Don't get around much anymore...

It is November.
Instead of moving, I'm finishing NaNoWriMo.
That's where I'll be.

Or on Twitter.

Or at my new job.

Which I don't start until the 14th, so am not jinxing with actual posts and info and whatnot.

There's a ton that I want to write about and hone and make concise and keep wandery and surreal and filled with links and staggered with images, but that will have to wait.

Now there is a ridiculous goal.

And there is contentment.

My world yesterday

Temptation - Marc Chagall

Elvira Resting at a Table - Amadeo Modigliani

Ballerina - Edgar Degas

Acrobats - Max Beckmann

Dinner

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I've become quite fond of this concept of late. Mostly because I've got things to do and there's just not enough space to make time at every moment for everything that I'd like to get done, but there is definitely time for all of it.

Working again, so fun with scheduling and availability and reading and watching the television and having lunch - did I mention lunch? Lunch is of good.

That's all really - I'll be around again, but first I'm going to be healthy and rested and interested.

Blessings!

To Honor the Catalogers. Sort of.

 The last part of a passage I previously quoted reads thus: “It’s tempting to say that his [Panizzi’s] discovery of intertextuality among even the most mundane books forebodes the rise of the interconnected world of the digital age; it’s probably more accurate, however, to note that, from the vantage point of the wire world, Panizzi’s catalog looks like the beginnings of the Internet.”¹

I immediately thought of Douglas Adams whose piece called “Build It and We Will Come” was published in The Independent on Sunday in November of 1999. The writing is included in a posthumously published collection of Adams’s writings called, delightfully, The Salmon of Doubt². It is also available as an audio book, which is how I first experienced it, and makes for wonderful and enlightening moments. The breadth of the man’s interests and writings astonished me and was also incredibly freeing, as was the recognition of the difficulties of writing to deadline.

Why this piece in particular? Because of the thesis statement buried deep in the middle of the thing: “The computer is actually a modelling device. (92)”²

Because the person who wrote it is Douglas Adams, and because I agree with him firmly based on the evidence given in the aforementioned essay as well as independent ponderings after the fact, I’m not going to try to convince you of the truth of the matter. I’m going to treat it as fact.

Thinking of the catalog of Panizzi as the monster of bibliographical information that it must be (with equally contorted card catalogs that threatened to, and eventually did take over many library lobbies and reading areas, and the sort of relief the floors may have felt when computers with much smaller footprints began to carry the same information): what exactly is a catalog modelling? I believe it is the brains of The Library. I would say that the catalog is modelling the actions of Librarians, but they are (in Truth if not in practice) specialized beings whereas catalogs are created for the generalist user/reader/patron. Online catalogs are incredibly useful entities for organizing, tracking and adding to or removing information from entries into the catalog. They have the potential to interact with other, already established catalogs, create MARC records with little strain and also can be programmed to make bar codes and spine labels.

They can do everything that a team of librarians can do, and they can do it more quickly and with less overt physical effort on the part of those librarians. They do not replace human ingenuity or interaction with materials, and they do have to be made to be flexible. But the basic idea of an online or digitally maintained catalog is that when a person, a human, looks for a book, that person goes to a provided computer terminal or available website, enters the information that is at hand, and is given the coordinates to find that item within their current context. Lists of books that don’t get checked out, lists of periodical titles that the library holds subscriptions for, items that are on order, damaged, in transit, etc. are generated as part of the library’s functioning.

I know a woman who works at A Novel Idea in Lincoln, Nebraska whose co-workers describe her biblio-recall abilities as watching her flip through her mental Rolo-Dex. I’m sure that the information that she stores on those cards appears in different places as the keywords or characters or impressions or genres are the unique search terms in different situations. It takes time to build the kind of depth and specificity into such a mental search engine as she has, but I have felt it begin and have encouraged it to take root on my own, and while mine is more of a commonplace book or recreation room strung with yarn and connecting images, and will never rival the power of what an online catalog can accomplish, still, it is confirmation that our brains can and do surpass our wildest expectations of them.

The library catalog has the potential to accomplish something no less daunting than magic. It can help a reader find something he or she was sure they’d never be able to identify. It cannot always leave traces of how to find the treasure someone seeks, but it can, through subject headings, authors, titles, series titles, keywords and the like, show the reader something like the path that was taken to get to the treasure the first time.

In order to accomplish such formidable tasks, minute and thorough items of information have to be identified and entered into the knowledge base of the catalog. It must be told when and how an item came to be in the library. It must be told how an item relates to another item. Humans must make educated guesses about the use of an item and include what information will allow that item to be used and useful. Other humans may be given the opportunity to add reviews and search terms, to suggest connections that the catalogers may not have known existed. Involving the patrons in the development of the library catalog is one of the brilliant strokes of catalog development. It has need for mediation, but it is a powerful way to engage library patrons with library materials.

The catalog is a model of the relationships built between libraries and their communities. It is in deciphering those relationships that we learn about the design of the model, and what meaning the library is seen to have in the community.

¹ Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2003. 214 pages +notes & index.

²Adams, Douglas. The Salmon of Doubt, Harmony Books, New York, 2002. Paul Guzzardi, ed. 299 pp.

³Mentré, Mireille. Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain, Thames and Hudson, Inc, London, 1996. Jenifer Wakelyn, trans. 304 pp.

 Before I end this, I have to put my nomination forward for canonizing Douglas Adams (who was, I know, an atheist; have a sense of humor). I thought of that particular essay as I was typing up the other post. At the library, I went looking for Homer in order to get details and ideas in mind for what I plan to write during November (NaNoWriMo!), and found The Salmon of Doubt instead. When I’d gotten home, fed the (starving!!!) cats, and unloaded my library haul (Illuminated Manuscripts of Medieval Spain³, anyone? Oh, yeah), I opened the book right to the essay I wanted, even to the page and almost the line. You can’t respect the man without at least nodding at his beliefs, so I can’t quite see naming him a Deity, but at least a halo of connectivity on portraits? If someone gets a chance, ask Stephen Fry, will you? He’d know what to do.

Perspective on Monet

Attempting to read up on Agapanthus becomes an increasingly interesting adventure. I learn not much that is terribly surprising, but I am a bit stymied in my limited resources. Right now I have access to one book in front of me and a few that I’ve requested at the library. It is in that light that I must turn back to what is in front of me: the paintings and a handful of books and articles, and mine them instead of the shelves of possibilities that I know exist.

As a relative amateur when it comes to art criticism, and a virtual expert on talking about whatever comes to mind, this series of blogs has become something of a quest with me. There is only so much that can be seen when looking at 3 paintings, no matter how large. There is infinitely more that can be said about them, or learned about them, or discovered underneath them. But without ever seeing them, without ever looking at what is in front of your nose, none of the rest of it is more than mere decoration.

Simon Kelly, in the wording that accompanies exhibit, talks about the effect that the lack of horizon line has on the painting itself and on the viewer. It is true – these are works that exist almost entirely outside of the standard geography of living. There is no bridge, there are no reflections; you do not know what time of day it is; who is around, if anyone or if there are any deeper meanings to the shapes and shifting swaths of color in front of you. I hate to be too pithy, but all of this almost forces the viewer to be reflected in the paint: we see ourselves in the surface. At yet, the experience is not disorienting. It is stunning, or at least it can be, but not upsetting, not to us who are so accustomed to such vast expanses of undefined space.

In Monet at Normandy, the publication that accompanied an exhibit by that name in 2006 & 2007, it is possible to follow Monet’s use of perspective and point of view from the 1860’s through to the Cleveland panel of Agapanthus, and it is a remarkable development. Discussing the painting A Seascape, Shipping by Moonlight from 1866, the authors address his use of space. “Monet plays with the viewer’s sense of equilibrium by omitting the jetty itself from the field of vision; only the stabilizing line of the horizon as it intersects with the strictly vertical rigging of the boats on the left counters the rolling pitch of the boat in the foreground.(56)” He is not creating here a sense of floating in the absence of the horizon, he is deliberating unsettling his viewers with very little that is stable and much that rolls and is unstill.

In other places, the experiments with perspective seem to be excuses to provide space for the sea or an expanse of beach or sky instead. As can be seen in his paintings of commercial ships in the port at Le Havre or on the Seine at Rouen, he is not shy of detail or specificity. In fact there is the sense that he is communicating something extremely specific, even in the Wisteria diptych that is still incomprehensible to me. (I have to admit here that I’m falling hopelessly in love with his paintings of the Seine at Rouen – the ships are functional and ethereal at the same time, and the skies are filled with a sense of wind and rain and diffused or too bright sunshine. Exquisite!)

“While the viewer instinctively constructs spatial relationships based on scale, position, and color, the artists himself seems no longer bound by such conventions.(168)” And we do, don’t we? Without thinking about it, we decide that there is a top and a bottom that are usually related to the top and bottom of the canvas. We plot the position of shapes and colors not just on the canvas but in relation to each other in the three dimensional space behind the canvas or in front of the canvas. We address ourselves in relation to the paintings: where am I standing in this painting?

I wonder how many of us place ourselves where we have so often seen M. Monet placed: in the garden, under an umbrella, palate on arm, cigarette smoldering. Or in his studio with the gigantic canvases leaning against the walls, as much a part of that space as any other. Perhaps more so. With so many visitors and so much attention given to the work and the garden while he was still alive, it seems plausible that there is as much of the life of the artist’s studio in the layered and floating studies of water lilies and absent agapanthus in these paintings as any representation of nature’s variability.

As much of an intellectual exercise as these can be, there is something excitingly simple and human that can be experienced viewing the triptych. They were part of a larger work that was intended to honor the end of World War I and the veterans. In that light, the serenity of this series has more weight than any horizon line could ever hope convey.

I’ve been looking for pieces of contemporary criticism to give context outside of the artist and outside of the 20^th century. Of course, the source that I’d love to read is in the St. Louis Public Library catalog. And equally of course, it is a reference book (non-circulating) of the Central Library (which collection has been moved entirely to a storage facility while the building is closed for renovation until summer of next year). So, how does one get a look at such a thing? The adventure continues.

Lemonades, Heather, Lynn Federle Orr, David Steel. Monet in Normandy, Rizzoli, New York, 2006. 192 pp.

A short note of frustration

 I’ve begun building a master list of jobs that I’ve held over the last several years. The list is intended to aid me as I fill out online and paper applications. It is not short. A friend of mine told me that she’d read that you only need to include the last seven years on applications. That’s nine jobs.

Facing the uncomfortable truth that when put next to a timetable created by societal expectations, if you take out my age, I’m not doing badly for a person who graduated college 6 years ago. It’s like the 11 years that I spent getting married and divorced just shot a huge hole in my life path. (I typed ‘whole’ instead of ‘hole’ there at first, and didn’t notice it right away. (Quick little-Sarah story: When I started taking piano lessons, Mr. Williams, may he rest in well-played peace, taught me about rests by drawing them on a chalkboard. He drew a small rectangle under one of the lines on the staff and said, “When you walk down the street, you have to look out or you’ll walk into a…” meaning for me to finish the sentence with ‘hole’ as homophone to ‘whole’ to teach me the name of the long rest. I looked at the drawing and piped up “Sewer!”) and now I’m happy on the inside.)

Job applications do not lend themselves to creative life paths. By creative I do not mean artistic, I mean self-defined (which, yes, given that I view works of art as defined by their active answering of questions and being evidence of deliberate decisions is not entirely consistent, but you get the idea). The last 15 months saw me taking jobs in order to work, not in order to further a goal. The goal was not firmly in mind until the beginning of 2009 anyway and since then hasn’t altered one whit, nor has my intention to achieve it, nor my continued research and active contemplation. But there isn’t really room for that on a job app.

It’s uncomfortable. I don’t particularly care for it. I feel required to provide spin for my life, not simply to others but to myself as well. And yet, I lived it. I process it daily. I am in no way unaware of the effects of my decisions on the directions my life has followed, frequently more than one at a time. It is not without consequence. And yet, I am in no way certain that some Life Lesson about marrying intelligently or a self-deprecating attitude towards my mistakes or not having anything to show for the living I’ve done is correct or morally acceptable. It is lived. It is done. I am here. There is no judgment anymore.

My skillz set is impressive, I tell you.

This is not unrelated to what showed me it was time to escape the inertial pull of Lincoln. It, this discomfort and getting past it, is part of learning to be in the unfamiliar and not quite known or understood place. I realized that I could have struggled in the same ways with the same set of incrementally lowering standards and been progressively less able to turn potential into kinetic anything – or, ask my parents for help and slow down and take the time to do the crap things like this.

It’s not a fabulous looking list. But it is mine.

Good weekends, folks!

Spent the day revamping stuff

so no blog (I had this whole notion of.... never mind, I'll write it anyway, just not today.)

Have this instead:

Poussière from Poussiere LeFilm on Vimeo.

Thank you, Coilhouse.