kw: book reviews, fantasy, mysteries, librarians, dragons, fairies
Genevieve Cogman's fourth novel of the Invisible Library series, The Lost Plot, introduced me to her writing. She knows how to write a page-turner. I wasn't sure when I checked the book out whether it was SciFi or Fantasy—the local library doesn't differentiate; they tag both genres with a "fantasy" logo, which I consider a bit snobbish. It soon became clear; however, the author's worlds have consistent rules, making this a lot more satisfying to a logical mind than most fantasy.
The Invisible Library (IL) seems to be located in a realm between worlds, in a kind of multiverse. Worlds such as ours have little or no magic, others have more, and some are "too magical", being chaotic. The IL operates portals between worlds, or portals between the Library and all worlds. The portals have at least some time-shifting abilities also. A Librarian can traverse the portals, and indeed, create a portal when surrounded by a large enough number of books. I gather that the Librarians are in the business of gathering the best literature from all worlds, and cross-pollinating. They also act as a buffer between the Dragons and the Fae (presumably a less fraught word than "Fairy" in the current sociopolitical climate), powerful and opposed forces, that control numerous worlds of their own, and can move between them more freely than humans.
Both Dragons and Fae are shapeshifters. I am not sure why either a Dragon or a Fae would take human form. It makes writing about them easier, I suppose. Their rivalry is strong and bitter, yet they seem to "play fair", according to rules only dimly revealed in the book. Each player, Dragon, Fae, and Human, has powers they can wield. One Human power is the language called Librarian. It evokes magic in any world, and is most effective in worlds with little or none of their own, such as ours. Some of the thrill points of the book focus on efforts by one or another Dragon or Fae to keep Irene silent so she can't speak Librarian to do such things as escape capture or injure opponents.
The book's plot (not the "lost" one), revolves around two high-ranking Dragons who, faced with a quest that can make or break their clans, begin to flout the rules. This can damage whole worlds, and also imperils the IL, which alarms the ruling Dragons and Fae both…once they find out about it.
Making the transgressions known to a particular Dragon Queen becomes the onus of Irene Winters, the heroine of the story, and a Dragon named Kai, her apprentice (although no Dragon takes the Librarians' Oath to become a full Librarian).
The flow of the plot reminds me of the Perils of Pauline books and similar stories, with one cliff-hanger after another. It is basically a series of exercises in keeping unbearable forces in (or near) balance. The writing is so entertaining that I recognized the transparency only in hindsight. And, by the way, I never figured out what Plot had been Lost. Considering that both terms have multiple meanings, perhaps that's for the best. Now, if only I can figure out how to get superpowers from being surrounded by books, as I am at this desk!
Showing posts with label librarians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label librarians. Show all posts
Thursday, August 02, 2018
Wednesday, November 15, 2017
Libraries - Don't even try to live without 'em!
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, libraries, librarians
In 2014 Kyle Cassidy was invited to a librarians' conference, where he photographed and interviewed a number of the attendees. A project was born. He went to more conferences and eventually obtained portraits and quotes from more than 300 librarians. This is What a Librarian Looks Like: A Celebration of Libraries, Communities, and Access to Information couples the photos and quotes with ten essays about specific libraries by Mr. Cassidy and a baker's dozen remembrances by authors and others who share how their lives were made or molded by libraries.
Spoiler (I suppose): Librarians look like everybody else. It is how they think that makes them different. Random quotes:
When I was 19 years old, having just moved from Ohio to California, I went to the nearest library and began checking out books. At that time of my life I needed escape and I needed it badly. The library had all the science fiction books in one section, a large shelf section seven feet high. I took the first five books at the upper left and checked them out. A few days later I returned them and checked out the next five. For the next year or more I continued this until I had read the entire section of about 500 sci-fi novels and short story collections. Thereafter I slowed down and branched out. When the library began to mix fantasy in with sci-fi, and then horror (Lovecraft was popular at the time), I backed off the fiction and began reading mostly nonfiction, primarily in science (Dewey Decimal numbers 500-599).
These days, even though I am retired, I am sufficiently busy that I seldom finish more than one book weekly. Looking back at recent blog posts (more than 70% are book reviews for the past four years), I find that I average about five books monthly.
I don't use the library only to check out books, though that is behind 90% of my visits. I have attended lectures and programs; I took a guitar to their Poetry Night several years ago and sang one of my songs, which led to a special program featuring my music; the genealogy club meets there and I have attended from time to time.
During the last ten years of my career at Dupont, I was a kind of librarian. I transferred from IT to IS (info science) and I was put in charge of upgrading the software used to index and retrieve technical documents in the Electronic Document Library (EDL). For the final couple of years, we had an upper manager who thought "Google can do anything," and cut way back on the indexing staff. Indexing is the highly specialized craft of determining the major themes of an article or report, and devising an appropriate set of key terms to attach to it in a Metadata portion of its electronic version. Professional indexers (I became one) also determine when a new key term is needed in the controlled vocabulary we were using. Human indexing is still the gold standard, and no "search engine" can yet extract the right set of key terms from any document substantial enough to warrant storing in an electronic library.
When Dupont was "only" a chemical company, the term "rust" was unequivocal. It referred to an oxidation process that corroded metals, particularly iron and some similar metallic elements. But someone who was creating the earliest controlled vocabulary for Dupont was wise enough to realize that "rust" could have wider meaning, and thus an entry in the list is:
That is one illustration of a phenomenon that is common in human languages. Words have multiple usages, and their context may be clear to us but not so to software. Even now, no Google search, not even using the Advanced Search page (if you can find it), is able to robustly distinguish articles about rusting of metals from agricultural rusts.
A growing problem today goes by the misleading moniker Fake News (If it is Fake, it isn't News; it's just a Lie). Things on the Internet were bad enough when the main issue with material was ignorance on the part of the writers, the "creators of content". I think nearly any random adult knows that advertising is biased. Gather all the ads you can on toothpaste, for example, and it seems that there are at least five brands that are "recommended" by more than half of all dentists. No toothpaste ad will mention that the surveys used to gather such recommendations consisted of questions of this form:
Which of the following brands of dentifrice would you recommend (Check all that apply)?
But what do we do when a larger and larger proportion of the "news" is truly a pack of lies? When I was young it was clear that the news media were biased to the left. Now the majority of them are left-leaning with actual malice. So what can we do? I suggest: Ask a librarian how to do your own research, how to track down the source of a story. That will take more than just looking it up on snopes.com (staffed by a very busy couple who are really, really good at research).
One of the most helpful humanities courses I ever took, with a title I no longer remember, taught us how to determine the bias in any publication. We read a very wide variety of journals, from Commonweal and The Wall Street Journal to National Review and The New York Times. We were to find diverse articles about the same recent event and compare them. It was the best course in critical thinking I've encountered.
I'll avoid digging further into the fake news conundrum. We need librarians' expertise and tool set to learn how to know what we know and how to know if what we know is worth knowing. 'Nuff said.
In 2014 Kyle Cassidy was invited to a librarians' conference, where he photographed and interviewed a number of the attendees. A project was born. He went to more conferences and eventually obtained portraits and quotes from more than 300 librarians. This is What a Librarian Looks Like: A Celebration of Libraries, Communities, and Access to Information couples the photos and quotes with ten essays about specific libraries by Mr. Cassidy and a baker's dozen remembrances by authors and others who share how their lives were made or molded by libraries.
Spoiler (I suppose): Librarians look like everybody else. It is how they think that makes them different. Random quotes:
"Without librarians and instructors teaching students how to do research, many students never learn that there is a better way to do and learn things." —Lindsay Davis, University of California, Merced
"I want to nurture curiosity, feed knowledge, lay a foundation for information." —Katie Lewis, Drexel University
"Everything comes down to information. Librarians know how to use it, find it, and share it with the world, and they're ready to help everyone else do the same." —Topher Lawton, Old Dominion University.
"In the morning, I'm a rock star to a room full of preschoolers; midday, I'm a social worker assisting a recently unemployed patron in finding resources; in the afternoon, I'm an educator leading kids through an after-school science workshop. Librarians serve so many purposes and wear so many hats, but all of them change lives." —Sara Coney, San Diego County LibraryMy favorite quote about libraries is by Jorge Luis Borges: "I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library." In case, dear reader, you haven't run across an earlier mention of this: the Polymath at Large blog would not exist without libraries. To date I have written 2,075 posts. 55% of them are book reviews. Other than the ongoing series of presenting The Collected Works of Watchman Nee, I own no more than a dozen of the books I have reviewed. The rest were borrowed from one of a handful of local libraries.
When I was 19 years old, having just moved from Ohio to California, I went to the nearest library and began checking out books. At that time of my life I needed escape and I needed it badly. The library had all the science fiction books in one section, a large shelf section seven feet high. I took the first five books at the upper left and checked them out. A few days later I returned them and checked out the next five. For the next year or more I continued this until I had read the entire section of about 500 sci-fi novels and short story collections. Thereafter I slowed down and branched out. When the library began to mix fantasy in with sci-fi, and then horror (Lovecraft was popular at the time), I backed off the fiction and began reading mostly nonfiction, primarily in science (Dewey Decimal numbers 500-599).
These days, even though I am retired, I am sufficiently busy that I seldom finish more than one book weekly. Looking back at recent blog posts (more than 70% are book reviews for the past four years), I find that I average about five books monthly.
I don't use the library only to check out books, though that is behind 90% of my visits. I have attended lectures and programs; I took a guitar to their Poetry Night several years ago and sang one of my songs, which led to a special program featuring my music; the genealogy club meets there and I have attended from time to time.
During the last ten years of my career at Dupont, I was a kind of librarian. I transferred from IT to IS (info science) and I was put in charge of upgrading the software used to index and retrieve technical documents in the Electronic Document Library (EDL). For the final couple of years, we had an upper manager who thought "Google can do anything," and cut way back on the indexing staff. Indexing is the highly specialized craft of determining the major themes of an article or report, and devising an appropriate set of key terms to attach to it in a Metadata portion of its electronic version. Professional indexers (I became one) also determine when a new key term is needed in the controlled vocabulary we were using. Human indexing is still the gold standard, and no "search engine" can yet extract the right set of key terms from any document substantial enough to warrant storing in an electronic library.
When Dupont was "only" a chemical company, the term "rust" was unequivocal. It referred to an oxidation process that corroded metals, particularly iron and some similar metallic elements. But someone who was creating the earliest controlled vocabulary for Dupont was wise enough to realize that "rust" could have wider meaning, and thus an entry in the list is:
rust USE corrosionAlso, two companion entries can be found:
corrosion USE FOR oxidative decaySure enough, if you look up "oxidative decay" you will find:
corrosion USE FOR rust
oxidative decay USE corrosionWouldn't you know it: Several decades ago Dupont began producing crop protection chemicals, and some of its anti-fungal chemicals were aimed at dealing with various fungi called "rust" such as "wheat rust". Thus, some newer terms referring to fungi were added to the controlled vocabulary.
That is one illustration of a phenomenon that is common in human languages. Words have multiple usages, and their context may be clear to us but not so to software. Even now, no Google search, not even using the Advanced Search page (if you can find it), is able to robustly distinguish articles about rusting of metals from agricultural rusts.
A growing problem today goes by the misleading moniker Fake News (If it is Fake, it isn't News; it's just a Lie). Things on the Internet were bad enough when the main issue with material was ignorance on the part of the writers, the "creators of content". I think nearly any random adult knows that advertising is biased. Gather all the ads you can on toothpaste, for example, and it seems that there are at least five brands that are "recommended" by more than half of all dentists. No toothpaste ad will mention that the surveys used to gather such recommendations consisted of questions of this form:
Which of the following brands of dentifrice would you recommend (Check all that apply)?
□ Beaver BriteThere may be 10 or 20 on the list. So, of course, if you're selling DentiGood and 64% of dentists happened to check it, along with five or eight others, you can claim, "2/3 of dentists recommend DentiGood!", thinking that nobody will mind if you round 64% up to 2/3. Of course, you would never, ever mention that 3/4 or more of those same dentists also "recommend" Sani-Kleen!
□ DentiGood
...
□ Sani-Kleen
...
□ Yello-Gone!
But what do we do when a larger and larger proportion of the "news" is truly a pack of lies? When I was young it was clear that the news media were biased to the left. Now the majority of them are left-leaning with actual malice. So what can we do? I suggest: Ask a librarian how to do your own research, how to track down the source of a story. That will take more than just looking it up on snopes.com (staffed by a very busy couple who are really, really good at research).
One of the most helpful humanities courses I ever took, with a title I no longer remember, taught us how to determine the bias in any publication. We read a very wide variety of journals, from Commonweal and The Wall Street Journal to National Review and The New York Times. We were to find diverse articles about the same recent event and compare them. It was the best course in critical thinking I've encountered.
I'll avoid digging further into the fake news conundrum. We need librarians' expertise and tool set to learn how to know what we know and how to know if what we know is worth knowing. 'Nuff said.
Tuesday, September 06, 2016
Don't give up on your neighborhood library just yet
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, libraries, librarians, digital libraries
Clever geeks have been trying to replace people with mechanisms for a long, long time. "Artificial intelligence" didn't begin with Eniac in the 1940's. It didn't even begin with "The Turk", a chess playing automaton that was exhibited from about 1770 onwards, for more than 80 years. Even after it was revealed that a chess master hidden inside its cabinet was actually moving the hands, it remained a popular attraction. The earliest legend of a manufactured intelligent creature may be that of the Golem; the legends long predate the story of Rabbi Loew in the 1500's.
I have watched the hype intensify for the fifty years I have been involved with electronic computers. Marvin Minsky, in particular, made numerous predictions of things that computers would be able to do "in 20 years", "in 50 years", whatever. He was wildly optimistic. Eventually, though, humans have been bested at certain tasks we tend to associate with "intelligence," by computer systems: Chess, Go, Checkers and Jeopardy. That last, by the Watson system, required tens of thousands of hours of laborious work by more than a hundred computer scientists and database experts, and cost at least a couple of billion dollars (IBM has been coy about revealing the amount). Watson did indeed glean the highest score, but made a few silly mistakes.
During my last ten years working at Dupont, I worked with the Indexing group, spending part of my time reading technical reports—usually very quickly—and applying index labels to their metadata; and part of my time improving the computer interface used by the professional indexers. During those years, we were dogged by questions such as, "Why can't something like Google do this instead, for a lot less money?" Fifteen years earlier I had helped the Indexing group test and review software that was intended to produce the indexing labels automatically. There are a lot of "keyword generators" out there, but only one "Summarizer" seemed to produce any shadow of appropriate key terms lists. It was by far the best piece of software, but it seldom scored better than 50%, when compared to the lists of terms produced by the human indexers. I heard that, a year or so after I retired, most indexing was indeed handed over to software, and though the results are rather poor, they are indeed cost-effective, if one only thinks in the short term. Sigh.
Later, working as an indexer, I experimented with using the Summarizer: After I had gathered my own set of key terms, I would run it and it occasionally came up with a term or two that made me pause, and then add them to my own term list. With practice, and some improvements of the interface, I reckoned that an indexer might be able to save time by having the software display its list automatically after the human list was first created, because it takes no more than a few seconds to discern if any of the machine-derived terms make sense. We might have been able to save some time and also produced a little better results. But with software alone, there is no such hope, and there will not be for at least one or two (or three or more) generations.
This effort was part of the Library and Information Sciences division of the Research department. Librarians have long (thousands of years) been the keepers of the flame of knowledge. Now that "the Web" has become a ubiquitous choice for finding stuff, an index into a world-spanning online library, people are wondering, why keep our physical libraries around? Here is why. The PageRank algorithms used by Google, though they are being continually improved, actually leverage human intelligence! The largest factor in the PR ranking is still the number of pages that link to a page of interest, as a measure of how many people have found it useful.
I built a career in computer programming and information science spanning, so far, 48 years (I still work part time), based primarily on taking proper advantage of both human and machine abilities. I like to call it the Synergy of Mind and Mechanism. Some (benighted) people may think that "the internet" can replace all the functions of the 120,000 libraries across America, and the 350,000 or more worldwide. Actually, with the current flood of new information being generated, mostly by non-professionals and non-experts, the need for librarians is increasing.
All that being said, I find now a book that reaches a similar conclusion, from someone we might call a "partial insider." Though John Palfrey is not a degreed librarian, he was made head of the Harvard Law School Library, where he updated its workflows, reformed it mightily, and kept the best of its traditional "analog" character while adding great digital resources. His status as a "feral"—the librarians' derogatory term for "layman librarian"—has made many librarians look askance at his work, even though it is intended to save their jobs and even increase their numbers! His book is Biblio Tech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (for non-francophones, bibliothèque is French for "library").
The book is not nearly as polemical as I expected. The ten chapters outline nine areas in which this digital age we are entering (we've only just begun) is a complement to the "analog age", not a replacement for it. Just because something is "old" doesn't make it "obsolete" or outdated. We are surrounded by "old" things that continue to function well and may never be replaced.
So it is with libraries. Documents were collected, not because people just like to collect (as indeed they do), but because there was value in having a place where every authorized academic or student could find the key documents needed to do his work. The primary innovation in libraries was not one or another technical improvement, but the opening of formerly closed collections to the public, which began no more than 150 years ago! Libraries and the networked communications of librarians were fundamental to the development of democracy.
I believe it is still true that most of us have a liking for the local library (some 16,700 branch libraries in towns and cities in the U.S. and nearly 100,000 in our schools). But Dr. Palfrey warns that nostalgia can only go so far. To date, nostalgia has not prevented the budgets for public and school libraries, in particular, from being reduced to half of what they were a generation ago, in real terms.
Call me a Luddite: I visit the local branch library at least monthly, and usually more frequently. I still prefer reading books printed on paper. I find that I can read from a computer screen, even the most "retina"-sharp, even the latest paper-white Kindle, no more than 10-15 minutes at a stretch. I can read a paper book for a practically unlimited amount of time. Sure, the under-30 crowd can focus on their screen the whole day long, but I suspect that nearly none of them spends long stretches of time reading an e-book. They scatter their attention, "multitasking". The "eye-unfriendly" nature of every kind of screen so far invented probably has something to do with that!
Libraries and librarians do their best work in a network. This has always been so, although there is a strong tendency toward hoarding within any "collecting" profession, including museum collections as well as libraries. I would never have finished graduate school without free InterLibrary Loan (ILL) facilities. Any book I could learn the title and author for, a reference librarian could find somewhere, and have it shipped to the library or even to me, within a week. The spread of digital technologies makes networking easier than ever. For those who like e-books, ILL can now take no more than a few minutes to find and deliver a document or book…for those items that are still lendable. Chapter 9 on Law warns that digital works are frequently hard or impossible for a library to loan out. The licensing contracts called "Digital Rights Management" trump copyright law, with its specific "second sale" provisions that favor library lending. Lending a hardcopy book is practically free. Lending an e-book often costs some small licensing fee for each loan, and those can add up in a hurry. So while a $25 hardbound book may seem costly compared to the $12 license fee for an e-book (you never BUY an e-book, you license it), the residual lending-licensing fees can make an e-book much, much more costly than the hardback.
Though this book has less of a "go do this" character than I expected, it does provide great resources for librarians and those who love libraries, and great ammunition to use at those public meetings where town and county budgets are discussed. The librarians are our friends, and they need our help. Has a library near you closed recently, or is one under threat? Get two copies of this book, one for yourself and one for your friendly local librarian, and then go together to budget discussions and enter into the fray of democracy, not just as a voter but as a participant. Perhaps a future generation will look back and thank us for keeping "physical libraries" from going the way of the Dodo.
Clever geeks have been trying to replace people with mechanisms for a long, long time. "Artificial intelligence" didn't begin with Eniac in the 1940's. It didn't even begin with "The Turk", a chess playing automaton that was exhibited from about 1770 onwards, for more than 80 years. Even after it was revealed that a chess master hidden inside its cabinet was actually moving the hands, it remained a popular attraction. The earliest legend of a manufactured intelligent creature may be that of the Golem; the legends long predate the story of Rabbi Loew in the 1500's.
I have watched the hype intensify for the fifty years I have been involved with electronic computers. Marvin Minsky, in particular, made numerous predictions of things that computers would be able to do "in 20 years", "in 50 years", whatever. He was wildly optimistic. Eventually, though, humans have been bested at certain tasks we tend to associate with "intelligence," by computer systems: Chess, Go, Checkers and Jeopardy. That last, by the Watson system, required tens of thousands of hours of laborious work by more than a hundred computer scientists and database experts, and cost at least a couple of billion dollars (IBM has been coy about revealing the amount). Watson did indeed glean the highest score, but made a few silly mistakes.
During my last ten years working at Dupont, I worked with the Indexing group, spending part of my time reading technical reports—usually very quickly—and applying index labels to their metadata; and part of my time improving the computer interface used by the professional indexers. During those years, we were dogged by questions such as, "Why can't something like Google do this instead, for a lot less money?" Fifteen years earlier I had helped the Indexing group test and review software that was intended to produce the indexing labels automatically. There are a lot of "keyword generators" out there, but only one "Summarizer" seemed to produce any shadow of appropriate key terms lists. It was by far the best piece of software, but it seldom scored better than 50%, when compared to the lists of terms produced by the human indexers. I heard that, a year or so after I retired, most indexing was indeed handed over to software, and though the results are rather poor, they are indeed cost-effective, if one only thinks in the short term. Sigh.
Later, working as an indexer, I experimented with using the Summarizer: After I had gathered my own set of key terms, I would run it and it occasionally came up with a term or two that made me pause, and then add them to my own term list. With practice, and some improvements of the interface, I reckoned that an indexer might be able to save time by having the software display its list automatically after the human list was first created, because it takes no more than a few seconds to discern if any of the machine-derived terms make sense. We might have been able to save some time and also produced a little better results. But with software alone, there is no such hope, and there will not be for at least one or two (or three or more) generations.
This effort was part of the Library and Information Sciences division of the Research department. Librarians have long (thousands of years) been the keepers of the flame of knowledge. Now that "the Web" has become a ubiquitous choice for finding stuff, an index into a world-spanning online library, people are wondering, why keep our physical libraries around? Here is why. The PageRank algorithms used by Google, though they are being continually improved, actually leverage human intelligence! The largest factor in the PR ranking is still the number of pages that link to a page of interest, as a measure of how many people have found it useful.
I built a career in computer programming and information science spanning, so far, 48 years (I still work part time), based primarily on taking proper advantage of both human and machine abilities. I like to call it the Synergy of Mind and Mechanism. Some (benighted) people may think that "the internet" can replace all the functions of the 120,000 libraries across America, and the 350,000 or more worldwide. Actually, with the current flood of new information being generated, mostly by non-professionals and non-experts, the need for librarians is increasing.
All that being said, I find now a book that reaches a similar conclusion, from someone we might call a "partial insider." Though John Palfrey is not a degreed librarian, he was made head of the Harvard Law School Library, where he updated its workflows, reformed it mightily, and kept the best of its traditional "analog" character while adding great digital resources. His status as a "feral"—the librarians' derogatory term for "layman librarian"—has made many librarians look askance at his work, even though it is intended to save their jobs and even increase their numbers! His book is Biblio Tech: Why Libraries Matter More Than Ever in the Age of Google (for non-francophones, bibliothèque is French for "library").
The book is not nearly as polemical as I expected. The ten chapters outline nine areas in which this digital age we are entering (we've only just begun) is a complement to the "analog age", not a replacement for it. Just because something is "old" doesn't make it "obsolete" or outdated. We are surrounded by "old" things that continue to function well and may never be replaced.
So it is with libraries. Documents were collected, not because people just like to collect (as indeed they do), but because there was value in having a place where every authorized academic or student could find the key documents needed to do his work. The primary innovation in libraries was not one or another technical improvement, but the opening of formerly closed collections to the public, which began no more than 150 years ago! Libraries and the networked communications of librarians were fundamental to the development of democracy.
I believe it is still true that most of us have a liking for the local library (some 16,700 branch libraries in towns and cities in the U.S. and nearly 100,000 in our schools). But Dr. Palfrey warns that nostalgia can only go so far. To date, nostalgia has not prevented the budgets for public and school libraries, in particular, from being reduced to half of what they were a generation ago, in real terms.
Call me a Luddite: I visit the local branch library at least monthly, and usually more frequently. I still prefer reading books printed on paper. I find that I can read from a computer screen, even the most "retina"-sharp, even the latest paper-white Kindle, no more than 10-15 minutes at a stretch. I can read a paper book for a practically unlimited amount of time. Sure, the under-30 crowd can focus on their screen the whole day long, but I suspect that nearly none of them spends long stretches of time reading an e-book. They scatter their attention, "multitasking". The "eye-unfriendly" nature of every kind of screen so far invented probably has something to do with that!
Libraries and librarians do their best work in a network. This has always been so, although there is a strong tendency toward hoarding within any "collecting" profession, including museum collections as well as libraries. I would never have finished graduate school without free InterLibrary Loan (ILL) facilities. Any book I could learn the title and author for, a reference librarian could find somewhere, and have it shipped to the library or even to me, within a week. The spread of digital technologies makes networking easier than ever. For those who like e-books, ILL can now take no more than a few minutes to find and deliver a document or book…for those items that are still lendable. Chapter 9 on Law warns that digital works are frequently hard or impossible for a library to loan out. The licensing contracts called "Digital Rights Management" trump copyright law, with its specific "second sale" provisions that favor library lending. Lending a hardcopy book is practically free. Lending an e-book often costs some small licensing fee for each loan, and those can add up in a hurry. So while a $25 hardbound book may seem costly compared to the $12 license fee for an e-book (you never BUY an e-book, you license it), the residual lending-licensing fees can make an e-book much, much more costly than the hardback.
Though this book has less of a "go do this" character than I expected, it does provide great resources for librarians and those who love libraries, and great ammunition to use at those public meetings where town and county budgets are discussed. The librarians are our friends, and they need our help. Has a library near you closed recently, or is one under threat? Get two copies of this book, one for yourself and one for your friendly local librarian, and then go together to budget discussions and enter into the fray of democracy, not just as a voter but as a participant. Perhaps a future generation will look back and thank us for keeping "physical libraries" from going the way of the Dodo.
Sunday, September 01, 2013
Made stronger in his affliction
kw: book reviews, nonfiction, librarians, illnesses, memoirs
In 1972, I experienced three significant events. My wife divorcing me was the least significant, in the overall scheme of things. Next, as I count it today, my mother's sister's husband divorced her. Most significant, from a long-term perspective, was the story she told me, during a visit shortly after the other two, nearly simultaneous events. My uncle was a rough man, yet wonderful in ways. A geology professor and well-honored; a classically trained pianist who had taken umbrage at my guitar rendition of "Moonlight Sonata" (movement 1 only, guitar is only capable of 2-octave chords and the Sonata uses 3+ octaves); father of my biggest group of cousins and a great grill chef. Yet my aunt told of a peculiar affliction he managed to keep secret from everyone but her. She said that often, at the end of a day, he'd go a little crazy, stomping around for a while, and groaning or roaring. "Sometimes," she said, "he would hit himself, and even knock himself out with his own fists." She attributed it to self-hate. I knew the verse in Ephesians, "No man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it." I didn't comment, but marveled and remembered her words. I have had occasion in later years to know a stunning variety of people, and learned compassion for their afflictions. I learned that apparent self-hate is usually a distorted kind of self-love. I know people with several kinds of mental illnesses, and some whose symptoms were quite distressing and disturbing. But none I have met are as afflicted as my uncle, so far as I knew.
Reading Josh Harnagrave's amazing memoir has brought it all together for me. In The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family we learn of Josh's titanic struggle to live with Tourette Syndrome. His case is one of the most severe on record.
In the following I will use the abbreviation PwT for "person with Tourette's". PwT's experience numerous involuntary actions that are called "tics". A Tourette tic is, we learn, like a sneeze, but imagine every possible level of sneeze, from a silent jerk to a tiny "choo", all the way to something that seems it will blow your head off and can be heard a county away. Some sneezes we can anticipate, and perhaps stifle, or press our philtrim to stop, but others happen suddenly and without warning. Now imagine the smaller ones happening a few times per minute, and so on. A PwT may experience many smaller tics without noticing: grimaces, tiny sounds, rapid blinking and head jerks. The classic Tourette tics I read about many years ago are less common: louder grunts and shouts, even spoken words, seemingly picked at random from a common vocabulary of one-syllable words.
A side note at this point. The "travesty" program gathers all possible strings of 1 to 3 characters, including blanks and punctuation, from some moderate size text, such as a Shakespeare play or a short story by Hemingway. It arranges these statistically according to frequency of use. Then it randomly picks text snippets from this database and strings them together. The result is a piece of text that can be read aloud, is meaningless, but sounds like something written by that author. Many longer strings make actual words. Here's the interesting point. Travesties in English always contain numerous examples of the word "shit". The reason is simple. "sh" and "s" are the most common word endings, while "t" and "it" are very common word beginnings. Divorce them from the words they started with, mash them together statistically, and you get a lot of shit! (along with "st" and "sht" and so forth). Accidental occurrences of other popular swear words are not nearly so common in travesties. In addition, "shit" is one of the easiest words to say.
When a PwT is having strong vocal tics, if the sounds resemble words, they are likely to be words that are easy to say, and "shit" tops the list. Thus arose the common perception that PwT's swear constantly. Actually, they don't. A few who have more frequent vocal tics make such words mainly by accident. They have no more control over the sound than any of us have over a sneeze, once it begins. If a series of vocal tics is a series of swear words, the PwT probably has partial control, and is swearing his (rarely her) heart out, with good reason!
I won't attempt to summarize Josh's life story. Rather, two items stand out. Firstly, in his late twenties, he began having more violent tics, which began when he slugged himself, drawing blood. Throughout the book, he describes how he could sometimes control the tics for a short time, but this would be followed by a more severe series of outbursts. He had a kind of theory that a certain amount of energy had to be expended in tics each day, and it was better to have a lot of littler ones. Once he began having such dangerous tics, he became more desperate to learn to control them. He had learned that vigorous exercise seemed to quell the tics for a time, or perhaps he was channeling their energy into his iron-pumping motions. But this resulted in great strength, and he was getting seriously hurt. Then (the second item) he stumbled on an extreme strength trainer named Adam T. Glass, who taught him a different way to think about himself and Tourette's. In particular, he needed to think about motions, and which ones helped or hurt. Over time, Josh began to focus on breathing. With time and patience and effort, he gained a measure of control. Spoiler alert: Then Adam confided that he is autistic. Josh writes that it took a different kind of mind to see through what others could not.
This is not the end of the story. Today Josh is 35 or so, and has found that some techniques that once helped have become less effective, but by focusing on motions that help or hurt, has learned to modify what he does to retain some semblance of balance and control. In all this, I am amazed at the composure and support he gets from his wife. He and his family are Mormon, and at times in his life he was helped by his faith. He explains some aspects of Mormonism "from the inside". He is closer to an agnostic stance now, yet acknowledges the comfort faith can bring.
I wonder how my uncle and aunt would have fared if my uncle's affliction, which was probably Tourette's, were more appropriately dealt with. He had apparently learned to bottle up his tics while in the classroom or among us, but paid for it with damaging outbursts later. He lived to be nearly 75. I hope Josh does better than my uncle did. He certainly has a better handle on it than anyone had 40 years ago. His web site contains a blog and helpful links for PwT's. And you can find more about Adam T. Glass here.
In 1972, I experienced three significant events. My wife divorcing me was the least significant, in the overall scheme of things. Next, as I count it today, my mother's sister's husband divorced her. Most significant, from a long-term perspective, was the story she told me, during a visit shortly after the other two, nearly simultaneous events. My uncle was a rough man, yet wonderful in ways. A geology professor and well-honored; a classically trained pianist who had taken umbrage at my guitar rendition of "Moonlight Sonata" (movement 1 only, guitar is only capable of 2-octave chords and the Sonata uses 3+ octaves); father of my biggest group of cousins and a great grill chef. Yet my aunt told of a peculiar affliction he managed to keep secret from everyone but her. She said that often, at the end of a day, he'd go a little crazy, stomping around for a while, and groaning or roaring. "Sometimes," she said, "he would hit himself, and even knock himself out with his own fists." She attributed it to self-hate. I knew the verse in Ephesians, "No man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it." I didn't comment, but marveled and remembered her words. I have had occasion in later years to know a stunning variety of people, and learned compassion for their afflictions. I learned that apparent self-hate is usually a distorted kind of self-love. I know people with several kinds of mental illnesses, and some whose symptoms were quite distressing and disturbing. But none I have met are as afflicted as my uncle, so far as I knew.
Reading Josh Harnagrave's amazing memoir has brought it all together for me. In The World's Strongest Librarian: A Memoir of Tourette's, Faith, Strength, and the Power of Family we learn of Josh's titanic struggle to live with Tourette Syndrome. His case is one of the most severe on record.
In the following I will use the abbreviation PwT for "person with Tourette's". PwT's experience numerous involuntary actions that are called "tics". A Tourette tic is, we learn, like a sneeze, but imagine every possible level of sneeze, from a silent jerk to a tiny "choo", all the way to something that seems it will blow your head off and can be heard a county away. Some sneezes we can anticipate, and perhaps stifle, or press our philtrim to stop, but others happen suddenly and without warning. Now imagine the smaller ones happening a few times per minute, and so on. A PwT may experience many smaller tics without noticing: grimaces, tiny sounds, rapid blinking and head jerks. The classic Tourette tics I read about many years ago are less common: louder grunts and shouts, even spoken words, seemingly picked at random from a common vocabulary of one-syllable words.
A side note at this point. The "travesty" program gathers all possible strings of 1 to 3 characters, including blanks and punctuation, from some moderate size text, such as a Shakespeare play or a short story by Hemingway. It arranges these statistically according to frequency of use. Then it randomly picks text snippets from this database and strings them together. The result is a piece of text that can be read aloud, is meaningless, but sounds like something written by that author. Many longer strings make actual words. Here's the interesting point. Travesties in English always contain numerous examples of the word "shit". The reason is simple. "sh" and "s" are the most common word endings, while "t" and "it" are very common word beginnings. Divorce them from the words they started with, mash them together statistically, and you get a lot of shit! (along with "st" and "sht" and so forth). Accidental occurrences of other popular swear words are not nearly so common in travesties. In addition, "shit" is one of the easiest words to say.
When a PwT is having strong vocal tics, if the sounds resemble words, they are likely to be words that are easy to say, and "shit" tops the list. Thus arose the common perception that PwT's swear constantly. Actually, they don't. A few who have more frequent vocal tics make such words mainly by accident. They have no more control over the sound than any of us have over a sneeze, once it begins. If a series of vocal tics is a series of swear words, the PwT probably has partial control, and is swearing his (rarely her) heart out, with good reason!
I won't attempt to summarize Josh's life story. Rather, two items stand out. Firstly, in his late twenties, he began having more violent tics, which began when he slugged himself, drawing blood. Throughout the book, he describes how he could sometimes control the tics for a short time, but this would be followed by a more severe series of outbursts. He had a kind of theory that a certain amount of energy had to be expended in tics each day, and it was better to have a lot of littler ones. Once he began having such dangerous tics, he became more desperate to learn to control them. He had learned that vigorous exercise seemed to quell the tics for a time, or perhaps he was channeling their energy into his iron-pumping motions. But this resulted in great strength, and he was getting seriously hurt. Then (the second item) he stumbled on an extreme strength trainer named Adam T. Glass, who taught him a different way to think about himself and Tourette's. In particular, he needed to think about motions, and which ones helped or hurt. Over time, Josh began to focus on breathing. With time and patience and effort, he gained a measure of control. Spoiler alert: Then Adam confided that he is autistic. Josh writes that it took a different kind of mind to see through what others could not.
This is not the end of the story. Today Josh is 35 or so, and has found that some techniques that once helped have become less effective, but by focusing on motions that help or hurt, has learned to modify what he does to retain some semblance of balance and control. In all this, I am amazed at the composure and support he gets from his wife. He and his family are Mormon, and at times in his life he was helped by his faith. He explains some aspects of Mormonism "from the inside". He is closer to an agnostic stance now, yet acknowledges the comfort faith can bring.
I wonder how my uncle and aunt would have fared if my uncle's affliction, which was probably Tourette's, were more appropriately dealt with. He had apparently learned to bottle up his tics while in the classroom or among us, but paid for it with damaging outbursts later. He lived to be nearly 75. I hope Josh does better than my uncle did. He certainly has a better handle on it than anyone had 40 years ago. His web site contains a blog and helpful links for PwT's. And you can find more about Adam T. Glass here.
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