possible kalopsic casualty

Last night I swam in a sea of almost-sleep, drifting in and out of almost-lucid dreams, all of which evaporated upon waking. It was the fan, I think. The fan instead of the A/C. What was I thinking. The Siren song of dropping humidity dripped its sugar-sweet serum into my ear holes. Damn you Weather Sirens. It is Wednesday now. My bird-of-the-day calendar displays a sleek Green Kingfisher. I replaced the bulb above my office plant. We are getting new green carpet; it smells bad and looks like it was torn out of some swinger’s 1960s basement rec room. I cringe at the thought of it creeping in all molester-like into my personal office space. My feet will never be the same. Violation! Violation. I am listening to the liferaft again. So help me, I cannot help myself. Do you know what i mean. Do you. Do you really know. I attended a meeting this morning. I was 9 minutes late on account of I was waiting for the coffee to stop brewing. Also my coworker and I were busy trash-talking the last 4 years of our professional lives. I am back to drinking too much coffee again. But I drink the special tea after lunch to try and repair the damage. It appears to work, but maybe not since there was the almost-sleep and that is a heavy consideration. i am eating my lunch now and not smoking a cigar. But I bet that guy is. I’ll bet he is. The liferaft has segued into the bedside table. That is where I keep the 5 books I am currently reading, most of them Kafka-related. But there is Jung, too. And Tessimond. All of my dear friends stacked in a pile within easy reach. With my Moleskine. Sigh. Last night while out walking Farley we saw a cat. It was not a metaphorical cat that might or might not be in a box, dead or alive. It was a real cat and Farley was interested. He stared under the car long after the cat had run back across the street. I want a cat so bad. Nearby to where I live a train went off the tracks in the dead of night. Two college girls were up on the bridge tweeting photos and they were buried under a mountain of coal. They died. I’d like to think this exposes the ills of social media, but I’m not sure. I feel bad about this. That’s why I listen to the liferaft so much. It makes the sounds that I feel inside most of the time. I am perhaps a blurred model of myself. I walk outside and brush my hand against the lavender blooms and surreptitiously sniff. Hey, it’s that guy who is always sniffing his hand. Yes, that is me. I enjoy touching things in nature that look soft. I find them irresistible. I find much of what is around me irresistible. The rest of it can fall off the planet for all I care. The Internet ruined my concentration. I enjoy chasing rabbits of information down their hidey holes. That is really what I do. Often. Sometimes I pass on what I find to others. Sandy Berman taught me that. He is a good man. We used to write letters back and forth. I was an over-excited new library school student. Now I just search for stuff on the Web. My idealism is easily trod upon into a gross paste that I plan to smear on the molester carpet when it arrives leering and panting outside my office door. What you don’t know is that I was just outside touching the lavender. Literally. Between that one sentence and the next. What do you think about that. My hand smells so fucking good right now. Outside there was a truck with bins on the side dispensing free energy bars. The orbs and their blobs were shoving their fleshy flaccid fingers in those bins so fast. But they are healthy nutrition bars. Ha! That is a fucking good trick! I feel so alive today. It made me walk fast. Surf the mania. I am 100% alive and 100% dead ALL THE TIME. I am petting the cat and its back is arched. I’m an out-of-the-box solution, suckers.

review of people magazine

“The horror! The horror!”
– Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

I feel like Kurtz today, holed up behind blackout shades typing in my lair as the heat blazes outside. I have been doing a disturbingly exhaustive update of my reading lists on Goodreads. In doing so, I pulled out some old papers from library school. While working on my degree, I took a course called “Popular Materials and Programming for Adults,” taught by the wonderful and esteemed Dr. Linda Walling. Now, I love Dr. Walling and consider her a strong influence in my librarianship, but she made us read a lot of terrible things in that class. Her theory was that in order to properly serve the adult population of a public library, you needed to read outside of your comfort zone. Did I mention she made us read a lot of books? As if graduate students have time to be reading 25 extra books in a semester?! But I digress. As part of this agony, she requested that we also read a couple of “popular magazines and newspapers.” I chose People magazine as one of them. I have entered the review I wrote below. If you’re curious about the books I read in that class, you’ll have to find me on Goodreads. You need to sign up in order to see my page, though. If you don’t know about Goodreads, it’s a site for people who enjoy obsessively recording their reading habits. If you’re into that, I’d encourage you to join. Then we can be obsessive together and hopefully find out about interesting books from each other. But enough banter…here’s the review:

More celebrity voyeurism [note: I’d just reviewed National Enquirer]. This time a little less sensationalism and slightly padded with “touching” human interest stories and slightly informative biographical sketches. Lots of ads for such items as Godiva ice cream and the latest Maeve Binchy novel. Sleazy pictures of Hollywood stars are mixed in with stories of family courage. Lots of pictures and short articles target the short attention span crowd. As it turns out, I’m not a member of that crowd, and would prefer to peruse the latest batch of zines I find stuffed in my mailbox. Oh, and I found this magazine in a box on the side of the road (I couldn’t bear to spend $2.99 of my hard-earned cash on something that’s going to end up in the recycling box) [prof’s note: That’s OK with me – why support them?].

flying the flag over fort futility

I’m at a low point in my job. I have no motivation for it. But it’s not that I’ve lost my passion for librarianship. It’s not that. I still fervently subscribe to Sandy Berman’s adage that “I can’t have information I know would be of use to someone and not share it.” This philosophy, I believe, is the golden kernel rotating inside every librarian. However, my present job affords me little opportunity to exercise this reflex of mine. I spend more time outside of work fulfilling this mission: finding bits and pieces of information, cataloging and sorting them in my mind, and sending them off with a flourish to friends, relatives, and colleagues. But at work I am too far removed from this process. I primarily sit at my desk and wait for the day to end. I answer emails. I review and fulfill (or deny) photo requests. I catalog photos and documents. I select journal articles to include in a database. I attend meetings. I wander around outside at lunch and wonder what the hell I am doing with my life.

I have long known that I am a dreamer. At this point in my life I’m comfortable with this role, but it often interferes with practical matters. I could certainly leave my job and go find some other job. I could do that. However, I know that I would soon also tire of it, because this is a now tattered pattern that I’ve traced my finger along for my entire working life. What this present job has going for it is a four-day week, valuable benefits, decent pay, proximity to home, low stress, and not much in the way of responsibility. Collectively, these aspects would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in another job. So I bide my time, suffering my disconnection from how I spend it, eight hours each day, four days per week.

Leaving my own personal melodrama behind, though, and returning to librarianship, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about access to knowledge lately. This is chiefly because I volunteered to write up a blog post for APLIC about Brewster Kahle’s presentation at the conference I attended in San Francisco. While Brewster is a librarian, among other roles, some of his views are unusual within librarianship. For example, I’d venture to guess that the traditional model of librarian-as-intercessor still carries significant weight among many librarians. And yet Brewster is sending a wrecking ball through this ideal with his efforts to put all knowledge within grasp of anyone with access to an Internet connection. These days such access is becoming easier and more convenient to obtain than access to an actual physical library. The question is, then, does access constitute nine-tenths of the battle when it comes to knowledge attainment?

If so, does this mean librarians will become obsolete? My guess is no, but we are certainly becoming more specialized. And I think our role as intercessor has largely fallen by the wayside, despite our possible reluctance to admit it. At this point, the knowledge is out there (if anything, now in such high quantities as to warrant special skills in navigating it) and much of it is freely available. Now, rather than brokering information, I see librarians as more important in authenticating information, and taking it one step further, in showing others how to authenticate it. And by that, I mean showing them how to determine the trustworthiness of information. Because there is plenty of just plain shoddy information out there.

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