I know this is supposed to be—and is (cough)—a real heart-heater, but I can’t help seeing it the ways I sees it:

Librarian loves her cat, lives in New York City and vows to install a radio frequency device in an item apt to go missing.

Ah, Valentine’s Day: Another pagan holiday commercialized into dopiness, with the boon of making people feel crummy when single, guilty when unmindful or insecure about appropriate levels of induced specialness. And what, pray tell, is up with those hearts?

The heart icon ♥ bears little resemblance to the anatomical human heart. Is it supposed to? Let’s find out. Some internet digging reveals that the heart icon more closely resembles a cow’s heart, which people in centuries past would be more apt to witness. Sounds reasonable.

Another interesting suggestion is it derives from the now extinct plant silphium, which grew wild near the ancient city of Cyrene. With seedpods of perfectly shaped Valentine’s-style hearts, silphium was used as contraception and to induce abortions. What says love and romance better than no kids?

How about a spread vulva?—another possibility for the heart icon, along with the buttocks and bosom. Throw in Cupid’s happily piercing arrow, and methinks we have our answer.

The above summary was hashed from Wikipedia and a handful of other sites devoid of reference (I’m curious, does everyone cut-and-paste from Wikipedia, or does everyone contributing to Wikipedia just rip off these sites? Wikipedia’s section on “heart as icon” regrettably also lacks citations.)

One last fun use for the heart symbol, discovered in Carl Liungman’s Dictionary of Symbols [amazon | worldcat]:

Nowadays, at least in Sweden, ♥ is strongly associated with the behind and defecation, as it is the sign used to denote a toilet for both sexes (p. 230, 1991 edition).

That’s just wonderful.

The Dictionary of Symbols is wonderful, too, with most of it available online at Symbols.com. I particularly like the hobo and gypsy signs. Check out the H index and scroll down to where “Here” starts to get a taste of the concerns of turn of the last century drifters. A sample:

Here live angry dogs and brutal people.
Here the locks are easily opened.
Here people tell you to go to hell.

I would like to acknowledge the associates who contacted Brainchild Protection Services to report my neglect of the Rising. I appreciate your concern and assure you all that though current evidence may not suggest it, the Rising has been on my mind a lot: not just ideas for more mysteries to unravel, but new directions completely.

This, amidst the following:

• November semester wrap-up and living arrangement snafu: I barreled through digital library proposals and the classification of medieval Chinese Buddhist thought while simultaneously searching for a new place to live in a city I didn’t have time to visit, finding someone to rent my room in Vancouver, packing up my life and planning a trip to…

• NYC and a two-week practicum at the New York Public Library: Most of my experience has been in academic libraries and I lean hard in this direction with career aspirations. I am nonetheless intrigued by public librarianship and had the amazing opportunity to immerse myself in the NYPL organization, providing reference with the General Research Division and exploring their incredible collections (I touched a Gutenberg Bible! I perused a Blake with original color plates! I rode the lions!). After the two weeks, I traveled to the Midwest for the remains of December—a full month of living out of a suitcase, and then…

• I moved to Victoria, BC, and started a new job at the University of Victoria. What about library school? It’s part of the program, albeit optional—it’s called a co-op, that is, cooperative education, a bit of Canadian brilliance shining its light on me. Although delaying my graduation (I have one semester left), this four-month internship is providing me with knockout experience developing and promoting UVic’s institutional repository and researching scholarly communications and open access publishing.

Suffice to say, I have been busy; and, as said, thinking of the Rising often. Though I still enjoy its original premise, I think it can, and should, do more. In addition to Rising Lights: indulging curiosity and knowledge partying, I also propose to observe…

• Rising Visions: LIS kudos and critique. The Library and Information Science/Studies field is fantastic and endlessly fascinating—and invariably frustrating, too. As a young library professional, I am fortunate and excited to have found a discipline so closely aligned with my personal interests and pursuits. While this passion drives me forward, it also rankles and confounds me to see LIS floundering—coattail-clinging, bandwagon-chasing, kid-sibling naïve and routinely clueless. I love it, dearhearts! And this makes it necessary to examine it and participate within it critically.

• Rising Voices: information activism. I endeavor to share more resources, news and responses about and to the current state of information: access, copyright, literacy and privacy. And piracy! And deception! Information insurgencies and insurrections! Citizens’ rights and responsibilities regarding what we know and what is known—and what others, Big Brothers and Media King Advertisers, know about us.

So how is the cure for shirked ambition more ambition? When there’s a massive mental redirection and renewed vitality brought on by a mix of hiatus and deeper delving: on leave from school yet engrossed in the field. While the experience provided by the co-op has been and will continue to be great by itself, an unexpected result of taking a break from school—delaying graduation—has been the time and mental space to assess and make sense of everything I’ve been learning in the past two years.

The amount of content required for the MLIS degree is appropriate, but two years is too short to digest it—to truly examine what I’ve been studying, to see it in action and to explore where I want it to take me… and where I might want to take it. I can just as well be public about this process—the parts that comprise the Rising in all of its guises.

So stay tuned. More soon.

I just tried to comment on my previous post, and I got a blank page. I can’t figure it out after several hours of frustrating investigation. I don’t know if this is a new problem or if commenting has been defunct for awhile—no one alerted me, suffice to say. Preliminary tests worked, but that was a million hacks and redirects in the past. Some blog this is, minus commenting, but this has a low priority given current states, and I do not have the time to fix it now—or as the situation seems, to reinstall the whole damn thing. Until further notice, consider this dead.

Oh: my comment was I just discovered that someone set a fire in my mailbox, presumably by throwing lit fireworks inside on Halloween, which scorched my new American Library Association membership card.

Here we are, a whole moon later already breaking down, and I was oh-so-pleased with my time-nabbing fortitude keen-set on crafting some rising. But two solid hours of research later, I’m still stumped by Vancouver’s peculiar and apparently undocumented Halloween tradition: fireworks.

That’s right, fireworks. Big fireworks. Baby fireworks. Bottle rockets down alleys and thunderous booms in inky skies scattering the half-pint ghouls. Fireworks on Halloween is unheard of in the States, save the few scamps with the superhuman patience who can hoard a cache from the Fourth of July. Nor, apparently, is it the norm for Canada at large—just some parts of British Columbia, with many cities recently making it illegal or requiring difficult-to-obtain permits.

In Vancouver, fireworks can only be purchased and ka-powed by people 19 or older and on their own property. There’s also a list of prohibited ‘works (good ol’ fashioned firecrackers, roman candles smaller than three-quarters inch thick (??) and single-report fireworks (laaaaame))—and don’t forget the Vancouver Fire and Rescue Service’s baffling recommendation to “wait at least 30 minutes” before investigating alleged duds [*].

But… why any of this? How’d this get started, when, why, who? Really, it’s a kid-dream come true—the rowdiest, riskiest, most creative and delicious holidays combined into one bloody blowout of free sweets, alter egos and setting things on fire. I’m also intrigued by the different, regional ways of celebrating a holiday in general—or of pushing it to the brink, letting a whole city go to hell for the hell of it, or perhaps more accurately, because it became the thing to do, a tradition of perdition, like Detroit’s Devil’s Night.

In the seventies to the mid-nineties or so, during the night to three nights before Halloween in Detroit, hooligan citizens committed devastating acts of vandalism and arson. I first heard of it from a former supervisor who grew up in Detroit, experiencing the worst fire-pierced years. Why egg the house of an enemy when you could burn it down? As weird as this “tradition” sounds, far stranger was its perceived normality. Said supervisor had thought every city in America burned itself down every eve of the Eve.

Though of much different caliber, fireworks in Vancouver is still rather unique. I started my research on the internets and found nothing except a few other souls asking the same question with no clear ideas or replies from their readers, just exclamations of nostalgia and childhood joy, and shock from non-BC natives that the tradition exists. I did, however, get a few hints. The fireworks are perhaps related to the British Guy Fawkes Day (”Remember Remember the Fifth of November!”) Or, given the sizeable population of Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver, it could stem from the historical Chinese influence, a claim that sounds both racist (fireworks! must be the Chinese!) and uncomfortably reasonable.

Wanting more substantial (and substantiated) information, I emailed the Vancouver Historical Society and was promptly told that my query,”What is the history of lighting fireworks in Vancouver on Halloween?” was not, in fact, Vancouver-specific (huh?) and couldn’t be answered by the apparently-having-better-things-to-do Society. I was referred instead to Wikipedia.

Ouch. Okay, fine. Wikipedia confirms that lighting fireworks in Vancouver is a popular tradition. I also see that firework displays are popular in Ireland, both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, with restrictions and consequent black market smuggling in the latter with draconian punishments for possession of fireworks with intent to make merry. (Better pray that artillery shell’s a beaut, ’cause if caught it’ll cost ya £10,000 or five years in prison.) There ends fireworks on Halloween.

So what about the Guy Fawkes connection? Bonfire Night, the English holiday remember remembering the execution of the 1605 would-be Parliament exploder, Guy Fawkes, is traditionally celebrated in Newfoundland, but from what I understand, is tapering off—and may be watered down to begin with, with a bonfire minus the guy burning up in it, so where’s the fun in that. There’s scarce mention of celebrating it on Vancouver Island and none that I can find in Vancouver.

There is, however, evidence that the British Guy Fawkes, which includes the effigy burning, bonfires and fireworks, is also tapering off—at least isn’t what it used to be [*]. But also of interest and more relevance, the holiday has become entangled with Halloween, at least was in the minds of children in the mid-eighties, with bonfires on the Hallows and pennies for the guys and general nightfall mischief all week long (from “Trickster on the Threshold,” an oldish but neat article article from the journal Folklore [worldcat]).

As I write this, the dark is sounding off—intermittent bangs and squeals, fire fizzing up and out over the city. I still don’t have my answer (and won’t bother documenting a half dozen other inconsequential leads—nothing quite fits). I know the reason is out there—a history and origin if not a rationale—and if not in books or bytes, in people’s heads. But it won’t be found by me before the night is through. And, alas, I’ve other Halloween things to do.

Hope yours was creepy, safe, fun and full of curiosity(/ies).

PS—If anyone has any ideas or insider information about fireworks on Halloween, I’d love to know about it. Add a comment below!