The Problem with What a Library is?

The National Archives building (via Wikipedia)

Throughout my life, I’ve had a bizarre relationship with libraries. Bizarre because, as a child, I didn’t particularly like to read, though, for some reason, I still liked going to the library. I’m sure I didn’t intellectualize it back then, or even examine my reasons for enjoying a space designed and functioning as the dispensary of a product (books) that I didn’t much care for. Then it also dawned on me that the pleasant feeling I got from being in proximity to books, with the disdain I felt toward reading them, isn’t all that unusual. Libraries are not just a place where one might go to indulge in a particular recreation. There is, at once, both a simplistic and really complicated and convoluted metaphysics to Libraries, the idea of a library: what a library is. And it's bigger than the books they carry.

Dark Rooms: Simon Schama's "The Power of Art"

In 2008 I moved out on my own, like completely on my own, like no roommates (good riddance), no dorms, nothing but me and a room. I was just about to start my first semester at UB, so a couple days before the start of class I moved into a tiny but still pretty comfortable studio apartment a few blocks north of the Washington Monument, on Calvert Street. The initial weeks were a mess. It was mid-August, so: hot. And, BGE wouldn’t come for almost two weeks—something to do with the previous tenants not paying their bill—so when I was at home, which I tried to be as little as possible, I sat around as the day squeezed me out onto the linoleum floors, and at night I tried to savor every crisp drop of the coldest beer I could find at the local liquor store.

I’ve never been happier to go to class than during those weeks. After class, I went directly to the library, picked a spot in a study room and rooted myself to the chair. The glittering potential and resultant optimism I felt signing the lease had started slipping into some kind of maelstrom of stress as the hot, dark days turned to weeks. This was five years ago. Though, in retrospect, it wasn’t that bad. Like most things that don’t physically hurt you—and even some that do—problems seem bigger and the barbs longer as they’re happening; what, in the moment, stresses us out, when looked at differently, big-picture-wise, are just mild inconveniences. Those first weeks on Calvert were such weeks. Painful in its dull time, chock full of boredom and stubbed toes and unanswered emails and uncharged cell phones that sat on the bed next to me like a pouty and spiteful child, unwilling to acknowledge my presence.

National Poetry Month and the Snot-Nosed Kid

National poetry month is really kind of a sad affair. Fiction doesn’t get a month. Film doesn’t either. And TV—are you kidding. They get that section of the year that lasts (and I’m approximating) the entirety of every year, year after year. But poetry: that squirmy child alone in the back of the lunch room timidly opening the lunch box his mother modified with foam-rubber because, come on, he’s fragile and the corners might bruise his knees as he walks to school. Alone at the table, he organizes the box’s contents—a bag of carrots, sandwich, sippy cup—in some esoteric but exacting way that, despite his outward appearance of shunning attention, secretly begs for it. He endures in a constant state of conflict over the meaning of what attention he gets. Is uncomfortable. The other children scowl at him. They regard him with angry curiosity between their spoonfuls of chocolate Snack Pack. They dismiss him almost as quickly as they consider him. They say, “Oh, really? So, we still make creatures like that. Strange world.”

“It’s a shame,” the principal thinks, “such a smart, sensitive young man, with so much to say but no one to listen. A cruel world.” He shakes his head at the thought. He stews in its heavy cloud. Considers implications and solutions. Maybe a light. He sits a little taller, his eyes widening. His what-a-sad-sad-word thought grows and darkens. He realizes the profundity of its truth, realizes the extent of the injustice in the world, realizes, as the light comes on brighter, that he alone possesses the power and empathy to change the course of events if not in the history of mankind at least for this snot-nosed hypersensitive boy. He immediately flips the switch for the intercom and gives his baritone announcement:

“Now hear this. For too long the snot-nosed boy with the padded lunch box has been ignored. This will stop...

"...for one month.

New Look for Langsdale

[From the spring edition of Langsdale Link, out soon:]

It’s finally happening: Langsdale is getting a facelift. With the University of Baltimore becoming, bit by bit, a modern and glittering campus—see the bright, glass hive of the John and Frances Angelos Law Center, the sloped and swirling geometry of the Student Center—Langsdale was beginning to feel a bit like an old shoe. But that is all about to change.

On Wednesday, Jan. 15, six firms were chosen to present their designs for the renovation and remodeling of Langsdale Library. As expected, many of the firms focused on the library as a space of learning and collaboration, one brimming with new technology and spaces adaptable to a variety of needs. This is a long way from the old mode of thinking about libraries as giant book warehouses, an idea that predominated both the philosophies of architects and librarians alike. Those days are dead and gone. The day just before us is full of color and light, glass and open floor-plans, in a word, spaces designed more for people than books. Concepts of airy, collaborative spaces were featured in one way or another in each of the design proposals presented at the contest.

Ground was broken for Langsdale Library on April 7, 1965 to accommodate both a growing collection of books and a growing student body. The building as it looks today was designed in the brutalist style (which, believe it or not was en vogue at the time of construction) by local architect Henry Powell Hopkins. Aside from the façade of the building looking progressively dated, the “bones,” as many of the architects at the competition called them, are still in good shape. For this reason, there was no need to start from scratch, instead the building will be gutted and given an entirely new identity, one that will serve the current needs of patrons and students, while remaining flexible enough to change with the times and with technology.

On January 31, the winner of the design competition was announced. Behnish Architen, the firm that drew plans for the Law Center, won with a design that celebrated the current façade’s strong vertical lines, bringing them squarely into the 21st century both aesthetically and technologically. The new design will be LEED certified and feature many similar environmentally-friendly features that now make the Law Center the jewel of the UB campus.

We are excited for the range of possibilities a new building will afford the library, and thankful to the Governor, the Maryland legislature and President Robert Bogomolny for their commitment to the project and the support they have shown University of Baltimore’s library.

Luddite with an iPhone

via Wikipedia

I’ve never been much of a cheerleader for technology: a Luddite with an iPhone, a friend once called me; a technologically proficient skeptic with a Facebook account. I’m not sure what that says about me, about my convictions or whatnot. A few years ago, during a class discussion about existentialism, I happened to mention that I was agnostic, to which the professor replied, “No, you’re just wishy-washy.” I didn’t argue the point: a moral relativist, a questioning empathetic observer. An ethical ghost, as Fernando Pessoa may have called me. But my agnosticism doesn’t end in spiritual or religious matters. That “wishy-washyness” seeps into my views on all things e- (or i if it’s an Apple product).

So, back to the start: I have an iPhone, a MacBook, a Facebook account, a Twitter account (which I never use), a couple Gmail accounts, and a Netflix’s subscription. I haven’t bought a (paper & ink) newspaper in over a year, though I nonetheless bemoan the slow erosion of our fourth estate. I got angry—or silently frustrated—when I found that my new landlord didn’t have an online payment system, but requires that I mail him a check (the barbarian), yet I sometimes put an extra stamp on letters, feeling as though I’m doing my tiny part to ensure the financial security of the Postal Service. The contradictions, or my cognizant dissonance in matter of new vs. old technology abound.

So the question remains: Why should I care that a service I find cumbersome and inefficient sticks around?

I'll Take Boredom Over Facebook Anyday

Socrates:
"The unexamined life is not worth living."

About two weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about a couple we both knew. They'd been married for a few years, not too long (I can't remember how long exactly), and as far as I knew, were very happy with one another. But earlier that day, the wife, we'll call her Jen, changed her relationship status on Facebook to single. The status change had for some reason popped up on my news feed and when I saw it I had a reaction that's probably pretty common (no matter how frequently people get divorced) and not all that interesting. I thought, "Holy crap!" or some derivation of that general sentiment. After a quick peek below the post, my initial reaction was forgotten and replaced by curiosity and disbelief that some of Jen's "friends" had actually "liked" her status. So, after my friend and I finished joking about all the possible meanings and interpretations of an individual "liking" someone else's divorce--are they reveling in their pain; happy that their friend is out of an unhappy relationship; are they, by clicking "like", stating their intentions to court the new divorcee (the meaninglessness of such a vapid statement makes the mind reel and the imagination go wild)--and so we went on and joked at the simplicity with which Facebook and other social-media sites try to distill really complicated and at times morally ambiguous events and emotions into trite and therefore meaningless bites of data. It wan't long after we ceased our rants that we realized we might see the husband, we'll call him Joe, at an event later that night.

"So do we bring up the divorce?"

Please, No More Award Ceremonies

Fall's here, which means, among other things (school starting being one), that hardly a day will go by without hearing about some kind of award ceremony, even if it doesn't take place till the end of the year. Gowns are sold for sums that I prefer not to think about, fashionistas crawl up into their deer stands flanking the red carpet to snipe at those who traverse it, critics sharpen their teeth, and everyone pics winners. The Emmys just passed--which for me is the start of the season, kinda like a harvest moon, which also just passed--so that means it's about time E! starts their wild guesses about nominations for the Oscars, still a few months away.

In books, the Man Booker Prize has been taking headlines both with their recently announced best-novel shortlist, and because of their plans to begin nominating Americans in 2014. Some are none to happy about the latter. (The Booker Prize is (traditionally) given to a novel published somewhere in that vast span that was once the British Empire.) The National Book Foundation has also announced their shortlist for the National Book Awards and you can be sure that editors around the country are trying to spin some controversy out of something in that list, or better yet, the prize itself.

But one "prize" (which isn't really a prize) that gets little attention but nonetheless represents something way more substantial to culture and to those that make culture than any of the prizes listed above. The MacArthur "Genius" Grants were announced this week. They award a substantial sum of money and title to those in the arts and sciences that have moved their field forward. One of the winners has revolutionized an aspect of library science in a way that can now give us a look into the past like we have never had before, and it's pretty cool:

The Ranking Jangle in Higher Ed

Mark Twain via Wikipedia

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics. - Mark Twain

How does one chose a single university out of all the stellar universities in this country? Answer: Rankings?

Earlier this month, US News and World Report put out their annual ranking of US colleges. Happily, the University of Baltimore was ranked in the "Top 25 Public Universities in North Region." And considering how many public colleges there are in the northern region of the US, that ain't too shabby. The university has come a long way, even since I started in 2009.

But what exactly does that mean? How did all those highly-caffeinated statistician's in their binder-clogged offices come up with that number? What was taken into account? And how could they possibly have quantified some of the most intangible, and arguably the most important, aspects of a great education--like engaging teachers or peer groups that challenge you to always do better, etc?

From the "Langsdale Link": The Ways We Read Books

At the end of last year, sometime right around the beginning of the holiday shopping season, it seemed editors and writers in just about every popular-news-and-editorial-based magazine and website were complaining that publishing was coming to an end as we know it … or, at least, there’d be an end to print. That turned out not to be the case, and probably never will be. The end was not so nigh as some may have had us believe. But that’s not to say that there is no massive sea change in the ways people are now buying and reading books, in the ways publishers are disseminating and promoting books, and the ways libraries are lending books. There are, and all these new processes of buying, selling, lending e-books and the copyright rules and rules of ownership that are paired with e-books─not to mention the decisions inherent in choosing from the different file types, the device requirements, and the terms of use from the publisher, the retailer, etc., etc …. This can all get really confusing and really murky─really quick.

At Langsdale, though, we are trying to make your choices, digital or print, as easy as possible. For all students, staff and faculty, it was and will continue to be easy to get books not only physically from our shelves, but also to have books delivered to Langsdale from any public university in the state within a few days (just a few clicks on the website or a quick chat with our circulation staff).

Where Did I Put that Article?

Logo for The Browser

You can find everything online. While this isn't actually true, it sure sometimes feels like it is. Even if you have to pay, which, I mean, come on, who actually pays for stuff online? (We don't need to go into that.) But, even though it feels like there is an article for every interest, a picture for every occasion/mood/event/place, a video for every idle second, a gif of literally every single cat and puppy walking the earth, there isn't always a good way to distinguish the good from bad without wasting a lot of time doing so. Reddit is a "good" (that term is very subjective and open to all kinds of debates) source of gifs, videos, funny pictures, etc. that have been vetted to a certain degree by a very large online community. Essentially, it's a good way to waste the better part of a day not really doing anything.

But articles and interesting content to read can be a bit trickier to find. Wasting your time looking at pictures or gifs online doesn't normally seem all that wasteful (though it defiantly can be) because it takes almost no thought or concentration, and to comprehend any given image takes only a second or two. Unlike articles or stories which take way longer (in most cases) to read, and require much more concentration. Fortunately there are a few places that will read and sort out all the junk for you, giving you a list of what a few editors believe to be the best content on the web for that day or week:

The Browser: This one is my favorite.They scavenge the internet's vast, information clogged [insert space/byway metaphor here]* so you don't have to. Almost everything I've read from this site has been worth my time. And they have a good variety of of topics; everything from politics to science to big Scottish guys throwing really heavy things in the air to show how big and Scottish they really are.

Longreads: Very similar to The Browser, but with more search refinement tools so you can zero in on exactly what you're in the mood to read.

McSweeney's Internet Tendency: This site is not like the others. It does not scour the internet for content, but instead posts short, mostly funny little tidbits that are a great way to blow off a little steam at the end (or in the middle of) a rough day.

*'Highway' is typically used, as in 'the information super highway,' which in 2013 seems a little dated and wrong. In my more pessimistic moods 'sewer' seems more apt, if slightly Luddite-ish and cranky. In an effort to find some common ground between the two, maybe a better metaphor would be 'the information super dollar store.'

Holy Motors: The Weirdest (and Best) Movie of the Year

The past year has been a pretty good one for cinephiles. Not great. But good. While the caliber of movies coming out of Hollywood is on average very, very, very low (and yes I did need three verys. Did you see Battleship? No? Good. Hopefully you like yourself more than that), the big movie houses still producing a lot of what resembles repackaged, empty calories than anything worth the mind to think about ten seconds after the credits. Yet there have been enough inventive and affecting foreign and indy movies to give some sliver of hope that culture, especially US culture, hasn’t once and for all fallen into some dark and strangely reflective pond, happily swimming in their own narcissism and consumerism (which are pretty much the same thing). And while some of these good art-house/indy/foreign movies have gotten some small dose of praise (The Master and Beasts of the Southern Wild, two truly excellent films, were both nominated for Best Picture), there have been a few others that have flown a little low of the media hype machine.

Holy Motors is one such movie that has been passed over not just by critics and award committees, but by
the public as well. I will warn you here: it is not a movie that everyone will like. It has no over-arching

Friday is Librarian-Work-Out-Video Day

It's not really. But, oh my God, what if it was?! Imagine.

Anyway, it is Friday. I didn't lie about that. And I am, as I'm sure all of you are, very tired. I've had to walk to work in the rain way too many times this week. I've had to deal with the hordes of swarming shoppers nervously buying every loaf of bread and carton of milk in sight because the seasonal thunderstorms that were, at the time, approaching us had an exotic name (Derecho) reminiscent more of a lucha libre fighter than a natural, and not all that exciting, weather event*. Then to add to my Illiad of inconveniences (as Thomas Phynchon would put it), I spilled coffee on my shoes, stepped in a puddle, and overslept because of a blown fuse (though the latter had nothing to do with the storm, but was the result of my girlfriend turning the air conditioner up too high).

So, now that the week is about over and the bold, red headlines that spelled doom and Apocalypse are gone from the Weather Channel's home page, we can rest easy and await a weekend that looks to be mild and clear -- that is, if we can still trust in weathermen that have given us little reason to.

And what better way to end a rainy week (or any week, for that matter) than watching a ridiculous and slightly creepy video of librarians doing aerobics to the sweet sounds of Van Halen (amongst a slew of other 1980's gems).

Enjoy:



By Adam Shutz

*Though sounding slightly inauspicious and, maybe more to the point, like something that will beat you up or run you over, Derecho actually just means "straight winds." Pretty anticlimactic, I know. But well suited to the week, as it turns out.

The Walters Goes Digital

Past the glass cases lined with Grecian urns and Roman armor, past the gift shop and the cafe dressed in Medieval stone archways, past the bronzes of Buddhist saints and paintings of Hindu gods, there are rooms at The Walters Art Museum lined with wooden cases that house some of the museum's richest collections. These rooms hold the institution's collection of ancient manuscripts, some dating back to the 8th century. And unless you happen to be a curator at the museum, you would never know that most of them existed, until now. With the help of a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Walters' staff are in the process of digitizing their entire collection of manuscripts, some of which are already available online and can be used in any way by the public.

I can't think of a better ways to waste a few hours online.

The Research Paper that Grew Legs and Destroyed Cities

There really are only a few things that I believe myself truly, unabashedly, and unapologetically good at. And right at the top of that short list is procrastination. It's a gift, I don't mind saying. Since college, though, I've learned to temper said gift to some small degree. I set schedules with alarms that blare annoying, piercing sounds, or program them to play some song that I utterly despise (at the moment it's "You Give Love a Bad Name" by Bon Jovi; I started this because I used to set my clock radio to NPR and then just lie in bed on the weekends listening to the news or Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me, sometimes for hours when I should have been at work). At times, I lock myself in my office through the early morning hours, and periodically on the weekends. I set my phone to vibrate and make sure to leave it on a different floor of the house so as not to be distracted by friends calling and luring me to this oh-so-cool thing that I already knew about and hadn't had the slightest inclination to join, but now that I am about to sit down and work, well, that sounds like a great idea. That last one might have more to do with with nerves or anxiety, than procrastination (the effect is the same though). After all, you can't fail at something that you haven't started. But boy, when I was in college did I truly have a penchant to procrastination. I once wrote an 8-page paper given to me at the beginning of the semester an hour before class. I don't remember the grade I got on that one, but I do remember walking to class reading it and turning red over the many, many typos and terrible constructions contained therein.

I know I'm not alone in this fact. If I were to take a poll of undergraduate students and ask, "How long does it take you to start an assignment with a deadline a month away?" I'm pretty sure I'd get a response of at least 75% answering three weeks. But that is slight consolation. The great men and women of arts and letters and science, what did they do? How did they circumvent the universal desire to watch a half-a-day's worth of infomercial GIFs? Well, as it turns out, they may not have had the fortitude and robotic determination that you may have thought.

So, for this time of year when many of you are beginning to have nightmares of unfinished term papers growing legs and a lust for destroying cities, I figured I'd give you some advice, and show that there is some hope.Well, maybe I shouldn't be the one to give you advice (see everything above). Maybe I'll let someone with credentials and accomplishments speak for me. Here is a link to a series on how many artists and writers and scientists got done all the great work that they did.

Hope that helps.

Dusty Books and Podcasts

Poetry Center, Chicago

It isn't the easiest thing to talk about books on the radio or on a podcast or, for that matter, in the classroom, and make them interesting. I'm sure you've seen, at one point or another, some version of this tried and true cliche from Hollywood: a protagonist in a deep and rarely visited part of an old library who finds a book that has long been neglected, high up on some mahogany shelf. For one reason or another the character is drawn to it. He pulls it from the shelf, blows off its thick layer of sienna dust and opens it to find an adventure of some sort, something magical or a riddle to be solved, which will probably drive the rest of the movie. Well, making a podcast about books has to feel at times something like that. The host has to figure a way, improbable as it may be, to get the dust off that book, old or new, and bring the thing to life.

Most fail at this (there are a lot of really bad podcasts about books), but some actually do succeed, and are really quite good: Here's a list of a few of my favorites:

• In more ways than one, The Poetry Foundation has revitalized the ancient art of poetry. Because of a substantial grant of $200 million dollars given them in 2003 by Ruth Lilly, the Foundation was not only able to redesign their magazine (Poetry), to build the Poetry Center in downtown Chicago, to award substantial prizes to both up and coming poets and those of considerable reputation, but was also able to redesign their website. As part of the redesign they created an award-winning poetry app, a blog that stresses the vitality and importance of  poetry as a form, and a podcast that discusses new work by poets published in their journal. On that same page, you can also find recordings of classic lectures, poets reading their work, poets discussing the works that have inspired them over the years ... I could go on, but I think you get the point. Highly suggested.
• KCRW is Southern California's NPR affiliate. On it's airways for many years now is the stalwart of literary discussion, Bookworm. Now, you can get their entire catalog of past broadcast online and for free. The show focuses on interviews with writers, primarily of fiction, discussing their newly released books. Browsing the shows archives is a veritable who's who of literary fiction.
• Indy Lit is a broad and ill-defined category for which I have deep reservations. But as I am not trying to debate the merits or lack thereof of a category, instead wishing only to suggest interesting things to listen to, I'll refrain for now. Bookfight, a podcast done from the basement of its host's home, does skew toward the category of Indy Lit, so despite my reservations, I'll slap that label on. It is produced by two editors of the literary magazine Barrelhouse, Tom McAllister and Mike Ingram, and if you care to know what the kids these days are doing with words, here is a great place to start. [Full disclosure: I know both the hosts, so my opinion may be a tad biased.]

iPhone Apps and Library Books

O. Von Corven "The Great Library of Alexandria

Last week I got an iPhone, my first. As you could probably guess, I've spent the past few days both trying to figure the thing out and browsing the insane amounts of everything on offer in the App Store. It turns out there are way more programs, games, and knickknacks of all kinds than I could have cared to imagine. Even when picking out what I thought would be a simple app, like a dictionary, there was more to choose from than I bothered to look at, probably in the hundreds. With this kind of selection it’s difficult not to think that I’ve picked the wrong one. Maybe there was a faster one. A more attractive one. One with more terms, or easier to understand definitions. One with a more complete etymology. One with pictures. One without advertisements. One that translates to the Spanish. One that translates to the Bantu. One that will read the pronunciation in a robot voice. One that will read the pronunciation in a celebrity voice. One that will read the pronunciation as a robot doing an impression of a celebrity voice. Etc. etc.

In the grand scheme of things, deciding what dictionary app to use is a pretty trivial decision. It isn’t something that I walk around regretting or even pondering as I’m in line grabbing a sandwich at Soup’s On. But I have noticed that I do, when I use the app, wonder if maybe I should go back and see if one of the others is more suited to my needs (whatever they are). Maybe it (that perfect-yet-ill-defined dictionary app) would make my life easier and me happier.

Zombie Poetry That Looks Just Like Healthy Poetry (and Could Very Well Be Healthy and Not Undead)

Fair Warning: This post has little to do with Dead Poet's Society. And only slightly more to do with a defense of poetry or a defense of that particular poem read at the inauguration.

I'm not sure if any of those topics are pertinent anyway. Especially since this post is so late—a rabbit-with-a-pocket-watch-running-around-his-rabbit-hole late—and the inauguration long past. Though timing may not matter. I can’t imagine too many people are sitting around counting the drips from the faucet echoing down the hall just waiting for a new defense of poetry (or, contrariwise, a eulogy for poetry) to spring up on their facebook news feed. But nonetheless it’s still kind of late, this post.

You might have missed it (I almost did) but in The Washington Post last week Alexandra Petri wrote an editorial called “Is Poetry Dead?” In her article she reacts to the inaugural poet Richard Blanco’s poem read before the nation last Monday. Leaving aside Petri’s criticism of the poem itself (which, I also thought was pretty bad, as most on-demand poems are), I’ll jump straight to her headlining question, Is poetry dead? 

Who cares.

I’m not arguing that nobody should care about poetry. I’m only arguing that no one should care about the Is-Poetry-Dead argument/question. It's a ridiculous question. If we give it any credence then we also must need to engage in many similar arguments about all kinds of other things: Is backgammon dead? Is bocce ball dead? Are talent shows dead? Who cares.

Folk Songs and Light Bulbs

From Wikipedia

Let me just preface this post by saying: I am not a librarian -- at least not in any technical sense. I never went to school... never even thought about going to school... actually, before I started working here, I'm not sure I even knew there was such a thing as a degree in library science. I just hung around a lot of libraries, used them a lot, read in them a lot, napped in them more than a few times before class, so when I started working here as a student it fit naturally. But possibly because I never studied libraries or the science of them, never really considered them in anything resembling a holistic, or comprehensive way, I still, even after a few years working here, find myself astounded at some of the things I find from time to time, usually by accident, doing this or that at work.

I'll share just a few quick examples:

• The Library of Congress website: If you've ever been to Washington (and this being Baltimore, there is a pretty good chance that you have) more than likely someone -- a tour guide, a cab driver, a cousin -- pointed this building out to you. It gorgeous (see above). The library does exactly what it says it does: it's the library for congress. So unless you're a representative or senator, or an aid to one or the other, you can't actually check books out of the building. But, there is enough on their website to keep even the mildly curious happy for a while. A few suggestions: 
• The American Folklife Center: Here you'll find digital transfers of wax recordings made around the country in the 1930's and 40's (folk songs, sea shanties, field hollers, Native American rituals, etc.), as well as pictures and maps of historical America.

• Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers: This site doesn't have quite as much info, but what it does have I think is pretty interesting: scans of Alexander Graham Bell's journal (containing many preliminary drawings for future inventions), and letters to and from him and his family (including one from Mark Twain, where he (jokingly) berates Bell's father-in-law for telephone service that always seems to cut out when he's practicing his cursing).

Columbus and a Sea of Blue Ideas

Columbus Breaking the Egg (Christopher Columbus) by William Hogarth

For a scientist -- or anyone for that matter -- to proclaim the discovery of a physical thing (a country, a particle, a planet, a new species of fish) has always rubbed me as a potentially childish endeavor, and, maybe more to the point, an altogether arrogant claim.* How could they possibly know, for sure, that in the thousands of years of recorded history no one else has found what they have?

Since we have recently celebrated Columbus Day, let’s use him as an example. “He,” the claim goes, “discovered America.” Well, actually, no. There are lots of things wrong with this claim, but I’ll only go into a few very briefly because the topic has been belabored by so many historians and activists that my adding to that body of lit. will do no one any good:  (1) he found a country/continent that was inhabited for about 12,000 years prior to his arrival, by an Asian population that walked an unimaginably long and icy bridge into Canada (which now, of course, isn’t there); (2) even if we try to claim that he was the first European to find the continent, there are problems here too; Vikings living on the southern tip of Greenland had traded and frequented the continent (they called it Vinland) long long before Spain traveled much further west than the Canary Islands; (3) he didn’t find America, he found Cuba.

Of course, this, the historical, empirical version of Columbus is not the person that we celebrated this past Monday. We celebrated the symbol of Columbus. A symbol that, for better or worse, is the symbol of America: determined; individualistic; steadfast in the face of the great, dangerous expanses of the unknown; slightly arrogant and reckless; and ultimately victorious in his endeavor to go where no one thought was possible – to add icing to the cake, he also came back rich. The story of Columbus mirrors the founding story of the US so well that to critique Columbus, even Columbus as myth, while continuing to sing the refrain of our own origin story, would rival the appearance of a patient suffering a traumatic brain hemorrhage caused by a great unknown cognizant dissonance. So here we are, kind of stuck with him, and a story we now know to be bull--

The Wizard and the Great Zeitgeist

"House of Knowledge" by Jaume Plensa 

If the internet or blogs were old enough to have what one might call a tradition, we can be sure that it would be predominantly based in retelling what is new, what is breaking or just broken, what is currently trending or being viewed, right now, at this moment, look! But the internet and blogs are still young, and a few years of repetitive habits does not a tradition make. But leaving aside questions of classifying a tradition, I believe I will break the habit, pattern… whatever you want to call it, and dredge from its recesses two discoveries – one very old, and one not quite so old (but still predating the Google-epoch*). Both of which I believe shed some light on how the internet has changed the way information is spread, though doesn't change the ways we interpret it.**

Anyone with a cursory interest in current events must feel at times inundated by the constant flow of news and discoveries and new information. It would be a full time job for any one person to keep up with all the revelations of any given sort circulated online. Everything from large, possibly world changing events – like the Arab Spring or evidence of the Higgs Boson (the “God particle”) – to less-than-world-changing revelations, like did you hear Rafalca, Mitt Romney's ballerina horse, lost the Olympics, or that the Orioles have yet to squander their winning record – and that’s to say nothing of the I-wish-that-tree-would-fall-in-a-forest-without-being-heard revelations that are tweeted and re-tweeted from the many TMZ-like sites that populate the web. Save a few controversial exceptions (evolution springs to mind), we accept most of these discoveries and news stories with an unspoken understanding that though it might be true today, tomorrow is another day entirely.

Ideas on truth and accuracy fluctuate as the piles of information grow. It seems we have cultivated an understanding that truth is a matter to be decided later, that we will either take note as we watch the evidence grow or we will quickly forget when another event comes storming along and blows the whole mess somewhere beyond our concern and past the scope of our Yahoo news feed. Without even giving it much thought, we assume that someone else has reviewed and edited all these tiny pieces of info; we trust, intrinsically, subconsciously, that the framework exists to discern truth from fiction and will eventually let us know the verdict. Yet this framework for fact-checking ­– as vague and large and unclassifiable as it is – breaks down more than we care to imagine. Most of the falsities are quickly forgotten, but others, more than I care to recall, get stuck in the teeth of the Great Zeitgeist, and live, looming over us, as a reminder of how gullible we sometimes are (what religion is Obama again?).