And it really felt like 27 years

History of the Peloponnesian War - Thucydides, trans. Rex Warner (Penguin Books, 1972 sorta)

Ten years ago, in my first week of grad school as a doctoral student in history, I was assigned both Thucydides and the Histories of Herodotus. For one class. Maybe I could have done that by the following semester, but it was essentially a non-starter. I got some ways into Thucydides, realized I could either finish it or start Herodotus, and so switched over.

And just like Sparta and Athens took a break of about eight years in the middle of their war, I took a nice long break before coming back to it. (And of course, re-starting from the beginning.)

This book is a beast. In short, starting in 431 B.C. the Greeks had their own World War. The Athenian and Spartan "empires" went at each other, often using proxy armies and invading/fomenting revolution in various other cities. They "laid waste the land" pretty much all the time. And there were lots of pretty speeches laying out reasons for and against various actions.

Eventually, Athens loses their upper hand by deciding it's a bang-up idea to go invade Sicily. This turns out to be a very bad idea, and eventually (although the work is unfinished and actually ends with an Athenian victory at sea) they fall entirely. But lots of detail in between.

Thucydides wrote essentially contemporaneously, although over the course of 27 years he had time to clean things up and insert additional information. Fortunately, his goal was to write an enduring work, so he really took time in crafting it (and hopefully in getting the details correct).

There are so many cities and politicians and generals and most of the time I couldn't remember who was on which side. Which makes for poor work in really understanding the ins and outs of the war, but was fine for providing a general arc of the brutal and complicated war and the set of shifting allegiances that brought Athens down. It took forever to read -- and required lots of stops and desires for lighter fare (I actually picked up Breaking Dawn last night) -- but I'm glad I finally did it. Now onto the next challenge.

Boo...

Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society - Jean-Claude Schmitt, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (University of Chicago Press, 1998)

Why hello historical monograph. I carved out time to do a quick read (not quite a skim, but close) of this very scholarly work over the last few days. It exercised the muscles I developed in grad school the first time around, when I was reading at least 1000 pages weekly of history, philosophy, primary texts, etc. I was so good at reading for content and argument then. But in the intervening years, those skills have waned quite a bit.

But not so much that I couldn't get into the text. Schmitt is exploring the role of ghosts in medieval culture, primarily how they (or rather the way people talked about them) evolved. The church played a primary role, of course, but there was some amount of room for older traditions of the dead. Anyway, there was a lot of souls stuck in purgatory, asking those still living to do something (pray, make financial arrangements) to better their lot in the afterlife. And somehow there was a tie-in to the tradition of charivari, which was more typically related to marriages that threatened society in some way (widowers taking young wives, widows remarrying unexpectedly, cuckolding). But the point is clearly that ghosts exist because of the function they serve for the living.

As a fan of the social construction of pretty much everything, I am down with this. And it's convincing. And yet, as a believer in ghosts - or at my most skeptical, an agnostic - I find myself working facing a bit of a quandary. If ghosts manifest in response to social expectations and constructions, can they still have an objective reality? I vote yes, although I can't imagine Schmitt agrees with me.

Librarians to the Rescue

This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All - Marilyn Johnson (HarperCollins, 2010)

For the past two months, I have been working on my e-Portfolio, the culminating project for my MLIS. As I have pondered core competencies and looked for evidence that I have met them, I have been guided by Johnson's humorous and impassioned look at the library profession. She's popped up in 3 or 4 of my essays, and thus I don't have much desire to pull a lot of quotes for you here.

But I will recommend this book to library-lovers, as well as those who are interested in how we are navigating the Information Age. Also those who like charming looks at the hidden sides of "boring" professions.

Johnson covers a lot of territory - I remember hearing first that she gets into librarianship in Second Life and other adventures in cyberspace. And yes, she does. But that's only one part of it. She talks about Radical Reference and librarians out of the streets, hawking their trade for social justice. She talks about cataloging, and the cultural importance of good subject headings, the economic value of libraries, the tension between scholars and the general public at renowned institutions like NYPL, and the value of reading as a reliable cure for racing thoughts. (It was a relief to be reminded I'm not the only one who does this.)

Did she get everything perfect? Doubtful. Will she save librarianship? That's too loaded a question to even tackle. But it's a fun and often witty reminder that my chosen profession is home to as much variety and opportunity as I could ever hope for. (Provided I ever actually find a job.)

Spun sugar

Bet Me - Jennifer Crusie (St. Martin's Press, 2004)

Over the summer, I did some research on genre fiction and along the way came across a reader's advisory guide to romance fiction that pointed me toward Crusie. I couldn't tell you what it said, but I noted the name with a "maybe I'll check this out sometime" sort of attitude.

So Bet Me takes on your typical mis-matched, romantic comedy couple. She's serious and a bit overweight, he's hot shit with a bad reputation. And thanks to a pile of misunderstandings all set off by a ridiculous bet by her ex, they end up on a date. Which is where fate takes over.

This book was insanely charming. I found everybody adorable. Friends, sidekicks, evil exes and family... it was like living in a little fairy world. With great banter. Seriously, the banter - and not just between Min & Cal - was really well-done. When I read romance, I tend to read it with a cynical eye. (Because I am - or ought to be - too cool for it, too intellectual for it.) But maybe because I'm trying to be more sincere in my enthusiasms in general, or maybe just because Crusie got past my defenses, I was sorta smitten. It was a really sweet reading experience.

Russian! Books! Stanford!

The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them - Elif Batuman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

This book has a whole bunch of things I love:

• A regular New Yorker contributor as author
• Lots of talk about my alma mater and professors I knew
• Russian books and Russian history
• A good sense of humor

Once upon a time (sometime late 2000 through 2001), Roz Chast did a cartoon for the New Yorker that was a series of "thank you" cards to Ralph Nader for playing spoiler to Al Gore. I remember this well because my ex-boyfriend was apoplectic about this. As a result, I never see her work without thinking of that. And here she is, with the cover design, this of lots of wild-eyed readers and one manic, dancing book. But all of this is besides the point because...

Elif Batuman is delightful. Is it obnoxious and conceited to say she reminds me a little bit of myself? Her comical accounts of the "adventures" of the subtitle are interwoven with consider detail and exposition about lots of random facts about literature, history, geography, etc. She passes up few teachable moments.

I found myself laughing aloud several times while reading this book (which is a collection of essays about her adventures in undergrad & grad school as a student of Russian literature, many involving travel), and when I tried to explain what was so funny, it didn't translate. So I'm not sure it will here either, but here are a few of my favorite moments:

On Derrida: Elif is "someone who likes to keep to a minimum her visits to Planet Derrida--that land where all seemingly secondary phenomena are actually primary, and anything you can think of doing is an act of violence, practically by virtue of your having thought about it using some words that were also known to Aristotle..."

"Babel in California" is chock full of awesome, particularly picking up Babel's surviving partner and their daughter, working with Hoover, and other daughter Nathalie Babel's speech as rendered by Batuman.

Also this moment, which manages to contain a deeply-held belief and be hilarious at the same time:

...one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for? On these grounds I once became impatient with a colleague at a conference, who was trying to convince me that the Red Cavalry cycle would never be totally accessible to me because of Lyutov's "specifically Jewish alienation."
"Right," I finally said. "A s a six-foot-tall first-generation Turkish woman growing up in New Jersey, I cannot possibly know as much about alienation as you, a short American Jew."
He nodded: "So you see the problem."

Older Russian women have a great perspective on the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

An Uzbek janitor giving Elif's boyfriend sex advice, because it's unthinkable that she would be childless at 24. The "husband" must be doing something wrong.

Utterly amazing quote by Tolstoy (too long to post in full) about that misty half-understanding of poetry in a foreign language... "once I deciphered its true meaning, there were many cases in which I missed the poem I had invented..." - this is a feeling I have about songs all the time.

A couple things I liked less: Batuman doesn't have much nice to say about Orhan Pamuk. This hurts my feelings a little bit, but okay. And at one point I found myself troubled by how often she recounted held truths, most often of foreigners, in ways that made them clearly and patently ridiculous. Then I realized the foolishness wasn't endemic to that culture itself, but rather to all cultures, or all held and unquestioned truths.

I'm really just scratching the surface. This book was tailor-made for me. But if you like Russian literature and/or have dealt with being in grad school in the humanities, you might also find it filled with fun.

History = yay; libraries = yay. History of libraries = zzzz

I am lazy. Therefore...

History of Libraries of the Western World by Michael H. Harris


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I like libraries. I like history. So there's really no reason this book should have put me to sleep so often. :(
It's not all boring though, and it particularly gets better in the second half when it moves onto modern library history.

View all my reviews >>

The Post-College Years

A Fortunate Age - Joanna Smith Rakoff (Scribner, 2009)

No citations, but I heard lots of mixed reviews about this modern-day homage to Mary McCarthy's The Group (which I haven't read, but apparently if I had read it, I would have known pretty much the major plot points of this novel). Enough that I wasn't really interested in reading it for the longest time. I forget what made me decide to add it to my list.

Regardless, I'm glad I did. Because I found the characters often terrifyingly familiar. There's something about coming out of an elite college or university and then making your way in the real world that perhaps happens to us all. There's a weird juxtaposition between who we are able to be in college and who we must be outside, for better or worse. I'm just about the same age as the characters when the novel ends (well, a little younger, but not much) and I can't really say that my life looks like any of theirs. (The differences between 1994 and 2001 matter a lot too.) But there is something there that transcends that.

Anyway, the novel jumps around between the major characters, a group of friends from Oberlin who all congregate in New York (most of them being from the region anyway). Most of the really big life-changing events - except Lil's wedding, which opens the novel - take place off stage. You see the lead up to them, and then suddenly we've jumped and they've already occurred. It challenges the notion, to some extent, of what is truly important, what matters the most.

And what strikes me the most is how much of growing up is about letting go. And how difficult that can be.

Making books, old-school

Scribes, Script and Books: The Book Arts from Antiquity to the Renaissance - Leila Avrin (American Library Association, 1991)

Sometimes I read books for school. Mostly I read PDFs of journal articles, but there are books too. And I just read this one for my course on the history of the book. (Technically it's the history of books and libraries, but apparently with this instructor, just the book.)

This book is pretty cool. It's laid out like a textbook. Lots and lots of graphics -plates, figures, maps. It averaged over 1 per page. So you could see examples of the evolution of pictograms into letters, and of scrolls and writing tools. Plus, it makes the text (8 1/2 x 11 pages) seem a little less daunting.

Avrin starts with writing and the alphabet and then moves on to ancient books/scroll/manuscripts through various eras and geographic locations. We get the Greek book, the Hebrew book, the Islamic book, plus lots of handwritten codices, manuscript and papyrus making, illumination, and bookbinding. What I suppose I most enjoyed was thinking about how much the transmission of information has both changed and stayed the same over thousands of years. And how much information we've be able to glean from the objects that made it through history.

And again, lots of cool illustrations. I can't really see this book being of much use to someone who isn't, say, studying the topic, but if that happens to be you, then I'd recommend the book. :)

Why my messy apartment is like Wikipedia

Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder - David Weinberger
New York: Holt, 2007

The semester starts later this week. I guess I don't mind, but it's not something I'm looking forward to in the way that I used to look forward to the new quarter and my new classes. Maybe because I'm only taking one class, and because I'm doing it during my busy time at work. Anyway, to prepare, my professor asked us to read the book above, in order to get a perspective about the possibilities for information in the digital age.

Weinberger's got a little Malcolm Gladwell in him; he likes to use interesting anecdotes to illuminate a broader theory. In this case, the theme is that instead of having an order of a single place and category for everything, we can now assign things multiple places and categories, sorting and resorting them according to our own individual needs and wants at that moment. (Note to self: should tag blog posts and photos better)

This argument necessarily embraces a seeming paradox about the desireability of having a glut of information. For example, "if [businesses] make their information messier, it'll be easier to find" and (italics Weinberger's) "the solution to the overabundance of information is more information."

While talking about some of the most popular Web 2.0 sites out there (and the way other sites have incorporated similar strategies), Weinberger has also reminded me about how exciting it will be to be a social historian of this era, sorting through this messy and miscellaneous pile of information about ourselves and what we deem important. Flickr alone could keep a researcher going for years. (Of course, what a historian leaves out is almost as interesting as what she includes, and with all this information, there will be an awful lot to leave out.)

What will be truly interesting will be to see how Weinberger's analysis stands up over time, as the trends towards miscellany continue and shift, and maybe reverse. What will the online world look like in the future?

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.

Mmm, history...

My first week as a grad student, Prof. K assigned both Herodotus and Thucydides for us to read and come back to discuss the next week. (Um, right. So I made it about 1/3 to 1/2 through each. Isn't 600 pages for one class as a baby grad student enough???) And then school got crazy - and then I left - and I've never finished reading them. I want to though! And after reading Daniel Mendelsohn's recent New Yorker article on Herodotus I might even find the wherewithal to do so.

First off, most awesome depiction of H ever: he was "like having an embarrassing parent along on a family vacation. All you wanted to do was put some distance between yourself and him, loaded down as he was with his guidebooks, the old Brownie camera, the gimcrack souvenirs—and, of course, that flowered polyester shirt." (Mendelsohn and co. originally preferred Thucydides. I, on the other hand, hate all that on vacations but LOVE it in my histories.)

Anyway, the article is awesome; it makes me want to go back to the books soon soon soon, and even compares H's style to that of "War & Peace" and the events covered to America's current escapades in the Middle East. So look for some ancient history coming to this blog sometime this summer...

SMART goal accomplished!

I don't know if it's officially a smart goal since I don't think I ever set a deadline or anything, but this evening I submitted my application for library school. Left to do: sending two transcripts and a one-page form. So maybe it's not entirely accomplished, but my credit card is being charged $64.75 (application fee plus Berkeley's fee to send my ONE CLASS transcript), so I'm not backing out.