• Going to try to finish The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright before the end of the day.
• Read a few bits of fiction lately in the New Yorker--that Cormac McCarthy with the rolling head and a short Sherman Alexie piece too.
• Almost 500 words today (493 so far, might be all I've got for today).
  

• A little more of Writing with Scissors, and a perusal through The Riot Grrrl Collection.

• This morning I read photocopies from Sandy before work: of "My So-Called Post-Feminist Lit Life," and "Paint Bombs"

• Skimmed Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rocker on the train, or tried to, as a dude tried to talk to me about my feet.
• More of Moonwalking with Einstein at lunch.
  

• At the reference desk: "Resistance in the Materials" by Bethany Nowviske. Could not agree more:
  "Art objects, little mechanisms and technical experiments, cultural artifacts reproduced for teaching or research—cheap 3d-printing is one affirmation that words (those lines of computer code that speak each shape) always readily become things. That they kind of… want to. It’s like when I learned to set filthy lead type and push the heavy, rolling arm of a Vandercook press, when I should have been writing my dissertation."
• On the train: "Computer Network Piecing Together a Jigsaw of Jewish Lore", and this article, catching up.
  

• This morning I was reading and enjoying: Barbara Tomlinson and George Lipsitz. "American Studies as Accompaniment." American Quarterly 65.1 (2013): 1-30. Project MUSE. Web. 24 May. 2013.
• And I'm also back to reading See Now Then in bits and pieces on the train and in coffee shops. It's pleasant but has an underlying rage, which gives it a unique feel.
  

• 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.
  

• 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?"
  

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

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

• 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

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

• 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.

• I thought I'd finish Anarchism and its Aspirations days ago (it's a really nice small--almost palm-sized--book), but everything just takes far far longer than I anticipate lately. But I'm trying also to account for the joys of doing extended research and reading, too.
• "On turning down a job" was a good lunchtime read.
  

• "The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments," by J. Anthony Blair

• Finished Zines in Third Space, started Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking, and ran across this interesting post.

• I was away for a while, and while away I read The Virgin Suicides, which is just a perfect book really.
• Back in reality, I've been enjoying Mother Jones magazine and Zines in Third Space and trying to light a fire to get my thesis going.
  

• More of remembered rapture:
  "Each day I sat at the typewriter and different memories were written about in short vignettes. They came in a rush, as though they were a thunderstorm." (83)

• Democracy Now!/Mariel Hemingway. Totally can't resist stories like these, about the underbellies of families and mental health/illness.
• More of remembered rapture:
  "I write with the intent to share ideas in a manner that makes them accessible to the widest possible audience. This means that I often engage in a thinking and writing process where I am pushing myself to work with ideas in a way that strips them down, that cuts to the chase and does not seek or hide or use language to obscure meaning. The longing to pattern the words and ideas so that they are 'in your face'--so that they have an immediacy, a clarity that need not be searched for, that is present right now--allows me to transfer to the act of writing vernacular modes of verbal exchange that surface in the expressive culture of the southern black working class." (40)

• A very depressing document
• Miriam Posner's "No Half Measures: Overcoming Common
  Challenges to Doing Digital Humanities in
  the Library"
• "Connecticut is About to Force* Publishers to Sell eBooks to Libraries"
• Started The Collected Works of Amy Hempel on the way home
  

• Finished The Cave, perhaps one of the most perfect books I've read in a long time.
  "...I just happen to think that there are times in our lives when we have to let ourselves be carried along by the current of events, as if we didn't have the strength to resist, but then there comes a point when we suddenly realize the river is flowing in our favor, no one else has noticed, but we have, anyone watching will think we're about to go under, and yet our navigation skills have never been better..." (304)

• Still enjoying The Cave

• More of The Cave:
  • "He looked at himself in the mirror, but found no new line or wrinkle on his face, It's probably somewhere within me, he thought, then he ran the tap, washed his hands and went out." (19)

• More of The Cave
• First chapter of Moonwalking with Einstein
  

• Finished Exit Wounds over breakfast. Looked at a bit of Rutu Modan's New York Times blog too
• More of remembered rapture on the train
• Catching up on work reading:
  

• A little more of remembered rapture, which is ah-mazing.

• Wrenching out a shitty first draft, looking over my theory notes.
  
• This reminds me of when Half Price Books in the dirt mall used to sell their fiction paperbacks literally for 1/2 the cover price. I got a bunch of copies of really old editions of some James Baldwin works for half the cost, something like 1/2 of 60 cents. And I've still got em, those copies where the pages seem to crispen, with black covers and green fore edges.
• Also started The Golden Compass during an intense hyper-way-after-bedtime bout.
  

• Some Barthes, Foucault and Butler. Still working on finishing up the semester.
• A surprisingly interesting interview with a baseball player, way more intriguing than I would have predicted (I tend to glaze over when the topic of sports comes up).
• I am no longer struggling financially like I have in the past, but I am still in debt (from school), and damn, if I received one of these notices in the mail, I think that relief might be the most relieving kind of relief that could be given. More info here.
  

• Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish re-reads on the train, deciding on who to choose to focus on for the final.

• Read Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman and felt pretty conflicted about many aspects of it. After having just re-read Matilda, it felt reminiscent.

• Started Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians:
  "In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. This huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks." (5)
  
  

• Too many deadlines, I listened to program #479 from This American Life, which happened to be about Minnesota, which happens to be where I was born.

• Baudrillard and Didion.
  From The Year of Magical Thinking:
  “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it..."

• Some of the New Yorker on my commute. Victor Zapana's piece about his mother made me take the magazine with me on the train.
• Trying to get away from the telly. Started Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Brilliant.
  

• Getting addicted to Sherman Alexie, plowed through half of War Dances while commuting
• I've been buying books lately. One because it was my very favorite as a child, another because I know of the author and happened to pick it up serendipitously in the local bookstore
• For class, reading excerpts from Said and Spivak and being inspired
  • Said: "The idea of the beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning..."
• Also, I've read as many books this year already as I had in all of the last few past years, and there's still a month left of 2012!
  

• "The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition," by Andy Marra. I totally needed this today--to be reminded of the big picture and what my own reunion felt like.

• Foucault on panopticon on the train, while simultaneously mulling over that movie I watched too.

• The 1999 preface of Gender Trouble on the train. Really appreciating this reading, perhaps above all the rest so far this semester (so far).
• Zines at work: Black Out and Ker-Bloom! among others.
  

• During Sandy (we are fine, thankfully), I've been stealing time from myself--from work, from homework, from scholarship. Hid from my life like I hid from the storm. Trying to re-charge my batteries. Spent all the time possible indoors, worried about when the pharmacy would open again (among worries for others and for all the areas--here and other places). Read only a tiny bit of Wizard of Earthsea, knitted.
• Then I read a quote about how if you read one book a week for life you only read 1% of what is in print. This made me wonder if I have regrets.
  

• Zizek's introduction to How to Read Lacan.

• Started Adela Licona's Zines in Third Space: Radical Cooperation and Borderlands Rhetoric on the B train to Manhattan, sun streaming in. This is a book I've really been looking forward to. I'm really struck, just in the first few pages, with Licona's blending of her academic and personal experiences (or the acknowledgement thereof--I think both things are always working in tangent whether they are spoken or not), and I'm really struck by her tone. It's very respectful and admiring of zine creators and her fellow scholars. So far I'm really impressed and am really looking forward to reading further.

• Started Simulacra and Simulation on the train. Disneyland? ¡¡ Yes.
• Working on Wolfgang Iser's "Interaction between Text and Reader," and Stanley Fish's "Interpreting the Variorum" for class, which makes me think a lot about Duchamp's theories about art (or what I remember them to be from high school).
  

• I'm finishing Open City today. A part near the end totally surprised me.

• Although my presentation hangover almost got the better of me, I got back on the horse and back into On Deconstruction, although I still think I have no idea what I'm doing with these reading responses/abstracts for class.

• "...he told me he needs a pencil in his hand when he’s thinking."
• Reminiscing and thinking with a pen in my hand, a highlighter nearby, and switching between a browser and slide software as I prepare for Protest on the Page. Right now I'm across the way from where you can eat a brat and have a pitcher near a full size plexiglass cow (and where Peter Kubelka was amazed by the televisions in the floor), but earlier I was in one of my most absolute preferred study spaces of all time:
  

• Glad I'm reading Barthes in class, because I think I digest just about 4% of it. That said, if I wasn't reading for class, I wouldn't be reading so quickly.

• Spent the weekend reading some escapist Laura Ingalls Wilder, then started Kirsty Leishman's thesis, "Becoming Zine: The Place of Zines in Australia's Cultural Life," today on the train, near the most still-partying couple ever to be seen by me on the 5 at 8am on a Monday morning.

• "Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change" by Janice Radway, from PMLA, Volume 126, Number 1, January 2011, pp. 140–150

• So great. #1 is something I have been talking a lot about lately, how important it is.
• Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy" from Social Text, 1990. Just what I needed.
  

• Wishing I could read faster, multiple books at once, and write myself simultaneously. This weekend read more Laura Ingalls Wilder and Intimate Ephemera

• Been reading a bunch, but other things have been keeping me from recording here. Today I enjoyed more of Open City by Teju Cole as I meandered my own trail throughout the metropolis.

• Returning to my love of the commonplace book, handwritten. But this also makes me want to study and see other commonplace books. Down the rabbit hole.
• Today (and this whole summer, really,) I'm trying to prioritize my huge reading log and cross off the things that could easily be accomplished. Piles and stacks and lists and notes, some digital and still lost.
  

• I went on an official, real, no responsibilities vacation. I think for the first time ever. In between pedaling, looking at greenery and listening to the ocean I was reckless: I ignored everything I'd brought with or intended and read Patti Smith's Just Kids and then Mindy Kaling's Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) on the train back to civilization.

This is the Summer of the Scheme, Summer of the Plot, Summer of Yes. The Summer of Big Projects and Collaborations. The Summer of the What-is-the-date-and-why-does-it-take-me-a-surprising-number-of-many-minutes-to-figure-it-out? It's also the Summer of Writing THREE Papers and the Summer of Don't Fuck With those Precious Research Days.

• Reading The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

• Reading Alexandra Heller-Nicholas' Rape Revenge Films: A Critical Study, peer-reviewing for the first time ever, and trying to catch up on my rss feeds.

• Been reading a little Foucault and also some Laura Ingalls Wilder. Little House on the Prarie is great bedtime reading because it reminds me of being little in a manner I never think about now, and it reminds me of a certain sense of trust that's impossible to have as an adult. And it's also amazing to read about all the prairie skills those folks had. However, it's also completely historically problematic in a way that keeps me from adoring it wholeheartedly.

• I have used this reading log as a record of what I've been reading, but today I read the most amazing piece by a Brooklyn College student that I may have, in some tiny, small way, been a part of inspiring, and in this case it feels like a marker of something bigger, the start of something to come.

10 years. RIP.

• Wasn't reading a whole lot earlier this year, was kind of fried, but now I'm reading all kinds of things that aren't necessarily what I should be prioritizing. Bechdel's Are You My Mother? was gulped down last night and into this morning and it was worth putting other things aside.

• Finished The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Hope that the Henrietta Lacks Foundation is functioning as well as it's portrayed in this article.

• Been too sick and busy and uninspired to keep up the reading log lately. Read Watchmen yesterday, and some zines today, including Doris #28:
  "I want to make this place a resource as well as a sanctuary. I want to open it up, but not so open that I can't come home and close my eyes. I want to learn how to give without giving too much. I want to teach what I know, and for someone to teach me. To keep learning so I don't give up. to keep thinking so I don't grow bitter."

• Finished Zone One. This is the kind of book that's so bad in so many ways you want to just go on and write your own, a la Octavia Butler. And yet the zombies kept me reading to the end, not that it was necessarily worth it.

• Gulped down Americus by MK Reed, which was suggested by a fellow librarian at the Brooklyn Zine Fest last weekend.
• Also started that zombie novel, Zone One, yesterday. Feels like reading television.
  

On a my own tour of BK today:

• Krik? Krak!

• I'll watch anything about Muppets, but this documentary is really great

• Assigned reading from Visual Complexity

• "Shunned" by Meredith Hall from In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction

I've been pretty unfocused and undisciplined about lots of things lately, this reading log included. Not reading as much as I have been in past years, less nose to the productivity grindstone. Lots of things are being read, but this spring I'm overall fatigued and a bit depressed and overwhelmed by life in general. Not sure if bringing back some reading log stability is what will help, but I have been reading and thinking and appreciating (as usual). Maybe in the next few days I'll get back into it, but here's a palette cleanser until I figure out more of the parts involved in figuring it out.

Underground presses cannot survive within capitalist society... they are created only in order to destroy capitalist relations.--Fredy Perlman

• Part one and a bit of part two of Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History by Franco Moretti

• Debates in the Digital Humanities
• "Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code"
  

• A few zines I picked up at the Feminist Zine Fest, including Words are Not Enough. Read on the train on the way to work and really enjoyed it. Also a zine you need more than one train ride to get through (a good point). Excited to teach my first instruction session on zines at Brooklyn College tomorrow and share the loot from this weekend.

• Getting notified that I'd been mentioned in this piece today really made me feel great. YOU TOO can feel really wonderful by signing, boycotting and educating about the perils of restrictive and proprietary scholarly publishing!

• Academic History Writing and its Disconnects as part of an exploration in open peer review for my Digital Humanities class

• More of Planned Obsolescence

Amidst fevers and coughs:

• More of 1Q84, which is weird to read when sick, mostly because in the third book everything is getting pretty repetitive
• Planned Obsolescence, which I'm really enjoying, as I can, as I recover
  

• What's been happening over at one of my old libraries is pretty amazing to see
• More of Debates in the Digital Humanities and related homework
  

• Just 1Q84 on the train.

• More of 1Q84. Getting more into the parts that make it obviously Murakami (not that the other parts weren't--just further into the fantasy side of things...)

• After seeing someone reading the new Murakami on a train platform yesterday (and seeing that they were further along than I am--after a month of reading and not reading it), I lugged it along on my commute.

• "Pictures will be graded on sincerity and evidence of time spent using up your crayons." (If only all art teachers were this straightforward.)
• More of The Marriage Plot. Probably will finish it today and look into more Eugenides.
  

• More of The Marriage Plot

• Started The Marriage Plot, and am really, almost guiltily enjoying it.
• Watched this crazy PBS show where they dissect a sperm whale because of just finishing Moby Dick. Although probably not as gory as a whale ship, it's really the real thing--watch out!
• Realized that Moby Dick is the original Animals Being Dicks:*

*Or maybe that should be Animals being (Moby) Dicks?... Now somebody's gotta make a GIF...

• Articles and passages for a bibliography
• Just a bit more of 1Q84
  

• More Melville.

• A tiny bit of Moby Dick, but stress city.

• Moby Dick. This book is grisly, and it leaves me with so many questions about the anatomy of whales. And how Tashtego could have gotten lost inside the head parts. Yikes.

• 1Q84 and Moby Dick
• Print culture articles.
  

• Research and Refworks.

• A book about Access, for the zine collection. Relational databases to the rescue!

• Moby Dick. More than 350 pages in, still no sign of that white whale.

• Stone Age and Dominion. And yes, I may have won 2 out of 3.

• Moby Dick
• "The Sound of that Ocean"
  

• More of Moby Dick. I suspect a lot of entries this month will be just this.
• Zines and Copyright Issues zine by Jude Vachon. Totally exciting/useful/educational zine.
• A few zines donated by Robyn Jordan, Wittgenstein, and a few other zines.
  

• Moby Dick. I like the short chapters, illustrations, and the fact that you can easily put this book down and pick it up again, no problem.

• Read a lot of misc. away-from-school-and-work things:
• Started Moby Dick
• Read V for Vendetta
• Also read all of the first volume of Lynda Barry's Blabber Blabber Blabber
• and started, in short bursts, Bulfinch's Mythology
  

• Finished Mockingjay. Not sure how I feel about the end.
• Pre-cataloging zines, finally took a good look at Excitement and Adventure--what an amazing zine--it totally does all the things a zine should: delight you in its construction, provide an avenue for an obsession and share some intriguing info. It has pockets and inserts and trading cards!
  

• Finished Catching Fire, started Mockingjay.

• Even though the semester, my paper and my prep for the presentation was not 100% done at 7am this morning, I started Hunger Games anyway.
• It's true what they say about this book. Finished it within 24 hours.
  

• Re-reading Scott and Bourdieu for final projects.
• Started 1Q84 by Murakami last night, just a few pages. Love the Chip Kidd design and the amazing slick paper, but my wrists are already aching from the weight of this thing.
  

• A few reviews of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting

• More of American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting
• POSSESSION !!!
  

• More of Flower's Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement
• McGill's American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853
  

• Started Community Literacy and the Rhetoric of Public Engagement by Linda Flower on the trains, which seem out of whack (more than usual) lately

• Re-read my notes and marginalia from Stuckey's The Violence of Literacy:
  
  The overriding term for literacy in economic or labor studies is "information," and the terms by which information is discussed tend to describe it as a uniform, prepackaged product, much like any product that rolls of an assembly line (12).
• More of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World.
  

Junot Diaz: “Eventually everything I have gets read. But naturally I buy more than I can read, so there is always at least a hundred-book margin between what I own and what I’ve read. What’s cool is that I’ve caught up a couple of times, and this year I intend to catch up again. But then I’ll buy too much and the race starts again.”

• More of The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World

• Finished The Violence of Literacy, which felt like it blew open a new space in which to think about education and libraries.

  Literacy, like communication, is a matter of access, a matter of opportunity, a matter of economic security--a total matter...

• The Violence of Literacy

The People's Library is now mobile!

• The Violence of Literacy
• All the information I could get while not being able to take part in the Day of Action.
  

• Bits about the fate of the People's Library and #ows as it developed. No library is "safely stored" when kept from its readers.
• Re-read chapter 8 of Distinction
• More chapters of The Violence of Literacy
  

• Bits of The Mind of a Patriot: Patrick Henry and the World of Ideas, by Kevin J. Hayes

• It Came from Kuchar, about two of the very best filmmakers of all time.
• I was really digging the beginning of this piece that I stumbled upon by Jonathan Lethem (one of the first things I've read in a long while that hasn't been homework or research). . .
  

• A couple of blog posts
• xeroxed chapters of Anne Lareau's Unequal Childhoods
• finished Reading Women

• Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
• Language and Symbolic Power and Distinction.
  

• Started Reading Women: Literacy, Authorship, and Culture in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800
• Toes Caked in Cake and Blood and Grape, the latest IPRC Zine of the Month, by Thom May
  

• Bordieu

• Started Language and Symbolic Power by Bourdieu
• Nicolas Kanellos' "Jose Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois and the Origins of Hispanic Publishing in the Early American Republic" (so glad to jump the pond finally and chronologically in this book history class)
  

• Finished Inscription and Erasure, which I enjoyed very much. Chartier ends on a nice quote by Borges: “A book is not an isolated entity; it is a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships" (143).

• Domination and the Arts of Resistance

• Domination and the Arts of Resistance, working on Chp. 5 still on the train this morning. The footnotes in this book are fantastic; circling lots of citations for a future when I have time to do lots of exploratory reading in labor and anthropology.
• Barbara Fister does it again: "Occupy Knowledge: It's Ours, After All"
  

• Lots of teaching today, not much reading.

• Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts
• More Darnton too
  

• Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance

• A tiny bit of Robert Darnton's The Business of Enlightenment, while waiting for talks to start at MobilityShifts

• Finished The Nature of the Book, as best as I can skim the hundreds of pages of it.

• A lot of The Nature of the Book and Literacy in Theory and Practice

• More The Nature of the Book

• Decolonizing the Mind, by Ngũgĩ
• "everyone feels secretly fraudulent. It’s the feeling of being an adult."
• Pieces of the battle between Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns: "An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited," "How to Acknowledge a Revolution," and "Reply," all from volume 107, issue 1 of American Historical Review
  

• The Nature of the Book on the shuttle bus

• Nature of the Book

• Editing and writing, and a tiny bit of The Nature of the Book

• More Hirsch, on the train.

• Started Adrian John's The Nature of the Book, which, after Eisenstein, feels like a breath of fresh air.

• Re-read Susan Kates, "Literacy, Voting Rights, and Citizenship Schools in the South, 1957-1970" and "Ideology and Rhetorical Instruction: Brookwood Labor College" without being in a hurry and appreciated it a lot more...
• Also went back through Leslie Howsam's Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture, because sometimes reading on the train without a bookmark means you have no idea what you read
  

• Eisenstein

• Resnick and Resnick, "The Nature of Literacy: An Historical Exploration" from Harvard Educational Review
• This piece, remembering iron pours past and old radiators...
• More Eisenstein
• Optic Nerve #12
  

• We lost our family dog in the last year, and what Alison Piepmeier writes about Benya reminded me of Charlie--he too was amazingly sweet and gentle. RIP.
• Jack Goody, Ian Watt: "The Consequences of History," from Literacy in Traditional Societies
• Walter J. Ong, "Writing is a Technology that Restructures Thought," from The Written Word: Literacy in Transition
• Shirley Brice Heath, "Protean Shapes in Literacy Events: Ever-Shifting Oral and Literate Traditions," from Spoken and Written Language: Exploring Orality and Literacy
  

• Homework over beer, then covers of Sabbath at the Bell House.

• More Eisenstein
• Lorde's "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" (mostly while waiting in line for a sandwich)
• Paulo Freire, "The Adult Literacy Process as Cultural Action for Freedom" Harvard Educational Review, 1998.

• More of the Eisenstein book, on the train

• Roger Chartier, "'The Order of Books' Revisited," from Modern Intellectual History
• Peter Burke, "'A Social History of Books' Revisited," from Modern Intellectual History
• David D. Hall, "What Was the History of the Book? A Response," from Modern Intellectual History
• David D. Hall, "Afterword," from Early American Studies
• Joan Shelley Rubin, "What is the History of the History of Books?" from The Journal of American History
  

• Homework:
  • "In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores"
  • "Literacy, Technology and Monopoly Capital" by Richard Ohmann from College English
  • "Literacy in Three Metaphors" by Sylvia Scribener from American Journal of Education
    

• School's back in session and my reading list is a little scary. Started Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture by Leslie Howsam on the train this morning, happy to see the work of my mentors referenced, and how they fit in with other scholars "of the book."

• Girls to the Front

• Chris Atton, "The Librarian as Ethnographer: Notes Toward a Strategy for the Exploitation of Cultural Collections," a great article.
• A bit of Girls to the Front
  

• "The Syllabus as TOS"
• "Back to School"
• Schedule for the upcoming MobilityShifts Conference
• My train cars are as old as... (but I prefer them to robot trains)
  

• Finished On Edge

• Finished Brother, I'm Dying, a beautiful book:
  There were words that both my father and I wanted to exchange but never did... No matter what the reason, we have always been equally paralyzed by the fear of breaking each other's heart.
• Started On Edge, by Barbara Fister. One train ride and already 50 pages in.
• Also FINALLY finshed Code 2.0. It's hard to read a book about "cyberspace," the internet, written (originally) so long ago.
  

• More Dune

• More Dune, and my own work: editing, re-working, revising.

• (I still think of Aug. 15 as moving day from Madison.)
• Dune
• Kindle.Amazon.Com: Social Kindling
• Leaving the West--just beautiful.
  

• "Peers Don’t Let Peers Perish: Encouraging Research and Scholarship Among Junior Library Faculty" by Jill Cirasella and Maura Smale

• Making my own whats-left-of-the-summer reading/project syllabus
• I really appreciate working in a library with a team of "yes, and..." folks.
• A bit of Code 2.0 by Lessig and Content by Doctorow
  

• Dune on the train, wishing I'd ridden instead

• Browsed through Behind the Zines. Not sure I can like these kinds of art zines...
• re-read Firebrands, an issue of Candy or Medicine, and 398 zine
• Girls to the Front
  

• Mimi and Eunice's Intellectual Pooperty Booklet
• Piece in Rain Taxi on Lacey and her Zine Apothecary, sent in clippings from Sandy
  

• Through the Cracks
• Aaron Swartz Stole Nothing, But You Wouldn't Know That From the Coverage
• More issues of When the Crash Meets Something Solid
  

• A bit of Through the Cracks

• Two chapters of Smoking Typewriters
• More of State of Wonder
• Totally fascinating
• Why We Need Free Public Libraries More Than Ever
• A Modest Proposal Inspired by Aaron Swartz
• Zines: When the Crash Meets Something Solid #006, and Grunted Warning.
  

• State of Wonder
• I think that this is completely great
  

• Re-started State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
• This piece about student loans ("But I can't see borrowing that amount of money for a degree in art, or humanities, or sociology...")
• The Revolution will not be Televised, it is being Published by Davida Gypsy Brier, to be published in Xerography Debt #29
• I've been following the Street Books blog, and it's been pretty inspiring
  

• Code 2.0
• In the Wind
  

• This exhibit and associated video totally made me melt.
• Another video of how things are made.
• To Teach: The Journey, in Comics by Bill Ayers. A quick but good read:
  

  I want to build spaces where...

• In the Wind

• Started Barbara Fister's In the Wind. I haven't read much in the way of mysteries, so I am really intrigued by this one.

• Little Brother
• This post. And no, I am not signing up for any new social networking sites run by Big Brother.
  

• More of Freedom
• Barbara Fister's post, "Nothing Personal: How Database Licenses Make Pirates of Us All"
• Found myself on Billy's website, (his video zine reviews are great!) and this hits home:
  

• Many pages of Freedom, but haven't finished it yet (close!).
• A few zine librarian zines, mostly those by John Stevens.
  

• Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. Which keeps making me get that Richie Havens song in my head.

• More Little Brother, including the few pages about cryptography out loud.

• X'ed Out by Charles Burns
• More of Little Brother
  

• The Handmaid's Tale
• Kate Angell's My Feminist Friends
  

• Radical Teacher #90
• Little Brother
  

• Rebecca Solnit's Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics

• McKenzie Wark's The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International
• Browsed Critical Theory for Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from Across Disciplines
• Jessamyn's 2011 Oregon Virtual Reference Summit talk
  

• Angels in America's very last scenes.

• More restructuring and citation revising...
• The more holidays I experience the more I dislike them. But I'm glad I read Laura's post, "On Father's Day." It made me feel a bit at home in my discomfort.
• A few more pages of Angels in America
  

• More of Piepmeier's Girl Zines: Making Media, Doing Feminism
• Parts of The Generation X Librarian: Essays on Leadership, Technology, Pop Culture, Social Responsibility and Professional Identity
  

• This post that Biella linked to with writing advice. I liked:
  There’s no such thing as too much time spent. As you well know, a great book can last forever. A great book can change a person’s life. A mediocre book is just commerce.
• Some zine reading:
  • Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture by Stephen Duncombe

• This post from baxter sez on family and biology.

• emails. catching up.

• James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
• A bit of Siva Vaidyanathan's Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity
  

• Working on another writing deadline. Watched this on a break. Continues my perpetual interest in seeing how material objects are made.

• Viral Spiral
• "The Right to Read"
  

• Brooklyn College Faculty Day. Presented, attended and felt summer almost beginning to start.

• May 23rd's song
• The Final Recap
• Men, Women and Chainsaws and The New Avengers
  

• Trying to edit and finish two papers and revise a book chapter: a whole stack of things, trying to figure out what to include, etc.
• Skimmed The Generation X Librarian: Essays on Leadership, Technology, Pop Culture, Social Responsibility and Professional Identity
  

• Code 2.0 by Lessig. I also went to a few local bookstores today looking for my own copy of this book. Why are books about both culture and technology so difficult to locate in bookstores? Or am I just too used to libraries?

• Free Culture. Should be required reading in library school.
• The Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of their Own
  

• Men, Women, and Chainsaws
• Having been in school for a number of things that perplex people over the years (art school, library school, liberal/cultural/American/print studies) I appreciate this video for its excitement about librarianship, but also for the way that it shows the struggle that education can be (even when, apparently, your parents are footing the bill)
  

• Angels in America
• I guess I want to be a Revolutionary!
• Radway on zines, over lunch. Always almost too good to read. I usually stop 1/2 way through her pieces, which is unusual for me. There's just too much she opens up that has to be contemplated before going on.
• I like seeing tools that (are usually not seen and) are used to make art. This little video makes mundane materials seem very powerful. Full of potential.
  

• Readings related to Ms.45, Abel Ferrara, rape/revenge and NYC vigilante films.

• I didn't ride my bike today in order to catch up on some more reading for papers: on revenge/avenger/females and horror/films.

• Down the rabbit hole w/research today, reading old battles surrounding F/OSS and/vs. Copyright (totally fascinating)
• A post about unprofessional (in both senses) cataloging at Lower East Side Librarian. "Enriched content." Ugh. What do we do ourselves anymore?
• Stallman, Free Software, Free Society
  

• Spring break came waaaaay too late this year. I'm ready for summer vacation, not the final push of reading and writing. That said, in the last few days I read a bunch of things about media and technology, and about Ms.45, but I still felt like I'd rather be riding my bike, or on a beach.
• I also listened to "Compensation, Access, and Theft: Copyright in the 21st Century" a panel that I was sad I had to miss.
  

• Alison Piepmeier's blog, and "Maybelle vs. The Memoir." Inspired by Alison's thoughts about families and hard work.

• After seeing Low for the fourth time last night, I can't stop listening to them and thinking about how utterly amazing they are. This morning I watched/listened to the documentary about them, You May Need A Murderer. Is there a finer band from Minnesota, or anywhere?

• Intro and Chp. 1 of The New Avengers: Feminism, Femininity, and the Rape-Revenge Cycle by Jacinda Read

• Cooking for Geeks

• Men, Women and Chainsaws
• Zines at work (working on the collection!)
• I blame a childhood of watching Mr. Rogers after lunch for being a total sucker for videos like this.
  

• Sandy clippings: "Women Under the Budget Knife" by Katha Pollitt from The Nation, among other things.
• "Is Sugar Toxic?"
  

• Men, Women and Chainsaws
• "Cult Films, Commentary Tracks and Censorious Critics: An Interview with John Bloom" by Gary Crowdus, Cineaste Summer 2003.
  

• Free Culture, on the train.

• Megan L. Benton, "The Book as Art" from A Companion to the History of the Book

• Finished American Psycho. I don't think I needed to be any more creeped out by consumerism and emptiness, but I am after finishing this.
• Chicago citation style info, and conversion from MLA...
• Homework articles--Warhol films, Solanis, and Gutenberg parenthesis
  

• American Psycho
• I attended Copyright and Fair Use @ CUNY, which I thought was a wonderful event. I especially appreciated the presentation of Brandon Butler and Peter Jaszi, who insisted on the preservation of fair use in libraries through their work with the Association of Research Libraries.
  

• More American Psycho. Today I'm thinking about Patrick Bateman in relationship to Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, a film that we just talked about in class. Both of their stories--or the stories of their unraveling--seem so similarly inevitable somehow, and tied to such a vacuous and isolated perspective of life, and NYC.

• Started American Psycho for class

ACRL prep has utterly taken over my life. Here's what I can remember reading in the last few days:

• Free Culture
• "A Right to Read Anonymously: A Closer Look at "Copyright Management" In Cyberspace" by Julie E. Cohen
• "The Surprising History of Copyright and The Promise of a Post-Copyright World" by Karl Fogel
  

• Last Exit to Brooklyn
• EULAs. Blech.
  

• "Contradictions and Consensus--Clusters of Opinions on E-books"
• Noam Chomsky on Intellectual Property
• "Noam Chomsky, Closet Capitalist"
• Last Exit to Brooklyn
  

• The Poet in New York by Federico García Lorca
• "Printed Ephemera" by Michael Harris, from The Oxford Companion to the Book
• "The Importance of Ephemera" by Martin Andrews, from A Companion to the History of the Book
• "Materiality" by Bill Brown, from Critical Terms for Media Studies
• "Writing with Light: Jacob Riis's Ambivalent Exposures" by Christopher Carter
• "Walking the Ethnic Tightwire: Ethnicity and Dialectic in Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives" by Bill Hug
  

• (Too many) Posts and tweets about ebooks.
• Jessamyn's "On the Internet, with the Exploded Text", on the commute home. I really enjoyed reading this piece. Right now I particularly like hearing from others about their writing process;
  

• Homework:
  • Kate Newell’s “Washington Square’s Virus of Suggestion: Source Texts, Intertexts, and Adaptations,” Literature/Film Quarterly
  • Laurence Raw’s “Reconstructing Henry James: The Heiress,” Literature/Film Quarterly
  • Laurence Raw’s “Rethinking the Costume Drama: Agnieszka Holland’s Washington Square,” Henry James Review
  • More of Free Culture
    

• "Lending: A Problem Solved" by John Sullivan, for the Free Software Foundation Bulletin.
• Finished Washington Square. You can tell this book was written as a serial first; it takes soooo long to get to the parts that were obvious all along.
• Content by Cory Doctorow, for class.
  

• Bitch #50
• Washington Square
  From page 107:
  She only had an idea that if she should be very good, the situation would in some mysterious way improve. To be good she must be patient, outwardly submissive, abstain from judging her father too harshly, and from committing any open act of defiance.
• Although James looks down on Catherine, I wonder how much this remains the standard for "good" women.
  

• Henry James' Washington Square
• "Why Bibliography Matters" by T.H. Howard-Hill
• Carnival of Souls, for class
  

• Low Life
• Zine World's piece on Microcosm.
  

• Reading more Luc Sante,

• Lloyd M. Daigrepont's "The Cult of Passion in The Age of Innocence"
• Charles H. Helmetag's "Re-creating Edith Wharton's New Yorkin Martin Scorsese's The Age of Innocence
  

• Eric Eldred, et al, vs. John D. Ashcroft, syllabus and the dissent by justice Stevens
  • Stevens: One must indulge in two untenable assumptions to find support in the equitable argument offered by respondent--

• The Age of Innocence. Almost done--what will happen?
• As I am currently obsessed with figuring out how I write, via how others write, and the spacial situation in which this writing takes place, I am totally enamored with this blog; from the desk of...
• Finished The Age of Innocence, #7 of 2011.
  

• The Age of Innocence
• Today I found Brooklyn College colleague Rosamond S. King's Not-A-Blogs: works that reflect her "interest in communicating with others in meaningful, creative, tactile ways that do not involve the internet." Totally adoring her work.
• Peep! #16, zine of this month from the IPRC.
• Sheila Hicks: Weaving as a Metaphor
  

• "The History of the Book in America," by Scott E. Casper and Joan Shelley Rubin, from The Oxford Companion to the Book
• "China" by J.S. Edgren, and "Building a National Literature: The United States 1800-1890" by Robert A. Gross, both from A Companion to the History of the Book
  

• Finished that Scientology article.
• Encryption article in mainstream/non-geek media/talk!
• Is Killer Coke marketing experimentation responsible for my interest in comics?
  

• More McLuhan
• That Scientology article from the New Yorker.
  

• Maggie, A Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane
• Another great video, that makes me wistful for a studio.
  

• "A Dark Episode of Bonanza: Genre, Adaptation, and Historiography in Sleepy Hollow" by Stanley Orr
• A few short stories, (Cheever, Kincaid and Paley) on the New Yorker Fiction podcast, while doing the laundry.
• Merrill Schleier’s “The Empire State Building, Working Class Masculinity, and King Kong"
• Joshua Muravchik’s “Terrorism at the Multiplex"
  

• Fledgling
• The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, for class
  

• Fledgling. Understatement: Butler got really sexual with this last one!

• I read Bourdieu, Darnton and more as homework, as well as many versions of a big paper before finally hitting the send button on that email. It's submitted!

• Finished The Dispossessed. My favorite thing about it was that ultimately it calls for Open Access publishing at the end :)

Snow Day!

• I'm reading through backups, software installations and a great number of other things due to the great hard drive crash of '11.

• I got my first zine-of-the-month today from the IPRC: The Empire Builder. It was sad. I liked it.
• I also got spam religious ephemera mailed to me from Egypt. I can't really say I read it all, but it did make me feel like I was working at the Wisconsin Historical Society once again. Which is a welcome feeling.
• The Dispossessed
  

• Happy Roe v. Wade Anniversary! I enjoyed Eric's post about his mom's secret radicalism.
• I'm also happy to share an anniversary of another kind with someone special today, who has helped me with all kinds of things--like this very website--for many years now. I am continually happy to be the partner of my partner. Happy day, mjg!
  

• An issue of Edible Brooklyn
• The rest of Questioning Library Neutrality
• A soon to be published article by Jenna
• The Dispossessed
  

• The Dispossessed

• An appreciated gift, Signal: 01
• The Dispossessed
  

• I am 100% against pay-per-use and 85% against patron-driven acquisitions (when clicking instead of conversation drives the acquiring). I am so glad that Barbara Fister agrees, and can summarize why these systems are undesirable so well:
  • Supplying books that patrons (or should I say "customers"?) order from a catalog of possibilities alters the fundamental nature of libraries. The library is not a mall where individuals select the goods they plan to consume, like groceries or shoes. It's a commons, a resource for the entire community furnished with books that can be shared amongst ourselves and beyond local boundaries so that, by pooling our library holdings, we all can accommodate the unanticipated and occasional need. Sharing among libraries is something that most ebooks don't allow. And building a collection for the future seems to be a thing of the past.
• The Dispossessed, which I enjoy more for its commentary, although I find myself re-reading on the train a lot. I'm appreciating gems like:
  • He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance,

• I read "Printed Ephemera" from the Oxford Companion to the Book on the train today.
• The Dispossessed
  

• The Dispossessed
• Articles, sources, notes for an article.
  

• More of the David Cross book. Still ambivalent.
• Critical Terms for Media Studies, part of the introduction. I'm doing homework before the semester even begins!
  

• Parable of the Talents on the train. I didn't want to get to my stop. A post-apocalyptic novel where the most heinous villains are "Christian America"??!

• Parable of the Talents

• Bicycle Diaries. I like that we end up back in NYC at the end of this book, with some familiar groups like Transportation Alternatives.
  • Why people feel that driving a car makes one independent minded is a mystery to me.--I kept thinking about this this last week, cars and buses littered throughout the city...

• Bicycle Diaries
• Reading the Romance. Radway's writing is always really inspirational to me, which I need today--got a deadline.
  

• Critical Library Instruction

• Parable of the Sower

• The Parable of the Sower
• Choice cards, zine piles and random articles as I prepare to leave the office for a while...
  

• Trying to finish Blindness for Wednesday when it is due. I think I'll do it--it was a quick read, very visceral but really true and honest also. Which is strange to say about a book that is like The Road, but about blind people. Update: I did it!
• Jenna's Lower East Side Librarian Winter Solstice Shout Out 2010/Lower East Side Librarian Reading Log 2010.
  

• Blindness
• "The Librarian as Ethnographer: Notes Towards a Strategy for the Exploitation of Cultural Collections" by Chris Atton--very intriguing for collection development.
  

• Been reading NOTHING... just wishing to get over this damn cold.

• A knitting pattern, for secret santa-ing.

• Bicycle Diaries
• Shipping and packaging info; sending out a few zines!
  

• Acker, wrapping up my last paper for the semester!

• The Borough is My Library, #2!
• A tiny bit of In Praise of Copying
  

• More Acker

• Zine-making :)

• Bicycle Diaries
• Critical Library Instruction
• Albee in class
  

• garfield minus garfield

• An article in the NY Times about killing your own shipped-in "happy" animals/food in NYC. Arg.
• The labels for about a million cleaning products. Which one is it that will clean year-old screen filler off again? Somehow I remembered buying a bottle of Soft Scrub from a supply list for a serigraphy class in '04 perhaps? It works! Also, convinced that Greased Lightning went out of business and/or never existed, despite its web page. Or at least it doesn't exist in Brooklyn.
  

• Critical Library Instruction
• Bit of another Kathy Acker book
  

• I've got too many deadlines, so I thought I would return Grace Lee Boggs' autobiography, Living for Change, which I have had checked out since the summer. But then I started reading it on the train, and it is just as absolutely amazing as she is. Straight-forward, bright, surprising, wonderful. 15 pages in and I think I may reward myself with this on the train for a while.

• I was brave on the train this morning, reading Blood and Guts in High School on my own bench, where anyone could look over and see scandalous genitalia illustrations. I had been putting off reading this on the train, but I figure 8am on a Saturday morning is as good a time as any to bring out some smut, assigned for class.

• Celebrate People's History
• Critical Library Instruction
  

• Critical Library Instruction
• T.S. Eliot
• Citizen Kane. Why didn't we talk more about capitalism and Welles as the anti-jesus?
  

• Critical Library Instruction
• A guide book about the beats in NYC that friends who are moving away insisted we take. Reminded me of when, in 1999, I used to try to find all the places where Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray lived in Manhattan.
  

• Critical Library Instruction. Shouldn't everyone with an MLS read this?

• The Dispossessed
• Bits and pieces of library literature, various serial titles (mostly ads) from 1914-the 70's
  

• Dime Novels
• Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks
  

• Bicylcle Diaries
• Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks
  

• Bicycle Diaries

• I've been reading a tiny bit of Bicycle Diaries each morning when I wake up.
• I had a really rough evening, and found myself reading ahead for class on the train. Ariel. The idea of reading Plath always frightens me a bit, because I am afraid reading her work will somehow make me as depressed as she was.
  

• More Douglass
• Harriet Jacobs
  

• A bit of Writing Your Journal Article in Twelve Weeks: A Guide to Academic Publishing Success
• Bicycle Diaries
  

• Captivity narratives, for a paper, for homework.
• Leaves of Grass, also homework.
  

• I cheated and skipped any of my homework or more productive reading and traded in a few things for Blood Child and Other Stories at Strand. These short stories are gory!

• Life in the Iron Mills, which left me with an inauthentic aftertaste, although the images of the landscape of the city were bleak and amazing.
• Selections from Uncle Tom's Cabin. In class we were asked "How much of an Uncle Tom was Uncle Tom?" I found that he was far less of the caricature than I had expected.
  

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• A bit of Life in the Iron Mills
• Women and print culture, bits from all over the place
  

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• Declaring Independence. Why are only the parts about Jefferson interesting to me? Because he is such an odd character? And especially here, where it's shown he feigned illness to avoid delivering a speech (the book is an exploration of rhetoric and "declarations"--and whether they were a particularly oral phenomenon in the age of the Declaration of Independence)? Oh, and the 3 pages about the founding fathers' chairs (pgs. 71-73) were great.

• Mish-mash; bits and pieces of print culture readings amidst the disturbing onset of a cold.

• I wish I hadn't heard this story on NPR this morning. Nationalism, sexism, the "feminization" of men ruining our nationalism and sexism, and golf (white men + money, "yanks," complete with pictures). What the hell?! Almost made me as angry as the National Public Radio coverage of Howard Zinn's passing. Reading some of the comments cheered me up a little bit; maybe we're not stuck in the 1950's. Although "we" doesn't seem to include Frank Deford--whose photo looks straight from the Onion. Tell me this was all a joke. Please.

• QZAP Updates
• Women in Print
• Print Culture in a Diverse America, Wiegand's introduction mostly, which led me to approximately a million other extremely useful pieces.
  

• Today was a perfect biking day in Brooklyn. Thus I only browsed the latest issue of Make/Shift; which was great as always.

• Started Declaring Independence, which I'm happy is on the reading list this semester.

• "Phillis Wheatley's Construction of Otherness and the Rhetoric of Performed Ideology," by Mary McAleer Balkun. No one in my class really wanted to talk about this article much,

• More about Butler on the train, a tiny bit of Phillis Wheatley for class, tables lists and graphs of serial subscriptions under review, and a knitting pattern for a soon-to-be person.

• I walked all over the LES today where everyone else just wanted to go and read in a coffee shop also.
• "The Women in Print Movement: History and Implications," by Trysh Travis. At a coffee shop.
• "Deviant Classics: Pulps and the Making of Lesbian Print Culture," by Stephanie Foote. At the bar with a Bengali Tiger.
  

• "When I began writing science fiction, when I began writing, heck, I wasn't in any of this stuff I read. The only black people you found were occasional characters or characters who were so feeble-witted that they couldn't manage anything, anyway. I wrote myself in, since I'm me and I'm here and I'm writing." --Octavia Butler, from a 2000 New York Times interview.

• I rewarded myself for the scholarship of this weekend by buying another Octavia Butler at the airport (partially also because I was surprised they had any; although I found Kindred in the regular fiction section and nothing in Sci-Fi, which I think said something). I had enough time in airports and on a really annoying flight to read the ENTIRE book. Phew!

• Heard lots of amazing talks at the Print Culture conference, the highlight being Jan Radway's talk in the evening about girl/grrrl zines, which totally blew the lid off of a great deal of zine scholarship, and was fantastic!
• I got a book all about the history of the WHS at the silent auction, and a book about collecting librariana (which, btw, is one of my favorite words)--score!
  

• American Captivity Narratives for class, on the train on the way to and from working on the CHPCMA presentation. Sometimes you just can't read fast enough.

• Librarian zines at Barnard.

• A truckload of materials from the archives about Jackie Eubanks and the Liberation Library.
• I listened to Bill Moyers interview Jane Goodall on the way home.
• Part of my homework, "How Indians Got to be Red," by Nancy Shoemaker.
  

• Research, research, research. Counterpoise, zine books, zine guru Dodge, and a mish-mash of other things.

• Anna H. Perrault, "The Changing Print Resource Base of Academic Libraries in the United States"
• Angela Brookens and Alan Poulter, "Support for Alternative Publishing by Public Libraries in Scotland"
• I won the first round.
  

• First day of "Save the World on Your Own Time: The Rhetorics of Advocacy." We read through a few definitions of rhetoric, and a few examples of advocacy (from 8.5x15 photocopy mash-ups), and then I read "The Cooling Out Function in Higher Education" by Burton R. Clark on the way home--because Ira Shor prints out the readings for us each week.

• Today was Orientation at my campus for undergraduates. I made a zine, copied a zillion handouts, and had fun meeting new students. Which utterly wiped me out for any other reading.

• A Passage for Dissent: The Best of Sipapu, 1970-1988
  • Noel Peattie on the word Sipapu: “For me, who chanced on the word, only dimly understanding its significance, it’s a personal message… If I have borrowed the term unfairly, at least I made my Sipapu a place of emergence for others: contributors, poets, and raisers of issues...

• Research, research, organizing pubs, research.

• More of How Does It Feel
• I listened to an old episode of Fresh Air on my lunch break that was all about a man who studies ants. Did you know the vast majority of ants you ever see are female? I didn't, or I forgot. The nice thing about eating your lunch outside on a beautiful day near a lily pond while listening to a conversation about entomology on your headphones is that you can look down and see some ants while you listen.
  

• Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, 1967-1974 by Toni Samek
• "Permission" vs. Fair Use: Today I was confronted by a security guard about copyright.
  

• Librarian Pubs. Not as many as I should have read.

• Imago. Almost all of it, on a long commute.
• Tons of radical librarian pubs.
  

• Broken Pencil #48
• Finished Adulthood Rites and moved on to Imago. 500 pages just goes along like nothing with Octavia Butler.
• Emily Drabinski's publications from her new website.
  

• Notes from the last three conferences I attended!

• Adulthood Rites
• Lots of ideas for Open Access Week, thanks to tvol.
  

• Finished Dawn, and moved on to Adulthood Rites.
• Older radical librarian pubs. So beautiful and so sad. Why were the 70's so awesome?
  

• Ultraviolet DRM campaign by the Free Software Foundation.
• I like starting off the day with Firebrands. It's inspiring.
  

• Dawn by Octavia E Butler. Immersion hangover.

• We talked about a great, great many things today at Immersion--we had over 12 hours together! I got to tell my group members about an article I read ("Re-Visioning Information Literacy for Lifelong Learning" by Dane Ward), and then we all talked about Palmer Parker's "Heart of a Teacher" chapter from The Courage to Teach.

• I didn't think that Survivor was anything to be ashamed of at all. In fact, I really enjoyed the questioning of the Missionaries a lot.
• My suitcase has a hole patched with pink duct tape, and I haven't started packing yet. I'm off to Immersion for a week, and I'm feeling a bit anxious!
  

• More Survivor, which I am enjoying.
• Immersion documents!
  

• Firebrands, which reminds me of Library Heroes in many ways.
• Doonesbury compliations, since they were left out on the kitchen table.
  

• These past few days have been devoted to hacking everything from culture to typewriters to toenails.

• Katelyn Angell, "Boom or Bust: The Need for Senior Services Librarians." from Progressive Librarian #32
• "The Career Risks of Scrutinizing the Physical Side of Books"
  

• Today I went over to the dark side, instead of getting a million things done on my to-do, and to-read lists: IRC.

• Finished Mind of My Mind on the train home, and yes, I will admit I took the long way to read some more. 500 pages in and it feels like nothing!

• Finished Wild Seed, and moved directly on to Mind of My Mind, since the trilogy is conveniently bound together. Good waiting-at-the-airport reading.

• Wild Seed
• Re-read parts of "Don't Leave your Friends Behind: Anarcha-Feminism & Supporting Mothers and Children" zine, which I came across a copy of in a box of donated materials at work.
• "Notes on Anarchism" zine by Noam Chomsky, in which he quotes Rudolph Rocker:
  

• The U.S. Social Forum program
• Finished A Gate at the Stairs on the road trip home
• Started a bit of Octavia Butler's Seed to Harvest compilation
• Added many good things to the reading list!
  

• A Gate at the Stairs, on my first-ever significant train ride. Great reading, great sights.

• U.S. Social Forum program (!!)
• Collection development marathon...
• From NYPL's Twitter feed: "One sure window into a person's soul is his reading list."- Mary B. W. Tabor
  

• Today my reading was centered on Information Literacy in preparation for Immersion. I'm starring the ones that I found particularly useful/interesting:
  • *Ken Bain, "How Do They Conduct Class?" from What the Best College Teachers Do.
  • Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen with Nancy O'Neill, "Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations" from Educating the Net Generation.
  • *Parker Palmer, "The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching" from The Courage to Teach.
    

• More of A Gate at the Stairs, even though there are many other non-fiction books that I should be reading.

• Many, many emails.

• All of a Jeffrey Brown compilation while on a plane at JFK, not even off the ground.
• Life story of a German woman who Isabella knew and who wrote of her life on a really old computer and printed out the tale for her friends and family after her death.

• Kiki Smith exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I liked the installs in the period rooms best. Creeptastic.

• "Grand Narratives and the Information Cycle in the Library Instruction Classroom." by Sara Franks from Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods

• Today was another day of absorption, but not through text. I attended (and presented at) Brooklyn College's Faculty Day, and was happy to participate in everything from a presentation on game theory to a Bob Dylan sing-along.

So,
so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.

• I got a free copy of Dreams from my Father; which is funny because I shared and then gave away my first copy, so it's like it came back to me. I read the preface and the intro on my way from BC today.

• I finally started Critical Library Instruction today! I read the intro, Elisabeth Pankl and Jason Coleman's piece and most of Jonathan Cope's chapter on my commute, and ate it up with a spoon. I feel like all of the spaces that Ira Shor's lecture opened up in my brain for critical teaching is being filled with these much-needed library perspectives. Special kudos to Jonathan, who really brings theory, history and thought to library instruction, yet very accessibly.

• Do you ever read fiction as fast as you can, wherever you can, to keep up with it, the story, as if it were really happening, in real time? That's how I've been reading Beloved, between meetings and speaking obligations, and an election for a new chair (me?!).

• Who said social networking wasn't good for something? I just joined #TeamAchieve through Twitter, and now I, along with a few other inspiring pals, am committed to writing 700 words a day six days a week. In addition to a reading log, this sidebar might begin to include my progress on this endeavor.
• More of Beloved. Excited for Summery, fiction train reading.

• I feel like I just performed a marathon of reading and writing in order to complete this 13-pager for my American Studies class. Now my reading will be semi-free again for almost three months, no longer beholden to a syllabus.* I will admit that I enjoyed my class enough to be a little disappointed about that.

• My subscription to Radical Teacher hasn't run out yet! I got a bill two days ago, but #87 yesterday. This morning I started right in with "Teaching Freire and CUNY Open Admissions," by Kristen Gallagher.
• Last night, again unable to get to sleep, I read a few more pages of Beloved, which still feels like cheating on the non-fiction and classwork (even though it relates to it and was mentioned over and over).
  

• Not so much reading, but listened to Ira Shor talk with a room full of librarians about teaching. Absolutely amazing. There was a very nice communal feel to our discussion afterward as well. Very nice afternoon of contemplation about teaching in libraries.
• Followed by a night of utterly incomprehensible Herzog. This and that.

• The Republic in Print

• Pickup Truck Stoled
• "Introduction: The Theme of Our Contemplation" from Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African American Protest Literature, 1790-1860
• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
• Russell L. Martin III, "North American Transatlantic Book Culture to 1800" from A Companion to the History of the Book

• shortandqueer #12, "Menstruation, not punctuation (periods.)"
• The Republic in Print

• After our presentation at the Conference on Intellectual Property, we listened to the keynote by James Boyle...

• The Republic in Print

• "Pamphleteering in America" by Howard Zinn, from Artists in Times of War
• Let's prepare to celebrate:

• Ties that Bind

• ebooks, ebooks, ebooks and preparation!

• ebrary, and more Tiya Miles. Still really enjoying this last text of my American Studies class.

• One of the things a decently long commute has taught me is what kinds of books I can or want to read on the train. Anything that causes me to want to take notes is impossible. Anything that I would want to append is borderline. Ties that Bind is a great read in that I can just read it; it's fascinating, it reads like a narrative and yet it's historically appropriate (many "we have no way of knowing"-s) and I am blowing through it, which somehow also inspires me to keep reading more + more + more.

• Started Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom by Tiya Miles, which I am really enjoying! It's nice to read narratives after a lot of theory.

• Migrant Imaginaries
• I got reference questions that I could relate to today! Art history, television, media, film, art ed. Hooray!

• Cracked open Alicia Schmidt Camacho's Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (for class)

• Somewhat impossible reference questions today, and more weeding. Things like software program books for software I've never heard of...

• Happy Birthday Brokenjaws'er!
• Taught the undergrad version of my American Studies class about the library today. Enjoyed hearing about their research topics; everything from the Beach Boys to the Lower East Side.
• Finished The Black Atlantic, discussed it and other imagined communities in class

• Black Atlantic: finished up all but the Richard Wright chapter (which I still hope to squeeze in!) on the train.

• More Black Atlantic, almost done!
• First two chapters of Imagined Communities by Benedict Arnold
• Browsed what I want to read in the History of the Book in America series and wished they were all part of my own library...

• ebook work day, complete with three simultaneous monitors--and that was just for me.

• more Black Atlantic

• ebooks, ebooks, ebooks.

• Finished skimming The Case for Books and Started Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Conciousness, for class.

• Phew! Marathon of Denning all day!
• At some point this week, I also read "The Culture of the Thirties" by Warren Susman.
  

• Denning is getting good
• Just discovered that crucial, helpful, and everything I was trying to get at book for my final
• Weeded old and very very dusty communications textbooks--I shook and blew and inhaled that dust off...
  

• My morning mta commute has happily been replaced by a bike ride, and the weather could not be better for it. I adore the crispness of spring with all its promises of everything summery to come. That said, I'm diving into Denning's Cultural Front for class today, but not between Flatbush and Utica.

• Kindle reading; The Case for Books is enjoyable.

• George Lipsitz, "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the 'White Problem' in American Studies"
• Barak Obama, "A More Perfect Union"
• Lisa Lowe, "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences"
• Philip Deloria, "Patriotic Indians and the Identities of Revolution"
  

• Knitting patterns (finally bought some DPNs I "needed" from Knitpicks)
• Browsed through my stacks of suggested titles for my final paper
  

• We pawed through the business/econ section of the Reference stacks today, finding an assortment of titles that would make Awful Library Books proud.
• I got five paragraphs or so in on the homework.
  

• Judith Butler, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire" from Gender Trouble
• Judith Halberstam, "Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene"
• Elsa Barkley Brown, "What Has Happened Here?: The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics."
  

• Helped a bunch of Queens Public librarians read some zines
• Got my issue of On Wisconsin in the mail, and got a little nostalgic. Interview with Lorrie Moore.
• Still working on the Teddie Roosevelt and manliness essay for homework this week. Didn't get much reading done on the 3 hour commute to Flatbush--a bit to tired in the AM to read about imperialism and conquest.
  

• Sometimes when it's real. slow. at. the. desk. it seems like the day didn't even happen at all. And I couldn't find where that woman's class was! Or satisfy the CPE student! Long Sunday.
• Read some more On Writing Well, but couldn't make it through kind of watching the Oscars.
  I liked this paragraph on revising well enough a few days ago that I folded over a tiny corner on page 87:

• More biking and celebrating than reading today.

• On Writing Well
• More of Counterpoise
• Call numbers for books for MALS class; American print culture and the construction of publics...
  

• Constance Penley, "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics and Technology"--highly recommended article about women and Star Trek slash fanzines
• Robin D.G. Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem': The Politics and Pleasures of Community"
• Kelley, "The Riddle of the Zoot Suit"--also really great; talks about Malcolm X's writing about his time as a zoot suiter and how his later perspectives clouded his recollection of the cultural significance of his hipsterism.
  

• The Pscychology of Moving
• Inside a Divided Upper East Side Public School
  

• Raymond Williams, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Theory
• Zitkala-Sa, School Days of an Indian Girl
• Finished Trachtenberg; recommended--his vision of American culture is a bit bleak, but true to life (largely powered by capitalism, for worse rather than better).
  

• More Trachtenberg, with a particularly enjoyable part about the myth of Thomas Edison as inventor and made man (as opposed to entrepreneur with an economic eye and workshop of collaborators)
• Booking a Flight the Frugal Way
  

• The last bits of the latest Bitch with breakfast
• More Trachtenberg, which I am finding hard to concentrate upon whilst on the train
  

• Most of today's reading was on the interwebs in preparation for this event, for which we librarians created a wiki.

• More Bitch, my reappointment CV.

• Somehow I am teaching three Television/Radio/Communications classes tomorrow. I would have liked to read a few results for searches in Ebsco databases, but they would not load from home. Thinking lately (with help from J.) that technical glitches and tutorials should not be what we teach.

• Reading and writing to-do lists (academic, shopping, deadlines and teaching) and proposals (talks, papers, grants) seems to take up the 90% of my sitting-down-getting-things-done time.

• Homework: The West in American mythology, the Frontier as it Americanizes all of us (via Nash Smith of the UW, interestingly), Buffalo Bill and the blur of the real (history vs. narrative and show) and Kaplan getting all imperial (thank you for that last little bit about Africa and Vietnam and the Philippines and the lack of awareness of the meaning of those helicopters dashing away while filming Apocalypse Now!).

• Broken Pencil-got a sub!

• I have been very poor about reading on the train lately. Somehow if it's not fiction or a codex, I can't get myself into it on the platform or on the train. Or maybe it's just the normal procrastination that accompanies homework.
• I printed out a good many things about the kindle today, and noticed a bunch of free ebooks online.
  

• Kept reading our proposed abstract for the Conference on Intellectual Property over and over (and our readers helped immensely), until I had all the PDFs in order and sent it off. I like confirmation emails on proposals; they seem to come easily and have an excited person at the other end of the computer tubes.

• Communications research textbooks for weeding (lots changed since 1996! Things like calling email "internet electronic mail")

• We went to 'Snice and I read my homework. I need to remember to keep a dictionary handy, as I have slowly become someone who does not skim over words, but insists upon looking everything up. I bothered Matt a lot because he has a dictionary on his computer, with or without the wireless.

• A lot of 2010 so far has been about organizination and getting hardware on the up and up in my free time, and today I finally got GnuCash to work properly (without futzing up the back end myself), and re-installed Open Office. Contemplating going totally linux. Reeling in numbers and installation pop-ups. Is this reading? Caught up on blogs amidst all of this-especially glad that Library Praxis is back up!

• Zine from Kelsey, "Getting the Guts Out" (really nice!)
• Ira Shor's Critical Teaching and Everyday Life has been rattling all my dreamy illusions about education, and feels so close to home and pertinent that I suspect someone is looking over my shoulder when I read it (especially on the train).
  

• Bits of Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, and supplemental materials from the BC New Faculty Retreat.

• More Wao, which made me laugh out loud more than once and read nerdy parts (400 hit points!) to Matt.