Caveat Lector

I finished revising my Morris bibliography (good thing, too; I had forgotten to fill in some parenthetical bits), and I chugged undauntedly through my take-home final for intro. That’s two classes I’ve finished except for attending the last few sessions (which is the fun part anyway).

I have the WAVE reports for all my chosen database sites, and I’ve set myself up a spreadsheet to record the variables I mean to test. I’ve also done as much lit-cruising as I’m going to—it’s pretty clear that about three-quarters of the current literature on accessibility is either “why-to” or “how-to,” which is a far cry from my “who has and who hasn’t” query. (I know, I know, two issues of Library Hi-Tech from last year. I have the relevant articles handy, thanks.)

So I’ve got nearly three weeks to churn through the data and write it all up. I can do that, yup yup.

Am I really going to finish this semester without any disasters? Knock wood.

We finished the Two Towers appendices today. Holy crow, there is a lot of stuff there. Very interesting, too; I do enjoy hearing people who take pride in their work talk about how they do it. I don’t always understand what they’re up to, mind you, but I do invariably respond with a smile to that kind of artisan’s gratification in good work.

There’s a bit of David’s work in the Appendices that isn’t credited to him (probably because it’s all unsigned; it was never intended for anything but clues to the production team). Two or three times, you see somewhat shaky black-on-white calligraphy pages in various letter-styles. One I know is the page on Sting (Maegnas); the others I don’t recall offhand—but that’s David’s work. They’re the pages he wrote up and faxed to WETA and New Line, very early on in the grand scheme of things.

The calligraphy is shaky partly because it was done in a great hurry (the word “urgent” was affixed to just about every request they ever made of him) and partly because David is left-handed and has to hold his pen in a very awkward position so as not to smear the writing. Of course none of his calligraphy got directly transferred to anything (weapons or maps or whathaveyou); they found pro designers and calligraphers to do that, and those folks did quite a smashing job from what I’ve seen.

Still. Good enough to make a major DVD release, eh? Pretty cool, I thought.

It probably should not surprise anyone that Umberto Eco gets it about ebooks. Eco is a certified Smart Guy, after all.

Still. A lot of certified Smart Guys have utterly and completely failed to get it. So I still find it refreshing when someone—certified Smart or not—does.

I don’t wholly agree with the “nobody reads for pleasure on screen” dictum; despite my well-known bitterness about the Beach Blanket Bob mode of ebook marketing, I know some people will read for pleasure onscreen because I am one of them. However, Eco is careful to restrict his comments to past and present without trying to predict the future, so I can generally go along with him as far as he goes.

And he is oh-so-right about reference books. We can finally start to solve the thumb-in-the-index problem.

Some good words about libraries, too, with which I wholeheartedly agree though I don’t think they go nearly far enough.

I am not a gourmet cook. Most of my friends can cook rings around me. (I don’t know why I have all these friends who can cook. But I do.)

But, damn, I can make a seriously boss banana cream pie. I wish you guys could see that thing. It’s magnificent, mounds of gorgeously-browned meringue over the perfectly hand-fluted homemade pie crust. If it tastes half as good as it looks, this could be the best Thanksgiving ever.

Okay… shower, dump roast in oven, do potatoes, dump remaining oven stuff in oven, do soup, and if all goes well… eat.

It’s just us Salos for Thanksgiving this year, which between you, me, and the fencepost is kinda the way I like it. I can do a small dinner party if pressed, and I can be polite at things like conference banquets and wedding receptions—but the truth is that all these things stress the heck out of me.

This year’s menu is a wee bit different from previous years, because a few old standards need a rest, and I already did stuffed squash for a dinner party a few weeks back. So here’s the plan:

• corn chowder
• soft rolls and butter
• quorn “this is not turkey” roast with homemade nut gravy
• walnut wedges
• herb dressing
• mashed potatoes (garlic-mashed if I can find the energy)
• banana cream pie
• eggnog

And some cat treats for the junior Salos, naturally. (Didi is sitting on the printer in most proper-elegant cat pose, hoping to be allowed at the table tomorrow. No such luck, of course, but I won’t dash her dreams quite yet.)

Some things I couldn’t be grateful enough for if I tried:

• A fantastic husband
• Generally good health
• A warm, safe, durable home
• Friends who never cease to amaze me with sheer kindness (another nifty package arrived yesterday; many thanks to the person who sent it, for that and for other things—and I know you’re reading this!)
• Two fine Goth-kitties who are sources of endless amusement
• Employment, financial solvency, and academic progress
• Many, many things to look forward to

I wish everyone such a list as this, modified appropriately of course. Happy Thanksgiving!

I did an I’m-bored cruise through the server log stats a bit ago. It’s funny, how people classify us. To a few people, $DEITY save us all, CavLec is a techblog. To a few more people, it’s a gaming and general geekery blog (which reminds me, I am behind on Game WISHes—should fix that). Lately I have attracted a few librarians. And some people (who should have their heads examined) apparently come here for crumbs of psychological or philosophic insight.

But a few people peg this place right. Just returned from one, actually. Miscellaneous. That’s what CavLec is. Miscellaneous.

I was slogging away on the introduction to my William Morris project last weekend when I got stuck. Just could not think of anything else to say that was even vaguely worth saying. I checked the syllabus and my class notes to see if the professor had offered any possibilities that might jog my brain into producing something else read-worthy.

Why I chose this person. Hm. Well, the real reason was totally meta: I knew Morris was versatile—not to say, miscellaneous—and I wanted to see how reference sources would deal with that. (Answer: some a lot better than others.) But I already talked about that. What do I say, then? Because, you know, it’s not entirely meta. I do connect up with Morris, more now than I did when I started the project. Why?

Sure, I’m a sucker for pierced capitals and illuminated frontispieces. And David and I own all the Morris fantasies—took us years to find them all. We even have Glittering Plain in facsimile. And sure, I like Morris’s eye for pattern. And I agree with a lot of his politics, insofar as I understand them, and in full awareness that he didn’t live out his politics especially well.

I like all those things. That’s part of Morris’s appeal to me; he was anything but a one-trick pony. He didn’t do everything he did equally well, to be sure; I was charmed to find out from the Biographical Dictionary of Neo-Marxism (yeah, really—there are encyclopedias of everything imaginable out there) that he was a lousy public speaker. But when he saw something he wanted to do, he up and did it.

That’s so rare, and so rarely celebrated. The one-trick pony, the obsessed Romantic, somehow became so overmastering an ideal that the alternative exemplified so nobly by Morris has been lost. Well, here’s one pony who’ll champion the Renaissance man over the Romantic.

I admit, too, that part of what’s going on is pure enjoyment of Morris’s hands-on, quality-driven ethos, especially in bookmaking. Morris didn’t pontificate about anything until he’d done it—and then he didn’t spare the vitriol. Reading what he has to say about typesetting after he’d set up Kelmscott Press is—well, a lot like reading me talking about how bloody ugly electronic text is and need not be. There’s a little shock of recognition when I read Morris. I’m not anywhere near fit to occupy his shoes, but I think the guy might have liked me, and I can’t help liking that.

The other part of my attraction to Morris, though, is the sturdy decency that shines through his life. He made an incredibly stupid marriage, but he did his level best throughout his life to love and honor his wife despite her multiple affairs. He was a fine father to his daughters, tending the epileptic Jenny with loving care. He dealt honestly with his business and artistic partners. And his social vision, however incomplete and flawed, was one of dignity for everyone.

This is about as close as I get to anointing someone a personal hero. It’s hard to be a straight-up person, hard to keep it together as a multiple-trick pony. I don’t doubt Morris found it harder than I do, all things considered—insofar as I manage it at all, that is—and I admire his grace.

And with that in mind, I will celebrate the hodge-podge that is CavLec, because it is a hodge-podge, and hodge-podges are valuable in a world where one-trick ponies seem to get all the prizes.

Addendum: Holy howlers, how did I miss this Morris site? It’s stunning. It’s so good it’s going into the bibliography, even though I’ve already finished the bibliography. From Morris’s obituary in the Clarion: “In all England there lives no braver, kinder, honester, cleverer, heartier man than William Morris.” Lovely.

I was chugging through various full-text article databases over the weekend for various projects, and my text artisan’s soul simply howled at the awfulness of much that I saw.

Back-end scanning and OCR done on the cheap and not even slightly proofread. And libraries are paying how much for these resources?

It is not a pleasant experience to come to the end of a sentence, find the letters “le” for no apparent reason, and then realize they are in fact a pointer to footnote 18. (Which, incidentally, may or may not actually appear at the end of the article. Full text, huh? Riiiiiiiiight.) And let us not even venture a hope that the pointer might be linked to the footnote in question. That would make sense or something.

Design? Ha! Let us not even use CSS to indent paragraphs! Let us not even have page margins! They’re getting full-text; why should they expect to be able to read it?

Let me be excruciatingly clear about this: if, in my conversion-peasant days, I had let something half that bad out the door, I would have been fired on the spot. And I would have deserved it.

This is unacceptable. Simply unacceptable. A library isn’t going to accept a stapled-together packet from Kinko’s in place of a professionally-bound book. Why should libraries accept this crap? Simply because it’s electronic? Bah.

Vendors need to do better, and libraries need to demand better. I don’t particularly care which comes first. Me, I’d start with random article audits, if I were a librarian. And then my vendors would be hearing from me, in big fat black spades.

Addendum: It occurs to me that this might be one way that open-access trumps the for-fee competition. Believe me, it ain’t that hard to do better than this!

My William Morris annotated reference bibliography is printing as I type. That’s the last bit of work I have to do for reference class; I read ahead and did all the article-reactions weeks ago.

I have a longish blog-entry series five-page essay to do for my intro final, and then I can buckle down to analyzing data for my virtual-collections project. At a glance, it doesn’t look as though my initial hypothesis is going to hold up; free databases are just as poor as their for-fee counterparts. The markup lapses are interesting, though, and it ought to be a reasonable paper when it’s done.

Via Household Opera, I find an old grad-school adviser. My dad resembled a lot of those remarks too. It really is a good thing he’s retired.

We grad students don’t get off scot-free either, naturally. A lot of those were me, five years ago.

Today’s snailmail held an actual, honest-to-goodness invitation for David and me to the December 3rd North American premiere of The Return of the King. I don’t doubt it’s terrible of me, but I am thrilled right down to the bottom of my fangirl soul.

What? No, of course we’re not going! The airfare would be exorbitant, we ourselves horribly out of place, and the deal-breaker is that David has classes that day, including lecture for the class he teaches discussion for.

But it’s still fun to be invited. How often in a lifetime does that happen?