The Autobiography of a Conscientious Objector

One of the texts in the New Zealand Electronic Text Centre is "We Will Not Cease", Archibald Baxter's account of his experience as a conscientious objector during the First World War. Rereading the first few pages it's striking how calm and matter of fact the writing is.

The Prisoners' Dilemma

Nicola Lacey is professor of criminal law and legal theory at LSE. Here's the 2007 Hamlyn Lecture, which she gave last December. She discusses the connection between the social, political and economic systems, and the criminal justice policies, of certain late modern democracies.

The sooner the better

Something to do at Rhymetime (originally posted by tobenseymour),

Cuties

Last.fm looks good. The Comet Gain biography cleared up something I've wondered about. Phil Sutton was the drummer in the original lineup, but the sleeve notes to their first album "Casino Classics" credit "Hoffner Burns" with percussion. It turns out that they're the same person. There's also an Anorak group.

This post brought to you by Zoho Writer

There's an article in The Listener this week about New Zealand historian WH Oliver and narrative history. It mentions his role in creating the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, and that the five volumes of the Dictionary are now completely available online. I haven't used this before, either online or the paper copy. It looks like a really useful source of information.

Technorati Tags dictionary of new zealand biography

Book Reviews

The Listener, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and The New York Review of Books all have interesting book reviews. You can search them here. Some of the reviews in the last two are subscriber only, but once you know the issue you want you can use the Opac to find a paper copy. So it's also a way of searching those serials more specifically.

Kazuo Ishiguro

One of the tags on LibraryThing for Kazuo Ishiguro's "When We Were Orphans" is "memory", which is pretty good as a one word part description of what the book might be about. I borrowed it for my library. And there are some interesting comments in the reviews about the unreliability of the narrator, and why he seems convinced his parents are being held captive in the same house as they were 30 years before.

Casino Classics

There weren't actually tickets for this show, it was just pay on the door. The Betsey Trotwood is a short walk from the Farringdon tube. It still has top class indiepop.

Things I am reading now

The Maori Magna Carta.

City Sights

It's a bit surprising that the Geoffrey Fletcher article on Wikipedia is just a stub. He wrote and illustrated quite a few books on the unlooked for aspects of London, including shop fronts and squares and street vendors. The best known is probably "The London Nobody Knows", which influenced Saint Etienne's film "Finisterre".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Scowcroft_Fletcher

We have two of the books. Perhaps we could have an unknown London wiki feature, including this.

Local History

If someone asks you about the history of Beach Haven wharf, you might use the Opac, or Local History Online, or the Oral History Archive, or Index NZ as ways of looking for information. And that's also how I think of the aspects of Web 2.0/Library 2.0, as ways of looking for comment on an Elam show, or a photograph of Hyde Park, or what's on at the Irish Film Institute tonight, or whatever.

This much is certain

If you search Technorati for posts that contain the phrase George Fraser Gallery, there are three references to a show from May 2008 called "This much is certain". (You only find one of these if you search for tags with that phrase.) It's kind of a quiet show, not giving too much away. There are two metal structures where you can really wonder about the making involved, but where the results look effortless.

http://eyecontactartforum.blogspot.com/2008/05/cohesive-combination.html

http://sonya-lacey.blogspot.com/2008/06/this-much-is-certain.html

Killer of Sheep

One of the tags used on the Dublin City Public Libraries and Archive's delicious page is "film", and one of the bookmarks with that tag is the Irish Film Institute. This evening at 7.05 they're showing "Killer of Sheep", which I'd like to see. You can also search their bookmarks. I guess the value of that would depend on what's there, just as it would with any collection of information. At the moment they have 429 bookmarks.

(No subject)

I think I'm more likely to add the RSS feed of a website I like than I am to look for a website I'd like on the basis that it has a RSS feed. I may have failed to understand what Technorati does though. And it would be good to have some more practice at searching it. (And Topix etc.) It's advanced search is pretty detailed. You could probably just use it as a way to search blogs, apart from anything else.

Smoke

Matt Haynes used to run a record label called Sarah Records, which was home to the likes of Talulah Gosh and The Field Mice. Now he publishes a magazine about London called Smoke. He also has a blog,

http://dangervoidbehinddoor.wordpress.com/

I subscribed to it's RSS feed through Bloglines, although I'm not sure I'd use that to see what he's written rather than just looking on the blog. I might do when I get used to it. It probably would save time.

George Plemper

In the late 1970's George Plemper made a record of life in south-east London while working as a teacher at a school in Thamesmead. Here's The Guardian's gallery of some of his photographs,

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2008/may/14/communities?picture=334075059.

And here's the associated story, http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/may/14/communities.society.

Until now the photographs have been stored away, but the online gallery means you can see some of them even if you couldn't be at the Bexley Business Academy between the 28th and the 30th of May.

Indietracks

http://anorakforum.com/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=1732&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=180

A mashup from the Indietracks pop! festival, held last weekend in Butterley, Derbyshire. (It's about a third of the way down that page.)

Hyde Park

A photograph of Hyde Park, taken by Alan. Or maybe Kensington Gardens. From January/February 2007 I think. Uploading the photograph was alright but then it obscured the date and title of the post, and that took a while to fix. It still seems quite hard to put empty lines in a post. Maybe something to do with the settings?

Prospect Palace Practice Tapes

Favourite song of the moment, "there he goes" by The Gladeyes.

www.myspace.com/thegladeyes