BCX

I don’t know what day it is. I mean, I know it’s Monday. My watch says it’s the 27th. I hear we’re about halfway through. We have done a lot of reading, a lot of writing, a lot of talking, a hell of a lot of online communicating (LEEP uses open courseware called Moodle, and LEEPers are sort of fanatical about it–it’s hard to keep up and I’ve been remiss). It’s busy. Everybody’s up early and late, everybody drags computers around everywhere they go, the campus is beautiful and mostly empty. I’m writing this from within Grainger hall, which I like very much. I envisioned using this space for a detailed record of everything we do and read and think and talk about, but Lord, I can basically hear the forum posts mounting while I sit and type this. The course has mostly been a broad survey of Librarianship, heavily liberal, lightly technical, mostly historical, very political. Animal, vegetable, mineral. I’ve been out of the house from about 0800 til about 0000 every day, but I’ve been eating well and I don’t feel to sleep-deprived. I’m making friends, nearly all of them Chicagoans: U of Chicago people, Newberry people, asstd others. All very nice, all very smart, all very interesting. I am proud and grateful to usually feel worthy of their company, though I am aware of it (frequently) when I’m in the company of a harder, smarter, or more dedicated worker/thinker than I am, and I’m happy to have high bars set in every direction.

I have received one paper back, glowingly reviewed; I have another due tomorrow at midnight and a third due two days later.

PS, tech note–I bought myself a Dell Mini 10v for this experience. Let me say unequivocally that I love it, and the more I use it, the more I love it. The keyboard is not at all a problem, the trackpad is serviceable (though I often plug in a USB mouse I keep in my backpack–oh, one thing I don’t like about this experience is that I’m dragging a backpack around all over the damn place all the time–I’m not a backpack person; the screen is just fine too. The thing is light and sturdy and the battery lasts oh approximately all day. I use emacs for all of my writing and note-taking, using LaTeX to typeset to pdf, so that helps – oo.org is a little clumsy on such a small screen. FF is workable, esp in fullscreen.

BC1

Boot Camp day 1. Mostly administrative. Actual orientation: walks around the campus, sessions with tech people to get computers and accounts set up, introductions to your friendly staff, pizza party. All very fun, all very good, somewhat intimidating but only appropriately so: many (most) of my peers seem to have quite a bit more academic/professional experience than me, but I’m comfortable with that: I have freedom, potential, a light step.
I’m writing this from the University’s Grainger Hall, the engineering library, its tall indulgently sunlit reading room. I think this is the best reading room on campus, and I think this is the only library open late during the summer. I have work to do. Class begins in earnest tomorrow morning.
One of the more useful things that happened today was a q&a with former and current LEEP students. They were, I believe, unanimous in their recommendation not to take 502, the orientation I’m now about, for four hours, that being too much work; I am currently registered for four hours, and I’m the only person with whom I’ve spoken yet who is. This too is ok. I’m a worker bee. I tilt after giants.

PS
Just set up Thunderbird to manage my LEEP email. Initial message download: 435 messages, all but one of them dated from 05/26/2009 or after. LEEPers are rabid online communicators. Many of these have to do with Sherman Hall, the apparently frigid dorm many of my peers are lodged in.

2 Minute Warning

Well I have read what seems to me a huge amount in preparation of the 10-day orientation that kicks off this program; I initially had attention deficit issues but my focus seems to have dilated and the more I have read, the more in general I have enjoyed the readings. I feel sort of remiss because my peers have communicated quite a bit more on the message boards than I have (and after all I think of myself as both a joyful communicator and a fairly savvy web tech user), but I am confident about catching up. A (very) short paper is due upon arrival; I haven’t written it yet (class starts Thursday). I did go to Urbana-Champaign Saturday (I keep referring to the actual UIUC campus as “the Mother Ship”; no one has laughed yet) just to familiarize myself with the environs–the campus is very nice. Fellow classmates and future GSLIS applicants: the campus is very nice; it’s just like any other large university campus and sports the usual amenities, and is clean and very walkable. I bought a train ticket (I depart Wednesday afternoon from chilly Chicago) that includes space for my bicycle (I bought a Schwinn commuter last week), but ended up feeling like the bike might not get much action: the friends with whom I’m staying and every other spot I could conceivably end up wanting to visit while I’m at school are all quite close to each other. I’d have been very happy walking. Even from the Amtrak station. It’s all very intimate. All very proximate. All quite convenient.

I also bought a little laptop, a Dell mini, $300. If anyone has any amazing software they think it would be totally stupid not to use to keep oneself organized, by all means let me know.

Tonight: Szechuan carrot soup, the rest of the readings, my Mill paper (hopefully).

Mill 1

Morning. Bach. Apple juice. Finished the assigned John Stuart Mill piece, Of the Liberty of Thought and Discussion – it finished much better than it started, but, by the light of the previously quoted Wallace essay, which completely captured my imagination, and wherein the author asks point-blank whether it’s even possible anymore to have an informed citizenry (that is, whether a sufficient proportion of the electorate can still take in and interpret a sufficient quantity of news and opinion and synthesize it into knowledge and political conviction, and then translate this conviction into meaningful action), I have to confess that the Mill seemed not so much non-controversial as of questionable relevance—he even starts the piece out by avowing that in his day and age the possibility of censure of the press hardly matters anymore because no civilized state could possibly get away with it, which is of course manifestly wrong, but his reasoning is still right, and now more so than ever, in the modern era of piratical communication technologies (e.g. the so-called Twitter Revolution)—and I therefore was mostly interested in the small clues he left that his argument fits into a broader argument about the efficacy of debate when performed by real humans outside of Plato’s dialogues—comments about, for example, the need for civilized and well-mannered discourse, and good listening skills, etc. And then there’s this: “The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and demoralizing effect of the trammels and hypocrasies of artificial society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time produce their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted as much as ever, and to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their power,” (emphasis mine).
Wait, what? Words can be exhausted of power? Discourse, disputation, argumentation, Socratic interlocution itself can exhaust their power? Then what are we secretly talking about, here?

(e.g.)

From his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007, David Foster Wallace:

…This year’s BAE does not necessarily comprise the twenty-two very best-written or most beautiful essays published in 2006. Some of the book’s essays are quite beautiful indeed, and most are extremely well written and/or show a masterly awareness of craft (whatever exactly that is). But others aren’t, don’t, especially–but they have other virtues that make them valuable. And I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of information and context that is by definition part of 2007’s overall roar of info and context. But it is possible for something to be both a quantum of information and a vector of meaning. Think, for instance, of the two distinct but related senses of ‘informative.’ Several of this year’s most valuable essays are informative in both senses; they are at once informational and instructive. That is, they serve as models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways–ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the overall roar.

Shakuhachi, Titans, Eros

Saturday morning. I’m supposed to be finished with the Mill, and probably should be moving on to other things; I should probably have pithy obsevations and contentious insights to spill onto the forum; instead I woke up early and turned on some very disorienting traditional Japanese shakuhachi music and read a long DeLillo interview given in the wake of Underworld. He spoke of the Cloud of Unknowing, which interested me, but the most interesting bits were  about a) the relation of the author to actual history–that is, specifically, a sense he developed, as he wrote, of a heavy theology of weapons, waste, and technology, and his use of passionate language, a language filled with Eros, as a defense against this theology–and b) how he views Underworld as “a larger sibling,” to Libra. The interviewer didn’t maintain that thread, but DeLillo managed the brief explanation that they were both about history, a source of power for the author. I feel like there’s more to it than that. I feel like Oswald could have been a character in Underworld, and not just because of his historical significance. There’s something thematic at work as well, something having to do with a spiritual reckoning with titanic force.

I’m doing dishes. It’s a beautiful day. I might go look at bicycles, or I might finish Mill, or I might do both.

New User

So, in the last couple of weeks, registration/classwork has begun: I am now a functioning electronic id/entity on UIUC/GSLIS’ systems, and I am assigned to an on-campus orientation time, worth four hours of credit, at the end of July. I am to meet with an unknown number of other LEEP newbs on campus for an intense period of study, a full-bore introduction to the field. Forums, moodle, listservs. I was invited to complete a profile, like unto those for myspace/facebook etc, complete with a little picture. The forum activity has already commenced, and with gusto: eager peers are already discussing Mill’s On Liberty, maybe even with a prospect of heat. I’m eager to join them, but I’m remiss for not having even started the reading yet. So today, at work mind you, I started it, and was moved to print it out, but found Bartleby’s online edition of it not to my liking. So here I am some hours later, having edited it in emacs and re-typeset it with LaTeX, which I had to re-learn to do it. Which was fun. If any of my peers read this and want a nicely typeset pdf, with footnotes rather than endnotes, and arranged with galleys for stapling like a book, hit me up. Now to the actual reading, which so far, though lacking charm, seems reasonable enough.

Checked out some essayists today, including, though I’ve read his whole catalogue already, David Foster Wallace; also checked out a Jacque Barzun text on rhetoric.

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Hello World! 1.2

Inaugural post, a necessary evil. This is a test. I have a private diary, that’s not what this blog is to be about; this blog is to be about my studies in library/info science, and about open source.