Since I’ve now entered some 200 of my books into LibraryThing, I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at copyright pages. It’s interesting how the effort to catalog books, or to provide concrete, categorized information about them, has evolved over time. From my recent wealth of experience, the ISBN was created to help solve this issue around 1965 (turns out it was 1966).

Since then, CIP (the Library of Congress’s Cataloging-in-Publication program) data has been added as a way to quickly summarize a book’s metadata. But Oxford University Press has apparently recently decided to stop providing CIP data on their copyright pages, and even fails to include the book’s ISBN, leaving the cataloger hunting on the back cover, where more often than not there are a few layers of dirtily peeling university bookstore price tags which prove irkingly difficult to remove. Why has OUP stopped providing CIP data? Is it because it looks so unintelligibly commercial? It seems awfully unkind to their books’ cataloguers, of whom, let’s face it, there will be tons since most of their books will end up in libraries.

Then there’s a book I have by Rudyard Kipling. It’s old, but nowhere in the book does there appear a single date. The only information on the copyright page is “Printed in the United States of America.” This publisher, presumably from about a century ago, apparently did not care about including publication information. But the impulse to include metadata on or near the title page wasn’t anything new in the twentieth century; I’m thinking primarily of the lavish self-description of John Bunyan’s publisher, Nathaniel Ponder, who took all pains to put dates and his address etc., etc. in the first editions of “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Why would Kipling’s American publisher leave all the info out? Is it a pirated edition? Does that matter?

Back to ISBNs, I’ve also managed to memorize the ISBN prefixes for several major publishers. It’s a neat trick. “Oh, you read 0-14-043916-1 today? How do you like Penguin’s new style for their Classics series?” I’m definitely going to bust that shit out at holiday parties. Good times.

I’m wrapping the presents for my small cousins in wrapping paper covered in big, happy snowmen. On two of these presents so far, the end of the paper that follows the gift lengthwise has coincided with the level between the head-snowball and the middle-snowball. Hence a lot of headless snowmen parading around my small cousins’ presents. Do you think this will be traumatizing to them? (Provided that they don’t rip all of the paper off before they even notice that it is covered in big, happy snowmen.)

Thank goodness that it’s no secret that I’m a huge dork, or else this post might disillusion some people.

Thanks to Liz, I have discovered and therefore completely devoted my morning (and probably most of break) to LibraryThing. Check out my catalog so far under my username, agwieckowski. I’ve only done the books in the living room so far, which is mostly the nonfiction that I’ve selected to bring here from my parents’ house. There’s more nonfiction there in PA, and also in my bedroom…and then there’s fiction.

Oh, thesis. I was so psyched to write you! And then I got to do something that involved both organization and books, two of my favoritest things ever. Poor thesis.

Jessica’s post reminded me of the Moan and Dove in Amherst, where they actually have delightfully appropriate Delirium Tremens glasses. The lighting is poor but you get the idea.

Do you ever see people and realize that they’re having your life, but an alternate version? This happens to me most frequently when it’s someone I envy–I just find myself thinking, “Wait, that should be me!”–indignantly. They usually share some attribute with me (more often than not it’s both hair color and vivacity), and then they have also got things that I have not got, that I then fixate on. One girl I know is cheerful, smiley, has a head full of brown ringlets, loves Victorian novels, and now she’s engaged to a boy she fell in love with in a classroom as they argued over books. Wait, that should be me! Once upon a time, it was Amanda, the ballerina fairy who found the right things exciting and happy, and got Tristan in the deal. Wait, that should be me! It’s not that I’m unhappy with my life. It’s just that sometimes I get these flashes of alternative lives, some better, some worse.

Amanda and I, luckily, became good friends. Maybe it had to do with the discovery of realism, or the reality of, the alternate life. But more likely than not, I’ve found, these spiritual doppelgangers and I don’t actually get along, despite my best efforts.

Sometimes, when I imagine my subjective universe (that is, God has built the world as my personal boot camp)(and he’s built your world as your personal boot camp–don’t worry, I’m not that self-centered), I wonder what I’m supposed to learn from seeing these people and knowing them to be my alter egos. Perhaps I’m supposed to see that their lives may not be that great after all, and that I’m lucky to have what I do. Maybe I’m just supposed to learn to keep my envy under control and learn humility. Or maybe I’m supposed to just be aware that I’m being tested. Or maybe that it really, despite everything my mind tells me, is not all about me.

I’m really interested in this conference in Iran questioning whether the Jewish Holocaust really happened.

In theory, when I first heard about it (from some indignant person or other), I actually liked it because (ow, stop throwing stuff at me!), as a liberal, I believe questioning the basis of what I have been taught to believe. Furthermore if they were to find that the Nazis did, in fact, do these horrible things, it would only make our outrage even more firmly grounded, and would silence all of the naysayers.

But perhaps everyone’s outrage stems from the fact that they are less idealistic than I, and they realize that it never really works that way.

The problem is that this conference, which is priding itself on being removed from the knee-jerk reactions of the West, is no more removed from bias. The speakers are made up entirely of supremacists and others who deny, a priori, the slaughter of the Jews during the Holocaust, primarily because they see its major outcome as the creation of Israel. It’s infinitely unlikely that they’ll come up with any kind of unbiased conclusion. Therefore the only outcome of the conference will be the propagation of the theory that the Holocaust did not happen, and the further characterization of Zionist Jews and (despite the conference’s very interesting efforts to the contrary) Jews everywhere as militarily aggressive, dangerous lying bastards.

What I’m now interested in is everyone’s reactions to the conference, and what that can teach us about how far we’ve come since 1945. Or 1948.

One of the participants says that they are so glad that this is the first time they have been able to speak their mind freely, having been imprisoned for some years in Germany for expressing the idea that the Holocaust did not happen. Germany has very strict laws, which are, as far as I know, fully supported by the majority, that preclude anything like the Holocaust ever happening again. Many of these laws admittedly deny civil liberties. Is it worth it? It’s just interesting to hear a supremacist speaking like a victim. But I guess that’s what this is all about: it’s a big game of Just Who Is The Victim Here.

One of my friends has pointed out that the intensity of the reaction in the West should be proof enough that the Holocaust did happen. I don’t think this makes sense. The West is reacting to our image of the Holocaust. If that image is not well-founded, then that doesn’t mean people wouldn’t react to it. On the other hand, if she’s saying that the intensity of the reaction is based on the stories of individuals who have told them to their families, that’s something else–hard to make up that conspiracy.

I also have a Zionist friend who sees this conference as proof that Israel is legitimated in its military aggression. His comments are the most emotional thing I’ve ever heard him say. And for sure this conference is revealing the deep rift in the ways history is taught in the Islamic world and in the West: I myself had never thought about how political Islam saw the Holocaust. And so it becomes another legitimation for U.S. aggression toward the Islamic world.

Anyway, I guess my point is that there’s something scary in the West’s reaction to all this. We’re so worried about letting it all happen again that we’re shutting ourselves off from any, any conversation about it. I’m not, not, not suggesting the Holocaust did not happen. I am one of those people that has individual family stories. Stories that make me angrier than anything else ever has. The conversation I want to have doesn’t have to do with whether the Holocaust happened or not, but with our ability to talk of the Germans as victims, with our ability to not be overwhelmed with guilt to the point of putting lines on someone else’s map, etc., etc. I’m not defending the conference, which is chock full of biased people and, as I said, isn’t going to do anything but perpetuate conservative, racist, religionist, and generally cruel views. I’m also not suggesting that we undertake some campaign to dull our own reaction. I don’t think that’s right. My comments are more of an observation than a call to arms (which I guess is my style). Rather I’m suggesting that if a similar conference happened in fifty, a hundred years’ time, that the reaction would be different, and that wouldn’t mean that we were any closer to letting it happen again.