Odds and ends and brick-a-brac

I've disappeared for a month or so, not that that's unusual. For all the time I spend on the internet, I do not think as much as I once did. Perhaps it's my day job-- I can explain the difference between a latte and a cappuccino, why french presses are better, why loose leaf tea is the way to go, why an iced cappuccino is somewhere between heresy and a desire for food poisoning, and so on forever. I can also tell you that the harder the economic times get, the meaner customers get, as though the baristas are personally responsible for their consistent wasting of money in all manner of "must haves" that aren't so crucial anymore. I can even start to talk about what went wrong in the economy, though not very well (it's an expansion on the theme of "who watches the watchmen" if you care). But thinking? Honest to goodness thinking? It doesn't come up very often for me anymore.

I've officially finished my first semester of library school. Not what one might call though provoking, maybe, but it isn't supposed to be. I mean, you are more than welcome to try and come up with a replacement for MARC21 or the Library of Congress Subject Headings (fat chance it'll catch on). But to do that you need a certain amount of time working in the field. What seems good on paper may not be in practice, and you won't know until you've worked as a librarian. So I went about my studies, and learned all about cataloging and collection development and research methods (perhaps the least helpful of my classes because it was all repetition of my Stats class a few years ago-- but with bonus ideology).

You know, the library world is a funny thing. It is at once focused on innovations and integrating the latest computer technology into the library and not moving a muscle from the established status quo. Which, I'll be honest, is befuddling. I understand the drive to get more twenty-somethings into libraries. They use it, they'll teach their kids to use it, etc etc etc. However, TELLING the twentysomethings that are entering the field that they couldn't possibly understand the demands of the twentysomething is ludicrous. So I'm young. So what? I've been computer literate since I was 4, internet savy since I was 6, and marketing myself since I hit school. My experience is most certainly valid-- I'm the kid with the iPod, the RSS feeds, the blog, and more-- all simultaneous activities no less. It appears that, somewhere along the line, the libraries forgot that they were a part of the service sector. I'm not busting out a "Just say Yes" policy (that, by the way, is the way that spectacular failure and disgruntled empolyees lies... from my observations). I simply wonder if libraries could listen, just a little bit, to their constiuents. The fact that they're run by the government doesn't mean they have to try to live up to the stereotype of a government agency. I mean really...

There's all kinds of business going on at my fair alma, though I'm sure everyone who reads this already knows. I'll try not to say I told you so, but I will ply you with arguments similar to those I make to the libraries-- the fact that recent graduate are, in fact, only 22 or 23 does not invalidate their observations, opinions, struggles, etc. My class seems to have been locked out by everyone: admin, alumni, everyone. And quite frankly, we wrote home, we tried to tell people that something was rotten in the state of Denmark. And we were called liars, and anarchists, and moles, and uncharitable, and every rotten name in the book. All of a sudden we were every villain of every piece ever read at that school. And all I have to say is-- we were right. You think we're a bunch of scum bags who lie for shits and giggles? We were trying to save the place that was onnly just turning us loose on a wide world, a place that was shifting right out from under us as we stumbled out into a ruthless world with nobody to watch us. And we were nothing, less than dirt. Well, if things go further south? It's not because we didn't try-- it's because no one else did. And with that, I leave it behind me. It's like ripping out part of my heart-- my graduation, which should have been so happy, was a boot up my ass to get me out of there. I was already forgotten. I'm just returning the favor.

The audacity of questioning

I have always been a questioning sort. Not in the "how does this work?" sort of way. I'm like Mindy from Anamaniacs, I just keep asking "Why?" My whole life I've run into people who were willing to question why things were, what they were, why they existed. As I look back, I realize that most of these people were outside mainstream academia, something that should explain why I sit where I sit now in grad school. It doesn't.

I have a class, Research Methods, which is very heavily grounded in ideology. And no, I don't mean that there's a background idea that weaves its way through the course. I mean ideology as in the dangerous kind, as in an idea that grabs hold of people to the point that their world view is entirely determined by the ideology. You know, the scary kind. In this case, its Italian socialism mixed with bits of Marx mixed with good old fashioned American know how and pushing things to the nth degree. It's certainly interesting, and outside my normal purview. For the sake of my grade, I haven't questioned this within the confines of the class. I have, however, spent the entire semester questioning the why and wherefore. It's a personal growth thing.

Perhaps that's why I was so shocked when the undercurrent I had detected in the comments flared out in the most awkward of ways. One of the students decided to hold forth on the fact that questioning isn't natural, that all of us are preconditioned to NOT question, and that we must learn how. This came from a student who has been nothing but dogmatic on many many issues, not the least of which was a debate with me over the usage of the word "hegemony." It gets me thinking again of how lucky I am, and how screwed we as a society are.

I'm lucky because I have been left to my natural inclination, ie, questioning. Aristotle says that man is, by nature, a political animal. That may be, but I think man is, by nature, a curious animal as well. How much do we prize inovation and invention? What marks a small child as annoying but their insatiable curiousity? Curiousity begats questioning which generally begats thinking. And man is marked by his thought-- what else distinguishes him from the other animals?

And this preconditioning thing-- my colleagues act as though it is nature, when it is the opposite. It's unnatural, it's not good, and its everywhere. It's also how ideologies take hold-- if there is but one school of thought that promises everything you ever wanted and an answer to the evils in the world wouldn't you take it? No difficulty, no pain, just an answer to the questions that you keep trying to supress. How wonderful. And so people stop questioning, and start being lemmings.

I'm sure you all know where that leads to. It's more than just different schools of thought. It's why people of radical political persuations can truly not understand someone with a different view point; it's outside the system so its outside the world.It just frightens me that so many people agreed with her assesment: that people think we are naturally sheep, uninquiring beings who simply live because we are waiting to die. If an entire society has entered that mind set that isn't it too simply living because it is waiting to die? Scary thought.

You know what grinds my gears?

I seriously cannot fathom basing Library Science/Information studies research on Marxist theory. I can't. I don't see why anyone would WANT to. I don't understand why Marx's substructure/superstructure works as a basis for research and the libraries when, quite frankly, it doesn't exist as he imagined it to in the real world. It certainly doesn't exist when taken out of his whole theory.

I mean, certainly things are culturally determined, but the superstructure was everything: state, church, family, personal relationships, academia (hint, hint, yo). If we base ourselves in that superstructure aren't we admitting that we are participating in something that is alienating man from himself, that our work is simply ephemeral and will pass away with all of the world as we know it when the revolution comes? Of course not, because we take only the idea of substructure, superstructure, and cultural hegemony. We also should think capitalism is evil, but I'll be you that none of these people have considered that Marx is probably rolling in his grave that the INSTITUTIONS of man's alienation are now trying to pick and choose his theory. I mean, give the man some respect and leave his theory intact. Geez.

Why academia, well, sucks.

It was a secret hidden well from me. My parents did it on purpose, the faculty of Thomas More saw it as something to be avoided at all costs. The secret I speak of is typical academia's attitude toward their students. Quite simply, they assume that you are rock stupid and unable to comprehend anything so well as they. Prodigies are acceptable only in grade school, perhaps high school. Beyond that, the professor knows all and you can only hope to achieve a measure of his greatness.
I was so blissfully ignorant going into my Master's program. I assumed that, along with being able to address your professors by first name came a certain amount of respect, if for no other reason than that you survived the undergraduate days and decided that pushing forward was a good idea. This idea was quickly knocked out of me after I left 504, "Librarian Boot Camp." I expected Drill Sergeants for profs and I got nice people. This, I was told, was the norm. I could expect earnest people who sought to impart wisdom. I should have known better than to expect the Boomer generation to think anyone could touch them, let alone learn.

Now before you say "But your profs at TMC were boomers!" they really aren't. Dr. Sampo is the "Greatest Generation," Drs. Fahey, Nelson, and Blum are too young to be in the Boomer generation. I think they fall between Gen X and Boomers, which I count as a good thing. I suppose that Dr. Mumbach qualifies, but she always stuck me as ageless, so I'll let it slide. So you see, I escaped there. Now I find myself faced with them, full on. There's something about the Boomer generation I just don't understand. Perhaps it's because they, in many ways, had it the best of all the generations we're dealing with now. They got the 50's ideal, they were the first generation that could really afford superfluous things like nice cars or vacations. And I think it went to their heads.

There are also a lot of them. They run just about everything, because the baby boom was so large. If I had even a dime for every time I endured a snide remark because of my youth (and thus, my perceived stupidity), I would be able to retire now a wealthy woman. This attitude of superiority is only worsened with the title "Professor." A PhD seems to confer a false sense of superiority that enables it's bearer to look down their nose at everyone younger than them, regardless of actual ability, intelligence, or qualities. As part of this, it is apparently necessary to assign readings that insult the basic intelligence of any person with the ability to use their brain. If you disagree with the article, clearly you are in the wrong because several of the author's colleagues reviewed the article and it was published! Have you been published? Therefore you are in no position to judge good research from bad!

The fact of the matter is that, despite my 22 years, I AM in a position to judge. I have read a large chunk of Western Canon. I have done an in depth study of a legal system which is nothing if not complex, and if you think that doesn't involve research you underestimate the project. I have performed analysis on political philosophies, literary interpretations, and plain old fashioned philosophy for four years. I have written, presented, and defended my study of common law and was complimented on my work by no less than a "Who's who" of Notre Dame Alumni, a man who holds two Master's degrees from Oxford, and an incredibly accomplished and published literary critic. And they were the least scary of the 100 person panel to whom I presented and defended my thesis. I did a semester long study of one man's political theory, a man who designed the American Executive and the Electoral College, as well as the man who took 20 resolutions and formed them into a document that would become the US Constitution. Hardly an easy study to do, and I did it, and did it well. Age is not a factor, accomplishment is. Even without a PhD, I can find an article insultingly simple and wrong.

A few highlights:

• Making "Hegemony" equivalent with political myth, sociology, and "acceptance."
• The 'pluralist paradigm'-- the idea that all groups within a given social science can have a paradigm, that each of these paradigms is in fact a paradigm, that each is equally valuable, and that this lack of consensus is in fact a STRENGTH
• That having no dominant group within a society can constitute an hegemony
• That the values of America are applicable to an international field as its base (btw? Fact chance that anyone else will agree with you on that)
• That the world can be "falsely imagined as a realm of facts independent of the knower." Moreover, they think that this means the same thing as not taking research out of context. If you're going to follow Hume, follow Hume and say you don't know the sun is gonna rise tomorrow. Don't do this weird side step watoosie that doesn't actually say anything.
• That the best way to understand research in library science is a Hegelian-Marxist-Neitzchan idea.
• Non canonical theory-- if it's in a book, it's canon. If it's canon, it had a maker. If it had a maker, it is automatically ideological in the worst sense and should be ignored, repudiated, and destroyed.
• Political economy and sociology? Totally the same thing.

I've still got 10 or so more pages, but I just can't make it. I cannot read through more of this. I cannot sit there and pretend that any of this is true or good or relevant. That's the kicker. This class is about RESEARCH, and apparently this means that we have to find what's wrong with everything according to our only socially constructed ideological bent. I guess I don't mind the ideology so much; it's the fact that the article claims it's uncovering it that bothers me. It's almost worse when you consider that they made a sort of shepherd's pie out of the major modern and and postmodern ideologies and called it fresh and new.

In the words of lolcats? UR DOING IT WRONG

If I thought I had a public to dissapoint, I would apologize for the long lapses between blog entries. However, I'm fairly certain I don't, so I don't feel the need. Sorry ^_^

Library school kicked off officially this week. I was ready: I had my notebooks, my textbooks, my loose leaf paper, my pens and pencils, and my mind was fairly itching for something more stimulating than the debate over how much ice should really go into a frappucino. And what I got was... underwhelming. Perhaps it's four years of the 'hit the ground running' mentality of Thomas More (The first 200 pages of Dostoyevsky's the Possessed: go) but I find "read the syllabus and post a hello message on the discussion board" to be a waste of an entire week. We only have 14 of them after all.

Outside of all that? The few things that I really truly want to explore I haven't been able to. However, I might be getting a kick start on those, one I don't mind sharing. Since most of you are aware of my Junior Project on James Wilson, I'll spare long winded explanations. Simply put, there are only 2 books that have been written about him. Ever. In the 200+ year history of this country. There are more books about Gouverneur Morris and exactly how well is he known? Not that he doesn't deserve the attention. If you've ever marveled at the simple poetic natrue of the Constitutional Preamble, you can thank Morris for it. My point being, Wilson is largely seen as the author of the Executive and the Electoral College, the second most powerful man at the Constitutional Convention behind Madison, was one of the original Supreme Court justices, spurred the 11th amendment on with a single judicial decision, compiled the first comprehensive overview of American Law, and was the 2nd law professor in the whole COUNTRY. And no one knows who he is. So it has been suggested to me that I write a book about this poor man who's theory was so important and who has been forgotten by history because of the unforgivable sin of wanting to be rememberd and falling into debt through land speculation. It'll take at least 5 years because I'm so piecemeal, but I think I'm going to do it. Nifty, huh?

The end is just the beginning...

So they say at least. As of 2pm today, I'm done with the face to face portion of IRLS 504, "Librarian Boot Camp." Most of my graduating classmates are winding down summer, or working. Summer has been over for me since before it began. I spent the early part of my summer fighting to get into grad school, then working to make enough money to go to grad school. And my grad school started in July. It's both good and bad. My prgram requires twice as many credits as the average Master's program. So you can see that I'm feeling a little...overaught, especially when reminded of the great summers had by all the people I know. I'm trying to overcome that, but it's just not working.

On the other hand, I haven't got time to feel sorry for myself, or really thinkg about anything above the basic automoton level. It's a rough way to say goodbye to your youth: running from undergraduate level stuff to a professional graduate program full of people who lived it up when they were your age. Granted that's why they're there at their age and not my age. Still...but no.

504 was fun, packed as all get out, but fun. I'm glad that I'm done with it, because the whole thing was sort of like 3/4 of the JP semester crammed into one week. However, I now know that there is such a thing as metadata, that cataloging is NOT the career of choice these days if you want to actually be in a library, that public librarianship is big but you can only really catch a break if you enter as a children's librarian (and really, how many of those do you need in one branch?), that I have an odd ability to be a smartass and therefore show up people twice my age (whoopsy), and that this program is more disorganzied then almost anything TMC attempted.

Notes from the trenches...

So I have 10 minutes until the afternoon lectures commence, and it's the first chance in two weeks that I've had a moment to blog.

I have found a new restaurant in Tucson that is worth the trip down here all by itself. It's an English pub called Frog and Firken and it's amazing. Google it.

Music libraries? Have no standard of cataloging and classification. The section that's not accounted for in the schemes? Recordings. Yes, you heard me, there's no room for recorded music in the music classification scheme.

I'm doing my issues paper on filtering, rather then my chosen topic, which apparently was too forward thinking. Look for my old topic to appear often in this space in the future.

I'm amazed that no one in class this morning could/wanted to define what the purpose of a catalog is. Oy.

I'm done on Thursday!!!! Back to Phoenix I go, armed with some new knowledge, but mainly the experience of a 'real live university.'

Can't see the forest for the trees...

So the first full week of Master's work is done. I'm about halfway through the syllabus with a week and half, two weeks to go. I feel pretty good about the odds of getting everything done, but I can't say that I enjoy it.

I like to have things challenge me. Even in my first semester at TMC, the America semester, I was challenged. I had read almost everything on the syllabus before, so that wasn't it. It was the works themselves, the professors, the environment. It made me rethink what I had and hadn't picked up before. My current reading material? Some of it is interesting, certainly, and some of it seems to be historically inaccurate. Some of the authors could benefit from a review of vocabulary and semantics-- I find myself too often thinking "I don't think that word means what you think it means." While I appreciate that the work I'm doing is far more technical and practically oriented, that's not to say that it should be inane.

Library Science is also the last place I expected to find ideology, mainly because of my own naiveté I will own, but there it is. There is more ideology in this course then I encountered in most of my courses at Thomas More. There is an overarching "Librarian power" message that somehow we should be open to everyone but to always know that we could, in fact, take over the world. There's truth to it, I suppose: if all the libraries and archives ceased to stock certain authors or certain books, they would likely disappear from the consciousness of the people. Let that terrifying thought sink in for a moment. There's an underlying advocacy of openness to certain viewpoints more then others: that because someone has suffered censorship in the past we must overcompensate, allowing them total freedom and punishing those who censored with... something like censorship. Again, I can't say this definitively because the whole thing is so poorly written as to send my brain into caterwamps. So, where do I go from here? I don't want to be the pompous ass in class that sits there and says "I once read in (insert famous or pretentious author here)..." At the same time, I can't just sit there while they say that the Catholic Church is a giant censorship organ that doesn't like education except for the secularized Dominicans and Franciscans. For starters, no, and for second secular? Really? And they left out the Jesuits. Say what you will about present day Jesuits, when the order was founded Ignatius was very much concerned with the education of his monks, and not just in the works of the Church Fathers.

It's all rather confusing. And everything is on e-reserves, and say what you will about the wonders of technology, sometimes I'd like to read it in an actual book.

Another day, another dollar. Today is the first day of my independent study period. For the next year and a half, I will be attending the University of Arizona's School of Information Resources and Library Science to achieve a Master's degree. Sounds all manner of fun don't it? And for those of you scratching your head saying "School to be a librarian? Huh?" Yes, that's what it is, but it's so much more!

For starts, I have a good bit of reading and thinking and learning to do. My undergraduate work is both an asset and a handicap. I'm very familiar with the Thomas More Library, but that has little to no analogue in the outside world. I'm also familiar with relying on the written and published word, on readings that are tangibly held, on BOOKS! Funnily enough, in this program, I have very few books. It's enough to make my bibliophilic heart weep. So, in honor of this very scary foray into a more typical college experience, I re-christen this blog "Once more, With Feeling!" Yes, it's a reference to Buffy, but it's also a fairly good summation of what's running through my head at the moment. School again, but I have to put more feeling into it, because goodness knows they won't. I got spoiled by my little liberal arts experience. I knew my professors very well, and they cared what I did and how I did and when I sprained my ankle. Now? I've got to put all that care and concern in myself. No one will do it for me. How can you care about students that you see for one class and never again? If you see them at all, since most classes are online.

In other news, Starbucks has a new drink launch tomorrow. Ya'll should check it out. I don't think I'm allowed to say WHAT it is, but it should make the back side of the bar just soooooo much more fun. Hopefully it's good.