Dibs

Three books have been removed from the Baillieu Library at Australia’s Melbourne University for promoting jihad and martyrdom, according to the Herald Sun. The country’s new anti-terror sedition laws drove the decision to remove two of the books, Defence of the Muslim Lands and Join the Caravan, which “were the subject of an investigation by the Federal Government’s Classification Review Board in July which imposed a ban on their sale or importation into Australia,” reports the paper. “The books were investigated after being found for sale in Islamic shops in Brunswick and Sydney. The federal censor found Defence of the Muslim Lands — which carries an endorsement by Osama bin Laden — incites ‘terrorism acts, including the plan, action and execution of martyrdom operations.’ The review board also found that Join the Caravan was a ‘real and genuine call’ to incite Muslims to carry out terrorist acts against ‘disbelievers.’” Library officials went one step further and pulled a third book, The Lofty Mountain, off their shelves. Written by Sheik Abdullah Azzam, an alleged inspiration to bin Laden, this third book contains similar subject matter to the first two. According to the Herald Sun, “Associate professor Richard Pennell, the university’s lecturer in Middle Eastern history, is understood to have bought the three books over the internet more than a year ago to help teach an honours course.” Pennell is now upset at the books’ removal: “‘Students and academics need to be able to access research materials,’ he said.” These are strange times. There is research, and there’s … um, “research.”

He’s on Death Row in an Ohio prison, sentenced in 1987 for the murder of two-year-old Cynthia Collins. And now Kenny Richey wants to publish a cookbook based on recipes he has devised in prison. The 42-year-old Edinburgh native “is in talks with US publisher Excess Q to see if he can have Death Row Recipes released worldwide,” according to The Scotsman. “The firm has admitted that it thinks it could have ‘mass appeal.’ Among the dishes he says he has created is a fish toastie, made from salmon and prawns, which is put in a tortilla and cooked on his radiator. And he says that he makes his own version of alcopops by letting orange juice sit for two weeks then drinking it.” Yum! But that’s what you get for slaying toddlers. Although he maintains his innocence. The story continues: “Richey is reported as saying: ‘You have to be creative with the food here. It’s not the best. I also make my own hooch. I use orange juice and let it sit for a couple of weeks until it is ready. I enjoy the taste of it — it’s the closest thing to alcohol that you can have in a prison cell.’ Excess Q’s director, Luis Serrano, said: ‘People are interested in Death Row.’” Richey’s sentence was quashed last year only to be upheld by the US Supreme Court. Maybe he will elect to cook his own last meal.

And you think you have “challenges”! Blind one-legged mountaineer Syd Scroggie, whose death at age 86 was reported yesterday by the BBC, was a poet and author and World War II vet, serving in a ski/mountain regiment called Lord Lovat’s Scouts. “Just weeks before the war ended he was injured by an anti-personnel mine in Northern Italy, losing his right leg and the sight of both eyes,” reports the BBC. Allegedly the last thing he remembers seeing were the Italian hills and vivid blue skies. “However, once back in Scotland Mr Scroggie achieved fame by resuming mountaineering,” outfitted with a metal prosthetic leg. His books include Give Me the Hills and The Cairngorms Scene and Unseen. Much else about him can be found here, on a site that lovingly recaptures Scroggie’s comments: “I can do without my eyes … but I can’t do without my mountains … whatever we call the hills, it has nothing to do with sight. It is an inner experience and can be as poignantly savoured with your eyes shut as open…. So long as there’s breath in my body, and the Ministry of Pensions keep mending my leg, I’ll get up Macdhui, pass down Loch A’an-side, and toast the knees of my breeks at a good fire of logs in Faindouran.” He liked cigarettes and lager and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Dundee. He kept climbing right up through his eighties. Now I feel guilty for complaining when someone obstructs my view of the TV.

Just as news reports are surfacing today about the tragic death last weekend of Anna Nicole Smith’s twenty-year-old son Daniel, a new (posthumous) book by the late son of another very famous figure is about to be published. Billed by its publisher, Soft Skull, as “a portrait of a wasted life,” Cursed From Birth is the sad story of a man born in 1947 to upper-class Beat honcho/heroin addict William S. Burroughs and Joan Vollmer, whom the elder Burroughs would later kill with a shot to the head in a William Tell re-enactment gone wrong. Soft Skull sez: “Raised by his paternal grandparents in Palm Beach after his mother was killed by his father … Billy saw his father become suddenly famous for Naked Lunch just as he became a teenager. Billy Jr.’s short life was defined by creating trouble to catch the attention of his father, mourning the death of his mother, descending into alcoholism and drug addiction, and reckoning with it all by beginning his own literary endeavors.” He authored two books, Speed and Kentucky Ham, but was such a serious alcoholic that while visiting his father and Allen Ginsberg in Colorado in the late ‘70s, he began vomiting blood and was rushed to a hospital where he was lucky enough to receive a liver transplant — at that time, a rare surgery. But he kept drinking after the surgery, and died in 1981 of liver failure, his corpse discovered in a Florida ditch. Compiled by writer David Ohle (author of The Age of Sinatra and Pisstown Chaos, I kid you not) from Burroughs’ journals and poems and unfinished novel Prakriti Junction, this new book has been in the works for many years.

Irish firefighters are commonly assaulted by hooligans who stab them with used hypodermic needles and trash their firetrucks as they attempt to fight conflagrations and save lives, according to a new book, Firecall: True Stories of Irish Firefighting & Rescue, by Ruairi Kavanagh, former editor of Firecall magazine, the official journal of Irish fire and rescue workers. “Officers at Dolphin’s Barn Station regularly get pelted with bottles and stones while trying to put out bonfires near council flats,” reads a report in the Irish Examiner. “Fire engines would respond to callouts in lanes, a vehicle would trap it from behind and it would suddenly come under attack.” One firefighter lamented: “Firefighters in the US and Canada do not have the threat of attacks hanging over them every time they answer a callout. It simply doesn’t happen there.” Also from the article: “In Dolphin’s Barn Station, thieves would sometimes ring in hoax 999 calls, then ransack the building when the firemen left. Fireman Gerry Sterio said: ‘We had cases here where we’d actually come back from a callout and met guys carrying a television out of the station.’” … Wow. As we approach the 9/11 anniversary, this book is a jarring revelation indeed. It seems to Dibs! that some people don’t deserve to be saved. Unfortunately, they often live on the same streets and in the same houses as people who do.

If you can’t be safe in a bookstore, then where CAN you be safe? Well, you can’t be safe in bookstores anymore, judging from an ongoing crime wave in the Boston area. Today police are “looking for a man who allegedly assaulted a young girl in the children’s section of a popular bookstore,” according to The Boston Channel. “The victim was 9 years old and was attacked Sept. 1 … this is the third such attack in the last year. Authorities said the most recent victim was at the New England Mobile Book Fair with her mother and wandered off into the children’s section alone when she was cornered and indecently assaulted.” She described her assailant “as a white man in his 20s, with strawberry blond hair and sunglasses. The man’s description fits the one that was given by two other young girls who were assaulted at the bookstore over the last year. A 9-year-old girl was assaulted there in September 2005 and an 8-year-old was attacked in June of 2005. No arrests were made in any of the cases.” Now there’s another good reason to shop at Amazon.com.

Authored by noted film scholar David Thomson, the brand-new bio Nicole Kidman is being described as “explosive” as it portrays the actress “as a power-hungry fame seeker who used her 10-year marriage to Tom Cruise to hit the Hollywood big time,” according to Sydney Confidential. Kidman never even met Thomson, according to her agent Wendy Day, who told the press that the actress “has only spoken to him briefly on the phone about her acting processes and various films.” Ouch! A quote from the book: “She realised she could be as big as him if she became as strong and self-centred. He wanted a beautiful, bright, obedient consort. She wanted a teacher. It worked. Then it stopped.” Ouch again! … It was in fact a bit surprising to see this new book. Thompson’s previous work was on such a high level that one can only wonder what persuaded him to pen a celebrity bio … especially of someone he hasn’t even met. A disaster? Or a huge advance?

Cody’s Books, whose Telegraph Avenue store closed earlier this summer, has just been acquired by Yohan, Inc., a major Japanese bookseller. I had heard rumors these past few weeks that “some Japanese company” had bought the business from Andy Ross. Apparently this is the company. The press release sent to Dibs! moments ago says: “Hiroshi Kagawa, CEO of Yohan, says, ‘I’ve loved Cody’s ever since I first visited the store in 1983.’ Founded in 1953, Yohan is the largest distributor of English-language books and magazines in Japan. It owns 18 bookstores in Japan, including the art and design-focused Aoyama Book Center, as well as the publisher IBC Publishing. ‘It is our ultimate mission to promote culture and communications worldwide,’ says Kagawa. Yohan also owns Berkeley’s Stone Bridge Press, run by Kagawa’s longtime friend and colleague Peter Goodman. ‘Hiroshi loves books,’ says Goodman. ‘Yohan and Cody’s share a sensibility that venerates the written word.’ Hiroshi Kagawa has long been active as a journalist and a specialist in international publishing. Born in 1955, Kagawa’s early career in the media was as representative for the New York office of Kodansha International. In 1988, he established his own publishing business in New York; in 1999, that company, ICG-Muse, Inc., acquired Tuttle Shokai Inc., the long-established foreign book distributor in Japan. In June 2004, Tuttle Shokai Inc. merged with Yohan (Western Publications Distribution Agency). Kagawa divides his time between New York and Tokyo.” Inquiring minds want to know: How much?!

Libraries grow ever more sinister, as the cute toys distributed to participants in summer-reading programs nationwide have been found to contain perilous quantities of lead. As reported by Lexington, Kentucky’s Lex18.com, the bendable cats and dogs were distributed at fourteen Kentucky libraries as well as in 36 other states whose libraries conducted similar literacy-enhancing programs. A test by the Indiana State Department of Health revealed that the toys’ lead content exceeded the maximum allowable by federal regulations, and they have since been recalled, but thousands have already been distributed as free incentive gifts. A spokesman from the Kentucky Department of Public Health is now urging parents to take the toys away from their children: “Chronic exposure leading to an elevated blood lead level in children can cause numerous health problems for young children, including hearing loss and liver and kidney damage. Such developmental problems can have a lasting impact in terms of performance in school and an overall impact on quality of life.” That’s a high price to pay for a span of summer-reading fun.

What with all the explosive news this week about faked “news” photographs from Lebanon and wire services firing the freelancers who took them, now Wired News has yanked three articles from its site amid suspicions that their writer — who is an author as well as a journalist — invented a source. “Tribal Curse Haunts Launch Pad” (June 27, 2006), “NASA Boosts Heart-Monitoring Tech” (July 7, 2006) and “Don’t Flush It – Breathe It” (July 14, 2006), all by Philip Chien, “relied in part on quotes and citations from Robert Ash, described in the first two stories as a ‘space historian’ and in the last as an ‘aeronautical engineer and amateur space historian.’ … Reached by phone this week, Ash said he is not a space historian and has never participated in interviews with Chien.” A freelance aerospace reporter who has spent over twenty years covering the US space program, Chien is the author of Columbia: Final Voyage, a book that came out earlier this year about the tragic 2003 space-shuttle flight. According to Wired, “Chien’s reporting came under scrutiny when he submitted a draft article citing a different source, Ted Collins, along with contact information for Collins, as required by Wired News…. An investigation traced the name and Hotmail account provided to a Usenet posting praising Chien’s work. Wired News senior editor Kevin Poulsen then compared the IP address of the poster and Chien’s computer and discovered they matched. An e-mail sent to Wired News from the Ted Collins account also originated with the same IP address. Poulsen linked Chien’s IP address to at least one other Hotmail account, created under the name Robert Stevens, which Chien had provided to Wired News as contact information for Ash. The name and address were used in additional Usenet posts making positive comments about Chien’s work.” Ouch!!! In an apology emailed to Wired, “Chien admitted he created the Ted Collins Hotmail account and used it in an attempt to mislead editors…. He also claimed his quotes are accurate and correctly attributed. Chien wrote that Collins died in 1997, but said he liked his quotes so much he wanted to use them posthumously.” So much harder to get away with stuff these days, thanks to the magic of electronic information networks.