Note: This post was intended for Memorial Day, but then BLOGGER.com hiccupped and ATE the better part of it, @#*@! , and then life got in the way, as it usually does, to keep me from re-writing it until now. -JJR
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"...It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them."
ATTRIBUTION: Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910), U.S. author. Following the Equator, ch. 20, “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar,” (1897).

Just when I think I've read all the best Mark Twain aphorisms, I find another gem like the one above that I'd not yet heard that makes me laugh out loud. Ambrose Bierce is up there, too, with good American witticisms. H.L. Mencken goes without saying--he's proudly touted by anyone trying to sound clever, either from the Right or Left, sort of the way Tocqueville (Alexis de, 1805-1859.) is similarly touted by both the Left and Right, for different reasons. Neil Postman's writings are similarly ecumenical in this respect. I already mentioned Dorothy Parker below. There's so much more to Mark Twain than Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He's justifiably "The Lincoln of Our Literature", as Hemmingway put it, based solely on those achievements alone, but there's so much more, the best of Mark Twain, I think, that our English teachers either don't know about or are afraid to talk about or don't like to talk about. Mark Twain the anti-Imperialist, Mark Twain the Freethinker. Reminds me of the way Martin Luther King, Jr.'s legacy is whitewashed, mainstreamed, and made "harmless". Montgomery Bus Boycott, Civil Rights, nonviolent disobedience, I Have A Dream--all well and good. Opposition to the Vietnam War, "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world--my own government", etc, all that is quietly airbrushed out of the "official" histories. Three years ago on another Memorial Day weekend I was in Washington DC with my then wife to attend a wedding of an old High School friend. While there we did some moderate sight-seeing in Washington; we spent an inordinate amount of time at the Library of Congress, of course, but we also saw the other major government buildings and monuments. I had the courage to put on a tie-dyed
t-shirt with a big peace symbol on it and walk up to the Lincoln Memorial. I got a lot of ugly looks, angry stares from people, some of them veterans, some not. Some snide, sarcastic comments behind my back. But no one confronted me, or threatened to hit me, though my then wife said there were a few men who looked as if they wanted to.

The Lincoln Memorial has a gift shop off to one side, where you can purchase all manner of patriotic Americana mementos. I was most disturbed by a little flip out card thing that purported to tell a “short history of the Vietnam war” that was so deceptive, so one-sided, so…full of shit…that it was downright embarrassing. Even as a young Reaganite conservative in High School, all it took was this book:

Eyewitness History of the Vietnam War (Paperback) by George Esper
· Paperback
· Publisher: Ballantine Books; Reissue edition (September 12, 1986)
· Language: English
· ISBN: 0345342941
· Product Dimensions: 0.2 x 9.2 x 12.0 inches
· Shipping Weight: 1.95 pounds

…to turn me firmly against the war, and smash all the Reagan-era cinematic mythology that I had been exposed to growing up. I still remained a young conservative after reading the book, still stayed in NJROTC, but it was the first real crack in my conservative edifice. It helped me to develop what Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner call, echoing Hemmingway, my “bullshit detector”. Just in time, too, since Gulf War I was just around the corner. The second crack in my conservative edifice was George Bush senior openly embracing the Religious Right anti-abortion crowd.

But this little thing on sale at the Lincoln Memorial was nothing like Eyewitness History of the Vietnam War. It was a travesty; it was selective, deluded bullshit for sale, and I was appalled.

My then wife and I did treat the Lincoln Memorial with solemn respect. It is a very reverential place, after all. The text of Lincoln’s speeches (including the Gettysburg Address) rang with a special resonance that all Americans assembled under Lincoln’s stony gaze could take to heart (and spoke with a painful bitterness to those, like my wife and I, who were opposed to the ongoing carnage overseas).

If any Right-wing vet had confronted me over my shirt, I would have pointed to the ominous black granite wall that is the memorial for that conflict and stated simply that if it weren’t for hippies who dressed like I am dressed, and countless other ordinary Americans who opposed the war, there would be many more names on that wall over there, and the war could have dragged on into the 1980s…Ever hear of the 30 Years War? The 100 Years War? Vietnam was America’s longest war, and yet compared to what Europe has known, it was still a comparatively short conflict.

On a positive note, as I worked my way back down the National Mall, passing the Smithsonian and approaching Grand Central Station, I noticed more and more civilians reacting with smiles of approval and even some thumbs up and winks in reaction to my “Peace” shirt. My then wife and I cleared out of DC and headed for home on Memorial Day 2003 itself, before the Official Nationalistic Bombast had reached its orgiastic red-white-and-blue crescendo. I also wore a tie-died shirt with Peace necklace all day Memorial Day 2006 this year, too. Yes, we put out Old Glory, but I really wish we had a US “Peace” flag…or if I were more cynical, a US “corporate logos” flag. Truth in advertising right there, boy howdy.

My cousin has been accepted into the United States Naval Academy, and I for one have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, of course I’m proud of him. It’s not easy to get into USNA. You have to be very smart, and/or very well connected. I was neither in the Fall of 1989, which is why I attended Texas A&M and became an Aggie. My cousin, by contrast, is a diligent student, studies all the time, and is very career oriented. His daddy is an Air Force medical officer—a full-bird Colonel. I had just assumed my cousin would be going to the United States Air Force Academy, but the Air Force Academy is experiencing a lot of problems right now, not the least of which too many of the leading officers who run the place are virulently evangelical, fundamentalist Christians and the cadets who share their worldview have been accused of harassing Jewish, Atheist, even Catholic cadets, pressuring them to convert to their brand of fundamentalist Christianity. These are the folks that will one day have their finger on the BOMB, people—remember that. If that doesn’t scare the sh*t out of you…

Anyway, my cousin opted not to go to the United States Air Force Academy, and his Dad agreed, making vague mention of the Academy’s “current problems”, but not specifying what he meant. My cousin made everyone nervous when he expressed a strong interest in West Point. He was deeply impressed with the campus. It looked for a time like he really would attend the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY. But ultimately, he opted for the United States Naval Academy, which made me whoop for joy and breath a big sigh of relief. The Navy is still a dangerous job, no doubt, but not as directly dangerous as Army life (and Air Force bases get mortared and ambushed and sometimes strafed and bombed just like Army bases do in “hot” zones—in fact probably more often). I don’t think my cousin is crazy enough to go Jarhead out of USNA (Marine Corps Option), so I expect he will come out of there as a regular SWO…Surface Warfare Officer; though if he has the smarts to do it, there’s nothing wrong with being a Submariner, either…SSN or SSBN. Navy nuke school is not for people who suck at math, that’s for sure. Unfortunately for him, his vision isn’t perfect (thought it’s way better than mine was at his age), so he’ll never become a Naval Aviator nor a backseat Navigator.

As a graduation gift, I sent my cousin a gift card from Barnes and Noble, with a copy of Hermann Melville’s face on it. The author of Moby Dick is appropriate enough for a Navy midshipman I thought, though on second thought, I probably should have picked the gift card with Mark Twain’s visage.

I also sent him a personal letter of congratulations, and, more provocatively, a copy of Michael Parenti’s short but excellent recent book Superpatriotism, with an admonition to my cousin to just focus on being a plain ol’ good patriot, and avoid the temptations of “superpatriotism”, because he would be exposed to a lot of “superpatriots” at USNA, especially the Marine officers and Marine Corps option upperclassman cadets. I don’t know if the message will take, if he’ll even read the book or not. He’s going to have a busy, very grueling Plebe summer, and I wish him the best of luck. I want to get his mailing address so I can send him regular postcards from the “outside”, which, as I recall from my own Texas A&M Corps of Cadets days, is very gratifying, especially your freshman year. Letters from outside give you something else to think about, lift you up and out of your current woes, etc. I want to be there for him. I’ll send him jokey cards with images of women in bathing suits from Galveston, Texas images galore.
I know now that I must be feeling what my own older cousin on my dad’s side of the family must have felt when I first started at Texas A&M, headstrong committed to a career in the US Navy. My older cousin grew up and came of age in the 1970s, even studying briefly in the then Soviet Union for a year, learning Russian. As he grew older his youthful enthusiasm for Europe faded, and he went off in search of a more humane, more genuine American mode of life that was anti-imperialist, anti-authoritarian, backwoods, down-home, democratic, ecologically friendly, grass-roots, etc. He even became a Buddhist of sorts, along the way. We communicated amicably enough, but he knew (as I did not) that if I stuck to the military road, we would never be able to fully connect with each other. He was much relieved when I turned my back on the National Security State after having lost my Navy Scholarship, turning instead to more humanistic pursuits. We’ve kind of lost touch over the years since he remarried, and since my divorce, and I feel I’ve lost connection to a kindred spirit I could really use in days such as these.

Anyway, I hope everyone had a good long weekend this past Memorial Day and spent it with family and friends, with a good backyard cookout and ice cold beer consumed responsibly, if that’s your preference.

thoughts on The Teaching Company

I recently finished a good Audiocourse that I purchased from The Teaching Company, on the subject of "European Intellectual History in the 20th Century", presented by the same professor who did "European Intellectual History in the 19th Century", which I finished in Spring 2002 and donated to the UNT Media Library in Chilton Hall. Both courses were good, but I must say I liked the presentation on 19th Century Intellectual History better than the 20th Century survey. Nevertheless, the 20th Century survey did cover a lot of interesting ground. It started with a re-cap of the late 19th century then moved forward to finish at about the mid 1990s.

One topic, on Pierre Bourdrieu's notion of "cultural capital" and its accumulation and comparing it structurally to the accumulation of financial capital, caught my attention in particular. What made me smile is how Professor Kramer alluded gently to the fact that it's not always easy to convert "cultural capital" into financial capital. It's certainly not a 1-to-1 tradeoff! In fact, if there's a rate of exchange at all, the Bulgarian lev or the Russian rouble probably converts more "profitably" into dollars than does most "cultural capital". I'm fairly rich, in cultural capital. Which is like saying "I'm rich--in Bulgaria". Rich in cultural capital, yes, but fairly broke on the financial capital side of things, and even while gainfully employed as a librarian, I was paying such high rent that it ate into my salary fairly quickly, and I was also paying too much for Road Runner highspeed online with digital cable; I didn't do the best job guarding my savings either.

So, anyway, while an interesting thought experiment, I think the analogy breaks down pretty quickly also because it ignores questions of POWER, which are usually rooted in a fairly firm materialistic basis.

As I said before, I really like The Teaching Company's offerings, and I probably buy too may personal copies of their best audio courses, especially the general history and intellectual history offerings. I was first exposed to them at the West U. branch of the Harris County public library while I was living and working in the Sharpstown area of Houston for 2 years. I checked out a survey of 18th Century European thought that was simply delightful. I also checked out a lecture series on Roman History; the professor who taught it was very engaging and made a convincing case that a lot of so-called "ancient history" really isn't all that ancient, in terms of the issues, and general themes worth discussing...a lot of it is strinkingly, surprisingly modern. Author Michael Parenti (who is not a Teaching Company contributor) makes the same case in his book The Assasination of Julius Caesar, which I have read only excerpts of, but I have seen him on DVD giving a book talk summarizing the work, which makes me want to read it all the more. More on Parenti, a personal hero of mine, in a moment.

The audiocourse on European Intellectual History in the 20th Century started out strong, but the finish I found to be rather weak. The last 2 thinkers discussed in the lectures were Juergen Habermas and Vaclav Havel. I appreciated the discussion of Habermas; however, it was Havel who got the final part of the lecture that Professor Kramer closed with, in large part because Juergen Habermas remains within the Marxist tradition of critique and still holds to a kind of ideal of democratic socialism (as do I). Havel, on the other hand, is not a Marxist. While I admire his dissident work and his Charta 77, which were legitimate delayed reactions to the '68 Soviet intervention and hardline crackdown on the Prague Spring movement, Havel's actions since becoming a political leader in the Czech Republic have increasingly left a bad taste in my mouth, especially his announcent of support for Bush and America's wars of aggression abroad, in flagrant violation of international law. Noam Chomsky rightly criticized Havel for his double standard of praising fellow anti-Soviet dissidents, but turning a blind eye to US-aided and abbetted repression in Latin America, for example. Chomsky allowed that the Soviet government often made life difficult for dissidents like Havel, but that it didn't send death squads after them like US proxies often did (and continue to do) with journalists and other societal dissidents in Latin America and other spheres of US influence. Michael Parenti, in his book Blackshirts and Reds : Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism , offers a biting criticism of Vaclav Havel near the end of the book in a section titled "Must We Love Vaclav Havel?", decrying the painful neoliberal economic policies that Havel helped force upon the Czech people, and decrying Havel's increasing resort to mystification in his intellectual work since becoming president. Parenti is a far more eloquent writer than I am, and I really enjoyed reading Blackshirts and Reds. Another Parenti personal favorite of mine is his History as Mystery, a deep meditation on Historiography--how it's done, and perhaps, how it ought to be done.

My problem with The Teaching Company is that, while their audiocourses are of high quality and very intellectually engaging, they never veer too far away from very mainstream, often very centrist points of view. It's nice to hear Marxism discussed at all, of course, and to their credit, most selected Teaching Company professors do at least make an attempt to represent Marxism's position fairly and objectively. But by the end of the lecture, without fail, every Teaching Company professor WILL ultimately condemn the Marxist position, explicity, regardless of the topic under discussion. It happens without fail, each and every audiocourse. Conclusions are reached that basically butress the the bourgeois-liberal, triumphalist view of American discourse and at best merely reconfirm the merely liberal outlook of most mainstream, college educated Americans and their pet predjudices. The Teaching Company will never market or sell lectures by, say, Noam Chomsky, or Howard Zinn, or Michael Parenti. That would probably upset or disquiet too much of their customer base.

I admit, I enjoy much of The Teaching Company's "products", especially when they discuss more esoteric artistic or intellectual topics, or areas of history that are new or not as familiar to me. But I always take the lectures with a grain of salt, and I take note of the hidden biases I've noted that run throughout their offerings. I still heartily recommend The Teaching Company's audiocourses and excellent DVDs not only for Public Libraries but also even for Academic Libraries. If a student misses an important lecture, a pre-recorded lecture by The Teaching Company may be just the thing to fill a knowledge gap and make the difference between a "C" and a "B+" on the next essay test, perhaps. The Teaching Company provides a well done outline of every lecture, with blank spaces for additional notes by students (these should be separated from the material and kept in a library's general reserves collection, in my opinion, so the students can photocopy the outlines rather than take them home and be tempted to write in them). Complete lecture transcripts are also available for an extra charge; these could be circulated normally like the AV recording of the lecture(s) themselves.

Another thing I sometimes find wanting in The Teaching Company's lecture series, is that, unlike real live face-to-face lectures, there's no recording made of any post-lecture Q&A session(s). The Teaching Company's lecture series ARE all apparently recorded before a live audience, and you can hear audience reactions, and the clapping at the end of each lecture. I don't know if they really do have Q&A sessions at these recording sessions, but if they do, then The Teaching Company is doing their customers a disservice by not including the Q&A sessions on a separate tape; Perhaps they could start offering a concluding tape that includes the highlights of Q&A from ALL the lectures, which would be a good, quick review of the entire course in condensed format at the end. If they don't have a Q&A session at all during the "live" sessions, they need to start. The Q&A period is just as vital a component as the lectures themselves in providing the virtual experience of "spending the next year in some of the best college classrooms in America", as the Teaching Company's advertising blurb has it.

Anyway, that concludes my summary of current thought on The Teaching Company and its products.

St. Dorothy or the necessity of promoting your academic library.

Dorothy Parker ( Parker, Dorothy, 1893-1967 , per LOC authority file), of the famed NY Algonquin Round Table, is a Saint in my personal literary cannon. Acerbic, funny, morose, depressing, sad...she's probably one of my favorite female writers.

Anyway, one of the quips popularly attributed to her, when reputedly challenged to use the word "horticulture" in a sentence goes something like: "Horticulture. You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." (play-on-words; horticulture = 'whore to culture').

Likewise, you can lead your students to your well stocked library and top-of-the-line databases, but you cannot make them READ (or think, for that matter). It won't do to simply point to the campus library and say "there's the library." and leave it at that. The Academic Library today has to engage in just as much self-promotion and raising reader awareness as the very best of our Public Libraries do. One of the things that always drove me up the wall about my last job is that my request(s) for certain or other print serials in Naval Science (mostly US Navy and US Coast Guard pubs) were shot down with the remark "we have that available online through vendor X"; Yeah, but do our PATRONS know that? We seemed to have all this great content online, but at most the outreach effort seemed confined to updating faculty, and leaving it up to them to pass the word along to their students--or not.

We did at least have a New Books shelf in the library, and a New Books search tab in our Voyager OPAC. These are absolute essentials for an academic library of any size, I think. The New Books tab is not a built in feature of the Voyager ILS, however. It is a well done hack by library leader Michael Doran, of UT-Arlington, whom I had the distinct pleasure of meeting at EndUser2006 in Chicago this year. I'll talk more about my personal highlights from EndUser2006 in a later post.

Public Services needs to be pro-active, and I'd say even a small academic library like the one I worked at needs at least 2 Reference librarians, one to cover the usual 8-to-5 day shift, another to cover afternoon/evenings and weekends. Maybe they could swap out from month to month. And they should be REQUIRED to sit AT the actual reference desk, accessible and out in the open at least a set number of hours per week, per day, and not hang out in their office all day and request students see them by appointment only. To be fair, the last public services librarian did at least help our students when they came to him for help; I saw students in his office often enough, getting help, etc. But I know he was so focused on electronic resources that the books were being neglected. Really, it wasn't my place, as Tech Services Librarian, to worry about that. It should've been the back-up Reference librarian's job. But there WAS no back-up Reference librarian, so I was it, and I *did* worry about it. The collection hadn't been weeded for...nobody could say how long it had been exactly. Now, I know that for the pure sciences, some of the basic stuff doesn't necessarily age that rapidly. But some of the stuff in the collection seemed embarassingly old/outdated. Likewise, browsing through the section on German history, I noticed the majority of what we had was about Hitler, the Nazis and the earlier Kaiserreich and that was just about it. I added some titles about former East Germany, since we had nothing on that topic at all.

I'm grateful that these books got displayed on the New Books shelf as soon as they were processed, but it seems to me the library could reach out beyond its walls and be a little more pro-active about advertising new books and new journals to students...how about fliers, how about a broadcast email on the campus Intranet? Something, at least.

Library displays are also important, but you have to keep them relevant and updated. In my last library, we had a display up for "Constitution Week", September 17 through September 23. It was still up when I was hired 24 October 2005. It was still up when I was dismissed 24 April 2006. Like a broken clock, it will be correct at least one week out of the year. I personally thought this made us look like fools, but I didn't raise a fuss because I was new and didn't want to step on any toes. Maybe most patrons didn't notice--or care, but any one who did think about it and looked up the actual dates for Constitution Week...well, what does it say about the library?! Sends the wrong message, to say the least.

Students did regularly clamor for a coffee bar, and while I'm not against it in principle, I am against just throwing one together without much thought or budget, as the main library at the university where I went to library school seemed to do. Is the coffee bar actually cozy, and conducive to reading, but also offset enough to not bother other patrons, yet still feel a part of the library? Is the lighting warm and subdued, like a real cafe? If it's normal, artificial fluorescent lighting, your coffee bar project is in trouble--trust me on that. But you also have to make extra sure to control for trash, uneaten foodstuffs, etc, because that will lure in insects and other pests and could cause you a preservation nightmare, giving your archivist(s) and/or special collections librarian and preservation librarian(s) a headache or heart-attack, depending on how much (or how little) forethought goes into the project. It's nice if the coffee bar generates a little extra revenue, but that ought NOT to be the primary motive for building one in an Academic library. The overarching university institution should be willing to run such an establishment at a net loss if it still ends up enhancing library services in non-tangible ways. This, I think, was the mistake made by my alma mater in northern Texas, and it was an assumption that guided the design and management of the coffee bar, which I really didn't like all that much. Sterling C. Evans Library, on the main campus at Texas A&M, has a really pleasant, well done coffee bar. It looks like it has a really nice atmosphere. I do happen to think it is perhaps a little TOO segregated from the rest of the library, but that may have been driven by preservation concerns, too. At least you can check out a book and then take it in with you to read. It's so popular, though, that the line can be quite long, and unless you get up pretty good and early, it can be tough to get couch space. Like the Yogi Berra-ism has it, "Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded."

I know that hard core catalogers would probably detest having the responsibility for it, but I think it does catalogers some good to get them out from behind their cubicles and plop them at the reference desk every once in awhile. Face it, nobody knows how to query the OPAC better than the catalogers do. It would give catalogers a chance to interract with the public that they are ultimately serving a little, and maybe get some feedback, without having to always rely on the regular Reference staff. I don't know about other catalogers, but I for one would welcome a chance in my next job to put in part-time behind the reference desk. There's this stereotype about catalogers being misanthropic and not working well with others (and I've met plenty of living examples so far who are closer to this stereotype than not), but I for one don't fit this stereotype. Then again, maybe I really am a misplaced reference librarian and don't belong in cataloging at all. But I felt I had to get a job first in Technical Services, because what they taught us in library school barely scratched the surface of the cataloging world, and I think a background knowledge of how cataloging is done and how it works is essential to the education of a competent Reference professional. In my cataloging class our professor asked rhetorically aloud "why don't more reference librarians use LCSH!?", and a Reference person blurted back "because patrons don't know it or use it". I kept silent at the time, but if I knew then what I know now, I would have jumped in and shouted back "No, but YOU should (and you should show your patrons HOW you are using it as you help them)."; Which brings me to another beef about library service and bibliographic instruction. It's all too often presented in an either/or fashion...e.g. Don't do it at all, just get the patron what they want and send them on their merry, or, show them the tools they need to use to find what they're looking for, then let them have at it, checking back in about 20 minutes to see how they're doing, etc. I happen to think BOTH of these approaches are wrong. You DO get them the information they ask for, right away, but AS YOU'RE DOING THAT, you SHOW THE PATRON exactly WHAT you are doing, so that they can repeat the steps themselves at a later time. There's a strong push in some library circles to do the first of the previous two approaches, because of the perceived power and status it gives the librarian as a guardian and gatekeeper of secrets, but this too me goes against the spirit of public service that is at the core of what Librarians and libraries should be all about. The 2nd approach goes too much the other direction, often leaving patrons feeling frustrated or embarassed that they are unable to do their own original searching as well as the librarian can, and feel frustrated that s/he is not helping them more. Keep this up and they will stop asking you for help altogether and just grab something easier off the Internet without you, which may be ok, or maybe it dumbs down scholarship just that much more, and needlessly.

Lead students to the library by all means, but then engage them once they're there.

I finish with another Dorothy Parker quote:
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."
Amen to that, and thank goodness for libraries.

paying homage to my intellectual mentors

Upon re-reading my earlier postings, I realized perhaps I am coming across as a bit harsh as regards my former professors. I am very fortunate to have had many excellent professors in my long academic career as a student, and I wish to honor them briefly below.

Despite my grumblings about the Department of German & Slavic Studies at Rice U, I did have some professors I really really liked and who helped shape the way I think about things.

so, at Rice University we have:
1) Dr. Michael Winkler : we got off to a very rough start, but he stuck up for me at my thesis defense, and he did invite all the grad students in the department down to a crawfish boil at his Victorian style house near the Historic District in Galveston, and we had some interesting conversations that whole weekend. He quit as my thesis director but had enough good will to remain on the committee, which I was grateful for when the time came for the oral defense.

2) Dr. Margret Eifler: Feminist, Postmodern guru, Film Studies. I even took a Women's Film class from her. I think I annoyed her when I kept bringing up Soviet/Russian women's films that she'd never heard of, though. Also, I always felt like I was beating my head against a wall dealing with the PoMo-theories & writings.

3) Dr. Klaus Weissenberger: We also got off to a rough start, and I never really cared for his intense focus on poetry and Lyrik. It's just not my thing, but I did develop a grudging respect for what Dr. Weissenberger did/does in that area, not least because I know I never could do that, even if I wanted to. Moreover, when the chips were down, he took me under his wing, took over as my thesis director, and helped me get my grades up and produce an acceptable MA thesis. ( a thesis I now deplore and feel embarrassed about, but it passed muster at the time)

4) Dr. Waclaw Mucha: Professor of Russian & Polish, adjunct faculty member for the Slavic side of the department. He was my professor for most of the core Russian language courses I audited in my spare time. Really nice man and very knowledgeable.

5) Dr. Ewa Thompson: Professor of Russian & Polish, head of the Slavic division of the Department. She taught one of the survey courses on contemporary Russian culture that I audited, and also administered my translation exam for Russian, which I passed acceptably, according to Dr. Thompson. I disagreed with her conservative, Catholic-centered politics (and staunch anti-communism), and she couldn't stand Dr. Eifler, who I liked, but she was/is an affable person with a formidable intellect. She and I both deplored PoMo, but for vastly different reasons. I always did my best to keep my personal politics to myself around Dr. T.

6) Dr. Richard Wolin: Now a distinguished professor at CUNY, and was universally despised by members of the German Department during his tenure at Rice U; I never took any classes with him, never spoke with him personally, but I found his books, especially The Terms of Cultural Criticism, very intellectually engaging. I attended a conference on the resurgence of NeoNazism held on the TAMU campus. In addition to myself and another graduate student, Dr. Wolin came to represent Rice University. Dr. Wolin has written probing works on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and has argued that Heidegger's philosophy is not so far removed from his Nazism as his defenders tend to assert. Wolin also has misgivings about Postmodernism--but I find I can no longer really stomach his writings, post 9-11. He always was a little too pro-capitalist, pro-USA ueber alles for my tastes, and the work he's produced since 9-11 is a little too holier-than-thou, a little too gratuitous with the Left-bashing. At an earlier stage in my academic career I once thought I might like to go back and get a PhD in Intellectual History under Dr. Wolin's guidance. But by the time I was looking at maybe doing that again, he'd already moved on to CUNY. How dare he advance his career while I was trying to advance my own!! ;-) Well, it was probably just as well, as things turned out. I still respect Wolin, but I have to read him with a much bigger grain of salt these days.

There are a few notables back at Aggieland I'd like to single out for a big collective thank you, too:

In the German Department:

1) Dr. Roger Crockett : now the head of German and Russian Studies at Washington & Lee University in Virginia. He taught the German Drama class every spring, the members of whom joined the ranks of the German-language Drama troupe Die Aggie Komoedianten and put on a single multi-act German Drama, usually from the 20th century, although sometimes comedies from the Medieval writer Hans Sachs were adapted as well. We tried to focus on comedy, especially slapstick/physical comedy, since that transcends language barriers. It was a brilliant living language laboratory, that, sadly, has been discontinued at TAMU due to lack of interest on the part of students. Dr. Crockett accepted the position in Virginia prior to my graduation.
Dr. Crockett was also the faculty sponsor of the TAMU German Club, which met every Wednesday evening to drink beer and speak German (usually in that order).

2) Dr. Eric Williams : Had the unenviable task of filling the mighty big shoes of Roger Crockett, and lived in his shadow for a few semesters before finding his own voice and place at TAMU. Eric and I got off to a rough start, with me just coming back from Germany to find my beloved TAMU German club having been taken over by students who were brazenly crypto-NeoNazi. It was very disillusioning and not fun; I abandoned German club, defecting to the TAMU Russian Club, where I felt much more accepted and at ease. I had been in Russian Club before, but not as actively due to my earlier, heavier participation in German Club. I made close friendships with a number of TAMU Russian club members and had a fun time with them. Anyway, Eric and I had a long talk, and it came out that he didn't like the NeoNazi frat boys any more than I did. We collaborated on the Komoedianten productions. I basically knew Eric from about my Junior year through my Senior year and then also through my fifth year (double major and study abroad delayed my graduation a bit). In time we became good friends, and used to correspond on intellectual matters every now and again. After I went to library school we sort of lost touch.

Other TAMU Departments:

3) Dr. Chester Dunning: truly excellent History Professor, Historian of Russia, took a Western Civ course from him, and the first Russian history survey course, Russia from the Medieval Period to 1880.

4) Drs. Brett and Olga Cooke: This academic couple are probably the nicest professors in all of TAMU, and they go out of their way to make a difficult subject (Russian as a foreign language) accessible, and yes, even fun! I wish TAMU would consider letting them teach part time at TAMUG (if they wanted to, of course). Simply wonderful people.

5) Dr. Resch: cantankerous, unapologetic Marxist professor of History. At the time, I didn't like him, but in retrospect I learned a helluva lot from him and his survey course on the 2nd half of Western Civ was fantastic. His lectures got better and better the more history he covered closer and closer to the present.

6) Dr. Terry Anderson: Texas A&M's other token Left-wing History professor. Non-Marxist, but still a very insightful critic of US domestic culture and US Foreign policy. Vietnam vet (U.S. Navy), outspoken, all around great guy, and funny, too. Think Jimmy Buffett-as-professor, and you'll get the right picture.

...and while I'm driving down memory lane, I even have an honorable mention from the ranks of the William P. Clements High School faculty:

1) Dr. Carr (then Mr. Carr): Senior honors history teacher. I had to petition to join his class, and even had a personal interview with Mr. Carr about my reading interests and interest in history in general. I worked my butt off in his class and came up with a "B-" that I was proud of, much more proud than the easy "A" I would've gotten in a less advanced class. He focused on labor and social history, made students read concise, scholarly articles then debate each other. Exams were all essay exams, just like college. He began, as Kant said of Hume, to "wake me from my dogmatic slumber", and was the first person who really made me think that the unbridled capitalism and rabid anti-communism the GOP was preaching might not be such great ideas after all.

2) Mrs. Tull: Best. English. Teacher. Ever. Period. (and she would roll her eyes at fragments like that)

So here I pay collective thanks to these mentors, without whom I could not have become that what I am today. I still haven't figured out what that THAT is, yet, but I'm working on it, and anyway, these people made me a better person, that much I do know.

Thoughts on serials/ERM

I am not a Serials librarian, Serials cataloger, nor do I have any paraprofessional background as a Serials Specialist, but I did have to indirectly manage serials in my last job as the resident Tech Services Librarian, doing what I could to help out my Serials Specialist and make her job a little easier. My former director used to joke that when everything started going electronic, our Serials Specialist was worried she would be out of a job. If anything, the opposite occurred and now the job has really grown beyond what only one person could reasonably be expected to handle. Endeavor put on a snazzy marketing webcast advertising their latest ERM (Electronic Resources Management) software, Meridian, which both I and my Serials Specialist watched. But when I went to EndUser, a library consortium put on a presentation that revealed that maybe Meridian is not all it's cracked up to be, and that if you don't set it up right the first time, you could have to scrap what you did and start over (which is what this library consortium ended up doing); also, even if you do the proper planning prior to implimentation, you may find that some processes automate better than others, and you may still be faced with a surprising number of manual processes. Despite my untimely dismissal from TAMUG upon my return from EndUser 2006, I did press this point to my boss, telling her that the product is still in development, and maybe needs more testing by others first before the TAMU Consortium jumps on board. Part of our problem was also a human problem at the main campus, of a certain person who shall remain nameless but who was very notorious for not responding to other people's communications in a timely manner, and when a response did come, it was often cryptic. No amount of technology automation would've fixed that.
My point in discussing all of this is to note that the crisis in serials management (an exploding number of increasingly virtual resources--online only, print + online, etc.) seems to be widespread (i.e. not just impacting smaller libraries like the one I worked in, though they are probably the worst impacted), and it puts additional budgetary strains on libraries in ways that go beyond the mere cost of inital acquisition (i.e. subscription price). The hidden costs are also the staff time required, including adding additional staff if needed. My former Library is very seriously considering hiring an Electronic Resources Librarian to help manage e-journals (and, I suspect, do double-duty as the unofficial Systems Librarian), letting the Serials Specialist go back to handling print-only publications. Luckily, my former boss had kept part of the library budget in reserve to be able to hire just such a person. Now, of course, I was willing to learn, willing to step in and help do more to manage the e-journals; I even joined NASIG, paying out of pocket, and pondered asking my director to let me go to the annual NASIG conference in 2007 (they met in Denver in 2006, just a few days ago, but with everything this year...EndUser, TLA, Amigos, so close together, back-to-back-to-back, I didn't feel right in asking to go to NASIG this year). Well, of course, since I was dismissed, none of that matters now per se. Though it did seem my predecessor had a near allergic reaction to serials work, which for a small library so focused on science and technology as ours was makes no sense. I thought joining NASIG made perfectly logical sense; Wish I'd done it sooner, like back in 2005 shortly after being hired.
One very specific effect I observed regarding the crisis in serials management as it was impacting our library: our director was VERY resistant in adding ANY new titles (especially print-only titles) that were not absolutely directly related to the Maritime/Marine Sciences mission of the campus. Even tangental fields like Naval Science were out. Whereas my director was generally accepting of my books suggestions, in serials she was resolute in shooting down every single serials suggestion I came up with. Dollars and Sense, the alternative Left economics journal? Denied. Navy Times? Denied. Any number of Coast Guard/Navy professional periodicals? Denied.
My concern is that, even in larger libraries, because of the ballooning management nightmare that is ever-expanding e-resources management, the management of these kinds of resources is going to strain and crowd out smaller, independently produced, print-only alternative info resources outside the mainstream. This adds a further wrinkle and complication for the dissemination of dissident information, as if there was not already enough ideological resistance from skittish directors unwilling to deal with "controversial" materials (unless they are a "slick" publication coming from a well-funded Right-wing source, of course). Now directors can also deny serials requests on the basis that it would be too much of a burden to manage those kinds of obscure print publications, they have their hands full with all the new e-resources, etc. There is some truth in that, and also, this problem of serials management (i.e. the hidden costs beyond mere subscription price) isn't exactly new, it's just been exacerbated by the explosion of scholarly journal prices in general, science and technology journals in particular. And since shelf space is no longer a limiting factor in the case of e-resources, smaller libraries can, in theory, manage many more e-titles that they could if all of the publications were print-only or print+online. None of which bodes well for independently produced, print-only (or even print+online) "alternative" publications. I'm just happy my former library did have a subscription to The Texas Observer, which is based out of Austin and includes such power hitters as Molly Ivins, Ronnie Dugger, and Jim Hightower. I think Dollars and Sense would've made an excellent contribution to the collection. Not all of my alternative economics book requests were approved by my director, but other alternative books, critiquing US foreign policy, for example, were approved and purchased. I am glad to say on my watch we added books by William Blum, Robert Fisk, Ryszard Kapucinski, and also I helped to "internationalize" the perspective of our collection, even in while restricting myself to Maritime Industry/Marine Sciences topics. I added more books on the WTO, the World Bank, GATT, GATS, etc. I requested material on topics pertaining to more obscure bodies of water (the Irish Sea, the Gulf of Oman, the Great Lakes of Africa), and added more general books on important countries now in the news headlines. I was shocked to see that we had no books on Pakistan, or the UAE, and quickly rectified that situation. I also requested updated books on other countries in the Muslim world, including guides to doing business in those countries.
I feel I was able to enhance the monograph collection quite a bit during my time on the professional staff at the TAMUG campus library. But I was blocked by my director on serials suggestions at every turn so eventually I just gave up. I mostly focused on getting the correct OCLC records loaded into Voyager for my serials specialist to attach her P.O.'s to, update holdings, etc, and learned a little bit about serials cataloging along the way. Not much, but enough to be interesting. To be truthful, I find serials a little scary, but it does no good to just run away from them like my predecessor did. If your new job requires you to deal with serials, take a deep breath, be brave, and just dive in...or at least get in at the kiddie pool end, like I did.
I just hope the next library I work in (if I ever do work in one), is more receptive to adding new serials titles, within reason.

other audiobooks, and another literary discussion.

Speaking of audiobooks, I also recently finished Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, which was laugh-out-loud funny and poignant. The actor who read for the book did a really good job with it. I love Vonnegut's stuff. In Germany I finished reading Slaughterhouse 5 while sitting outside at McDonald's on Prager Strasse in Dresden, Germany. I read the last lines of the book then looked up at the still obvious smoke damage to the historic buildings on the skyline and shivered. I next read Joseph Heller's Catch 22, which was quite possibly the funniest book I've ever read in the English language, though the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams certainly comes close. Catch 22, along with Slaughterhouse 5, helped me re-define myself as an American, and made me able to move on to Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States some years later. Catch 22 also reminded me of my favorite Czech novel The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek, a satirical anti-war classic steming from the Eastern Front of the First World War. Hasek's own biography is no less outrageous and hilarious than that of his famous character(s). He was an irrepressible joker to the last. I don't know what it is about the Czechs, but they have more of the funniest, most irreverent novelists in their 20th century literature than any other European country, and I love them for it (though I suspect the reason for this is owing in part to the repeated tragedies in Czech history throughout the 20th century).

I'm less crazy about Polish writers, but I do have my favorites...among them the recently deceased Stanislaw Lem, probably the greatest (and most cantankerous) SF writer who ever lived, the journalist Ryszard Kapucinski, who tells poignant, sensitive stories from his travels all over the so-called Third World; I also admire the exile poet Czeslaw Milosz, especially his memoir of Poland under Stalinism, The Captive Mind. I am impressed with Witold Gombrowicz, though so far I haven't read him, only read about him. I also like the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda.

...is it a little obvious by now that I have something of an affinity for Slavic literature & culture?

...it was this affinity that actually caused me a real crisis in graduate school, and made me quite disillusioned with cannonical Germanistik as it was being taught at Rice. I found Slavic literature, culture, and film suddenly much more appealing, that it drove my passions much higher than the dessicated German Studies program I was slogging through...not that there's not plenty I truly love in German Studies...but 1) I was prevented from focusing on those German authors who most appealed to me {anything after 1900, basically}, 2) made to focus on stuff that was of absolutely no interest {Buergerlicher Realismus, Medieval German Lit, etc.}, and even the stuff that did interest me, say 3) the cultural millieu of Vienna around 1900--the professors still managed to just suck the life out of it, ignore anything beyond narrowly defined Literature and bore me to tears. No wonder I did my Thesis all on works after 1945--and even that was a tough task. I was an (intellectual) historian by temperment, and LitCrit work never did come easy to me, no matter how much lit theory I read and tried to absorb.

I figured out that Germanistik as it is taught in Germany, and as Rice U. tried to replicate, is not at all the same as German Studies, properly taught, at other American universities. German Studies, as opposed to Germanistik, does not assume the students grew up in a German speaking country, and covers a lot more of the anthropological and meta-cultural analysis of German society that is just assumed to be intuitively known by natives studying traditional Germanistik. In other words, it's WAY MORE FUN, TOO. I actually had time to explore this side issue of Higher Ed during my first semester on campus at Library school, outside of class time. It was nice to see my own earlier grad school impressions vindicated by American professors of German in a scholarly book on German-language pedagogy.

Ironically at Rice U, I got to know several of the Slavic Studies professors rather well; Unfortunately for me, Rice U. only offers undergraduate degrees in Slavic Studies, and doesn't have any graduate degrees for Slavic Studies. One of the professors even nominated me for a scholarship to go study in St. Petersburg, Russia for a year. I would've won, too (there were, remarkably, no other interested candidates!!), but because the scholarship was actually designated for undergraduate students, my Department informed me that if I accepted the scholarship to Russia, I would lose my graduate fellowship and all my funding, and I didn't think that was an option. Turns out I lost all that anyway, owing to writer's block and an inability to get finished with my thesis within the expected 2 year mark (I was originally going to write on German SciFi, actually)...so maybe I should've thumbed my nose at the department and followed my passion and gone back to Russia for more intensive study. Hindsight's always 20x20, though. If I had been attending UT-Austin, it would've probably been considerably less difficult to switch graduate majors from German Studies to Slavic Studies--though of course the UT-Austin German Studies program probably didn't SUCK as bad as Rice's. But they were not willing to give me a graduate fellowship while Rice University WAS. Push came to shove, and I chose Rice over UT. UT did actually have the better grad program in my field, but the name recognition of Rice U. pays its own dividends, sometimes. And besides, I liked the whimsy of Rice University's campus culture, and I met all manner of truly brilliant people (not my professors) outside of the classroom who REALLY expanded my mind and my intellect many times over. Can't put a price on THAT, though it's something my parents will never understand and I'm unable to explain it to them.

What I am, and what I am not

I should probably have made this my first post, but whatever. Since I am using the moniker "Aggie Librarian", I feel the need to clarify the meaning of it. For those of you not from Texas, an "Aggie" is a current student or former student/alumni of Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas (or the branch campus in Galveston, who are known as "Sea Aggies"). For the record, I attended Texas A&M University from the Fall of 1989 until August of 1994, with one year in Germany on TAMU study abroad. I graduated with a double-major BA in History and German Studies. I did at one time wear an Aggie ring, which has been subsequently lost and the way gold prices are going (up, up, up), I don't know if I'll ever be able to afford to replace it. Aggies have a reputation for being very devoted to their school, with almost cult-like fanaticism. I am not like that. I am what those kinds of Aggies would call "a 2%'er", which, as legend has it, is "that 2% of the student population which does not show/have/feel the true Aggie spirit." (the figure is undoubtedly higher than 2%, but that's Aggie mythology for you)

Aggies also have a reputation for being very conservative, folksy, belligerent, aggressive, usually working in Business or the Military or Republican political machines. I am none of THAT either (except maybe the folksy part).

DISCLAIMER: Yes, from Fall 1989 until Spring 1991 I was a proud member of the Fightin' Texas Aggie Corps of Cadets, outfit Trident P-2, of the Naval Regiment. I earned a Sul Ross Scholarship, was inducted into the Freshman Honor Society, and even earned a 3-year NROTC scholarship pending a successful medical exam. My outfit helped build some of the last of the last great Aggie Bonfires and was named Centerpole outfit my freshman year. When I graduated High School I had been in 4 years of NJROTC at Clements High School, and was quite the young fascist, Reaganite militarist, and fanatical anti-communist. I lost my Navy scholarship owing to bad eyesight, and it crushed my plans to become a US Navy officer. I entered the civilian student population. I considered transferring to UT-Austin, but by that time I already had good friends both in the Corps and among the non-regs (civilian students), and I didn't want to pull up the roots I'd already planted in Aggieland, and so I stayed.

Losing that scholarship, and with it, a promising military career, was a watershed moment, and changed my life forever, and I'm convinced for the better. It's very unlikely I would've ever gone to library school to become a librarian if I'd been commissioned as a Navy officer out of Texas A&M. I allowed myself to think heretical thoughts for the first time, and really question a lot of "givens" about our much vaunted "American Way of Life". I was highly ambivalent about Gulf War I, mostly out of ignorance, I now see in retrospect. I wasn't rah-rah pro-war, but I wasn't immediately anti-war either.

I wandered many intellectual paths since those early years, but to make a long story short, unlike the (stereo-)typical Aggie, I consider myself a Socialist, a Green, a radical democrat, with some sympathy for anarcho-syndicalism. I am a secularist, a humanist, and privately atheist. I belong to the Progressive Librarians Guild, the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT) of ALA, and am very supportive of the UK-based Information for Social Change.

I worked for Texas A&M @ Galveston for 6 months, home of the Texas Maritime Academy, another Aggie connection, and yes, I am a member of the Corps of Cadets Association, which I felt as a new TAMUG employee I might ought to join. Because my own values and beliefs are at such variance with the typical TAMU graduate, I'm reluctant to call upon the so-called "Aggie Network" to look for employment, etc. Anyone who hired me primarily because I was "a fellow Aggie" would most likely be doing so for the wrong reasons, making mistaken assumptions about my personal views and politics and overall philosophy.

But the truth is, I'm just as proud, no, prouder, of my graduate studies at Rice University, a.k.a. our "Harvard of the Southwest". At one time I owned more Rice shirts and memorabilia than I did A&M stuff. I really loved my time at Rice, for all its ups and downs. Ditto for dear old Aggieland, though the dominant culture could be a bit much at times. I survived at TAMU because I connected with fellow dissenters, those 2%'ers, like me. The atmosphere at Rice U. was much freer and more open and tolerant (if a tad elitist and snobish, rubbing shoulders with some very stuck up wealthy people at times).

Aggies in Texas (much like many a super-patriotic, nationalistic American abroad) draw a lot of ire for their arrogance, their closed-mindedness, and it doesn't help that the idiot in the govenor's mansion right now was not only an Aggie, but also was in the Corps all 4 years and was a Yell Leader on top of that. I unfairly get tarred with the same brush by ignorant people who hate the Aggies (and yeah, there are good reasons why many do--I'd probably hate them too if I wasn't one) and seem to think all Aggies are just alike. It's just something I've had to learn to live with, until people truly get to know me, and come to see I'm not an arrogant asshole at all like they were expecting, that my views are actually more like theirs, more than they ever dreamed possible. Now that I'm no longer a TAMUG employee, I think I'll be wearing my Aggie gear a whole lot less these days. I feel no need to fly those colors ostentatiously anymore. I'll go back to dressing casually, and if I must wear collegiate stuff, I'll grab my Rice U. gear or even my North Texas gear (where I went to library school) first.

Also, the Aggies are the butt of many jokes from their long history as a "cow college"; The university was once known as the Agricultural & Mechanical College of Texas, a land grant institution mostly dedicated to agricultural study, animal science, and the engineering aspects of farm equipment, etc, and it was moreover all male and all military until the early 1970s. Aggie Jokes are a variation on the theme of the Polish Joke...highlighting the supposed bumkin/hick nature of Texas A&M students. A lot of the angry rivalry between the University of Texas and Texas A&M was borne out of very real class resentment of working class farmers against wealthy elites who could afford to send their offspring to the University of Texas at Austin. Those early class resentments are long forgotten to most, and no longer apply to present circumstances. Texas A&M is actually not all that easy to gain admission to anymore, and tuition can be formidable indeed. There are still a few Animal Science majors and Ag majors that may know some of this history, but they are a small minority of the student population. Official histories certainly don't dwell on class resentment, but it really was very much part of that history. Another part of A&M history, and quite shameful at that, was the segregationist motives behind the founding of Prarie View A&M, an historically black college within the greater Texas A&M University System. Separate but Equal? Hardly.

Anyway, to self-identify as an Aggie can also have this jokey double-meaning, as a kind of self-depricating kind of "Aw, shucks, I'm just a dumb Aggie, what do I know?"; It is this final sense that I adopt when I call myself an Aggie Librarian, beyond the fact that I am indeed an alumnus of Texas A&M University, Class of 1993. Once an Aggie, always an Aggie, and nothing I do or say can change that history. I am what I am, despite however much I may disagree with other Aggies about any particular subject. I will always have to count on people seeing beyond the stereotype and getting to know me as a person--those willing to bother, at any rate.

things I passed up at the HPL booksale & other observations.

When I was younger, it used to be a very dangerous thing to put me in proximity of a book sale whenever I had money. I would inevitably walk away with at least one or two books under my arm. I've sold more than my fare share of books back to Half Price Books over the years, usually when moving in our out of some place. But I still have an embarassingly substantial private collection of books. Some good, some crap. When you're young and foolish you fantasize about building this fantastic personal library full of the wisdom of the ages, and having the personal pride of having read at least half the books in one's library, etc, etc. When you're older, reality sinks in. You know you can't read all the books on your shelf in one lifetime, much less all the books out there in the wider bibliographic universe, including those books not even written yet. As you get older it becomes a just as much a choice of deciding what is safe NOT to read as it is deciding what to read. I look at my personal collection and see the beginnings of intellectual threads started but not continued, over and over and over. I'd like to believe I've read quite a lot in my lifetime, and been deeply transformed over time by what I've read. But everyday life all too often gets in the way, I find, and some intellectual threads have to be abandoned out of necessity.

I successfully managed to resist making any purchases at the HPL booksale. For one, I'm pretty broke, which usually happens when you lose your job. Second, I've already got limited shelf space, with half my personal books still down in Galveston.

But I did see a few titles that piqued my interest. In particular I saw the library had de-selected the premier documentary on Modern Art, namely Robert Hughes's venerable Shock of the New, a 7 part series tracing the development of Modernism in European art from the late 19th century down to about 1980. I checked this entire series out from HPL in the late 1990s and watched it with undivided attention; it was so intellectually stimulating and fulfilling. I'm vexed that this wonderful documentary is STILL not available on DVD and may never be. Hughes did do a follow up series on American Art called American Visions, and it makes a very nice companion piece to Shock of the New, and it IS available on DVD, but all I have is the companion book to Shock of the New and it was very hard to resist the temptation to buy the original VHS tapes, despite the fact that the quality of the tape was probably questionable after this many years, and it was still $1 per cassette, for a total of $6.00 (would've been $7.00 but they seemed to be missing episode 1). Damn, the BBC produces the best documentaries...I also remember one by BBC Journalist Jack Pizzey on South America called Sweat of the Sun, Tears of the Moon. It was made circa 1985 and gave a good country-by-country survey of the history of the South American continent from pre-columbian times down to the early 80s. It rings a little quaint today, since in 1985 Jack Pizzey held up Colombia as a beacon of hope for the rest of South America. Today that torch has passed decisively to Venezuela. I'm sure HPL de-selected this documentary as well, and I don't think it's ever coming out on DVD either. But I'm glad to have watched it, just the same.

Also saw a very good book called The Art of Living Single, which I could've used the last 6 months out on my own, since I don't think I was doing it right. I'm happily divorced (Sept 2005) and single again, and not necessarily interested in another relationship anytime soon. The book's contents seemed appealing to me, and addressed a number of questions I have been curious about. My life's been too unstable on the emotional and financial fronts lately anyway for a relationship with anyone. When I got home I looked this book up on Amazon and saved it in my personal wish-list, and, as it usually does, Amazon also provided some additional titles for my consideration. Say what you want, I love Amazon...it can be a bibliophile's best friend at times.

There were a few other titles that caught my eye. It was charming to see childrens books for sale that I had once had as a child myself. Some fond memories there. Some unexpected humor, too, in re-reading them with adult eyes.

There was a lot of history books for sale, lots of novels, lots of cook books, lots of "how to" books. A few good, attractive natural sciences titles as well. Lots of schlock as well, but hey, for $2 for hardbacks and $1 for paperbacks, whaddya expect. The re-sort area where I worked today is basically where people bring back books they decide they don't want after all, and we re-sort them to be re-stocked and let someone else have a crack at them. People tend to go a little overboard and bibliobinge and first, then get ahold of themselves and shed all but the very best books before they head to the cashier.

I learned only comparatively recently that HPL's gift policy is that ANY gift donated to HPL will be disposed of through this annual sale and NOT added to the collection. HPL reasons that since most of their books are purchased on approval plans and come pre-cataloged and shelf-ready, it is a waste of money & staff time to (copy-) catalog any donated items, no matter the quality of the individual donated items (admittedly often questionable in the case of gift books). It all makes financial sense, but in a way it limits the public's ability to participate in collection decisions. To HPL's credit, they do have a "Suggest a book" feature on their website, and sometimes they have actually taken me up on my suggestions, but more often they decline to purchase items I suggest, some for legitimate reasons (too narrow in focus, etc), others questionable. Fort Bend Libraries are also fairly responsive to book suggestions from patrons. But I once donated a very high quality audiobook lecture course on the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche to HPL (before I knew their gift policy), and I now know the audiocourse was NEVER added to the collection and probably sold for a nice profit at the annual booksale. I'm glad if they got any funds from the sale, but I would've been happier if they'd added this audiocourse to their holdings. Harris County Libraries have collected these types of audiocourses before, from The Teaching Company (see www.teachco.com - not the current URL, but it re-directs, I think). They are very high quality, with audiocourse lectures given by award-winning US professors recognized for excellence in teaching. Their intellectual history offerings are especially good and impressive. I have my criticisms of The Teaching Company, but I'll save those for another time. I am chagrined to admit how much money I've spent on personal copies of these audiocourses, and I almost always sell them or donate them to libraries aftewards, but they do provide so much intellectual satisfaction, especially if I have a long commute to work. I mostly read "nonfiction", even in my audiobook choices, unless it's collections of short stories, which are just about the perfect length for an audiobook presentation. I did once "read" Turgenev's Fathers and Sons on a long road trip to Austin once. It was okay, but I wouldn't recommend doing it again. I've also enjoyed many of British historian Arnold Toynbee's works in audiobook format, and a good many of Neil Postman's as well. When I read Toynbee's description of his own agnostic atheism, noted how parallel it ran to my own views, I found that very comforting indeed. Always nice to find a kindred spirit. I also enjoyed Peter Gay's biography of Sigmund Freud on audiobook as well, and Paul Fussell's hilarious cultural critique B.A.D. the dumbing down of America. Sheer delights, all these audiobook experiences.

I did survey the audiobook offerings at the HPL booksale, but none of them caught my interest save a study of Oliver Cromwell that I remember seeing on the stacks in past years, but it wasn't interesting enough for me to want to shell out even $2 for it. I guess maybe from a preservation standpoint, audiobooks on CD make more sense these days, but since my car doesn't have a dashboard CD player, I still hate listening to audiobooks in that format. It's cassettes for me until they stop making them altogether. I did finally break down and buy a clunky CD-adapter thing for my car, which plugs into the cigarette lighter, because Sarah Vowell's last book, Assasination Vacation was ONLY available in CD format, not cassette, and I love Sarah Vowell's work too much not to give her a listen. Same with David Sedaris. They're examples of not only great writers but also great storytellers. I admit, both of them are, shall we say, an acquired taste. It takes awhile to get used to their voices, but I wouldn't trade Sarah Vowell's deadpan gallows humor nor Sedaris's searing irony for anything. Sedaris has only gotten better, even more "literary" with age, and Vowell is a solid, engaging writer of history and adept commentator on politics and contemporary culture. I have a secret librarian's crush on Sarah Vowell, honestly.

Well, that's enough biblio-musings for one post. I'm really going to try to keep this thing a "topical" blog, focused on the library world and the bibliographic universe as I relate to it, and keep the personal angst, pathos, and assorted neurosis in check.

backstory

I am recently returned from a fabulous conference in Chicago, IL
sponsored by Endeavor Information Systems called EndUser2006, focusing
on the ILS software Voyager and related applications. My knowledge of
the ILS system grew exponentially during this week and answered a lot
of lingering questions, especially of the how-to type, that had been
plaguing me on the job all these months. I'm afraid I don't do very
well when told to just "RTFM", as the I.T. people say. I need to be
SHOWN something--usually only once--then I get it.

Unforunately, as of 24 April 2006, I am no longer an employed Librarian at
Jack K. Williams Library of Texas A&M University at Galveston, and will not be able to put any of the aforementioned knowledge to use at that worksite. There were
definite communication/feedback problems between myself and my
director regarding expectations, reasonable outcomes, etc; There was
also a decided lack of local support for training on the ILS;
basically I had to teach myself, and consult with my
paraprofessionals, who helped as they could, but who possess no deep
understanding of the underlying structure and logic of the ILS.
Post-conference, I now have that deeper understanding. Unfortunately,
it no longer matters.

My immediate plans are to try to get a TEMP job back at my former
employer, AIG. Their turnover is so high that I don't feel this will
be much of a problem. It's stressful, thankless office work, but it
beats the alternatives near as I can tell. I also plan to go back to
volunteering at the local Houston art libraries that I volunteered
with before. I already contacted the Menil Collection, but unfortuately they've filled their last volunteer position with a current UNT library school student. They would be interested in having me drop by to chat about the Voyager ILS, however, since this is a library that still has not yet automated and still runs off a card catalog (yes, it still happens even in the 21st century, even in the US of A).

The good news for the rest of you is that a new position will be
opening up down at TAMUG very soon. Word to the wise: forget that mantra they told you in Library school about "copy-cataloging is not professional level work". That may be the rules for UNT SLIS practicums, but in the real world it is the kiss of death. Oh, and demand feedback from your superior, if you're not getting any. Don't assume everything is hunky dory--silence is NOT golden.

The position was pretty much sink or swim. I evidently sank. Better luck to
the next librarian, it's back to the drawing board for me.

I'm trying to look at this as a learning experience and a temporary
setback, though in my darker moments I wonder if I will ever work in
libraries again. Colleagues at other institutions tell me it can be
done. I'll try to stay hopeful. I met so many nice people in
Chicago; it's awful that the business cards I handed out are now just
meaningless information.

I'm moving out of Galveston permanently at the end of May at the latest--back to Sugar Land, I hope. My parents are supportive, but I know this is just as devastating to them as it is to me.

I even missed the Texas Library Association meeting this year on account of my dismissal.
That's like the 3rd time I've missed it in Houston. I wish I could be there, but my registration was of course cancelled upon my termination, and I couldn't afford to pony up for it myself at the last minute.

At least TAMUG is going to reimburse me for the Chicago business trip,
though for the life of me I can't figure out why they bothered sending
me in the first place if a dismissal letter was waiting for me upon
my return. It's all still so surreal and Kafka-esque. On 07 April 2006 I was given a letter of reprimand an a very specific job quota for cataloging to be completed no later than 24 May 2006. The week before EndUser I sat down with my copy-cataloging paraprofessional to review all copy-cataloging workflows. I knew a lot of my problems could get resolved at EndUser and I could come back refreshed and ready to tackle the quota, working nights and weekends outside normal work hours if I had to.

I had been hired 24 Oct 2006. My dismissal letter was dated 24 April 2006, which was 6 months to the day from the date of hire; I suspect that my director overstepped her bounds, thinking she could extend that probationary period 1 month into May, only to be told by university Human Resources that no, this wasn't possible, and if she wanted to fire me within the probationary time (which they can do for ANY reason) her last day to do so woudl've been 24 April 2006. My firing wasn't just, or moral, nor even in the best interest of the library. It was simply expedient. Nothing more, nothing less.


Well, life goes on, my friends. See you around.

First post

Concluded my volunteer work at the Friends of the Houston Public Library booksale at George R. Brown convention center today. I had been assigned as a "re-stock" person, but ended up being a "sorter" instead, taking all the unwanted/unsorted books and tossing them into category bins to be sent back out to the shelves (tables) to be re-stocked. It was kind
of like impromptu cataloging, in an abstract sense. Had to make a lot of snap decisions about "aboutness" and toss in the appropriate bin.

It was fun mental exercise, as well as a decent physical workout. In between I answered patron's directional questions, including where to look for certain kinds of books, etc. --Did some of that yesterday too. I told a few people today that I actually am a real librarian in
"real life", albeit an unemployed one at the moment. (*sigh* a librarian without a library is a rather sad creature, though; a doctor without a hospital is still a doctor, but can a librarian say the same thing...? Maybe, but not as convincingly perhaps.)

Anyway, it was good to put in the community service, chit chat with some of the organizers, and help people. I really do think I will transition back over to Reference work someday, as much as I like cataloging. In cataloging you kind of have to accept on faith that what you do does ultimately help someone on down the line. As a Reference librarian, you have more direct, more immediate confirmation that you're helping, in very concrete ways. That, I have to admit, is
very emotionally gratifying.

I heard back via email from the HR person at AIG; they want me to
start as soon as possible. So it looks like I got my old corporate
gig back after all. It's good news, of a sort, but the job's just not
as fun as it used to be...not the least because it long ago ceased to be
about helping people and become more and more about protecting the
insurance company's bottom line at the end of the day. Like my past 2
times working for them, my decision to rejoin them now is being driven by
the same basic motive--economic necessity. Period. I still think
they could use a corporate librarian to organize their information
better, but they're totally unwilling to spend the money on something
like that.

Anyway, maybe deeper involvement with HPL friends might look good on a
resume and help me in landing my next library job--who knows?