Will Unwound

Sometimes I sit here in the Tavern and contemplate fate.  “Why” is the word that often comes to mind.  Why do some people end up getting the short end of life’s rewards?  The phrase “there but for the grace of God go I” often enters my mind when the subject turns to homelessness.

Homelessness has become a constant in the Great Recession economy that we can’t seem to shake.  It is impacting more and more people and more and more families.  Because of the all the government cutbacks, our human services network has been diminished and more and more homeless end up at the public library’s doorstep.

A story  that I came across today  really has me torn.  Click on I’m just One Small Man to read it in its entirety. It won’t take more than a couple minutes.

It’s about a public library in Illinois.  Apparently someone on the staff of the library read a local newspaper feature article about a homeless man named Steven Johnson.  In the article it was revealed that Johnson had lost both his job and his apartment and that as a result he spends most of his time at the library and then sleeps in his car.  The library staff person who read this article made sure that Johnson’s library card was cancelled because he no longer had a local address.

The issue has become somewhat of a local and national issue.  The overall impression is that taking away this man’s card was a public relations mistake because it makes the library look both petty and insensitive.   On the other hand, the staff member was just following the policy of the library that a card can only be granted to people who can prove their residence within the city.

While Mr. Johnson is still free to spend as much time as he likes within the library, his “new” non-residence status limits him to 30 minutes per day at the computer.  This is a problem for him because more and more companies provide only an on-line employment application form and 30 minutes is often not enough time to fill out the form.

Questions for Unwinders:

• Does the fact that Mr. Johnson parks his car/home in the city qualify him for a city library card?
• Should the library’s definition of “residence” be stretched to include homeless people who live in the city?
• Should the library have simply looked the other way and not taken away Johnson’s card in order to avoid a public relations controversy?  This would come under the subject heading of “picking your battles.” The library knew he was a high profile individual.
• Did the library send the right public relations message that WE ARE NOT A HOMELESS SHELTER AND OUR SERVICES HAVE BEEN CUT BACK ALSO?
• Is the real villain in this story all the companies who have put their job applications exclusively on-line?  How many unemployed persons can afford their own computer?
• Other thoughts?

I’ve been sitting here in the Tavern, drinking Earl Grey, and daydreaming.  

I’ve been daydreaming about writing another book. 

In the 80’s and 90’s I wrote nine books about librarianship.  I found a niche and stayed with it.  Then my career shifted into city management and I stopped writing books.  When I retired and realized that my real passion was still in the field of librarianship, I had big plans to write more books.  Then one day while I was at the local library I realized something that I should have noticed years ago .  Most of the adults in the library were either working at the public access computers or at their own laptops.  It was my retirement “aha” moment.

My instincts told me that instead of working on a book about libraries, I should blog everyday about libraries.  My instinct was dead right.

Writers have different reasons for writing a book.  Some do it to make money.  Some do it to pad a resume. Some do it as a personal challenge.  Some do it to try to change the world.  Some do it to try to try to connect with an audience.

I wrote books to try to connect with an audience.  I love the give and take of dialog.  Unfortunately a book about library science is not a good way to connect with an audience.  That’s an example of where my instinct was dead wrong.

Back in the day, it would take me about a year to write a book in my spare time.  Then it would take a year to get the book published.  Then it would take another 3 to 4 months to get the book reviewed in the big 3 library publications.  Then it would take another month or two for a library to order the book, receive it, catalog it, process it, and put it on the shelf.  Then it could be read by one librarian at a time in any given library. This was not exactly a way to stimulate a dialog.  Out of frustration I began one of my books by imploring librarians not to catalog the book but to just stick it on top of the microwave oven in the staff lounge.  I never heard of one library doing this.  Not cataloging and shelving a book is just an extreme form of library heresy.  I also included my address in the book in case anyone wanted to write me a letter. No one did.

Then I started blogging and over a period of a few months I had connected with the elusive audience that I had always tried to reach with my books.  Each day I sit down, type out a blog post, publish it, and wait for the comments to roll in.  It’s like science fiction.  Thirty years ago when I started writing books, if someone had told me that when I retired I would type my thoughts into a television screen and librarians as far away as Australia would tune in to them and, get this, respond instantly to them on that very same television screen, I would have said the person was reading too many science fiction novels.

So…I will never write another book unless one of you can give me some compelling reason why I should do so.  What I find fascinating about this is that I am not a gadgets or machine guy.  In fact I absolutely hate most new fangled inventions like the internal combustion engine, radios that have “seek”  and “volume” push buttons rather than round twisty turn buttons, and cell phones. 

I keep thinking about little old Luddite me and my new aversion to writing books and I can’t help but wonder what the future holds for how authors will connect with readers.  Really the old days of taking two years to get a book out are over.

How is this for a prediction: serialization will be back.  We are talking about a 19^th century literary concept here.  Charles Dickens reached large audiences by publishing his novels piecemeal in the newspapers.  My guess is that this will be trendy again…only this time it will be done via the author’s own website. 

One other prediction: remember the choose your own adventure books we used to buy for the children’s department?  Computer technology gives authors a realistic technology to build this feature into their novels and stories.

I used to think that the novel was dying and that all the really great writers were working for television and Hollywood, but now I’m thinking that literature may be reborn with many new permutations.  I’m excited again.

What do you think, Unwinders?

Yesterday we had a most interesting discussion about the relative merits of working in a landfill versus a library.  What triggered the debate was a recent trip I made to the local landfill.  I found the place to be not to my taste at all.  The mountains of trash, the strong unpleasant odor, the thundering trucks, and the constant rain of gull poop.  My little excursion made me appreciate my life as a librarian and made me also appreciate the work of landfill workers.

It was pointed out to me, however, by several people that many people enjoy the challenges and satisfactions of working in an outdoors landfill environment and even find the work intellectually stimulating.   It was also pointed out to me that these same people might very well find working in a library a distasteful as I would find working in a landfill. 

Okay…to each his or her own.  Live and let live.  I get that.  I really do. The people I do feel very sympathetic toward, however, are the people who labor a lifetime in a job they find distasteful for a boss they hate in a company they don’t respect.  With the economy the way it is, more and more people are stuck in jobs they don’t like because they have no options.  They have to make a living.  Worse yet, are the people who can’t even find any job.  Unemployment is a very mentally debilitating problem to have.  What’s worse unemployment or laboring in a job you hate?  Unemployment!

Where am I going with this?  One word: money.  We got into it a little bit yesterday with some discussion of who is paid more: librarians or sanitation workers.  My guess is that in some municipalities, sanitation workers are paid more and in other cities librarians are paid more.   It would depend upon three basic variables: 1) the strength of the local union and the right to collectively bargain, 2) the determining factors for developing a city’s salary schedule…required degrees, training certifications, etc. and 3) supply and demand.

Do I think entry level librarians should be paid more than entry level sanitation workers?  To me it’s pretty much a wash.  Librarians are required to get a graduate degree, yes, but generally speaking their work is in a safe (although that might not be true in all public libraries) and pleasant environment.  Also right now, the supply and demand curve works against entry level librarians. Freshly minted MLS holders are a dime a dozen.  Sanitation workers are not required to have an academic degree, but they do have to be able to operate various heavy equipment.  They also have to deal with safety issues and environmental hazards that librarians are not challenged with.  I’m not sure about the supply and demand ratio for sanitation workers.  Who is more important to society?  Sanitation workers are essential to our health and safety.  Librarians don’t provide life and death services but they do provide the resources that make life worth living.  Like I say, I don’t think either group should be paid significantly more than the other one.

My rant today has to do with another class of worker…college and university sports coaches.  One of the great revolutions that have occurred in my lifetime is the monetizing of amateur sports.  I’m not saying that big time college football and basketball were ever truly amateur but I cannot believe how much money big time college coaches are making.  A major university head football or basketball coach now makes anywhere between a million and five million dollars a year.  An assistant coach can make upwards of a million dollars.  It used to be that most schools had an unwritten rule that the head coach could not be paid more than the highest paid professor.  Not anymore!

To me there is only one word to describe this…obscene! 

Please take note…I have no problem with the salaries of professional athletes and coaches.  They are in it strictly for the money.  More power to them.  I do have a problem with city and state governments subsidizing professional sports teams with billion dollar arenas, but I have no problem with pro coaches and athletes getting what the market will bear.  There is no pretense in the NFL about “student-athletes.”

Academia, however, is a different story.   Recently, I read a story that the salaries of the faculty at Texas Tech were frozen due to budget cuts.  What galled me, however, was that an exception was made for the head football coach who was already making big, big money.  He got a big raise.

I’d love to hear from academic librarians about this double standard.  Please note:  I am not against a vigorous intercollegiate sports program.  I am against the professionalization of it.

Your turn, Unwinders.

When I called the landfill on the telephone, the woman on the other end gave me directional instructions and then added “Wear an old hat.”  When I asked her why, she just chuckled.  I figured it had to do with rain or sun.

This was one of those days when I looked back on my life and gave thanks to the Almighty for having the good fortune to devote my life to librarianship.  It’s trite but true that you really don’t appreciate what you have been given until you experience an alternative reality.   Then a starkness hits you all of a sudden and you get down on bended knee and give thanks.

This morning I rented a truck and hauled a truck full of refuse and debris from my raccoon infested new property to a large landfill up in the hills 15 miles away.  I had no idea what it would be like.  It was absolutely otherworldly…totally like something from Dante’s Inferno.  First there was the absolutely gagging odor.  Then there were the large trash trucks zooming in and out.  Then there was the long, ugly ride up the hill to a place where thousands of gulls hovered overhead.  They were divebombing into the massive piles of trash.   Then there were the many mice and mice like creatures.  Then there was getting out of the truck and unloading sixty 42 gallon bags of debris into a big hole.  Good thing I wore that hat the woman suggested.  The bird droppings were like an air raid of dung.  Then there was the long winding road downhill and out of the dump.

But I have been in the dumps all day…depressed that so many people spend their lives working in the landfill business day after odiferous day.  To all of you hardy souls – you have my utmost respect and appreciation.  I also feel darn lucky (guilty?) that I was born with the opportunity to get a good education and enter a clean, fulfilling, and intellectually stimulating profession.  I also feel darn guilty that I’ve never really appreciated the lives of people who, to eke out a living, are forced to work in the most unpleasant circumstances imaginable.

Today, Unwinders, is a day to give thanks for libraries and the library profession.  I used to think that being a telemarketer would be the worst job imaginable.  Today I have changed that to being a hands on worker in the waste industry.

Questions of the day:  1) Did you ever have an “aha” moment in which you blessed your lucky stars for becoming a librarian and 2) What is the worst job (day in and day out) you could imagine doing for a life’s work?

I hope you remember who David Souter is because he is one of my top five heroes.  Souter was appointed to the Supreme Court by Bush 41.  He is a hero of mine because he did just the opposite of what everyone in the media predicted.  He was supposed to be a Bush toady but from the very beginning of his tenure he was the very definition of an independent thinker.  He voted outside party lines. That’s how Supreme Court Justices are supposed to act but rarely do anymore. 

A couple of years ago when he retired I read a news article that said he planned to spend a lot of time reading.  I was intrigued by this and so I wrote him a letter thanking him for his service and asking him about his retirement plans.

Here’s what he wrote back:

Dear Mr. Manley,

Thanks for your note and article.  There are a number of good reasons to retire on the cusp of 70, but the report you read was correct that one of my reasons is that I want time to do some serious reading.  This job does not leave time for any sustained courses of study outside the law itself, and I have one of the best unread collections of books in the state of New Hampshire.  Holmes said somewhere that there are certain books that have to be read before the day of judgment.  I used to think that was a very nice aphorism, but as I’ve gotten older, I realized the truth of it.  With luck, I’ll die a little bit more literate than I am now.

Yours sincerely,

David Souter

I love that phrase – “one of the best unread collections of books.”  Can’t we all apply that description to our own personal libraries?  Sometimes I wonder which is greater: the number of personal books that I have read or the number of personal books that I have not read.

So, the question of the day, Unwinders, is which book in your personal library that you have not read do you most want to read when you get the time?

For me the answer is easy: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Unwinders, yesterday was a painful day with little or no humor unless you consider sitting in the waiting room of the root canal dentist, and discovering that every single magazine on the lamp table featured a story and photo collage of ………………….Charlie Sheen.

Today, as I kept my Advil bottle in my coat pocket at all times to soften the ache in my jaw, I decided to fight through the pain and proceed with my plan to gut the interior of the house with the raccoons living in the crawl space.  If you having been following this story click on raccoons.  Suffice it to say I sunk my life savings into a very blighted property that I am trying to rehab as my “dream” retirement home.

I had lined up some helpers with a large dump truck to help me.  First off you need to know that we have had excessive rainfalls here in Northern California this winter and especially this week.  In fact it was drizzling today.  My guys showed up on time and just as I was saying, “we need to talk about the best way to back the truck up to the house because there is a very good chance you will get stuck if you just follow a straight line” they backed the dump truck up in a straight line and got stuck.  Then just as I started to say “we will need to grab some boards for traction” the driver started a furious and panicked rocking maneuver and the stuck truck was now buried to the axle.  It would have been deeper but the tailgate hit the ground.

No problem, my guys said, we know a guy with a diesel truck and a chain who can pull us out.  Just as I was about to ask if this diesel truck was a bonafide tow truck they were on the phone and their buddy was on the way.

He shows up in fifteen minutes hooks up a long chain to the bumper of the stuck truck, maneuvers his diesel into position and promptly does 2 things: 1) rips off the front bumper of the stuck truck, and 2) gets his diesel stuck up to its axle.

Will, the former library director and city manager, now takes matters into his hand and drives home to call a tow pro.

An hour later the tow pro shows up, sizes up the situation, and tries unsuccessfully to control a snicker that turns into a flood of full fledged laughter.  By this time, all my new neighbors have gathered around and I hear random words in the flow of comments such as: stupidity, moron, and idiots.

A half hour and 350 dollars later, we proceed to gut the interior of the raccoon house.

No one was bitten.

Challenge of the day Unwinders:  Please analyze this fiasco from a management perspective.  There are a number of managerial flaws that you should easily be able to detect.

Unwinders, I don’t want to whine but here was my day today:

• Arrived at dentist for more oral jackhammering;  was told I need a root canal consultation from a specialist.
• Left dentist ; made appointment with endodontist 20 miles away.
• Hurried to my appointment with my tax guy; was told I owe Uncle Sam an additional 10K.
• Drove through a biblical rainstorm to get to the endodonist.
• After tapping, xraying, and other torture was told I needed a root canal.
• During root canal procedure I listened to the endodontist and his assistant discuss the impending apocalypse.  It turns out that the dental assistant is so worried about the apocalypse post Japan that she now is on a Xanax prescription to treat her panic attacks.
• Drove through another biblical rainstorm to get home to do my daily blog post.
• Am feeling, what’s the word….very apocalyptic about life.
• So please read my latest Booklist article “How You Can Benefit from the Coming Apocalypse” and please leave comments on it here since Booklist does not have a reader reaction feature.
• Am now going in search of pain medication and then will read something really apocalyptic like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.
• Good night, Unwinders.
• Oh, one other thing…thanks for understanding this weird post.  It’s been a week!

Yesterday, I think there was a general agreement that on-line education is the wave of the future.  Research shows that students who take on-line courses learn as much if not more on a particular subject than students who take face to face classroom classes on that same subject.  On-line education has the big advantage of being cheaper to produce and consume.  It is also a huge time saver in that it eliminates commute time.

Traditionalists criticize on-line education for two basic reasons: 1) it limits classroom dialog among students, and 2) it limits give and take with teachers.  They say that a computer is no substitute for person to person contact. 

I wonder about the criticism of the traditionalists.  As I reflect back on my education, I can only think of two teachers who really made a significant change in my life.  The first, was my fifth grade teacher, Mrs. Dubois.  Up until I encountered her, I was a mediocre student at best.  I loved baseball and I loved reading.  My comfort zones were the ball diamond on the playground and the school and public library.  Mrs. Dubois saw something in me that no teacher had seen.  She channeled my love for reading into my classroom work.  Without Mrs. Dubois, I may well have ended up homeless.

When it comes to high school and college, however, I can’t really think of a teacher who had a profound influence upon me other than the graduate assistant for my senior year “Utopian Literature” class.  He mentioned that he was planning to go to graduate library school.  Until then I had no idea that there was a masters degree for librarians.  I did some research, and made an almost immediate decision to apply for library school and become a librarian.  So even though I barely ever interacted with this graduate student, you could say he changed my life too.

Other than that fateful encounter, I can’t really say that a professor profoundly influenced my life.  For that reason, I’m not particularly opposed to on-line college classes.  For a reader like me, in fact, I can see some real advantages.

Today is Fantasy Friday and I want you to spend some time daydreaming about your past educational experiences.  Can you think of any teachers who had a profound influence on your life?

Have you noticed lately that the trend seems to be to evaluate higher education from a cost benefit standpoint?  It wasn’t always like that.  In the not too distant past, a college education was seen as inherently good for the individual and good for society.   The individual benefited from developing the mental tools needed to read critically, think analytically, and write clearly and precisely.  Society benefited from the development of an informed citizenry capable of making prudent democratic decisions.  No one thought to put a price tag on those benefits.

Now the operative phrase is “return on investment.”  That’s a huge problem because looked at from a strictly financial standpoint, the return on investment for most college majors is not at all impressive.  The job market for new college graduates hasn’t been this bad since the Great Depression, and to make matters worse while wages are down and jobs are scarce, tuition is rising ever more sharply. 

Looked at in that light, it probably makes sense that families are questioning the wisdom of going into serious debt to send their high school graduates on to college.  My guess is that in the next ten years, on-line education will become more and more popular because of the savings in time, tuition, transportation, and room and board.  Eventually, I see it spreading to the high schools as a cost savings feature.

I have already predicted that because of the aggressiveness of the San Jose LIS school to go 100% online that the traditional face to face LIS programs will fall by the wayside.  There is no compelling reason why this will not happen to most undergraduate programs of study especially in the liberal arts.  The colleges that go most aggressively into the on-line marketplace will have a much better chance of surviving the triple whammy of declining enrollments, rising tuitions, and diminishing governmental subsidies.  Ditto for high school districts.

Like it or not, and I like some aspects and not others, we are becoming an online society.  I see this when my retirement program stops sending monthly statements in the mail, when the utility company gives a price break with on-line payments, and when many of the books I want to purchase are now only available to me on-line.  The litany of basic services that have gone from snail mail or person to person to online is growing every week.

What does all this bode for libraries?  I have predicted that a generation of librarians trained in on-line LIS programs will be more predisposed to offering services on-line, but what about students?  What will on-line students in high schools and colleges demand in the way of services from their school, public, and academic libraries?

The revolution in education is just beginning.  Are libraries prepared? What say you, Unwinders?

Today is an open rant Wednesday.  The sky’s the limit.

My rant of the week is our military involvement in Libya.  Maybe it is because I grew up with the interminable and terribly wasteful Vietnam “Conflict” that I have been opposed to every single one of our military incursions into other countries.  This would include but not be limited to: Desert Shield, Desert Swarm, Bosnia, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  When will we realize that we cannot impose our will upon other countries, other cultures, other religions, and other peoples?  It is the height of American arrogance to assume otherwise.  My study of history tells me that had we not intervened in World War I, we would not have tipped the balance of power in Europe and the Europeans would have been forced to settle their own problems in a more balanced way, thus preventing the rise of Hitler and World War II.  Intervention in other countries always turns out badly.

I am terribly, terribly, terribly disappointed with President Obama.  He pledged to bring peace to the world.  He was given the freakin’ Nobel Prize because he pledged to bring peace to the world.  Not only did he not stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he now has us embroiled in the middle of a civil war in another Islamic country.  We now have Bush the Third in the White House.  Unwinders, I don’t get this.

In addition to being opposed to war in parts of the world that we do not understand and in addition to the terrible waste of life and property that our wars bring, I am absolutely furious that we would undertake a new war when we can’t afford it.  Schools and libraries are being cut back to the bone but we can afford to drop bombs on other peoples?

As you know I am reading through Isaiah this week.  Here’s a quote from Isaiah I would love our President to meditate upon:  And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.

Amen.  What’s on your mind, Unwinders?