Library girl (that would be me)

I've been busy with school. The bulk of my reading has had to do with information science, or management theory (or political blogs or the ever-present New Yorkers, which have gotten the best of me again.) And even my airplane reading on the flight back from Hawaii turned out to be related to school...

Which takes me to Quiet, Please: Dispatches from a Public Librarian, from McSweeney's contributer and Anaheim librarian Scott Douglas. Douglas is about my age. Except he started working as a library page in college, and then went straight to library school. So he's been official for something like 5 or 6 years. And working in libraries for more like 10. (Also, most of my classmates are already longtime employees of some library or another. This makes me nervous for my future career prospects. How am I going to get hired when everyone else already has way more experience? Answer: quit my day job and get unpaid internships?) Anyway, I'm going to say that Douglas has certain writing quirks that mark him as part of the Dave Eggers cadre. (I'm not sure what I even mean by that, and am afraid of getting myself into trouble, so I'm just going to link to a wiki post for Eggers, and make a vague reference to a sort of self-referential, insouciant, nerdy hipsterism.) He also reminded me - with his penchant for wanting to share more information than he can possibly fit in through use of footnotes and "for shelving" asides - of David Foster Wallace, which just makes me sad.

Anyway. Douglas is funny. I laughed. He is good at noting the ridiculous. Yet everytime he edges toward being mean, he tries to take a step back, and I believe he is fundamentally a good guy who just happens to love telling a good story. None of the story of his time in school at SJSU or his early days at the library particularly makes me excited about what lies ahead. In fact, I sat at the airport wondering if I could run out of there and just live on my uncle's couch in Honolulu and swim in his building's beautiful new saltwater pool. But that's a life dilemma for another moment.

And Douglas isn't all "working in a library with librarians is C.R.A.Z.Y." He mocks them, and says they really don't read (working with books too much kills some of the joy, like Dr. Franzblau in this episode). But still, libraries will always be "the gateway to something greater." And the community that they inspire as they serve the community (tortured sentence structure, I know) is really something special.