I tried embedding this video, but that seemed to have problems. So do follow this link, which captures how I feel. I’m happy to do charades in the living room until the studios agree to be fair to their writers. (And what a great example of why writing matters!)
… Oh and then there’s this one, and this one, too!
My email is still acting up, FaceBook is being a Grinch, and Amazon wants to charge for blogs. All that tsuris aside, I have a lot to say thanks for:
Health, which we don’t appreciate until it’s challenged.
Happy family life (uh, ditto).
A good job at a place where people like and trust each other enough to send around baby pictures and corny jokes — the stuff that says “we are more than our tasks.”
Six bags of candied ginger from Trader Joe’s (I eat one piece every day — candied ginger has never tasted so good).
Two cats who fight over us every night.
My local writing friends, who give my life-chair its fourth leg, to make it stable and true.
Having three literary essays published this year, and one other very wonderful pat on the head I’ll share with you later when it is more official.
The opportunity to teach writing last Friday — combining two of my loves, teaching and writing — in a class that was one of my best teaching experiences in a very long time. MPOW gave me release time to do this (I negotiated this before starting my new job — so give thanks for knowing how to negotiate).
A friendly city agency helping me with a variance for the shed I want to build in our backyard… I may need to call it Karen’s Folly, after all the fuss I have to go through to make this happen, but as hobbies go it’s fairly harmless (though the more time I spend on this project, the more ambitious my end-game gets).
The miracle of two-day mail, which is often four-day mail in Tallahassee but still means nothing we want is ever terribly out of reach.
For that matter, mail-order Peet’s coffee, and kind staff from my Former Place Of Work, who gave me a year’s subscription to Peet’s as a going-away present. I am just now finishing the last pound they sent me!
Finding wonderful real-McCoy tacos en route to Atlanta at Taqueria Jesus Maria in Omega, Georgia, and then having tacos there again two days later, on the return trip, and then having amazing fish tacos in Panama City last Friday… good Mexican food makes me feel better about life in general.
All of you, reading blogs and email and Twitter and FaceBook and whatnot, and every good thing that has happened to you since the last Thanksgiving.
May your tofurkey/turducken/brined-bird/whatever-dinner be a chance to reconnect with those you love… but not for so long they make you nutty. Happy holidays!
For the last three weeks I’ve been the perfect candidate for a high-quality ebook reader, such as the Kindle that Amazon debuted today.
As I crisscrossed the country — Tallahassee/NorCal/Tallahassee/Denver/Chicago/Tallahassee/Atlanta/Panama-City — I lived in the rarefied world of the highly-connected business traveler, my small body bristling with smartphones, Bluetooth headsets, teensy high-powered wifi-enabled laptops, iPods, cellular PC cards, and several other devices, most of which require long black proprietary cords.
And I also lugged good old dead-tree reading. So much so that I checked my carry-on bag in order to carry on my hefty old-lady bag that holds all necessary hardware (as well as wallet, keys, license, cough drops, and empty pretzel bags), plus a well-stitched reinforced tote bag (thank you, OCLC!) bulging with several books, a pile of magazines and journals, printouts of stuff from work, and the day’s newspapers.
I always tuck a couple more books in my suitcase, because there is absolutely nothing worse than facing a long plane ride without reading material. I once stood up on a Southwest flight and yelled, “Does anyone have something to read? Please?” At which point two frightened guys immediately handed me their Wall Street Journals.
So the Kindle might seem to make sense for me. It’s got that all-elusive screen quality — and when you enter the Trifocal Years, trust me, it’s all about the screen quality. Thanks to Amazon’s decision to use cell phone technology (versus wifi), you can download books in a minute just about anywhere you are in the U.S. You have access to over 80,000 books, including 100 of the 112 best-sellers — a better batting average than most airport bookstalls. You can subscribe to newspapers cheaper than you can get them in paper; you can read blogs; you can even load your own documents on the reader. You can make notes! You can annotate! And it’s only 10.3 ounces — half the weight of a small box of powdered sugar!
Let’s shrug off the $399 price tag — I’d save enough on Times subscriptions to pay for the Kindle in a year — and note that at $9.99, best-sellers would suddenly be accessible to me.
So, nu, I hear you ask? Is it not good for the readers?
Well, not quite.
First, as Jason Griffey points out on Pattern Recognition, the Kindle reinforces the idea of one owner per book, period. Fair use? We don’t need no steenkin’ fair use. If the Kindle’s DRM model becomes standard, you can kiss libraries goodbye.
Second, it’s a proprietary format. So when Kindle loses its spark and is replaced by the Apple iReader (yes, I made that up), your Kindle books are lost. Sometimes I misplace my books, and once in a while I lose one; but I don’t go to sleep at night worrying that in ten years I won’t be able to access what I can see on my own shelves.
Third, Amazon picks the blogs you read. Yes. They do. Several hundred of them. The world of blogging becomes commodified and stilted and squinched down to the same airport-mall collection. And — sit down — you have to pay for them (“Get blogs wirelessly delivered to your Kindle for as little as $.99 per month”). Yes — you heard correctly — pay for blogs. Anil Dash sounds a twee hesitant when he says, “I don’t think they should be charging for blogs that are distributed to Kindle users.” Let me be man enough for both of us: that blows chunks. Amazon. Stop. Now. Insane.
Fourth, unless you transfer documents via cable, you are charged every time you transfer a personal document to your Kindle. Yes, Kindle burns your own money to move documents from one device you own to another! It’s just a wee micropayment — ten cents per document — but like felling fair use with a death blow, that strikes me as a very bad precedent (though a pretty slick trick; I’m trying to think of a few businesses I could “repurpose” along those lines — perhaps that plate-to-mouth thing that happens in a restaurant? Call it a “prandial usage” fee, perhaps?).
The most enthusiastic reviews on the Amazon product page come from testers who got free access to the Kindle and authors who were caught on tape rhapsodizing about the glorious new flying machine. (Nabokov is dead, or he would no doubt point out that his own works aren’t in there.) Which reminds me of the last three weeks: fun, interesting, mind-expanding — but also, in its way, terribly cloistered, a world circumscribed by other highly-privileged people laden with technology and advanced reading. For three weeks, it didn’t cause too much damage; but if I lived in that strata, me and my old-lady bag and a Kindle, eventually I would see the world as a place defined by Starbucks lattes, carefully-selected hotel mood music, all the other people who think a lot like me, and that thin slice of the reading world afforded by Jeff Bezos and Co.
I believe we are moving to a networked future. I just hope this isn’t it.
I’ve been asked why I prefer LibraryThing to Shelfari. Here’s why: because Shelfari is run by dirtbags.
Brian over at Laughing Librarian links to a post on LibraryThing’s Thingology blog that spells out why you should avoid Shelfari, a LibraryThing knockoff that when you sign up will attempt to spam your email contacts six feet deep.
A few months back I had a similar experience with a FaceBook plugin — I wish I could remember which one — that spammed every contact in my AOL instant messaging buddy list. I felt inane, a total Internet rube.
It’s cheesy marketing and a bad, bad thing to do.
Now go set up your LibraryThing account and tell them I sent ya (though actually, they won’t ask who sent you… LibraryThing is pretty laid-back that way). If nothing else, if your house ever burns down you’ll know what books you owned. On a brighter note, LibraryThing has saved me at least $100 so far by answering the question, “Do I already own this book?” Plus it’s a fun network.
(If you have written a book or three, for heaven’s sake set up a LibraryThing account and ask Abby, LibraryThing’s MLS-decorated librarian, to make you an LT author. Then be sure your books are in there! I was the first owner for A Mile Down.)
Over on TechEssence, Roy Tennant has posted a manifesto about library software.
The part of the manifesto that hit me most was the list of consumer responsibilities… and though the manifesto is good and deserves discussion on its own point, I’m going to drift in another direction.
I just spent two days among very smart, dedicated people who for five years or more have been struggling with a standard that like the ball of yeast dough in one of Leo Rosten’s stories has been bulging out of its container in a most scary way. NCIP started as a “circulation” protocol, but as happens with most library standards, it has been larded up with additional stuff to the point where it’s almost unrecognizable (and it’s going to be tough to fit the dough into a pan to go in the oven). This good group of folks has been kneading this ball of dough… with excellent effect… but they’ve inherited an old-school standards process that is shoving them around the kitchen in a most frustrating way.
I only have 20 minutes to blurb this out before a very crazy day begins, so here goes.
I read David Vann’s A Mile Down early one Saturday morning when I thought I was going back to sleep but didn’t, in one luxurious unstoppable four-hour marathon that meant the cats sulked in the living room because I didn’t top off their food bowls and I was late to some meeting I had sworn I would be on time for and I kept thinking how can I keep reading without coffee but David Vann is like the best French roast, he’s a mainline jolt to the neocortex because he’s fun and exciting and you hate him and you badly, badly want to be him.
“Him,” of course, being the narrator of A Mile Down. Maybe I would actually like David Vann in person, in fact I met him at a reading and he was kind and polite but had a wrinkle in his forehead that meant “I am running late for class, would these people stop chatting,” which is ok because where he teaches being late means he is going to have to discard all ideas of driving and just fly there, lecture notes zipped into his backpack as he cruises at low altitude over Tallahassee, which seems perfectly reasonable because after you read A Mile Down you think if David Vann can’t actually fly he will find a way to raise the money to try to do it anyway, even if he gets too close to the sun and his wings fall off, maybe even twice, and then everyone will say “We forgive you, David!” (well, not exactly everyone, some are quite pissed and he is contrite though I bet they’d rather have their money back) and he will tilt his crazy charismatic smile in your direction and you will give him money and he will build more wings.
Because “A Mile Down” is a true story, as they say, about a guy who charms money out of friends and acquaintances — twice — to go to sea in a dubious boat — twice — which is going to be his Get Rich Quick scheme so he can sail and write for the rest of his life, and you can use “sail” and “write” to substitute for anything you’d rather be doing, maybe something pious like volunteering in food banks, maybe something fabulous like every day you get up and read for four hours before you do anything else. Which would be cool. Even though the moral is your wings keep falling off. Which again is ok because people pay you to put them back on, which is the part I’d like to figure out, except I suspect you can’t learn that charisma thing.
But now David Vann is a professor with a teaching load and is not sitting in the middle of an ocean in his own boat with water like “a bright metal sheet crumpling without sound,” as he writes toward the end of this excellent very unstoppable book.
Though I do wonder, what next.
Which is a thought that makes me grin.
Go, read A Mile Down, even if you think you don’t read books about guys in boats, and I generally do not cotton to swashbuckling guy-lit, my idea of using the sea in literature being more on the order of Jane Herself, with the sea in Persuasion a genteel abstraction, not something that can swallow you up in a heartbeat, particularly if you’re young and rash and crazy and charismatic and people give you shitloads of money.
And if you are a librarian and you buy this book, and you should, right now, please do not immediately jam it somewhere in the Dewey section where it will sit unnoticed, but put it on a table with a big arrow over it, maybe with other books like Into the Wild and The Orchid Thief, lovely books about humanity not only unbound but even a bit unraveled, books that are also, like A Mile Down, ultimately about the full-tilt drowning power of love itself.
Earlier I observed that in one part of its policy manual ALA attempted to redefine “meeting” in order to include some virtual functions, but that the definition was too literal.
(Incidentally, there is a truism floating around that it takes “two votes of Council” to change policy. No, that’s only true for changes to the constitution and bylaws; policy changes take one vote — and there are ways to route around Council. More later.)
Yet the policy elsewhere contradicts itself. 7.4.1 says a meeting can take place electronically, but 4.5 says that for the sake of committee work, only face-to-face attendance counts:
With the exception of virtual members, members of all ALA and unit committees are expected to attend all meetings. Failure to attend two consecutive meetings or groups of meetings (defined as all meetings of a committee that take place at one Midwinter Meeting or Annual Conference) without an explanation acceptable to the committee chair constitutes grounds for removal upon request by the chair to and approval of the appropriate appointing official or governing board. (ALA Policy 4.5 Requirements for Committee Service)
Intriguingly, the ALA Executive Board — the actual governing board, to which Council delegates control of the association — conducts much of its work electronically; it couldn’t do its work otherwise. (Its primary technology is called the telephone, though I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they also use email.)
So 4.5 isn’t about the ability to conduct committee work through other means than face-to-face meetings; it’s about forcing people to meet face-to-face — which is about protecting Midwinter, a crucial revenue stream.
Elsewhere, Jason Griffey takes an interesting stab at reverse-engineering Midwinter costs and revenue; I think he needs better budget data, but it’s a good start at tackling the premise that ALA has to meet face-to-face twice a year in order to survive, an assumption that needs close examination from a wide swath of the membership.
Personally, I’d prefer an ALA conference that was much less enforced-meeting and far more human networking, meeting with vendors, useful programs, inspiring speeches, and interesting cities (here we can pause to reflect on the idea of flying to Anaheim next year — a conference location with all the class of microwave popcorn). I’d pay more to attend a great conference once a year than to schlep myself to two places twice a year. I know a few folks say conferences are “too expensive,” but we’ll always hear that.
Reality check: ALA conference fees are extremely low. I wonder if we raised conference dues 50% or more, made Annual the only face-to-face conference, and monetized virtual activities (including finding ways for vendors to peddle wares) if it wouldn’t be much more profitable for ALA and better for the rest of us.
For some time I’ve observed that ALA’s rules about virtual members box us into face-to-face meetings for the “work of the association”:
Virtual members of committees or task forces have the right to attend meetings, participate in debate, and make motions. Virtual members are not counted in determining the quorum nor do they have the right to vote. (ALA Policy 6.1.6)
However, while diligently plowing through ALA’s policy manual, constitution, and bylaws, I was reminded that the definition of committee work — embedded in the definition of a “meeting” — creates its own issues:
A meeting is an official assembly, for any length of time following a designated starting time, of the members of any board, committee, task force,commission, etc., during which the members do not separate except for a recess and in which the assembly has the capacity to formalize decisions. Conference calls, Internet chat sessions (and their equivalents), and in-person meetings are recognized as meeting subject to the open meetings policy (ALA Policy 7.4.4). (Asynchronous electronic discussions by electronic mail or other asynchronous communication methods do not constitute meetings because they are not an official assembly with a designated starting time.) (ALA Policy 7.4.1)
This policy in its earliest form was no doubt born at a time when it was inconceivable to imagine conducting work other than face to face. As time went by, other ideas were awkwardly shoveled into the policy to attempt to address modern work behavior. It’s not a malevolent policy, but (along with how we define “virtual membership” and “open meeting”) it is anachronistic.
In fact, you could rewrite that policy section all day and all night and it would continue to fall short of the mark, because what’s missing is the idea that committee work can be continuous and incremental — and conducted by email, among other media — and yet observable and open.
The all-important “sunshine clause” in ALA policy is in another section:
Notice of meetings held outside of Annual Conference and Midwinter Meeting must be announced ten days prior to the meeting and the results of the meeting must be made public no fewer than 30 days after the meeting’s conclusion. Reports of meetings held outside of Annual Conference and Midwinter Meeting should convey a summary of the discussion of each item considered by the assembly and the decision made. (7.4.2, Meetings Outside of Annual Conference and the Midwinter Meeting.)
If we changed “meetings” to “active work” and “votes,” we’d have all the sunshine we really needed — and section 7.4.1 becomes almost superfluous. In fact, modifying 7.4.2 would be an improvement on how we do things now, because so many ALA units are conducting committee work electronically — but because this work isn’t recognized for what it is or included in the narrower idea of “meetings,” these committees they have no means (and for that matter, no incentive) to advise ALA members that they are conducting work or making decisions.
I’m hoping to address more of these “change ALA” topics over the next week or so. Anyone may copy this content anywhere useful (e.g. a wiki, mailing list, etc.).
Simply because several dozen other bloggers claim to be the Annoyed Librarian does not make it so.
The gig is up. I could tell people were getting close to the truth; last week I received email from unsuspecting friends saying they were tracing Annoyed Librarian, I have a friend who’s an investigative reporter who was poking around, and I didn’t want some Oprah-James-Frey-Nan-Talese-Britney-Paris “Oops, yeah that WAS really me” blowout appearing in American Libraries Direct while I was in Atlanta struggling to stay awake during meetings about some zombie standard.
Yes, I’m the Annoyed Librarian. The clues were right under your nose, if you were looking: