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 21^st 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 2^nd 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 18^th 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

thoughts on The Teaching Company

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

paying homage to my intellectual mentors

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the German Department:

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

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

Other TAMU Departments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on serials/ERM

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

other audiobooks, and another literary discussion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I am, and what I am not

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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