T. Scott

1st Day In 1st Grade

"What do you think you're going to like best about first grade, Bug?"

"I'm not sure, 'cause I've never been there before.  But I think it'll be reading and learning."  I like the distinction.  "I know what I'm going to miss the most, though -- nap time!"  She grins and I can't tell if she's kidding.  She insists that she's not.

That was a couple of weeks ago.

The other day I asked her how many books she's read this summer.  "Two hundred and eighty-eight," she replies, promptly.  When I suggest that she's exaggerating she gets mock-angry with me.  "No, really!" she says.

At dinner last night her Mom gave her a back to school kit -- her crayons and markers and glue and scissors.  A marker board that she can write "gymnastics" or "dance" on in the evening before bed so she knows what stuff to take with her in the morning.  And her own alarm clock, with an iPad dock.  We tease her that she'll be able to have Justin Bieber wake her up in the morning now.  This embarrasses her only a little.

Marian called this morning after getting Josie on the bus.  She showed Josie how to work her alarm clock last night before bed.  "When it goes off, you get up and turn it off, like this.  Then wash up, brush your teeth, get dressed, brush your hair, make your bed, and then make sure that I'm awake."

She listened this morning (having actually set her alarm to go off slightly before Josie's).  Heard it go off, heard Josie shuffling around, getting ready, coming in to check on her.   And when she peeked into Josie's room the bed was made!  "I wish it could be like this every morning!" said Marian.  "I know it won't be."  But we agreed that it was a great start.

Marian has responsibility for rounding up parents to help out with buses and cafeteria trays these first two weeks.  So I'll go out tomorrow afternoon to help guide the kindergarteners onto the appropriate buses.  I hope I don't scare 'em.

Sometimes you just need to talk....

It seemed as if the unstated subtext of most of the conferences & meetings I went to this spring was that the boundaries between publishers and librarians is getting increasingly porous.  Geoff Bilder made it explicit in his plenary session at the MLA meeting when he referred to a presentation that John Unsworth gave at the Society for Scholarly Publishing meeting several years ago titled, "Pubrarians and Liblishers: New Roles for Old Foes."   Increasingly, librarians are starting to move into the publishing space and publishers are worrying about things that used to be the exclusive domain of librarians.

Despite this, we're still too often talking past each other, or not talking at all.  We need more conversation.  Which is why one of the most enjoyable things I did was the SSP "Chat With A Librarian" roundtables.  Jean's done a good writeup of the event for the SSP website.  The room was packed and ninety minutes flew by.  We could easily have gone on longer.

Jean and I, along with Norm Frankel, will be using some of the feedback from that session to develop the Chicago Collaborative's "Libraries 101" modules, designed to present the broad array of library issues to people in publishing.  The evidence of the SSP session is that many people in publishing are very hungry for more information about how libraries really operate and what librarians really want.

Anything that can foster more conversation will help.  As those boundaries continue to become even more porous we're going to need the expertise of everybody involved in the scholarly communication chain more than ever.

 

 

It's Not About "Balance"

Jean asked if we miss the traveling when we're home for an extended stretch.

 "I'm good for about six weeks," I said.  "And then I start getting eager to go somewhere again."

 It's been an exceptionally busy spring.  Since mid-April I have been home exactly two weekends.  It hasn't all been work -- last weekend was Salt Lake City for MEY's retirement, and the weekend before was band camp in Memphis.  And I've followed my usual practice of building in an extra day on most of my work trips so that I've got a day to play and feed my head.  (Which gave me the opportunity, in one remarkable 5 week period, to get to the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, along with several other notable museums.  And some fine dive bars.)

 I still enjoy the travel experience and despite the complaints & horror stories that one hears so often about air travel, I'm rarely inconvenienced too much -- or maybe it's just that I don't spend much time dwelling on the inconveniences.

In the front of my travel journal I list the cities that I've been to while using that particular volume.  The current one starts on February 23 of this year and the list is fourteen cities long.

 I've been able to do some of those journeys bringing only the iPad and leaving the laptop at home.  Depends on how much, and what kind of work I'm planning on getting done while I'm on the road.  If it's just email (and there is always email) the iPad has turned out to be completely sufficient.  It typically takes about an hour a day for me to get email handled and I can just about always squeeze that time out of the day, no matter how hectic the schedule is.

 If I'm working on a document or a presentation, however, I'll take the laptop.  In any case, I'm always in touch.  I very rarely bother with an out-of-office message.  I can't imagine maintaining this kind of schedule if I wasn't able to keep connected in that way.

 I saw a blog post recently where someone was trying to work out the work/life balance thing.  I rejected that notion years ago.  There was a point, probably a couple of years after I moved to Birmingham, that I realized the distinction between my "work day" and the rest of my day had evaporated.  It's not that "my life is my work" or anything like that -- it's that the time that I spend doing the things that I get paid for is seamlessly interwoven with the time that I spend doing other things.  As I've said before, I'm a library director 24 hours a day, but I'm also a doting grandfather 24 hours a day, and an amateur musician and a husband and all of those other roles that I partake of -- 24 hours a day.  I don't need to balance a duality -- I need to manage my time so that all of those roles get the time that they deserve. 

Still, as much as I enjoy the traveling and am able to interweave my responsibilities and pleasures, it does get tiring, so I'm very happy to be home for a stretch now.  As luck would have it, my next flight is five weeks from tomorrow.

When The Chef Is Having Fun...

If you cook often, you come to realize how much your mood affects how your meals turn out.   I come home weary and distracted and I make a dish that I've made many times before and I am sure that I am doing it in exactly the same way that I have in the past but it ends of up tasting uninspired -- fine, but nothing special.   Three weeks later, I'm trying the same dish but I'm in a mood where I'm loving what I'm doing and taking tremendous pleasure from it.  I still don't think that I'm doing anything different in terms of ingredients and amounts and heat and time...  but the food tastes better.  And it tastes better to Lynn, too, no matter what her moods may have been.

So it's become my standard practice in a restaurant, when everything on the menu looks interesting, and I can't make up my mind what I'm in the mood for, to ask the server to bring me whatever the chef "is having the most fun with tonight."

This only works, of course, when you have a chef who really knows what he or she is doing, and that was definitely the case last week when we had dinner at Tangled Up In Blue in tiny Taylors Falls, Minnesota, about an hour or so from the Twin Cities.

We went early, since we wanted to be able to get back to the Inn in time to watch the sunset from our porch.  It's still early in the season, so we were the only people there when we arrived.  The interior is, unsurprisingly, done up in various hues of blue, dusted with sparkles.  Wine bottles, sculptural fixtures, small candles on the tables; the place calms and invites.  It is intimate and welcoming with the sense that someone has turned the front half of their house into a casual, but sophisticated, dining space.

A nicely wide-ranging menu with a variety of seafoods & meats -- including bison, which Lynn was immediately intrigued by.  Everything looked interesting, everything looked good, and I wasn't in the mood to have to make my own choices.

So when the server came, I ordered wine and we ordered appetizers, and then, after Lynn expressed interest in the bison, I said, "Whenever I'm in a place where everything on the menu looks good..." and Lynn interrupted, laughing, "I know just what you're going to say."  And so we explained, and the server grinned and said, "I may have to have the chef come out and talk to you."

A little while later, Paul appears at our table, a little quizzical.  I explain my theory about how having fun affects your cooking and he smiles and nods.  I tell him that Lynn's in the mood to try something with the bison, but I'm up for whatever he wants to do.  He sees that we've ordered a big red wine, so he suggests that if he goes with the bison for Lynn, he can do something with a filet mignon for me.  "That works,"  I say. 

As he turns to the kitchen Lynn calls out, "Oh, and with red meat we're definitely rare to medium-rare people."  He turns, with an even bigger grin, and says, "I love you guys!"

Turns out that one of the things Paul is particularly good at (at least on the evidence of this one meal) is mixing sweet and spicy in perfectly balanced but unexpected ways.  My filet (a beautiful piece of meat in and of itself) came with a semi-spicy roasted pepper and raisin risotto topped w/ toasted almonds.  There were cilantro lime carrots and the sauce was honey habanero.  Lynn's strip steak was possibly the tenderest, most flavorful piece of bison she's ever had (and she'll go for the bison whenever she sees it on a menu) with carrot potato gnocchi, wilted spinach /w tomatoes, sauteed zucchini & squash and a bleu cheese demi glaze.

We traded up a bit, just to compare, but he'd done a perfect job of picking for each of us.  I laughed when he came out to check on us -- "As far as our own cooking goes," I pointed out.  "Lynn's the one who makes gnocchi and I'm the one who does risotto."  You'd think he knew.

At the end of the meal, it's not as if we needed dessert, but they do bananas foster, flamed at the table.  Why not?  It seemed like an appropriately celebratory way to end a marvelous meal.

I hope that Paul had fun -- he was certainly carrying a big smile at the end of the night.  So did we.  We were stuffed.  We were happy.  We were hoping we can figure out a way to get back there one day.

 

 

 

Reading E

Lynn sends me an Unshelved comic that, while it may not entirely reflect my experience of reading on the iPad, sure does resonate.

I read Turkle's book on the iPad and I've started The Information (so far I'm only getting books in which the iPad itself has at least a bit part).

Here's what I like: 

I can write notes of any length (or, at least, I haven't hit a word limit yet).  Since I have to type them (which is easy enough with the wireless keyboard) they're more legible than my handwriting ever is, and I don't have to squeeze them into the margins of the page.  In a print book that is really engaging, this sometimes gets ludicrously messy.  I really like that you can then go to the front and see a list of all of the places that you've underlined or noted and go right to them.

With the case that Marian gave me, I can easily prop it up and read while I'm eating lunch.

I love that you can touch an endnote number and go right to it and come back.

What I don't like: 

Blocking the passage that I want to highlight or attach a note to is very awkward. More than half the time it takes me two or three trys to get it to stick. This interrupts the flow of the reading. Very different from just having a pen in hand to underline or annotate as you go along.

There's no variation in marks.  You can highlight or attach a note, but that's it.  When I'm reading I underline, use check marks and circles and stars and a whole iconography that I've developed over 50 years of reading and writing in books.  I feel bereft. 

I was startled, when I started The Information, at how much I didn't like the fact that it looks exactly like the Turkle book.  It's a different book.  It ought to look and feel different.

 

The technology will get better.  We are so much in the early stages of this.  No doubt a scholar in Alexandria who was used to papyrus scrolls was very frustrated the first time he came across a codex.  This'll never take off, he would've thought.

Still, it's hard for me to imagine that an electronic version could ever be better than the equivalent print book.  It can be different.  It can do different things, and be much better at those things.  Josie loves the electronic version of The Monster at the End of This Book.  But when she goes to that she's playing with a toy, she's not reading a book.  Not for a moment does she think that it's equivalent to reading the book (which she also loves).  They're different experiences.  Both worthwhile, but fundamentally different.

I'm trying to imagine the technology getting to the point where I would prefer the electronic version of a print book.  But unless the "book" does different things, I can't see why I would -- and then it's no longer a "version" of a print book.  It's something else.

I do love that endnote feature, though.

Me, Twitter?

Bart & Gabe are determined to see how far they can push the use of twitter at this year's MLA conference.  They want to use my Doe Lecture to seed some of the discussion before and during the meeting, so I just sent Bart some questions that he can use for the "Twitter Tutorial" that they're cooking up later this month.

As I understand it, they'll use the questions as the basis for generating some twitter discussion so that people can get used to re-tweeting and using hashtags and embedding stuff and whatever else it is that people do with twitter.  As someone who is pretty twitter-averse I find my participation in this to be tremendously amusing.

I have an account.  I'm following 65 people and am followed by 61.  But I almost never put anything up, other than a note when I've put up a new blog post (not that there's been much of that lately).   Since June 2008, when I signed up, I have precisely 130 tweets.

I keep an eye on it, but mostly because I find Rosanne Cash to be wonderfully hilarious.   But now, even the president of my university is trying to tweet something every day or so.

Gabe, who I actually don't follow (I probably should) and I have had a number of long talks, particularly as he's been planning for the conference, on how twitter can be used productively.  I remain agnostic about it's potential value to me, but interested.

Last year, I followed the twitter feed for the Doe Lecture from my hotel room. It didn't give me much of a sense of what Ana was actually saying, but it did give me a good feel for the emotional temperature of the room and how well-received the talk was.  (I did watch the video of it later on, which then helped to make sense of some of the tweets).

I know that what Bart & Gabe are after is real conversation -- the feel of taking half a dozen people and putting them in a bar after a good lecture and listening to them talking animatedly about it.  Can you create something like that among a much larger group of people who aren't all in the same place?

I don't know. I don't track twitter discussions enough to have examples of where I think it has really worked well.  But it's worth the experiment.  I might even pitch in.

Ambient Overload

Valerie asks if any of us have tried to do the kind of daily audit that Henry Cloud recommends. Somewhat sheepishly I confess that I've been doing that for over 20 years.

"Where does the time go?"  people say, wistfully.  In my case, I could tell you.  Yes, it's a little OCD I suppose.  I think of that senator from Florida who took a lot of ribbing a few years ago for tracking all of his daily activities in little notebooks.  I'm not quite as manic as he was -- but I kind of understand the impulse.

The particular context of the discussion we were having was figuring out how to arrange the time in your life in order to have the life that you want. What Cloud calls the audit (what I call my "day logs") is just a tool for helping you see where your time goes so you can make better choices.  It's all about choices.

I just finished reading Turkle's "Alone Together."   That I am not a social person protects me a bit from the excesses of constant connection that Turkle worries about.  I don't have a smart phone (yet). When we were at Disney a couple of weeks ago, I didn't post my status to Facebook because I didn't feel that people needed to know where I was.  (My mom and the people I work with knew -- that's enough). 

Clay Shirky will be one of the major speakers at the MLA meeting this year.  (Shirky, Geoff Bilder, and me. Hmmm.)  I'm looking forward to Shirky's talk and hope I can incorporate some of what he says into my own.   (He kicks things off on Sunday, I'm the Monday morning speaker).  I  expect that I'll disagree with much of what he says -- I usually do. He has a much sunnier view of social technologies than I do and I think he is flat out wrong about what their impact on politics and culture is.  That's okay -- he's thought-provoking and his reputation is as a really good speaker.

But I'm thinking about him now as I'm thinking about managing time and dealing with connectivity in the context of a post that Nick Carr put up earlier this month on different kinds of information overload. He quotes Shirky saying, "It's not information overload. It's filter failure." This is the pleasantly optimistic view of a lot of the techno-geeks. The more information, the better -- we just have to build better tools to sort it all out, and that, of course, is just going to happen because that's what we're so good at doing.  (This is a point of view that has been thoroughly debunked by David Levy, who doesn't get nearly as much attention as he deserves in these discussions.)

Carr approaches it by saying that it's more complicated than Shirky thinks (most things are). "Information overload actually takes two forms... situational overload and ambient overload."

"Situational" is what we tend to think of -- it's the needle in the haystack problem. This is what librarians worry about. With all the stuff out there, how do we get you to the piece that you need?

But Carr says, this isn't really the problem. We are building better tools to deal with this and when we say that we're suffering from information overload, this is not the kind of overload that we're referring to. "Ambient overload," he says, is that we're surrounded with so much information that is of immediate interest to us that we feel overwhelmed by the pressure of keeping up. This is what prevents us from focusing. This is what continually distracts us.

Better filters aren't going to solve this problem. While they winnow out the stuff we're not interested in, they deliver vastly greater amounts of stuff that we ARE interested in. So we're still overwhelmed.

We don't need better tools. We need a kind of daily discipline that enables us to focus on the things that are of most value to us. This is what Cloud is trying to get at with his daily audits, and the other techniques he discusses.  Every moment that we spend is a moment of choices. What kind of a life do you want to lead?  Make better choices.

Touching the words

Their birth dates are all in the early 1990s.  They're undergrads in the Honors class that Liz & Sylvia are teaching, and I went in yesterday to talk about issues involving copyright and plagiarism and retractions in the context of the role of librarians in preserving and transmitting culture.  I wanted to frame it, as I often do when talking about this stuff, by comparing the world that we now live in with the beginnings of print culture in the late 15th century.  I'll usually talk about what a long time it took from those beginnings for a truly mature print culture to emerge.  I've often used the phrase "the mature print culture that we all grew up in" because my audiences have always been people for whom that's true.   But I realized as I was speaking yesterday that I'd have to say, "The mature print culture that I grew up in..."  as contrasted to the nascent digital culture that they've grown up in.  Digital natives.

I wrote a letter to Josie yesterday morning, as I do every few months.  I imagine these letters to be read by a Josie who is 12 or 14 or so, a young woman who'll get a kick out of reading about what she was like in her own pre-literate era.  But she is emerging from that now.  Her reading is clearer every time I see her, and her writing is getting stronger.  We spent nearly twenty minutes after dinner the other night as she wrote out for me a Valentine's Day poem that she'd learned at school.  When we were at  John & Evelyn's some weeks ago, we'd get up in the morning together and she'd write in her diary sitting next to me while I wrote in mine.

Soon I'll have to quit writing letters to her older self -- I'll need to be writing them to the girl she is now. And then, I think, will she want to write back to me? She's fascinated right now with her ability to form words.  But for how long will the notion of putting pen to paper, rather than fingers to keyboards, retain any appeal?

Twenty years ago, for reasons that I won't go into here, I switched my daily journal writing from the notebooks that I'd been using to the computer.  For about five years, I did all of my journal writing that way.   But the letters that I wrote to Lynn were done with pen on fine stationery (the way I write letters to Josie now).   After I moved to Birmingham and the flow of letters to Lynn gradually slowed (although it never has entirely stopped, and it never will), I found myself moving back to the pen and paper journal.  It seemed to give me something I was missing.

There is an intimacy to writing with a pen on paper that cannot be replicated electronically.  The screen is forever between you and the words.  There is an esthetic quality to the pen and ink and paper that is inherent in their physicality.  It is rare, very rare, that I will spend half an hour in a bar or restaurant writing in one of my leather bound Italian journals and somebody won't make some comment about how beautiful the journal itself is.  The envy in their voices, and the sense of desire to handle such beautiful objects is palpable.   We are physical creatures, not digital constructs, and we respond to physical things.  Sometimes I need to write something down for the content and any medium will do.  Sometimes I ache for the physical act of writing and nothing can substitute.

I've pointed out many times that if I'm writing an essay, I want to do it at the keyboard.  That's the best tool.  But if I'm writing a love letter to Lynn, a fountain pen and fine paper are the only sensible  tools to use.  Neither is better than the other in any absolute sense -- they have different qualities which make them appropriate for different purposes.   I don't think my chef's knife is better than my paring knife -- I need them both when I'm working in the kitchen.

I expect to be writing letters to Josie for the rest of my life.  I'll certainly communicate with her electronically as well, but the letters are a kind of communication that can't be replicated in any other medium.  As my little digital native grows older, I hope that she never loses touch with the magic of making little marks by hand on pieces of paper -- little marks that change lives.

 

Apparently, It Starts Early

Josie got her first phone call from a friend yesterday.    Ashleigh called and left a message on Marian's cell.  Josie called her right back and they talked for ten minutes.  This is by far the longest phone conversation she's ever had.  If she spends 2 minutes on the nightly phone call with her dad or her mom (depending on whose house she's at), that constitutes a very long conversation.  She'll call me or Nonni on occasion when she's got big news to share, but she'll tell the news and then quickly get to her standard signoff, "Love you, bye!"

At Mikey's, we're sitting at the table finishing dinner and Ashleigh calls again.  Marian sees who it is and hands the phone over.  Josie says, "Hi Ashleigh!"  She says, "Oh, thank you."  She says, "Let me go to the bathroom so we can talk about this," and bounces out of her chair and heads down the hall without so much as a glance at her Mom or a word to the rest of us.  We look at each other with amused and shocked faces.  Me, the clueless guy at the table, says, "I thought they learned to do that in high school!  I didn't realize it started when they were five."

Josie's in the bathroom a long time.  Marian asks Tanya, the waitress, to poke her head in when she's back there.  Tanya comes back and reports that she can hear Josie chattering away in the stall.  Finally, Josie comes back, hands the phone to her Mom, and takes her seat.  She's wearing a very self-satisfied smile. 

"So what did you talk with Ashleigh about?" asks her Mom.  Josie raises her eyebrows slightly and makes the zipper motion across her lips.   Apparently, it's private.

Josiebug, I remember when I first held you, barely ninety minutes old, not even sure how to open your eyes.  You amazed me then.  You astonish me every day since.

Simplicity

Lynn decided to take Marian out for some therapeutic Christmas shopping so she called me to see if I could pick Josie up from school.  It's the kind of call I love to get.  I rearranged a couple of things so that I could leave the library by 2:15.

Josie's school has a pretty slick arrangement for pickup.  The cars snake in a long line around the parking lot, each car with a paper plate hanging from the rearview mirror with the child's pickup number on it.  The kids are all gathered under the portico in front of the school.  As we turn the corner, an aide stands with a wireless microphone and reads the numbers.  This is relayed to the aide standing with the kids who shouts the numbers out and the kids run up to find their car.

Josie sees mine and bursts into a big silly grin.  She gets in and says, "I didn't know you were coming to pick me up, Nonai!" 

"Your Mom and Nonni went Christmas shopping so they asked me to get you.  Here," I hand her my phone.  "Do you want to give your Mom a call so she knows I've got you?"  They chat for a minute or two.

"So," I say.  "What did you think when you saw my car in the pickup line?"

"Awwesommme...." she drawls in her distinctly southern accent, grinning back at me.

My heart is lighter than it has been all day.