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This little librarian-perfect meme is already well-travelled (1, 2, 3, 4) and since I have a classic beside me right now, I had to play…
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal/blog along with these instructions.DON'T search around and look for the coolest book you can find. Do what's actually next to you.
"I think it was because she was young as hell." (Salinger The Catcher in the Rye)
Talk about timeless. And I'm listening to "Let's Fall in Love" a la Ella Fitzgerald. I can smell the Red Tofu Curry coming from the kitchen. I love Sunday nights like this.
This was the only link I followed out of the recent ALA email newsletter. While I like the idea of recycling plane bodies, I don't think I'd want to work in this building. Little-bity submarine-style airplane windows? On nine floors? Mm… no. The architectural spaces I live and work in are, for some reason, really important to me. I want windows. I want space. These aren't just perks, these are "why would I come here every day without them" qualities. 
This morning a very good friend clued me into two incredible examples of nonfunctional
art – one of my favorite kinds of art
(see my walls: maps and calendars).
Here is the first example …incredible, beautiful, stairs of fused glass for the suggestion of water. From their website: “….his clients wanted the
outside in, they wanted their stairwell to be like water, like air, like the ocean….“
The next example is maybe not so much beautiful as it is
creative, although people have been using old books as an art medium for a long, long time. I include this one to remind myself to be open-minded even when the art in question makes me wince. And yet… I think Walt Whitman would have approved.
— tangent –
Why did I almost call these pieces nonfunctional art? Well, the glass stairs… I mean people have to walk on them, don’t they? How does that work? I’m sure the installation is stable and safe, but still… glass stairs? They just look too beautiful and delicate for that.
And the books… well… that’s just my own bias. I’ve seen ratty torn-up paperbacks and mauled hardbacks. I know they can’t be read anymore. To be honest, I am very amused by the reincarnations these artists have given the old tomes. Would I have one in my house… well, maybe.
| You Belong in Amsterdam |
 A little old fashioned, a little modern – you're the best of both worlds. And so is Amsterdam.Whether you want to be a squatter graffiti artist or a great novelist, Amsterdam has all that you want in Europe (in one small city). |
As I mentioned earlier, I've stumbled upon a wonderful criss-crossing web of academic blogs that have reminded and enlightened me about the traps one faces in higher education… namely, one's self. Our procrastination, our hesitation, our second-guessing, our indecision. The theme I see running across almost every academic blog I've read so far is the feeling of not getting enough done. Never enough time. Always more grading, research, proposals, search committees, articles, and clueless students (not to mention those nasty department politics).
And here I am, on the verge of jumping into my own deep pool of – at the very least – a master's program or – hopefully – a double master's leading to a PhD.
Am I crazy?
Reading this article at the academic coach blog has intrigued and worried me. The Intrigue: graduate students making something of a name for themselves with their blogs. The Worry: incriminating blog remarks coming back to bite you.
This article made me stop again and think about whether or not I really want to be identifying myself on this blog. My gut instinct says I would stop writing if I couldn't be writing as *me*. I've noticed the careful anonymity employed by other academic bloggers — using all sorts of creative euphamisms to describe their partners, employers, and even home towns. If I wasn't such a visual person, that might work for me. But I know I'll be using photos in my blog anyway – some of them featuring the people in my life, possibly myself (see sidebar) – and I don't actually use my name on this blog anywhere, so it's not at though a simple Google search for me, individually, would bring anyone here. Nevertheless, I wouldn't want to post anything here that would hurt people.
Ah, but what about those times when something really needs to be vented and the venting would implicate certain persons? Such as right now, someone close to me has a working situation that is downright awful and I would love to lambast the tyrant to shreds, but it could backfire on the someone close to me. So I have to keep my blogging mouth shut in order to protect the innocent.
I'd be doing that whether I was identified on this site or not. Keeping my blog mouth shut, that is. This is the internet. There's no way to be completely invisible anymore.
Anyway… it's a very interesting article about blogging and graduate students. I hope I'll grow this little bloglet into such read-worthy material.
Walking back from lunch, I entered the quad from a far corner looking out on the music building, women's building, and the library. Classes were in the ten-minute switch so students were everywhere. Beautiful, sunny 60 degrees, a few people sprawled out on the grass, while everyone else was walking to one building or another. A slow trumpet solo sailed out from a window somewhere, an environmental group was asking for donations, and a preacher in a cowboy hat was lecturing in front of the library from his placard of bible verses. I walked past just as he said something about "our imaginations or other people's imaginations"… Times like this remind me why I like working on a college campus.
Snapshots from this past weekend that stick out for me:
- watching The Nomi Song on Friday night. I'd never heard of Klaus Nomi before we watched the movie, and now I want a CD (sucka). As far as the movie itself … why doesn't anyone ever point out that Klaus' early look is straight out of a Fritz Lang movie? Did anyone else catch his "Falling in Love Again" sounding almost EXACTLY like Marlene Dietrich? Do I just get excited about that stuff because I haven't practiced my German in, oh, decades?
- Thursday night we were in Eugene, stopped at a funky place for pizza where – just a few minutes later – a band starting pounding out electronica. We couldn't see them since we sitting on the other side of the order counter, but we stopped to watch on our way out. They were playing *laptops*!!
- Ugly gaudy fashion is in. Extreme gender roles are in. Ick, ick, ick.
- I saw this in one of the Ugly Gaudy stores. Felt humor and horror at the same time:
- ULIV 1S … this was the license plate of a car we passed on the interstate. When I figured out it meant "you live once" I smiled.
So… this morning I was just looking at the Illinois website for DMV, trying to figure out how to get a driver's license once we're there. The Secretary of State is bannered across the top, hard to miss.
Then at work I grab an old envelope to send an interoffice mail, and where is this envelope from? Yeah… the Illinois Secretary of State. Creepy.
I did a search for "pet-friendly Urbana Champaign" and came across this blog by an English professor at UIUC, which then led me to other fascinating people who are venting, musing, and slowly rushing their way through the forests of academia. Within ten minutes of reading and linking, I forgot all about my original pet-friendly search and became delightedly engrossed in all the wonderful conversations (1, 2) criss-crossing these blogs.
And it drives home a blogging conundrum that I am especially sensitive to, being a blogger novice… how does one build one's blogging community? I've read that leaving comments on blogs you like is one way to get readers, but the collection of blogs I looked at above seem to be from people who all know each other outside of the blogosphere.
Patience, I guess.
Good news! I got the assistantship I wanted! I'll be working in
a big, beautiful hexagon and trying out a completely new aspect of library work. Woo hoo!
Okay, to be honest, I got that news back on Monday. And I was definitely effervescent about it, thrilled, overjoyed. I'm still very happy about it but the big looming question that threatens to pop my bubbles of joy is WHERE THE HECK ARE WE GOING TO LIVE?
Problem 1: We want to move in the middle of Summer, but all the apartments are either available in August or right now.
Problem 2: We have two dogs. They're good dogs, so that really isn't the problem. The problem is the reputation that other bad dog owners have given to all us good dog owners. Talk about discrimination.
(Listening to: “Beds are burning” by Midnight Oil)
I’ve been reading more of Jane Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck and came upon a wonderful section about “multiform stories” — those fictions that take readers in multiple directions. Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is one great example. The film Groundhog’s Day was one of Murray’s highlights.
I looked around for other discussions of “multiform stories” [say, remember when people used to use the word Internet and you could hear them mentally putting quotes around it like it was a strange word? That's so funny now, I think] and I found the class Jane Murray taught at MIT about cyberfiction. One of the best parts is the Gallery of student work — examples of multiform stories that her students wrote.
I ask myself, is that the kind of writer I’ll be? Will I blossom with hyperlinks and all the hide-and-go-seek options of writing with code? But I think of hyperlinks in a completely different way than the narrative examples used by Murray. Her multiform stories all link back on themselves and refer to different structures of their own plots. When I think of hyperlinks, I think of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and all those little allusions and references he made throughout the poem to — you name it. I think of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene with all the nods to Virgil, Ovid, the Bible.
If I used hypertext for my fiction, I would want it to be a trail of breadcrumbs for the reader… or, better yet, a treasure map to all the other writers who have come before me, to whom I could introduce my reader as though my story were simply the afternoon tea meant for us all to get to know each other.
A couple years ago a friend and I started a long (and ongoing) debate about determinism vs. free will. She was (and is) completely in the determinism camp, believing that everything we do is simply the culmination of everything that has come before so that no action great or small is a decision, it is simply where all the little daily influences have been leading us all along.
And I understand that… but I don't see it as something detrimental or fatalistic. I guess a lot of people have a huge problem with the determinism idea because they can't let go of the notion that they are in control of everything they do. I don't think I've ever considered myself in control in the first place. I know that I like certain music because my parents liked it when I was growing up. I know that my political views have been influenced by people I've met. All my likes and dislikes have been due to people, culture, and random radio ads.
That's fine. Whatever. We're all brainwashed in one way or another.
Which is why I am actually seeing a real positive to determinism today. I realized that – without decisions – no one chooses to be evil (or stupid), they've simply grown into the only individuals their environments, genes, social positions could produce. So when people are being intolerant or cruel, there is not so much a malicious intent behind their actions, but rather a long ugly background. It's the intent I've imagined behind people's cruelty that has made their cruelty that much more painful. Looking at their actions as the end result of anything and everything they've ever been through, I can see them as human again. Humans with an unfortunate history. I don't think they're hopeless. I think they just need some different influences in their lives in order to go a different direction. Maybe you and I are – unknowingly – those different influences. Imagine that.
I've been reading blogs all day, trying to find the ones that I want to subscribe to, and after just a few hours of linking, linking, linking, I start asking myself "how do these people do this all day? Why do they do this all day?" But I have to remind myself that it only feels like they do it all day because I'm trying to catch up all in one day (won't happen, I understand that).
But seriously… have you ever noticed how many blog entires are simply about blogging? They blog to write about the act of blogging (as I'm doing right now, yes) and I get impatient / frustrated with that because I don't even want to be on this computer right now anyway. It's SPRING outside, for heaven's sake. Why are we taking the Internet so seriously? If the world ends tomorrow, will a blog help you start a fire? Help you find food? How long will your little 6-cell battery last if there's no power in the first place?
What I'm trying to say is… how important are all these new electronic communication methods? I've heard people say they feel like the convenience gadgets aren't actually saving us any time, just making life more complicated and/or less fulfilling. I think about that a lot, actually. I wonder if that kind of sentiment is actually saying more about our misconceptions of the past than it is about our present day lives, or if, on the other hand, it might be true.
When I ask "are these things important" I don't mean in a global change-the-world way. I mean in a will-you-be-happy-about-living-this-way-on-the-day-you-die kind of important. When we look back on everything we've done, will blogging even matter?
This is all to say… I'm going outside.
I confess. I've been surfing. And I haven't joined the del.icio.us band wagon yet, so I'm leaving a short but varying collection of links here that have interested me for today:
Article about the *mythical* shortage of library jobs
http://www.infoshop.org/alibrarians/public_html/article.php?story=20050412145051971
A cheat sheet for the latest online buzz words
http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging
a Library student’s take on BLOG acceptance
http://libschoolconfidential.blogspot.com/
Librarian Trading Card
http://www.bloglines.com/public/bevedog
a blog to get your goat
www.librarian.net
what’s wrong with libraries today http://www.blogwithoutalibrary.net/?p=182
Professor bans laptops from classroom http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2006/03/university_of_m.html
When I was an undergrad in a poetry class, I wrote a piece about my jealousy of the Sturgis Rally bikers that came through my home town of Rapid City every August. It seemed like a chance for thousands of complete strangers to identify with each other simply because of the leather they were wearing, the bike they were riding, and the fact that they were all there together. It looked like a sense of community to me, which I felt I was lacking way back in those Rapid City days of being a teenager (and really, what teenager feels like they have "community"?).
But I have found ways of developing all sorts of different communities around me. My latest one is library students. Check out this collection of library student blogs from the Dominican University in Chicago.
