...Sorry for the short notice, but if anyone's interested, this conference is going on in my area very soon.
I'm considering taking off 3 days from work to attend, though with some mixed feelings and reservations which i'll detail
below. First the full announcement, then dissected with commentary below.
-JJR, aka The Aggie Librarian.
==================================================================================================================
De Lange Conference VI
Emerging Libraries
link: http://www.delange.rice.edu/conferenceVI.cfm
Date: March 5-7, 2007
Host: Rice University via the Fondren Library and Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI)
Site: Alice Pratt Brown Auditorium, Shepherd School, Rice University, 6100 Main St., Houston, Texas
Rice University's 2007 De Lange Conference Aims to Describe How Knowledge Will Be Accessed, Discovered, and Disseminated in the Age of Digital Information
The traditional concept of a library has been rendered obsolescent by the unprecedented confluence of the Internet, changes in scholarly publication models, increasing alliances between the humanities and the sciences, and the rise of large-scale digital library projects. The old ways of organizing and preserving knowledge to transmit our cultural and intellectual heritage have converged with the most advanced technologies of science and engineering and research methodologies. Such rapid and overwhelming changes to a millennia-old tradition pose significant challenges not only to university research libraries but to every citizen. If the traditional library is undergoing a profound metamorphosis, it is not clear what new model will take its place. More information has been produced in the last several years than in the entire previous history of humanity, and most of this has been in digital format. Libraries are not storage places any more; they are less and less a place. The critical issues now include: How can that information be efficiently accessed and used? How do we extract knowledge from such an abundance of often poorly organized information? How might these enormous digital resources affect our concept of identity, our privacy, and the way we conduct business in the new century? Insight from many disciplines and perspectives is requisite to begin to understand this phenomenon to identify ways to help chart a future course.
The De Lange 2007 Conference will examine the transformational influences these astonishing emerging libraries may entail. A planning committee, led by Rice University's Fondren Library and Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI), now seeks a rich mix of subject specialists with unique perspectives who will enliven and enrich this exploration. The De Lange Conference will also have a historical perspective as well as be forward-looking and self-reflective; the conference will reveal that the emerging library is of enormous consequence and relevant to the rethinking of fundamental assumptions that structure our understanding of the world and facilitate new discovery.
The following topics will be addressed by some of the world's foremost thinkers:
1. The history of knowledge organization; major periods during which the organization of knowledge substantially changed, and the implications of those changes
2. The rise and evolution of academic disciplines and their structure during the last 150 years: Why does the university look like it does today? Why is the library organized like it is today?
3. Current disciplinary changes in method and practice: how knowledge is acquired, transmitted, and used in fields such as genomics, proteomics and computational biology
4. The emergence of genuinely hybrid disciplines (archaerometrics; archaeogenetics; music informatics; 3-D laser capture/analysis of art history objects)
5. Large-scale (global) collaborative research (Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO); Fermilab particle research; Large Hadron project)
6. Large-scale digital library projects (US, Australia, UK, EU, China): goals and implications
7. Does the current organization of departments and programs inhibit progress?
8. Copyright and intellectual property in the digital age
9. The emerging library as the new (virtual) campus
10. The rise of undergraduate research and its effects on libraries and curricula
11. Exemplary innovation: digital libraries and teaching (Connexions)
12. What the future might hold (wide-open possibilities, pro and con)
13. The end of traditional scholarly publishing
14. The economics of information: Who will pay for these major changes in tradition?
It is expected that this conference will appeal to an audience representing a very broad range of background and interests.
Conference Dates
Day One: Monday, March 5, 2007
Day Two: Tuesday, March 6, 2007
Day Three: Wednesday, March 7, 2007
=========================================================================================================================================
It...looks important, so part of me feels the need to go; but like I said, lots of mixed feelings for me about what the above says:
Things like:
>> The traditional concept of a library has been rendered obsolescent by the unprecedented confluence of the Internet, changes in scholarly publication models, increasing alliances between the humanities and the sciences, and the rise of large-scale digital library projects.<<
Oh really? Quite a few VERY sweeping assertions there (without evidence offered to back it up, notice)....
>>The old ways of organizing and preserving knowledge to transmit our cultural and intellectual heritage...<<
That would be, um, printed books-in-libraries, for the most part. Other media to a lesser extent, but mostly printed books & manuscripts.
>>have converged with the most advanced technologies of science and engineering and research methodologies. Such rapid and overwhelming changes to a millennia-old tradition pose significant challenges not only to university research libraries but to every citizen. If the traditional library is undergoing a profound metamorphosis, it is not clear what new model will take its place. More information has been produced in the last several years than in the entire previous history of humanity, and most of this has been in digital format.<<<
Information mass-production does NOT necessarily equal a net increase in human WISDOM, however.
>>Libraries are not storage places any more; they are less and less a place.<<
Like Hell they aren't!
>> The critical issues now include: How can that information be efficiently accessed and used? How do we extract knowledge from such an abundance of often poorly organized information? How might these enormous digital resources affect our concept of identity, our privacy, and the way we conduct business in the new century? Insight from many disciplines and perspectives is requisite to begin to understand this phenomenon to identify ways to help chart a future course.<<
As a side note, I notice that very few actual librarians are presenting at this thing, except, of course, for "visionary" administrators...
>>The De Lange 2007 Conference will examine the transformational influences these astonishing emerging libraries may entail. A planning committee, led by Rice University's Fondren Library and Computer and Information Technology Institute (CITI), now seeks a rich mix of subject specialists with unique perspectives who will enliven and enrich this exploration.<<
Subtext: But those Humanistic librarians emphasizing the continued importance of print literacy decidedly NOT welcome, however.
>> The De Lange Conference will also have a historical perspective as well as be forward-looking and self-reflective; the conference will reveal that the emerging library is of enormous consequence and relevant to the rethinking of fundamental assumptions that structure our understanding of the world and facilitate new discovery.<<
Code wording for renewed Neoliberal assault on public sector/public service libraries, I think, buried behind nice, flowery, euphemistic language.
>>The following topics will be addressed by some of the world's foremost thinkers:
1. The history of knowledge organization; major periods during which the organization of knowledge substantially changed, and the implications of those changes<<
It's really too bad Neil Postman is no longer around to address (harangue, symbolically eviscerate) these people.
>> 2. The rise and evolution of academic disciplines and their structure during the last 150 years: Why does the university look like it does today? Why is the library organized like it is today?<<
Any chance of a discussion about Class struggle emerging here? Somehow I kind of doubt it. Anyone wanting to discuss Paulo Freire please exit the building now.
>> 7. Does the current organization of departments and programs inhibit progress?<<
Progress as defined by whom? Progress toward what, exactly? One of the GOOD things Postmodernism DID teach me was to be more attentive to asking questions like this and taking fewer things at face value.
>> 12. What the future might hold (wide-open possibilities, pro and con)<<
That's "Con" in the double entendre sense, mind you.
>> 13. The end of traditional scholarly publishing
Read: Neoliberal ideological assault redux.
>> 14. The economics of information: Who will pay for these major changes in tradition?
Why the public of course. Socialize risk, privatize gain, as in the usual Neoliberal paradigm. We pay, they profit. Do you get it already?
...Now, in fairness, there probably are some worthwile talks being given in the midst off all the technology hype.
For example, I freely admit, I don't know nearly enough about any of these to have much of anything to say:
-------------------
3. Current disciplinary changes in method and practice: how knowledge is acquired, transmitted, and used in fields such as genomics, proteomics and computational biology
4. The emergence of genuinely hybrid disciplines (archaerometrics; archaeogenetics; music informatics; 3-D laser capture/analysis of art history objects)
5. Large-scale (global) collaborative research (Sloan Digital Sky Survey; Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory (LIGO); Fermilab particle research; Large Hadron project)
6. Large-scale digital library projects (US, Australia, UK, EU, China): goals and implications
=======================
...Thus I don't want to come across as a total Luddite curmudgeon, but with the exception of the few talking points directly above, I generally don't like the whole tone of this conference. Maybe I was naive, but it seemed like for a brief, bright, shining moment in the late 1990s we humanistic librarians had pushed back hard enough against the all-digital, all-the-time crowd, showed them up for the foolish extremists they were, and that library discourse moved away from the patently insane talk of "paperless societies", etc.
I guess with Bush's 2nd term well underway, it was only a matter of time before those forces regrouped and renewed their blustery assault.
There's no separating the technology being pushed from the ideologies doing the pushing, and those come from information-capitalist entities, seeking to undermine social(ist) formations like public-service libraries, even traditional academic libraries in universities....all part of the larger general assault on higher education.
Part of me wants to go and ask akward and embarassing questions of some of the more blatant presenters...but on the whole I wonder if going at all is kind of an exercise in sado-masochism...since it's likely to mainly depress the hell out of me. And I'm likely to be dismissed outright I get to heavy with the Class analysis and critique of sacred cow capitalism. Plus considering all of the above in light of the implications of post-peak oil production energy scarcity, renders nearly all of what will be said at the conference quite irrelevant in the long term.
My dad, when he read the conference intro above said "all of that is so true...." (I wanted to pull my hair out); he also joked "why bother going, it says you (as librarian) are obsolete.."
Why go indeed. Well, might make for good blog fodder anyway--I don't know.
But it can't be healthy for (non-Systems) librarians to attend too many of these kinds of conferences. To have it reinforced into your head "you are outmoded and irrelevant unless you are high-tech 24-7..."; Bollocks to that.
I just haven't made up my mind yet, if I'm going or not. "Emerging Libraries"?--more like "Submerging & Subverting Libraries"
--The Aggie Librarian
Monday, February 19, 2007
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
more thoughts on the CHE piece
As I confided to some PLG friends, I read some of the CHE comments there and became so frustrated & passionate that I had to post my own.
I don't think I was overly harsh, but I did want to demolish a Library school "catechism" that contains the very stupid, quite unquestioned idea that somehow format does not matter in our daily LIS work.
It is one of the more pernicuous, stupid, harmful, and pervasive memes in all of mainstream LIS, and it always produces a virulent allergic reaction in me, at least.
A King James Bible printed on velum, with gold-inlaid leather binding...versus the same text printed in sharpie ink on a roll of toilet paper. I know it's the same text, yada yada yada, but which is more likely to inspire awe and reverence? There's value to having the KJB or other variants of the bible, for that matter, archived online, or on a searchable CD-ROM, specifically for quick reference, quick textual manipulations and comparisons, etc. The toilet paper bible might even be elevated to an important component in an edgy, contemporary art museum piece. In a practical cataloging sense, no, it does not matter, we can describe each manifestation of the work as needed, distinguishing between them with good descriptive cataloging work. But too many librarians go to far and suspend all critical judgement about appropriateness of format, etc, especially if it comes with lots of electronic bells and whistles. In a corporate library, true, there will be not nearly as many hardbound volumes to circulate--some "collections" may be entirely virtual, depending on corporate needs. But to information managers who work in these settings still stubbornly clinging to the term Librarian (and most are actually all to happy to abandon that title, actually)....when there aren't any more Libros (books) to bibliographically control and lend out...and proscribing this state of affairs as the sublime ideal toward which all libraries should strive...because it's so damn sexy...like I said, I thought we humanistic librarians had beat back that particular form of madness in the late 1990s, but the struggle continues. In all the high tech hoopla, there seems to be an unspoken disdain for those of us who still give a damn about books-in-print, about cultivating a love of reading for its own sake, and critical thinking about that reading. Not always, not a 100%, and yes, there are some interesting technology applications out there that are seeking to reinforce the construction of communities of readers, etc. All to the good. But Humanists, don't let your guard down, not for a minute.
Format DOES matter. Read your McLuhan, read Walt Crawford, Michael Gorman, Neil Postman, etc.
Or LC's Thomas Mann, too, for that matter, who is an L.I.S. Demigod second only to Sandford Berman, in my personal pantheon. I just ordered his Oxford Guide to Library Research off of Amazon.com, because dammit, if I'm going to repackage myself as a reference librarian I might as well learn from the best. Mann is a Reference specialist, but he also displays a deep and abiding understanding of subject cataloging and its uses; he also has a deep and abiding understanding of the folly of current LC Administration, and doesn't shy from letting that knowledge shine forth either. I also happen to like his namesake in the Modern German literary Canon as well, as a footnote.
Mann offers a robust defense of the primacy of printed books-on-paper for all research save the hard sciences (and related fields like Engineering). Mann believes passionately in the continuing mission of the research library in support of scholarly enterprise, and rightly eschews "trendy" concerns and buzzwords about "market-share", "competition with other info providers", etc, dismissing them as inappropriate business metaphors butting in where they truly don't belong.
It's unpopular to say so, but "Information Capitalism" and its affiliated ideology that runs through and is embedded in the very guts of so much contemporary high technology, is very much on the offensive against the ideology of traditional librarianship, because it is part of Capital's wider struggle against public sector/social institutions for supremacy, or as Bill Hicks would say (or rather, softly scream) "...sticking a goddamn dollar sign in front of every fucking thing on this planet."
"It's like I'm caught in a fucking web", Hicks said, in reflection.
And how, brother, and how. Yes, it's fucking maddening, it is complex, and it really IS all interconnected.
I don't think I was overly harsh, but I did want to demolish a Library school "catechism" that contains the very stupid, quite unquestioned idea that somehow format does not matter in our daily LIS work.
It is one of the more pernicuous, stupid, harmful, and pervasive memes in all of mainstream LIS, and it always produces a virulent allergic reaction in me, at least.
A King James Bible printed on velum, with gold-inlaid leather binding...versus the same text printed in sharpie ink on a roll of toilet paper. I know it's the same text, yada yada yada, but which is more likely to inspire awe and reverence? There's value to having the KJB or other variants of the bible, for that matter, archived online, or on a searchable CD-ROM, specifically for quick reference, quick textual manipulations and comparisons, etc. The toilet paper bible might even be elevated to an important component in an edgy, contemporary art museum piece. In a practical cataloging sense, no, it does not matter, we can describe each manifestation of the work as needed, distinguishing between them with good descriptive cataloging work. But too many librarians go to far and suspend all critical judgement about appropriateness of format, etc, especially if it comes with lots of electronic bells and whistles. In a corporate library, true, there will be not nearly as many hardbound volumes to circulate--some "collections" may be entirely virtual, depending on corporate needs. But to information managers who work in these settings still stubbornly clinging to the term Librarian (and most are actually all to happy to abandon that title, actually)....when there aren't any more Libros (books) to bibliographically control and lend out...and proscribing this state of affairs as the sublime ideal toward which all libraries should strive...because it's so damn sexy...like I said, I thought we humanistic librarians had beat back that particular form of madness in the late 1990s, but the struggle continues. In all the high tech hoopla, there seems to be an unspoken disdain for those of us who still give a damn about books-in-print, about cultivating a love of reading for its own sake, and critical thinking about that reading. Not always, not a 100%, and yes, there are some interesting technology applications out there that are seeking to reinforce the construction of communities of readers, etc. All to the good. But Humanists, don't let your guard down, not for a minute.
Format DOES matter. Read your McLuhan, read Walt Crawford, Michael Gorman, Neil Postman, etc.
Or LC's Thomas Mann, too, for that matter, who is an L.I.S. Demigod second only to Sandford Berman, in my personal pantheon. I just ordered his Oxford Guide to Library Research off of Amazon.com, because dammit, if I'm going to repackage myself as a reference librarian I might as well learn from the best. Mann is a Reference specialist, but he also displays a deep and abiding understanding of subject cataloging and its uses; he also has a deep and abiding understanding of the folly of current LC Administration, and doesn't shy from letting that knowledge shine forth either. I also happen to like his namesake in the Modern German literary Canon as well, as a footnote.
Mann offers a robust defense of the primacy of printed books-on-paper for all research save the hard sciences (and related fields like Engineering). Mann believes passionately in the continuing mission of the research library in support of scholarly enterprise, and rightly eschews "trendy" concerns and buzzwords about "market-share", "competition with other info providers", etc, dismissing them as inappropriate business metaphors butting in where they truly don't belong.
It's unpopular to say so, but "Information Capitalism" and its affiliated ideology that runs through and is embedded in the very guts of so much contemporary high technology, is very much on the offensive against the ideology of traditional librarianship, because it is part of Capital's wider struggle against public sector/social institutions for supremacy, or as Bill Hicks would say (or rather, softly scream) "...sticking a goddamn dollar sign in front of every fucking thing on this planet."
"It's like I'm caught in a fucking web", Hicks said, in reflection.
And how, brother, and how. Yes, it's fucking maddening, it is complex, and it really IS all interconnected.
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Am I the Bill Hicks of Librarianship...?
I swear sometimes it feels like I'm the f*cking Bill Hicks of Librarianship. Or Sam Kinison.
I can easily imagine this scene in other LIS people's head:
AggieLibrarian (as played by Sam Kinison): "...@#)*$@!$$@!!!!"
Casual mainstream LIS observer or Average Library patron (as played by Rodney Dangerfield): " He really seems to care!! (whispering) ...about what I have NO idea...."
Sam K. died too young, but I do think he was at peace when he went. He regretted his earlier homophobia and apologized. I had it to, until someone close to me came out of their closet and changed my life for the better, forever, giving me the courage to cast off old hatreds and prejudices through the power of love I had for a friend whom I loved like a brother, and without whom I probably wouldn't be here right now.
Like Bill Hicks, though, I rant, scream, try to get people to laugh AND think at the same time, and probably end up just pissing half the people off.
I bring Bill up for a number of reasons; One, although like me, he wasn't born in this city of Houston, he was profoundly shaped by his living here. He got his start here. He's one of us, always and forever.
Two, like Bill Hicks, I too have been approached by someone and asked "What are you readin' for?"; Not "what are you reading?", which is a reasonable question, but "What are you readin' for?" (actually, I was specifically asked in fewer words..."why are you reading?"). My reaction was much like Bill's. Bill relates that he was asked this question by a pancake house waitress, who added "you can just flip on the 'tube..."; Bill looked back with disdain and disgust and said "It's not the same". "Part of why I read is...so I don't end up a waitress in a Pancake House."; My response, just about as cruel, "...because this book is probably more interesting to me than you are."; Of course, I used to read in bars, which is admittedly a little bit eccentric. I try to stick to venues where caffeine & nicotine are the drugs of choice offered instead. Things tend to go smoother for us readers there. "Looks like we got ourselves a READER", said a burly Trucker to Bill Hicks, in the same aforementioned Pancake House. Nobody ever said that to me, admittedly, and it's a good thing, too, because that's about the creepiest declaration I can imagine ever hearing about myself. My ears would definitely be pricking up listening for the dueling banjos at that point.
Three, because I've been watching a lot of the best of Bill Hicks lovingly archived on YouTube lately, and it's been a true Zen bliss experience, in the midst of laughing my ass off, and of just plain feeling the rage, along with Bill, at his angriest moments. He died so young. But you can't say he didn't live life to the fullest, when he did speak, he spoke/lectured...no SCREAMED FROM HIS HEAARRRRTTT!!!
That's your barbaric yawlp right there, my fellow Dead Poets' Society members; He was a man of passion who died young. As the Billy Joel song says, only the Good Die Young. But even if you do make it to a ripe old age, despair not--for if you remain young in your HEART, you too, shall die YOUNG. Only the GOOD die young, regardless of physical age. You dig?
Peace, bro.
CHE excerpt & my rant, er, response (comment #5)
Excerpted from the Chronicle on Higher Education...
(sidebar: the original editorial referenced here appeared first in the Washington Post and was reprinted in the Houston Chronicle in the past few days, which is where I read it; It depressed the crap out of me. I think it was an accurate depiction of the way things are and are going, but as I remarked to my mom, that doesn't mean I have to like it...)=====================================================
January 23, 2007
Wanted: Librarian. Book Lovers Need Not Apply.
As more and more librarians become "media specialists" or "information technologists," what happens to librarians who remain chiefly interested in collecting books, not in promoting information literacy? They get a bit jaundiced, writes Thomas Washington, the librarian at a school in the Washington area.
In an editorial for The Washington Post, Mr. Washington bristles at the notion that libraries should be helping students navigate "the digital forest of information overload" instead of getting people to the stacks:
The buzzword in the trade is "information literacy," a misnomer, because what it is really about is mastering computer skills, not promoting a love of reading and books. These days, librarians measure the quality of returns in data-mining stints. We teach students how to maximize a database search, about successful retrieval rates. What usually gets lost in the scramble is a careful reading of the material.
Mr. Washington's skeptical take on information-literacy training is debatable. But the piece is worth reading because of its underlying point: that bibliophiles may find modern library jobs unrewarding. Have the requirements for library work changed over the past decade, or is Mr. Washington romanticizing the past? --Brock Read
Comments
Technology Newspeak & Humanistic Librarianship
I got this on another ALA-related discussion list and I couldn't help being taken aback by the rhetoric and tone.
start original blurb here:
==========================================================================================
Subject: ACRL ULS Campus Administration and Leadership Discussion Group
Colleagues -- FYI.
(some Librarian)
(An Academic Library)
What Do You Do When . . . ?
Your library agenda is 21st Century
with dreams of institutional repositories,
open access, digital preservation, Google and Library 2.0.
But your provost's, president's, and chancellor's agendas
are stuck in the 20th Century
with tired old worries about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours.
First, You've Got to Get Their Attention!
Join the ALA Midwinter meeting of the
ACRL ULS Campus Administration and Leadership Discussion Group as we talk about successes and failures
in getting the attention of our bosses and in transforming their agendas into our agenda.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
10:30 am - 12:30 pm
Westin Seattle Room: St. Helens
For more information, e-mail
(same Librarian as above)
Discussion Group Chair
===================================================================================================================
Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
...Anyhow, it's the kind of rhetoric that, after reading critical LIS lit by Thomas Mann of LC, or John Buschman, Rory Litwin, et. al. of PLG, that I'm now quite suspicious of.
I'm a little hesitant to post my "WTF!?" reaction to the original list as a whole, for fear of coming across as a reactionary fuddy-duddy, but...
I read the blurb below..."stuck in the 20th century with 'tired old worries' about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours".
Now, I can only speak about tuition, but with the way it's spiraling upwards, and becoming ever more out of reach for ordinary people, it's still a worry, and quite a 'trendy', 'cutting edge' worry at that!
"...stuck in the 20th Century with tired old worries about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours."
the subtext practically sneers: "and heaven help you if you still care about those even more passe 19th and 18th century ideas about universal literacy, informed citizenry educated to fully participate in democratic life, moral self-improvement, etc, sheeesh...."
>>....with dreams of institutional repositories,
um, okay.
>> open access, <<
empty feel-good buzzword--sounds lovely, but what do you really MEAN?
>>digital preservation,<<
...still highly problematic.
>> Google <<
ditto
and Library 2.0. <<<
--and I still don't fully know what the hell this means, either, precisely.
On a side note, I really enjoyed the hell out of John Buschman's last book, and Ed D'Angelo's new book too, from Library Juice Press; Ed's is a real page turner and packs a lot of good stuff into a tightly bundled package; We (Progressive Librarians) make our arguments forcefully and passionately. But we seem to talk past our opponents in mainstream Library practice, and they politely ignore us. For a change, I'd like to see a well written polemical dust-up, where one of us takes on any one of the more mainstream, uncritical techno-consensus writers and really tries to engage them head on, challenge them and their vision over what librarianship is and ought to be explicitly. I'm not talking about the few self-described "right wing" librarians out there. Screw them. They're willfully stupid. No, I'm talking about more mainstream opinion makers, respectable LITA members all.
I've also come across some of the buzz about the "Second Life Library". My gut reaction is "uh, my first life is quite full & busy enough, thanks."
I'm equally dismayed about "Gaming in Libraries", etc, including some recent articles in American Libraries on the topic that had me pulling my hair out.
I want to sarcastically write...."aw, shit, if only this research had come out earlier, I wouldn't have wasted all that time reading, I would've spent even MORE time goofing off playing Atari 2600, Zork, Ultima III, etc."; Given my age, I keep insisting, sort of against the grain of conventional wisdom, that the 1970s and early 1980s were also part of the "Digital Age".
Some educator wrote an article that my mom, who is a school librarian herself, showed to me not long ago (and now I can't find it, damn it) ...the article was going on and on about the dichtomy between what it termed "digital immigrants" and "digital natives"...contrasting older gen educators & librarians having to learn technology in their later years, to younger people who've always known it, because they were "born" into it. It played on the metaphor of the American immigration experience & cultural assimilation, etc. I wrote a creative response to this (as an email), riffing on the fact that although I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, this was still part of the Digital Age, and thus, people of my age group were like first generation immigrants; we may have been born in "the old country" (pre-high tech age), but we came to "America" (hi-technology) very young; We have a foot in the old and in the new. We learned English (technospeak) but are also familiar with the native language of the "home country" (humanistic, non-technical discourse). We like the new, but still have respect for the old ways...It was an email I sent to my mom, and no, I didn't save it, nor did she. I do that too much. I write very philosophical, introspective emails then never save them.
It seemed as though, for a bright shining moment, from, say, 1998 thru 2002, the Humanists had won the battle, made the All-Digital Brigades look foolish, and achieved a truce recognizing the need to balance out viable print collections with augmented, cutting edge electronic resources, especially in the area of serials and serials management, or high-demand, high-circulation monographic items being augmented with their Ebook equivalent as needed.
But with the two successive Bush administrations, the Digital/Info-Capitalistic barbarians are renewing their assault.
One of the ironic things about PLG, SRRT, and all the so-called "Left/radical" library groupings is that, although in the realm of Politics we are all Liberals, Radicals, Leftists, Populists, etc.
in the realm of Librarianship, narrowly defined, we are indeed the TRUE CONSERVATIVES of Librarianship...in the best sense of the term, in the same sense that Neil Postman declared himself a conservative and further declared that in comparison, Ronald Reagan was not.
Conservative in the sense of "to conserve", to fight for the best of the Humanistic (& largely Anglo-American) library tradition in opposition to the crass, vulgarizing, "market-based", hi-tech/technocratic approach to libraries. That Humanistic tradition of libraries which is a socialism that-dare-not-speak-its-name. And the force behind the assault on that tradition is the ideology of free market fundamentalism, inextricably bound up with high technology, transforming from the paper society to the "pay-per" society as Vincent Mosco so neatly puts it.
Soneone recently coined a valuable turn of phrase...."the new Digital Dark Ages", bemoaning declining real, informed literacy despite burgeoning electronic resources. Of course, it's not all bad...some of my best news and info comes from the web, especially from Alternative and Independent sources. My dad watches CNN, FOX and MSNBC nearly every day for hours, while I get my info from emailed alternative news aggregators and websites and blogs. Guess who's better informed. My dad will continually come up to me with "new" breaking stories in the MSM that I've known about for months, in some cases. Even when using just MSM sources, I don't restrict myself to US sources. I regularly read CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Moscow Times, Liberacion, L'Humanite, Australian Broadcasting Corp, Asia Times, etc.
Of course, the move against "Net Neutrality" is a ham-firsted attempt to "ghetto-ize" alternative/independent, uncontrollable sources of news and information.
Well, anyway, enough babbling from me. Peace.
-JJR
start original blurb here:
==========================================================================================
Subject: ACRL ULS Campus Administration and Leadership Discussion Group
Colleagues -- FYI.
(some Librarian)
(An Academic Library)
What Do You Do When . . . ?
Your library agenda is 21st Century
with dreams of institutional repositories,
open access, digital preservation, Google and Library 2.0.
But your provost's, president's, and chancellor's agendas
are stuck in the 20th Century
with tired old worries about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours.
First, You've Got to Get Their Attention!
Join the ALA Midwinter meeting of the
ACRL ULS Campus Administration and Leadership Discussion Group as we talk about successes and failures
in getting the attention of our bosses and in transforming their agendas into our agenda.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
10:30 am - 12:30 pm
Westin Seattle Room: St. Helens
For more information, e-mail
(same Librarian as above)
Discussion Group Chair
===================================================================================================================
Names have been changed to protect the guilty.
...Anyhow, it's the kind of rhetoric that, after reading critical LIS lit by Thomas Mann of LC, or John Buschman, Rory Litwin, et. al. of PLG, that I'm now quite suspicious of.
I'm a little hesitant to post my "WTF!?" reaction to the original list as a whole, for fear of coming across as a reactionary fuddy-duddy, but...
I read the blurb below..."stuck in the 20th century with 'tired old worries' about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours".
Now, I can only speak about tuition, but with the way it's spiraling upwards, and becoming ever more out of reach for ordinary people, it's still a worry, and quite a 'trendy', 'cutting edge' worry at that!
"...stuck in the 20th Century with tired old worries about tuition, faculty productivity, and student credit hours."
the subtext practically sneers: "and heaven help you if you still care about those even more passe 19th and 18th century ideas about universal literacy, informed citizenry educated to fully participate in democratic life, moral self-improvement, etc, sheeesh...."
>>....with dreams of institutional repositories,
um, okay.
>> open access, <<
empty feel-good buzzword--sounds lovely, but what do you really MEAN?
>>digital preservation,<<
...still highly problematic.
>> Google <<
ditto
and Library 2.0. <<<
--and I still don't fully know what the hell this means, either, precisely.
On a side note, I really enjoyed the hell out of John Buschman's last book, and Ed D'Angelo's new book too, from Library Juice Press; Ed's is a real page turner and packs a lot of good stuff into a tightly bundled package; We (Progressive Librarians) make our arguments forcefully and passionately. But we seem to talk past our opponents in mainstream Library practice, and they politely ignore us. For a change, I'd like to see a well written polemical dust-up, where one of us takes on any one of the more mainstream, uncritical techno-consensus writers and really tries to engage them head on, challenge them and their vision over what librarianship is and ought to be explicitly. I'm not talking about the few self-described "right wing" librarians out there. Screw them. They're willfully stupid. No, I'm talking about more mainstream opinion makers, respectable LITA members all.
I've also come across some of the buzz about the "Second Life Library". My gut reaction is "uh, my first life is quite full & busy enough, thanks."
I'm equally dismayed about "Gaming in Libraries", etc, including some recent articles in American Libraries on the topic that had me pulling my hair out.
I want to sarcastically write...."aw, shit, if only this research had come out earlier, I wouldn't have wasted all that time reading, I would've spent even MORE time goofing off playing Atari 2600, Zork, Ultima III, etc."; Given my age, I keep insisting, sort of against the grain of conventional wisdom, that the 1970s and early 1980s were also part of the "Digital Age".
Some educator wrote an article that my mom, who is a school librarian herself, showed to me not long ago (and now I can't find it, damn it) ...the article was going on and on about the dichtomy between what it termed "digital immigrants" and "digital natives"...contrasting older gen educators & librarians having to learn technology in their later years, to younger people who've always known it, because they were "born" into it. It played on the metaphor of the American immigration experience & cultural assimilation, etc. I wrote a creative response to this (as an email), riffing on the fact that although I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, this was still part of the Digital Age, and thus, people of my age group were like first generation immigrants; we may have been born in "the old country" (pre-high tech age), but we came to "America" (hi-technology) very young; We have a foot in the old and in the new. We learned English (technospeak) but are also familiar with the native language of the "home country" (humanistic, non-technical discourse). We like the new, but still have respect for the old ways...It was an email I sent to my mom, and no, I didn't save it, nor did she. I do that too much. I write very philosophical, introspective emails then never save them.
It seemed as though, for a bright shining moment, from, say, 1998 thru 2002, the Humanists had won the battle, made the All-Digital Brigades look foolish, and achieved a truce recognizing the need to balance out viable print collections with augmented, cutting edge electronic resources, especially in the area of serials and serials management, or high-demand, high-circulation monographic items being augmented with their Ebook equivalent as needed.
But with the two successive Bush administrations, the Digital/Info-Capitalistic barbarians are renewing their assault.
One of the ironic things about PLG, SRRT, and all the so-called "Left/radical" library groupings is that, although in the realm of Politics we are all Liberals, Radicals, Leftists, Populists, etc.
in the realm of Librarianship, narrowly defined, we are indeed the TRUE CONSERVATIVES of Librarianship...in the best sense of the term, in the same sense that Neil Postman declared himself a conservative and further declared that in comparison, Ronald Reagan was not.
Conservative in the sense of "to conserve", to fight for the best of the Humanistic (& largely Anglo-American) library tradition in opposition to the crass, vulgarizing, "market-based", hi-tech/technocratic approach to libraries. That Humanistic tradition of libraries which is a socialism that-dare-not-speak-its-name. And the force behind the assault on that tradition is the ideology of free market fundamentalism, inextricably bound up with high technology, transforming from the paper society to the "pay-per" society as Vincent Mosco so neatly puts it.
Soneone recently coined a valuable turn of phrase...."the new Digital Dark Ages", bemoaning declining real, informed literacy despite burgeoning electronic resources. Of course, it's not all bad...some of my best news and info comes from the web, especially from Alternative and Independent sources. My dad watches CNN, FOX and MSNBC nearly every day for hours, while I get my info from emailed alternative news aggregators and websites and blogs. Guess who's better informed. My dad will continually come up to me with "new" breaking stories in the MSM that I've known about for months, in some cases. Even when using just MSM sources, I don't restrict myself to US sources. I regularly read CBC, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Moscow Times, Liberacion, L'Humanite, Australian Broadcasting Corp, Asia Times, etc.
Of course, the move against "Net Neutrality" is a ham-firsted attempt to "ghetto-ize" alternative/independent, uncontrollable sources of news and information.
Well, anyway, enough babbling from me. Peace.
-JJR
Intellectual Property run amok, or a DMCA-inspired Aggie Joke
Why I hate intellectual property lawyers and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act….Exhibit A
This is the kind of crap that Siva Vaidhyanathan, Jessica Litman & others are warning us about. This is the kind of actions that are emboldened by legal raw deals like the DMCA.I'm normally a 2%'er WHEN IT COMES TO AGGIELAND, but this story makes my blood run boiling MAROON.
-JJR '93 ===================================================================================
UT sues Aggie retailer over
'saw em off'
10:27 AM CST on Tuesday, January 23, 2007
COLLEGE STATION, Texas -- The University of Texas is countering a jab from an Aggie business owner by taking him to court over his “saw em off” variation of the familiar Longhorn logo.
'Saw em off' lawsuit
Oh, Really, Mr. Huddleston!? Way to boof your buddies there, as we used to say in the Corps. They (UT) don't have a case, this is clearly SATIRE and PARODY, and I hope this case gets laughed out of court. I hope this case is NOT heard by a judge who graduated from either school--lest accusations of bias come in...give us a Rice judge or a Baylor judge. A Rice judge especially, since PARODY and SATIRE are the lifeblood of the Marching Owl Band ("M.O.B.").
The UT "brand" isn't diminished by these parodies, though stupid lawsuits like this only reinforce the negative "T(ea)-sip" stereotype. It's not diminished anymore than a parody of the TAMU logo, like the clever " E-aTm-E " (eat me) graffiti I've sometimes seen in Austin. I wouldn't be offended if this was put on a T-shirt. I'd laugh. Hell, the Aggie "mascot", Rock a.k.a. "Ol' Sarge", is in large measure SELF-parody. Everyone knows Aggies write the best Aggie jokes. The A&M "brand" capitalizes on a kind of "aw, shucks" self-parody, as does this blog, for that matter ;-) Rice U has some of the self-deprecating humor, like putting upside down the bumper stickers that read "I must be smart, I go to Rice".
I remember during library school there was earnest and quite serious discussion about reinventing the UNT "Brand", what it symbolized, etc. etc. I could not take any of it seriously, no matter how hard I tried (which, admittedly, wasn't very), no matter how much these pontificators DEMANDED to be taken seriously, and took seriously their own project.
It is just another sad symbol of how powerfully the ideology of Marketing, Spin, and PR and extreme hyper-capitalism have corrupted what remains of the already corroded and anemic Realm of Ideas in these United States. No idea, no matter how ridiculous, will be dismissed or ignored so long as it invokes the ideology and language of marketing and the nostalgia for stalwart American business mytholgies.
One of the last films hosted by the currently defunct Texas Film Festival on the A&M campus was the documentary on Ron English, the subversive Pop-o-ganda rebel artist. Ron would make an excellent "expert witness" for a case like this.
More ramblings later. Gig 'em.
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Documentary on Salvador Allende/Rice Media Center
I love the Rice Media Center; I loved it as a student, I love it as a Houston-area resident. They always bring such consistently high-quality cultural offerings to this city, as does MFAH.
Last night I saw a moving documentary on the life and tragic death of Salvador Allende, the former President of Chile, before the Military Coup'd'Etat (materially assisted at some level by the Central Intelligence Agency) which ended his presidency, his life, and Chilean democracy for a couple of generations and installed the brutal fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It was a very moving film, but also very sad. Here was a man, a medical doctor by training, a truly decent human being, a self-described militant socialist, yes, but almost Gandhi-like in his demeanor. In truth he was a classic Fabian (Utopian) Socialist, who believed Socialism can be voted in at the ballot box. As he is described in the narrative of Guzman's documentary of him, he strikes me as a man who was a pure idealist, who really did believe in the power of ideas, that the pen was mightier than the sword, that the upper classes would lay down their opposition because he could out debate them. He insisted always on the pacifist's path, to a fault.
Douglas MacArthur is reputed to have said "whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword never had to contend with automatic weapons"; and that is the lesson Allende learned tragically too late. He would also have done well to remember Mao Tse Tung's dictum about political power flowing out of the barrel of a gun. Allende seemed to like to give aggressive, determinedly militant speeches. The US State Department claims Allende was a deep admirer of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-Tung, and of course every US nationalist's favorite bete noir in Latin America, Fidel Castro. He did invite Castro to Chile, which scandalized and mobilized the Right wing in Chile in reaction. And some of the recorded speeches Guzman assembled for his film seem very determined and defiant. But Guzman himself catches the kernel of the problem by noting that Castro himself once told Allende that he would need to break the army and sieze it as his own instrument (a lesson not lost on Hugo Chavez today, by the way, who rose up through the ranks of Venezuela's military). He failed to do so, in the same way the Social Democrats in 1918 left the Junker-dominated military in place after the Armistice (and sickeningly relied on right-wing paramilitaries like the Freikorps to do their dirty work against their rivals in the German Communist movements--but that's another story). The only reason Lenin's revolutionary movement succeeded is because the Tsar's army was itself broken and disillusioned by World War 1, and when Kerensky ordered them back to the trenches, back to the front, the Bolshevik promise of "Bread and Peace" became unstoppable. Enough of the Tsar's common soldiers went over to the Reds, bringing their valuable military equipment with them.
My point is, if you're going to talk the talk, like Allende clearly relished in doing--and man o man did he have the popular support of the masses, too...you've got to be willing and able to walk the walk as Mao, Ho, Fidel, Lenin, et. al. did. Allende surely remembered the fate of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954...or Mossadegh in Iran. But because his movement was not sufficiently armed and militant, it was doomed when the forces of reaction began their backlash and asserted their traditional class power.
Michael Parenti offers an excellent analysis of the problem of a path like Allende's by noting, with analogues also to the situation around John F. Kennedy...that actually there are 2 centers of power in most countries today...there is the formal, civil, elected government that is (or is supposed to be) relatively open, transparent, democratic, etc. But there is also the vast National Security State, with men and women in appointed, largely unaccountable positions...it is comprised of the nation's armed forces and its intelligence agencies and national police forces and the agencies, corporations, and private interests that nurture and support them and often provide the leadership for. As one prominent investigative journalist has demonstrated, the CIA is Wallstreet, and Wallstreet is the CIA. The same people, in the same small circles, all defending their mutual class interest(s) around the world. These are people who live off of trust funds and use their modest government salary as purely discretionary income. They are the sort of people, both in this country and in their proxies abroad drawn from the elites of third world nations, who support brutal men like Agusto Pinochet, and see to it that men like Salvador Allende meet with an early grave. Allende seized the reins of power of the formal civil government, but learned too late that the real power was in the internal Chilean National Security State, where Pinochet had his base.
Although careless right-wingers might (mis-)label me an "extremist liberal", in fact I'm a radical populist, a socialist with anarchist leanings. Allende could've taken a page from Patrick Henry who rightly insisted "that every man be armed". Although I don't deny the Leftist lable, I'm intelligent enough to know that the Right-Left dichotomy is often chimerical and illusory, and that the real struggle is actually Top versus Bottom, and this does NOT always neatly map the same territory as Right versus Left....lot of overlap? Sure there is--but it's not a perfect overlay, which means there are a few right-wing populists running around that I may actually have more respect for than some centrist and more mainstream "limousine liberals" who mostly focus on "cultural" issues and obfuscate or just plain ignore true class realities and honest class struggle. Michael Parenti has written in a very general way that any Third world leader who starts a socialist revolution will have to beef up his military almost immediately to prepare for the inevitable capitalist backlash and counter-revolution. Nice, inoffensive Fabian Social Democracy might not be possible right away because of these inherent dangers...Allende was right in that genuine democracy IS a road to socialism, but that's why genuine democracy is usually attacked and subverted by ruling classes the world over whenever possible. De Toqueville records the opinions of American oligarchs who privately express their genuine distaste for American democracy at bottom. Point is, they still feel that way...and some of them ever more openly than before. Did you know there was actually a plot to remove FDR from office by possible military coup? The problem is, the conspirators approached a man with far more integrity than they realized and who knew very well that he had been, in his distinguished military career, a "gangster for capitalism"---I speak of none other than General Smedly Butler, author of War is a Racket whose message is as poignant now as then. He would not work with the plotters.
Does Patricio Guzman's Salvador Allende have any lessons for our present moment? Of course it does. But they are not lessons many Norteamericanos either want to hear or learn from or even acknowledge in their own hearts, and so it goes. I'm not talking about US complicity in the Chilean coup, that much is obvious. I'm talking about the lesson of the reaction of the Chilean people to the destruction of their precious democracy by the brutal fascist regime of Agusto Pinochet. I'm not so sure it would be comfortable for many Norteamericanos to walk around in the shoes of Chileans from that generation. There are some important words to know in Spanish if you wish to count yourself as remotely politically aware about what goes on in the world, words like "los deceparicidos", "guerra sucia", "golpe militar". Guzman's film is a documentary, but I can also point to a fictional film, based on real life, that could be set in very nearly any Latin American country (which is why the country goes unnamed in the film); I refer, of course, to the film Hombres Con Armas , "Men with Guns". Also still painfully, ever relevant, Eduard Galeano's classic book Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina , the "Open Veins of Latin America". The United States, with ever increasing gulfs between the super-rich and the rest of us, is structurally becoming ever more like the stereotypical Latin American government(s) that snobbish (and ingnorant) Norteamericanos used to feel vastly superior to. Return of the Repressed? Baby, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Ben Franklin was once asked by an esteemed lady what sort of government he hoped for America. His reply was "a Republic, madam, if you can keep it." He did not mean a "Banana Republic", either.
Last night I saw a moving documentary on the life and tragic death of Salvador Allende, the former President of Chile, before the Military Coup'd'Etat (materially assisted at some level by the Central Intelligence Agency) which ended his presidency, his life, and Chilean democracy for a couple of generations and installed the brutal fascist dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. It was a very moving film, but also very sad. Here was a man, a medical doctor by training, a truly decent human being, a self-described militant socialist, yes, but almost Gandhi-like in his demeanor. In truth he was a classic Fabian (Utopian) Socialist, who believed Socialism can be voted in at the ballot box. As he is described in the narrative of Guzman's documentary of him, he strikes me as a man who was a pure idealist, who really did believe in the power of ideas, that the pen was mightier than the sword, that the upper classes would lay down their opposition because he could out debate them. He insisted always on the pacifist's path, to a fault.
Douglas MacArthur is reputed to have said "whoever said the pen is mightier than the sword never had to contend with automatic weapons"; and that is the lesson Allende learned tragically too late. He would also have done well to remember Mao Tse Tung's dictum about political power flowing out of the barrel of a gun. Allende seemed to like to give aggressive, determinedly militant speeches. The US State Department claims Allende was a deep admirer of Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-Tung, and of course every US nationalist's favorite bete noir in Latin America, Fidel Castro. He did invite Castro to Chile, which scandalized and mobilized the Right wing in Chile in reaction. And some of the recorded speeches Guzman assembled for his film seem very determined and defiant. But Guzman himself catches the kernel of the problem by noting that Castro himself once told Allende that he would need to break the army and sieze it as his own instrument (a lesson not lost on Hugo Chavez today, by the way, who rose up through the ranks of Venezuela's military). He failed to do so, in the same way the Social Democrats in 1918 left the Junker-dominated military in place after the Armistice (and sickeningly relied on right-wing paramilitaries like the Freikorps to do their dirty work against their rivals in the German Communist movements--but that's another story). The only reason Lenin's revolutionary movement succeeded is because the Tsar's army was itself broken and disillusioned by World War 1, and when Kerensky ordered them back to the trenches, back to the front, the Bolshevik promise of "Bread and Peace" became unstoppable. Enough of the Tsar's common soldiers went over to the Reds, bringing their valuable military equipment with them.
My point is, if you're going to talk the talk, like Allende clearly relished in doing--and man o man did he have the popular support of the masses, too...you've got to be willing and able to walk the walk as Mao, Ho, Fidel, Lenin, et. al. did. Allende surely remembered the fate of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954...or Mossadegh in Iran. But because his movement was not sufficiently armed and militant, it was doomed when the forces of reaction began their backlash and asserted their traditional class power.
Michael Parenti offers an excellent analysis of the problem of a path like Allende's by noting, with analogues also to the situation around John F. Kennedy...that actually there are 2 centers of power in most countries today...there is the formal, civil, elected government that is (or is supposed to be) relatively open, transparent, democratic, etc. But there is also the vast National Security State, with men and women in appointed, largely unaccountable positions...it is comprised of the nation's armed forces and its intelligence agencies and national police forces and the agencies, corporations, and private interests that nurture and support them and often provide the leadership for. As one prominent investigative journalist has demonstrated, the CIA is Wallstreet, and Wallstreet is the CIA. The same people, in the same small circles, all defending their mutual class interest(s) around the world. These are people who live off of trust funds and use their modest government salary as purely discretionary income. They are the sort of people, both in this country and in their proxies abroad drawn from the elites of third world nations, who support brutal men like Agusto Pinochet, and see to it that men like Salvador Allende meet with an early grave. Allende seized the reins of power of the formal civil government, but learned too late that the real power was in the internal Chilean National Security State, where Pinochet had his base.
Although careless right-wingers might (mis-)label me an "extremist liberal", in fact I'm a radical populist, a socialist with anarchist leanings. Allende could've taken a page from Patrick Henry who rightly insisted "that every man be armed". Although I don't deny the Leftist lable, I'm intelligent enough to know that the Right-Left dichotomy is often chimerical and illusory, and that the real struggle is actually Top versus Bottom, and this does NOT always neatly map the same territory as Right versus Left....lot of overlap? Sure there is--but it's not a perfect overlay, which means there are a few right-wing populists running around that I may actually have more respect for than some centrist and more mainstream "limousine liberals" who mostly focus on "cultural" issues and obfuscate or just plain ignore true class realities and honest class struggle. Michael Parenti has written in a very general way that any Third world leader who starts a socialist revolution will have to beef up his military almost immediately to prepare for the inevitable capitalist backlash and counter-revolution. Nice, inoffensive Fabian Social Democracy might not be possible right away because of these inherent dangers...Allende was right in that genuine democracy IS a road to socialism, but that's why genuine democracy is usually attacked and subverted by ruling classes the world over whenever possible. De Toqueville records the opinions of American oligarchs who privately express their genuine distaste for American democracy at bottom. Point is, they still feel that way...and some of them ever more openly than before. Did you know there was actually a plot to remove FDR from office by possible military coup? The problem is, the conspirators approached a man with far more integrity than they realized and who knew very well that he had been, in his distinguished military career, a "gangster for capitalism"---I speak of none other than General Smedly Butler, author of War is a Racket whose message is as poignant now as then. He would not work with the plotters.
Does Patricio Guzman's Salvador Allende have any lessons for our present moment? Of course it does. But they are not lessons many Norteamericanos either want to hear or learn from or even acknowledge in their own hearts, and so it goes. I'm not talking about US complicity in the Chilean coup, that much is obvious. I'm talking about the lesson of the reaction of the Chilean people to the destruction of their precious democracy by the brutal fascist regime of Agusto Pinochet. I'm not so sure it would be comfortable for many Norteamericanos to walk around in the shoes of Chileans from that generation. There are some important words to know in Spanish if you wish to count yourself as remotely politically aware about what goes on in the world, words like "los deceparicidos", "guerra sucia", "golpe militar". Guzman's film is a documentary, but I can also point to a fictional film, based on real life, that could be set in very nearly any Latin American country (which is why the country goes unnamed in the film); I refer, of course, to the film Hombres Con Armas , "Men with Guns". Also still painfully, ever relevant, Eduard Galeano's classic book Las Venas Abiertas de America Latina , the "Open Veins of Latin America". The United States, with ever increasing gulfs between the super-rich and the rest of us, is structurally becoming ever more like the stereotypical Latin American government(s) that snobbish (and ingnorant) Norteamericanos used to feel vastly superior to. Return of the Repressed? Baby, you ain't seen nothin' yet. Ben Franklin was once asked by an esteemed lady what sort of government he hoped for America. His reply was "a Republic, madam, if you can keep it." He did not mean a "Banana Republic", either.
WTF? or Pleasantly Surprised!
I have resumed my jobsearch in earnest, and the feedback has been astonishing...I've been called back and conducted telephone interviews already twice now within less than a month of starting my jobsearch...Guess the old showbiz cliche about "no bad publicity" is also partly true about "library experience"...professional library experience is still experience, even if you f*cked up in your last job. Actually the f*ck up in my last job really was just as much my clueless, ditzy director's fault as it was my own, but anyway. I'm serious, though, I NEVER expected the 2nd time on the job search path to be like this...suddenly I'm like a hot commodity or something where fresh out of library school it was a pretty tough sell. I'm getting called back by mid-sized universities...all of them bigger than TAMUG, thank goodness. I got called by one just north of Houston (cataloging) , one in extreme South Texas affiliated with the t-sips (reference!), and now one in far northeastern Missouri (cataloging). I've interviewed for the first two by phone already, and have a phone interview for the third on Wednesday. The NE Missouri school is a premier liberal arts institution in that region and they teach A LOT of foreign languages there, which means I might actually get to deal with German and other Foreign Language Monographs quite a lot more than I ever would've anywhere else so far. I'm really hopeful about this one. Maybe a chance to really learn Cataloging properly, the way it's supposed to be learned/done, e.g. hands on with a mentor always at hand, working with subject matter I truly love. They just may make a decent cataloger out of me yet. Wish me luck.
I felt strangely ambivalent about the position in South Texas, mostly because I don't know much about South Texas or what it would be like to live there. My gut reaction was negative, then looking at photos on flickr of the town, its environs, etc, reinforced some of that negativity. But then looking at their book holdings, and their curriculum...I felt a little better--and at least it would be a Reference job, which despite my best efforts at Cataloging, is probably still my forte in the long run. The phone interview went alright, but I know it was rougher and less prepared sounding that I probably would've liked. I had really just applied to the position on a lark, I didn't seriously believe they'd actually call me back...and so I guess I was caught a little of guard when they actually did. Another thing I like, I happen to know the Socialist Party of Texas (such as it is) is active down in the Rio Grande Valley (I get their emails), so it would be something I could hook up with if I felt like it. Reynosa, Mexico, is the nearest town across the border from where I'd probably move to if this t-sip library actually did make an offer and I accepted...and I would accept, no bones about it. I had my reservations before the interview, but now that I've had more time to think about it, absolutely I'd go to South Texas, no matter what, if they promised me a decent professional library job at a fair salary. I'm single, no girlfriend, no kids, no car payments, no mortgage payments--I'm free as a bird--Have MLS, Will Travel, baby. I could always fly in and out of Harlingen, TX on Southwest Airlines if I got homesick for Houston. Besides, they do teach French at this place, and the Rio Grande Valley has an organisation simliar to Alliance Francais, promoting French language and culture. Vive la difference, vive la France!!
The other library just north of Houston would be alright, too. It's a decent sized college, again better than my last one. I'd not plan on staying there long term, mind you, but it would be another good place to pick up experience, even if the materials I'd be cataloging weren't nearly so interesting as the potential items I might get to work with in Missouri. Although I'm familiar with Missouri, and my parents are both from there, neither one of them has been to this particular part of extreme Northeast Missouri...it's further North than St. Louis...quite a bit further North, in fact. Snow would be a definite reality every winter up there. It'd be a real test whether or not I really do like more northern climates like I say I do. But I do know that at least as far as weather goes, I definitely preferred Denton, Tx, where I went most of my time in library school, to my (semi-)native Houston. People are a different question, but I liked Denton, with its cooler fall temperatures, prettier leaves, and guaranteeed at least 1 or 2 perfect "snow days"...just enough to be beautiful without being annoying.
This part of Missouri is a small college town....rural, yes, but also seat of a major (if small) state university focused on liberal arts. It would be reminiscent of College Station. It's depressingly saturated with churches, of course, and not a UU congregation among them, either. And good ol' St. Louis, with the fabulous Saint Louis Rationalist Society, is over 100 miles away, much much further away than Mineral Area College would have been (one of the schools I actually did a face-to-face interview with but didn't get the job). Still, the town...or at least the campus, sounds like it would be an oasis of liberal-minded thinking in an otherwise more conservative area. The University itself sounds very cool and I like the way they organize their curriculm, especially for foreign languages. I mean WOW, they have RUSSIAN! In Missouri!! Amazing. As much as I'd like to pick up French, maintaining and building on my Russian skills would be even better.
October in Houston has been an amazing month for cultural stimulation...so many great films recently, both at Rice Media Center and MFAH; I've been so caught up in things I actually missed one of the ones I was dying to see, the new Jan Svankmajer film Lunacy (Sileni). At least I got to see the pair of American animators who draw their greatest inspiration from this Czech master, namely the Brothers Quay, who contributed heavily to the new film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes...a poetic science fantasy horror-suspense art film, kind of. You just have to see it, there's no adequate label for it. It's strange, it's fun, it's classic Brothers Quay expanded to feature length movie making, much the same way Svankmajer broke new ground with his retelling of FAUST, etc, after doing animated shorts for many years.
Last night I caught a documentary in Spanish on the life and death of Salvador Allende, former President of Chile. I'll post more at length later; it was a powerful film, but deeply saddening.
Aside from the flooding rains of last week, we have had a couple of cold fronts lately in Houston that have given us some wonderful and genuinely Fall weather. It doesn't last, of course, but it's nice when it happens. Makes me get out and walk more...I love the smell in the air when the air is cool and crisp. Love wearing sweatshirts and jeans...wish it was like this a whole lot more often, y'know?
That's it for now for the Aggie Librarian; I'm just pleased as a peach to get so many phone interviews so quickly this time around...makes me hopeful I'll be getting back in the game a whole lot sooner than I expected. I was anticipating a tough slog, but I'll take a quick, decisive victory if it's within my grasp!
I felt strangely ambivalent about the position in South Texas, mostly because I don't know much about South Texas or what it would be like to live there. My gut reaction was negative, then looking at photos on flickr of the town, its environs, etc, reinforced some of that negativity. But then looking at their book holdings, and their curriculum...I felt a little better--and at least it would be a Reference job, which despite my best efforts at Cataloging, is probably still my forte in the long run. The phone interview went alright, but I know it was rougher and less prepared sounding that I probably would've liked. I had really just applied to the position on a lark, I didn't seriously believe they'd actually call me back...and so I guess I was caught a little of guard when they actually did. Another thing I like, I happen to know the Socialist Party of Texas (such as it is) is active down in the Rio Grande Valley (I get their emails), so it would be something I could hook up with if I felt like it. Reynosa, Mexico, is the nearest town across the border from where I'd probably move to if this t-sip library actually did make an offer and I accepted...and I would accept, no bones about it. I had my reservations before the interview, but now that I've had more time to think about it, absolutely I'd go to South Texas, no matter what, if they promised me a decent professional library job at a fair salary. I'm single, no girlfriend, no kids, no car payments, no mortgage payments--I'm free as a bird--Have MLS, Will Travel, baby. I could always fly in and out of Harlingen, TX on Southwest Airlines if I got homesick for Houston. Besides, they do teach French at this place, and the Rio Grande Valley has an organisation simliar to Alliance Francais, promoting French language and culture. Vive la difference, vive la France!!
The other library just north of Houston would be alright, too. It's a decent sized college, again better than my last one. I'd not plan on staying there long term, mind you, but it would be another good place to pick up experience, even if the materials I'd be cataloging weren't nearly so interesting as the potential items I might get to work with in Missouri. Although I'm familiar with Missouri, and my parents are both from there, neither one of them has been to this particular part of extreme Northeast Missouri...it's further North than St. Louis...quite a bit further North, in fact. Snow would be a definite reality every winter up there. It'd be a real test whether or not I really do like more northern climates like I say I do. But I do know that at least as far as weather goes, I definitely preferred Denton, Tx, where I went most of my time in library school, to my (semi-)native Houston. People are a different question, but I liked Denton, with its cooler fall temperatures, prettier leaves, and guaranteeed at least 1 or 2 perfect "snow days"...just enough to be beautiful without being annoying.
This part of Missouri is a small college town....rural, yes, but also seat of a major (if small) state university focused on liberal arts. It would be reminiscent of College Station. It's depressingly saturated with churches, of course, and not a UU congregation among them, either. And good ol' St. Louis, with the fabulous Saint Louis Rationalist Society, is over 100 miles away, much much further away than Mineral Area College would have been (one of the schools I actually did a face-to-face interview with but didn't get the job). Still, the town...or at least the campus, sounds like it would be an oasis of liberal-minded thinking in an otherwise more conservative area. The University itself sounds very cool and I like the way they organize their curriculm, especially for foreign languages. I mean WOW, they have RUSSIAN! In Missouri!! Amazing. As much as I'd like to pick up French, maintaining and building on my Russian skills would be even better.
October in Houston has been an amazing month for cultural stimulation...so many great films recently, both at Rice Media Center and MFAH; I've been so caught up in things I actually missed one of the ones I was dying to see, the new Jan Svankmajer film Lunacy (Sileni). At least I got to see the pair of American animators who draw their greatest inspiration from this Czech master, namely the Brothers Quay, who contributed heavily to the new film The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes...a poetic science fantasy horror-suspense art film, kind of. You just have to see it, there's no adequate label for it. It's strange, it's fun, it's classic Brothers Quay expanded to feature length movie making, much the same way Svankmajer broke new ground with his retelling of FAUST, etc, after doing animated shorts for many years.
Last night I caught a documentary in Spanish on the life and death of Salvador Allende, former President of Chile. I'll post more at length later; it was a powerful film, but deeply saddening.
Aside from the flooding rains of last week, we have had a couple of cold fronts lately in Houston that have given us some wonderful and genuinely Fall weather. It doesn't last, of course, but it's nice when it happens. Makes me get out and walk more...I love the smell in the air when the air is cool and crisp. Love wearing sweatshirts and jeans...wish it was like this a whole lot more often, y'know?
That's it for now for the Aggie Librarian; I'm just pleased as a peach to get so many phone interviews so quickly this time around...makes me hopeful I'll be getting back in the game a whole lot sooner than I expected. I was anticipating a tough slog, but I'll take a quick, decisive victory if it's within my grasp!
All's Well that Ends Well
Happy Ending to my quest to get books on Cowboy Action Shooting into Fort Bend County Libraries:
-----Original Message-----
From: AskALibrarian
Sent: Fri, September 22, 2006 8:28 AM
To: (AggieLibrarian)
Subject: Library Question - Answer [Question #XXXXXX]
Dear Mr. (Aggie Librarian)
Thank you for your suggestions.
I have found a book on the subject in which you are interested that is available through our vendors. The book is "Cowboy Action Shooting," by Hunter Scott Anderson. I will place this title on our next order list.
We appreciate your input as the library system is always interested in patron recommendations. If you have further questions, you may e-mail me, or you may telephone the Reference desk at 281-XXX-XXXX.
I hope this information is helpful.
(another Helpful Librarian)
Fort Bend County Libraries
somebody[at]fortbend.lib.tx.us
-----------------------
Question History:
Patron: -----Original Message-----
From: Aggie Librarian
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2006 1:30 PM
To: (original librarian)
Subject: RE2: Cowboy action shooting
Importance: Low
Are there any books on this particular SUBJECT available from your vendors?
The Aggie Librarian, MA, MLS
Alumnus, 200X
School of Library & Information Sciences
University of North Texas
Personal Email: TheAggieLibrarian[at]myisp.com
Resume/CV Page: http://people.unt.edu/.... (snip)
(sometimes doesn't hurt to show a little Library cred...)
The upshot was, I was persistent without going all Saklad on their *sses. ;-) An equitable solution was reached, and the library found books at least on the subject I wanted, if not the specific book I was after. I'm sometimes pretty hit or miss with Public Libraries and my suggestions...sometimes the things I request are declined because they're too advanced, e.g. better suited for an academic library. Sometimes the sources are too old, reportedly, even though I think the topic is timeless and the book in question is still the best book out there dealing with the subject matter. Anyway, I guess the lesson here is, if the library's vendor can't get you the specific book you want, but you'd be satisfied with ANYTHING else on the topic, it doesn't hurt to ask. They just might come through for you, like they did with me.
-----Original Message-----
From: AskALibrarian
Sent: Fri, September 22, 2006 8:28 AM
To: (AggieLibrarian)
Subject: Library Question - Answer [Question #XXXXXX]
Dear Mr. (Aggie Librarian)
Thank you for your suggestions.
I have found a book on the subject in which you are interested that is available through our vendors. The book is "Cowboy Action Shooting," by Hunter Scott Anderson. I will place this title on our next order list.
We appreciate your input as the library system is always interested in patron recommendations. If you have further questions, you may e-mail me, or you may telephone the Reference desk at 281-XXX-XXXX.
I hope this information is helpful.
(another Helpful Librarian)
Fort Bend County Libraries
somebody[at]fortbend.lib.tx.us
-----------------------
Question History:
Patron: -----Original Message-----
From: Aggie Librarian
Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2006 1:30 PM
To: (original librarian)
Subject: RE2: Cowboy action shooting
Importance: Low
Are there any books on this particular SUBJECT available from your vendors?
The Aggie Librarian, MA, MLS
Alumnus, 200X
School of Library & Information Sciences
University of North Texas
Personal Email: TheAggieLibrarian[at]myisp.com
Resume/CV Page: http://people.unt.edu/.... (snip)
(sometimes doesn't hurt to show a little Library cred...)
The upshot was, I was persistent without going all Saklad on their *sses. ;-) An equitable solution was reached, and the library found books at least on the subject I wanted, if not the specific book I was after. I'm sometimes pretty hit or miss with Public Libraries and my suggestions...sometimes the things I request are declined because they're too advanced, e.g. better suited for an academic library. Sometimes the sources are too old, reportedly, even though I think the topic is timeless and the book in question is still the best book out there dealing with the subject matter. Anyway, I guess the lesson here is, if the library's vendor can't get you the specific book you want, but you'd be satisfied with ANYTHING else on the topic, it doesn't hurt to ask. They just might come through for you, like they did with me.
Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Why relying on Vendor Approval Plans only SUCKS
Sorry for the long silence, folks, my personal life has been unusually turbulent lately. Not to be too gossipy, but the Aggie Librarian recently admitted to himself that he's an alcoholic, has been attending AA, and doing a lot of introspection and self examination lately.
But this really got my gander up today and I had to blog about it. The following is a real email exchange; names have been changed to protect the guilty:
====================================================
I'm not making this up....Cowboy Action Shooting really is very popular in Texas. But seriously, this is why doing Approval Plans and Approval Plans ONLY as a way to save money really can SUCK, because in the end, diversity suffers. This wasn't even a request for "alternative" materials from some radical point of view, either. It damn well has appeal and interest to this local community, not just yours truly. The librarian's response is ultimately a cop-out; they could always special order an item not on their vendor's list if they really wanted to. Unless it's county-wide policy not to...and if so, it's stupid. HPL does this, and, while I partly understand, owing to the scale of the greater Houston Metro community they're trying to service with their limited funds, it still means, in the end, that diversity suffers, because relying on vendor approval plans always produces a mainstreaming effect that shuts out smaller publishers; Maybe the vast majority of patrons would never notice or care, but as librarians, we should be willing to color outside the lines and have the courage to expose our patrons to ideas outside their normal boundaries of thought. We should give comfort even to those with ideas that buck mainstream trends, or provide information about hobbies that are a little unorthodox but rewarding in their own right...like Cowboy Action Shooting. Even if these specific titles were NOT available from the vendor, did the library even bother to look if anything remotely related to this subject WAS available? I really can't tell, but I sort of kind of doubt it. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. My point is, they SHOULD have, and should have reported on their findings..."sorry, our vendor doesn't seem to offer any books even on this topic, let alone the titles you requested" or "but we did find these titles....but we do not have the necessary funds to aquire them at this time,", yada yada yada.
Obviously I'm not going to go all Saklad on their ass, but this interaction was a little irksome, especially since I am a librarian and know a cop-out when I see one. I once turned down a book request for a dual biography of two leading figures/founders of the state of Pakistan for the campus library at TAMUG, noting that the focus of the book was too narrow for our institution and that its subject matter fell outside the scope of our curriculum. (Which isn't to say I didn't sometimes order some titles that could have the same criticism leveled against it, perhaps). But the patron's suggestion did prompt me to look and see what our holdings were for books about Pakistan, the UAE, and other Islamic-World countries. I found that most of our information was woefully out-of-date. The book suggested by the patron was too narrow in focus, but as a result of the suggestion, we DID order 2 very good general accounts of Pakistan and its recent history and politics. I also ordered books on the UAE (since the Dubai Ports scandal was just breaking at that time), as well as less obvious but equally important books on locales like Lybia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and more clearly needed works on Saudi Arabia, and surrounding countries, etc. Of all the books I was instrumental in the acquisition of while at TAMUG, these were by far the ones I'm most proud of, even above and beyond the excellent Naval Science and Maritime Industry books I ordered for the library. Approval plans are great, they have their role, and they can be an efficient way to allocate limited resources, but they shouldn't be a straight-jacket that stifles diversity either. {climbs down off soapbox}
But this really got my gander up today and I had to blog about it. The following is a real email exchange; names have been changed to protect the guilty:
-----Original Message-----
From: {Fort Bend County Libraries}
Sent: Tue, August 29, 2006 3:41 PM
To: {me, i.e., the Aggie Librarian}
Subject: RE: Cowboy action shooting
From: {Fort Bend County Libraries}
Sent: Tue, August 29, 2006 3:41 PM
To: {me, i.e., the Aggie Librarian}
Subject: RE: Cowboy action shooting
Dear {Aggie Librarian--actually it was my real name--you get the idea},
We received your requests for the titles, Cowboy Action Shooting, by Kevin Michalowski, and All About Cowboy Action Shooting, by Ronald Harris. Unfortunately, the books you requested are not available for purchase from our vendors. If you still wish to obtain the books, you may call the branch of the Fort Bend libraries where you would like to pick up the books and request they be obtained through Inter-Library loan. Postage cost to you for this service is $1.50 per book, if the ILL librarian is able to obtain the books from another library system. Any further questions you have will gladly be answered at any of our branches. Thank you for using the Suggest-a-Title service.
{Polite Public Librarian}
George Memorial Library
Adult Services Department
somebody@fort-bend.lib.tx.us
-----Original Message-----
From: suggestatitle@fortbend.lib.tx.us [mailto:suggestatitle@fortbend.lib.tx.us]
Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 4:56 PM
To: suggestatitle@fortbend.lib.tx.us
Subject: Cowboy action shooting
{Patron} wrote:
I would like to suggest the following title:
Title : Cowboy Action Shooting: Gear - Guns - Tactics
Author : Kevin Michalowski
Format : Book
Library barcode : 23219004057609
Pickup location : Sugar Land
Additional comments : here is a similar title on Cowboy Action
Shooting...this sport is very popular in Texas!
{The Aggie Librarian}myname@myreal.address.com
I'm not making this up....Cowboy Action Shooting really is very popular in Texas. But seriously, this is why doing Approval Plans and Approval Plans ONLY as a way to save money really can SUCK, because in the end, diversity suffers. This wasn't even a request for "alternative" materials from some radical point of view, either. It damn well has appeal and interest to this local community, not just yours truly. The librarian's response is ultimately a cop-out; they could always special order an item not on their vendor's list if they really wanted to. Unless it's county-wide policy not to...and if so, it's stupid. HPL does this, and, while I partly understand, owing to the scale of the greater Houston Metro community they're trying to service with their limited funds, it still means, in the end, that diversity suffers, because relying on vendor approval plans always produces a mainstreaming effect that shuts out smaller publishers; Maybe the vast majority of patrons would never notice or care, but as librarians, we should be willing to color outside the lines and have the courage to expose our patrons to ideas outside their normal boundaries of thought. We should give comfort even to those with ideas that buck mainstream trends, or provide information about hobbies that are a little unorthodox but rewarding in their own right...like Cowboy Action Shooting. Even if these specific titles were NOT available from the vendor, did the library even bother to look if anything remotely related to this subject WAS available? I really can't tell, but I sort of kind of doubt it. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. My point is, they SHOULD have, and should have reported on their findings..."sorry, our vendor doesn't seem to offer any books even on this topic, let alone the titles you requested" or "but we did find these titles....but we do not have the necessary funds to aquire them at this time,", yada yada yada.
Obviously I'm not going to go all Saklad on their ass, but this interaction was a little irksome, especially since I am a librarian and know a cop-out when I see one. I once turned down a book request for a dual biography of two leading figures/founders of the state of Pakistan for the campus library at TAMUG, noting that the focus of the book was too narrow for our institution and that its subject matter fell outside the scope of our curriculum. (Which isn't to say I didn't sometimes order some titles that could have the same criticism leveled against it, perhaps). But the patron's suggestion did prompt me to look and see what our holdings were for books about Pakistan, the UAE, and other Islamic-World countries. I found that most of our information was woefully out-of-date. The book suggested by the patron was too narrow in focus, but as a result of the suggestion, we DID order 2 very good general accounts of Pakistan and its recent history and politics. I also ordered books on the UAE (since the Dubai Ports scandal was just breaking at that time), as well as less obvious but equally important books on locales like Lybia, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and more clearly needed works on Saudi Arabia, and surrounding countries, etc. Of all the books I was instrumental in the acquisition of while at TAMUG, these were by far the ones I'm most proud of, even above and beyond the excellent Naval Science and Maritime Industry books I ordered for the library. Approval plans are great, they have their role, and they can be an efficient way to allocate limited resources, but they shouldn't be a straight-jacket that stifles diversity either. {climbs down off soapbox}
Monday, July 24, 2006
Texas Cultural Artifact
Lost cultural artifact – The Texas Film Festival at TAMU, 1993-2005
It was what I liked to call the “poor man’s South-by-Southwest”, which remains the internationally famous Austin-based film and music festival held every year in the Texas capital. Austin is indisputably such a well-known live music and arts venue that it wouldn’t be the same without SXSW, of course, but the fact is, all that fame and fortune comes at a pretty steep price for the average Texan, and as much as I love Austin myself, I have never once attended SXSW, mostly owing to the high price tag, and the fact that I know a lot fewer single people these days in Austin I could crash with anymore.
But I always had a cheap alternative in the Brazos Valley, at my Alma Mater, Texas A&M University, proving it is not always the cultural backwater it is popularly imagined to be. Thanks to MSC Aggie Cinema (e.g. a student organization full of enthusiastic Aggies who are also film buffs), we had, for over 10 years (from 1993-2005) running, one of the best kept film-fest secrets in the Southwest, namely the Texas Film Festival, held every March around Spring Break time, right after the Oscars.
This was always a joy to attend, the films were always an eclectic mix, and I especially enjoyed staying at the MSC Guesthouse rooms, right in the Memorial Student Center complex on campus—always makes me feel like I’m living back in the dorms again when I stay there, and just like for dorm residents, the best bars and other assorted watering holes and eateries are within easy walking/stumbling distance of the MSC Guesthouse. I love it. You can be as wild and crazy as you want with no worry about DWI (within reason—of course if you get too crazy you risk getting a P.I., but mainly just don’t stop to pee in the bushes on your way back to the hotel).
The Texas Film Fest has also played host to a number of outstanding guests, particularly Robert Rodriguez, of El Mariachi fame (who later went on to direct Desperado and Spy Kids, both featuring Spanish heart-throb actor Antonio Banderas).
If it does not come back to TAMU next year and is lost forever, it will truly be a sorely missed Texas cultural artifact.
The Aggie Librarian hasn’t felt much like writing lately, but I have been kicking around in my head an idea for this column for some time now. What prompted me to start writing was, in part, finishing Michael Parenti’s excellent book The Assassination of Julius Caesar : A People’s History of Ancient Rome. It is a long overdue re-examination of Roman history, wresting it from gentleman Classicists down through the ages and taking a critical perspective informed by Parenti’s unique brand of analysis. It calls into question self-serving aristocratic, ostensibly Republican partisans’s self-aggrandizing, self-flattering accounts of the events leading up to and following the assassination of Julius Caesar. Most importantly of all, it stresses that Ancient History is, well, not so ancient after all. In other words, some of the issues critical in the time of the Ancient Romans are still with us today. Some of the outlandish statements Parenti quotes from the likes of Cicero and Cato, for example, sound uncomfortably close to contemporary Bush administration talking points. As Pierce Brosnan, in the role of James Bond, once commented: “Governments change, the lies stay the same.”
Julius Caesar, in Parenti’s analysis, emerges as a populist leader, struggling against aristocratic privilege and avarice to ameliorate the lives and working conditions of Roman commoners and slaves, and for this he is condemned as a demagogue, an autocrat, and a usurper of “Republican liberty”...in similar fashion the way Louisiana Governor (and later Senator) Huey P. Long was later demonized in American politics, or Salvador Allende in Chile.
I had been thinking long and hard about the nature of a college education, how my happiest years by far have been those carefree years when I was an undergraduate student and later graduate student, both at Rice and my first on-campus semester at UNT when I was starting library school. I make no secret of the fact that I like to drink beer. A lot. I have learned to self-moderate over the years and cut myself off to stay safe if I haven’t secured alternate transportation to-and-from my favorite watering holes. What I loved about college was that I always lived on campus, always could eat in the campus dining facilities cheaply, and lived always within stumbling distance of some pretty interesting bars and other hangouts. Now, you may ask yourself what the hell has this to do with Julius Caesar and Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece, anyway? And it’s a valid question, so hear me out. When you examine the lives of the ancient philosophers, thinkers, orators, historians, and political theorists…and not just in Ancient Greece and Rome, but their example is the most familiar to us…you see mostly well-to-do gentlemen with lots of leisure time on their hands, and servants to do the dirty work for them. Men who have plenty of time to lounge about consuming wine and engaging in thoughtful conversation with other men (and rarely, women). What I’m trying to connect here is that the atmosphere of the contemporary college education, especially at the graduate level, tries, albeit imperfectly, to re-create, as closely as possible, the very same material conditions enjoyed by the ancient philosophers and writers. Free from undue material want, free from the need to labor long hours using one’s bare hands, enough free time to socialize, to read, and to think profound thoughts (and plenty of pedestrian thoughts as well). And when you think about it, the ruling classes have fought hard throughout the centuries, to deny these simple pleasures, and the time to think for oneself, to the toiling masses, who, through resistance and struggle, have managed to win for themselves things like…weekends, the 8-hour day, public transportation, etc. What was previously granted from on high by the church…festivals, holidays (holy – days), had to be won back, tooth and nail, by the people themselves.
Like the majority of aristocrats, actually, this free-time is usually squandered fruitlessly by the masses as well, not put to creative use to make something of lasting value. Television is far more effective a distraction and a sedative than all the Roman bread and circuses, or the Holy Church. But at least the potential is there, and it is those material conditions which create the fertile ground for the mind to grow in, which is why we structure residential graduate school student life the way that we do currently. It doesn’t always take, for some people, and some schools hyper-exploit their graduate students to such a degree that it inhibits their ability to effectively perform individual research. Heavy heavy teaching loads are not conducive to an effective graduate school education.
Unlike the Roman aristocrats, however, contemporary graduate student life, enjoyable as it is, does come to an end eventually, and for the majority of us who have managed to forestall the “real world” for a time, the drudgery of the working life comes as something of a rude shock indeed. The happy few that can become professors, particularly in the natural sciences and useful arts, are among the luckiest people in our society. An even smaller select few become successful professors in the humanities, while the vast majority that somehow remain in academia and don’t get discouraged altogether remain on as hyper-exploited college instructors with no hope of tenure, even materially worse off than the average public school teacher.
It’s very hard to keep an intellectual life going when you work 10+ hours a day, come home tired, exhausted. Seems at times there’s barely any time to read, barely any time to stop and have a beer or two after work, what have you. I’m struggling with that now. My schedule recently changed from 4 days on, 3 days off, working 9.5 hrs a day with a ½ hour lunch to working a 5-days on, 2 days off MTWRF schedule—ostensibly from 6:30am to 2:30pm. Sounds sweet to some, but in actual practice, I rarely leave the office on time, due to the case workflow. My old schedule was more realistic as regards day shift case work-flow. So it ends up I’m working a lot more over time on my new schedule, with a good deal less free time. More money, I guess, but I’d rather have the leisure time back. And it’s not like it’s library work, either.
I am working hard to get back into the library game. I’m starting to apply to selected positions again. I know my getting shit-canned by TAMUG is a black mark on my employment record, but I’m doing the best I can to massage that without overtly lying. I think the new cover letter I wrote was actually pretty good. But I know it’s going to be a long road of rejection after rejection ahead of me until I maybe get a new library position. If Peak oil, expanding Middle East war, and dollar-collapse don’t wreck the economy first. I helped mom move some plants from pots to the ground today this morning. My first step towards learning how to be a gardener. They were flowering plants, not food plants, but when the season changes and Texas enters the late growing season, I plan to be out there growing spinach and other crops. I anticipate the need to re-localize the economy as much as possible the rest of the 21st century and beyond. Growing one’s own food will become a necessity again, for many many Americans. Most of us have lost the art of knowing how to preserve and self-can foods, etc. It’s a survival skill that is going to become painfully relevant again. Sugar Land is not the ideal place to live—no suburb is—but it will have to do for now until maybe, perhaps, I could find a place to live independently in rural Missouri somewhere, not far from a big town like Farmington, but far enough in the country to have some elbow room, to raise food crops, and do some recreational shooting & hunting. Part of the problem with planning for a potential collapse of civilization as we know it, is that the job of Librarian is very much connected to the structure of industrial civilization. Whether or not even literacy would survive a post-industrial collapse is an open question, much less whether libraries as we know them would make it. Like I’ve said before, don’t throw away those old Library Science textbooks on how to do 3x5 card catalogs JUST yet…and save old manual typewriters (not electric), too--’cause we just might need them again if we have to go back to all-local, all-original cataloging. Maybe that sounds like crazy-talk to some, but if you take the implications of Peak oil seriously, then that could very well be in the cards for us—pardon the pun. If the networks go down, the OPACs will go down, and all those books on the shelf will have to be manually re-cataloged, if people have any good sense or foresight when that time comes….not if, mind you, but when. I hope not in our lifetimes, but I’m afraid that’s wishful thinking on my part.
I went back to the gun range yesterday (Sunday) to squeeze off several hundred rounds of .22 LR ammunition through my Ruger Mark II target pistol and my Rossi pump-action rifle which is a cheap Brazilian knock-off of the Winchester Model 64. It’s an okay rifle, but it tends to jam at least once nearly every outing, which is getting tiresome. It jammed twice today. First time I got the range officer’s help to clear the jam; Second time I managed to clear it myself. With all the trouble this gun has given me over the years, I’d have been better off purchasing either a Henry Arms levergun, a bolt-action .22 LR, or else a .22 LR tube-fed semi-automatic like my paternal grandpa’s gun. Pa’s gun was always a beaut’, and it never misfired once in all my years of shooting it since his death and my coming of age. It now belongs to my Uncle Art, I assume. I’m getting better with my shooting, especially with the Ruger Mk II at 15 yards, which is the maximum target distance on the pistol range. I need to move up to 25 yards and beyond for rifle fire. I need to practice bench-rest rifle fire from a sitting position…certainly more stable than offhanded shooting. I also find myself wishing the rifle overall were longer…it feels like a kid’s gun in my hands and against my shoulder; the slide action moreover makes for an unstable hand-rest. I don’t know if my Marlin .30-.30 would do any better or not, but I need to take it out to the rifle range and put some rounds through it from the sitting position. I also need to loose a few shotgun rounds (12 ga & 20 ga) on the trap range one of these days, too. I’m slowly but surely feeling more comfortable on the shooting range. I wore my NRA t-shirt out there, mainly because I feel like it won’t attract as much attention as, say, my Karl Marx t-shirt, or my Peace t-shirts or my “No war” t-shirt, or my Green Party t-shirt, etc, etc. But even my NRA shirt is mildly subversive—the backside reads “the 2nd Amendment: America’s original homeland security”; Seems pretty blasé on the surface of things, but if you take it to mean “no standing army”, in the 18th century understanding, then it becomes quite a radical proclamation indeed—and this is precisely how I do mean it. I am a socialist, but I have an anarchist streak a mile wide, so I sometimes find myself advocating some policy positions more commonly associated with people in right-wing circles, but it’s frequently a more nuanced position than the right-wingers adopt. I usually don’t try to explain myself, just prefer to let others think what they will of me. One thing that has been interesting, from a librarian point of view, in joining the NRA and the GOA, is becoming aware of magazines and books and publications that might be very popular in a rural or small town public library that I probably would never have thought of before. It’s always good to learn new things, and sometimes you pick up things from the most surprising places, too.
In the meantime I’m trying to read Richard Heinberg’s The Party’s Over and also Kenneth Deffeyes Beyond Oil, two very key books in the Peak oil debate. More on my impressions of those works later.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Being an Aggie Librarian for me is all about learning to live with one’s personal contradictions. I’m a city boy but one who’s in touch with and has connection to roots in rural Missouri. My daddy was a farmboy, but also grew up to be a Science teacher. Mom lived on a Missouri farm, too, and became first an English teacher, then a school librarian.
I am unabashedly Left-wing, but anymore, I’m insulted with being called Liberal. I’ve moved beyond Liberalism…I’m now a Radical, in the current scheme of things, though I don’t think the things I believe in are at bottom really all that radical. Now I do usually agree with Old School Democrats of the Liberal mold shaped by FDR. I happen to think, despite his corruption scandals, that radical Louisiana populist Huey Long was pretty cool too, and he helped push FDR further Left than FDR really wanted to go. Like any populist leader that makes a real difference in the lives of poor people, Huey Long has had to be demonized time and time again. But the “American Fascist” label, invented by real American fascists, by the way, simply doesn’t stick to Huey Long. He was a Democrat who happened to believe in small-“d” democracy, roused the masses, had the audacity to tax the wealthy, then help the poor. Maybe enriched himself a little much along the way, but nobody’s perfect.
I think the people can seize the reins of the state and use it as a blunt instrument for economic and social justice, and to make everyone’s lives better, and push back and keep the National Security State in check, on a tight leash. But I’m no “mere Liberal”, either, of the type Phil Ochs satirized in his song… (“…love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal…”). Mere liberals can still support the worst of US imperial politics abroad, albeit for the most noble of misguided motives. Mere liberals are still paranoid, rabid anti-communists who quickly brand me with their voodoo label they call “Stalinist” (I’m more of an anarcho-syndicalist Trotskyite-Titoist, thank you very much). I’ve been a radical small “d” democrat and Marxist for quite some time now, and I no longer have a gag reflex when people bring up the signifier “Marxist-Leninist”. I feel increasingly pushed towards Marxism-Leninism nowadays, really. I’m in need of doing more research and taking stock of my current beliefs again.
In the meantime, I believe that mildly paternalistic welfare-state socialism can and does work, well-funded and efficient public mass transportation is superior to the sprawling, expensive road network created for personal car and 18-wheeled trucks, and I believe such a state sector can be integrated, ala Tito-style, into a Yugoslav-model “mixed economy”, with a vibrant (but properly and stringently regulated) market sector, if you want to go that way. There’s also something to be said for the Spanish anarchist cooperative collectives around Mondragon, too. Grassroots ECONOMIC democracy is a GOOD thing. But even in so-called Liberal circles today it’s still heresy to defy the Reagan-Thatcher inspired orthodoxy, which declared post-1991 that “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) to so-called “Liberal free-market democracy”. That was swallowed whole by both Clinton and Tony Blair. Thus, they occupied the ground formerly occupied by so-called Rockefeller Republicans. US New Democrats today all struggle to “restore” so-called Liberal Free Market Democracy, the Republicans are plowing full steam ahead with a crazy brand of “free-market fundamentalism” combined semi-theocratic Christo-Fascism, unbridled militarism, and naked imperialism. It was an old fashioned US Liberal president (LBJ) that helped give us Vietnam (though fatuous GOP rhetoric that intimates that the Republicans would have avoided Vietnam is pure fantasy…the Republicans would’ve NUKED Vietnam if they could have)…LBJ felt pressure from the Right, and from the National Security State, to get involved with Vietnam, to continue what Kennedy had clandestinely started...
But there is one issue out that could ultimately render most of this whole political debate meaningless and absurd, and really break down a lot of Left – Right distinctions and show that the only true Dynamic one need really worry about is the Top versus Bottom dynamic.
That issue is Peak Oil, or specifically the post-Peak oil decline in world oil production, and how the world leaders and world citizens decide to react to it and to each other in light of changing physical reality.
In a later post I might provide more links to Peak oil-and-gas related information, for those not yet educated on the phenomena and its implications.
But so that I don’t make this post overly long, let me simply state a few watchwords to remember for the unavoidable Post-peak oil/gas (and therefore economic) decline.
1) Re-localize your economies
2) Learn permaculture—start growing your own food now!
3) Get off the grid…go solar, maybe, but mainly, learn to cut consumption!
4) Get out of debt, but invest in physical gold—not paper gold—as your rainy day fund.
5) Self-reliance is an excellent virtue, but mutual aid is better.
6) Learn self-defense and be prepared/vigilant.
7) All politics are ultimately local…get to know your neighbors, talk to them about Peak oil.
This isn’t really a Right or Left discussion, this is a human survival discussion….it’s a living in denial versus facing reality question. And while I generally like the warm touchy-feely fuzzies generated by Mother Earth News,
http://www.motherearthnews.com/
…like the US Democratic Party, it became too Yuppified from its scrappy, hippie roots; I’m told it is returning to those roots, slowly (and how could it not, with GWB in the White House!?) but it appears to be a slow arc back, by the look of it. The advice given isn’t bad, but it’s….maybe a little too fashion conscious?
No, for my money, you want the best advice for surviving the aftermath of post-Peak oil collapse, your best source is going to be Backwoods Home Magazine,
http://www.backwoodshome.com/
Scrappy, independent minded—a publication even a Left-wing Anarchist could love. Honest!
Yes, the magazine is in fact a little Right-wingy, but their hearts are in the right place. Maybe in the Clinton years I would’ve thought they were nuts…but in the Clinton years I was ignorant about Peak oil, even though the implications of Peak oil had been theorized in the 1950s and widely known in petroleum circles since at least the 1970s.
For what it’s worth, I should mention that I happen to agree with Michael C. Ruppert and his investigative reporting staff over at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ . I think the PNAC people needed 9/11, and helped conspire to make it happen. I highly recommend his website and his print newsletter as well.
Now, the folks at Backwoods Home Magazine might dismiss Michael C. Ruppert’s investigative reporting team out of hand, and people like me who read him. They have a banner that says “Remember September 11, 2001”. I would agree, just remember that signs point over and over to it being an inside job, or at least aided and abetted by elements of the National Security State, within the Federal government apparatus, under Dick Cheney. Read Michael C. Ruppert’s very excellent book Crossing the Rubicon for more details.
The precedent is there, folks…if you’re not familiar with the name “Operation Northwoods” from the 1960s, get familiar with it. “Rex 84” is another Federal plan to be familiar with. Some right wingers are aware of these things, and thus their fear of the Federal government does have some basis in fact. I am myself prepared to say, as a Leftist and an Atheist, with no special love for religious nuts, I think there’s something fishy about Waco and the fiery, bloody end to the siege of the Branch Davidians, and moreover, there’s something fishy about Oklahoma City, and for that matter something fishy about TWA Flight 800, too.
So for a number of reasons, even as a Leftist, I endorse Backwoods Home Magazine whole-heartedly, because, frankly, there IS a lot to fear about the Federal Government these days. After Katrina, is there really any doubt that these bastards don’t care about ordinary people and will only do just enough to keep up the appearance of caring, if that. In public pronouncements about Avian Flu, the government message is clear: “you’re on your own, chump”.
Backwoods Home Magazine is more straightforwardly Libertarian…no government intervention period. They are less explicitly condemning of corporate power centers, though, as near as I can tell. In fact, they don’t really address overarching corporate power that much at all, other than a general screed against mindless materialism generally. They make no distinction between paternalistic welfare state a la FDR and outright fascist states like GWB. They believe in backwoods self-reliance as the ultimate expression of human freedom, in a kind of Jeffersonian, yeoman-farmer mold.
I can respect that view, but as a Left-wing socialist, I believe the paternalistic “nanny” state (as the Libertarians mockingly call it) can actually do some real good in the world, engage in socially beneficent income redistribution, and restrain the worse corporate excesses, but the Welfare State in general, and the Social-Democratic parties that ran them, let’s be honest, were always just bones tossed out by the capitalists to keep working class people, especially in Europe, from going communist. Social Democracy was always that kind of compromise pay off…don’t go communist, workers, vote for social democracy and we’ll give you modest pensions, national health insurance, paid vacations, and educational opportunities. Once the USSR collapsed in 1991, though, all bets were off, all compromises no longer needed, and the more vicious, nakedly aggressive forces of Capital came to the fore to smash all half-measures and revert us back to 19th century modes of capital/labor relations, world wide. So anyway, the “welfare state” has been replaced by the “warfare” state, and it truly IS a thing to be feared.
Backwoods Home Magazine above all advocates what is properly seen by socialists as a fall-back position, nearly Anarchist in nature--a strategy of survival. The magazine and its writers advocate self-reliance. I’d say self-reliance is good, but Anarchic “Mutual Aid” is better. I’d rather have old-fashioned democratic State socialism slightly left of FDR, maybe even slightly left of Marshall Tito. But recognizing that that probably won’t happen in my lifetime, Anarchist communes are the next best option for survival, but they need to be able to defend themselves. Which is why I recently held my nose and rejoined the National Rifle Association, and why I subscribed to Backwoods Home Magazine, and would recommend it for any Public Library. With my NRA membership, I get a free subscription to American Rifleman. I will say the same thing about American Rifleman that I say about Playboy Magazine...I read it for the (technical) articles, and enjoy the pretty pictures (but ignore the right-wing blather, the way I ignore raunchier fare like Hustler).
…Backwoods Home Magazine gives so much practical advice that you’ve got to love them. Permaculture books are fine, and I do recommend them, but I also read Massad Ayoob’s columns on guns with great interest. I mostly ignore the right-wing blather, or read between the lines.
I’m not the only Lefty who does, either. Check out:
http://www.liberalswithguns.com/
and
http://progunprogressive.com/phpBB2/index.php
I myself have mixed feelings about gun politics and issues. I think the NRA’s rabid tirades against the United Nations are utterly insane. The UN isn’t trying to take away your guns, they couldn’t do it even if they wanted to. The UN is trying to reduce the spread of military small arms in the Third World, too lessen the chances of ethnic conflicts boiling out of control to become full-born blood feuds and civil wars. Don’t they have a right to guns too? I guess so, in the abstract, but they also have a right to an education, adequate housing and food, and a decent job, according to the UN. The UN is trying, in its own way, to save lives in impoverished areas of the globe by reducing the tools of violence in those regions. It’s a thorny issue enough without the NRA throwing a paranoid hissy-fit and conflating an issue that has nothing really to do with them (arms trade regulation in the Third World) with legitimate questions on gun ownership and regulation in the First world, in more stable societies with police, rule of law (ostensibly, at least), the 2nd Amendment, etc.
I think gun laws that work for, say, rural Montana might not work for urban New York City, and vis versa. In sum, I think it should be a local issue. I believe cities are right to insist on stringent CCW regulation, and to declare some areas off-limits, even to licensed concealed-carry owners, such as venues that generate 51% or more of their revenue from alcohol sales (bars & liquor stores), public schools, large central Public Libraries, etc. Rural areas can and should be able to be more relaxed and less stringent with gun regulations.
Come the Peak Oil decline & collapse, though, you will not only need to know how to garden, cultivate your own food, and perhaps raise animals for food…you’ll have to be familiar with guns to defend your family and your community. They won’t be coming from the UN, but black SpecOps helicopters are real, and make no mistake…the Pentagon has its own contingency plans for global warming, Peak oil, etc, and what little has come to light isn’t very pretty. That’s the main reason I re-joined the NRA. And it’s not just the Pentagon, mind you…they’re just the servants and shock-troops of the Wealthy. The mega-rich have their own contingency plans for survival…what else do you think they talk about at the Bilderberg conference, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Project for the New American Century, etc.? Do you think they’re unaware of the looming crisis? They’re not—but they’d prefer to keep you in the dark for as long as possible. I may not be a good Lefty in some people’s eyes for not disavowing guns 100% and seeking only non-violent solutions. I can only say in response that the Black Panthers learned how to use guns, and so did The Weathermen splinter group who broke off from SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). I respect the hell out of practitioners of non-violence who achieve positive results by sheer moral force. But I don’t have the faith in humanity to believe the Gandhi way will work every time…I still remember my Frantz Fanon and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, too. Every MLK will have his Malcom X, and even MLK was a lot more radical than official histories properly recognize.
It’s a sad fact that not everyone will prepare properly, either, and some will be less well able to deal with the economic shockwave than others…You should be charitable when you can to those who are without, but realize some who are without will have guns and try to take your food (and guns) by force, too. I’m trying to get my parents prepared, slowly, gradually, without scaring them half to death. I really do wish we could realistically move back to our grandparent’s homes in rural Missouri sometimes. We may yet do that, I can’t say. Maybe I am a little paranoid myself, but as I always like to say: “Just because you’re paranoid does NOT mean they’re NOT out to get you.”
I pray (figure of speech only--I’m an atheist, mind you) the worst of this won’t happen in my lifetime, that I’ll be long dead before any of us really have to worry about post-Peak oil economic collapse and even a worldwide human Die Off event of massive proportions owing to starvation and disease.
But the more I read, the less confident I am that this won’t start happening in my lifetime.
A friend of mine, and fellow librarian, once said she wanted to study the effects that post-Peak oil collapse would have on libraries. I commented that libraries are in large measure a product of mass civilization. If that civilization collapses, libraries as we know them collapse too. And Socialism? Yeah, it would’ve been a good idea, when we still had the industrial means to go that road…instead, democratic anarchist communes will have to suffice, if they can be defended and maintained.
Socialism now would help mitigate the worst effects of post-Peak oil decline and collapse, but there’s zero chance of it being implemented in any Western country where it would make a real difference.
So don’t throw out those old LIS books on how to do manual card-catalogs just yet. Keep around a copy of older versions of AACR2, keep your manual type-writers, The Big Red Books, and your DDC21 books (or LC Classification Tables if you got ‘em)…you just might need them if small, community based libraries are to survive the demise of Petroleum Man someday. And save those print archives of Backwoods Home Magazine, and Farmer’s Almanac and all the best 1970s Permaculture books, mainly from Australia.
Humanity will be lucky enough to maintain an 18th or 17th century mode of existence in the wake of a post-Peak oil collapse, if even that. Even that may be too optimistic. Vital minerals have become so difficult to recover, it is questionable whether, without cheap petroleum energy, humanity would even have the material basis for a return to the Bronze age, much less the 17th or 18th Century with its proto-industrialization and world-wide commercial empires. There’s only so much we can recycle from our existing material culture; the world of Mad Max isn’t as far fetched as it seemed in the 1980s. It too was about a collapsing world of hyper-scarcity of fossil fuels, if anyone cares to remember. As much as I love city life, Cities are the one place you don’t want to be when the crap really starts to hit the fan.
I’ll write more later but for now I want to wrap up this post. Backwoods Home Magazine is important to read, and important for your local library to subscribe to if you can’t afford a subscription yourself. The archival collections they offer through their website seem totally worth it, too.
I am unabashedly Left-wing, but anymore, I’m insulted with being called Liberal. I’ve moved beyond Liberalism…I’m now a Radical, in the current scheme of things, though I don’t think the things I believe in are at bottom really all that radical. Now I do usually agree with Old School Democrats of the Liberal mold shaped by FDR. I happen to think, despite his corruption scandals, that radical Louisiana populist Huey Long was pretty cool too, and he helped push FDR further Left than FDR really wanted to go. Like any populist leader that makes a real difference in the lives of poor people, Huey Long has had to be demonized time and time again. But the “American Fascist” label, invented by real American fascists, by the way, simply doesn’t stick to Huey Long. He was a Democrat who happened to believe in small-“d” democracy, roused the masses, had the audacity to tax the wealthy, then help the poor. Maybe enriched himself a little much along the way, but nobody’s perfect.
I think the people can seize the reins of the state and use it as a blunt instrument for economic and social justice, and to make everyone’s lives better, and push back and keep the National Security State in check, on a tight leash. But I’m no “mere Liberal”, either, of the type Phil Ochs satirized in his song… (“…love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal…”). Mere liberals can still support the worst of US imperial politics abroad, albeit for the most noble of misguided motives. Mere liberals are still paranoid, rabid anti-communists who quickly brand me with their voodoo label they call “Stalinist” (I’m more of an anarcho-syndicalist Trotskyite-Titoist, thank you very much). I’ve been a radical small “d” democrat and Marxist for quite some time now, and I no longer have a gag reflex when people bring up the signifier “Marxist-Leninist”. I feel increasingly pushed towards Marxism-Leninism nowadays, really. I’m in need of doing more research and taking stock of my current beliefs again.
In the meantime, I believe that mildly paternalistic welfare-state socialism can and does work, well-funded and efficient public mass transportation is superior to the sprawling, expensive road network created for personal car and 18-wheeled trucks, and I believe such a state sector can be integrated, ala Tito-style, into a Yugoslav-model “mixed economy”, with a vibrant (but properly and stringently regulated) market sector, if you want to go that way. There’s also something to be said for the Spanish anarchist cooperative collectives around Mondragon, too. Grassroots ECONOMIC democracy is a GOOD thing. But even in so-called Liberal circles today it’s still heresy to defy the Reagan-Thatcher inspired orthodoxy, which declared post-1991 that “There Is No Alternative” (TINA) to so-called “Liberal free-market democracy”. That was swallowed whole by both Clinton and Tony Blair. Thus, they occupied the ground formerly occupied by so-called Rockefeller Republicans. US New Democrats today all struggle to “restore” so-called Liberal Free Market Democracy, the Republicans are plowing full steam ahead with a crazy brand of “free-market fundamentalism” combined semi-theocratic Christo-Fascism, unbridled militarism, and naked imperialism. It was an old fashioned US Liberal president (LBJ) that helped give us Vietnam (though fatuous GOP rhetoric that intimates that the Republicans would have avoided Vietnam is pure fantasy…the Republicans would’ve NUKED Vietnam if they could have)…LBJ felt pressure from the Right, and from the National Security State, to get involved with Vietnam, to continue what Kennedy had clandestinely started...
But there is one issue out that could ultimately render most of this whole political debate meaningless and absurd, and really break down a lot of Left – Right distinctions and show that the only true Dynamic one need really worry about is the Top versus Bottom dynamic.
That issue is Peak Oil, or specifically the post-Peak oil decline in world oil production, and how the world leaders and world citizens decide to react to it and to each other in light of changing physical reality.
In a later post I might provide more links to Peak oil-and-gas related information, for those not yet educated on the phenomena and its implications.
But so that I don’t make this post overly long, let me simply state a few watchwords to remember for the unavoidable Post-peak oil/gas (and therefore economic) decline.
1) Re-localize your economies
2) Learn permaculture—start growing your own food now!
3) Get off the grid…go solar, maybe, but mainly, learn to cut consumption!
4) Get out of debt, but invest in physical gold—not paper gold—as your rainy day fund.
5) Self-reliance is an excellent virtue, but mutual aid is better.
6) Learn self-defense and be prepared/vigilant.
7) All politics are ultimately local…get to know your neighbors, talk to them about Peak oil.
This isn’t really a Right or Left discussion, this is a human survival discussion….it’s a living in denial versus facing reality question. And while I generally like the warm touchy-feely fuzzies generated by Mother Earth News,
http://www.motherearthnews.com/
…like the US Democratic Party, it became too Yuppified from its scrappy, hippie roots; I’m told it is returning to those roots, slowly (and how could it not, with GWB in the White House!?) but it appears to be a slow arc back, by the look of it. The advice given isn’t bad, but it’s….maybe a little too fashion conscious?
No, for my money, you want the best advice for surviving the aftermath of post-Peak oil collapse, your best source is going to be Backwoods Home Magazine,
http://www.backwoodshome.com/
Scrappy, independent minded—a publication even a Left-wing Anarchist could love. Honest!
Yes, the magazine is in fact a little Right-wingy, but their hearts are in the right place. Maybe in the Clinton years I would’ve thought they were nuts…but in the Clinton years I was ignorant about Peak oil, even though the implications of Peak oil had been theorized in the 1950s and widely known in petroleum circles since at least the 1970s.
For what it’s worth, I should mention that I happen to agree with Michael C. Ruppert and his investigative reporting staff over at http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ . I think the PNAC people needed 9/11, and helped conspire to make it happen. I highly recommend his website and his print newsletter as well.
Now, the folks at Backwoods Home Magazine might dismiss Michael C. Ruppert’s investigative reporting team out of hand, and people like me who read him. They have a banner that says “Remember September 11, 2001”. I would agree, just remember that signs point over and over to it being an inside job, or at least aided and abetted by elements of the National Security State, within the Federal government apparatus, under Dick Cheney. Read Michael C. Ruppert’s very excellent book Crossing the Rubicon for more details.
The precedent is there, folks…if you’re not familiar with the name “Operation Northwoods” from the 1960s, get familiar with it. “Rex 84” is another Federal plan to be familiar with. Some right wingers are aware of these things, and thus their fear of the Federal government does have some basis in fact. I am myself prepared to say, as a Leftist and an Atheist, with no special love for religious nuts, I think there’s something fishy about Waco and the fiery, bloody end to the siege of the Branch Davidians, and moreover, there’s something fishy about Oklahoma City, and for that matter something fishy about TWA Flight 800, too.
So for a number of reasons, even as a Leftist, I endorse Backwoods Home Magazine whole-heartedly, because, frankly, there IS a lot to fear about the Federal Government these days. After Katrina, is there really any doubt that these bastards don’t care about ordinary people and will only do just enough to keep up the appearance of caring, if that. In public pronouncements about Avian Flu, the government message is clear: “you’re on your own, chump”.
Backwoods Home Magazine is more straightforwardly Libertarian…no government intervention period. They are less explicitly condemning of corporate power centers, though, as near as I can tell. In fact, they don’t really address overarching corporate power that much at all, other than a general screed against mindless materialism generally. They make no distinction between paternalistic welfare state a la FDR and outright fascist states like GWB. They believe in backwoods self-reliance as the ultimate expression of human freedom, in a kind of Jeffersonian, yeoman-farmer mold.
I can respect that view, but as a Left-wing socialist, I believe the paternalistic “nanny” state (as the Libertarians mockingly call it) can actually do some real good in the world, engage in socially beneficent income redistribution, and restrain the worse corporate excesses, but the Welfare State in general, and the Social-Democratic parties that ran them, let’s be honest, were always just bones tossed out by the capitalists to keep working class people, especially in Europe, from going communist. Social Democracy was always that kind of compromise pay off…don’t go communist, workers, vote for social democracy and we’ll give you modest pensions, national health insurance, paid vacations, and educational opportunities. Once the USSR collapsed in 1991, though, all bets were off, all compromises no longer needed, and the more vicious, nakedly aggressive forces of Capital came to the fore to smash all half-measures and revert us back to 19th century modes of capital/labor relations, world wide. So anyway, the “welfare state” has been replaced by the “warfare” state, and it truly IS a thing to be feared.
Backwoods Home Magazine above all advocates what is properly seen by socialists as a fall-back position, nearly Anarchist in nature--a strategy of survival. The magazine and its writers advocate self-reliance. I’d say self-reliance is good, but Anarchic “Mutual Aid” is better. I’d rather have old-fashioned democratic State socialism slightly left of FDR, maybe even slightly left of Marshall Tito. But recognizing that that probably won’t happen in my lifetime, Anarchist communes are the next best option for survival, but they need to be able to defend themselves. Which is why I recently held my nose and rejoined the National Rifle Association, and why I subscribed to Backwoods Home Magazine, and would recommend it for any Public Library. With my NRA membership, I get a free subscription to American Rifleman. I will say the same thing about American Rifleman that I say about Playboy Magazine...I read it for the (technical) articles, and enjoy the pretty pictures (but ignore the right-wing blather, the way I ignore raunchier fare like Hustler).
…Backwoods Home Magazine gives so much practical advice that you’ve got to love them. Permaculture books are fine, and I do recommend them, but I also read Massad Ayoob’s columns on guns with great interest. I mostly ignore the right-wing blather, or read between the lines.
I’m not the only Lefty who does, either. Check out:
http://www.liberalswithguns.com/
and
http://progunprogressive.com/phpBB2/index.php
I myself have mixed feelings about gun politics and issues. I think the NRA’s rabid tirades against the United Nations are utterly insane. The UN isn’t trying to take away your guns, they couldn’t do it even if they wanted to. The UN is trying to reduce the spread of military small arms in the Third World, too lessen the chances of ethnic conflicts boiling out of control to become full-born blood feuds and civil wars. Don’t they have a right to guns too? I guess so, in the abstract, but they also have a right to an education, adequate housing and food, and a decent job, according to the UN. The UN is trying, in its own way, to save lives in impoverished areas of the globe by reducing the tools of violence in those regions. It’s a thorny issue enough without the NRA throwing a paranoid hissy-fit and conflating an issue that has nothing really to do with them (arms trade regulation in the Third World) with legitimate questions on gun ownership and regulation in the First world, in more stable societies with police, rule of law (ostensibly, at least), the 2nd Amendment, etc.
I think gun laws that work for, say, rural Montana might not work for urban New York City, and vis versa. In sum, I think it should be a local issue. I believe cities are right to insist on stringent CCW regulation, and to declare some areas off-limits, even to licensed concealed-carry owners, such as venues that generate 51% or more of their revenue from alcohol sales (bars & liquor stores), public schools, large central Public Libraries, etc. Rural areas can and should be able to be more relaxed and less stringent with gun regulations.
Come the Peak Oil decline & collapse, though, you will not only need to know how to garden, cultivate your own food, and perhaps raise animals for food…you’ll have to be familiar with guns to defend your family and your community. They won’t be coming from the UN, but black SpecOps helicopters are real, and make no mistake…the Pentagon has its own contingency plans for global warming, Peak oil, etc, and what little has come to light isn’t very pretty. That’s the main reason I re-joined the NRA. And it’s not just the Pentagon, mind you…they’re just the servants and shock-troops of the Wealthy. The mega-rich have their own contingency plans for survival…what else do you think they talk about at the Bilderberg conference, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Project for the New American Century, etc.? Do you think they’re unaware of the looming crisis? They’re not—but they’d prefer to keep you in the dark for as long as possible. I may not be a good Lefty in some people’s eyes for not disavowing guns 100% and seeking only non-violent solutions. I can only say in response that the Black Panthers learned how to use guns, and so did The Weathermen splinter group who broke off from SDS (Students for a Democratic Society). I respect the hell out of practitioners of non-violence who achieve positive results by sheer moral force. But I don’t have the faith in humanity to believe the Gandhi way will work every time…I still remember my Frantz Fanon and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, too. Every MLK will have his Malcom X, and even MLK was a lot more radical than official histories properly recognize.
It’s a sad fact that not everyone will prepare properly, either, and some will be less well able to deal with the economic shockwave than others…You should be charitable when you can to those who are without, but realize some who are without will have guns and try to take your food (and guns) by force, too. I’m trying to get my parents prepared, slowly, gradually, without scaring them half to death. I really do wish we could realistically move back to our grandparent’s homes in rural Missouri sometimes. We may yet do that, I can’t say. Maybe I am a little paranoid myself, but as I always like to say: “Just because you’re paranoid does NOT mean they’re NOT out to get you.”
I pray (figure of speech only--I’m an atheist, mind you) the worst of this won’t happen in my lifetime, that I’ll be long dead before any of us really have to worry about post-Peak oil economic collapse and even a worldwide human Die Off event of massive proportions owing to starvation and disease.
But the more I read, the less confident I am that this won’t start happening in my lifetime.
A friend of mine, and fellow librarian, once said she wanted to study the effects that post-Peak oil collapse would have on libraries. I commented that libraries are in large measure a product of mass civilization. If that civilization collapses, libraries as we know them collapse too. And Socialism? Yeah, it would’ve been a good idea, when we still had the industrial means to go that road…instead, democratic anarchist communes will have to suffice, if they can be defended and maintained.
Socialism now would help mitigate the worst effects of post-Peak oil decline and collapse, but there’s zero chance of it being implemented in any Western country where it would make a real difference.
So don’t throw out those old LIS books on how to do manual card-catalogs just yet. Keep around a copy of older versions of AACR2, keep your manual type-writers, The Big Red Books, and your DDC21 books (or LC Classification Tables if you got ‘em)…you just might need them if small, community based libraries are to survive the demise of Petroleum Man someday. And save those print archives of Backwoods Home Magazine, and Farmer’s Almanac and all the best 1970s Permaculture books, mainly from Australia.
Humanity will be lucky enough to maintain an 18th or 17th century mode of existence in the wake of a post-Peak oil collapse, if even that. Even that may be too optimistic. Vital minerals have become so difficult to recover, it is questionable whether, without cheap petroleum energy, humanity would even have the material basis for a return to the Bronze age, much less the 17th or 18th Century with its proto-industrialization and world-wide commercial empires. There’s only so much we can recycle from our existing material culture; the world of Mad Max isn’t as far fetched as it seemed in the 1980s. It too was about a collapsing world of hyper-scarcity of fossil fuels, if anyone cares to remember. As much as I love city life, Cities are the one place you don’t want to be when the crap really starts to hit the fan.
I’ll write more later but for now I want to wrap up this post. Backwoods Home Magazine is important to read, and important for your local library to subscribe to if you can’t afford a subscription yourself. The archival collections they offer through their website seem totally worth it, too.
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Mr. Washington is forgetting that books are just a vehicle for getting ideas and information to others. There is nothing wrong with being a lover of books but I bet the monks that wrote on parchment felt much the same way as Mr. Washington
when Gutenberg printed his first books. It is the information that is important, not the medium!
— Bill Drew Jan 23, 05:01 PM #
As a parent, I think it is my job to promote a love of lifelong learning which for me includes “a love of reading and books”.
As a librarian, it is my job to help others find the books, information and data that promote their love of lifelong learning. That love of learning may be enriched in the laboratory, in the field, in a national park, in the coffee shop or in library stacks.
“Information literacy” may be jargon, but it is also a necessary set of skills that will enable lifelong learners of this century to pursue their passion in a world that is very different from the 20th century. “Information literacy” refers to a set of skills that will prepare our children to participate in a 21st century global workforce.
— Terry B Jan 23, 05:38 PM #
I think the key phrase that I took away from Washington’s article is the following: “ What usually gets lost in the scramble is a careful reading of the material.” My own perceptions of working in the academic library field has been that the newer technologies, unlike the more traditional monograph, make it far easier to deal in snippets-“paper soundbites”, if you will-rather than truly wrestling with academic content. Utilizing the book format is more likely to force a student to devote the time to understanding their work topic; the newer web technologies of the past decade have definitely made it easier to be distracted, to click on that next embedded link, to not read the whole document, etc-in short, to not really follow through with the “guts” of research that are often needed for true mastery.
— Shannon R. Jan 23, 06:00 PM #
My job, as librarian, is to facilitate access to information…in any format. It’s exciting to discover what else we have access to electronically every day. It’s equally thrilling to find just the right article or book for a patron.
It would be better if students and the public in general did not believe that “everything they need, information wise, is available on the Internet for free.” Not everything is available on the Internet and the scholarly databases are not free. Sometimes patrons have to find information “the old fashioned way”; in a book. There again, formats have changed with the evolution of ebooks. They’re great resources.
After finding the information, it’s important to read the material and then apply critical thinking skills to determine how the information fits into essays and term papers.
I agree with the author of comment #1, it’s the ideas that are presented that are important. The format is irrelevant.
Electronic formats facilitate access to more information for more people. It’s a win win situation and just as exciting and rewarding for this librarian.
— P A Martin Jan 23, 06:18 PM #