“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
--Audre Lorde

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Library Heroes/Heroines

Submitted by alycia on Tue, 06/30/2009 - 18:58

Inspired by Toni Samek's Librarian Heroes page, I decided to make my own in the wake of a recent rant about radical librarians.

The folks listed below are utterly inspirational people. Not all of them have an MLS, but all of them are library workers and thinkers. My hope is that this list will continually grow.

My library heroes include:

Alana Kumbier

Aliqae Geraci

Andrea Grimes

Audre Lorde While studying library science, Lorde supported herself working various odd jobs: factory worker, ghost writer, social worker, X-ray technician, medical clerk, and arts and crafts supervisor.

Barbara Fister

Chris Dodge

Celeste West

Christine Pawley

E.J. Josey

Emily Drabinski

Greig Means

The InfoLadies

Jackie Eubanks

James Danky

James Jacobs

Jenna Freedman

Jerianne Thompson

Jessamyn West

Jill Cirasella

John Gehner

Julie Tozer

K.R. Roberto

Katelyn Angell

Kathleen de la Peña McCook

Kelly Shortandqueer

Laura Crossett

Lia Friedman

Marcel Duchamp "So, that cooled me off so much that, as a reaction against such behavior coming from artists whom I had believed to be free. I got a job. I became a librarian... " (Dialogues With Marcel Duchamp by Pierre Cabanne, 1987)

Milo Miller and Christopher Wilde

Mitch Freedman

Noel Peattie

Randall Scott

Sanford Berman

Sherman Clarke

Shin Jeong Yeo

Tom Eland

Toni Samek

Zoia Horn

same

I won't even bother to make my own list because it would be nearly identical. I'd just add you, Barbara Fister, James Jacobs, and Melissa Morrone. Oh yeah, and my dad.

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Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric



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Daily Reading Log

May 12, 2013

  • Lots of reading, amidst the cracks of life as it goes, changes. Halfway through E. Biella Coleman's Coding Freedom, started David Graeber's Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, and wanted to start, but probably have to wait until after the thesis, bell hooks' Where We Stand: Class Matters.

April 24, 2013

  • A piece in the New Yorker about Noah Baumbach, a person whose work I have a lot of sympathy for somehow, but in this piece he sounds like he wants to be a vampire sucking the energy off of his girlfriend's ideas. Is that a great way to have a relationship, or a terrible way?
  • I've also been reading Living Anarchy on the train, while very tired lately.

April 23, 2013

  • Zines from the Brooklyn Zine Fest: Alex #4 and #5, Deafula #5, and Indulgence #11.

April 22, 2013

  • Jeppesen, Sandra. "Becoming Anarchist: The Function of Anarchist Literature." Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies 2011.2
  • Imhorst, Christian. "Anarchy and Source Code - What does the Free Software Movement have to do with Anarchism?"

April 19, 2013

  • Going to try to finish In Praise of Copying today. This book has pleasantly surprised me in many ways and I'm greatly enjoying it. Highly recommended if you would like to think more deeply about copying (and its mimetic, ever-present nature) on a philosophical level.
    Many of the books about intellectual property I've looked at recently discuss the absurdities of various IP situations, or examine IP clashes via specific (often outrageous) legal cases. This book, on the other hand, talks more about the practices and traditions of copying, collaging or appropriating through many different perspectives, going back to the work of philosophers who are long dead but also looking for the mimetic in religious practices, theory, art, and even inside the human body. Totally fascinating.
  • Also this article on drone, also by Boon.

April 11, 2013

  • More Moonwalking with Einstein, enjoying the history of the book (as related to memory) section.

April 10, 2013

  • Inching my way through Moonwalking with Einstein, which I've only read over BC lunches in the office.
  • Insomnia had me reading Fosterhood in NYC

April 9, 2013

  • About half of In Praise of Copying by Boon, which I am enjoying.

April 8, 2013

  • Read the introduction to Common as Air by Hyde.
  • Last week watched the documentary, Kind Hearted Woman. Among many powerful scenes, was struck by those where Robin took family to go walking through the U of M, and how looking at the university and thinking about what it offered was a powerful activity for them.

April 1, 2013

  • While fighting some kind of bug finished Please Kill Me and ripping through Cometbus Omnibus and Straight Edge: Hardcore Punk, Clean Living Youth, and Social Change

March 23, 2013

  • Been reading Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. Not sure if it will help the thesis, but it's a good pick up/put down at random book.
  • Also still moving very slowly through Moonwalking with Einstein, my official over-lunch-at-work book of the moment.

March 13, 2013

  • Still finishing up Getting Things Done
  • Thesis reading: Living Anarchy by Jeff Shantz
  • Democracy Now! and WBAI, who could sincerely use your help.

March 9, 2013

  • Been reading Getting Things Done and trying to get things done.

March 6, 2013

  • Broke open Getting Things Done on the train. Still in the intro parts where there's talk about overwhelming obligations and the ever-increasing nature of the amount of things that are related to work these days. Tell me about it.

March 5, 2013

  • I started See Now Then because I saw that Jamaica Kincaid was going to be doing a reading that I could actually attend. I went tonight and she was fantastic. I didn't have a question afterward, because what I really wanted to say was that reading A Small Place and the surrounding discussion in high school was huge working class awakening and a moment I still think about. And that's not really a question.
    Here's one of many great portions of See Now Then:
    "Mrs. Sweet was a knitter and mender of socks, and she did that because while doing so she could delineate and dissect and then examine the world as she knew it, as she understood it, as she imagined it, as it came to her through her everyday existence."(38)
  • This feels like a p.s., but I'm also trying (and failing) to read Getting Things Done. Ha.