Will Unwound

When librarians of my generation (I am 61) reflect upon change in our lifetimes, we automatically think of technology – computers, microwave ovens, fancy television services, cell phones, etc.  What we tend to forget is the amazing social changes that we have gone through – the evolution of the family prototype from Beaver Cleaver to Elton John, the transition from the stay at home mom to the CEO mom, and the end to racial segregation and the election of an African American President.

But have we changed as much socially as we have technologically? I’m not so sure.  Technological change is all about brains and behavioral habits. Social change involves hearts and souls.

There still remains in our culture the sticky wicket of race.  How much progess have we really made?  Can we even talk about race in a direct and honest way without upsetting one side or the other in the black and white divide?

That is the subject of my current Booklist column which I wrote for Black History Month.  It is entitled “Starting a Conversation on Race” and it discusses the importance of libraries in this modern day dilemma.   Just Click on The Manley Arts to get the full text.

I would greatly appreciate it, Unwinders, if you could read my little essay and comment on it.  It is the only way I can get feedback because Booklist does not have a reader response feature.  Thanks for your time and attention.  Maybe we can get that vital conversation started right here in our Tavern.

Gourmet hot chocolate is on the house and I’ve just stoked the fireplace.  It’s cold here in Northern California today (53 degrees).

Father Andrew Greeley is a literary juggernaut.  He has written over 200 books, seventy of which are novels.  I have read a number of Greeley’s books (both fiction and non) and they are okay.  As a Catholic priest and a doctor in sociology Greeley is a keen observer of human behavior.  He knows people; he understands them; and he portrays them with insight and sympathy.  I have never come away from an Andrew Greeley book feeling disappointed.  On the other hand, I have always had the nagging suspicion that maybe I just wasted 3 or 4 hours of my life.  I used to get the same feeling after watching a much ballyhooed miniseries (remember The Thorn Birds) on television.  That’s why I ultimately decided to kill my t.v.

Yes, that’s it.  Reading an Andrew Greeley novel is like watching television…absorbing, enjoyable, but ultimately leaving you with an empty feeling.  In fact a number of Greeley’s books have made it in one form or another to the small screen.  So, yes, Greeley is literary television…about midway between Masterpiece Theatre and a network miniseries…and that’s a shame because he had the goods to be so much better.

I don’t think about Greeley very much but when I do I wonder if instead of writing 200 books, he wouldn’t have been better off writing just 3 or 4.  But alas, this is just mere speculation because this is obviously an author with no sense of verbal discipline. Did he ever have a thought that he did not publish?  I doubt it.  Isn’t it ironic that someone with a strict religious training could have so little verbal self restraint?  If only someone early on in his life had teamed him up with a really forceful and talented editor, he might have been able to create a truly classic late 20^th century Irish Catholic saga…maybe an urban ethnic version of “Gone with the Wind.”   

That’s what first drew me to Greeley 40 years ago.  He was a man who seemed to understand that the once cherished traditions of the Irish American Catholic world were in fact “blowing in the wind” in the wake of the revolutionary Vatican Council of 1962.  Greeley thrust himself into the liberal side of the fractured church and has been there ever since.

It’s no wonder, therefore, that Bishop Blackford “Blackie” Ryan, the detective around whom Greeley centered 17 of his murder mysteries,  is the mouthpiece for many of Greeley’s pointed criticisms of the Vatican and its ultraconservative response to the modern world.   The book I read for my mystery project is entitled The Bishop Goes to the University.  While Greeley’s theological agenda tends to get in the way of what is a rather intriguing mystery (a Russian Orthodox monk has been assassinated in his office at a Chicago University), he did manage to pull me into the book and keep me there for three solid hours. 

Make no mistake about it, Greeley understands how to build a suspenseful plot and he understands  how to create characters who will bring the plot alive.  But at the end, as with every Greeley book I have read, I was left empty.  Why?  Greeley’s style is too breezy.  He just doesn’t take the time or the effort to plumb the depths of the human condition.  The elements are all there for a more visceral, more priestly look at the ultimate question of why bad things happen to good people.

I give The Bishop Goes to the University a 2 star rating.

Note from Will:  I received an e-mail last week from our tavern’s resident soothsayer, Joe Schallan, regarding the bankruptcy of Borders Books.  In reply I sent him a 3 word email: “Are libraries next?” Here is Joe’s answer.  I thought it would be fun (following Joe’s lead) if we all gaze into our crystal balls on this Fantasy Friday and try to predict the future of libraries.  Have fun and get creative.

ARE WE NEXT?

I don’t think that libraries are going to disappear overnight. I also don’t think their funding will rebound to the levels they enjoyed prior to the Great Recession. Much smaller budgets and staffs will be the “new normal.” The financial pressures on local governments are simply too great for services rightly or wrongly characterized as luxuries or frills to rebound in the foreseeable future.

Libraries will soldier on for a time, in much reduced circumstances. The sorts of services they offer will change as technology changes and as public expectations change. Will libraries change into agencies providing electronic portals to ebooks, media, and article databases in place of bricks-and-mortar places with print collections? Quite likely, in my opinion. Having a small staff to negotiate licenses and
oversee access in behalf of the public, with everything physical outsourced to the cloud, is much cheaper than maintaining buildings and staffing them.

Nothing dramatic will happen in the short term. Libraries will continue on for a time, but never at pre-Recession funding levels. Most will drop the pretense of reference service entirely, conceding the entire information function (cf. Bill Manson’s guest post Monday) to the search engines. Libraries will be fewer, smaller, and more oriented toward digital media. Libraries will continue to hemorrhage jobs, especially professional ones. Big city and suburban libraries will be affected first, and the last stronghold of traditional libraries will be in small towns.

Will the buildings someday vanish entirely, replaced by electronic surrogates? I think so. Archives will survive, since there will be a need to curate important documents and images, in both their original form and in the form of publicly-accessible electronic surrogates. Ancestry.com has already become a sort of archive of this kind.

When I pass on in ten or twenty years, I expect I will go out of a world that still has library buildings with physical collections in them, though they will exist in much reduced circumstances.  In fifty years? I expect physical libraries will be gone by then. Scarcely imaginable devices — the iPad to ten powers of ten — will put the Library of Congress, and much more, into your hand.

At least, for the time being, we are still loved by the public, even though there is a huge disconnect between the image of the library they love and the reality they actually want us to provide.

The major trends affecting us in the near term are

- severely reduced funding
- mistrust of and contempt for expertise
- acceleration of the decline of literacy and long-form reading
- death of the informational and cultural middleman role, and deprofessionalization
- acceleration of the shift away from print to digital media

None of these bode well for libraries as we have known them. Having that scarcely imaginable device in one’s hand will be quite something, though, and I’m sorry that I’m going to miss that.

It’s Rave Thursday, which is the other side of the coin from Rant Wednesday.  Yesterday we ranted about buzzwords; today we’ll rave about favorite words (notice I didn’t say “faves”).

Here’s what I love about words.  They are the building blocks of communication.  Technology cannot change them.  They are indestructible.  You can text “bamboozle” on your ithingy, write it long hand, type it into your laptop, read it in a tattered old book with a broken spine (the book not you!), peruse it on an e-reader, squint at it on microfilm, google it (sorry, that was one of our hated buzzwords, wasn’t it), print it with children’s alphabet blocks….you get my drift.  Words are a librarian’s stock in trade.

Here are my faves…I mean favorites.

Really Cool “B” words ( Question of the day, Unwinders: why do so many cool words begin with “b”?)

• Bamboozle
• Beelzebub
• Buzz
• Bogey
• Bugaboo
• Balderdash
• Bumptious
• Bumpy
• Bungee
• Bunghole
• Burp
• Bubble
• Baffle
• Bumbershoot
• Buckle
• Bungalow
• Boondoggle
• Bazooka

Beautiful Words

• Nuance
• Murmur
• Pastoral
• Ethereal
• Love
• Epiphany
• Esoteric
• Mist
• Serenity
• Cascade
• Coalesce
• Enchanted
• Luminous
• Exquisite
• Entice
• Whisper
• Grace

Funny Words

• Psychobabble
• Gobbledygook
• Hobnob
• Pandemonium
• Caddywampus
• Flibbertigibbet
• Cornucopia
• Doppelganger
• Discombobulated
• Cantankerous
• Hootenanny
• Smorgasbord
• Goggle
• Foggy

Random Words I like to Utter

• Dodgy
• Ripple
• Sparkle
• Echo
• Gawk
• Skunk
• Snappy
• Voodoo
• Cryptic
• Bizarre
• bazaar
• Putter
• Chrome
• Spelunk
• Geezer

My All Time Favorite Word

• Puppet

Your turn, Unwinders.  What are your favorite words?

Today’s rant focuses on your least favorite buzzwords.  To be helpful I have created a list that you can pick or choose from.  Or you may add to it with your own faves.  Note: I am guilty of using many of these clichés.  The spark for today’s post came from a couple of Unwinders who took issue with my use of the term “library rock star.” 

In compiling this list of modern day clichés I was rather horrified at how often I resort to using them.  I chalk that up to laziness and a lack of intellectual capital.  Have fun picking out your faves.  Don’t hesitate to upsize the list. Sometimes you need to think out of the box to come up with some good ones.  Others are nothing more than low hanging fruit. This list is a work in progress and as such is a living document.  Don’t hesitate to impact it with your own iterations.  Paradigms are shifting and so is the need to do a gap analysis of the language we commonly use.  We should get a lot of synergy from a proactive group like the Unwinders.  I can’t wait to see your deliverables.  So don’t go away without giving me your takeaway from this little linguistic dog and pony show:

• Faves
• Proactive
• Stakeholders
• Deliverables
• Challenge or Issue (instead of “problem”)
• Proactive
• Takeaway (as in “what was your takeaway from the meeting?)
• Push the envelope
• Intellectual capital
• Paradigm
• Tech savvy
• Rock star
• Dog and Pony Show
• Upsize, downsize, rightsize
• Gap Analysis
• Movers and Shakers
• Game Plan (as a verb)
• Facilitator or Coordinator (instead of supervisor)
• Impact (as a verb)
• Herding Cats
• Iteration
• Out of the box
• Leverage (when used for debt)
• Work in progress (when used for a train wreck)
• Train Wreck (to describe a dysfunctional situation)
• Turnkey
• Synergy
• Transparency
• The New Normal
• 24/7
• Monetize
• Low Hanging Fruit
• Living Document
• Flyover Country
• Seamless
• Cutting edge/Bleeding edge
• Core values
• Invest (as a synonym for tax)
• Buzzwords

Note from Will …the e-mail came in a couple of weeks ago. 

Hi Will and Unwinders, 

My problem is bums in the library. Not just garden-variety bums that read the newspaper, doze in chairs and sneak a nip in the stacks–I’m familiar and comfortable with those bums since they do leave. The bums I am taking exception to are addicted bums that are being fostered, fed and given money by our IT manager. 

Our IT manager has found Jesus and is now doing ministry by bringing society’s flotsam and jetsam in from the cold and into the teen area where they can freely mix, no supervision, with the few YA’s that brave the bums and use the room to access Facebook and create music. This worries me and, yes, I do know we are not a social service agency but unrelated, non-staff adults in any area with kids is concerning. 

The latest bum, whom I just met this morning, just makes my skin crawl. When I saw him I could sense the guy was just not right, potentially dangerous and scary. I told IT Dude that the guy sets off every alarm in my head—that’s when he told me this bum was a crystal meth addict he was “helping.” with his problem. I told him if Jesus is telling him to do this, he should bring the latest bum home and introduce him to his wife. Maybe, I also suggested, the bum can move in and IT Dude can really work to save him. 

There have been incidents in the past when one of the bums was chatting up my 17-year-old page.  That enraged me and when I later found out that that particular bum was a registered sex offender, I hit the roof. In another incident, three bums beat up another bum and, since I witnessed the assault, I was the one who had to go to court. To top off the last incident, one of the bums made a death threat against me and the state’s attorney issued me an order of protection. My director has gotten involved, spoken to IT Dude about the situation and remedies are applied that last a few months until the eventual backslide into business as usual. 

Am I wrong to be violently opposed to IT Dude’s ministry, which I believe has nothing to do with his job description? 

Sincerely,

Furious

Note from Will – I thought that this guest post was a fitting subject for out Sunday Meditation segment because it basically asks you to reflect upon the great movement of our day – the computer revolution.  What’s fascinating about this subject is that everyone’s response to this new reality is to a large part dependent upon one’s age.  It’s a fascinating subject for librarianship from a standpoint of both staff and patrons.  You can read my response on comment #1.  Enjoy. 

After Monday’s post with Will’s response to Andy Woodworth’s blog on the Case for Retirement, I feel I have to write this. I read Will’s blog (The War Between the Library Generations Has Started) and Andy’s original blog.  Then I read Joe’s comment about the history of the Internet.

What now interests me is our history of adapting to technology. Andy mentioned people who started in the field in the 1980’s. Joe told us the Internet was still in its infancy in the early 90’s. I recently read a statistic somewhere that there are more people on Facebook now than there were on the whole Internet in 2000. The Unwinders are an active online group of people, so may be above the norm, but I don’t think so for our education levels.
 
 By 1986 I was using Word (we were a MS Word company, not a WordPerfect company) and Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. In 1993 or early 1994 I joined my first Internet provider (I forget what we called them then) and joined a few groups as well as played games and watched the Star Trek news. This was still a DOS based system. I had the maximum membership, which allowed up the three hours a day on the service. By 1997 I was in and out of different groups and live chats. By 1999 I was a part time moderator for a large discussion site that covered science fiction, history, books, movies, and other topics. I was playing online Scrabble with my family.
 
 My girls started getting computer classes by first grade, although while they were younger they only had one afternoon a week. They learned as much at home as they did at school at that time. By the time my younger one was in college in 2005, students were living on their laptops. Most homes of our socioeconomic group had at least one computer in them, if not more. That was a huge leap from ten years earlier.
 
 Now I have a Facebook account, a Twitter account, a Reader account to follow my different blogs and sites, a blog, a web page (the oldest of this group), a Diigo account, etc. No, I’m not up on all the latest technology, but I’m not far behind. I can serve my patrons quite well, both the older, less techno savvy ones, and the younger ones who are working on their Ipads.
 
 I’m obviously not the person Andy had in mind when he suggested retirement. Still, how many of us who started in the 1980’s are behind on technology? Probably not as many as he implies. While we may not be on the bleeding edge of technology, we’re active. No, I didn’t grow up with the Internet and easy computer access. My daughters didn’t have easy access until they were in middle school.
 
 When did you join the computer age and/or online community? For the older members, was it because you were forced to because of your job, or was the natural interest there? For the younger members, was it due to school or your home environment? How do we plan to keep adapting to the changes in technology?

Authors are like neckwear fashions.  They go in and out of style. 

Hemingway is the skinny black necktie on a plain white shirt.  James Joyce would be one of those wildly abstract neckties that were in vogue in the 1960s.  Jane Austen would be a silk scarf with a floral design.    And Willa Cather is definitely a plain wool scarf.

G.K. Chesterton would be a bow tie with a paisley pattern.  His writing is old fashioned and florid with a touch of whimsy. 

The fact that he is in vogue again is a mystery.  It’s hard to think of an author more out of step with modern times than G.K. Chesterton.  We live in an age of moral relativism, an age in which the individual takes precedence over the group, an age when religion is dying, and an age when technological progress has become our best hope for the future.

Chesterton was absolutely and unequivocally against all those things, which might explain why he has been resurrected.  Chesterton’s best and most famous book bears the simple title: Orthodoxy.

If that bare fact doesn’t speak volumes enough for you, here are some of his most representative quotations for your consideration:

• “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
• “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
• “Once abolish the God, and the government becomes the God.”
• “It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.”
• “Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks.”
• “These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.”
• “The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”

Sooner or later in my mystery project I knew that I would have to confront this giant of an author.  I had dipped into Chesterton almost 40 years ago when he was as out of fashion as a writer can be and I found him to be almost unreadable…like hiking up a mountain on a long muddy trail.  It takes time to get used to the slow pace and who has the time when there are so many other things to peruse? 

But, Chesterton,  in addition to being the author of scores of books on philosophy, theology, and social commentary,  was the creator of Father Brown, one of the very first literary sleuths.  So …if you’re going to sink your teeth into the mystery genre, you have to try to digest Chesterton.

The fact that Chesterton is back in fashion did not help my trek back up that muddy mountain.  I had a great uncle who talked like Chesterton.  He was windy, pompous, and repetitive, but he did have one redeeming quality.  He possessed an irreverent wit.  Although he was full of b.s., his own b.s. detector was accurate and reliable.  Does this make sense?  I didn’t think so.

Anyway, that is Chesterton in a nutshell…full of sound and fury and signifying something.   The man was full of balderdash but, boy, could he see through everyone else’s balderdash.

Father Brown is important because he truly is a father, the father of the hundreds of cleric/detectives who have followed his lead and his mentorship over the past 75 years.  Interestingly enough in the book of Father Brown stories that I read, The Scandal of Father Brown, Chesterton rarely dwells on any religious concepts but one: original sin.

The great insight of Father Brown, who unlike Chesterton was reserved and restrained, is the proclivity of people to engage in self absorption to a sinful and sometimes evil end.  Nothing escapes the notice of his wise and wizened eyes.

Is Father Brown a priest I would love to have to have as a confessor?  Yes.

Is Chesterton an author I would love to have on my nightstand? No.

Does that make sense?  I didn’t think so.

I give The Scandal of Father Brown two stars (out of five).