spring. This coincided with a handful of new features that are of crucial importance to (especially) Anglopone/American tourists.
First, the new website is entirely available in English. The old version seemed to have an English veneer that quickly gave way to French pages as one dug deeper into the site.
Second, and far more importantly, it is now possible to buy Vélib’ passes online using US credit cards. The credit card swipe thing at the actual kiosks still requires a card with a chip in it (so a Canadian or European-style credit card), but you can e-commerce your way to a one-day, one-week, or yearly pass with your old style American MasterCard or Visa. This finally makes Vélib’ wholly accessible to the American community. Of course, this now means that I no longer have to send a check and RIB in to renew my yearly account, too. Welcome to the glorious Twenty-First Century!
Third, the price structure for the annual plan has changed. As the site notes, there are now four schedules for annual plans. What used to cost 29€ and be the only available option is now called “Vélib’ Classic,” but there is a “Passion” upgrade for 10€ more. Paris is more or less entirely crossable in 45 minutes (north-south), making the Passion upgrade rather tantalizing for big commuters. There are also two options, at lower price points, for students.
Fourth, Vélib’ has raised the prices of the 1-day and 7-day tickets. What used to cost 1€ and 5€ now cost, respectively, 1.70€ and 8€. These prices are still, of course, ludicrously cheap, and now there is no reason not to unleash a massive wave of tourists on these bicycles.
——
This all said, I have started to feel the pinch of Vélib’ and have learned to appreciate what a fragile ecosystem it actually is. The station nearest me, which held about 50 bikes, was closed in the spring, so that work could be done on the street. It has still not reopened. At first, I was able to reliably get a bike at a station just a bit farther away, but then that station became empty in the morning. This emptiness has spread from station to station such that now, the nearest station to me that has bicycles in the morning is over 600m away.
Since the tram, on the other hand, is a mere 50m away, one can imagine how a certain laziness has set in, where I give up and pay the 1.20€ (or whatever it is) to ride the tram to work. I understand that 600m is not a terrible distance to walk, but it does add time to the commute, and it further shows that, for some reason, my neck of Paris, which used to be reliably served by bicycles, is now a bit of a wasteland. I don’t know how it is elsewhere at 9am, but I know that it was not like this before, so, basically, cry cry, I want my old station back.
They would have you believe this is why the EU’s in shambles. You’re better off reading this article.
Tags: ethnicity, EU, nationalism
One of my summer plans involves rebuilding this page as well as merging it with something resembling more of an “official” online presence. “Donkey Hottie” was originally nominally anonymous—posts were (and are still) signed “m,” but I didn’t deny being that “m”—but it’s increasingly important, I suspect, to take what is good from this decade-long project and add it to something that I can, say, put on a small piece of cardstock that I give like-minded (or simply interested) parties when I see them at various professional functions in my field.
So I’ve got the domain name, I’ve set up the email system, and now I’ve got to put it all together when I’m not tearing out my hair dissertating in the hot European summer haze. Maybe doing so will also encourage me to update here more often, even. It’s not impossible.
In the meantime, there’s this:
Tags: housekeeping
A quick note, which did not really fit inside a single tweet, though I tried. I’m writing my chapter on For Whom the Bell Tolls, and I wanted to know a bit more about John Mosby than I already did, so figured I would ask Google Scholar if anything recent has been written about him.1 Turns out there is an article from 1994 by Maj. William E. Boyle, Jr. about Mosby’s (retaliatory) execution of a handful of captured Union prisoners during the Civil War. Boyle’s question is whether that act, or the act to which it was a response, could be considered a war crime at the time. Now, they would certainly be considered war crimes, unless <insert comment about US policy>.
Google Scholar search. (click to enlarge)
Now if I search for the article on Google Scholar, using the search term “‘Under the Black Flag’ Mosby,” the top hit is to the article in question, appearing in Military Law Review in 1994. And if you click on the link, it takes you to HeinOnline, a web journal gatekeeper with which I was previously unfamiliar. It asked $30 for the privilege of browsing the site for the day.
So I did what I normally do in this case: try again, this time through my university’s proxy. Nothing changed, and the article remained elusive. But when I tried my Plan B, which is looking up the journal through the university’s library catalogue to see where they consider the electronic archive of the journal to be, I was forwarded to the Library of Congress, which offered not only the issue in question but an entire back catalog of Military Law Review for free, for everyone. No proxies, no nothing.
What gives? Google Scholar only links to the pay version of an article that is free from the US government?
Ah, but then look: there’s that link to “all 4 versions” of the article in the Google Scholar database. These versions include the HeinOnline one already mentioned, a citation of some sort, and two links that take you to LexisNexis, another for-pay gatekeeper. There is no link on Google Scholar for the free version of the article.2 At least not that I can see. And if you search just on “military law review,” the first free pdf–offered by the military, not the LoC–comes only on the third page of hits. You have to click to the fifth page before the loc.gov pdfs start showing up in the Google Scholar search results.
I know publishers are pleading poverty left and right, but something about this situation stinks and stinks badly. If there’s a gateway to the free version of this article via HeinOnline, I was certainly unable to find it. The same is true via LexisNexis.
So fair warning: always, always, always exercise a little legwork before considering parting with $30 for an article whose value is uncertain from reading just the first page. And Google Scholar is certainly not providing the most useful results.
(I guess part of the issue here could be that the Military Law Review at the LoC does not seem to be indexed by articles, just by issues. Perhaps that is why the Google robots do not find them. Still, boo to paying for free things!)
- Despite the fact that I’m pretty sure I don’t like For Whom the Bell Tolls or consider it particularly good, I could probably write a book about how crazy it is in important and interesting ways without repeating any of the work in Blowing the Bridge. [↩]
- A regular Google search yields the free version at the bottom of the first page of hits, after the links to HeinOnline and LexisNexis. [↩]
Tags: articles, free stuff, google
