My Conference Can Beat Up Your Conference

Hi there sexy library creatures. I’m spending this weekend doing prep-work for the upcoming South by Southwest Interactive conference. In my case, this means re-dying my hair, e-shopping for warm weather gear, and drinking a lot of water. Chris and I are flying to Austin on the 9th – we’ll be hunting down margarita machines and Shiner Bock soon thereafter.

The cool local burlesque troupe that I wanted to take you guys to isn’t performing this month. Still, I promised a party so I’ll do what every good librarian should: utilize existing resources. I’ll meet everybody at the Frog Design party (they had belly dancers last year). I’ll be handing out Librarian pins and buying beer for anyone with a library degree. If are going to be in town, lemme know and I’ll send you my cell number. Chris is an Austin native, so we’ll be hitting some good Mexican food joints throughout the week. Finally, I’ll leave you with a list:

The Ethos of ALA vs SXSWi

ALA SXSWi
Gobs of free books Gobs of free drinks
Shoulder Pads Electronic Notepads
Informative panels about last year’s technology Informative panels about next year’s technology
The Caldicotts The Bloggies
Meet Winnie-The-Pooh Meet famous pornographers
Nuclear politics Nuclear tacos
Blue hair Pink hair
Power suits and eye shadow Power symbol t-shirts and iBooks
Sponsored by: Demco Sponsored by: Tito’s Homemade Vodka

Rock Rock Rock n’ Roll Librarian

Hey avenging librarians… A few weeks ago, Bill Harmer wrote a letter asking for our help. You may remember Bill as the founder of the Rock n Roll library tour that was featured on This American Life. I wrote about the show here.

Bill wants to take the Rock n Roll library tour nationwide. Last summer the Michigan tour was a big success, and he wants to get at least one library to sign up in each of the 50 states. This is a killer after-school program that serves the dual purpose of getting reluctant readers in the library, and busting through some myths about how the library is boring. You know? Those myths? Now you can do something about them.

After some initial hoo-ha-ing, the ALA got its act together and is sort of helping out. You can now register your very own ever-loving library for the tour. You’ll be booking library rock n’ roll veterans The High Strung for an all-ages show and a question and answer session afterward.

Just read the press release, then write to Bill and he’ll make it happen.

I hope they come here. Ithaca is desperate for decent music. There’s a large Contra Dance movement here that MUST BE STOPPED. Also, if anybody has suggestions or offers of help, I think Bill would be glad to hear them.

Bloggies

Last year I attended the Bloggies at the South by Southwest Interactive conference. The presentation was wonderfully low-budget, like a high school assembly. But, oh THE FUNNY. Not only were funny people doing the presenting, there was a huge screen next to the stage showing the IRC conversation about the presentation. So, imagine a presenter saying something funny, and then almost simultaneously, more funny people chatting about the presenter and mocking him. It was so meta that several audience members actually turned inside-out and had to be rushed to the hospital.

Anyway, I’m going again this year (yes, you’ll get your feminist strippers – hang on) and I WANT A BLOGGIE. Gimme gimme. Please. Although there are far more worthy candidates, I’m asking anyway. Won’t you nominate me? Please? I have included this emotionally manipulative kitten to help you with your decision.

To nominate Librarian Avengers for the Best Topical Weblog category, go here. Yes, I know I’m a publicity whore. La la la. Tttpth.

Here are the other fabulous blogs I’ve nominated. I left out some of the obvious ones, like Boing Boing, since they were well-represented last year. Check them out, but not while you are drinking anything that will hurt if you snort it through your nose. I’m just saying.

Best weblog application
WordPress
Spam Karma

Best Australian or New Zealand Weblog
Boudist

Best American Weblog
Dooce
Mimi Smartypants

Best Tagline of a Weblog
Bad News Hughes – Striving to find a way to punch people in the face by using the internet.
My Life as an American Gladiator – Caution! Do Not Insert In Ear Canal!

Best Entertainment Weblog
Pink is the New Blog
Gallery of the Absurd

Best Weblog About Politics
Sivacracy
Low Culture
Salon Broadsheet

Best GLBT Weblog
The Book You’re Not Reading
Pink is the New Blog

Most Humorous Weblog
Bad News Hughes
Mimi Smartypants
Cat and Girl Donation Derby

Best Writing of a Weblog
Echidne of the Snakes
My Life as an American Gladiator
Pound

Best Web Development Weblog
A List Apart

Best Designed Weblog
Megatokyo
Jenny’s Realm

Lifetime Achievement
Dave Shea

Best-Kept-Secret Weblog
PostSecret
Dog Blog
The Ten Thousand Year Blog

Best New Weblog
50 Books

Have you decorated your home for the holidays? A patriarchal plot to make me hang ornaments instead of conquering the galaxy

Recently several people have asked me something that strikes fear into my cold and icy heart. The question is innocuous. The question is well-intended. The question makes me want to pull out my big librarian rubber stamp and do some smiting.

The question:
“Have you decorated your home for the holidays?”

No, this isn’t a war-on-Christmas screed, nor is it a rant against bland conversation.* This is about feminism. Specifically, this is about a brand of feminism I subscribe to, the kind of feminism that thinks being a woman really doesn’t require me to do extra crap around the house.

I’ve got nothing against decorating for the holidays. I’ve got nothing against talking about decorating for the holidays. I’ve got nothing against the holidays.** What I don’t like is that the lads seem to be exempt.

I have the good fortune to work in I.T., which means my co-workers are mostly male.*** I took an informal survey of these guys to see how they responded to this particular social pressure. Donning my best “we’re all girls together” face (you know the one) I sidled up and asked innocently “Have you decorated your home for the holidays”

The result? Derisive snorts, awkward this-chick-has-gone-nuts pauses, glassy stares, and one guy actually did a spit-take. Finally one gentleman described his holiday decorations. His wife, it seemed, had done a great job this year.

Fine, maybe it’s the nesting hormones. Maybe women really do love to decorate. Maybe we’re all a bunch of scented-candle-chugging tinsel-hangers. But still, I get all gitchy when somebody just assumes I subscribe to this apparently gender-specific hobby. I mean, hell. I’ve got some garlands and shit, but I don’t enjoy feeling like it’s my venereal duty to start shooting holiday cookies out my oven just because every other woman on the earth seems to be.

I would love to sum it all up for you and present a nice, clear solution to all this damned gender inequity, but I can’t think of one. Just, maybe, the next time you ask someone about their hobbies, try to stay away from the race, gender, and sexual orientation-related ones. Don’t ask the gay man if he enjoys flower arrangement Just Because He’s Gay. He might love flowers but that still doesn’t make it cool. Don’t ask the black woman if she likes collard greens Just Because She’s Black. She may love them (how could you not?), but that doesn’t make you less of an asshole. And dangit, don’t ask me about my dang holiday decorations. Ask me about my Star Wars Battlefront score. I conquered the galaxy yesterday.

*Sure, the world needs conversational crutches. But lately, the holiday decoration thing seems to be as important to office social lubrication as “what are your vacation plans?” and “can you believe how cold it is?” Hopefully, it will never be as important as “here, have another drink.”
**I’ve even got nothing against Martha Stewart. Hell, I dumpster-dive Living from the Borders’ recycling bin regularly.***The inequities of this are so obvious they don’t need to be stated right? Right?

Overwhelm them with sheer numeric superiority

Me and Dewey at ALAI just checked the frappr map, and dang you Librarian Avengers are so cute! And geographically disparate! All 81 of you. Gulp.

Once I realized there are so many people out there willing to read about my battles with bad librarianship, scary interfaces, and look at photos of my grandma, I had to sit in the closet and rock back and forth for awhile. But I’m back! And do I have news for you.

According to Siva and the ALA, there are more libraries in the U.S. than there are McDonalds. Let’s consider this news. Let’s consider the possibilities it opens up. Let’s consider what, say, 16,220 librarians (that’s one librarian from every U.S. branch) could DO if we all decided to work together. Are you thinking? Let’s make a list. I’ll start.

  • We could swarm the U.S. Senate carrying burning copies of the Patriot Act on pitchforks.
  • We could donate one book each and create a brand new library
  • We could build a search taxonomy for the ALA BY HAND
  • We could build an entire neighborhood for Habitat for Humanity and call it Librarian Land.
  • We could dig up enough dirt on our local censors and anti-library-funding jerks to put them all out of commission.
  • We could start selling yummy hamburgers and make the whole country fat.
  • We could start making people do pushups for books and make the whole country fit.
  • We could have the world’s biggest librarian party! Every year! Twice!

Your turn.

Spain! Ham!

Spain!
Thanks to the noble efforts of our catsitter friends, the famous librarian-and-animal scientist couple Clay and Mike, our tickets to Spain arrived safely, and we spent six public transportation-filled hours in Madrid while we waited for our train to the north.

This might come as a surprise to some of you, but Madrid? Not a town for vegetarians. Within two blocks, we passed El Museo de Jamon, and Palacio de Jamon. Yes, that’s the Museum of Ham, and Ham Castle. Madrid was beautiful and huge and weird. We did a quick tour through la Plaza del Sol while searching for food. As the default sometimes meat-eater, I ended up consuming all things mysterious that arrived at our table. Which pretty much ended up being everything. We kept ordering things that seemed vegetarian, and they kept arriving covered in ham. Chris ended up eating a bocadillo and some cheese we brought from the UK.

The best library-related thing about Madrid was the Amazingly Clever and Fabulous Biblioteca Metro – sort of a bookmobile kiosk in one of the subway stations. It was charming, modern, well-designed, and the librarian helped us figure out the difference between commuter trains and metro trains. Sadly, we didn’t get a photo of it (or one of Ham Castle) because travel rule number one is: Sleepy people shouldn’t bring expensive digital cameras that they don’t own into downtown Madrid on a Friday night. So you’ll just have to imagine it. Mmm.

We couldn’t get a sleeping car to our conference in Gijon because they were all going to Bilbao, so we ended up sleeping in the brightly-lit second class compartment with our feet on our bags and cricks in our necks. Our guidebook, which shall heretofore be referred to as The Big Book of Paranoia, convinced us that every third person was a pickpocket, so that didn’t help with the sleeping. This morning was a blur, spent trying to speak enough Spanish on .2 hours sleep to convince the kind hotel lady to give us una cama de no fumando. We have now learned that the process of preparing a no smoking room in Spain involves removing the ashtray and spraying Drakkar everywhere.

Still, this may be the best hotel I’ve ever stayed in. I want the hotel decorator to come and visit my house immediately. Everything is modern and minimalist and ergonomic and just so not British. It’s Hotel AC Gijon. It’s a chain. I unhesitatingly recommend it, and not just because they gave us our rooms at 7am on a Saturday, when every sensible Spaniard is home with a hangover.

We to took a long hike around the city center this afternoon and walked along the sea, then returned to the hotel exhausted. Chris took gobs of photos of la Biblioteca Gijon for your viewing enjoyment. They have a cute and comfy reading room filled with middle aged men reading the newspaper.

We watched Pedro Almodovar’s Carne Tremula tonight on one of our laptops and now appreciate Madrid even more. I think this is one of Almodovar’s most accessible and least creepy films. If you want to check out a great piece of Spanish cinema but don’t want to yell “Oh God please don’t do what I think you are going to do” every five minutes, then this is the film for you.

Hi to everyone. I just read my London comments today and am Really grumpy to have missed the Women’s Library. But we also missed Westminster and The tower, thanks to some bad info about closing times. I also planned to become a reader at the British library, but we didn’t have time to return. So, feh. We’ll be back. And next time I’m bringing my 12 postgraduate degrees so I can stay.

The British Library is the boss of you

We saw The Producers last night in the West End. I know, I know. I live in New York. I just never get into The City. It’s five hours away. Besides, when The Producers was running with Harvey Fierstein and Matthew Broderick I was rather involved in school and didn’t have time to pop down for a theater weekend. So we saw it here, and it wasn’t bad.

So, there are some peripheral benefits to hanging around a conference that you aren’t attending. Chris is having a great time at the Neilson/Norman group thing, btw. Hi Chris’ family! Besides rubbing elbows with Jakob yesterday, I met a guy in the elevator wearing an eBay shirt who ended up knowing my cool friend Jake (hi Jake) who was just hired there to do UI design. Jake gives me Professional Hope, because he used to do approximately the same thing I’m doing at the lab, but now he’s raking in Bank down in San Jose. Of course since I live in Ithaca, I own a lovely house, and he lives in an apartment with roommates, so there is some justice.

Could one of my delightful British readers explain to me this towel rail business? It seems like such a good idea, a nice warm towel after your bath. But the thing really just warms up a couple stripes on the towel that cool down by the time you’ve gotten it out. We cranked it to 10 and waited 20 minutes or so. Are we doing something wrong? Should we crank it up to 11?

Our hotel is odd – it’s as if someone wanted to pattern it after a US hotel, but they were only allowed to see one for ten minutes and weren’t allowed to write anything down. The room looks fine, but the details are just off. I went to the sink a minute ago and there was No Water. There’s a closet near the door, but it has No Clothes Rod. Put your jacket on the floor! There’s No Fan in the bathroom, so water steams up the room and the windows are covered with mold. The room has a high-tech card lock, but a door next to the bed opens right up into the next room and is only locked with a little closet knob. Strange.

I forgot the camera yesterday. Sorry y’all. That’s ok, though. There was no photography allowed in the British Library exhibit room anyway, and that’s where I spent all day so you aren’t missing much.
 
Except that you are! Because if you aren’t standing in the British Library RIGHT NOW you are just not as happy as you could be. I was BLOWN AWAY by the fabulousness of the building and the collections. The new building wasn’t complete the last time I was here, so everything was new to me. Let me just say, I’ve been from one side of this galaxy to the other and I’ve seen a lot of strange things, but I’ve never seen anything like this: Shakespeare’s First Folio, the oldest manuscript of Beowulf, Pope’s handwritten transcription of the Iliad complete with his sketch of the shield of Achilles, Jane Austin’s writing desk, the draft of Jane Eyre, the illustrated manuscript of Alice in Wonderland, the Jungle Book, Finnegan’s Wake (Joyce’s handwriting is a mess! No wonder he’s so disjointed), the lyrics to A Hard Day’s Night written on the back of a greeting card, shall I go on? Ok. Admiral Scott’s diary left open to the horrible last page written as he froze to death, Sir Thomas More’s last letter to Henry VIII vowing loyalty, pages from Leonardo’s notebooks, a Gutenberg Bible, one of the first printed Papal Indulgences (hee), a stack of illuminated manuscripts, some hilariously inaccurate old maps with sea monsters hanging around Florida, and well…damn…just, damn.

While eating tuna nicoise with sparkling water next to a four-story stack of leather-bound books, I decided I want to be a geek for the British Library. These people have their ACT TOGETHER. If I have to go back to school and get 12 more degrees to do it, then that’s just what I’ll do. Because wow. Seriously people, wow.