Secure Reading

As high school kids we hung out in libraries all the time. Only two places in New York City would screen who got to use the reading rooms. The New York Public on 42^nd St had a rule that you had to be over 18 to enter, but no one really stopped us from ordering books there so long as we approached the librarian's desk earnestly with a hushed demeanor. Columbia University started checking ID cards in the late 70s probably from fear of crime. So as high school kids we shied away from Butler library. But once in a while we would sneak into the law school library where they had not yet placed any guards, probably because the stacks were modern and bright as opposed to Butler's gothic dungeon. By and large though, there were no restrictions on getting into the libraries of New York, and that a cluster of geeks would stop at nothing to find a back issue of the New England Journal of Medicine never entered the minds of library administrators.

Today institutional libraries require users to demonstrate that they have the proper credentials, but their motives are totally different. They are not trying to keep the place quiet or prevent muggings. It's not even the fear of terrorism. The real motive is financial.

The spread of security passwords has the effect of creating barriers that protect property, not unlike enclosures around common fields at the end of the eighteenth century when capitalist agriculture restructured the English countryside. Today, the more security barriers are strictly enforced, the more certain publishers are that their on-line services will not be accessed by those, who are not part of the fee structure.

After 9/11 there came a wave of security password protection on libraries. The occasional suggestion was made that terrorists would use free public computers to plot attacks, and librarians protested at the requirement that libraries track the books users check out. Once that requirement was dropped, the pass words still remained, and they exist now, one suspects, so as to allow libraries to buy and publishers to sell online journals, books, reference databases and the like.

The ease with which academics can research online is of course made possible by the passwords that protect the property of the publishers who sell their content to the library. Now admittedly there has been little file sharing of academic databases. How often does one download a pdf from a journal in order to spread it around the internet? Never. Passwords are the hedge around the academic field. Few wish to poach there these days. High school kids may sneak in, but they do so from their computers, not on foot past a hung over security guard.

So the next time you type in your user ID along with an eight symbol figure, know that you are entering a financial deal built upon the hysteria of terrorism.

The Loss of Strangeness

What's missing from the current American assumption about the global and its Englishness, is the wonder at difference, at the strange ways of another civilization, that there could be some completely different manner for people to treat each other and distinctly different values about books, marriage, religion, war, health than our single universally applied assumptions. I miss the care one needs to take while entering a new culture.

Now, there may be moments when caution is required, but behind any quiet first steps into a strange city, there lies implicit a fundamental sense that back home is superior.

Only the most stubborn fanaticism is treated as outside the global, and while it needs to be treated cautiously, it is never seen as a respectful alternative, never the sense that in this other society things are done differently for good reasons.

Whereas in the nineteenth century for an American to visit France or Russia, it meant to enter into a "new world" that one could not dismiss as backward. They were parallel societies.

The out-dated notion of civilizations, in the plural, meant that there were a goodly number, not a very many but more than a handful, of different ways to organize life.

Now the assumption is that one global norms exists which has many variations, most of which are measured in relation to some imagined standard of advanced modernity.

Even up until the end of the Cold War, there was the cautious respect for the limit of Western civilization. Now there are just pockets of intransigence.

Harvard Bag

In the water soaked heat of August there is a leonine satisfaction in ordering a gyro at the corner Greek diner, then wandering over to the bodega for a gallon of water and a large Heineken. The nice Mexican lady behind the counter puts the water bottle in a plastic bag and then hands the beer, wrapped in its own little paper bag, to you directly. The assumption—you might want to drink it out on the sidewalk and the brown paper bag shields you a little.

"Is that allowed? Can you really drink a beer outside like that?" says my European friend, so accustomed to strict American police regulations that she can hardly believe a simple brown bag will allow you to consume the hops beverage under the open sky.

"Well, it works only so far as the police let you get away with it. There is an old guy over there in a t-shirt drinking something wrapped in paper. The police aren't going to bother him."

"So why did she give you a bag for your beer?"

"Cause, there is this veneer, if the police want to bother you, then the bag is no cover. If you are Skip Gates, and they happen to be looking for someone who looks like a professor with a cane, then they could easily use the open container wrapped in paper as an excuse to bring you in.

Even if they are not particularly looking for a professor, but they see you sitting on your front stoop with the can, they might still arrest you for disorderly conduct, because you look like Skip Gates drinking a beer."

"Too bad I went to Harvard," she said.

Not a steamy August in NYC

Ottoman Queens

Almost as enticing as the architectural remnants of a lost empire is its aftertaste.

The culinary heritage of the Ottoman Empire lives on ninety years after its political collapse. The polyglot neighborhoods of Queens certainly lack Istanbul's glorious temples but they have more languages and not a little of its food.

Astoria is ostensibly a Greek neighborhood, but its changing fast. Along with Brazilian immigrants and hipster refugees from Brooklyn, Ditmars Boulevard has a secularized Muslim feel imported from old Yugoslavia and Turkey.

It is as if the northeast corner of the Mediterranean has moved in around the old Greek ladies.

The vexed geographical question of Europe's boundaries shows itself in the careful phrasing of the store sign. The Balkans are "European" and thereafter comes the Middle East.

However, a hurried pedestrian might read the sign so that 'European' refers to both the Balkans and the Middle East.

What a generous idea of the shop owner: to advertise a European Middle East! Storefront diplomacy. Either way consumer satisfaction solves cultural conflict once again.