Update 7 Oct 2009: Professor Rivera-Ayala responded to my email and I posted our exchange.

This is the kind of thing I can’t stand.

A senior student sent Iris Jastram at Pegasus Librarian an email suggesting that she buy Sergio Rivera-Ayala’s new book, El discurso colonial en textos novohispanos: espacio, cuerpo y poder. That’s a pretty normal thing for librarians at institutions like Iris’s and mine. I tell students working on theses to let me know if they come across books we should own.

But this email was strange enough to ring some warning bells for Iris. She tends to know the seniors in her subject areas, and they call their senior projects “comps,” not “thesis.” So she called the registrar and found no student by that name registered.

So the message was spam. Sleezy spam. From the publisher, Tamesis? From the author Sergio Rivera-Ayala? It’s impossible to tell, and Iris is wise enough not to speculate.

So that was a little kerfuffle, but it cooled right down. Until the comments tonight.

Someone using the name “Verga Parati” makes a comment wondering why she wouldn’t just buy the book anyway. I mean, besides the lying fraud, it’s probably a good book anyway? The commenter ends with “Jesus, what kind of librarians are you?”

I wondered what kind of commenter this was, so I googled the name to find out that “verga para ti” is Spanish for “cock for you.” Boy, I’d hate my parents if they somehow accidentally gave me a name that was a Spanish obscenity. Then every time I showed up in someone’s blog comments to give them a hard time about not adding a Spanish-language book to the collection, they wouldn’t take me seriously and would assume I was trying to send a veiled sexually hostile message to the librarian. Man, that would be a drag.

Then another comment comment from Mr./Ms Cock came in, trying to be a little nicer, but still implying that Iris should buy the book. Iris’s last reply makes it clear that she knows where the cock person is posting from and that this information is perhaps incriminating to some degree.

I’m sorry that this post is mostly a play-by-play rehash of something on Pegasus Librarian. But this is the kind of thing I simply hate: people using the anonymity of the net to try and lie and defraud and intimidate. I’ll be contacting the author, Sergio Rivera-Ayala, and the publisher, Tamesis, tomorrow to be sure they know that someone is doing this. If I were Sergio Rivera-Ayala, I’d be most distressed that someone was griefing librarians about my book and I would make every effort to find the real emailer and commenter and make them apologize publicly.

(This also reminds me that I need to make a comment policy. Basically, anyone who uses a pseudonym or otherwise falsely identifies themselves in my comments gives up all right to privacy. Try and pull any crap like this with me and I will publish your IP address and everything I know about you.)