"Librarians in Japan upset after newspaper published names of books that novelist Haruki Murakami checked out as a teenager from his high school library."

A new thread on Metafilter, where somebody says:

This reminds me so much of that scene in Se7en where Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt gain access to John Doe's library check-out list and attempt to use it to profile his behaviour based solely on this list that they've illegally obtained.

And that reminded me of the nomination of Robert Bork to the  Supreme Court:

During debate over his nomination, Bork's video rental history was leaked to the press. His video rental history was unremarkable, and included such harmless titles as A Day at the Races, Ruthless People, and The Man Who Knew Too Much. Writer Michael Dolan, who obtained a copy of the hand-written list of rentals, wrote about it for the Washington City Paper. Dolan justified accessing the list on the ground that Bork himself had stated that Americans only had such privacy rights as afforded them by direct legislation. The incident led to the enactment of the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act.

Here's the whole Michael Dolan article. Excerpt:

When the list landed in them, I felt as if I held history in my hot little hands, and wondered whether I dared dissect it. Then I remembered A.J. Weberman. Weberman, founder of the school of intellectual discourse known as “garbageology,” was a Greenwich Village loon who spent years stealing Bob Dylan’s trash and subjecting it to the sort of deep-focus scrutiny usually reserved for such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. If Weberman could deconstruct Bob Dylan’s detritus, I finally decided, Dolan could deconstruct Bob Bork’s, even if the trash was cultural and not literal.

The garbageologist’s life may be a sleazy one, but it’s not an easy one. Weberman suffered for his scholarship; Dylan once caught him rooting through the used Pampers and kicked his inquiring butt. Invading Judge Bork’s privacy could get me into trouble if we ever met face-to-face. But then, I’ve seen the man move – he might be in line to vote for reinstating the death penalty, but he’s way too slow to pull a Refrigerator Perry on me. And anyway, the judge indicated during his confirmation hearings that he’s not necessarily a rabid fan of the notion of a constitutional guarantee of privacy.

So let’s get Borkological. Let’s Bork out. Let’s Bork again like we did last summer....

Celebrating the stalker.

I really can't understand why the New York Times would write a substantial article about A.J. Weberman, a man who has rooted through Bob Dylan's garbage for years. I can see that he's written a book, but this isn't a book review, and there's no indication that the book is anything other than a deluded obsessive's compilation of invented interpretations of song lyrics (published by the Yippie Museum Press).