Caveat Lector

(Okay, super-lame title there… but I’m sure I can’t be the first to have used it.)

My foot is okay, much to my relief, and even my bad knee is bugging me less than it had been. (I was going to say “not at all,” and then I stood up…) Picking up the pace a tad bit on the walks to and from work.

I discovered that despite Mondo Pay Cut, I’m less than $100 per month out-of-pocket once rent differential is taken into account. This is not at all uncool, though in its turn it doesn’t take into account that I was making way bigger retirement contributions in previous job. That will require some adjusting-to.

Talks are underway that may enable me to do a little something-something about Mondo Pay Cut. Further deponent sayeth not until matters are more settled… but no, not a raise; extra work. Fun work, though, and I hope it comes to pass.

I have to bite the bullet and (re)learn to drive. Part of the price of landing a job that serves the entire state. The story of my last ill-fated attempt to learn to drive is an amusing one (in a finger-pointing “what a maroon!” sort of way) that I may share sometime. In the meantime, it’s lessons for me… and annoyance that I can’t become a Community Car member until five years after I get my license. That’s just irritating. (Yes, I’m sure their insurer does demand it, but it’s still irritating—and not really protective, either, because I certainly don’t plan to own a car in the next five years, so I’ll be nearly as naive a driver in five years as I will when I first land the license!)

The loons are gone from Monona Bay. I suspect the cretin in the motorboat with his equally cretinous waterskiing friend is at fault. I’d hope the motorboat would sink, but that would just pollute the bay. I hate those damn things. Canoes, kayaks, rowboats, sailboats, windsurfing, that’s fine. I can even live with crew practice and its megaphones. But ban motorboats!

I did see a brown creeper last week, though (cute little nipper, he was), and a flock of cedar waxwings, and some redhead ducks, and on a trip to Green Lake for a meeting my boss stopped at a pond to look at some yellowlegs (greater and lesser) and blue-winged teals, and we also saw a crane flying overhead at one point. Oh, and wild turkeys. Yesterday’s trip to LaCrosse produced a stooping redtailed hawk, a peregrine falcon, a turkey vulture (surprised there weren’t more of those, actually) and some great blue herons.

(My boss is an avid birder. The chair of the unit’s steering committee is taking a three-week trip to Spain to do some birding. There is SERIOUS BIRDING going on around here. I am only an egg!)

My post on what can be done to reduce misogynist online talk has gotten a lot of attention, most of it positive, all of it (even the disagreements) civil. I find that encouraging. Curiously, it got loose on LiveJournal and became something of a mini-meme there, as best I can tell. I can’t tell much, because most of the entries citing it were friendslocked. If I were a sociologist, I’d be pondering a project about semi-private online spaces, who uses them, and what sorts of topics are restricted to them right about now.

Oh, and academic librarians are too nice, or something. Karen gets it right, but I just want to ask a quick question—what am I, chopped liver? (I swear it’s an Inside Higher Ed thing. I’ve been dissed-and-dismissed by them before.)

I didn’t precisely defend M-ch–l G-rm-n during the blog-people kerfuffle, but I did say that I thought his detractors were overreacting in unproductive ways. (When I did rip on the man, it was for something rather more important than ticking off a few bloggers.) I regularly chronicle how librarianship (writ large) and library systems irritate the living crap out of me, and I’m not particularly nice about it, either. And as for comments, I tell you what—I’ll have them when Mr. Bell agrees to moderate them for me. This is a female-dominated profession by the numbers, Mr. Bell, and being female has consequences online—never mind being female and outspoken in the way Mr. Bell seems to desire.

Privileged git. There. Not-nice enough for you?

Went to Loreena McKennitt concert last night. Was fun! Also ate about a bucket’s worth of veggie sushi. (Wasabi Autumn rolls. GET THEM, for they are most excellent. With a side of the ever-reliable veggie tempura rolls. Thus ends the commercial, with apologies to Walt.)

Couple-three linkies, just to tide folks over until I have my brain back:

• The latest SPARC Open Access Newsletter. If you are an academic librarian and a CavLec reader and you do not take ten or fifteen minutes to read the opening article, which is a brilliant and quite hopeful look at the “State of OA”—well, bah, there’s nothing I can tell you, is there? Because you clearly haven’t been listening to a word I say. Seriously. Read it. It is that good.
• A by-the-numbers but still worthwhile article on women in techie librarianship. May I please say how amazingly grateful I am that the author, Eva Miller, didn’t do the usual thing that’s done with women-in-careers articles, namely, include all kinds of irrelevant family detail? That’s a cheap sexist trick, intended to provide wink-nudge reinforcement to the whole kirche-kuche-kinder thing, and it just gladdens my wizened little heart not to see it.
• A tart, cogent, and useful reminder that there’s no easy way out of privilege. I memoried that one, because I need to read that or something like it every so often.

I got some plaintive emails asking me just what the heck “whuffie” was. Wikipedia is the best source for a quick answer. (All you librarians who just cringed: aside from the OA e-text of Doctorow’s book, which indeed answers the question but not necessarily quickly, find me a better source. Resolved: for a certain slice of pop culture roughly bounded by geekdom, Wikipedia is the best encyclopedia there is. Discuss.)

I’m not sure the real point of my last post on the subject got through. This is probably due to my not explaining it clearly, so let me have another go.

Academic libraryland has a flavor called “tenure-track” in which the acquisition of whuffie by means of publications, conference presentations, and the like is not optional if you like your job and want to keep it. The exact rigor of the tenure process varies; it can be absolutely as rigorous as the process for teaching and research faculty (Ruritania is like this), or it can be watered-down, a bit or a lot.

Academic libraryland has another flavor that I call “wannabe tenure-track,” where whuffie-acquisition is not strictly required but upper management leans on librarians to acquire whuffie anyway. (My former POW is of this flavor. Just warning folks who are considering becoming the next me. Don’t let it scare you, though; I got through all the renewal/promotion process except the actual ruling, and I survived. Moreover, I’m pretty sure I would have survived the ruling.)

A librarian in one of these academic libraries, as well as a librarian who wants to protect her ability to get a job in such a library, has little choice but to set herself a yearly whuffie quota. New librarians particularly may find (she said ruefully, having been there and done that) that they accept work they wouldn’t otherwise have done just because there’s whuffie at the end of it. I know folks hate the phrase “paying dues,” but this is the clearest example of it I can think of.

Other librarians may want to amass whuffie in order to make themselves competitive in the larger library job market, supplement their incomes, feed their egos, whatever. Although these librarians may also accept whuffie-ful work that they aren’t otherwise interested in, they’re slightly different from the paying-dues group in that the motivations are basically internal rather than external.

None of these librarians is me. I’m not in a situation with any kind of tenure, I’m happy with my job, my income is adequate to my needs, and I have to starve my ego or it’ll stomp Neo-Tokyo.

But I don’t plan to stop speaking, writing (much though I have to flog myself to do it), and finding ways to contribute. One reason is that every now and again, I get to do something cool, like go to London and San Antonio. Both those trips were blessings; I won’t pretend otherwise, and I won’t pretend that subsidized travel (within my travel limits, which are somewhat straiter than most people’s) isn’t an attraction.

That aside, though, speaking and writing can be tools to advance other goals I have, goals that live wholly outside the “fun” and “personal advancement” segments of my brain. If you’re a long-time reader, you can probably recite the litany as well as I can by now: open access, academic libraries as publishers, more and better digital text, digital preservation, a better (or at least more honest) labor market for librarians, female enfranchisement in technology and systems librarianship, and so on. I care about all these, and when speaking and writing will further them, I’ll get in gear to speak and write. That’s what I meant by “achievement:” using such talents as I have to further real-world goals, with whuffie a side-effect at best.

Unfortunately—and this is a personal hangup, not anybody else’s problem—if I’m not careful, I fall back into old habits of mind, competitive and compulsively perfectionistic habits that don’t do me or anyone else any good. So I do push back pretty hard when people start talking whuffie at me. I don’t want to turn into a compulsive whuffie-chaser, now that I have the luxury of not having to chase whuffie at all (and it is indeed a luxury).

Here is where the whole thing gets difficult—and from email I get and blog posts I see, I’m not the only person with this dilemma. Sometimes you need more whuffie than you’ve got in order to reach your real-world, non-personal-advancement goals. I, for instance, have zero formal whuffie in open-access circles. None. No, really, none, not a biscuit. Maybe the book review and book chapter I’ve got coming out this year will change that a bit, but there are no guarantees in this world.

This means I don’t get speaking invitations that I could do good with. For every one I have gotten (and that’s all of, um, two), I’ve gotten a nibble for one that’s eventually fallen through. Truth. And of course there are all the invitations I don’t get because nobody knows who I am because for all the fire in my belly and my mad public-speaking skillz, I don’t have the formal whuffie in my sub-field.

So otherwise-uninteresting whuffie opportunities directly relevant to OA would get more attention from me than my anti-whuffie intransigence would suggest. I can’t think of a better way to play it. Wish I could.

I’m lucky in a way, though, because OA doesn’t have any formal organization that I have to stay on the right side of. When I see opportunities, I can jump. When I don’t, I can make opportunities without having to get anyone’s imprimatur. And the sub-field is small enough that worthwhile opportunities exist for individual action.

It’s gotta suck when the main venue for your sub-field is ALA. I mean, maximum “the airlock’s blown!”-level suckage. Not only do you have to do a lot of pointless crap to earn enough ALA whuffie to actually accomplish something halfway useful, you constantly have to wonder whether the red-tape and waste irretrievably associated with ALA is really sufficiently mitigated by the additional resources ALA makes available.

(Or whatever the attraction is. I think we all know where I am on that question—nothing excuses ALA’s resource-hogging ways in my book.)

And if you put in all the effort to grab enough ALA whuffie to finally matter, but your experience suggests that ALA isn’t worth further effort—what do you do?

Believe it or not, I’ve always respected that particular struggle by individual ALA participants, even though I’ve rarely had a good word for ALA itself. I’m still all for fomenting revolution, but I understand why not everybody climbs on board with me.

Karin Dalziel has posted an introductory presentation on open access intended for librarians to her CV site. It is well worth reading for all librarians, and well worth adding to a repo-rat’s persuasion arsenal.

(And I just scooped Peter Suber. How often does that happen?)

Library-school students, do note how polished and professional-looking that site is. It’s built off WordPress (making considerable use of the Pages ability, I suspect) and will impress employers no end when the time comes.

If my life ever stops being weirdly (but amusingly) ironic, I’ll look down to see if I’ve died and somehow just not noticed it yet.

Not two days after I whinge about not having any OA whuffie, I get a pitch to do an article for an IR-themed journal issue. Before you even ask, the journal in question is not an Elsevier organ, the green-OA terms look just barely acceptable, and one of the issue editors is someone I respect a good deal.

But I cringed, because (I suddenly realized) it isn’t all writing I dislike, just academic-research writing. Probably a grad-school hangover, and a stupid one at that, but there it is. Introduction, lit review, methodology, results, discussion, conclusion, bibliography, shoot me now please.

It’s the lit review that really gets me. In college and grad school (not so much library school, though) I had the uneasy feeling that my professors knew every article that had ever been written about my topic, and would descend upon me in rivers of red ink if I missed even one. (I didn’t even start a dissertation, either. Go figure.) The literature wasn’t a support or a source of useful background—it was an evil devouring hydra with more necks than a chicken-house.

So I didn’t answer the request right away. Ugh, need the whuffie, but double ugh, academic writing.

Cuddled in bed for a nap with a Goth-kitty, however, I started thinking about all the things I’d like to say about the journal theme, and they started fitting themselves together in my head around anecdotes from my real-life work experience, and… damn it, there’s the article, there it is right there, it’s just not strictly research-academic-type writing.

Bleh, so I don’t need the whuffie so bad I can’t risk losing it. I pitched them the article idea, because the worst they can do is say no and get somebody else, you know? And I can still write the article and send it somewhere, though I admit to more screaming horrors at the notion of writing articles purely on spec. (Like I don’t have anything else to do with my off-work time?)

I’ve got a great title for it, though, thanks to my former coworkers at Mason. “Innkeeper at the Roach Motel.” My low peasant sense of humor has me grinning like a loon at the thought of that title coming up in a search of a research-article database.

So we’ll see. Maybe I kick another grad-school monkey off my back by giving this particular article-monkey a ride. If the pitch flies, I’m gonna try to negotiate the OA terms, though, at least as they’re expressed on SHERPA. Publishing is too damn slow, that’s all there is to it.

I made my very own librarian macro. Actually, it’s more of a librarianship macro, but I guess that counts.

Thirty bucks for an Elsevier article, though. Sheesh. Rent-seeking much?

I once thought about writing a guide for graduate-school attriters. How to know when you’re slipping, how to know when you should never have done this in the first place but still forgive yourself for doing it, and most importantly, how to get out and move on.

I never found a round tuit, as happens not infrequently. Fortunately, that last-named trick is covered with remarkable sanity and decency in this short, sensible book.

What I admire most about it is its gentle but unrelenting effort to disabuse its audience of the false and pernicious messages and mindsets they bring with them from academia. Me, I am not gentle about this, not in the least—but my approach doesn’t work; you can’t tell a fish “that’s water, all around you, water; c’mon up out of it and grow some legs and then we’ll sort you out.” The poor fish doesn’t know what water is, because it’s never tasted air.

The book’s approach is less confrontational but more straightforward: here are things you must not do, here are things you must not say, here are things you must rethink. No whys or wherefores other than the strictly pragmatic “this will block your being hired.” No Cude- or Lovitts-style debunking of myths. Sorting all that out to arrive at a new understanding of the world takes perspective, a commodity most recent ex-academics, still thoroughly enmeshed in academia’s account of itself, don’t have in abundance. Therefore the book mostly doesn’t bother. Smart.

What it does do is model the new modes of thought and action extensively by means of case studies. Where I would say something like “Academia has a vested interest in your belief that it contains the smartest of the smart,” or even “Get over your damn dissertation already; it doesn’t make you All That,” the book quotes people talking approvingly about their new coworkers’ intelligence, or shows them reworking their résumés. Show, don’t tell. Very smart.

I plucked the new edition off the new-books shelf at MPOW because my husband is struggling with mid-dissertation sturm und drang and I have completely run out of ways to help him; he’s got the good old deer-in-the-headlights learned helplessness that New Librarian (also an academia-baby) had before him, and unlike New Librarian, he’s too acclimated to my standard goosing tactics to respond to them any more.

Which leads me to the book’s one defect: no advice for family and significant others! Now there is a book that needs to be written…

I passed the written driver’s test. No worries. I didn’t previously know that in Wisconsin you are required to report an accident to authorities if it causes $1000 or more in damage—but now I know, and apparently that makes us all safer. Or something.

(What I don’t get is how you’re supposed to know. Call your insurance adjuster, then call the cops? Weird.)

The me and driving story isn’t so much funny as it is pathetic, honestly. I waited until I was a senior in high school to take driver’s ed. The guy teaching it wasn’t the brightest candle in the candelabra, but he was a patient and conscientious teacher, which was a good thing as I was about the nervousest student driver you ever did see.

I wasn’t bad at it. I was very good at reading and reacting to traffic. I just wasn’t very good at controlling the damn car. I am, shall we say, not terribly physically gifted, and driving takes a lot of coordinated movements that were just plain unfamiliar. I got better toward the end of the course—I will never forget the red Saturn wagon that cut me off trying to get to the exit to the Beltline; I handled the freakin’ moron (I mean really, cutting off a student driver?) just fine—but I surely could have used more practice time.

My parents duly offered same. But my parents clung stubbornly to their stick-shift cars, and I just could not manage the damn clutch. I managed a couple of shifts of a long drive to Indiana with my dad in the car, although when we stopped to have lunch I had to unclamp my seized-up fingers from the wheel. Highway driving, not so much with the clutch.

When we got back, though, I made the mistake of practicing some in-town driving with my mom. Who was nervouser than I was, and I was plenty nervous enough for two.

I was driving Gus-Gus the little gray Nissan (Mitsubishi, hat-tip to my sister), a low-slung critter that always had trouble getting into our driveway without scraping its undercarriage on the sidewalk. Mom hated that. She never failed to yell at my dad when he did it, and she yelled at me when I did it—

—which scared me so bad I missed the brake with my foot and drove right into the front yard.

No harm done to me, Mom, house, Gus-Gus, driveway, or even plants (Mom had the sidewalk edged in monkey grass liriope, thanks again at the time, and that stuff is totally indestructible). But I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car since.

First lesson Tuesday afternoon. Word of advice? Stay off the Madison roads, ’k?

How old does it make me if a mass-market paperback from the used bookstore costs what I remember new mass-market paperbacks costing when I was a kid?

You know what? Don’t even answer that.

Well, not exactly. Or at least, not from Dream’s point of view.

I caught him sitting on the table by the dining-room window staring steadily upwards, shoulders hunched and tail thwacking the table. Figuring he’d ticked off a squirrel, I bent down and followed his gaze up… into the beady eye of a robin sitting on her nest in the spruce outside.

I petted Dream and told him he was a good boy, and he looked at me disgustedly, knowing that I wasn’t going to go on a bloody robin-chasing rampage as is only right and proper. But on the whole, looking at him now, he seems quite satisfied with himself.