Smart filtered by a dumb brown shirted computer

I work in a public community library which I find to be quite a joyful place where people come to learn, read and enjoy their community and one of its finer churches.

As librarians we seem to be valued as almost shamanistic care-takers of a public place which is safe and and interested in sharing knowledge, and literature and providing a happy venue in which the local community can feel at home and enjoy its public manifestation.

Naturally the best of us like to show off our almost psychic powers in being able to find the authors of books following the single clue that "it has a black cover."

The library is also a place which is not hell bent on relieving people of their money.

It has long been the mission of public librarians to allow people a freedom to read. We seem to value this.

We also keep such gems as Lolita and Henry Miller's The Tropic of Capricorn. These are two of the funniest books I have ever read.

Nowadays, I suppose as a salute to that great librarian from Hull (who spent a long time on the cull), Philip Larkin, we also keep Adult graphic novels and Mills and Boon and "Black Lace" fiction and various nordic updates on the Karma Sutra which seem to be favourites with the How to Get Pregnant Without Really Trying reader. These readers invariably show up later in the library with their chldren to hear my sage advice at children's storytime when I sing "If you're happy and you know it wash your hands; if you're happy and you know it clean your teeth". If they are lucky they will hear me read Dr Heinrich Hoffman's Little Tom SuckaThumb or Augustus.

(Augustus was a chubby lad, fat ruddy cheeks Augustus had and everybody saw with joy the plump, and healthy, hearty boy

But one day, one cold Winter's day he said oh take the nasty soup away I'll not have any soup today...

final line of the long poem and after a week's worth of whingeing:

the next day he was dead!)

Nowadays we librarians also have an interest in "information literacy" and literature and its evolving forms.

We have a professional interest in the nature of the new media such as blogspot, facebook etc as discussed in my previous blog where I have indicated a little disquiet about the censorious tendencies in these media.

(I notice that the father of the internet Tim Berners Lee has also expressed some disquiet as to the information silos of of the Facebook wide web in today's press.)

But imagine my surprise, dear reader, when I emailed a copy of my post on these issues that it was "smart filtered" by my work place "dumb filter". I was denied access to the email because, according to the my censor the dumb filter, it contained offensive material and profanities!!!

Jesus Christ!!!! Was it Henry the Eight who said "when I break wind all of Rome hears the news."

Naturally I pursued the censors which I know to be machines that look out for words that contain the letters "fukcing" and maybe "nude". I found this censor's minders turned out to be a pair of eighteen year old computer nerds whose duty it was to report the liberation of profane communications to "security" while at the same time relieved that at last there was something interesting for them to read.

Oh the rise and rise of the censorious and easy possibility of brown shirtism in our oh so clever electronic world.

What hope for Otto Dix?

What hope for Henry Miller, Raphael et al...