What to do with an unexpected day off?

Apparently, I have today off. I didn't actually realize this until Friday evening when a coworker pointed out. "Don't show up on Monday," he said. How could I argue?

Though I certainly should have spent this time getting as many applications into the ether as possible, I change my focus to distracting myself fairly quickly. I did get two applications in first thing, but I'm left with a nagging suspicion that I screwed them up royally. So, I decided to take a "break." Thankfully, my breaks have a rhizome like quality of branching out in random directions at the slightest provocation.

I started by continuing to read Nikos Kazantzakis' Christ Recrucified. It's a book I've had on my shelf for quite sometime and have never really given a chance. I have a couple Kazantzakis books (this and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel), and I've viewed them both as something I should some day get around to. Since I've been in a fiction drought as of late, I thought I'd go ahead with the less intense of the two. So far it's fairly interesting. It has a sort of Gogol like quality where everyone in a small town is a bit of an asshole that makes it darkly amusing. Since one of the assholish qualities Kazantzakis highlights is the gluttony of the town elders, there's a fair amount of interesting and, to my palette, unusual gastronomical details. Most, like raki, are beyond my pantry's capacity (if not my wallet). However, at some point a character is said to drink his morning coffee which was made with chickpeas and barley. This may, in fact, signify how tight fisted he, as he is tight fisted. But it occurred to me that, hey, I actually have some chickpeas! (I may, in fact, have some barley as well, but I'm not sure where it is, or what it actually looks like.)

I wondered how one goes about making coffee with chickpeas. The chickpeas that I'm familiar with come in a can, soaked in water. Perhaps, I thought, grinding those up would not be the best idea. So I looked up how make some chickpea coffee and found this intriguing resource, which also details how to make barley coffee. As it instructs, I preheated the oven to 300° and shoved the chickpeas in there on a cookie sheet. 

While I waited for that to finish, I started to download and listen to the cut ups of Top 100 songs that you can find over at the excellent WFMU Beware of the Blog. Nat Roe combined the Top 100 list of songs from each year since 1956 by laying 10 second snippets of them one next to each other. He let a computer algorithm figure out the hooks by looking for the loudest section, which, surprisingly, works fairly well. That being said, it's an intensely odd listen as it plays out as the worlds longest Time Life compilation advertisement ever. Add to that the occasional novelty track in there and it's just plain weird sometimes. I've only got so far as 1962 as I type (which, nonetheless, totals over an hour and a half), but it's interesting seeing the dips and peaks of musical evolution over the years.

So, while that was playing in the background and I did the dishes, the chickpeas roasted. Because of my impatience/ignorance, it was sort of difficult to gauge when the chickpeas were done. The instructions say that you should roast them until they're the color of coffee beans, but I was getting bored with opening the oven every ten minutes or so to see how they were doing, so I took them out after they were crunchy and let them cool. Now I'm going to try it for the first time as I type this.

Hmm. It tastes like weak coffee.

Critical Gaming Theory, or, It's important 'cause it's popular

Recently I've been perusing what few books on computer/video/whatever gaming theory I can get my hands on. It probably has a lot to do with an unrealized ambition towards literary criticism, mixed with bored noodlings in computer games. I think, perhaps, in part I realize that I'm not particularly good with actually playing games, so I tend to make myself feel better by analyzing them from the bush with my pith helmet on.

Cataloger's Lament 2 or DVD cataloging can be annoying.

Sometimes when I finish making an original record, I step back and think, "huh... is that it?" There really isn't a whole lot that goes into any given catalog record. You've got your title and/or main entry and then, if need be, some subject headings. Additionally, there's a small spattering of other stuff that gets thrown into the mix like physical description, publication information, and perhaps some stuff that only catalogers really care about (like bibliographical references, geographic codes, and, of course, the all important festschrift bit). When you're done you're left with a few fields and some nagging feeling that you've left something out.

A small part of a Cataloger's Lament

Sometimes subject cataloging is like fitting a square peg into a round hole. The constraints of Library of Congress's subject headings require a combination of diligence and apathy: exploring the furthest reaches of analogy while recognizing that there's a good chance that you'll never actually alight on a heading that perfectly describes the point of the piece in your hand. So not only is it like fitting a square peg into a round hole, it's like fitting a square peg into a round hole in a world where the very concept of a round peg does not exist. And that's if you're lucky. Since a large part of my job requires me to catalog dissertations and theses, dissertations and theses in disciplines that I have absolutely no grasp of, I'm fully aware that what I think might be a round hole could very well be some extradimensional shape that I have no remote conception of. So sometimes subject cataloging is fitting a square peg into a tesseract shaped hole.

So you hammer the peg in with all your apathetic might, you trim off some corners, or, some days, you just place the peg on top of the hole and redefine your definition of fitting so you can go home. Such is the state of things.

I can't really complain, of course. The alternative, of uncontrolled keywords, hardly seems attractive. Without some sort of standardization, collocating things would be nightmarish. Searching by publisher is like that. Publishers are free text, which sure saves time when entering records, but if I want to find everything by a certain publisher I have to hope to God that they've never changed how they record their name even slightly. I also have to know the conventions of how catalogers enter publishers names: what they leave off, what they leave in, and all the up in the air possibilities dependent on the mysterious cataloger's judgement.

I'm currently very frustrated with the state of conventional cataloging in the library system. It seems traditional cataloging is stuck in its own mire of antiquity, complicated by interlibrary reliance on those outmoded systems. At two different ends of the spectrum: I was complaining about how time intensive subject cataloging can be to a co-worker in Reference and Instruction who pointed out that patrons don't even navigate the catalog with subject headings. Of course, they don't. On the other hand, a coworker in acquisitions pointed out how important subject headings were for collection development: if books aren't cataloged correctly, how do they know the subject areas that are most heavily used?

If the organization of information was started to help seekers make sense of the information available, the organizers have since been buried underneath their own system.

Notes Found in Books and Their Possible Meanings

I find the notes and random enigmatic markings people leave in books to be tremendously fascinating. Since people generally don't leave markings in books for other people's benefits, they're often completely incomprehensible to any following readers. Hell, if the people who leave notes in books are anything like me, they're probably totally meaningless to themselves after a month or so.

So, divorced from the original intention as they so often are, I find it fascinating to speculate on why someone would take the time to mark a passage or write a word or two. What was it about that passage that they felt needed comment, or deserved coming back to? And, of course, some people will use the blank pages at the back of the book, or the inside back cover, to write more general thoughts on the work itself. But usually these are no more understandable than something written in text. My favorite note is in a copy of Beckett's Watt at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee's library. Just above the start of the text someone wrote, in large letters, "You're supposed to like Watt." Do they mean the character? Do they mean the book as a whole? If it's the former... well I don't really think that's a requirement, but whatever. But if its the latter, that's just hilarious. Were they some burgeoning Beckett scholar, but just couldn't stand Watt (which is totally understandable)? "Goddamnit, I just hate this book! But if I don't like it... what kind of a Beckett scholar will I be? No! I HAVE TO LIKE WATT! I'm just going to write it here so I remember that."

Gay Jesus Movies: Or, Toward a Better Sacrilege

I’m a Snopesophile. Snopes, for those unfortunate few who don’t know, is a website dedicated to urban legends, email chains, and other ephemera than can be identified as apocryphal or true. When I first found out about it, I would stay up nights digging through their horror page, finding totally over the top, but nonetheless unnerving grotesqueries. It’s a fantastic collection of silliness, but they also tend to do a commendable job of discovering hoaxes and, occasionally, analyzing their spread.

I don’t visit the site nearly as much anymore, but I am subscribed to their twitter feed and occasionally check out the Internet scuttlebutt. Unfortunately, as can be seen on their Top 25 page a lot of the circulating rumors tends towards the boring side. Most of the popular pages on Snopes are dedicated to ridiculous terrorist warnings, virus alerts, questionable home remedies and, unfortunately, Islamophobia. But one of the incredibly persistent rumors on that Top 25 list, one that’s consistently been there since I first started going to the site, is the warning that someone is making a gay Jesus movie.

The Cover Letter of Sisyphus: And, Libraries with No Money and No Proust

Searching for a job is tremendously frustrating. Everyone seems to point out that you have to look at your job search as your full-time job. That makes perfect sense, of course, but it ignores that fact that looking for a job is the worst job ever. First of all, you never get paid, and second of all you rarely get the satisfaction of knowing that your task has been completed in an excellent, let alone satisfactory manner. It’s not like, when you send a cover letter and resume out, along with a rejection letter you get a list of improvements that you should make. “This looks good, Nathan, but could you emphasize your work experience with archives a bit more?”