The Invisible Library

Boy In Darkness, by Mervyn Peake.

I had never heard of this strange little aside to the Gormanghast trilogy but, among Peake fans, this is considered a rare gem of a read.

Nestled somewhere inbetween Titus Groan and Gormanghast, this novella tells the story of Titus on his 14th birthday. In a fit of Pique, he leaves Gormanghast, finding himself in a desolate gray, dusty land populated by two strange beast-men and a freaky little lamb. It’s quite weird and very short but has moments of brilliant prose. If you can find a copy, I recommend it.

You never heard much talk about the Enemies of Civilization before 9/11. That is one of the few things that the WTC disaster did change. It’s all we hear about now. The Enemies of Western Civilization (EOWC) supposedly crouch in caves, polishing their homemade explosives, plotting to blow up our churches and unravel the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge, just because they have no churches or Brooklyn Bridges of their own. That’s a vivid picture, isn’t it? The dirty, brown skinned fellow with the weird language and the hard to pronounce name, huddled in a cave. The problem is, he’s not really the Enemy of Civilization. Sure, Bin laden, the Taliban and all the other bogeymen we call Al Quida don’t like Western Civilization so much. but they love, love, love Muslim culture, even if they are willing, in their fanaticism, to undermine it with their explosive expressions of devotion.

No, the real enemies of civilization have been with us for a lot longer than the last four years. They’ve been around for more than a thousand years. I’m not talking about the Commie Jew Pinko Atheist Terrorist scapegoats of the last hundred years or so. I’m talking about the proud, upstanding Enemies of Civilization. The men in fancy suits and elaborate robes, with rings on their fingers and desolate minds filled with vapourous notions. About Good and Evil. About the Culture of Life (so long as it isn’t living on their land).

What’s gotten me in this mood is the news that President Kill Again has nominated yet another fox to guard the hen house of Western Civilization. This is another example of Bush’s disturbing attitude towards every institution that might even clear a throat and mutter week objections concerning his agenda: find the most vocal enemy of a cause and put them in charge of it. Need to fill some vacant Judicial seats? Load them with naked theocrats. Got a UN ambassadorship that needs a warm body? How about a dude who thinks the UN building in New York could stand to loose a few floors. Got a gross incompetent advising you on National Security? Why not promote them!

Bob Harris has rather accurately described this trend as Dada Performance Art rather than the actions of a concerned civil servant. Either that, or the actions of a man frustrated by the niceties of civil culture, trying to remake the world in the image of a medieval empire. Not that I for one minute buy any of Georgie boy’s piety. It rings as hollow as a church bell. No, he and his gang of ubercapitalists strike me as third rate Medicis; wealthy families trying to rule with impunity while pretending to be just bankers and art patrons.¹

It’s as if Ubu Roi came to life and is stalking across the political stage. Only this time, when the curtain closes, it just might kill us all. Maybe this sounds like hyperbole but what other reason could there be? What other end can be reached when Unrestrained greed trumps even basic human rights? Our leaders are all Randian Survivalists, dreaming of an end to the restraints put on their desires by such petty concepts as justice, decency and emotion. Only the strong will survive. The poor and week will be crushed and their goods and services devoured, until nothing remains but one really, really wealthy king. He won’t be able to breathe the air or drink the water but he’ll have the grandest, most bejeweled mausoleum, ever.

Bob again:

Last year, I wandered the ruins of Troy, where you can witness the rise and fall of almost a dozen different civilizations, all stacked up in the same spot. Every single one of them thought they knew what they were doing. When then end came (as it always does), every single one of them returned to the dirt, their gods dead, their epic struggles wasted and forgotten, and their most treasured creations reduced to inscrutable shards.

You and I and all of us are not the privileged product of millennia of human improvement. We do not occupy a privileged luxury box from which we can view the mistakes of the past from above as they parade for our amusement. We are on the ground, in the dust, and making the same short-sighted decisions, this time on a fantastically grander scale.

What disturbs me this morning, other than my own part in the waste (which remains large, as it must be for anyone living in the highest-impact society yet designed), is a growing sad realization:

Suppose for a moment that an international movement began with the genuine potential to start pulling humanity back from the precipice. Just imagine it, briefly. Let a few details of its shape and scope and necessities bounce around in your brain for a few seconds.

And now let’s consider: if such a movement actually existed, would America’s government, media, and populace be likely to join?

Or would this most heavily-armed nation in human history — the one where an advocate of killing rare species for fun is currently about to become director of a key wildlife post — be vigorously, furiously opposed?

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1. Their lack of taste in art is what makes them third rate. The Medici family may have been wealthy beyond all reason, they may have hand picked Popes and bent the rules of the day to serve their own interests but at least they threw some coins to make their palaces and private chapels presentable. The Bushici just drape gaudy velvet over statues to hide their tits and froth about the decadence of modern art and wonder aloud why more artists can’t paint pretty pictures like Thomas Kinkaid.

Elvira and I spent several days in museums. We went to the Baltimore Museum of Art (The Slide Show was lame, all photographs that would have looked better printed instead of on slides), saw the Toulouse-Lautrec show at the National Gallery in Washington DC (Kevin joined us for this little outing. He took the above picture, in fact). And Philadelphia (if you’re in Philly, check out the Dali exhibit if you can).

We also went to the Greenmount Cemetery in Baltimore and took pictures of interesting headstones and monuments, which is a hobby of ours.

Who says Goth librarians don’t know how to have a good time?

General consensus was that the black background was a little hard on the eyes. I like this one better. Also, after extensive research, it looks like I won’t be able to afford to switch over to Typepad right now. So, it’s Blogger for me for a little while longer.

Posting will be slight to non existent for the next week or so. It’s Spring Break and I’m pooped. When we return, however, there will be a few changes to the Library. Here’s a rough preview of one major change that I’m considering. Kevin and Jay may pop in from time to time so there could be some activity here but as for me, I’m going on vacation. Turn off the lights when you leave.

“My mother’s a librarian, but I hate to read,” Sharon Grover’s son is quoted as saying in today’s
Washington Post article by Valerie Strauss about boys and reading, page A12. [Does this sound like a radio ad for the paper, or what?]

One of the basic intellectual and emotional challenges people face, I think, is nesting one’s own talents and gifts with those of a community, either a biological or chosen family, or an arbitrary intellectual family in a public school. Elementary school, well in fact school in general all the way through graduate school, was (and is) a mind-bending experience. My own reading interests didn’t take root until high school, and I am almost a librarian. [Unlike my blog host, Keith, who was reading avidly from an early age and is way a head of me!] The thing is, people are motivated by (in this case NOT motivated) at different times and different ways.

The recent flap, more than a flap really, about Harvard’s President Summers and women in the sciences is another very complex example of diverse definitions of diversity in education at all levels.

The gender divide in human intellectual development is fascinating, and territory laden with morals and morasses often if not always better avoided. However, over the holidays, a family member (who is also a librarian) was telling me about grant work she was doing with public libraries in Maryland to help boys read. On these issues, I’m used to the teacher’s perspective, but not the public librarian’s. I find myself not wanting to avoid these issues at all, but need to be careful with my verbal tendencies and my small male language center.

Equality of being and of access to information are two of the highest ideals our society and education system support, though for many it’s more a myth, according to the papers, if not also life experience. And that ideal of equality exists in the face of tremendous human diversity.

Archivists and librarians have a role to play in these issues, I think. So when we read in class the psychological aspects of the reference interview, it is important material, and material not mastered without the support of our professional peers.

Where am I going with all of this? Simply this: information professionals in all contexts have a responsibility to make themselves and their institutions as diversely user-friendly as possible. So many aspects of our lives encourage us to act against the rhythms of our bodies, let’s not make reading (the second best adult game ever) another.

So, we had a guest speaker in my class today who gave a presentation (for an hour and a half) on resumes, cover letters and interviews. But she spent the bulk of the time describing in detail the new trend in library interview techniques, the Portfolio Presentation. Apparently, we now have to have a nice big book full of awards, cirtificates and thank-you letters scribbled in crayon from drooling anklebiters to round out our resumes. Who knew?

When I was in high school, conventional wisdom dictated that to get a decent job, a college degree was a must. After college, I discovered the reality: so many people have college degrees that they are pretty much worthless. The new CV had it that an advanced degree would definitely get you the good job (or at least, a decent one).

Now, less than two months to go and I find out the masters degree and skills honed over two years don’t matter so much as whether or not I can do a little tap dance and entertain some jaded librarian administrator, bored with the other seventy five applicants and in need of some way for me to set myself apart from the masses.

“Yawn. I’m bored. Dance for me library monkey! Play me a fiddle!”

Has Western Civilization decayed so far that now even librarians must be entertained 24/7? Has the corporatization of America become so thorough that Power Point slides and “Shameless Self Promotion” have become standard practice, even in Academia? If so, than I’m in the wrong fucking profession, in the wrong fucking country.

Guess it’s off to Nepal to heard mountain yaks.

On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt.

Bullshit is the operative word here. “Pure Academic Masturbation” would have been a more apt title. It’s a good thing the book is only 68 very small pages of very large type, or else I would feel cheated by the time I spent reading it. There’s probably a good reason no one has ever written a philosophical treatise concerning the nature of Bullshit before. Who said, “You become the thing you hate?” Well, your book also becomes the thing you write about, apparently.

On the plus side, if you have a thing for nicely designed, small press hardbacks, the book itself is a lovely object. I’ll probably dissect it in order to get a better idea how books are bound.