How has technology changed your job?

Posted on March 26, 2024 by smellincoffee
Daily writing prompt
How has technology changed your job?
View all responses

Oh, good lord. Where to begin? As some of you may know, I’m a librarian — not an official Librarian because I’m still working on MLS, but I’ve worked for a library for twelve years as a local historian, IT dude, and general answerer-of-all-questions. The easy and obvious answer is that “Gosh, computers have just changed everything” — because pretty much all of our reference work is conducted online now, as is some of the content we offer. For instance, although I have both an analog and a digital microfilm reader, the only time I ever touch those machines is to demonstrate to kids how we did things back in the stone ages. All of my newspaper queries are done online, and one of the reasons I’m pursuing an MLS is because I want training in creating and maintaining digital library collections so that our holdings are more accessible to the general public, not just people who can come inside.

At my library, though, I would say technology has most transformed our work by allowing corporations, organizations, and government agencies to outsource service access to the client/customers, or more indirectly, to us, since most people aren’t tech-savvv. You want to book a flight? Go to the library and get them to help you. You need proof of your benefits from one government agency to apply for benefits from another government agency? Go to the library, they’ll help you register at our website. And they’ll have to call us for a PIN code, because that’s part of the registration process. You want a marriage certificate from the courthouse? Hah-hah, you silly goose, here’s your blank form: take it to the library and and have them fill it out for you, then come back. You want a job? Go to our website and apply, the process of which will involve a 30-minute personality test with an interface so badly designed that the librarian will have to sit there and read the questions out to you and patiently explain that no, I can’t tell you the right answer, and — oh, would you excuse me? There are people needing to scan and fax and then there’s someone else who was told by her church she’s responsible for creating the Easter program, but her ‘computer skills’ are limited to basic typing, not formatting and setting up Word for brochures, let alone finding usable images online to decorate the thing with, and this other lady wants a wallet-sized picture from 1983 blown up to an 8×10, and what do you mean, it’s going to be blurry because of the ‘resolution’?

….get the idea? This is how I manage to be both a techie and a luddite. (And don’t get me started on how many Android & iOs issues we help with every day…)

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March’s last Tuesday tease

Posted on March 26, 2024 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is TV shows or movies that would have made amazing books. But first, the teasin’.

It is pretty generally recognised in the circles in which he moves that Bertram Wooster is not a man who lightly throws in the towel and admits defeat. Beneath the thingummies of what d’you call it, his head, wind and weather permitting, is as a rule bloody but unbowed, and if the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune want to crush his proud spirit, they have to pull their socks up and make a special effort.

PG Wodehouse letter, as printed in P.G. Wodehouse in His Own Words

How much more alive were these Anglo-Saxons than are we moderns! They lived in a world that was harsh and hard, but at least it was real. We live in our computer-generated demi-worlds, centred on ourselves, utterly addicted to the artificial-life support machine which drips the anodyne into the anoesis of our comfortably numb minds. How can we experience the beauty of this Old English poetry if we have never heard a curlew, or a gannet, or a cuckoo, or a gull? How can we experience Keats if we have never heard a nightingale, or Shelley if we have never heard a skylark?

Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know, Joseph Pearce

Okay, now: the TTT.

(1) NCIS. During the original run of NCIS, one of the main characters was an aspiring novelist who wrote Deep Sixed: The Adventures of L.J. Tibbs, which was a thinly (very thinly) veiled attempt to take the NCIS crimes and drama and make them into a book. I always wished CBS had done a media tie-in and produced that book, the way JK Rowling turned various books in the HP universe into real-world books.

(2) Breaking Bad
(3) Better Call Saul
(4) The Sopranoes

These three are my favorite dramas, and I’m grazing from them constantly. They were all expertly written, bu if they were translated into book form there would have to be something to make up for the visual storytelling — the use of significant props in Better Call Saul, for instance, like the tequila top that Kim touches whenever her character is flirting with her dark side, or Tony being haunted by the image of Big Puss after he’s killed off.

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A Right to Read: Segregation and Civil Rights

Posted on March 25, 2024 by smellincoffee

Alabama public libraries were early stages for Civil Rights projects, given their high public profile and higher deals: libraries were created for the common good, for the benefit of society, meant to serve everyone. How could they bar someone from literature or information on the basis of skin color? Patterson Toby Graham here offers a history of how libraries and librarians attempt to serve all patrons, or failed to do so, throughout the 20th century. Choosing 1900 as his starting point isn’t just because it’s convenient: most Alabama public libraries didn’t get their start until the turn of the century, with some exceptions like Huntsville, the library of which predates the state. (There were, of course, private subscription libraries, many of which operated from bookstores judging by what I’ve seen in newspaper ads.) As these libraries began during Jim Crow, some libraries offered ‘negro branches’ like that of Booker T. Washington in the Birmingham system. Other libraries, especially the small-town ones that came to life only with outside funding were limited to white patrons. These librarians did find ways of serving their communities’ black patrons: the Anniston library had certain windows wherein it was closed to whites, but open to blacks, and in the Selma library black patrons were discreetly served through the back door. The Selma library, as is noted in this book, also integrated itself in 1962, thanks to the leadership of director Patricia Blalock — who used sit-ins in other cities to convince the library board that integrating early would avoid any embarrassing scenes that would shame the library or Selma itself.) Several other Alabama cities integrated themselves in this quiet way before becoming the targets of protests, but others were involved. Anniston unfortunately became the scene of mob violence when two black preachers were accosted by “rednecks who would be more comfortable in prison than in a library” and beaten: a smaller black group then attacked the first white man they saw, a random passerby. Graham notes that most Alabama librarians in the 1960s were neither antagonists nor strident supporters of the Civil Rights movement: there were many well-meaning librarians who wanted to do more, but given the precariousness of library funding, no one was over-eager to go to the mattresses over contemporary politics. The stiffest resistance they offered was defending access to information, as when books were challenged for promoting racial integration. This is a little volume, but an enjoyable read and it allowed me to understand the context of Selma’s integration better.

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OPENING DAY!

Posted on March 25, 2024 by smellincoffee

In celebration of baseball officially starting again this week, I’m going to be featuring books about America’s game. This will include a book about baseball parks and the American city, a baseball murder mystery, possibly a book on the science of baseball, and more. PLAY BALL!!

Neil Diamond: Hands touching hands, reachin’ out, touchin’ me – —
Crowd: SWEEEEEEET CAROLINE, BUM BUM BUM!
Neil Diamond: Good times never seemed so good —
Crowd: SO GOOD! SO GOOD! SO GOOD!
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Plum, in his own Words

Posted on March 22, 2024 by smellincoffee

I’d intended to save this for Read of England, but — rum thing, when you begin reading Wodehouse it’s as hard to resist finishing him as it is to rescue Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha when she topples down the stairs. One moment you’re eying the cover in dreamy anticipation and the next moment you’re drowning your sorrows in lemon squashes because it’s over. Sorry, I can never resist bad Bertie imitations when I’m writing about Wodehouse. Actually, bad Bertie breaks in all his own, at the worst possible time, like pimples or uninvited guests.

Ok, sorry. I’m really done now. Ahem. P.G. Wodehouse in his own words is a dashed lively mix of Wodehouse biography, excerpts from Wodehouse describing his own life, and quotations from Wodehouse works that draw from his life, like his fondness for certain dogs, or the fact that he was mostly raised by a series of other female relations, rather like Bertie’s aunts. These same aunts also introduced Bertie to the Downstairs world where butlers were king, especially those molded and fired in the Edwardian day. We learn of his preference for rooming with others, his delight in playing golf despite his dodgy-at-best talents at the old ball-whacking, and his inglorious beginning in…in a bank? Well, it worked well enough for T.S. Eliot. The Wodehouse material is mined from letters, introductions, and of course his novels themselves, many of which I hadn’t heard of despite owning a huge Wodehouse kindle collection. I didn’t know a bally thing about Wodehouse before this, so this little book provided — in addition to Wodehouse’s absolute charm and good humor — a multitude of new insights into the man who made whimsy. I had no idea that he wrote musical comedies, for instance, and was amazed by his World War 2 experience: he was captured by Germans while giving a dinner party in France, imprisoned in an asylum, then put up in a Berlin hotel because the Germans regarded an old writer as a non-threat: he managed to get himself banned from British airwaves by doing humorous sketches inspired by prison life! Fortunately, before the Eighth Air Force and the Red Army began visiting Berlin, he’d been removed to France. For a Wodehouse fan, this is a genuine treat, while not being a full-length biography.

Related:
Essay on Wodehouse, “Wodehouse: Balm for the Modern Soul“, Dean Abbot
Essay on Wodehouse, “Reading for Fun and Freedom”. Thomas Behr.

Also:

I’m so proud.
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Anxious People

Posted on March 19, 2024 by smellincoffee

The scene: an apartment showing, the day before New Year’s. The apartment is filled with people, and then enters one more: a masked individual wielding a gun, panicked. They’ve just tried to rob a bank, only the bank is a cashless bank, and in an attempt to evade the police after their failed crime, they’ve found their way into this apartment where the only thing left to do is take hostages — which, among this group of neurotics, will go about as well as herding cats. By day’s end, the hostages are free, but the hostage-taker is missing….and the cops are left wondering if one of the hostages isn’t lying. This isn’t just a story about a bank robbery gone awry, though; there’s also a bridge that connects several lives within the room and without it, stories of relationships gone awry and hopes dashed and people muddling along as best they can. It’s a delightfully messy mix of absurdism and pathos, with one of those carousel-esque narratives that can be frustrating and confusing, depending on the reader, but here serves the story well, because everyone is kind of confused, especially the cop and the not-actually-a-robber, and it’s not until the end that anything really makes sense. And yet, at the same time, the characters and authors speak truth to the reader from the very beginning, lighting bolts of insight erupting from a chaotic and cloudy setup. Like many people I know, this book is confusing, captivating, maddening, and beautiful all at once — not for its main story, but for the way that main story encompasses several others, like a symphony of different movements, shades and preview of the sister movements making themselves known throughout. If you like straightforward narrative, Backman’s approach will frustrate — think Catch-22 — but it’s a story that takes readers on a whiplash ride, banging around from deep sorrow to unexpected mirth with the turn of a page. I don’t know who stuck a copy in our library bookstore, but I’m glad they did. Both of the works I’ve tried by Backman have been wonderful.

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Springing into Teases

Posted on March 19, 2024 by smellincoffee

Happy Spring! Today’s TTT is books on our TBR. But first, teases! But firster, Vivaldi!

They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.

Anxious People, Fredik Backman

It appears to us that of all the fairy tales none contains so vital a moral truth as the old story, existing in many forms, of “Beauty and the Beast.”There is written, with all the authority of a human scripture, the eternal and essential truth that until we love a thing in all its ugliness we cannot make it beautiful.

Twelve Types, GK Chesterton

To open yourself to the past is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of descending in tweeted wrath on a young woman whose clothing you disapprove of, or firing an employee because of a tweet you didn’t take time to understand, or responding to climate change either by ignoring it or by indulging in impotent rage. You realize that you need not obey the impulses of this moment—which, it is fair to say, never tend to produce a tranquil mind.

Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader’s Guide to a More Tranquil Mind, Alan Jacobs

So, books we’re planning on reading this spring….

(1) Resurrection, Leo Tolstoy. I’d like to post a review for this on Easter Sunday, for obvious reasons. This is a Classics Club entry.

(2) The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, Jonathan Haidt. Waiting for this one to be released on March 26.

(3) Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty, Charles Leerhsen. A newish biography that challenges popular conceptions of Cobb

(4) The Diary of a Bookseller, Shaun Bythell. I’ve read a couple of Bythell’s other books about his store, but this is the first in the series.

(5) The Victorians: Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain, Jacob Rees-Mogg. For my annual English history & literature sweep in April, naturally.

(6) The Irish in Baseball: An Early History. Meant to finish this in time for St. Patrick’s Day.

(7) Amy Winehouse in Her Own Words. Recently discovered that they’re doing a biopic on Amy, so I wanted to revisit her life.

(8) Jesus of Nazareth, Part 2: Holy Week From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, Joseph Ratzinger/Benedict XVI. Might give this a try next week if no one else has the same idea and checks it out first.

(9) Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet, Ben Goldfarb

(10) Kinfolk, Sean Dietrich. Another humorous memoir, I imagine.

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Satire and our dark hearts

Posted on March 18, 2024 by smellincoffee

From GK Chesterton’s Twelve Types:

It has become a breach of etiquette to praise the enemy: whereas when the enemy is strong every honest scout ought to praise the enemy. It is impossible to vanquish an army without having a full account of its strength. It is impossible to satirise a man without having a full account of his virtues. It is too much the custom in politics to describe a political opponent as utterly inhumane, as utterly careless of his country, as utterly cynical, which no man ever was since the beginning of the world. This kind of invective may often have a great superficial success: it may hit the mood of the moment; it may raise excitement and applause; it may impress millions. But there is one man among all those millions whom it does not impress, whom it hardly even touches; that is the man against whom it is directed. The one person for whom the whole satire has been written in vain is the man whom it is the whole object of the institution of satire to reach. He knows that such a description of him is not true. He knows that he is not utterly unpatriotic, or utterly self-seeking, or utterly barbarous and revengeful. He knows that he is an ordinary man, and that he can count as many kindly memories, as many humane instincts, as many hours of decent work and responsibility as any other ordinary man. But behind all this he has the real weaknesses, the real ironies of his soul: behind all these ordinary merits lie the mean compromises, the craven silences, the sullen vanities, the secret brutalities, the unmanly visions of revenge. It is to these that satire should reach if it is to touch the man at whom it is aimed. And to reach these it must pass and salute a whole army of virtues.

See also: “Dickens’ descent of desertion“, talking about the subtle snares that take over our hearts.

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Quotes from “Strange Gods”

Posted on March 16, 2024 by smellincoffee

I was going to post this on Sunday, but then I realized it’s the Feast Day of St. Patrick, and I’ve something else planned. So, here you quotes, quotes on idolatry and mindfulness for your Saturday.

The human heart craves attention and love—love is the common longing of our lives. We may search for a career, or wealth, or status, but the desire to be loved and valued is usually at the root of our strivings. Finding this kind of love can be difficult. Giving love can be more difficult still. Sometimes, discouraged or impatient in our search, we chase illusions and yearn not for the give-and-take of a lifetime of sacrificial love but the fifteen minutes of fame Andy Warhol once predicted everyone would enjoy. Lacking loving relationships, we yearn instead for an audience.

Our feelings, desires, and convictions become our gods and, exactly as strange gods are wont to do, they lead us astray, down circuitous paths that appear to be taking us somewhere but are forever leading us back into the dungeon of ourselves.

No idol is constructed in the act of murder. Rather, the murder is, at its end, an offering to an idol. The real idol is the enlarged anger within us, and it forms through our willingness to sustain an idea about our righteousness and, therefore, an idea about ourselves. We cling to resentment or feed jealousy until it grows into something we burnish daily with our justifications. We get it to glitter in our minds like something alive, like a genuine force outside of ourselves. We go so far as to proselytize our grudges to others through spin, gossip, and even lies—see my anger, my resentment, my jealousy, and my spite! Acknowledge it with me; let us have communion in our shared umbrage! Worship me with me! The great evil of murder, then, is the fruit of the idolatry that is first an idea, and the idea is almost always about the self.

One thing that can hinder growth is our willingness to attach labels to ourselves and adopt identifications, particularly with groups, to whose ideas we’ve become attached. In doing so, we cease to ponder, cease to wonder, cease to think. Remember Saint Gregory of Nyssa: only wonder leads to truly knowing. When we over-identify with an idea or hermetically seal ourselves within the seemingly safe cocoon of groupthink, we stop knowing much at all. 

It shows us that the Internet, particularly social media, serves our idolatry by assisting in our fascinated pseudo-engagement with others. Or more precisely, the Internet assists our obsessed engagement with ourselves by disguising it as a fascination with others who—either by offering opposition or validation—keep us fixated on the self. All those social media friends who confirm our every thought, all those tweeting followers who make it seem like our ideas matter in the grand scheme of things, are like so many shiny trophies and mirrors, reflecting back at us what we think of as our best and truest selves.

What I have chosen to call “super idolatry” grows out of ideologies too well watered. A super idol is not one but two steps removed from God. If all idolatries contain elements of self-enthrallment, the enthronement of a collection of our ideologies ramps things up by endowing the ego with a heavy veneer of moral authority. Dress up tribal identifications that accompany one’s participation in a party or a movement, determine that the opposition is not merely wrong but evil, and suddenly mere ideas become glittering certainties. These certainties give us permission to hate and tell us our hate is not just reasonable but pure. If simple idolatry blocks our view of God, the super idol—because it is so highly burnished—makes us think we are seeing God in our hatred. 

We all do that from time to time; we get caught up in our cause, and we become careless with our words. Sometimes that’s about busyness and distraction, and not idolatry. But when we catch ourselves being thoughtless (or when someone points it out to us), we should consider the first commandment and ask ourselves if we have not elevated the object of our enthrallment to that position where it blocks God.

“[….] the Church is a giant and eternal urging toward yes to God —whose ways are not our ways and who draws all to himself, in the fullness of time—rather than a yes to ourselves.”

Justice and mercy are the right and left sides of the horizontal beam of the crucifix, upon which a near-constant tug of war ensues. Pro-justice tugs right, and pro-mercy tugs left, again and again. They both move farther away from each other and away from Christ, the centering balance who is all justice and all mercy.

Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols of Everyday Life, Elizabeth Scalia
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Short rounds: Idols, community, and baseball bros

Posted on March 15, 2024 by smellincoffee

Despite appearances, I have been reading this past week…

Elizabeth Scalia’s Strange Gods: Unmasking the Idols of Everyday Life invites readers to consider those things which get between them and God. I heard sermons on this topic in my youth and was not expecting much, but Scalia proved surprising; she doesn’t settle for something trite like asking the reader to compare how much time they spend praying compared to how much time they spend watching television, but instead offers a reflection that points out how thoroughly most of us trapped in “the dungeon of ourselves”. At the beginning, she writes that many of our woes come from the need to be loved, the difficulty of finding that in a broken world, and a subsequent tendency to go the easy route — to pursue an audience instead of relationship. What an apt description for the rising generations, lost in social media apps and neuroticism — but she was writing this over ten years ago. Scalia’s work goes deep into mindfulness as she explores the way our reactions to what people do and say is often less about them, and more us; how we delight in raging self-righteous! I will be sharing excerpts from this a little later, possibly on Sunday.

Lost City: The Forgotten Virtues of Community takes a look at three communities in 1950s Chicago: a working-class Catholic neighborhood centered around St. Nicks’s; a then-new suburban development erupting out of a pre-existing neighborhood, with tensions between the old residents and all the new up-and-comers; and Bronzeville, a black neighborhood that was much-dismembered in the name of slum clearing. Much of society has been dismembered since the 1950s, chiefly in the name of self-interest — both on the part of individuals and of corporations, the ties between having been gleefully severed. This book was of great interest to me, in part because because it’s illustrating the richness that Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone documented our losing, and in part because it’s encounter an author who is capable of writing about the 1950s as were, instead of how they’re idolized or demonized. I was most interested in the section on St. Nick’s, because it so thoroughly demonstrates how multi-layered and reinforcing society used to be: teachers, clergy, and members of the community worked together to keep an eye on and discipline children, so that the nuns of St. Nicks would discipline boys in-class if they’d misbehaved on the street, parents kept an eye on each other’s children as they played together in the lane between houses; and the cathedral’s monsignor patrolled the neighborhood, offering admonition and mentorship at the same time. The author points out that some of the tension between old and young came from the fact that men like Father Lynch had grown up in the Depression and fought in World War 2, and were now having to deal with insolence from the children of peace, ease, and prosperity. Not done chewing on this one yet — I think re-reading it in tandem with a re-read of Bowling Alone, joined by another book I have my eye on, would be an interesting experience.

Next up, The Teammates: The Story of a Friendship. This is a brief mix of history and biography, taking a look at the friendship between four Red Sox players (Ted Williams, Joe Pesky, Dominic DiMaggio, and Bobby Doerr), framed around the latter three members’ final visit to Ted, dying of cancer. It’s short, sweet, and informative, at least if you (like me) don’t know much about these guys. I didn’t even know Joe DiMaggio had one brother playing baseball, let alone two. These four men were fortunate enough to spend years playing together on the same team, and maintained friendships long after they’d left the ball club. In the age of free agency when members float between teams at whim, I imagine that’s much rarer — especially since other bonds, like DiMaggio and Pesky both being the sons of immigrants who did not understand how their boys could mistake a game for a career — are less salient.

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