Doors closing, Windows opening

The most recent issue of Texas Library Journal honors the libraries and library workers of the Texas Gulf Coast who bore the brunt of Ike's fury and helped and continue to help their stricken communities in the storm's aftermath. I bow my head in quiet observance of a moment of silence to honor those colleagues, especially those currently without a functioning library to call home, many of them close personal friends and recent associates.

The Aggie Librarian counts himself lucky that he is no longer a Sea Aggie. That problematic stint at TAMUG lasted only 6 months, and I felt on pins and needles the whole time I resided along Seawall Boulevard that Fall, Winter, and early Spring. I always knew in the back of my mind that an Ike was possible.

Ironically, with the latest upgrade to Voyager, EX LIBRIS has mercifully dumbed down and made much more intuitive the record overlay process such that it is actually a command now and not dependent on one's duplicate detection profiles, which was my utter nemesis back at TAMUG, when I didn't understand that until I attended ENDUSER 2006, which, by then, it was too late. I also now have sitting on my desk my very own label printer, and rather than an external program, we make use of Voyager's own label printing utility. Had I had this set-up back at TAMUG, able to print my OWN labels without dependence on our very unreliable student assistant, as well as a dumbed down Voyager allowing me to very very easily overlay records, etc, had I had those things in place, I would never have been fired, but I would now be sitting, if I was lucky, in a B/CS apartment with very little furniture, maybe a laptop, and trying to fit in and transition from being a Department head to being just another cataloger, and being very worried, uncertain about my future. The TAMUG website optimistically predicts a return to campus by this Spring 2009, but I am much more pessimistic, I think it will take at least 1 calendar year to recover if not more.

It was quite a shock and blow to loose my then job at TAMUG in the early Spring of 2006. For a time I was uncertain if my library career prospects would ever recover. But looking back, I am so grateful to have been let go from there before Ike finally came. I was sitting in Denton, Texas when Ike came, and Ike veered off before it ever reached my humble town. It brought only a few light rains, and more importantly helped lower our temperatures to give us our first taste of real Fall weather this year; while my parents sweltered for 42 hours without electricity, I enjoyed some of the nicest, coolest weather we've had in many months.

I'm currently working on multiple projects, but the most fun has been recataloging a subset of old books that somehow got lost in the shuffle, and were hastily added to the catalog from card data, with the intention of being overlaid later with fuller records. However, this was never re-visited by anyone in a systematic fashion until me. OCLC must be wondering why our collection is growing so unexpectedly, and why we seem to be adding so many antiquarian works. Of course, we're adding nothing, really, just making visible what we've had for years and years that sadly have been off OCLC's radar until now. By attaching our holdings to OCLC, we make these older, sometimes rare works visible to the wider world, accessible via ILL, and by downloading and overlaying the temporary bibs with full LC-generated cataloging in many cases, we provide fuller bibliographic accesses, with richer records at not only the local level but also the WorldCat level. This project itself was spun out of a Name Authorities control project, which we will now be turning over to a 3rd party vendor to finish, while I stay focused on the re-cataloging project. I am going to have this vendor help in identifying these records, all of which will be lacking an 035 $a field; they will either have an undefined $9 field, or no 035 at all. Once we have a better handle on the scope of the problem, I can ascertain if I need to enlist the aid of my copy cataloging staff; I suspect that I will, but for now this remains a solo project.

On the occasions when new books DO arrive, I set aside the re-cat project and attend to the new materials right away. I catalog them, affix bar codes, and turn them over to our student assistant for quick end processing and to get these material onto the library shelves, available for checkout, as soon as humanly possible.
The new books always have top priority.

The new books always had top priority at TAMUG, too, but because I was never able to get myself set up to do proper, independent cataloging and processing, I was always at the mercy of someone else, which got me ultimately terminated in the end. My copy cataloger at TAMUG viewed me with suspicion, and I think she was afraid that I would do my job too well and take her job away. I do believe she passively sabotaged my position there, though perhaps it wasn't even a conscious act. But I do believe it was an act of perceived self-defense, however factually wrong it was.

In any case, I am doing my best to make myself valuable to my new employer, and I feel markedly more secure in my present job than I ever did back at TAMUG. I never felt comfortable living on Galveston Island...I always felt like my life could be washed away without warning. Luckily that happened to me metaphorically first before it had a chance to happen to me literally.

Still, I bear them no ill will. I hope the Jack K. Williams Library survived with only minimal damage, and I hope the collection itself survived without water damage...hell, I helped build and enhance that collection, dammit. Of course I want it to survive. I know that the Rosenberg Library, Galveston's public library, was much harder hit and sustained considerable damage, though at least it to is still standing. I know that the bridge to TAMUG was damaged, and the road leading to that bridge was washed out, so the only way onto and off of Pelican Island right now is probably by boat. Until all of that basic infrastructure is repaired and power restored, those books will have to go into remote storage to protect them from the elements, lest humidity and heat take their toll. I would not want to change places with my former director for even double her current salary. Of all the staff, I would probably have made the transition to B/CS the easiest. I know it must be a real hardship on the remaining staff, with so many so close to retirement. My thoughts are with them. If TLA sets up some kind of fund for them, I would probably donate something.

I also look at the metaphorical storm clouds on our economic horizons, and I don't see much cause for hope regardless who becomes president after the November elections. I'd like to believe I'd be the "last cataloger standing" in the event of any downsizing, but it's not a theory I'd like to put to the test by any means. I'd certainly feel overwhelmed if I lost my 2 copy catalogers. If the economy continues to crash, and if we have students needing to drop out to work full time just to feed themeselves, enrollment will drop, funding will drop, and salaries will be cut back for those not made redundant outright. I plan to start buying MREs and beef jerky at the next couple of gun shows I attend, if any are to be had. I'm content with my current personal arsenal, so at least I'm not jonesing to make a firearms purchase at any of the recent gun shows I've attended...though I was tempted by a pre-ban Norinco Tokarev TT-33 re-chambered in .38 Super, and by an M-1 Garand that was going for a mere $579 (one day special). Those were very tempting, but they are not practical purchases but collector's luxury items. Besides, I'd rather have a TT-33 chambered in the original 7.62x25 Tokarev round. .38 Super is just as hard to find as 7.62x25 Tokarev ammo. And I've already resigned myself to having to wait a long time before I can ever afford an M-1 Garand, and maybe I never will be able to. Doesn't matter. I'm happy with my SKS/WASR-10 combo, and my AR-15/Mini-14 combo.

Owning guns and knowing how to operate them is going to be increasingly a necessity as civil order breaks down in the wake of economic collapse and decay. That's just reality. Libraries ought to stock up on how-to books on Permaculture, gardening, recycling, capturing rain water, etc, even academic libraries.

Once upon a time the students of the then Texas State College for Women (TSCW), now TWU, raised crops and chickens. They were partially self-sufficient with respect to their own food supply, even incorporating agricultural rituals into the school's traditions, with such yearly events as the "husking bee", to coincide with the corn harvest, etc. Call me crazy, but I predict that within our lifetimes, some of these traditions will, of necessity, be revived. The A&M of Texas A&M will cease being a meaningless signifier as it currently is, and will in short order revert back to the original meaning of Agricultural and Mechanical. It will do so because the people of Texas will NEED it to do so in order to survive. The exportation of our industrial base abroad will prove a near fatal error in the end once globalism dies for lack of cheap energy to make it run efficiently. The local and communal will re-assert themselves in competing (successfully) for our attentions, and the world will become once again the truly big place it actually is.

I try not to think about these things all day...but rather just try to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep on cataloging the books, new and old, as they come across my desk, and just try to stay focused on doing a good job. My next task is to acquire emergency food rations and continue servicing and paying down all outstanding debt. Eventually, if I can pay down my debts sufficiently well, I can begin thinking about long term investment in tangible wealth like gold and silver. The stock market is going to be a boondoggle and basket case for a long time to come until the economy settles back down and starts accepting physical reality and reforming itself, so that it no longer postulates infinite growth on a clearly finite planet. Until we change the way money works, we really change nothing.

The longer we push Suburban sprawl, the more resources we squander, the more pollution takes a toll on the environment, the more erratic and violent earth's weather patterns become, etc. All one vicious cycle after another, spinning faster and faster in a death spiral. While I don't think humans will die OUT as a species, some degree of die OFF is probably not avoidable, as a mater of nature and population pressures. If economics calls itself the dismal science now, just wait until the Long Emergency stretches on past the lives of the current generations.

The Dumbest Generation will prove utterly not up to the task, I'm afraid. Fewer and fewer people remain alive with a living memory of the last Great Depression and the skillsets learned to survive it. We are in for a rough time ahead, we X'ers and Millenials both; We're both unprepared, but we X'ers at least grasp HOW unprepared we are, I think...or at least some of us do.

Belated Book Review: M. Bauerlein's THE DUMBEST GENERATION

This review is rather delayed, and I apologize for the long silence between posts. The Aggie Librarian has been busy re-cataloging lots of books that have been sitting in our collection without holdings affixed to OCLC, an oversight that was to have been corrected "someday", and that "someday" just happens to coincide with my becoming the Catalog Librarian at my institution. I've also goofed off a lot on weekends, watching oodles of Japanese anime, and gone to the occasional gun show here in North Texas (Fort Worth, Dallas, Mesquite--the 3 biggest), dragging along a colleague from a neighboring institution.

Anyway, without further delay, I provide for you my review of Mark Bauerlein's THE DUMBEST GENERATION, which I had the pleasure to read just before school started back up.

As a 30-something, nominally Gen-X, somewhat traditionalist Librarian (Cataloger), weary of repulsing time and again the charge of the All-Digital Brigades proclaiming Lib/Web 2.0, or by now 3.0, ad infinitum, there is much in Bauerlein's critique here that is music to my ears, and I appreciate his compilation of statistics aimed at deflating the hype of Web 2.0 enthusiasts.

However, by about the middle of the book, Bauerlein's own ideological biases begin to overshadow the book, and it's clear he's got his own axe to grind. Like other Right-leaning intellectuals before, he is out to demonize the 1960s, which for him are the habitat of the Ur-Dumbest Generation, i.e. 60s Youth Culture (an estimation I emphatically do NOT share). He casually cites Leo Strauss without further attribution or explanation, which set off immediate alarm bells for me. I know damn well who Leo Strauss is, and while the quotation Bauerlein cites from Strauss is not objectionable, the corpus of Strauss' philosophical work is, in my view, quite odious and not at all in harmony with the American Democratic tradition that Bauerlein expresses such sympathy for elsewhere in his book. He similarly casually mentions David Horowitz without giving much background or context to this highly controversial turncoat ex-Trot.

While Bauerlein and I might agree in common on the philosophical outlook and valid cultural criticism of Neil Postman, he would probably balk at further mention of heroes in my pantheon, men like Paulo Freire, Michael Parenti, Peter McLaren, Richard Brosio, or even James Loewen.

Bauerlein insists on a CAUSAL connection between radical 60s youth culture and the techno-addicted Dumbest Generation of the present moment. While I will agree with Bauerlein on the general sequence of events, I dispute strongly the causal connections that he asserts. He seems to be of the opinion that radical 60s youth culture imploded from within, and that its radical rejection of the past (as if alternating iconoclastic/iconodule dialectics aren't a common feature of cultural history) is what ultimately doomed its ability to continue, thrive and reproduce itself.

He approvingly cites such "voices of moderation" as Zbigniew Brzezinski, Irving Howe...voices urging the US to stay in Vietnam, mind you. Yes, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who would later rationalize arming the forces of Usama Bin Laden in Afghantistan, to use radical Islam as a bulwark against the Soviet Union and raise the stakes in the Cold War by giving the USSR a taste of the Vietnam experience...regardless of the potential for Blowback that eventually contributed to Sept 11, 2001.

So, it was the 1960s young intellectual's own fault that they allegedly did not endure...As if, say, the sheer exhaustion of the American body politic in the aftermath of the Agony of the Vietnam war, the heightened cynicism about government in the wake of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate cover-up scandal, the general malaise of the later 1970s, and the gathering Right wing counterattack that blasted into the open with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980—As if none of that might also have had an impact on the long term viability of 1960s radical intellectual culture, which came under withering backlash assault from the mid 1970s onward. Regretfully, thus, Bauerlein is long on assertion but short on evidence in these final sections of his book. He detests the internet-addicted "Dumbest Generation" that is the object of study in the first part of the book, and also detests 1960s youth culture...and desperately wants there to be a connection, but I don't find his arguments for causality even remotely convincing here.

I also felt he undermined his general case against the so-called "Dumbest Generation" proper by focusing in on and excoriating a young artist for failing to bow down and worship at the altars of the great artists of the past. While I myself deplore the ignorance of basic history among all Americans, and have a healthy respect for the intellectual history of our reining political philosophies and their detractors, in the realm of the Arts, the Artist, it seems to me, is always under the burden to make something new, to be distinct, etc. Sometimes they succeed, sometimes they fail. Abtract Expressionism claimed to be taking on Michaelangelo; And I agree with art critic Robert Hughes's sucinct prouncement on that artistic agenda: “You lost.”

Still, the Dada movement in Germany and Switzerland of the early 20th century, or the Wiener Sezession before them in the Fin de Ciecle of Emperor Franz Joseph's Austria-Hungary were no less rejectionist of traditionalist “academic” art, yet no one today would deny their greatness in hindsight. Sezession artists were quite scandalous in their day, the blatant depiction of sensuality scandalized the Vienese burghers while thrilling the Parisian art scene. Dadaists, in a flush of furious creative impulses, proclaimed a doctrine of Anti-Art, by which they meant Anti-academic, anti-stilted, hidebound traditionalist art which they felt was tainted by association with the corridors of power which unleashed the calamity of the Great War. French Impressionism, so beloved by contemporary middle class Americans today, was itself profoundly radical and controversial at its outset. Of course one must learn the basics of painting, of color, of contrast, etc. But artistic taste is highly personal. I do enjoy visits to museums, and as the saying goes, I may not know much about art, but I know what I like, and what I like less. I respect the technical talent of earlier realist painters, but their works don't move or speak to me very much. So where Bauerlein sees impudence, I see independence that, in an artist at least, we should recognize, respect and nourish. Would it be too scandalous to bring to this youth the art of the Harlem Renaissance of the 20s? Something with which, as a young black American, he might more easily relate to than Rembrant? He might reject that, too, but no artist can expect to make a name for himself merely aping the style of what has come before.

I don't disagree with Bauerlein's general thrust in what he is trying to argue, but I do strongly deplore his selection of the visual arts as a forum to bolster his case, which I think falls flat at this weak point. Perhaps I err in showing preferential, even deferential treatment to artists and artistic temperments. So be it; I admit I am guilty of these biases.

I think Bauerlein is also willfully blind to the wider political economy implications of cultural production, the increasing corporatization of the University, the growth of (mostly right-wing and well funded) Think Tanks creating an quasi-alternative, policy-driven intellectual world that seeks to supplant the traditional academy. Bauerlein buys completely and uncritically the right wing canard, promoted by hacks like Roger Kimball, and Horowitz, et. al. about the campus being utterly dominated by the Left. Even when discussing the real, existing Left-leaning professoriate, He seems not to know either Cary Nelson or Michael Berube or their promotion of community outreach as a legitimate exercise for professors to engage in apart from basic research and which ought to count towards tenure considerations. He claims to see redemptive value in the Culture Wars but can't seem to name the major players on the side opposite his or describe many of the recent events in those struggles. No discussion of Stanley Aronowitz, or even Alan Sokal. Where Bauerlein wants to grill 1960s youth culture, my own inclination is to lob grenades at the wayward excesses of relativizing, irrationalist Postmodernism. I happen to think George W. Bush is the most vulgarly Postmodern President in US History. Frederic Jameson identified Postmodernism as the cultural condition of Late Capitalism, and I believe that point still stands. It's sobering for me to realize that the landmark motion picture THE MATRIX came out nearly 10 years ago, yet still seems like it was released only yesterday. But at least Bauerlein and I can agree that, while both of us know these names and the ideas behind them, we are correct to fear that many of our readers, both of his book and this review, won't have the foggiest idea what either one of us is talking about, and we can agree that THAT is a deplorable state of affairs made ever worse by the distractions of the technophilic, neophillic, multitasking Infotainment screen-media culture.