The British Library Reader Bulletin
IN THIS ISSUE
The Library's news on a conviction for theft
LIBRARY THIEF CONVICTED

Mr Farhad Hakimzadeh, a former British Library Reader, is due to appear at Wood Green Court today (Friday 21 November). Hakimzadeh has pleaded guilty to ten counts of theft from the Library, and asked for further charges to be taken into account. He has also admitted theft from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Sentencing in this case is expected later today and you may have seen coverage of the case in this morning's press.

Hakimzadeh used considerable skill, deceit and determination to steal leaves, plates and maps from collection items. In many instances his thefts were initially difficult to detect. The items he mutilated are mainly 16th, 17th and 18th century items, with a lesser number of 19th and a few 20th century items. The predominant subject area is the West European engagement with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul [Mughal] empire (roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh), and western travel and colonisation / exploration.

Readers should be assured that theft from the British Library is an extremely rare occurrence. As Readers will appreciate, we are a library, not a museum. We are committed to making our collections available in the interests of scholarship and research, and to do this an element of trust is necessary. Hakimzadeh fundamentally betrayed this trust.

I know that Readers will share the anger we feel about this crime. The Library takes very seriously its duty to protect the collections for your use, and for the generations of Readers to come. We have zero tolerance of anyone who harms our collections and will pursue anyone who threatens them with utmost vigour.

The successful prosecution of Hakimzadeh follows a thorough and detailed investigation by Library staff and the Metropolitan Police. This led to the recovery of some of the items stolen by Hakimzadeh, and civil proceedings are now underway to recover further items and to seek financial compensation.

The Library has been heartened by the generous co-operation it has received during this investigation from a number of institutions and from other libraries in this country and abroad.

Should any Reader have a concern about the security of a collection item, please do speak to a member of Reading Room staff.

Dame Lynne Brindley

Chief Executive Officer

The British Library

While it must be true that most art thieves have a studied area of expertise, I am posting the above mainly so you can all see the context for the following sentence: "The predominant subject area is the West European engagement with Mesopotamia, Persia and the Mogul [Mughal] empire (roughly the area from modern Syria to Bangladesh), and western travel and colonisation / exploration." Also NB that the CEO of the BL is a Dame. Apparently, the heads of Oxford and Cambridge UP's are also either Dames or Sirs, depending.

So what have I been up to, you ask, if not slicing out items from sixteenth-century books? Let me tell you , it's been positively dialectic over here, what with the highbrow and then the lowbrow and back to highbrow again with nary a stop in between for the decidedly middlebrow pleasures of dissertation work. I imagine myself nimbly skipping over the mis en abyme that is Spenser, but alas, I feel that is both inevitable and that we need to give more studied considerations for the reasons Spenser's Chaucerian imitation in the Shepheardes Calender manifests itself in specifically lexical ways (you like that? Yeah.).

Anyway, I digress. Instead, a quick digest:

Highbrow: Impressing the Tsar, contemporary ballet from the Eighties Future at Sadler's Wells.
Lowbrow: Bonfire night! Fireworks! Really close to my head!
Highbrow: Contemporary Chinese art at the Saatchi Gallery. I hope Mr. Saatchi likes his contemporary Chinese art, since it may be a while before he can sell it at anything other than a loss.
Lowbrow: A trip of Odyssey-like proportions on the night bus back from Brixton.
Highbrow: Delirium an adaptation of the Brothers Karamazov from the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. Not the best play I've seen here, but perhaps the most ambitious and certainly the most exciting and therefore one of my favorites. The production's focus did, um, wobble a bit with the introduction of some interpretive dancing in the second act but what can you do? They get an A for effort.
Lowbrow: Louche drinks and arguments about Freud and Chaucer with a bookseller/would-be-writer in Joycean hat and glasses. A friend of John Shurmer-Smith's, obviously.
Highbrow: Tea tasting at Samuel Johnson's house, courtesy Twinnings Tea. I sat in an uncomfortable chair for thirty minutes and learned why only Philistines drink anything but Twinnings. Then I myself drank a lot of Twinnings tea, most of which was quite nice.
Lowbrow: Taping for a BBC sit-com. To be honest, I found the show to be insipid and the taping process tedious. But, on the plus side, I don't think I'll ever have the urge to go to one of these things again.
Highbrow: Two Vaclav Havel one-acts at a theater in Richmond it took forever to get to on the Tube (it didn't help that there was "a body on the tracks at Victoria station"-- I didn't need to know that!).
Lowbrow: BOWLING! I remain obsessed with the British take on classic American culture, especially since it usually involves playing really good music and drinking decent German beer.

Going to Edinburgh with the students this weekend; it is supposed to snow. And Ben is coming in just four days!

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In which I write blog posts all day instead of reading

Item: I took a walk down Oxford Street after dinner tonight. All the big department stores have their Christmas displays out, some of which are quite clever. In fact, the Christmas seasons starts sort of insanely early here.

Item: I have a new hat! I like it very much! It goes well with my new coat.


Item: This is not for girls, so obviously I had to try it. I don't even know what it is, yet, though I suspect it to be chocolate of middling quality.


Item: Muji. Have I mentioned how obsessed with them I am? They have a lot of small stocking stuffer type gifts for Christmas, stuffed toys, gadgets, games and the like. They also have a City in Bag building block sets: you can get Tokyo, Paris, New York, London, and the set below, which is labeled "Mystere." You've got Stonehenge, a pyramid, some Easter Island statues, the Loch Ness Monster, the Nazca Lines, the Sphinx and some sort of temple. I love it. I am happy to have it sitting on my windowsill.


Item: all of this should give you an idea of how much work I got done today.

More crisps

Walkers Sensations: Oven Roasted Chicken with Lemon and Thyme. I readily believe that real thyme was near this product at some point. The lemon is understated, mostly discernible in the aftertaste. The chicken flavor is there throughout, but not overpowering. The overall taste is savory, rather than salty, which is offset nicely by the citrus. Subtle, but pleasant, and miles away from Walker's regular range roast chicken flavor. The mildness of the flavoring means the taste of the chip itself comes through (unlike the sechuzan spice flavor, where it was completely overpowered), and the two are naturally complementary. I was concerned about how the meaty taste would mesh with texture of the crisps, but it suits the thicker kettle-chip style Sensations crisps very well.

This is the last of the Walkers Sensations range that I've been able to find in individual serving packages. I'm excited try the other flavors, especially Carmelised Onion and Balsamic Vinegar (maybe with some goat cheese?) and Vintage Cheddar and Red Onion Chutney. But there's a whole world of unfamiliar junk food out there!

Well, how about that? At least as far as I can tell from London, everything that the US media is reporting about the collective sigh of relief breathed by most of the rest of the world upon Obama's election seems spot on. There's a large news shop down the street from me that specializes (specialises?) in international papers, and I made a point of passing by yesterday to see what I could about how the international media was reporting the results. Now, I don't read Turkish or Japanese or Hindi. But, like the nytimes.com breaking out the 72-pt headline, I didn't have to: the exuberant typography conveyed enough.

The sense of eubullence will fade soon enough, of course, as it perhaps should. The bulk of the real work that remains to be done is nowhere near as direct, simple and straightforward as electing a president (and as we've certainly seen, a presidential election is none of these things to any meaningful degree), and while the two are obviously related, it matters less who is in office than the policies he enacts and the government he builds. It could all go terribly wrong. But I also think it may have the possibility to go well for once, and that's a change. For the first time sense arriving here, I took no particular delight in being the stealth American yesterday, unrecognizable as a foreigner until I open my mouth. Rather, I wanted to let those flat vowels and dropped t's. More significantly, for the first time in my politically aware life, I feel proud to be an American. I mean, I feel it, and it is a qualitatively different feeling than what I've felt before. This is a sentiment I have heard echoed again and again and again amongst friends and acquantances in the past day or two, and I think it's hard to understate its potential import. You'd have to crunch some numbers to get any true sense of the size and scope of this group (though my gut tells me it extends far beyond my de facto focus group of humanities graduate students), but there is a whole generation of people out there, under thirty, who are for the first time feeling affection, connection, and acute interest in their government.

(But, you know, think about California. Track down Judith Bulter's "Uncritical Exuberance" which makes a number of very good points and is actually quite lucid and making the rounds on various blogs. Think about the fact that total political unity is neither achievable nor desirable, particularly in a democracy. "Change," if we're going to keep harping on that word, is a dialectic, not a light switch, and I would hate to see the left turn around and prima facie shut out more conservative voices as the right did to liberals at the height of the Bush administration. The campaigns of both parties showed American political discoure of pretty much all persuasions to be incredibly fraught, and wounding, and divisive, and downright nasty and I personally think that needs to change before any other kind of meaningful progress can be enacted.)

(So exhilirating, a ride on a high horse.)

Until I and some of my fellow Americans (and also Canadians, and a stray Mancurian or two) got set up with live feeds from the US news networks, we watched the BBC's coverage. Particulary early in the evening, when they were explaining the electoral college again and again, they reported it as though it were a football match: the dossiers of key players, statistics based on past performance, an analysis of the critical moves that needed to win the match. Were I relying on vocal patterns and inflection alone, I would have believed these were sports casters. In closing, a side note: it is impossible to explain the electoral college to anyone without sounding slightly foolish. "But you already count the popular vote!" they will object. And you will be forced to acknowledge that yes in fact we do count the popular vote, but that it doesn't matter because the framers of the constitution way back in 1787 could not count the popular vote.