accumulate small observations

Posted: 30 Mar 2013 | Author: | Filed under: Internet, Reflection | Tags: , , | 4 Comments »

I’ve already decided: when Google Reader shuts down, I won’t be finding an alternative for my 500 or so feeds. I’ll create some bookmarks of my favorite places on the Internet but so much of the stuff I filled Reader with over the last 5 or 6 years will not come back around. Google has given me an involuntary reboot of my Internet media consumption, a reboot that I needed but have been reluctant to implement.

This year is looking to be the most wide-open, blue-skied year of my life. Everything is new. I need that in my information consumption too.

 

Journal-Keeping PLUS Publicity = Blogging: A look back at May

Posted: 31 May 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Blogging, Books, eBooks, Facebook, Philosophy, Reflection, Social Media | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

This is the third post in an ongoing experiment on blogging as a form of public journal-keeping and self-reflection. Each month I post a recap of the major themes that were of interest to me. Here is March and April.

On Poetry and Blogs: Michale Ondaatje’s novels continue to overflow in my mind. As I mentioned in my March post, his words influence all that I do and see. He combines beautiful sentences, strong imagery, and interesting stories in rare and exciting ways.

Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle

Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.

Within two years of 1066, work began on the Bayeux Tapestry, Constantin the African brought Greek medicine to the world. The chaos and tumble of events. The first sentence of every novel should be: “Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.” Meander if you want to get to town. – Michael Ondaatje, ‘In the Skin Of a Lion 

Reading more of his work, I am becoming aware of just how much his poetry informs and works inside of his prose. The Cinnamon Peeler is one of my favorite Ondaatje poems. Listen to him read it, be swept away by the words, get lost in the story.

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It occurs to me that I have never read poetry with the amount of seriousness that I approach fiction or philosophy. The question of beginnings, of essentials, of relatable poets has always been an early stumbling block. I did not take any classes on poetry in school. Very few of my friends read like I do, and if they do, they don’t read poetry either. So, with the exceptions of a few poets, like Yeats or DH Lawrence or Whitman or now Ondaatje, I am incredibly undereducated, which is something that I would like to change.

My quest to find more (quality) poetry gained some momentum when I read this post on a little blog with an awesome name: Books & Bowel Movements. The author writes thoughtfully about the books she is reading or the projects she is working on (I’ve read some older posts but haven’t seen much about bowel movements…). Blogs like this one are the reason that I find so much edification in the platform.

I taught a class on blogging this month and one of my slides read: EVERYONE can be a publisher! Leaving out the nuances, this is generally true today. All it takes is an Internet connection, a bit of intelligence, and something to say. I don’t know the person who writes at Books & Bowel Movements. I’ll never meet her. But we are, in a sense, conversing with each other every time I read her blog. That’s powerful, exciting, democratizing. And endlessly fascinating. It opens new worlds.

On Quitting Facebook: I signed up for Facebook in 2004 when it was still limited to a few universities in the US. The site was a lot simpler and a lot more closed. It was an exciting new way to connect with friends who had scattered around the country to different schools. Since then Facebook has changed more times than I can remember. Some of the changes are good, some of them are bad. When the News Feed launched, there were petitions to have it removed. It felt like an overreaching, a breach in privacy. But can anyone imagine Facebook without it now?

My point is that when I started using Facebook it was a completely different website. I did not worry about privacy or about Facebook selling my information or about advertisers or about being inundated with the boring, mundane details in the lives of my acquaintances. I find that all Facebook offers me today is a way to waste time. All the people who I want to connect with, I do so in more meaningful and important ways. This is why I am no longer on Facebook.

It is a strange thing to be cut off from Facebook so suddenly and completely. It is like leaving the country. I feel a little shut off, which was odd at first but is incredibly enjoyable now. The worst part of this now is how much justification I have to give to people when I tell them that I am no longer on Facebook. To answer this, I am pointing people to Steve Coll’s recent essay in The New Yorker about why he quit Facebook. The important take-away from the essay is this paragraph, which I think needs closer consideration.

Zuckerberg’s business model requires the trust and loyalty of his users so that he can make money from their participation, yet he must simultaneously stretch that trust by driving the site to maximize profits, including by selling users’ personal information. The I.P.O. last week will exacerbate this tension: Facebook’s huge valuation now puts pressure on the company’s strategists to increase its revenue-per-user. That means more ads, more data mining, and more creative thinking about new ways to commercialize the personal, cultural, political, and even revolutionary activity of users.

Cory Doctorow has been talking about privacy and Facebook for a while.
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On Graham Harman and Philosophy: Since I am never completely satisfied with my current situation, I spend a lot of time planning new career options. A perennial favorite of mine is the pursuit of a PhD in Philosophy. If money, time, and laziness were not factors, it is the one thing I would want to do above all else.

There’s a wise old saying: don’t become worse than what you’re fighting. I would put a twist on that and say: don’t become less imaginative than what you’re fighting.  -Graham Harman ASK/TELL interview 

This month Graham Harman, a philosopher from the American University in Cairo, reignited my interest in the discipline with his highly original and thought-provoking books, Circus Philosophicus and Towards Speculative Realism: Essays and Lectures (I read both of these books using the Kindle app on my iPad. Luckily, Harman’s publisher, Zero Books, sees the benefit in making an eBook version available, which is not something I’ve found with many other books of contemporary philosophy)

Harman’s work is interesting because he makes a strong – and I think pretty successful – effort to bridge the analytical and continental divide. Harman thinks that the current fashion in philosophy has runs its course. He says, “The dominant personality type of recent decades has been the precise and assertive arguer who speaks clearly and likes to call people out on “nonsense.” It’s a personality that holds itself not to believe in very much, but to undercut the gullibility of other people’s beliefs.”

It is this thought that drew me to Harman’s work. I felt a similar sentiment during much of my undergrad and it is what ultimately led me away from graduate programs in Philosophy right after I graduated. Well, that and the fact that I wanted to travel.

This is not to say that Harman’s work is not rigorous. It just refuses to work in the confines of much of academic philosophy today. It makes for philosophically interesting and important work that is also a lot of fun to read. Even though I disagree with Harman on a number of things, I finished Circus Philosophicus in a few short hours because it was so enjoyable and different.

Thanks to Harman, I also realized that I need to read deeper into Heidegger, Bruno Latour, and Husserl. More importantly, his work is pushing me towards developing (or feeling the need to develop) a more robust metaphysical framework.

On Lena Dunham’s Girls: This show sparked a lot of debate in Film Club during May. Out of everyone in the group, where opinions ranged from love to meh to hate, I am probably the biggest (or just most vocal?) supporter of the show. Whether or not it shows “authentic representation” of young, educated, white girls in NYC, I’m not sure. But what I do know is that it portrays a certain feeling of unease or confusion that young, educated people have to face when stepping into the “real world” and realizing that their English degree isn’t exactly the great thing they were promised when they plunked down $20,000 for it. The girls in the show are living in this sort of ersatz adulthood that so many (myself included) go through in their early to mid-20′s where things are a bit strange. They can’t quite make it on their own, they don’t yet know what they want to do, etc. This show articulates that strangeness very well. I guess that I am more interested in what the show says about a certain segment of contemporary culture than anything else.

On the 2012 Tour: The weather is warm and the ground is drying up, which means it’s disc golfing season. The first big outing of the summer happened this month and it was a lot of fun – even if my arm was sore the next day and I spent too much time in the sun.

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On My Favorite Reads From Around the Web This Month: 

On the Wisdom of Love:

Journal-Keeping PLUS Publicity = Blogging: A look back at March

Posted: 01 Apr 2012 | Author: | Filed under: Blogging, Reflection | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

Next month I am teaching a few classes on blogging at the George F. Johnson Library’s Public Computing Center. In preparation for this, I’ve been reviewing articles and (blog) posts on the topic and reflecting on the nature of blogging and what it has meant for me in the past. This is part of my effort to determine whether “blogging” is really an important skill that people should learn (or, at least, be aware of). Contemplating this, I find myself returning, over and over, to this excellent blog post by Claire Creffield: Know thyself, blog thyself: Socrates and the Internet.

I’ve blogged at several different places over the last five or six years. This site is only my most recent – and most infrequently updated – blogging platform. Of all the hours I have spent writing blog posts, the aspect of blogging that is the most meaningful to me is the same point that Creffield ultimately concludes with:

Perhaps my blog might have a reader, but more than likely it will not. Either way, the imagined eyes of another, sympathetic but critical, intimate but distanced, are an aid to careful reflection.

There is an old cliché about teaching that I think can apply to blogging as well. It goes something like, “the teacher learns more than the students.” Similarly, the blogger learns more than the reader. The greatest awareness my blogging raises is my own self-awareness. It provides an outlet for where I am at – mentally, emotionally, intellectually – at a certain point in my life. Blogging is public journal-keeping – even if it’s not always recognized as such. It’s the most democratic form of personal storytelling. Readership is not as important as imagined readership.

“Funny how it was, everyone perched in their own little world with the deep need to talk, each person with their own tale, beginning in some strange middle point, then trying so hard to tell it all, to have it all make sense, logical and final” - ‘Let the Great World Spin’ by Colum McCann

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March’s Journal

March was a good month.

On Jonathan Franzen: The month began with a reading and Q&A session with Jonathan Franzen at Binghamton University. Franzen has received a lot of attention, both positive and negative, since the release of Freedom in 2010. Lately, after he took some pot shots at Twitter, I can’t seem to look at the Internet without seeing an essay, blog post, tweet, or online article about how “out of touch” he is with  the ways in which the world really works or what today’s writers have to face (e.g. increasing distraction by TV, Internet, etc., the decline of “readers”). For a while I followed this discussion, but have come to the conclusion that I just do not care. So much of the debate feels manufactured. It has become the very distraction it laments.

Franzen’s work is an important and instructive influence in my life. His long and complex novels are expertly crafted and his non-fiction is some of the most honest I have read. I do not want to let any of the noise surrounding him to obfuscate that.

In the Q&A at Binghamton, which my friend John recorded and has made available on Soundcloud, Franzen says (and I’m paraphrasing here) that he writes not to put across a particular position, but to complicate and confuse things for his readers. I think that when he makes statements about Twitter, or anything else related to, for lack of a better term, “popular culture,” he is doing it for similar reasons.

I admire this sentiment and I enjoy reading challenging works. When pushed wider and deeper, and forced to consider and accommodate for things I never imagined or knew existed, is when I grow the most.

Franzen Q&A at BU:

On Libraries and My New Job: A week after I attended the Franzen reading, I started a new job that promises both rewards and challenges. My hope is that I can put into practice many of the ideas I have about what libraries CAN and SHOULD offer to their patrons. The biggest hurdle will be funding. I suspect I will get very good at writing grants and begging for money over the next several months. If any other librarians have suggestions for funding, or creative ideas for a Public Computing Center, please let me know.

Also, fellow librarians should really check out the webinar on Content Creation for Teens that Justin Hoenke gave on Wednesday. He is doing some really cool stuff up there in Portland.

On Michael Ondaatje: Ondaatje’s writing was nothing short of a revelation for me in March. I began with Divisadero and then proceeded to Anil’s Ghost, The Cat’s Table, and The English Patient. His books are trance-like. They seem to live on the edge of dreaming and waking life where memory and time flow in all directions. Hauntingly beautiful one minute, stunningly vivid the next, Ondaatje puts me in a different place. It is a place where others exist as completely different yet wholly the same as myself.

“‘Everything is biographical,’ Lucien Freud says. Why we make, why it is made, how we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us, even those we have known briefly. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border that we cross.” – ‘Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje

I feel about Ondaatje the same way that Colum McCann once said he felt about John Berger: I’ve been over-served in a good way. I am so full of his writing right now, it influences everything I do and everything I see. (*Video* of John Berger in conversation with Michael Ondaatje)

On Reading & Female Writers: Michael Ondaatje novels are not the only books that I read in March. I also read two books not worth talking about (The Road and Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress) and two books by young female writers. They were: Follow Me Down by Kio Stark and The Melting Season by Jami Attenberg. In terms of plots and prose, both are good though very different from one another. While Attenberg’s is a straight-forward novel about a young woman running away from, well, everything, and subsequently finding herself, Stark’s novel is an airy mediation on city life – part mystery, part contemporary and literary fiction.

What kept striking me while I was reading these novels is how much they say about female sexuality. They don’t do this overtly, but the differences between how these two authors introduce sexuality in their characters and how a lot of the other (re: white, male) authors I read do it is so apparent. Not since I first read Aimee Bender have I seen it as starkly.

I guess my only conclusion is that I should try to read more female authors. But then, of course, I have to wonder about whether I should be thinking of Attenberg and Stark as “writers” as opposed to “women writers.” Shouldn’t the art and not the gender come first?

On the iPad, Instapaer, and Long-form Non-fiction: Since I got an iPad and downloaded the Instapaper app, I have read A LOT more long-form non-fiction. Some of my recent favorites are:

  • Logically Speaking – This 3:AM Magazine interview with philosopher Graham Priest is fantastic. I wrote my capstone philosophy paper at BU on dialetheism (true contradictions) and have kept up a bit with the debate since then. It has been really interesting to see Priest gain more recognition both inside and outside of academia. This interview is a good introduction to Priest’s thoughts but will also be engaging to those familiar with the concepts as well.
  • Late Bloomers – Malcom Gladwell gives me hope that I might still make something of myself later in life. He dispels the myth that creativity always has to be associated with precocity.
  • White Savior Industrial Complex // Jimmy McNulty Gambit - I consider these two essays by Teju Cole and Aaron Bady companion pieces. They are shrewd examinations of our current culture and the issues surrounding charity, sensationalism and, as Cole defines it, the White Savior Industrial Complex. Both of these pieces need more readers.
I want to separate this next piece out from the rest because of the sheer force with which it hits. Unconventionally written for what it is, Michael Paterniti paints a vivid picture of the crash of Swiss Air Flight 111. It is a moving account of how we deal with life and death and a beautifully told story of an incredibly sad event.

On Movies: March was a slow month for me in terms of movies and Film Club. All I watched was The Little Minister and A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies.

On Writing and Future Blog Posts: I write almost every day, but I don’t blog much anymore. I am of the opinion that writing isn’t worth anything unless it pulls from  inside and contains forms of your deepest secrets, desires, fears, and dreams. Writing like that take time. It takes care and polishing and cannot be done in an hour the way a blog post can. At least, it can’t be done well in an hour. Like I said at the beginning, blogging is public journal writing. It has it’s own benefits, one of which is the quickness and ease that comes from the informality of the platform. That said, my plan is to reignite my interest in blogging as a medium for reflection.

On Idea Incomes: In Steal Like An Artist, Austin Kleon says:

There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income.

I think the same thing is true of idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with.

I think that this is true both online and off.

On Happiness and the Horizon: “A clear horizon” is how Alfred Hitchcock defines happiness. That seems about as good a definition as any in the concluding days of March.

Meta-MLIS? Also, hopes and plans for a post-graduation summer

Posted: 03 Jun 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Digital Workspace, Education, Internet, Library School, Reflection, Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 2 Comments »

In less than one week, on June 8th, I will have turned in the last of my school assignments. On June 11th, even though I’m not attending the commencement, I will officially be a MLIS graduate. Working on this degree over the last year and a half has, at times, been inspiring, frustrating, boring, emotional, difficult, fun and challenging.

My last semester at Binghamton University, where I double-majored in Philosophy and Pre-Law (PPL), I wrote a meta-philosophy paper as part of an independent study. I wanted to know exactly what I had just spent four years of my life thinking about and studying. Was it really important? What, if anything, did I learn from the experience?

My paper was really not that impressive and essentially said that philosophy is important even if it does not provide concrete answers because it still asks questions, advances the dialogue, blah, blah, blah. It was very abstract and, looking back, relied on a lot of weird rhetorical and creative flourishes that did not necessarily make sense and that I would never have attempted in a class assignment as it would have been a sure way to receive a poor grade in a department full of ethical philosophers.

So, the paper kind of failed on a philosophical level. However, it still is one of the most important tasks that I undertook while at BU. It was only a semester long but it was mostly self-directed. I got reading suggestions from my advisor and was allowed to write and explore in whatever way I chose. I gained a lot personally from this paper and it made me really think critically about the degree I was receiving and what it meant – and would mean – in my life. Those were the things I could not write about – yet they may be the most important.

Now that I am at the end of my MLIS I find myself wishing that I was given a chance to explore the degree in the same way. What would a meta-MLIS paper look like? It is difficult to really think critically about the MLIS degree from inside of it. Drexel is on the quarter system. So, I took five 10-week quarters starting in March 2010 and ending June 2011. The breaks between quarters I spent catching up on things that would get pushed aside during the busy 10 weeks before it. There was not much time to look inward and assess what I was learning.

But now that I am graduating and facing an unsure job market I suspect that I will have some free time for just such an endeavor and I plan to document it here. More than just writing about LIS education, I really want to figure out what I gained from it on a different level. Sure, I learned about metadata and information architecture and web design. But what else? What did I learn that is not specifically taught? How has the last five quarters changed me?

I think that a blog (specifically, this one) is a good way for me to start exploring the thoughts I touched on above. I am not necessarily saying this because I think that what I have to say is profound or even important to anyone but me. But blogs allow for conversation – even if that conversation is only perceived. They are dialectal in nature. Lacking any sort of advisor or professor as I had during my undergrad, a blog is a decent substitution.

Claire Creffield recently said this much more eloquently:

Blogging might seem (has always seemed to me) like a hideously public way of conducting personal reflection, but its saving grace is its joyful acknowledgement of the inescapably communicative nature of thought.  Blogging puts into practice a recognition that, if a private language is an impossibility, so, too, it is impossible to pursue self-knowledge by means of a wholly private use of language.

In addition to blogging about my MLIS experience, I also hope to write more about education in general and comment on some of the ideas that Michael Stephens brought up in his recent LJ column.

 

Turning off to think: thoughts about being “always on”

Posted: 19 Feb 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Internet, Reflection | Tags: , | Leave a comment »

In a post a few days ago, I ranted a bit about how LIS schools need to take a more active role in embracing new technologies.

Though there is a lot of potential for great communication and collaboration in emerging technologies, it is important to shut down every once in a while for thought and reflection. These last few weeks I have been “on” more than I have been “off.”  There have been times – while running in the dark late at night – that I realized my entire day had been mediated through a screen. These are the instances when I have to consciously remind myself to reconnect with the world around me.

In Program or be Programmed Douglas Rushkoff writes:

Our computers live in the ticks of the clock. We live in the big spaces between those ticks, when the time actually passes. By becoming “always on,” we surrender time to a technology that knows and needs no such thing.

The ticks are so much richer when we occasionally shut down and remember to explore the “big spaces between.”