Philobiblon

A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

BBC journalist Paul Mason in a blog post early in 2011 titled Twenty reasons why it is kicking off everywhere, which almost instantly filled my Twitter feed and discussion on multiple email lists. You might have called it the History 1.0 version of explaining the Arab spring, Occupy, the indignados of Europe – everything important from 2011. He has just returned to the subject, with Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions. You might call it version 1.3 – a few initial kinks ironed out, a little more perspective obtained, a few more experiences added.

Wisely, he very explicitly says this is journalism, not history, and he disavows any claim to be trying to provide a unifying theory of events, or to be the movements’ guru.

Nonetheless, he does provide a useful perspective for thinking about the current state of world protest – in simple terms, what is the best historical parallel, and what lessons might be drawn from it? He looks at 1848, which followed an economic crisis, the politics starting in Paris where the Parisian workers overthrew the monarchy (“a shock because, like Saif Gaddafi and Gamal Mubarak long afterwards, King Louis-Philippe had counted himself something of a democrat”) and the subsequent wave of revolutions in Austria, Hungary, Poland and states in what is now Germany, with monarchies forced into constitutional form elsewhere.

His general conclusion about what then went wrong then? “Once the workers began to fight for social justice, the businessmen and radical journalists show had led the fight for democracy turned against them, rebuilding the old, dictatorial forms of repression to put them down. conversely, where the working class was weak or non-existent, the radical middle classes would die on the barricades, often committed to a left wing programme themselves.” (p171) He doesn’t explore how that translates into modern times, but the possibilities are obvious.

Other options he proposes are 1917, but these were events led by “hardened revolutionary socialists” and involving a “large industrial working class”; 1968, but that was more “surge of protests with students in the lead, workers and the urban poor taking it to the verge of insurrection only in France, Czechoslovakia and America’s ghettos,” and 1989′ but that occurred, with the exception of Romania, by “demonstrations, passive resistances and a large amount of diplomacy”. (p171)

Soberly, he concludes 1848 is the best parallel, events which ended of course in widespread war and the general triumph of reaction.

If he does provide one simple philosophical framework for understanding today – and I think it is a pretty good one to be working with – it is that 2011 is “a revolt against Hayek and the principles of greed and selfishness that he espoused”. (p207) (his explanation of Hayek runs “he said that social justice was unachievable and that the inequality and misery produced by capitalism we both moral and logical”.
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A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

I finished Guy Standing’s The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class thinking that the parts were rather more than the whole. There’s lots of fascinating statistics, facts and anecdotes, and the idea of the precariat – while already well established in general form in debates about casualisation and commodification of workers – is a useful one, but the author’s determination to fit without a particular political framework, to declare, with a specific set of technical meanings, that this is a new class, weakened rather than strengthened his arguments.

The definition of this class slips and slides all over the place. At one point Standing even seems to suggest that it includes “gays and lesbians [who] feel insecure in a society geared to heterosexual mores and standard nuclear families”. (p. 63) It includes the obvious migrant workers in low pay jobs in meat processing and care, but also, it seems, a 24-year-old social worker on £28K (reported in the Observer) who’s denied the chance to progress in her career, but has to wait for a post to become available. (p. 20). As the use of a newspaper case study as a key part of the argument in that case shows, it also has the feel of a very 21st-century cut and paste job, with inadequate digestion of the mass of material amassed. Nonetheless, I’d still call it as a well-worth-reading.

The accumulation of the statistics about the decline of the place of the working person is impressive, and depressing. The slide of the Nineties is obvious in US figures – the number of firms offering healthcare benefits fell from 69% in 2000 to 60% in 2009. But the decline had gone on longer – US employers paid 89% of retirement benefits contributions in 1980, 52% by 2006. (p. 42)

Quoting the National Strategic Skills Audit of 2010, England’s fastest growing jobs over the previous decade “included a few modern professions and crafts – conservation officers, town planners, psychologists and hairdressers – but mainly consisted of semi-professional jobs, such as paramedics, legal associates and teachers’ assistants.” (p. 40) Standing notes how entitlement to benefits is dependent on regular participation in the labour market, or a “breadwinner” in the household. Market demands had to be met to obtain a social income. (p. 41)

And there’s determination to force those on benefits into unattractive, unrewarding, hopelessly paid jobs. “Lawrence Mead, an American libertarian invited by Downing Street to advise the British government immediately after it was elected in 2010. His view of claimants is that ‘government must persuade them to blame themselves.” (p. 143)

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A shorter version was originally published on Blogcritics.

Stewart Lansley’s The Cost of Inequality: Three Decades of The Super-Rich and the Economy is full of figures to make the blood boil.
* According to Forbes, the number of American billionaires jumped 40-fold in the 25 years to 2007. In that period general US incomes stagnated in real terms, but the aggregate wealth of the top 400 soared from $169 to $1500 billion. (p. 7)

* The average pay of chief executives of Britain’s biggest 100 companies grew by 11% per annum in real terms 1999-2006; for other fulltime employees the figure was 1.4%. (p. 24) In the US chief execs’ pay ratio to workers’ from 1960 (42 to one) had leapt to 334 to one by 2007. (p. 25)

* To make it global, the combined wealth of the world’s 1000 richest people is almost twice as much as the poorest 2.5 billion. (p.27)

It makes the point that most of us have been around for long enough can feel instinctively – all of this is not some kind of inevitable way of things, but a relatively recent, and relatively sudden, development. In the early 1970s “most rich nations … were characterised by unprecedented levels of equality” (p. 14). In the US from the start of the Thirties to the mid-Fifties was known as “the great compression”. In the UK it was known as the “great levelling”. (p. 14). The trend slowed and then came to a halt in the 1970s, then went into reverse, returning to levels of inequality of the Twenties: “almost half a century of economic and social progress had unravelled in little more than two decades”. (p. 15)

The symmetry is amazing. In the US the top 1% took, at its lowest point in 1976 8.9% of the national income, but by 2007 this had risen to 23.5% – the same level it had been in the late Twenties. (p. 20) In this economic “megashift” the top 30 US family and individual fortunes were, collectively, 10 times the size of the same group 17 years earlier – this is more like 19th century leaps. (p. 22)

There’s original thinking in The Cost of Inequality, chiefly in its historical framing that shows the circle we’ve made back to the Twenties (and in same place back to 19th-century robber baron capitalism). And if not entirely original, it powerfully develops its argument for the causes, and the consequences. Lansley concludes that it was the slump in the power of organised labour in the 1980s that allowed real wage growth to fall behind profit growth in productive capacity while profits soared (p. 30)

As to why this has caused huge economic imbalances, at the basics, it is obvious – purchasing power couldn’t buy the extra output being produced (between 1980 and 2007, real wages in the UK rose by 1.9%/year, but economic capacity grew by 1.9% – p. 55), so, particularly in the US and UK, the government allowed, indeed encouraged, massive increases in lending to private individuals. This greatly increased the size and profits of the financial sector. There were thus, from finance and other industries, huge amounts of liquid cash sloshing around the world, at every increasing speed, passing regularly through London and New York, with regular stops in tax havens.

“Little of this circulating pool of hot money ended up in sustainable, wealth and job-creating investment. Money poured into hedge funds, private equity houses, takeovers, commodities and commercial property. … large speculative deals … offered, at the time, spectacular returns. Asset prices and business values soared. Deal-making and corporate restructuring became highly complex mechanisms for transferring existing rather than creating new wealth.” (p. 32) Once again, we’re back to 1929.
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A shorter version was published on Blogcritics.

Back in 2006, it was in part concern about world food supplies – and particularly the condition of the soils and water that produce them – that led me to join the Green Party. I did an agricultural science degree, a long time ago, and I never “practiced” as a scientist, but an interest in soils, and comprehension that their complexity is something that is terribly important and terribly poorly understood, has stayed with me. And being an Australian, particularly one who spent some time in the bush, an awareness of water scarcity is part of my DNA.

Since then, I’ve had to ration my reading on the subject. It’s too depressing to confront it too often. But it seemed when I came across The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do To Avoid It by Julian Cribb, from the University of Technology Sydney (ah, I remember its wool science lab well!), published last year, it was time to update with the words of a specialist.

We’re already in a bad place. As Cribb notes, in the Soviet grain emergency of 1972-5, world food prices rose by 78%, while between 2005 and 2008, they rose on average by 80%. (p.3) But in the intervening period, it is very clear, global governments and NGOs took their eye off the ball. They thought food was fixed, sorted, and would keep on getting cheaper. And it is set to get a lot worse:

The challenge facing the world’s 1.8 billion women and men who grow our food is to double their output of food – suing far less water, less land, less energy, and less fertilizer. They must accomplish this on low and uncertain returns, with less new technology available, amid more red tape, economic disincentives, and corrupted markets, and in the teeth of spreading drought.” (p. 13)

On soil loss, Cribb is bigger than others I’ve read on the spread of cities, noting that adding all of the world’s urban areas together they are estimated to occupy 4.75 million square kilometres, about half the size of the US or China (p. 58), and making the, good, point, that not only do they consume land for housing, but also for leisure facilities around them – golf courses, playing fields etc, plus off course in the West anyway commuter belts. Because cities are usually located on the best agricultural land, they’re also pushing farming into more marginal territory, where soil degradation, saliniation etc are likely to be more of a problem.

Cribb follows one of my favourite issues in stressing how much cities once did and could again supply a significant proportion of their own food, but current planning policies actively work to prevent this. (This madness being just a small example.) And he’s big on the need for cities to preserve nutrients (yes, I’m a big fan of composting toilets for this reason) – “humanity is thought to produce around 3 billion tonnes of phosporus in its sewage, so, in theory at least, the world’s cities concentrate around 1.5 billion tonnes- an immense resource that is largely wasted by flushing it into the oceans”. (p. 80) Particularly telling since peak phosphorus (produced from rock) was around 1989 – and “there’ are no substitutes for phosphorus. It is fundamental to the chemistry that supports all forms of life”. (p. 76)

And supplies depend on a narrow range of sources: “The lion’s share of phospate production… comes from China (37%), Morocco and the Western Sahara (32%), South Africa (8%) and the US (7%). Potash [one of the other key nutrients] is obtained by mining potassium salts and comes chiefly from four countries – Canada (53%), Russia (22%), Belarus (9%) and Germany (9%).” (p. 72) Nitrogen, the other key element, is mostly made from synthetic ammonia made using natural gas and is made in more than 60 countries. (Still sounds like a powerful argument for the coplete fertiliser of compost to me!
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A shorter version was published on Blogcritics

I blame this particular recent acquisition on the Guardian Books of the Year guide. When distinguished veteran historian Eric Hobsbawm recommended Göran Therborn’s The World: A Beginners Guide as follows, what could I do but buy it: “a survey of the present state, problems and outlook of the globe by a Swedish master sociologist, is one of the rare books that lives up to its title. It is lucid, intelligent about the future and admirably researched.”

To be honest, this isn’t a gripping read. It’s rather encyclopedic, survey nature left me sometimes wondering if perhaps the washing up needed doing, or maybe some weeding, but I am glad that I read it – and I’m sure that I’ll be regularly referring to it for some time to come.

It’s one of those books that keeps throwing at you facts that make you look up and ask anyone else in the room “did you know that…?” “In 1820 more than half of the world’s goods were still produced in Asia and only about a fourth in Europe” (p.45), or “illiterate people didn’t get a vote in Brazil until 1989″ (p. 74) or “40% of the world’s parents still have a say over their children’s marriages” (p. 168).

As that small collection illustrates, this book is not in fact about the world, but about the human race, and it takes an admirably global, even-handed approach in its account, with pretty well all parts of the world fairly covered. (Which means, sorry UK, it’s hardly ever significant and different enough to get a mention.) At various points this Swede who’s now an emeritus professor at the University of Camdridge lets drop about teaching in Korea and Iran, and that breadth of experience comes out in his work. He’s also got a broad stretch. He’s explicitly not writing a history – he recommends Fernandez-Armesto’s The World: A Global History, for that – but he certainly takes the long view of developments today in relation to events over the past few centuries or so, and sometimes longer.

He wants to understand “sociocultural geology – looking at the “enduring effects of ancient civilisations, multiple waves of globalization, different pathways to modernity”. (p. 3) Then he wants to understand human evolution (certainly not in a determinative biological sense), as a result of interactions between humans and nature, competition between different political and economic systems, cultures and values, and the impositions laid upon lives by events.

And finally he looks at this through the lenses of the human life course. Noting of course that for many, the risk of being cut off before the age of five still remains disastrously high, while even in developed countries, wealth has a lot to do with outcomes. Finally all this produces an ideal 21st-century life course:

“A safe birth followed by non-authoritarian parenting in Northwestern Europe, continued by a Finnish-style state schooling – top performing, independent of your parents’ wealth, no cramming. Then, growing up into a free Northwestern European youth, with the ability to travel the world, an Oxbridge university education, and ending in style with a memorable wedding anywhere in Asia, with a wonderful partner from a different culture from your own. After that, you would embark, on an exciting, hard-working and high rewarding adulthood in a big city in East Asia (or India). This would be followed by a serene retirement in some quiet, beautiful and well-connected place, like Geneva or Vancouver. Finally, you had better go to Scandinavia for elder care.” (p. 207)

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First published on Blogcritics

I was reading an article about “Armageddon fiction” — well there is a lot of it around at the moment, for obvious reasons — and comment left on it recommended Gwyneth Jones’s Bold As Love in a way that caught my fancy. Something a bit both radical but also playful seemed like the seasonal thing, if you’re going to read something like this at all. (Couldn’t face The Road again – it is a brilliant book, but I spent two weeks depressed after reading it!)

Published in 2001, it tells the story of “Dissolution Summer”, as Britain splits into its constituent parts, the economic and technical systems break down, and total societal collapse looms. (The rest of the world, we sketchily learn, is on varying parts of the same spectrum.)

What’s curious, reading it now, is how many echoes there are of the Occupy movement, in a novel written more than a decade before the first Occupy tent peg was driven in. At the centre of the story are fans of alternative music, and alternative lifestyles, who gather at traditional spots (and some non-traditional) around the country and refuse to move. They’re keen on a particular mask (though this is fro a rock group, not a movie, as today). And there’s a faint echo of Charlie Brooker’s recent Black Mirror – albeit far grimmer, in the fall of England’s first prime minister/dictator.

There’s also a war with Islamic separatists in Yorkshire, 300,000 environmental refugees and cyclical brownouts as the fossil fuel runs out – not much that dates there. Although perhaps the nation looking to alternative music stars has – we’ve had far too much X Factor for that industry’s magical gloss to have been retained.

The whole thing is centred around a romance, told from the perspective of the female lead, which not being a reader of romances I often found quite irritating, and it fluctuates in tone and content between the fantasy genre (this is the first of the series and you get the feeling the main character’s “magic” credentials will come to the fore later – Jones gets a touch of JK Rowling influence there, you feel) and rather more realist disaster fiction – the later elements being those I found more interesting.
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A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

Sometimes it helps to approach politics from a sideways direction – from a different perspective you can see the old political issues – why was the British Labour government from 1997 to 2010 so awful in so many ways (only of course to be far surpassed by our current Tory-Lib Dem nightmare)? – in new ways.

Owen Hatherley in A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain approaches from the direction of architecture, and very enlightening, if depressing, that direction turns out to be – helped by a wry, not infrequently laugh-out-loud dry sarcasm and a minimum use of professional jargon. He’s on form on the Science Centre in Glasgow – “If we really need these comprehensive redevelopment-trailing enclaves of titanium tat housing interactive experiences to patronise pre-teens (and I see no reason why we do), then this is one of the better example.” (p. 191)

Despite the general lack of jargon, I did, however, learn a new term, Googie, for architecture that originated in American Forties to Sixties roadside diners and coffee shops, designed to catch the eye of passing motorists, and which Hatherley traces through “radical” architecture to the typical boring but “enlivened” by weird roof shapes and odd bits poking out or off kilter that characterises a mean and poky “luxury flat complex” that’s bound to be located near you – “its forbears are in the aesthetics of consumption and advertising, its forms designed to be seen at great speed, not in serene contemplation. It should not surprise us that a style of consumption would return under neoliberalism, but the formal affinities of Pseudomodernism with this aesthetic offers an alternative explanation for what often seems an arbitrary play of forms. By drawing on the futurism of the McCarthy era, the architecture of the equally conformist neoliberal consensus establishes a link between two eras of political stagnation and technological acceleration. It also allows us to reinterpret what purports to be an aesthetic of edification as one of consumption…. The architecture once described as deconstructivist owes less to Derrida than it does to McDonald’s.” (p. xxix)

So that pretty well tells you where Hatherley is coming from, both politically and architecturally. He’s a fervent critic of the past couple of decades of “regeneration” of British cities, and something of a defender, if far from an uncritical one, of the aspirations of the Fifties and Sixties – and the structures built then, often poorly and carelessly, but he says with good intentions, and designs that would have held up fine had faith, and investment, been maintained. Now instead we’ve got, he says, rightly in my view, mean and pinched, poorly built structures characterised by “vernacular” brickwork (often clearly “decorative”) and slatted wood, or even worse plastic and plasticky or metalled panelling in preschooler-friendly colours, thrown up by developers with no consideration to the environments in which they’re placed. Topped off, of course, with oddly angled or shaped roofs, which almost invariably leak. (I’m reminded of a Camden new block of flats crammed into a busy road that I visited recently – badly placed glass, odd shapes, and plaster weeping from barely finished walls to show the cheap and shoddy concrete block beneath.) And that’s without mentioning the seemingly deliberately, outright, unredeemably ugly hotels….
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I’ve been reading recently about the people of Southeast Asia who seem to have chosen a “lower” level of development – and a freer, less laborious life – with an attempt to look at a view of history from outside the nation state, and that took me on to Joseph A Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies.

Published in 1988 it is a book that sometimes shows its age (and I think its account of the Ik in northern Uganda – based on others’ research – is frankly bizarre and nonsensical; the controversy is discussed on Wikipedia).

But I found myself revisiting the thoughts of how many peoples through history might have chosen to move back to a lower level of complexity and technology, in the interests of a better life (a thought with obvious importance today).

Tainter is, as you’d expect, much interested in the fall of Rome, which he puts down to, as with other cases, to a decline on the rate of return on expansion, to the point where it starts to be negative: “the Empire had to maintain a far-flung, inflexible administrative and military structure on the basis of variable agricultural output, and in the face of an increasingly hostile political environment.” (p. 149) “During the fourth and fifth centuries .. The Empire… was suistaining itself by the consumption of its capital resources: producing lands and peasant population…. the Dominate paid for the present by undermining the future’s ability to pay taxes… reduced finances weakened military defense, while military disasters in turn meant further loss of producing lands and population.” (p. 150)

His view of the so-called Dark Ages is rather different to the classic one: “The collapse yielded at the same time both a reduction in the costs of complexity and an increase in the marginal return on its investment. The smaller, Germanic kingdoms that succeeded Roman rile in the West were more successful at resisting foreign incursions (e.g. Huns and Arabs) than had been the later Empire. They did so, morever, at lower administrative and military costs. The economic prosperity of North Africa actually rose under the Vandals, but declined again under Justinian’s reconquest when Imperial taxes were reimposed. Thus the paradoz of collapse: a drop in compexity brings ith it a corresponding rise in the marginal return on social investment.” (p. 151)

So there as, Tainter suggests, often a welcome for the “barbarians”. “Contemporary records indicate that, more than once, both rich and poor wished that the barbarians would deliver them from the burdens of Empire. While some of the civilian population resisted the barbarians (with varying degrees of earnestness), and many more were simply inert in the presence of the invaders, some actively fought for the barbarians. In 378, for example, Balkan miners went over en masse to the Visigoths. In Gaul the invaders were sometimes welcomed as liberators from the Imperial burden, and were even invited to occupy territory. … Zosimus, a writer of the second half of the fifth century AD, wrote of Thessaly and Macedonia that “as a result of this exaction of taxes city and ountryside ere full of laments and complaints and all invoked the barbarians and sought the help of the barbarians”.” (p. 147)
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With the fourth election of the London Mayor and Assembly, in which I’ll be taking a part, fast approaching (all those doors to knock on!), now seemed an opportune time to take a look back over the origins and structure of this rather curious institution of the Greater London Authority (that term applies _only_ to the combination of the two, for those who like to get the technicalities right – hi Darren!)

I’ve got a lot of respect for Tony Travers, not only because I know that he’s one of a handful of experts on local government in Britain, but because he very sharply chaired one of the ten hustings in 2010 for Holborn and St Pancras, and helped make it one of the most interesting. So his The Politics of London: Governing an Ungovernable City seemed a must-read.

In it, he covers the lead-up to the creation of the GLA in 2000, and the first three years of its existence. I must admit some of the latter is really only of interest to the specialist, but he’s very interesting on the historical long-view of London – broadly what he sees as the “ungovernableness”, and the strains, stresses and nature of the unusual (in British terms) and rather anomalous constitution structure that we have today.

He explains: “The status of the GLA is unclear. The mayor’s hugh electorate and the GLA’s strategic role suggest devolved regional government, like the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, but the financial rules and close continuing central government control make it look more like local government. … it is not the top tier in a vertically integrated hierarchical system of metropolitan government. As set out in the legislation, and confirmed in practice, the powers of the mayor are largely those of patronage, persuasion and publicity. Patronage, through his or her ability to appoint to functional bodies; persuasion, using limited control over resources and position at the centre of hat is a continuing system of network and multi-level governance; and publicity through exploiting the mayor’s legitimacy, accountability and democratic claim to ‘speak for London’.” (p. 68)
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From A Journey Through the Ruins: The Last Days of London, by Patrick Wright, a slightly curious mixture of architectural/heritage comment and development politics of the 1980s in the capital (first published in 1991). A few snippets of interest…

“Hackney’s experiment with high-rise flats was accompanied by the usual allegations of corruption and graft, but whatever may have been going on locally, there can be no doubt at all that large dividends were being reaped elsewhere. Patrick Dunleavy investigated the links between national politicians, civil servants and the large construction companies that thrived on the public housing programmes during the years of Conservative government, and his findings certainly add up to an interesting picture of corporate and personal involvement. A significant number of of MPs had connections with the construction industry but so too did two ministers in the Cabinet responsible for the high flat subsidy*: Keith Joseph was heir to the Bovis fortune and Geoffrey Rippon was a director of Cubbitts. Among the construction companies both McAlpine and Taylor Woodrow were major contributors to the Conservative Party and also such right-wing pressure groups such as the Freedom Association. Dame Evelyn Sharp as Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government during the crucial years, 1954-64; she was also a friend of the construction boss, Neil Wates, and, after her retirement from the civil service, the holder of a directorship at Bovis. Kenneth Wood, Chariman of Concrete Ltd, as among the ‘advisers’ employed by the Ministry of Housing and Local Government from the construction industry; even as late as 1974, a Bovis executive was appointed to ‘mastermind a more vigorous public housing drive’.
Architects are still inclined to blame the worst excesses of the Sixties on every aspect of this planning framework, except their own professional culture. But there can be no doubt that a self-referring professional world built up; one in which consultation with the ‘client’ meant nothing more than discussion with borough architects, planners and other such experts who shared a professional outlook based on what Martin Pawley described as a ‘curious amalgam of ‘modern’ thought and scientific mumbo jumbo’.” (p. 92)

* High-rise flats were always an expensive form of housing… High-rise flats grew out of central-government subsidies. There were ‘expensive site’ subsidies in the Thirties, and in 1946 Attlee’s Labour government had added a ne increment per flat for blocks of at least four storeys high with lifts. But … it was the Macmillan government that triggered the high-rise boom in 1956, when it introduced a progressive storey-height subsidy that gave large increments for four-, five- and six-storey flats and a fixed increment for every additional storey over that.” (p. 91)
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The mummies and the grave goods are unsurprisingly getting lots of attention in the new Egyptian galleries opened last month at the Ashmolean in Oxford, but on a visit today it was the Nubian aspects of the collection that really got my attention.

Particularly the Meroitic pots – a style I don’t recall seeing before, of a much under-rated and under-covered civilisation (certainly Egyptian influenced, but very distinctive).

I was particularly taken with this Hathor pot…

But the liveliest were depictions of animals, such as this ibis sitting on the back of a crocodile…

These glorious frogs…

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The latest issue of the Institute for Historical Research points to a couple of rich online sources.

The History of Parliament online – pretty much what it says on the tin.

And the Connected Histories, covering 1500-1900. (Not all of the databases linked to are free, but all give at least a snippet, giving a sense of what’s there.)

Feeling very old when I think I can actually remember when the first CD journals arrived in the university library and I discovered the joys of full-text search!