I’m here in Houston for the Texas Library Association conference. It’s been so long since I’ve been in place where people don’t look at me funny when I say “y’all.”
Month: April 2016
The crow (1994)
… holds up remarkably well after 22 years. I haven’t watched it since it was first released but it still carries a prodigiousness that leaps over the decades.
Texas Library Association 2016
Off to the Texas Library Association’s annual conference. Hard to believe it’s been almost a year since I was on an airplane!
You need to let it breathe
I wanted to enjoy this documentary about wine sommeliers, but I couldn’t get over how unlikable most of the subjects were. Plus, the whole “Master’s exam” has an unpleasant fraternal odor to it. Then again, maybe I’m just jealous that I don’t get to spend every waking moment consumed by (and consuming) wine history and culture.
I love libraries. I plan to live in one someday.
I recently started following Tressie McMillan Cottom, Professor of Sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, on Twitter and then quickly added her to my “do not miss!” list. Her recent interview with WordPress has some great quotes about writing, teaching, and libraries.
On blogging:
“[A]s my mother always told me, “If the lease isn’t in your name, you’re homeless.” You have to have a place of your own to take the kind of risks necessary for intellectual development.”
On libraries:
“Oh! I just love libraries. Love them. I plan to live in one someday.”
On learning:
“We can come to know alone, but to learn we have to be social. If I cannot translate my research into praxis and my praxis into research then I don’t really know what I’m talking about.”
Read more on her blog.
We’re eating ourselves alive
“Our current version of the internet lives and breathes off a currency of human attention. With the success and failure of many internet companies predicated on how much of a person’s time they can capture.” Jesse Weaver, Instagram and the cult of the attention web.
After stepping away from Facebook and Twitter for a month and subsisting on a diet of chronologically, self-customized feeds instead of algorithmily-defined ones, I realized how empty much of that content is. Also, I miss Google Reader.
Drabinski on professionalism in libraries
Before opening the floor for discussion of professionalism in libraries, I recommend we start here: Emily Drabinski, “Valuing professionalism: Discourse as professional practice” (2016).
QOTD: One’s own name is a magical thing
Words do have power. Names have power. Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it. — Ursula Le Guin, The Wave in the Mind
Drug-induced consolation
Usually, I don’t mind getting old, but today getting old sucks. I’m just gonna lay here in my codeine-induced haze and read some Boethius.
Backyard demolition
Today, the real demo work began. In two weeks this all will be flowers, trees, and raised beds.