morrisseyed

the first day of the new programme is compleat (yes, compleat).  i spent the morning and afternoon meeting new people and re-acquainting myself with older acquaintances.  a couple instances of déjà vu with some some others rounded out the entire day, and all in all, it wasn’t too bad.  i wasn’t surprised by the large number of students from the humanities in the programme, but i was a little alarmed by the number of people who said something like “public libraries” when asked about a career option.  although I will admit a certain enthusiastic first-day bias for the programme i’ve just enrolled in, I must say that all the same, it is surprising to hear “public libraries” so often as a career option.

i don’t have anything against public libraries.  i think public libraries fulfill a vital part of a community’s needs to enrich the lives of its residents.  this enrichment doesn’t begin and end with books, either.  public libraries are more than books and internet accounts.  public libraries are public spaces.  they’re part of a human geography that allows a community to mingle, intermingle, and co-mingle with itself.  desiring to work in a public library is hardly a bad thing; if ever i was offered to work for a public library, i think i’d take the job offer.  but why must a career possibility be just “public libraries” when it could be “access”, “literacy” or “advocacy”?  Why not consider issues such as privacy v. public information?  why not consider how new, emerging and emergent technologies (dare we say “Web 2.0″) are advancing literacy, or changing our notions of literacy, or altering our public spaces?  I don’t have the answers to these questions - that’s partly why i enrolled in the programme i did. perhaps i’m just used to taking - or am one inclined to take the long view as opposed to others?   anyway.

yes, anyway.  anyway, one of those old acquaintances i ran into today is someone I never ran into frequently enough when I was in the middle of my BA.  He’s a great dude who is politically active on too many levels.  And, as a hobby and side project, he’s an amateur geneological researcher.  (I’m not giving his name here, even though he likely wouldn’t care, because I respect people’s privacy in this regard..)  According to google, (googling is a compleatly different regard, of course) he once started a blog, which is only three or four entries long.  two of those entries outline a geneological record of the house he lives in.  This is something i’m very much interested in.  We have so much paperwork on mundane little spaces and places out there that we really can determine (or fabricate) the story behind every spot and every picture of that spot.  one day i will compleat the novel i’m working on that is based around nothing but one photograph of some people in front of a home, and when I do, I will first apologise to Michael Ondaatje for ripping off his incredible prose style, and then I will thank this MLIS dude for reigniting my creative spark which I seem determined to let flutter out before it can gloriously torch the place.

It is a couple days before the start of September. I don’t know how many days it is before the start of September.  I cannot be any more precise regarding the change of months beyond a general couple of days, give or take a day or two.  The passing of time has all at once been compressed, shortened, lengthened and expanded by various forms of end-of-summer anxieties which are best described as a change-of-season turmoil.  Such a description, however, is neither “good”, “better”, or “best”.  “Best” is a superlative which demands a baseline I neither gave nor presumed to give.  And ‘turmoil’ would be a word more appropriately used in politics, epidemics, or war.

But a summer which ends flush of anxieties that can be best, however inadequately, described as a change-of-season turmoil it has been. That’s how we roll.

My inbox is full of unopened emails, and my desk is brimming full of unopened or unreturned letters.  It appears that I’ve taken on several psychoses this summer, one of which would definitely consist of wishing (or willing) away certain issues by ignoring the consequences that have already befallen my person.  One example of this would be my hair (left untethered for four months until a nice, but expensive cut this morning). Another example would be the taxes.  The Taxman is determined to make my life difficult by demanding reams and reams of paper to confirm that I’m a student, that I pay tuition, that I am funded by a federal agency, that I have employment at the same school, and that not one account is directly linked to another.  And here I was, all these years, expecting Revenue Canada to strike the hammer down regarding gratuities earned at one of several other jobs.  But no; it would appear that one arms-length agency (The University) refuses to correspond at all with two others (The Taxman, and the Federal Funding Agency).  Not so good. This mess will never end until I start paying tuition again, I suppose.

I begin another academic programme next week.  I’m putting on a brave and encouraged face for it, but I’d be embellishing, if not lying (nothing new there) if I didn’t admit that I am a little anxious about what’s to come by way of it.  I was admitted on a scholarship, but I’m still not exactly sure what’s to be done with the degree, or what’s to be done with my person to get the degree.  The programme is in a different, albeit parallel field than that which I am accustomed to.  It is also in a different faculty, and has an entirely different culture.  I’m a half-decent actor, and will be able to play the part fairly well, but in spite of those half-decent acting abilities, I’ve never been comfortable putting on a face.  Although I couldn’t ever describe my real face to someone (no one could do such a thing, except perhaps the blind), I certainly don’t like living with a different face on a face-to-face basis.  If all the world really is a stage, and we are the players, the cast, the crew, the front of the house and the back of the house, then nothing really is real.  I can live with that concept until the moment, however, when The World Out There demands that we pretend, whilst playing our roles on that stage, to actually be acting The Real.  That’s a little too meta even for me.  I can talk about it.  I can hype it up.  I can write you a beautiful piece of prose or fiction about it.  But I can’t live that second-order simulacra without feeling my person break up into its (in-)constituent parts.  Entering this new faculty, this new culture, has prompted me to constantly question my own person.  I might be in for a long week.

The programme also has certain social demands that might require me to use the dreaded Spacebook again. As well, there stands a good chance that I will likely have ventured onto the internet with yet another persona by the end of the first term to fulfill certain course-related or social-related demands.  There was a time I confidently portrayed a unified internet persona.  Those days disappeared this past summer, and I believe that latent anxieties about this programme may have precipitated this demise.  It could be that my internet persona will yet become even more fractalized before (hopefully) coalescing again.  Having fought the good fight, should I surrender my internet identity for the sake of a programme, and for the sake of a current and commonly-held opinion that internet anonymity is truly dead?  In many ways I think the war might be over, that Facebook.com has absolutely destroyed internet anonymity.  Perhaps this bullet should have been bitten long ago.  But I don’t know if I’m yet ready to lower the red flag of war and raise the white flag of surrender.  Time likely will tell the answer to this dilemma, though.  This programme will either offer me the water that will satiate my thirst for anonymity, or pass over the kool-aid and turn me into a devout convert of the cause.  And of course, whatever the answer is, I will wholeheartedly agree with it forever more.

so i’m venturing out in the “web 2.0″ world once more by signing up for librarything.com. I nearly signed up for it a year and a half ago, but I backed out at the last minute after a small email conversation with its founder.  Given that librarything’s servers are located in the USA, their data is subject to that nation’s egregious PATRIOT ACT.  As I’ve said all along, I know that any data on me - aggregate or otherwise - doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, but all the same, the stubborn, principled person that I am forced me to back down on the prospect of signing up.  I eventually turned to Delicious Library to catalogue my library instead.

A serious hard drive failure (i.e. complete data loss) last December effaced my own mini-OPAC from existence, though.  I can turn back to Delicious Library and begin to re-catalogue everything, but I instead began to reconsider LT.com, instead.  So, a week or two ago, my quixotic person beat down that stubborn, principled person, and together went ahead and signed up, PATRIOT ACT be damned…

So far, in some ways, I’m liking what I’ve see..  I do miss Delicious’s integration with a camera to catalogue my items by their ISBNs, but LT.com is pretty damn quick at searching Amazon to correctly match items to their original ISBNs.  The folksonomic tagging system is pretty nice too.  Who can’t like folksonomy?  Tags give us the chance to catalogue whatever we have by whatever we want, so go us - it definitely is the (false) reign of the individual in this aspect.

But I’m still a little confused by the point to it all.  Delicious Library’s mission is clear - to catalogue your Stuff.  Librarything, on the other hand, loves to promote its social-networking capabilities.  They’re incredibly proud of the fact that we can find and connect with people who have “eerily similar” interests and tastes in lit.  So what?  Who cares?  I guess this part just doesn’t appeal to me; perhaps there are people out there who need the internet to find people who have similar tastes in books.  Well, good on them and good on LT.com.  For now, I think I’ll just stick the cataloguing aspect.

(kinda hypocritical social-networking cite:  link to my librarything account here.)