Somerville Public Library Blog

If you’ve been spending much time online or reading the news in dead-tree format, you’ve probably encountered the term “net neutrality.” Some of you might not know what that means. But as Internet users, you should. Basically, it means the networks and companies that provide us access to the Internet don’t restrict our access to content or sites, or limit the types of equipment we use or the ways we communicate. You pay your service fee and then you read what you want, visit what sites you want.  That’s more or less how it’s been since the advent of the World Wide Web in the early nineties.

Since that time, Internet use–and data traffic–has exploded, and soon the world-wide network of fiber optic lines that carry our e-mails to each other and allow us to get to websites in California or Canberra won’t be able to handle it.  Soon we”ll need more lines-lots of them. And they’ll cost money.  And even without that expense, businesses are always looking for more ways to make money.

This issue got a lot more attention  three weeks ago when Google and Verizon approached the Federal Communications Commission with a proposal: they pledge to keep what they call “the public internet” completely neutral, but that Internet Service Providers be allowed to charge for certain services.

In other words, the Internet could become like television. It would be multi-tiered: ISPs would deliver some traffic faster and better than others. You might need to pay extra to get speedy delivery of Hulu or Facebook–or to access medical data. Or if the Google/Verizon deal were to go through, you would be able to access YouTube (which Google owns) but possibly be unable to watch videos from (for example) vimeo.com. There’s a good overview of the issues here. The Google-Verizon proposal has provoked varying responses. The Washington Post liked it. The Globe didn’t.  Here’s the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s take.

And Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Copps weighed in yesterday.

It’s an important issue, and you need to know what’s at stake.

Many patrons ask about the frieze that runs along the interior wall of the main reading room.  It’s a reproduction of one of the friezes that adorned the Parthenon, a temple built in Athens between 447 and 432 B.C.  The temple was dedicated to the worship of Athena (the city’s patron deity) and the frieze is believed to depict the Panathenaic procession, which took place annually in the goddess’s honor.

But the fact that the frieze is colored gives some people pause. After all, most people think that Ancient Greek sculptures were white. Actually archaeologists and scholars have long known that the Greeks painted their buildings and sculptures: faint traces of color linger on some artifacts; there are also references to the colors on statues in Ancient Greek writings.

Of course 2,600 year-old-paint residue and written references aren’t enough to tell us what the fully painted sculptures actually looked like, so the colors on our frieze are guesses based on the color scheme of a reproduction of the Parthenon that once stood in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But in recent years German archaeologist Vinzenz Brinkmann has been using ultraviolet light to examine the faint traces of paint on Ancient Greek sculptures (traces often not visible to the naked eye) and determine the materials used in making the pigments. And to illustrate his findings he created copies of Ancient Greek (and Roman) statues and painted them using the pigment combinations he’s found in his investigations. The results are radically different from the austere sculptures we see in museums (and from the subdued hues of our own frieze):

Our Books Into Movies Discussion Group is meeting tonight at the West Branch Library (40 College Ave.) at 7:30.  They’ll be discussing To Kill A Mockingbird. This coming-of-age novel that explores racial injustice in the Depression-Era South won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and is beloved by readers worldwide. The 1962 film starring Gregory Peck (left) won 3 Academy Awards and was named one of the greatest American movies of all time by the American Film Institute.

If you’ve read the book, seen the movie,  (or both!) come on by. New members are always welcome!

You’re probably a responsible Internet user: you’ve got a firewall on your home computer, you’ve set your browser not to accept cookies, and you don’t go to dodgy sites. Well, according to Julia Angwin of The Wall Street Journal, that’s not good enough. She recently analyzed tracking software used by the most commonly visited websites to discover what kind of information they collect on Internet users and how it’s sold and used.  Angwin was recently interviewed on Fresh Air about this project. She defines and discusses cookies and beacons, who’s tracking you and why, and what you can do protect your privacy. A link to listen to the program is here. The transcript is here.

(Or movies in German). SPL has a great collection of foreign films. We’ve got movies from countries as close as Mexico and Cuba and as far away as Iran and the Philippines.  But today I’m posting about one of my favorite sub-collections: German films.  German filmmakers have produced some of the greatest movies in cinematic history and the nation is home to one of the most vibrant film industries in Continental Europe–and the world. Without further ado, here are some of my favorite German movies available here at SPL.

Im Juli/In July (2000). Daniel is a Hamburg schoolteacher who thinks he’s just fallen in love, and he’s about to drive to Istanbul to tell the woman in question. Juli is a young street vendor who’s hitchhiking her way out of town when she crosses paths with Daniel. Together they set off for Turkey, beginning a road trip that features an encounter  with a beautiful, drug-dealing thief, a run-in with hostile Romanian border guards, and an attempt to sneak a dead body across the Turkish border.  Im Juli is one of the quirkiest, most delightful romantic comedies I’ve ever seen.

Der Untergang/Downfall (2004). Berlin, April 1945: The Russians are closing in from the East, the Americans and British from the West. The Third Reich is doomed, but in his bunker the man who started the war lives in denial, surrounded by his most fanatical followers. Based on the memoirs of his last personal secretary, Downfall is a chillingly realistic recreation of the last two weeks of HItler’s life, and a terrifying look at madness.

Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) Imagine your mother has a heart attack and goes into a coma. Then she comes out of it a few months later. She’s fragile, but she’s okay. That’s all good, right? Well, it’s a bit complicated if you’re young Alex Kerner and your mother is loyal Communist Christiane Kerner. Because when she went into a coma, the German Democratic Republic still existed. Then the Berlin Wall fell and your mother regains consciousness in a reunited, capitalist Germany. So you do what any good son would do: you take your mother home and pretend you’re still snug and secure behind the Iron Curtain. You re-package groceries with labels from the old state-owned shops. You edit old East German news broadcasts for your mother to watch on television. You go back to dressing in the old drab clothes you wore before you had access to Western shops. And all the while, you wonder how long you can keep this up….

Meet control-freak chef Martha Klein. She runs her kitchen like Bligh ran HMS Bounty. If a customer has any complaints about a dish, they’re wrong.  But Martha’s tightly-wound life gets completely up-ended when her sister dies in a car crash, and she’s suddenly responsible for her eight-year-old niece–who is possibly the only other person in Germany as strong-willed as she is. As if she didn’t have enough on her plate (pun intended), she feels weirdly threatened by Mario, the new sous-chef at work. And to her surprise, the tensions between them aren’t just professional.  Do yourself a favor and watch Bella Martha/Mostly Martha (2001). It’s a great food movie, a touching love story, and has the funniest therapy scenes in movie history.

Alles auf Zucker!/Go for Zucker! (2004). Jakob Zuckermann has been estranged from his mother and brother ever since they abandoned him in East Germany when he was a child.  But he’s also drowning in debt.  His mother has just died, and if he reconciles with his Orthodox brother in the presence of a rabbi and sits Shiv’ah (the seven day period of mourning) with the family he stands to inherit a substantial amount of money from her.  The catch (aside from Jaekie’s loathing of religion and his brother) is that the period set for Shiv’ah overlaps with a pool tournament he desperately wants to play in. From there things get complicated….

Today is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki.  Paired with the bombing of Hiroshima, these two events hastened the end of World War II and demonstrated the horrible power of nuclear weapons. It’s also arguable that fear of a nuclear holocaust helped prevent a third world war between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The first (and so far, only) use of nuclear weapons has been the subject of narrative, analysis and reflection by some of our finest writers.  The classic account of the first use of the atomic bomb is John Hershey’s Hiroshima. Based on the author’s interviews with six survivors, Hiroshima tells what it was like to be on the ground at the site of a nuclear detonation and has been judged one of the finest works of journalism of the twentieth century.

After the Japanese surrender, George Weller became one of the first U.S. Journalists to enter Nagasaki and see the effects of the bombing. He talked to survivors and to their doctors. He also interviewed Allied prisoners who had seen the blast. His dispatches were censored. Every word. After Weller’s death his son found copies of his reports–and the first eyewitness accounts of Nagasaki were finally published after sixty years.

Another route to learning more about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is to read about the atomic bomb’s conflicted creator, Robert Oppenheimer, a man at his happiest dealing with equations in a classroom who was horrified by the reality his brilliance made. Jeremy Bernstein is both a physicist and a staff writer at the New Yorker known for his profiles of scientists. He modestly describes his Oppenheimer: Portrait of an Enigma as the magazine profile he never wrote.  Yet most reviewers agree that Bernstein’s work is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced account of one of the commanding figures of twentieth-century physics as well as a compelling guide to the intertwining of politics and science.

And speaking of politics, the decision to use atomic bombs against Japan has never stopped being the subject of heated debate with both sides fervently taking the moral high ground. In The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, Gar Alperovitz argues that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn’t about winning the war at all, but about intimidating the Soviet Union. However, in Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision Fifty Years Later,  historian Robert James Maddox lays out the case for military necessity, arguing that the use of atomic bombs was absolutely necessary to prevent a long and bloody land war in Japan.

There’s some interesting material online about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well. Life has a collection of never-before seen photos.  Gizmodo has interviews with survivors of Hiroshima who recount what they experienced and then there’s this utterly bizarre clip of This Is Your Life, in which a survivor of Hiroshima meets a crew member of the Enola Gay (the plane that dropped the bomb.)

As you may recall we’ve posted quite a few book lists on this blog: some focusing on genres, others on the classics, and some on the theme of “best books of the decade.” This time around I and  a couple of colleagues are focusing on old favorites: books we just love for whatever reason.

I’ve always had a fascination with conspiracy theories, fringe groups, and just plain weirdness.  If there’s any book that totally gives me a fix on all three it’s Them: Adventures with Extremists by Jon Ronson.  We get to meet a former sports journalist who’s convinced alien reptiles walk among us, sit down with a Texas talk radio host who raised money from his listeners to rebuild the Branch Davidian compound, and join Ronson as he searches for the secret cabal of millionaires, politicians and intellectuals who really run the world. You’ll also meet the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan as they struggle with their rebranding process and with the trickier technical aspects of cross burning (don’t laugh, people: it’s harder than it looks).

When Walter Karp died in 1989, America lost one of its finest social critics and most astute defenders of individual liberties. Even though the essays published in Buried Alive: Essays on Our Endangered Republic, were published in the seventies and eighties, the issues and principles Karp discusses are still relevant. In “The America That Was Free And Is Now Dead,” Karp recounts the massive assault on civil liberties that began with American entry to World War I–a war most Americans did not want to enter. In “Why Johnny Can’t Think,” Karp provides a scathing critique of an educational system that focuses on test scores and regurgitating pat answers rather than creation of independent-minded citizens. These are just two of the grimly fascinating works in “Buried Alive,” a collection that provides a much-needed articulation (and reminder) of our society’s highest ideals.

And now for something completely different: mysteries (of sorts)–two of them. Twilly Spree is a young eco-terrorist with a trust fund. Palmer Stoat is a sleazy wheeler and dealer who’s planning to turn a pristine Gulf Coast island into a giant shopping mall. Add a hooker who accepts only Republicans as customers, an ex-governor of Florida hiding in a swamp, a drug dealer turned real estate developer (who’s always complaining he gets no respect since he went into real estate) and you’ve got Carl Hiaasen’s 2000 comedic thriller, Sick Puppy, one of the most satisfying and funniest mysteries I’ve ever read.

London, the early 1970s: George Smiley is a former official of British intelligence who spends his days doing research in the British Museum and enduring the turbulence of marriage with his beautiful but unfaithful wife.  He comes home one day to find a former colleague waiting to take him for a ride out to the country. They’re going to meet a former agent, Ricki Tarr,  who went AWOL in Hong Kong months ago and has sneaked back into England gambling he could trust his former boss. He’s got a lead that someone in British intelligence, someone at the very top, is a Soviet spy.  Thus begins Tinker, Tailor, Soldier Spy, one of my all-time favorite books. If your idea of spy thrillers is based on James Bond or Mission Impossible movies, put those out of your mind right now. The author, John Le Carré, worked for British intelligence before becoming a novelist, so his work is very realistic, depicting a world of sleuthing, surveillance, blindness and betrayal, with no gadgets or glamor. The writing is beautiful, the plotting brilliant, and George Smiley one of the most believable and sympathetic fictional characters I’ve ever met.

If your American history classes were anything like mine, they started with Columbus and Jamestown, as if there just wasn’t much to say about the people already living here.  That’s a shame, because the history of this continent before European settlement is absolutely fascinating. Fortunately we’ve got Charles C. Mann to give us a tour of the Americas before Columbus in 1491, one of the best books of popular history I’ve ever read. He debunks the myth of Europeans arriving in a pristine Eden, outlining how Native Americans actively (and sometimes radically) altered the natural landscape with a great deal of knowledge and skill. He also analyzes the paths in science and technology taken by the more advanced indigenous civilizations, explaining why it made perfect sense for the Maya to not adopt the wheel (even though they had invented it), but charge ahead on projects like making rubber and developing advanced mathematics. He also examines the literature and philosophy of the Aztecs just before the Spanish Conquest, speculating that the Spanish might have stopped a culture comparable to Classical Greece dead in its tracks, and pulls together the evidence that the supposedly illiterate Incas of Peru may have invented a system of three-dimensional writing.

Now for the best novel I’ve read this year. The Court of Henry VIII is rich fodder for drama and fiction (did you catch The Tudors?) But novelists and dramatist have given most of their attention to Sir Thomas More, Anne Boleyn, and the big H himself. In Wolf Hall award-winning novelist Hilary Mantel shows us the world of Henry VIII through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister.   A commoner in an age where birth usually determined everything, a shrewd money manager in an extravagant court, a master of several languages in an age when most men couldn’t even read and write in their own, Mantel’s Cromwell is also a man losing all faith in old certainties,  who sees the printing press and the rise of humanist thought bringing a newer, freer world. But it’s the old world of kings, nobles and popes that he has to survive in. Mantel has produced a beautifully written, moving portrait of a self-made man who’s risen in his career to the very top–the level at which a single mistake can mean death.

Somerville had quite the weekend. Saturday afternoon we had three inches of rain in less than an hour. Power  is still out in parts of town, and the police have had to relocate to the station in Teele Square at 1154 Broadway. Even if you can read this (meaning you’re either in a place with power or a working smartphone), the flash food may have affected you. If  you have a home basement, workplace or a car to clean out, here are some flood cleanup manuals that might help:

Flood cleanup instructions from Mass.gov. (includes links to information on disposal of items such as damaged computers, and on managing pathogen risk from sewage backup).

Post-power outage food safety issues.

EPA guide to making sure indoor air is healthy.

Drying out your car and getting rid of the mildew smell.

Post-flood home cleanup.

The Mexican painter Frida Kahlo was born 103 years ago today in Mexico City. She’s probably best known to Americans from the Salma Hayek movie Frida, but you owe it yourself to learn more about this remarkable woman and artist. The Christian Science Monitor has a short written piece on her and a video tribute to her work here.

Her painting was heavily influenced by the Surrealist movement and by Mexican indigenous culture. Over a third of her 143 paintings are self-portraits. She once said, “I paint myself because I am often alone and I am the subject I know best.”  She began painting when she was eighteen, after a traffic accident that left her in a body cast for three months.  A  recurring theme of her work is emotional and physical pain.

If you would like to know more about her life and work, you could start with the appropriately titled Frida Kahlo: Her Life and Work, in our oversized books section. If you want something a little more portable, check out the DVD Latin American Women Artists from our AV collection. Our copy of the movie Frida is the worse for wear, but we can request it for you from another MInuteman library.

We also have other books on Frida Kahlo that aren’t so back-breakingly large: Frida Kahlo: The Paintings with commentary by noted Kahlo scholar Hayden Herrera provides a thorough introduction to her work; The World of Frida Kahlo: The Blue House, takes you into her home and haunts; and you can get a more glimpse of her life in I Will Never Forget You, a collection of her letters to her friend and lover, the photographer Nickolas Muray.

Take a look in the network catalog or come to the library: we’ll help you find what you’re looking for, whether it’s about Frida Kahlo or not.

July 8, 1932: Here’s some perspective for all the pundits bemoaning recent poor stock performance: on this date the Dow closed at 41.

July 10, 1866: Edson P. Clark patents the indelible pencil, which he soon regrets inventing when his five-year-old gets hold of it and tackles the walls of the parlor.

July 12, 1982: In an announcement that completely relieves all anxiety about the U.S.-Soviet arms race, the Post Office assures U.S. citizens that they will continue to receive mail after a nuclear war.

July 18, 1975: The jury in Boston Bruins player David Forbes’ trial for aggravated assault can’t reach a verdict, probably because most of them don’t understand what’s wrong with a hockey player being violent.

July 22, 1975: Apparently desperate for something to do that’s completely unrelated to Watergate or Vietnam, the House of Representatives restores U.S. citizenship to Robert E. Lee.