As my contribution to the Infinite Trackback Project, I am now commenting on a blog that links to FRL’s main page with the comment, “podcasting seems silly to me.” A lot of things seem silly to me, including braille pads on drive-through ATMs,”fruit punch” without fruit, and most box wines. But I’d be careful to […]
Blaise Cronin has never struck me as Indiana’s answer to Ranganathan, and his latest lame attempt to be a Gorman wannabe doesn’t change my opinion. But this is not Croningate; it’s just another example of bad library writing. Cronin’s screed was written the way most anti-blog pieces are written. I just heard about blogs, the […]
It is an exhausting week for both work and school; gave a talk about My Place Of Work in Burbank Tuesday, turned in another essay yesterday, did the publishing-morning thing today, and have a talk at Oakland PL tomorrow. But I had a Moment of Zen at Tuesday’s talk in Burbank worth sharing. During break, […]
I’ve spent the weekend working on an essay about how the working poor fight our wars. No military writing can be the same, though, after a writer reads Michael Herr’s accounts of Vietnam in 1967-1968, written in country for Esquire Magazine. (I just re-read that sentence, and I know it’s weak, but it will have […]
I waited two days in case I was misreading the situation. Hey, just because it’s on the front page of the New York Times doesn’t make it true, unless you still believe there are WMD hiding in a big ol’ cave somewhere in Iraq. But it’s true, as Scoble’s memo shows. Microsoft, which has not […]
Top tunes I write by these days: Aretha Franklin, “To Be Young, Gifted and Black” Dixie Chicks, “Cowboy Take Me Away” Eva Cassidy, “Fields of Gold” “Down to the River to Pray,” on the songtrack for “O Brother, Where Art Thou” Alison Krauss, “New Favorite” Emma Kirkby, “Time Stands Still” Joni Mitchell, “The Hissing of […]
Last call! Please take two or three minutes to fill out the annual user survey for Librarians’ Index to the Internet, which offers a publicly-funded, free web portal and weekly newsletter (and yes, LII has a terrific RSS feed, with thousands of subscribers). Last year over 4,000 people helped us justify continued funding, fine-tune our […]
(Update: minor style tweaks. I guess I can’t get my own blog right…) I had just finished taking the picture below of “Harm Saville,” a fragrant, dusky red miniature rose named in honor of grower and breeder Harm Saville (the bud is as big as the tip of my index finger), when a friend pointed […]
This is a brief kibbles-and-bits post. First, I swooned over ZZ Packer’s reading at University of San Francisco last night. Big take-away: read my writing aloud. (We had just been reminded of this in my lit class, too. Reading aloud is like flossing: we know it’s important, and we don’t do it enough.) I refuse […]
The National Gay and Lesbian Task Force has issued a press release about Cardinal Ratzinger, the new pope: “during the reign of John Paul II, Cardinal Ratzinger was the driving force behind a long string of pronouncements using the term ‘evil’ to describe gay people, homosexuality, and marriage equality. … it seems inevitable that this […]