Pop-culture break - Frank Miller's "300"

I wasn't sure how I would react to the new Frank Miller film 300 which proports to tell the story of the Battle of Thermopolyae, via the medium of Frank Miller's own graphic novel retelling of this history. This film has been getting pooh-poohed in Left wing circles, so I was predisposed to be wary of it. And on a certain level, yes, to produce the film 300, at this specific moment in our history, with all the overtones to the present moment, at least in obscene Neocon private wet-dream fantasies...makes it at some level a fairly crude propoganda film, that, no doubt, neocons, militarists, and passionate Rightwingers and Cruise Missile Liberals will embrace quite uncritically and praise as their new anthem.

But putting that aside for the moment, and laying aside all the other politically correct sniping of the identity politics crowd, and the "historical accuracy police", and taking 300 on its own merits as cinema, I may damage my Lefty cred in saying so, but I rather enoyed the film...both as an action flick, and as a Foundations of Western Civ object lesson. It gave me a new admiration for the Spartans...not so much from the film itself alone, but from the interest it sparked in me to hit up Wikipedia after I got home and just read and read and read. I may go check out Edith Hamilton's The Greek Way again from Houston Public Library. It taught me that the adjective "Laconic", which I often am myself (and I admire fictional characters who are), stems from a region in Sparta, and it was an personality trait common to Spartans. Socrates also admired the Spartans...their ability to "play dumb", to hide their true wisdom. I've done the same thing periodically in my life, Inspector Colombo style.

For you see, as much as I admire Athens, and the Athenian way, until recently I was all Athens and No Sparta. This was unbalanced. I am getting back in touch with my Spartan past, my unbridled masculinity, love of guns, etc. In Texas universities, we have our version of Athens (UT-Austin) and Sparta (Texas A&M). It's no mistake I wound up at Texas A&M, and my first year there as a freshman in the Corps of Cadets was very much described by the adjective "Spartan"....no frills, ruthlessly utilitarian, harsh, military-life existence. My first semester of my Sophomore year was equally so. A tad more privileged but mostly still pretty Spartan.

Watching the end credits of 300 , with its blackened 3-D silhouettes meant to evoke the images of ancient Greek pottery, it sent chills down my spine. I felt a twinge of pan-Western Civ pride seeing the Greeks--particularly the Spartans--in their iconographic Greek helmets...Not Roman, but distinctly GREEK. The Cradle of Western Civilization, or at least one of its main legs. The Hellenistic and the monotheistic Hebrew heritages are the main superstructure of Western Civilization as we came to know it. I love the wisdom of Socrates/Plato/Aristotle, and the thought of Democritus before them, and the Historian Herodotous, a.k.a. "The Father of History", as understood in the Western Tradition. (and damn, I do love Gyros pita sandwiches too, for that matter). The Spartans were brutal bastards, but the Greek world might well have been wiped out and lost to history were it not for their military prowess.

Neocons will of course wet themselves with mental masturbation over this film, but the analogue to the present simply does not hold true. The Greek story that DOES carry over to the present moment is the story of Alexander of Macedon, aka Alexander The Great, and his eventual over-extention and collapse. Bush & Cheney are trying to one-up ol' Alex, knocking over a lot of the same territory because of the oil resources to be had there. There's also a Greek word worth learning for our present times---HUBRIS.

But to compare Bush's foreign wars and foreign entanglements with the Battle of Thermopolyae and the brave 300 that held that narrow pass against the invasion of Xerxes....that is offensive to their memory. Those were men directly defending their homes, their families, their way of of life. That is NOT what the US Military is doing today, no matter how much GWB may insist it is. No, we are engaged in an ever-expanding Imperialist enterprise, which like Alexander of Macedon, called The Great, and like the later Roman Empire after the fall of the Roman Republic, it is an enterprise that cannot be sustained over the long term.

Some criticize 300 for not accurately portraying the Persian Empire of Xerxes. They point out Xerxes was a short, fat man with a beard. All well and true, but in this celluoid vision of Persia, what is shown is Persia as reflected (and yes, distorted) in the fervid Western Imagination...and in that, 300 succeeds masterfully. It dramatically tells the tragic tale of King Leonidas and his brave 300 Spartan warriors who held the narrow mountain pass at Thermopolyae. It also softens some of the history...the man who survived the battle because he was ordered home by Leonidas to tell the tale of what happened...was in real life condemned as a coward. He did not--as the movie would have it--sustain a war wound which robbed him of an eye--but rather, caught an eye infection that rendered one eye blind. Another man suffered a similar infection, losing sight in both eyes, and he too was ordered by Leonidas back to Sparta, but on the way home he turned back and fought the in the final battle at Thermopalyae and was slain. The surviving man, who obeyed Leonidas's orders, was treated as a coward back in Sparta, but later redeemed himself in the ongoing war against Xerxes, but he was denied honors for valor because he was too recklessly suicidal in his fighting style, which was not the Spartan way, I learned to my surprise, and this humane aspect of the Spartan way I found most heartening, reading it later.

Anyway, I credit 300 with rekindling in me a love and interest for all things Ancient Greek, and that is surely a good thing. If it inspires the same in others, so much the better. It is through the study of "ancient" history that one learns a bit of humility, that, like Ecclesiastes proclaims, there's not much new under the sun...the "profound" ideas one may have in a lifetime you quickly learn were already said by some Greek, some Roman, some Hebrew, or some Egyptian, or some Ancient Chinese man thousands upon thousands of years before you, and said much better than you managed to articulate it yourself.

"Ancient" History, one learns, isn't so ancient after all. A lot of it becomes shockingly "modern", at times, under careful examination. One French writer, Bruno Latour, goes so far as to proclaim "we have never been Modern", as the title of one of his books has it. Michael Parenti's The Assasination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome really brought that home for me very strongly, as have other lecturers on the Classics, who are of recent vintage, recent enough to poke fun at Postmodern pretentions.

Anyway, for all its warts, 300 is a superb film and well worth the full-ticket price I paid for it.

Eine kleine Auseinandersetzung...

I just read over at Library Juice blog that librarian John Pateman of the UK-based Information for Social Change, sort of the UK analog for the North American Progressive Librarian Guild that I belong to, has just reviewed Ed D'Angelo's Barbarians at the Gates of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good - a book I positively enjoyed not long ago. Anyway just follow the links from Rory's blog, they're less messy than the direct link from ISC:

http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=216

the direct link is here:
http://libr.org/isc/occassional_papers/Barbarians%20at%20the%20Gates%20of%20the%20Public%20Library.html

My reaction?
(note: I did try posting directly to Rory's blog, but it got all buggy on me and I don't know if it ever took, so I reproduce my reaction below)

Ugh...I normally respect John Pateman's ideas and opinions a great deal, but that review was awful. Maybe I am a just a "psuedo-marxist" after all (another slur I've had hurled at me fairly recently, albeit not directly). And again, he's got the UK perspective, mine's solidly U.S.

Pateman's dismissal of the notion of low or banal in culture does not hold up to scrutiny, for it, too, is a "tool of the capitalist state", which a cursory reading of:

Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (Paperback)
by Michael Parenti (Author)
# Publisher: Wadsworth Publishing; 1 edition (November 15, 1991)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 0312056036
# ISBN-13: 978-0312056032

Would have made clear...

Pateman has way more faith and trust in the working class to liberate itself than even Lenin did. Like or no, Marx had a middle class background. As did Lenin. And early socialist movements had a very strong component of education in them. Before they could get around to advising the working class what to read they had to first tackle the business of teaching them simply TO read. And early socialist movements did provide their own reader advisory of a sorts...the IWW flatly said "don't read capitalist newspapers". Why? Because unless you're a (gasp!) somewhat sophisticated, intellectually developed reader, they will snow-job you quite easily.

Now, I happen to like Emma Goldman's quote "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal"; It's an expression of turn of the century frustration and despair. I get where she's coming from.

But in the contemporary era of Blackbox e-voting...I think the powers that be are afraid they JUST MIGHT change something, so now they have to be hacked and stolen. Q.E.D.

The height of political achievement for working class Americans was probably the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, another tool of the capitalist state, yes, but who wouldn't have been possible as a political phenomenon without Sen. Huey Long of Louisiana to his Left, and a still kicking Socialist party to HIS Left, driving things along. Sen. Long forced FDR to go further Left than even FDR wanted to go. FDR, yes, aimed to save the capitalist system from itself...and was despised, called a socialist, and even had an abortive coup'd'etat plotted against him by members of the very class interests he was supposedly "saving", which General Smedly Butler, USMC refused to participate in and thus deep-sixed the whole plot.

Maybe I'm just a hopelessly naive Fabian Socialist for being unwilling to defer betterment of my fellow man until the Glorious Revolution comes...I just prefer to roll up my sleeves and make things slightly better NOW.

Public-service Libraries (I include in that rubric Academic and School libraries) may very well be to some degree "tools of the capitalist state", but I would hold the key thing to remember is that they are CONTESTED GROUND. They are in other respects socialist anomalies in an otherwise capitalist economy. They are Public Sector entities in a country (USA) that exalts the Private Sector to almost mythic status. They are threatened by hyper-capitalist rollback and are worthy of defending.

Without education and guidance, the working class (especially poor whites in the southeastern USA), left to its own devices, is far more likely to go in a Nationalist-Fascist direction. Some lower-middle and working class whites have a rebellious (Anarcho-)Libertarian orientation, a kind of Rightish populism that I can respect on some level, and has potential to be anti-corporate-capitalist, but...without dialogue, sustained reading of expository prose, engaged discussion of those readings, etc...absent that I'm just not sure how things will play out.

"Subversion @ your Library"

...is still possible, is desirable, and the contested ground of Public Libraries as a whole is worth of defense against Neoliberal (and NeoCon) onslaught.

All that being said, I would be interested to hear more about the UK library innovations of which Pateman speaks...he is addressing a UK audience who presumably already knows what he's talking about, but some elaboration and background for those of us on this side of the pond would be welcome; I certainly allow that we could learn something useful from such innovations, whatever theoretical disagreements I may have with Mr. Pateman.

De Lange, Day 3 (conclusion)

De Lange, Day 3

I was a bit late getting to Rice for Day 3, but luckily for me, the conference got kind of a late start anyway.

Daniel E. Atkins, Director of the Office of Cyberinfrastructure, National Science Foundation, gave a good overview of how NSF views data-storage and access needs of the near future at both the National and International level. But it was such a high level of discussion, so far removed from anything I’m immediately interested in, I do admit I almost nodded off more than once during this presentation. Probably university presidents and library directors paid more attention during this one than I did. Rice University has on its campus a Computational Sciences building, which I’m given to understand is not so much about computers as the applied use of heavy computing capability in the service of more specific scientific disciplines dealing with very large datasets requiring very heavy duty number-crunching. I have a hard time grasping how libraries, traditionally conceived and currently constituted, really have much of a direct role to play in the warehousing and archiving of these massive datasets, and the facilitation of later datamining of these datasets, teasing out connections in the datasets that may not be immediately obvious at first glance. I do think that Information Science professionals do have a role to play in facilitating access to such complex scientific and technical information, as it’s clear that our traditional library classification systems—LCSH, DDC22, LC Classification, etc, brilliant as they are, will be far to general in nature to be of much use in such specific, specialized fields. No, where the Information Science-trained Metadata experts will be needed is in the construction of new taxonomies and descriptive cataloging frameworks…beyond AACR2r2, beyond RDA, beyond Dublin Core…to describe these huge datasets and provide intellectual access to them via a well-constructed subject thesaurus. This is really a huge exercise in the basics of SLIS 5200, Information Organization, for those of you fellow UNT alums out there. As with that intro course, anyone tackling the project will have to pretend to forget MARC, forget Dewey, forget LCSH and go deeper to the theory behind all these systems that provide descriptive and subject-based intellectual access, and, in close consultation with experts in the field, create a new system of information classification, storage, and retrieval that is easy to use, puts all the relevant datasets together in some form of Union Catalog, organized by internationally recognized standards, etc. Despite the influence of the Cult of Google, a coherent, controlled vocabulary is still the best approach and will provide superior results to Google-style keyword ranking systems, which will leave the searcher S.O.L. for anything in a language other than English. Google-style searching should be available as an option, no objection there, but it’s not the only way to go about getting at the data scientists are wanting access to in a logical, coherent manner.

That’s what ought to be done, and how. But don’t ask me to do it…it’s far removed from the kinds of things I’m really keenly interested in. I’m sure there are plenty of other more techno-savvy Information Science practitioners willing to step up to the plate and deliver on a project like this one. I’m not one of them. And if those are the only kinds of conceivable library-like jobs that will be available in the future, then I guess I’ll be looking for a new line of work or resigning myself to the fate of being an underpaid, overeducated office drone.

Dr. Donald Kennedy’s talk on "How Science Enters the Mainstream" was very good, especially his discussion of National Security considerations impinging on Scientific research. Dr. Kennedy used the metaphor of Canals, and their various Locks, to describe the flow of information from the research being done by scientists, and the gateways that scientific information needs to pass through. Lock 1 was the apparatus of Science publication itself, the editing an peer review process for journals aimed at other science professionals more so than the lay public. Dr. Kennedy pointed out that there is a lot of value-added work done in this stage by conscientious editors, reviewers, etc. Lock number 2 highlighted the problem of Mainstream media filtering; the lack of good science writers in the mainstream media, and the elimination of science sections of newspapers and popular magazines out of cost considerations by a smaller and smaller number of media owners, similar to the way truly investigative reporting has been cut back, and the scaling back of foreign correspondents and foreign desks for international reporting. Dr. Kennedy advocated for readers and consumers to write letters and otherwise clamor for more scientific reporting of high caliber in mainstream media. This is, needless to say, quite an uphill battle. Because for all their talk of “simply responding to consumer demand”, Mainstream media is driven primarily by advertising, because it is likewise driven first and foremost by the pursuit of ever-increasing profit margins, which means pandering to the widest possible market, which often means “dumbing down”, UNLESS a particular niche market can be developed and enhanced…like for Science reporting. The most extended discussion was for Lock #3, the National Security considerations filter, with Richard Perle’s name popping up even as far back as the Reagan administration, raising a few eyebrows. Lock 4 concerned undue political influence on the tone and thrust of scientific findings, of such findings being made more politically correct, to pander to a specific political base, such as religious fundamentalists, or heavy industry, diluting the language used with deliberately vague obfuscations, evasions, equivocations, etc, not found in the original scientific findings.

Someone else during the Q&A mentioned the role of large corporations and agencies tying too many strings to their funding dollars, with the potential to skew research. Worthwhile question, especially considering the kind of research fronted by the American Petroleum Institute or the American Enterprise Institute. But that just scratches the surface. The real problem of communicating Scientific research clearly, comprehensibly and rationally to the mainstream public does indeed face formidable challenges as laid out by Dr. Kennedy’s theoretical model of a Canal Locks system—but it also more importantly faces active interference, obfuscation and suppression through noise and chaff of the odious, obnoxious, and obnoxiously well-paid Public Relations industry. The role of libraries, as I see it, is to collect works of brave investigators who keep a close eye on the PR industry and routinely expose these machinations to greater public scrutiny. Libraries should play an active role in promoting those forces that expose the PR industry for what it is, and the negative effects, vis a vis the Public Good, that their efforts entail on behalf of their well-heeled clients. A good example of what I’m talking about is the work of investigative journalists John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, who are the leading figures of the Center for Media and Democracy, and whose books Toxic Sludge is Good For You and Trust Us, We’re Experts lay bare the origins and current activities of much of the Public Relations industry, spelling out specific tactics, modes of attack, etc. Many of the techniques mentioned are also frequently employed by government Public Affairs officers, both in uniform and in civilian service, sometimes due to the influence of Locks 3 and 4, other times for other specific agendas usually pertaining to the raw exercise of power that they desire to cover up or sugar-coat.

Lastly, we had Brewster Kahle, who gave a rousing talk on “Universal Access to Human Knowledge”; unlike many of the talks at this conference, it was aimed squarely at librarians; preaching to the choir, mostly, but even the choir needs a good rousing “amen, brother” kind of sermon every now and then, and this one (mostly) did not disappoint. The best take-away line from this presentation was a play-on-words : In academia, as well known, professors seeking tenure must “publish or perish”. For libraries and their sacred mission, Mr. Kahle asserted, they must either remain “Public, or Perish”. Amen to that, as I said. And I was quite excited by the Internet Archive project, both in America and in Alexandria, Egypt. Also interesting was preservation efforts of early software, especially old games (referred to as “abandonware” by gaming hobbyists, but still covered by the draconian DMCA, which Kahle railed against more than once)…I’m thinking of old 1980s text-based games like the sort put out by INFOCOM….Zork III, Enchanter, A Mind Forever Voyaging, etc. Also good is the effort to digitally archive old films from early in the 20^th century, because the film medium they were originally created on will not last forever, and they stand a much better chance of surviving in digitally preserved format.

No complaints from me about the digital preservation of such quality AV materials. But I’m sorry if I remain skeptical of the whole digitization of books thing. Call me old fashioned, call me a Luddite (others have, and worse). But I simply remain quite skeptical of the real feasibility of it. I’m unconvinced by the economics of it, for one. Kahle didn’t dwell on that topic for long, leaving me with the impression he was pulling a fast one (like several of the other speakers from day 1, I might add). The sample book he passed around was a children’s book from 1889. This means 1) out of copyright and therefore 2) public domain. It’s wonderful that such works are digitally preservable and re-issueable in attractive paperback format. It may very well give these works a second life they would otherwise not enjoy.

But also one of the points that really irritated me was the enthusiastic assertion about how easy it would be to “digitize the entire collection of the Library of Congress and have it available, for free, forever”.

Pardon me for raining on the parade, but this is a flawed assertion on a couple of points. For one, NO, what you would have is a SNAPSHOT of the Library of Congress, from a specific moment in time, in digitally preserved format. But for those followers of Ranganathan out there, recall that the Library is a growing organism. Books (and other materials) are added, books (and other materials) are weeded—the library is always in a process of re-transformation and growth, not unlike the way a snake sheds its skin, our bodies very cells grow, divide, die, ever renewing until we die and are reduced to our basic elements again. So in fact we do not have the Library of Congress always and forever, in a digitally preserved format, but a sliced and diced dead version, not unlike the National Library Medicine’s “The Visible Human Project”, come to think of it.

And moreover, it wouldn’t be “always and forever”, but rather, “until we can no longer sustain reliable power generation for such purposes”, which given the dire prognostications of post-Peak Oil implications, may not be as long as some people may think, maybe not even into the next generation. Considering such implications, boring old printed books printed on acid-free paper have a lot better chance of long-term preservation for passing on the cultural heritage.

And as much as I agree with Kahle’s overall enthusiasm for Public(-service) libraries [and I say Public Service Libraries to include both school and academic libraries under a broader rubric than classically conceived Public Libraries], I’m afraid this uplifting rhetoric is being used to sell a bill of goods that doesn’t measure up, in the end. (yeah, like THAT never happens…)

Although Gorman & Crawford’s Future Libraries: Dreams, Madness and Reality (1995) is a bit outdated now, Walt Crawford’s follow-up piece, Being Analog (1999) is still recent enough to be relevant, and upon being exposed to Kahle’s presentation, which concluded the De Lange conference, I am going to do something all too common among us bookish Luddites. I’m going to re-read it. And I’m going to press on reading Thomas Mann’s Oxford Guide to Library Research , the most recent edition of which I recently purchased for personal use. Because I’m not altogether convinced that many of the glaring shortcomings of mass-digitization of books coupled with print-on-demand technology laid out by Walt Crawford in Being Analog have been resolved as of 2007, not yet 10 years later. And as LC’s Thomas Mann would still point out, formidable, perhaps even insurmountable difficulties with Copyright restriction remain that simply will not go away no matter how much the digital dreamers may wish otherwise. I’m afraid I can’t accept Kahle’s entire spiel at face value. I’d want to see it vetted by the likes of Michael Gorman, Walt Crawford & Thomas Mann before I sign off on it. My suspicions are it wouldn’t pass muster with any of them, for the same reason(s) since before I went to Library school.

I appreciated all the heavy discussion over science, public policy, and raw storage issues of mass-datasets of scientific findings that took up the overwhelming majority of the time of the conference—largely thanks to Carl Sagan’s influence in my life and educational development. But much of that discussion is only tangentially related to our daily library work, or at least the kind of library work most of us humanistically-oriented librarians are interested in doing. It was definitely a conference more in tune with Information Science oriented people rather than Library Science practitioners. Information Science was the big winner at this conference, as its parameters as a legitimate discipline were laid out quite clearly…the tasks required by the scientific community are clear, you Information Science people out there—so hop to it. Meanwhile, we Library Science people will tend to the Books-centric side of the ‘Verse as we always have, if it’s all the same to you.

All in all, it was a good conference, and Aggie Librarian is very glad to have attended, even if it did mostly depress him, as predicted.

De Lange, Day 2

From start to finish, truly excellent presentations all around. Good overview of Creative Commons licensing as a partial answer to knotty copyright problems, bad court decisions and Intellectual Property run amok.

The bulk of today's talks had to do with the information explosion and management problems associated in the natural sciences, particularly in Astrophysics and other related fields where they do REALLY big calculations of large, chaotic data sets, that, until computing power caught up to these problems, were basically insoluble. And pointing out, yes, that Libraries are increasingly not the repositories of these mass quantities of data, and modeling created from that data, etc.

It was all terribly fascinating, but well beyond any of my expertise. I have a strong layman's interest in science, thanks to having a dad who was an Earth Sciences primary school teacher for many many years during my formative years, and watching lots of Carl Sagan's COSMOS as a kid, and spending a lot of quality time down at the Houston Museum of Natural Science.

But I did appreciate one librarian sticking up for the humanities in the Q&A and pointing out the remaining, sustaining centrality of the printed book to most of the deep work in the Humanities, and that brick-and-mortar may give way to clicks-and-mortar, but it will not go all-digital, all the time. The Medium is the Message--still. The Library of Congress on an Ipod is not the totality of LC. The Map is Not the Territory.

It's still distressing at times as a mostly humanities person to see SLA-type libraries, and hyper-digitized disciplines like Law, Natural Sciences, etc, and the types of library-services that exist (mostly digital) in support of those disciplines having an undue warping effect on the perception of ALL library services. And maybe we Humanists are fighting a losing battle here, but I still think it's a battle worth fighting. If we loose the library as a physical space with books, serving as the anchor for Humanities work, the Humanities themselves will go not long after, and how much poorer off we'd be as a species if that happened.

I know I got into Librarianship as a way to stay connected to Humanities work in Academia without actually having to scrounge together a loose semblance of an academic career with part-time teaching gigs, no job security, no reliable benefits, etc. I mainly want a rewarding job that will afford me enough disposable income to just keep learning as many foreign languages as I can. I don't want to be a formal linguistics scholar, nor do I do much lit.crit anymore...I just enjoy learning, speaking, exploring foreign languages and helping others to do the same. My main interests now are in Intellectual and Social History, Political Economy, Cultural Criticism, Philosophy, etc. I also still have a love of Cinema (Studies) and a love of the visual arts, especially in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna and also in the Weimar Republic era of Germany, and also in the arts & culture in early days of the Soviet Union before Stalin.

I would be deeply saddened if Librarianship in support of the Humanities truly is doomed to obsolescence, or will in future be restricted to only an elite few who live on trust funds but do Librarianship only as a hobby. I sometimes wonder if if Ray Bradbury's bookless world of Fahrenheit 451 might yet come true...not by Orwellian means as Bradbury envisioned, but rather through Huxleyian means a la Brave New World...Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson drowned out completely by the Ipod and American Idol. The crass superficiality of such as society as depicted in the film version of Fahrenheit 451 seems all too closely familiar at times.

Anyway, the conference concludes tomorrow, and I am looking forward to it.

So far, so good...

De Lange Conference, Day 1.

This is a bit of a re-cap, but also a bit of a rambling rant, so please forgive my going off on tangents. This post is also a day late, my apologies.

So far, so good vis a vis the De Lange conference. Despite a last minute change of speakers, the conference got off to a flying start. It was delightful to see so many familiar library faces, reminds me just what a small world the library world actually is. Even if the familiarity is mostly one way, i.e. people I’ve seen, interacted with. I even ran into a reader of this blog, which was for me a bit stage-fright inducing. I wanted to say “Me? I’m no Michael Stephens, I’m no Shifted Librarian, you’ll never see me in American Libraries, because I’m not a REAL library blogger, I’m just a cranky humanist bibliophile with a computer who spouts off every now and then about libraries…”; But of course I didn’t say that; All I could manage was a weak smile and a dismissive wave of my hand, which probably came across as rather arrogant, which was not my intention at all, but…

The presentations were all very good, very crisp. There were minor technological glitches, but nothing terribly distracting nor detracting from the speakers’ presentations.

One thing about the conference I’ve noted since the beginning is how the scholarly information universes of the Law, and of Science and Technology topics in particular are given emphasis and made to set the tone for the rest of the conference. The watchword is all about the frantic pace of change, about the emphasis on the NOW. It’s sort of déjà vu all over again, as I’m currently reading Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity, wherein they caution about the unprecedented quality of change in their time…change itself changed, they argue, and this is an analysis coming from the 1970s, too, mind you. I’ve no doubt I’m just as fixated on the “rearview mirror”, metaphorically speaking, as Marshall McLuhan warned about in the 1970s.

In President LeeBron’s opening remarks, he noted how something on the order of 95% of contemporary legal research material is available online, but because a book chapter he wrote for a print book was only available in that concrete format, to the contemporary legal researcher, it may as well not exist. Of course, his name would appear in a well indexed OPAC online with copious formatted note information in the 505 field in the bibliographic record for that book, which could then be ordered via ILL if not available in the host institution’s library. Fire up the ol’ Z39.50 and….(yawn). But administrators nowadays probably frown on that as not being good, cost-effective cataloging. Damn catalogers striving for that “perfect” bib record again, what’s a cost-conscious administrator to do…

But of course LeeBron’s book chapter does exist, as do other carefully written monographs on legal theory, legal history, etc. I’m particularly fond of Louis Menand’s writings devoted to Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes, tying this American’ jurist’s legal understanding to wider currents in uniquely American Intellectual History and Philosophy. Of course, contemporary law students probably don’t have time to peruse such ancillary material; I wouldn’t know--though considering Rice’s most notable contribution to American jurisprudence has been Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, perhaps it’s high time they did.

While I appreciated the talk on Open Access Education, the telltale problem emerged in the Q&A about MIT’s open courseware being only available in “locked” PDF format, with authors/contributors, still, quite naturally, expecting a royalty stream for their intellectual labor, and somewhat hindering the capacity to create/rip/mix/burn these products in new and innovative ways. It’s a sticking problem that LC’s Thomas Mann has highlighted before, and it won’t be going away anytime soon. Creative Commons is a partial solution I'm eager to hear more about.

One thing encouraging I drew from this first presentation is professors taking scholarly information production into their own hands. It is sort of an unspoken truth in scholarly publication that producing an undergraduate textbook is in some ways the “kiss of death” when it comes to the publish-or-perish nature of the contemporary Academic world. That being acknowledged generally does not obviate the need for such textbooks to be produced, some way some how. I think that Professor Baraniuk has found an innovative way to collectively share the burden of producing good textbooks collaboratively; It’s an endeavor that doesn’t have much going for it for the individual academic author…even if a textbook is successful, it hasn’t tended to garner the author much acclaim in academic circles for his or her efforts. With a more collaborative model, experts can contribute smaller, article-length sections to a collaborative work, and also open the field up to other potential authors, such as community college instructors, who would not otherwise have a venue for getting published at all in the academic publishing marketplace.

It’s also great that Professor Baraniuk wants to save community college students money by producing textbooks more cheaply. We could also offer more scholarships and grants, but that’s evidently not an option. In activist circles we call this mainstream outlook of resignation “TINA” = there is no alternative.

I also got to thinking, that, on the other hand, traditional publishing is no less an exercise in creating, ripping, mixing and burning…quoting primary as well as secondary sources, current articles, and drawing connections between them not previously established, etc. It hasn’t been that long ago since I finished and defended my MA thesis. I didn’t burn CD ROMs, true, I was still using quaint floppy discs in those days. Nowadays I’d probably use a USB Flash drive.

But I do appreciate what Connexions can do for textbook publishing in particular, and I agree with him that more academic recognition is due to those academics who take time to contribute to collaborative works that become widely used and generally successful. It’s a good way of spreading the risk around for an academic author, who is thus able to do his or her part to ensure there remain up-to-date, quality teaching materials in his or her field, while at the same time perhaps having more time to devote to individual research leading to the production of the individual research monograph in his or her field.

I myself make modest contributions to LISwiki, when the mood strikes me and I don’t have anything much else better to do.

Michael A. Keller’s talk went from imminently reasonable to—for me at least--seemingly half-crazy so fast it was disorienting. His talk proceeded at such a breakneck pace I really do have trouble recalling it now. He started to loose me, I think, when he talked of reducing on-site staff to a few paraprofessionals to handle the shrinking books collection and only needing a few “Cybrarians” to manage the digital resources, make linkages, etc. Once they got to the 2^nd Life Demonstration, I was already tuning out and burying my head in my copy of the Winter issue of Progressive Librarian. I’ve played too many games of Quake to care much about 2^nd Life. Keller himself noted while 2^nd Life is “interesting”, it wasn’t his conception of what a digital library would look like either.

I was deeply impressed by the presentation on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, looks like they’re doing wonderful work over there, and I wish them great success, especially in promoting more universal literacy, building civil society, etc. We in the West all retain a soft spot in our hearts for the original library at Alexandria. Part of me had the nagging thought of “yes, but how are you going to keep this thing running in an age of post-Peak Oil energy scarcity? It’s a situation that is not going to be kind to a library like this…”, but then again, it’s a situation that’s not going to be kind to ANY of us, and part of me can’t help but say “since this is pretty much a one shot deal, and we are at the maximal productive capacity for humanity, why NOT go for broke while it lasts...”

I overheard a snippet of conversation at lunch that I think, incidentally, captured quite well the overall theme of the conference. A person at my table remarked something to the effect of: “I barely have time to read things in my field, much less anything for pleasure or personal interest.”

More time-crunching, narrowing specialization, causing perhaps a more pronounced tunnel vision effect. I read somewhere recently that a good definition of a fanatic is someone who, having forgot his aim, redoubles his efforts.

I certainly wish I’d taken more time to prepare for this conference myself. I crammed in between sessions during breaks and it still wasn’t enough.

Now, it’s certainly true that in fields like the natural sciences, engineering, information science and computer science, legal studies, etc. the pace of change is so rapid that staying current in one’s field means keeping abreast of the latest scholarly journal publications, etc, and so much of that completely of necessity online because anything we stopped to print in large numbers would already be obsolete before the ink was even dry.

This is not so much the case in the Humanities, however. Not so for History, nor Fine Arts, nor Foreign Language instruction, nor general Cultural Studies, etc. There is some spillover speed-up effect in some sections of these broad research areas, but in the main these disciplines more with slower, more deliberative, more contemplative speed.

I am a lover of the printed book, that’s for sure, but I’ll be the first one to stand up and cheer for innovative teaching methods, where students don’t just read, they DO something. I had the very good fortune to participate during my undergraduate college career, in a German-language drama production at Texas A&M, which put on plays every Spring semester in Rudder Theater. The first time I participated, I had a limited speaking role. I progressed through more and more complex roles, finally winning the lead role in the main play my final year. It was an innovative living language laboratory, insofar as it permitted students of all levels, from beginners with non-speaking walk-on roles, to intermediate students with minor speaking roles, to advanced students with the leading roles all participating and collaborating together in the production of the stage drama. We did all of our own set design, tech booth work, etc. It was a labor of love, mostly driven by the passion and charisma of the professors involved.

A quick and dirty Google search using the terms “drama as language teaching tool” yielded some interesting results, but mostly about drama in the context of EFL classrooms, and only a few pertaining to use in foreign language instruction besides English. Perhaps there are ways to offer innovative electronic resources to enhance such instruction, but what it boils down to is having the available theatre space and allotted time to use it, having plain old books on how to do set-design on a budget, then actually doing the sets; books on how to do proper stage lighting, filters, etc. Perhaps some virtual reality could come into play on set-design, especially visualizing lighting effects, though the real proof comes out in rehearsal in the actual theatre space. The library also has to have the original text of the drama for students to memorize their lines and the overall stage directions. A really in-depth study would also incorporate a bibliography of secondary literature/criticism of the drama itself in English, especially to give first year students a better sense of what the play is about.

It was far and above one of the most rewarding educational experiences I ever went through, and it had been done a few years prior to my participation, and a few years after, but once the key professors involved in the play production moved on, retired, etc, and once the core of interested students graduated and moved on, the project ceased operation.

Call me cynical, but I don’t see much institutional support being forthcoming for such innovative educational projects in the Humanities. Morover, the ever anticipated great electronic resources for the Humanities are always just round the corner, ever lagging behind, since I started paying attention to these things in the late 1990s. Yes, there are some wonderful things out there, but in comparison to what is out there for the natural sciences and engineering disciplines...To borrow a line from one of my favorite films of recent years it’s a “Long wait for a train don’t never come.”; The fact is, the bulk of work in the humanities remains bound to printed works, extended expository prose in book form, and deep readings and discussions of said works. Knowledge “production” is admittedly slower in our fields than in the natural sciences and engineering, much to the consternation of the previous Malcolm Gillis administration towards my former department, which no longer offers advanced degrees in my field. One of their chief complaints was that our production of PhDs was far too slow, but such is simply the nature of the beast. Our work is more artisan, more individual. We don’t just set up experiments in a lab, then do a write-up of the results. And to those who do produce knowledge in that way, it’s hard to understand those of us who don’t, and to understand why we don’t. One of the reasons I found Edward O. Wilson’s book Consilience so infuriating was because it demonstrated to me clearly the mindset of a Natural Scientist who really just didn’t “get it” about how we do our work in the Humanities and why.

I had the same impression my first time in graduate school, prior to library school, hanging out with fellow graduate students, most of whom were brilliant microbiologists. When they talked shop, I could only vaguely follow at best. Often I was completely lost. I also enjoyed just talking about day to day life, pop culture, life experiences, etc. But when they began to intrude on my turf, and pontificate on history, political economy, etc, I began to stop feeling so inferior to natural scientists, because I realized my own field(s) of knowledge had value, because I realized however distinguished these folks were in biological sciences, they were babbling the most utterly inane horsesh*t when it came to any reasonable understanding of history, sociology, etc.

Regarding all the hype surrounding the “net” generation, I also like to be a little contrarian and point out that when I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, it was already a digital age. I never used DIALOG personally, but it was around in those days. The Atari 2600 is unspeakably crude by today’s standards of the Wii and Playstation 3, but it was no less eye catching and distracting from homework and chores back then as its latter day game consoles are today. But I was also nerdy kid whose parents had the foresight to buy an actual World Book encyclopedia set. It became my best friend and I spent many hours of some days chasing down various threads from topic to related topic. Today I do similarly play with Wikipedia sometimes, but it’s not quite the same. My point is, I did learn to value reading, despite the usual distractions of youth. I took mostly advanced courses in High School, just shy of Honors level courses, but my senior year I found myself so bored by my advanced history class that I petitioned to join Honors History. I actually had to sit down and interview with the teacher, had to talk about the most recent book I’d read, which was American historian William Manchester’s Goodbye, Darkness , his memoir of the Pacific War as a US Marine. I must’ve impressed the teacher sufficiently, because I was admitted to the class. It was a very hard class, and I really struggled all throughout, and only wound up with a B- for the course, but I was more proud of that B- than I ever would’ve been of the A+ I could have gotten sleeping through the Advanced class.

So I’m afraid I don’t much buy arguments about pandering to the learning styles of today’s high tech kids, and don’t get me started about “gaming in libraries”. Yes, we do need to move beyond “read this so you can pass a test about it later”, or “read this because it’s an important part of the cultural heritage—never mind what that means, just trust us.”; The latter justification I faced a lot in high school. Truth is, yes, I do appreciate Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in ways now that I never did as a teenager. But it took a long time for me to reach that level of appreciation, perhaps longer than would have been necessary if it had been taught differently to begin with. There’s moreover plenty wrong with the way education is done today, both in schools and at university. A lot of what Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner wrote about the problems in American education in the 1970s, and Jonathan Kozol wrote of in the 1990s still persist to this day. And much of it has so precious little to do with the availability or lack thereof of high quality, on-demand electronic resources in libraries...though per Kozol, some of it could have something to do with a lack of libraries altogether in some inner city K-12 schools.

Regarding Deanna Marcum’s LC lecture, I can only say that my “library of first stop” remains Houston Public Library, and for more specialized topics, Fondren Library, since the Friends of Fondren yearly fees are just barely affordable to me with my alumni discount. Though I’m also a former student of UH, where I earned my teaching certification slightly less than a decade ago, I find their “Friends of the Library” fees for limited borrowing privileges to be prohibitively expensive. Anyway, LC remains for me the library of last resort, the library of record, what have you. LC copy remains--for now--the gold standard for copy-catalogers all over the English speaking world. I admit, I had a hard time paying close attention to Dr. Marcum’s lecture, as I was only half-listening while skimming Thomas Mann’s latest article in Progressive Librarian, wherein he rakes Dr. Marcum over the proverbial coals. I found it hard not to giggle myself silly, actually, since I firmly agree with Mann, having more recently read in full his critique of the Calhoun Report, while attending EndUser 2006 last year in Chicago, hosted by Endeavor InfoSystems. I pretty much knew the ground Dr. Marcum intended to cover, so as such I was predisposed to be hostile to her presentation. Not very fair minded of me, I freely admit.

The British Library presentation was quite good, though again, with all of these presentations, the material is presented fast and furiously, and if you’re not paying attention you will miss some key (sticking) points that the presenters are usually trying to skim over. Ms. Brindley noted in passing that it was very easy to get initial monies to start digital projects, but much harder to procure additional government monies to sustain the projects over the long haul, necessitating creative use of fees, etc. She then jumped quickly on to the original mandate for the British Library to provide information access to all Britons…a mandate which would be undermined by potentially onerous fees passed on to end-users, etc, but that’s detrimental to the overall Library “marketing” message, so quickly passed over without discussion. In both the LC talk and the British Library discussion, the unspoken attitude of TINA (There Is No Alternative) towards existing political economy arrangements vis a vis these public resources was ever present, taken as a given. Public Service Libraries are indeed a public service worthy of public, that is, government support via taxation. They are still about collective ownership of recorded information, held in common for all.

By the end of this lecture, I’d had my intellectual fill for the day and sauntered over to El Meson for a fine dish of Ropa Vieja and some iced tea. After a leisurely meal, I simply didn’t have the stamina to stick around for the after-dinner keynote address at 19:30 hours, and so I called it a night and headed back to the suburbs.