From the Useful to the Inane

I joined Facebook late this summer after some gentle coaxing from my friend Joe. After creating the account I went about searching for friends (the 35 and over demographic, while growing, is still somewhat unrepresented), adding applications, joining groups, uploading some photos and wondering if I shouldn't poke the Facebook doppelgangers who share my name. Perhaps I'll start a group for my fellow Chris Breitenbachs, if anything to discover where the Christopher Breitenbach from Poughkeepsie, New York picked up the fantastic Spiderman shirt he's wearing in his Profile picture.

An article in last weeks Economist had this to say:

Facebook has made two genuine breakthroughs. The first was its decision to let outsiders write programs and keep all the advertising revenues these might earn. This has led to all kinds of widgets, from the useful (comparing Facebookers' music and film tastes, say) to the inane (biting each other to become virtual zombies).... Facebook's second masterstroke is its “mini-feed”, an event stream on user pages that keeps users abreast of what their friends are doing—uploading photos, adding a widget and so on. For many users, this is addictive and is the main reason they log on so often. Jerry Michalski, a consultant, calls the mini-feed a “data exhaust” that gives Facebook users “better peripheral vision” into the lives of people they know only casually. This mini-feed is so far the clearest example of using the social graph in a concrete way.

That seems about right. Seeing what films my friends have checked out or what books they're currently reading offer small but intimate glimpses into their lives. I like that. Should they desire to turn me into a virtual zombie, that's fine. The "mini-feed" is even better, an aggregate of everything my friends have posted. Just today, for example, my friend Dennis updated his Profile picture, Joe and Heath saved some links on del.icio.us and I took a look at what book Jeanne is reading.

Comment Enabled Blogs: Are Libraries Really Having Conversations?

Casey and Savastinuk write that the "participatory Web seeks to harness the power of its users in order to enhance content" (p. 59). They go on to write that "participatory service seek to do for library services what the participatory Web has done for the Web itself. Users and their knowledge have the ability to reshape library services, but libraries must first change the way they craft their services and tools so that users have a clear and open avenue on which to communicate and participate" (p. 61).

There are, of course, numerous routes through which libraries can and have attempted to encourage this kind of participatory service ethic. Casey and Savastinuk, along with many of their Library 2.0 peers, have written broadly about the potential of library blogs (both internal and external), catalogs, wikis and any number of the rapidly expanding body of software applications as exciting new platforms through which libraries and their users can "talk and communicate as never before" (p. 75). With dependable regularity, the example most Library 2.0ers use as their demonstration model to exemplify this is the comment enabled blog. "As librarians," Casey and Savastinuk write, "we know that a give-and-take conversation is critical to being understood...With blogs, when a question comes through, it no longer lives in seclusion..."(p. 84).

That is, provided a patron actually does post a question through the library blog.

I've read about this a lot over the last year and I've made a habit of checking the comments of the various library blogs I've visited. Rarely, if ever, do I see patrons making use of these comments, leading me to wonder just how effective this kind of conversation is. I think library blogs can serve an important purpose but I wonder if it isn't perhaps time for us to reevaluate if conversation is one of them. What libraries are truly having sustained comment enabled conversations with patrons?

Surely Casey and Savastinuk would provide us with effective examples. Libraries like "Waterboro Public Library in East Waterboro, Maine," they write, "are creating blogs that allow customers to comment on library happenings in their community" (p. 62). But a visit to Waterbro's library blog reveals that it isn't currently comment enabled. Perhaps it once was but the blogs archives aren't available to check. What happened? Why did they stop? Is this the best example Casey and Savastinuk can muster? Offering another example, Casey and Savastinuk go on write that other libraries, "such as Darian Library, are creating blogs on which their directors post news and field questions and comments from the public" (p. 62). But while the director, since the blogs launch in July of 2006, has sporadically posted (she starts of strong but hasn't posted any new content since July of this year) and received roughly a dozen comments, none of these rise to our authors' claim of providing valuable feedback to "be discussed in meetings, and used to improve existing services."

What, I fear, Casey and Savastinuk are positing/inflating is the ideal while neglecting the reality of what's really happening on library blogs. It would be brilliant to see library directors, staff and patrons engaged in a rich, sustained current of blog enabled conversations but I've yet to see it. Are there blogging libraries truly having such conversations?

Earlier this summer John Blyberg, one of Library 2.0's most lucid and critical writers/thinkers, wrote of the "fairly severe disconnect between what the 2.0 pundits say (among whom I count myself), and what is really happening." The 2.0 pundits have been writing for over 2 years now of blog enabled conversations between library staff and their users. I don't doubt that the one way conversation is happening--there are plenty of libraries regularly updating their blogs, offering convenient RSS feeds, and passing along valuable information regarding a stunning array of services and programming. But perhaps it's time, as the 2.0 pundits so often remind us, to reevaluate this claim. The comment enabled library blog, as it now stands, doesn't seem to be encouraging a two-way conversation.

The Pancake Girl

We made pancakes this morning. Or, as is usually the case, Cathy made pancakes with her enthusiastic munchkin assistant while I hovered about in anxious anticipation.
According to Alan Davidson's mighty Penguin Companion to Food (written with the "intention that browsing through it should be a pleasure," and it is!), it was the English who did the most to advance the griddled brilliance of the pancake as we in the West have come to know it. "An English culinary manuscript of about 1430," Davidson writes, "refers to pancakes in a way which implies that the term was already familiar, but it does not occur often in the early printed cookery books. It seems to have been only in the 17th century that pancakes came to the fore in Britain." If only for this, I am a dedicated Anglophile. Thank you for the pancakes!


When I was a child, a few years older than Abby is now, my Dad would take me along on Saturday mornings to bum around the sawdust and Formica scrap strewn rooms of the family business. For lunch we'd walk a few blocks down to a restaurant run by a Greek couple who served breakfast all day. When we'd enter the owner would receive me from behind the counter with a warmhearted salutation of "It's the Pancake Boy!" And of course that's what I'd order, marveling that such a place existed where pancakes were no longer confined to the tyranny of the morning hours.
A Vietnamese restaurant is there now. Their cinnamon beef ball soup is said to be quite good.


Not just pancakes with strawberries, but bacon too! The salty, redolence of bacon on an early autumn morning is life affirming. Writing Alexander Donald from Paris, Thomas Jefferson, heavy with the burden of his times said, "I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give." Of course, he's lying. Try as he might, Jefferson couldn't resist "the most splendid post" of the presidency and he was both petty and fiercely tenacious in his quest to claim it. And he loved pancakes as much as bacon. Still, relaxing in a modest cottage with good friends, some books and bacon while the world rolls on by sounds mighty nice. I'd add a few bottles of wine though. And a badminton net.


Abby has begun humming again while she eats. She did this for many months but it abruptly stopped not long after her first birthday back in December. The hum returned a few weeks ago though. It's the hum of foodstuff approval. A hum to accompany the delicious, both savory and sweet. It's not subtle, this hum, but emphatic and assertive. She hummed through each and every bite of pancake and bacon this morning. I'm glad it's returned.

Skokie Meebo

I headed over to the recently meebo me widgeted Ask a Librarian page at Skokie Public Library and had the following conversation:

meeboguest376001: Hi there! I'm a LIS student at Dominican University and hoping to ask a few questions regarding IM'ing at your library. Is now a good time?

ask skokie: We just began the IM link this past week so I don't know how much info we have to offer you yet. Do you want to talk with one of the librarians who set it up, if yes I can give you their names and let you know when they are scheduled to be in the library.

meeboguest376001: No, I don't think I'll need to talk to one of them. If you don't have info, that's fine. Do you know how it was integrated into your system?

ask skokie: We are using the Meebo aggregator so we can serve people with the various IM providers such as AIM Yahoo Google etc

meeboguest376001: Yeah, meebo is a nice IM aggregator. Have you noticed a lot more reference questions coming in?

ask skokie: We have just placed the Widget this week. Have not really publicized it yet. Soft rollout. We will be doing flyers, bookmarks articles in newsletter later in the year.

meeboguest376001: OK, I didn't know it was so recently--though it's great that you guys are rolling it out. Any idea as to how you'll go about evaluating it?

ask skokie: Keeping Stats on sessions--will keep archives of transcripts stripped of any personal identifiers. We consider it another way to make contact---like the telephone. Will treat requests as we treat any other request for information. If we cannot answer completely via chat will ask for email or phone for more detailed followup

meeboguest376001: Was there any staff training involved in rolling it out?

ask skokie: Not much---had a short intro session and did a cheat sheet. We have been doing AskAway Virtual Reference---so concept not new. Software is easy--not much to learn just type rather than talk

meeboguest376001: Ok, last question (you've been very helpful!): Any plans to place meebo on every results page of your lib's search interface--to be at the point of need for your users?

ask skokie: We are considering this---Heard Michael Stephens suggest it & he's right. We will be expanding placement, though our site has literally thousands of pages--so not sure will be on all but definitely will eventually be on many more

meeboguest376001: Oh, that's funny! I'm taking Michael's Lib. 2.0 class this semester!

ask skokie: He's great---knows his stuff- interesting speaker too!

meeboguest376001: Thanks again for your help!

ask skokie: Good luck in your classes. feel free to contact us again any time we're open

-All in all a very good experience, and I'm ashamed to say one of the longest, no make that the first! IM conversations I've ever had. I know that the PewInternet and American Life Study revealed that, contrary to what many thought, adults are actually using IM. Still, there is a huge generatin gap according to a similar AOL study of IM use.

Anyone with teenagers knows already that there is a huge generation gap in IM usage. In AOL's survey, IM usage ran 90 percent among those age 13 to 21; 71 percent for ages 22 to 34; 55 percent for ages 35 to 54; and 48 percent for 55 and older.

More than half of those over 35 are using IM? Where have I been? Probably all those years I resisted using a cellphone, no?

A Museum Of Apples

If the apples haven't already been baked in this freakishly tropical October heatwave Chicago's presently wilting under, we're hoping to round up a few of the 20 different varieties of apples Kuipers Family Farm's grows tomorrow morning. But reading Michael Pollan's The Botany of Desire has me aspiring to one day make it over to Geneva, New York. It's here, as Pollan writes,

...on the banks of Seneca Lake, in excellent apple-growing country, a government outfit called the Plant Genetic Resource Unit maintains the world's largest collection of apple trees. Some 2,500 different varieties have been gathered from all over the world and set out here in pairs, as if on an a beached botanical ark. The card catalog of this fifty-acre tree archive runs the pomological gamut from Adam's Pearmain, an antique English apple, to the German Zucalmagio. In between a browser will find almost every variety discovered in America since Roxbury Russet distinguished itself in a cider orchard outside Boston in 1645.

A museum of apples. Imagine the apple pies you could make! The apple fritters!

Would You Like to GPS the Location Of This Book?

The great library crisis of the 21st century is one of relevance. Hands are wrung, shoulders are shrugged and ideas are sprung in hopes of offering patrons the tools necessary to fulfill their various information needs. Tools, one might add, many patrons are already using in their daily lives and have come to expect of their libraries and other public institutions.

And so we behold Maricopa's Dewey eviction. Out with the outmoded and in with the new? The fascinating flurry of comments found at the end of Karen Schneiders Techsource post regarding Maricopa are well worth reading--exhibiting passions about this issue that I find hard to muster. At best, I'm agnostic. At worst, indifferent. I understand and respect the history and merits of Dewey but I'm not entirely convinced of its irrevocability. If Maricopa's patrons were discouraged by Dewey and hankering for a new, friendlier classification system that encouraged and facilitated browsing--then by all means--if BISAC supports that need, fantastic. It certainly seems to, though I was especially encouraged by Maricopa's readiness to revert back to Dewey if their experiment failed.

Certainly there are some questions that need to be explored. Would this work for larger libraries? What about those patrons or reference staff who don't want to browse and want to find a specific book? Could Dewey be kept if the natural language signage was improved or expanded?

Ideally, in the end, my hope is that with all the telecom convergence activity currently underway, I'll soon be able to use my phone to access a library's catalog in addition to taking advantage of the catalogs GPS application which will conveniently lead me directly to the book I'm looking for.

In the Library

In the Library

for Octavio

There's a book called
A Dictionary of Angels.
No one had opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angles were once plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be filled with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

-Charles Simic

Who says librarians don't have special powers? I wonder if one of the singular strands that runs through all librarians, both present and future, is the quiet joy we've experienced drifting up and down those aisles of whispering books.

Autumn

We headed out to the Chicago Botanic Garden this morning for a picnic. A perfect autumn day, too- an embracing warmth with a dry soughing wind and a powder blue sky lazy with clouds. Can we squirrel some of this away and dig it up sometime in mid-February?

Picnics at the garden, it turns out, are frowned upon. The sight of people gorging themselves on cheese and crackers might, I suppose, upset the laboriously manicured balance of all that is, well, botanic. I wondered, upon seeing some lily pads, if they weren't tended each morning by groundskeepers who neatly tethered them to the silty bottom of the pond. Undeniably pretty, it brought out the ageist impulse in us. "This is probably really nice for grandmas," we thought.

Still, it left me feeling expansive and with an itch for my own garden. Last weekend Abby, Cathy and our 2-year old friend and upstairs neighbor Emma invested in some crocus bulbs. Planted by small hands on a late summer day in September they offer the promise of winters end come late March. Fluorescent purples and yellows making a mockery of a Midwestern settlement of gray. I'm already looking forward to their arrival.

Personal Anthropology: Electronic Mail

Back in the heady days of the early 90's I could be found amongst the undergraduate sprawl of the Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Like most financially strapped undergrads, costly long-distance phone calls were rarely an option. I wrote letters to my family and friends using nothing but a pen and college ruled notebooks courtesy of Mead. A week or so later I'd receive their reply. How quaint! Virtual communication options were, however, quietly establishing their presence in dull, red-bricked campus buildings where--as my then Northwestern-tethered friend Joe repeatedly, excitedly insisted--I could sign up for an "electronic mail" account.

An entry from a diary I kept then. April 12, 1991--Friday:

Ate lunch and headed over to Baker Systems and finally got an Electronic Mail account--something Joe has been telling me to get for almost a year--so it'll be in effect by this Thursday--cool! I can't wait. I'll be able to send mail directly to Joe and Will at Northwestern-- I can even talk directly to them...

That following Thursday, May 2, I stumbled through my first e-mail. A few weeks later I had managed to join various newsgroups and mailing lists, most devoted to the various niches of the then burgeoning electronic music scene ricocheting about Europe--the sounds and news of which, much to my discontent, were wading far too slowly across the Atlantic.

In their article, Netizens: On the History and Impact of USENET and the Internet, Michael Hauben and Ronday Hauben nicely summarize the giddy potential such aggregation of niche content suddenly, almost magically, made possible:

Inherent in most mass media is central control of content. Many people are influenced by the decisions of a few. Television programming, for example, is controlled by a small group of people compared to the size of the audience. The audience has very little choice over what is emphasized by most mass media. Usenet, however, is controlled by its audience. Usenet should be seen as a promising successor to other people's presses, such as broadsides at the time of the American Revolution and the penny presses in England at the turn of the nineteenth century. Most of the material written to Usenet is contributed by the same people who actively read Usenet. Thus, the audience of Usenet decides the content and subject matter to be thought about, presented, and debated. The ideas that exist on Usenet come from the mass of people who participate in it. In this way, Usenet is an uncensored forum for debate where many sides of an issue come into view. Instead of being force-fed by an uncontrollable source of information, the participants set the tone and emphasis on Usenet. People control what happens on Usenet. In this rare situation, issues and concerns that are of interest, and thus important to the participants, are brought up. In the tradition of amateur radio and Citizen's Band radio, Usenet is the product of the users' ideas and will. Amateur radio and CB, however, are more restricted than Usenet. The range of Usenet connectivity is international and quickly expanding into every nook and cranny around the world. This explosive expansion allows growing communication among people around the world.

Suddenly the trickle of content I had been piecing together from various mass media resources became an all-you-can-eat buffet covering various facets of the scene. Album reviews, heated discussions concerning the definition of "ambient music," and a multitude of other "issues and concerns" of interest were available for perusing and expanding.

So, more then a positive experience, it was a small epiphany--the discovery of a formally non-existent community of fellow electronic music travelers huddled and hunched over their far-flung computer keyboards all excitedly (and eloquently) sharing their passions.

LIS768

This blog has been on summer-induced hibernation. School, however, is coaxing me from my slumber in the form of LIS768, one of the last classes I'll be taking through Dominican's Graduate School of Library and Information Science. I'll be digging around and writing about various curiosities regarding this fascinating, albeit sprawling and amorphous world of Library 2.0.

For those of you in LIS768--I'm primarily interested in audiovisual services and programming in public libraries, an area that, for a variety of reasons, receives scant academic or professional consideration. I hope to soon post a series of interviews I conducted and filmed this June with some wonderful local audiovisual librarians sometime in the next couple weeks.

I've long wondered how audiovisual departments could, in addition to providing materials to their patrons, assist them with creating content. Pre and post-post production software for creating and editing film or music is cheaply and readily available. Why aren't libraries working with teens, for example, to facilitate and create dynamic YouTube documentaries about their communities?

Perhaps what I find most exciting about the Library 2.0 movement (campaign? lobby? agitators?) is that it embraces this idea of patrons as content creators, whether it be adding comments on a blog or creating podcasts. I look forward to exploring that, among other curiosities, more in-depth over the course of this class.

Deep Down The Slide

Over the last few days Abby has requested "Little" Louie Vega's sublime 1993 House single, Deep Inside. numerous times. Indeed, it's become her tiny yellow slide anthem as she's cleverly altered the "Deep, deep inside...Deep, deep down inside" Barbara Tucker sample that runs throughout the track to "Deep, deep down the slide...Deep, deep down the slide!" Maximum adorability set to a 4/4 beat.

House your body to the bass, little girl!

Waiting For The 22

"How ya doin?"

Instinct, habit, without thinking though the warning bell had already been sounding from the moment I first noticed him approaching, the barely conscious registering of his queasy body language.

"Fine," I said.

He sat down next to me, on the hot black bench where I was waiting for the bus. He held a package of cigarettes in his hand, trying repeatedly to fish one out. Tapping repeatedly on his wrist. Needless repetition. He was thin, feverish and untethered. Completely off. Schizophrenic. A tyrannizer of the normal.

"Are you a good sport or a spoiled sport?"

Is there an answer? Best to look away. I'm not really here. I have a hard enough time engaging with the self-possessed. But empathy kicks in. I want, and I'm probably thinking this later, as the bus is pulling away and I'm looking at him still sitting on the bench, still talking to the me that is no longer there, to bring him back, as though he surely left it at some point, to sanity. A wave of my hand, a lift of the curse, a bestower of miracles. "Return to yourself," I'd say with a sorcerer's flourish and there he'd be, intact, bewildered by his new clarity...apologetic and a little embarrassed. "No worries," I'd say. Instead there's this.

"It's like....it's like your watch. Like the glass on your watch and when you walk you can smash right into it. Like the glass inside you."

At which point the bus arrives, curing me of my agitation, of my delusions, of the rubbing up against madness. It's only a few seconds, this absurd interaction. But it's part of the lingering accumulation of mental health disasters, of humanity still breathing but gone to husk, that nag and haunt me and our entire approach to mental health in the U.S. So I'm left with clumsy empathy wanting to offer a line, to pull him back, to bring him within proximity of right where I am now, where reason is, for now, firmly tethered, and where my agency meshes with those I love and is met, a million times, by their reassurance--their reinforcement.

Riverwalk

Check it out! The missus might tell you she flew a little by the seat of her pants to get this one off the ground, but I doubt she was ever without the reigns held firmly in hand, offering an occasional kick in the ass when necessary.

Show the Riverwalk some love the next time you're downtown this summer.

Roman Candle Lightning Lights Up the Sky

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are crated equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and pursuit of Happiness."

Those simple words are our starting point as Americans; they describe not only the foundation of our government but the substance of our common creed. Not every American may be able to recite them; few, if asked, could trace the genesis of the Declaration of Independence to its roots in eighteenth-century liberal and republican thought. But the essential idea behind the Declaration-- that we are born into this world free, all of us; that each of us arrives with a bundle of rights that can't be taken away by any person or any state without just cause; that through our own agency we can, and must, make our lives what we will-- is one that every American understands. It orients us, sets our course, each and every day.

Indeed, the value of individual freedom is so deeply ingrained in us that we tend to take it for granted. It is easy to forget that at the time of our nation's founding this idea was entirely radical in its implications, as radical as Martin Luther's posting on the church door. It is an idea that some portion of the world rejects- and for which an even larger portion of humanity finds scant evidence in their daily lives

-Barack Obama, from The Audacity of Hope

Early Bird, Before the Worm

Sometimes Abby gets up awfully early. Like 3:45 am early. That's what she gave me for Father's Day. I was able to get her to go back to sleep, but that usually means 15 minutes to a half hour if we're lucky. But at 4:15 I brought her into bed and she slept on my chest for another hour. I never fell back asleep, though I didn't want to anyway. I listened to her breathing, heard the first birds begin their chatter and felt overwhelmed. With gratitude, with joy, with wanting to hold on to the moment. "You're my kid," I kept thinking. "You're who makes me a Dad." I'm damn lucky.

Enough sap to make up for the maple shortage.

DVDs and (the Woeful Lack of) Accompanying Texts

In his latest Global Discoveries on DVD column for Cinema Scope magazine, Jonathan Rosenbaum discuses why he's never rented a DVD-- namely that they lack the accompanying booklets or special features that come with so many reissues. Criterion DVDs, for example, often includes lavish brochures or booklets with scholarly essays, photographs and other enlightening materials. And with box sets, as Rosenbaum points out, "the differences become more pronounced," with the sets including "larger booklets and even book in some of these packages."

Of course, for those of us who aren't film critics for a living but have insatiable appetites for film, to say nothing of salaries that don't exactly encourage the rampant buying of all that we'd like to see, renting DVDs is usually our only option. But what a bummer to not have those accompanying texts.

One of the many things I adore most about film, especially those works that challenge me, is to read what others, especially those with more time, resources and insight than myself, have to say about it. After watching Michael Haneke's masterful and devastating debut film, The Seventh Continent, a few weeks back, for example, I was lucky enough to find a couple highly astute essays that greatly enhanced my own muddled understanding of the film. It's one of the great joys in my life, and clearly I'm easily gladdened-- to luxuriate in a piece of film criticism that manages to direct all my inchoate thoughts (of which there are many) about what I just saw, that takes the raw emotional charge of the film as it's still reverberating through me, and begins to give it structure or, with the best criticism, adds depth and texture to my nascent understanding of the film. So obviously I miss those accompanying texts that Netflix removes (where do they go...in the trash?) in order to keep its overhead costs in check. But I'd be willing to pay a couple extra bucks a month to have them make quality scans of this material and make it accessible to members through their website.

Let Me Bind Your Governement Accountability Document

When I worked at the Northwestern Law Library one of my more pleasurable responsibilities was binding the latest Government Accountability Office reports that arrived as part of the Federal Depository Library Program. In a nutshell, the GAO is a nonpartisan "investigative arm of Congress" that "studies how the federal government spends taxpayer dollars." The reports are concise, well written and fascinating. For a policy wonk dabbler like myself, the relative brevity of the reports coupled with the fascinating range of issues they cover makes for worthwhile reading.

For my Internet Fundamentals class I read a May 2006 (GAO-06-426) report on broadband infrastructure and access in the U.S. Rural areas, for a variety of reasons, don't have nearly the broadband infrastructure that urban and suburban areas enjoy. But not because they'd rather be growing ethanol corn than surfing the Web. The biggest reason, unsurprisingly, is that providers of broadband don't think they'll make a profit. The three main reasons the broadband providers give for not deploying infrastructure in rural areas is population density (namely, the lack of it), terrain (mountains, lots of trees) and something known as backhaul. And the Amish.

Other recent GAO reports that I wish I had more time to peruse include electronic voting challenges, FEMA and The Department of Homeland Security's continued waste, abuse and fraud in regards to their ongoing response to Hurricane Katrina, and a look at the $420 million the U.S. provided to entities in the West Bank and Gaza over the course of 2005 and 2006 in hopes of reforming the Palestine Authority and supporting the piddling Middle East peace process.

Lefty Wholesomeness

There's a great cast in The Family Stone (not to be confused with Sly and his own Family Stone), one of those films that came and went over the holiday season of 2005 and will no doubt go on to find a snug place on December back-channel television lineups, sandwiched between Jingle All the Way, Love Actually and The Santa Clause 3. I caught it yesterday afternoon over the course of a couple Abby naps courtesy of HBO's On Demand movie fare.

The great cast is headed up by Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson who play the loving parents of the Stone family. But the great cast are slathered over 103 minutes of warmed over Hollywood liberalism and equally soft-hearted sentiment dolled out with an almost admirable sense of guilelessness.

There's a scene around the dinner table on Christmas Eve that plays like CNN's Crossfire as Keaton, playing the matriarch Stone, protects her beatific deaf and gay son (but no incurable disease for him!-- that honor goes to Keaton, who's cancer has returned thus allowing for a long parade of tears, hugs and gently falling snow) from the slings and arrows of Sarah Jessica Parker's Meredith Morton, an anxious, materialistic, illiberal type who may actually marry Mr. and Mrs. Stone's first son, played by a zombie-like Dermot Mulroney.

Parker's Morton repeatedly sticks her foot in her mouth, the end of which has her character awkwardly declaring that no reasonable parent would ever wish their child to be gay, life being difficult enough as it is. This is too much, of course. Such a dazzling check list of conservative homophobia is met with righteous indignation. And it isn't so much that I disagree with this indignation, a proper response to the strong currents of homosexual intolerance that run through so much of America, so much as the whole scene, like much of the movie as a whole, feigns innocence while serving us a primer in lefty wholesomeness every bit as white bread and stilted as Sam Brownback dancing to YMCA at a wedding.

A Spectacular Din of Tymbals

I stepped out of the car this morning in River Forest and was greeted by this awesome sound. Cicadas were everywhere. First I noted the thousands of former slumbering holes next to the bushes where I parked. Then I saw them on the bushes, curled and clinging. Some torpidly flew through the warm air while others, less fortunate, lay squashed on the sidewalk.

At lunch I sat outside to enjoy their collective sound which is like a police siren without any edges, one sustained note ripe with urgency. According to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History (where the above sound sample was found):

The sound is made with structures known as tymbals which are located on the sides of the first abdominal segment, near the top just behind where the hindwings attach. Large muscles contract, causing the tymbal surface to bend inwards which produces a vibrating click. These vibrating clicking noises are enhanced by a large air chamber that extends well into the abdomen. Repeated contractions by thousands of cicadas can create a spectacular din.

After lunch I returned to the library where I sat to a curiously hearty crunch. One of the critters journeyed in on my posterior and had met its demise.

Memorial Day

Audiovisual and Public Libraries

While I wasn't expecting to find books with encouraging titles like Audiovisual Bonanza: A History of the Public Library's Alternative Media Niche or, even better, Audiovisual Departments, Public Libraries and the 21st Century (though I certainly would love to find books like that, especially if they included a comprehensive annotated bibliography), I am a little surprised by the utter paucity of titles available expressively concentrated on audiovisual materials in public libraries. Of course, it's now dawning on me that my search criteria has been entirely wrong...and that what I really need to be searching under is "Nonprint Media Services" or something similar.

In any case, I created my own independent study course through the GSLIS program I'm currently wading through at Dominican University in hopes of immersing myself in the history of and possible futures for audiovisual materials/departments in public libraries. While Dominican offers a healthy smattering of courses covering librarian fundamentals, its course catalog ventures little further. No course I've taken, no book or article assigned, has discussed or even mentioned, however fleetingly, matters pertaining to the audiovisual. Nor, for that matter, do many GSLIS schools. I spent a few hours roughly a month ago hungrily browsing through the ALA's list of Accredited Master's Programs in Library and Information Studies in hopes of finding a professor I could contact or a syllabus I could use as a template. In the end, I came across only one course that bluntly offered what I was looking for. The GSLIS program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offered a class titled, simply enough, Audio Visual Services In Libraries which was, I'm sad to say, discovered in their Historical Course Catalog, which "includes courses no longer taught as well as all courses numbered under the system used through summer 2004." That dog don't hunt. The description for this now defunct class read:

Designed to acquaint students with the nonprint media responsibilities of libraries; includes the evaluation, selection, and acquisition of software and hardware, the utilization of media in various types of libraries (by individuals and groups, in formal and informal programs), and the administration of integrated media collections (films, recorded sound, video, and exhibits).

Nothing too sexy, but what I wouldn't give to have seen the reading list!

My own initial questions regarding audiovisual services in public libraries, as flimsy as they may be, are asked in hopes of finding a more promising path and ultimately gleaning something far more substantial:

-What's the history of audiovisual materials in public libraries?

-What public libraries are known for having great audiovisual departments/collections? What makes them great? How did they that way?

There are other questions, equally inadequate, but it's a start nonetheless.

Overcooked Suburban Malaise

Roughly the first 45 minutes of Little Children, Todd Field's film adaptation of Tom Perrotta's novel of the same name, is wonderful. Field has a real flair for capturing and depicting the languidly enchanted quality of suburbs in the summertime. His sound design work is also finely crafted, frequently taking diegetic sources and subtly manipulating them to reinforce the narrative. And one of Little Children's strokes of genius is having Will Lyman of PBS's Frontline provide voice over narration, his rich authoritative voice giving a surreal gravity to the characters inner lives. What starts with so much promise, however, ends in a heap of overwrought, hackneyed silliness.

One of the films conceits is that Kate Winslet's character,
Sarah, is a plain Jane type, maybe even a little homely. The filmmakers do their best to make her look frumpy by putting her in overalls and without makeup. But by trying to disguise Winslet's beauty they end up making it even more apparent.

Carousel Organ

Jan. 26, 1897

Dear Sir:--

The season for outdoor amusements is approaching. Business in this country is greatly improved. How are you fixed to harvest your share of the good things coming?

Your success depends on the music at your disposal. Your organ cannot produce good music unless it is in good repair, and to attract the crowd you need the latest popular tunes. Give the people the music they want and they will give you the nickles.

An excerpt from an 1897 letter written by Eugene deKleist, owner of the North Tonawanda Barrel Organ Factory from Ron Bopp's The American Carousel Organ: An Illustrated Encyclopedia.

Greater Darkness

I'm lifting this quote wholesale from a recent Economist obitiuary because I've never read the book, though I imagine if I ever get around to reading anything David Halberstam wrote it'll likely be The Best and the Brightest. This timely quote comes from the end of that book.

Time was on the side of the enemy, and we were in a position of not being able to win, not being able to get out...only being able to lash out...And so the war went on, tearing at this country; a sense of numbness seemed to replace an earlier anger. There was, Americans were finding out, no light at the end of the tunnel, only greater darkness.

I'm not entirely hopeful, but that sense of numbness Americans are experiencing anew over Iraq and the breathtaking military, political and diplomatic disaster it represents seemed, this past week especially, to be plucking the White House out of the dark recesses of its own asshole and sending it, however fleetingly, quivering into the light. That contentious, supposedly confidential and ultimately widely reported meeting between Bush and Republican moderates concerned about the war even managed a dismissive snarl from Cheney on his stomping grounds over at Fox:

"We didn't get elected to be popular. We didn't get elected to worry just about the fate of the Republican Party. Our mission is to do everything we can to prevail on what is now, we believe, a global conflict, a fundamental test of the character of the American people, whether or not we're going to be able to prevail against one of the most evil opponents we've ever faced."

But the thing is, there are a lot of folks who are worried about the fate of the Republican Party and precisely how, under its leadership, the character of the American people has been precariously debased. It may be basely political for moderates in the Republican party to be clambering for change just as the '08 election cycle establishes itself but if that's what it takes to nudge the White House, so be it. In the end, I fear, Bush will be handing things off to the next administration and happily sauntering to Crawford to cut brush and crack fart jokes with Karl Rove. And even if the White House and Congress actually manage to work out some agreed upon system of benchmarks with consequences (namely, troop withdraws), the problem and consequences of Iraq will be dangerously reverberating on any number of levels, each more depressing then the next, for quite some time.

Who We Are At 5:30 In the Morning

The last couple mornings as I've been carrying the munchkin up the stairs, both of us still solemn with sleep, she's looked at me very determinedly, placed her hands on her chest and declared, "Abby." Having established that, she then places her hands on my own chest and assures me that I am, "Dada."

Little does Abby know that I've gone and replaced her Dad with an exact duplicate for several nights running now.

Second Life Paper

Thus my argument is not that you should care about the ogres and elves running around in cyberspace, but that you should care about the fact that there are ogres and elves, millions of them, running around in cyberspace. It’s the phenomenon that deserves interest, not its manifestations per se

Edward Castronova, an associate professor of telecommunications s at Indiana University and author of Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, from which the above quote was taken, has written extensively about the economics of massively multi-player online role-playing games or MMORPGS as the ogres call it. He's a gifted writer with a nice, subtle sense of humor who spends a good deal of time demonstrating to fellow researchers that MMORPGS and virtual worlds like Second Life are worthy of serious study. He also writes about some very sensible (and ridiculous- but I find I'm more then willing to listen even if I'm not entirely buying it) things along the way. The above quote is one of the more sensible. There really are millions of people running around in these synthetic worlds, spending a lot of time and energy embodying virtual ogres and elves. Or as animated versions of themselves.

The crummy screen shot is of myself and some of my classmates lounging at our bar on Entropy Island (restricted access for now) in Second Life after holding a book chat that briefly descended into a John Updike pileup. When folks can't get down with the Rabbit-man, he's like an itch you just gotta scratch and tell everybody about. Anyway, I'm at the bar, far left and dressed all in black. I have a Grizzly-Adams like beard and a long, flowing lock of a mohawk as my do. I'll post a better picture soon. Once, looking just like this, I spent 15 minutes dancing to Sleazy D's I've Lost Control (still the ultimate acid track) in some lame virtual club I teleported to. I ended up feeling terribly lame for dancing my free, prefabricated dance moves amongst fellow avatar's who had either spent some serious downtime modifying their movements or wheeling and dealing with some dance programming maestro to jack their groove. It was fun for about 15 minutes because of the novelty of hearing Sleazy D, then I got bored. There's potential in that there Second Life, but I think it's at the Atari 2600 stage of development. Some folks are definitely doing some amazing things in Second Life with "user-generated content," for sure, but most of what's been created there passes as an amusing novelty or is simply banal. I'm interested in its potential and will continue to check in but I think I'm okay with letting others advance it.

I'd Try It

More from Suketu Mehta's Maximum City:

You can order a masala Coke. This is the same old Coca-Cola you know, the same fizzy brown liquid, but with lemon, rock salt, pepper, and cumin added to it. When the Coke is poured into the glass, which has a couple of teaspoons of masala waiting to attack the liquid from the bottom up, the American drink froths up in astonished anger. The waiter stands at your booth, waiting till the froth dies down, then puts in a little more of the Coke, then waits a moment more, then pours in the rest. And, lo! it has become a Hindu Coke.

I wonder, though- do the insecticides throw off the taste?

Leslie Burger's On the Phone, She's Got A Copy of the Roaches Sophomore Album She'd Like to Donate to Your Library!

Nobody should have to spend 12 hours reading about collection development policies or replying to any scenario where Leslie Burger of the ALA purrs into the phone and asks you to forecast how recent electronic resource initiatives will impact the development and management of library collections over the next five years. And yet, this is is how my day went down. I'd say I was committed to my fate roughly 75% of the time. That other 25% was given over to reading but not comprehending, zoning out, eating tapioca (which I adore) and blowing my nose because Abby and I have been given the gift of phlegm for 8 days and counting.

My independent study for this summer is a go. By early July I'll know all there is to know about public library audio-visual departments. Or not. I'm especially keen to unravel the mystery of why so many public libraries seem to have an inordinate amount of CD's from the likes of The Roaches or Spyro Gyra.

Sunday Lunch By the Lake

Cathy, Abby and I enjoyed our lunch by the lake yesterday afternoon, grateful to be out and taking advantage of the first 80 degree temperature readings since early October. We (or rather, Cathy) packed a little picnic, put it and Abby in her wagon and walked/rolled our way on over. After eating her share of cheese, grapes and bread Abby felt compelled to give me a hug. My back was soon covered in affectionate crumbs.

Further Adventures in Very Bad Ideas

Have you heard about this?

American military commanders in Baghdad are trying a radical new strategy to quell the widening sectarian violence by building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods.

As Anthony Shadid's excellent Night Draws Near makes abundantly clear, for many Iraqis America's presence in their country evokes Israel's record in the Middle East, namely the incendiary issue of Palestine. Not surprising, Maliki ordered that the building of the wall to be stopped today. It reminded people, he said, of "other walls." As the Times article further articulates:

Mr. Maliki did not specify in his remarks what other walls he referred to. However, the separation barrier in the West Bank being erected by Israel, which Israel says is for protection but greatly angers Palestinians, is a particularly delicate issue among Arabs.

The American military isn't giving up hope yet. But honestly, the tactical stupidity, while following in the proud footsteps of over 4 years of tactical stupidity, is truly dumbfounding.

Symbols of Corruption and Greed

Did you know that Tom "The Hammer" Delay, the former House majority leader and author of the memoir No Retreat, No Surrender: One American's Fight (not to be confused with the 1986 Jean-Claude Van Damme film of the same name) has a blog? Neither did I. Recent entries rake the hot coals of the conservative rights odd Rosie hatred and ask the burning question "Who is holding Barbara Walters accountable for Rosie’s offenses?," chastise the recent Supreme Court ruling that the EPA can indeed regulate greenhouse gas emissions and where Tom lets us know that "as a biologist I have always felt that the science behind ‘global warming’ and man-made climate change was absolute hokum," and pelts the United Nations for its tepid response to the recent Iran kidnapping of British soldiers. No real surprises under this hood.

According to a recent Economist article, Delay reminds some Republicans of "the days when the party controlled Congress and the romped over their Democratic colleagues. But most Republicans are keeping their distance, and his book is selling very slowly." Which is to say, Tom isn't exactly being welcomed back into the fold.

Fried Dougy Goodness

The picture is from William Swislow's wonderful Interesting Ideas blog, an amazing clearinghouse of links galleries and additional resources committed to spreading the good word about "outsider, vernacular, self-taught and folk art, roadside art and architecture, weird cultural insights and warped politics."

Swislow writes:

Chicago's most vibrant art scene is not to be found in the galleries of River North or Wicker Park, but stretching along the city's longest street, Western Avenue. The work in this spontaneous gallery is unpretentious and, for the most part, unheralded. Its functional purpose does nothing to diminish its creativity or its range, from isolated drawings to full-blown art environments. And though these pages include images from all over Chicago, most of them are from Western Avenue itself -- the world's most artistic street.

Of course, what I like best about this picture is what it says (the warm, soft joy it expresses) about dough rather then its aesthetic merit, fond though I am of its lithe rendering of "Fried" followed by the bold, meaty "Dough." Sadly, Swislow informs us, the "emphasis on fried dough did not sustain this edition of the restaurant at 31st Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway."

(Thanks to Joe and his mighty Liminal for leading me to this doughy goodness.)

"Is This It?" Carmalla Asks

I'm going to miss The Sopranos something fierce when they close up shop in June. Cathy and I caught the first episode of its final run (Soprano Home Movies, the 78th episode...long may it live in syndication!) last night and among the myriad of things to love about it was its idyllic lake house setting in the Adirondacks. Its director, Tim Van Patten (he's directed 16 episodes of the Sopranos run) was particularly good at challenging the cozy cottage setting (there's even one of those vintage wooden Chris-Craft boats) with camera angles that were intensely ominous. The camera repeatedly cut from intimate close-ups of the characters (Tony and Bobby out fishing, and especially throughout the drunken, fisticuffs inducing Monopoly game scene) to angles that gave the appearance, intentionally, I thought, of the characters being unknowingly observed, perhaps being stalked or under surveillance. I was certain something awful and shattering was going to happen, the final narrative impetus set terribly into motion. I actually cowered behind a throw pillow because I thought Carmella was going to get shot by one of Phil Leotardo's guys. Or something equally outrageous. But it didn't happen, I realized, because David Chase would never capitulate to something so hackneyed.

The only thing I know, or so it's being said, is that it all ends in an ice cream parlor in New Jersey.

The America I Loved Still Exists Between the Pages of a Kurt Vonnegut Book

While on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.

-Kurt Vonnegut, extracted from A Man Without a Country: A Memoir of Life in George W Bush's America

We Are Individually Multiple

The first 48 pages of Suketa Mehta's Maximum City have blown me away. I wish I had more time to read it though I'm happy to have grabbed a half-hour or so before bed the last couple nights. It's a dangerous book to crack when already pressed for extracurricular time.

Mehta was born in Calcutta before his family moved to Bombay for 9 years in the early 70's. From there they moved to Jackson Heights, New York where his father and brother transplanted their families for 8 years as they sought to carve out an even larger niche in the diamond business. Jackson Heights was, as Mehta writes, a "working-class enclave that was steadily being encroached upon by immigrants from darker countries" where he spent his formative teenage years living and pining, as any right-minded teenager should, for his native Bombay and the friends and culture he left behind. Ostracized by his white classmates as a "stinking heathen" who emitted "the foul odors of my native cooking," Mehta describes walking outside the schools "barged-wire-topped gates" on graduation day and kissing the ground in gratitude.

The book is also rich in stunning facts. Like many, I'm fascinated by urban spaces- their people, the energy they exude, their infrastructures both physical and political, the communities they support or deny. I'm especially curious about their population densities. For example, in the 2000 Census, Chicago had a population density of 12, 447 per square mile. Taken by itself, Edgewater, the Chicago neighborhood Cathy, Abby and I live in, had a 2000 density of 36,587. Of Bombay's population density, Mehta writes:

India is not an overpopulated country. Its population density is lower than that of many other countries not thought of as overpopulated. In 1999, Belgium had a population density of 130 people per square mile; the Netherlands, 150; India, under 120. It is the cities of India that are overpopulated. Singapore has a density of 2,535 people per square mile; Berlin, the most crowded European city, has 1,130 people per square mile. The island city of Bombay in 1990 had a density of 17,550 people per square mile. Some parts of central Bombay have a population density of 1 million people per square mile. This is the highest number of individuals massed together at any spot in the world.

1 million people per square mile is intense. How does that work exactly? Mehta has the gift of any great journalistic reporter fervently trying to take the pulse of a kaleidoscope. "All great cities are schizophrenic, " Mehta writes, quoting Victor Hugo. "Bombay has a multiple-personality disorder."

I'm looking forward to reading the rest of this one.

Tarpon Springs, Florida

Here's Abby smiling away at my parents breezy townhouse in Tarpon Springs, Florida last weekend. Note the bunny on the table just to her right, an object whose presence sent Abby into occasional paroxysms of delight. Known as neither "bunny" or "rabbit" but as the repeated exclamation "Hop! Hop! Hop!" it, along with a soft yellow duck basket, the moon viewed before bedtime and her grandparents held a special allure.

I should also note that Abby has a new song she's been singing this past week. It's the Applesauce Song. I made it up Wednesday afternoon and she was smitten. The girl loves her applesauce. Not surprisingly, improvisatory songs relating to apples are championed. Here are the lyrics:

Apple, apple, apple, applesauce
Apple, apple, apple, applesauce (repeat as needed)

It's more a chant then song, I suppose and Abby sings it as though it were an incantation, its reciting the surest way to conjure up Fuji slices for squeezing in the palms of each hand.

We Was Wrong

"It is hard to imagine any post-war dispensation that would leave Iraqis less free or more miserable than they were under Mr. Hussein," we said four years ago. Our imagination failed.
-The Economist, March 24th-30th 2007

First Haircut