Lots of professional reading these days

I have a better idea about this (will not be specific with this indexical) site that I will probably see again at the beginning of November. (I use “probably” because a type of social action may cause a cancellation of my visit.)

On another front, it seems that I caused a stir on a listserv with my comments on businessese as the “newspeak.” The outside world, or the most potent part of it, defines librarians or information professionals in its own terms, but that is not unexpected. What is, then, unexpected? Hmm, I think it’s our willingness to adopt that language, and make it part of our own, as if we should replace our preexistent language. Somehow, this phenomenon reminds me of entire ethnic groups who were forced to adopt a dominant group’s language as a way to survive. That must be it: we, information professionals, should we wish to survive, will have to forget out identity, since we cannot use our language, so to speak, and adopt a new one, which is defined by the faculty, business world, and others.

We will reformulate identity which is not ours anymore, but that becomes ours since we will speak the language of those who define us. Does this make sense?

I’m reading an article on “genres” in LIS: it is so abstruse right now because it does not seem to clarify what a genre is (will re-read it several times, though). Would need to write a few words about that. Soon.

Not a lot of pleasurable reading

Dedicating my time to a  merry-go-around travail, I feel almost guilty if I read for pleasure, even for a few anodyne minutes.

Longing for normalcy: leisurely cognition. I know, I know—it sounds pretentious, but pleasure always does (at least to me).

Late night sawing in downtown Toronto

Am just about to go to bed and I have heard this strange noise. Wonder what would they attempt to cut at this hour (around 10:30pm)?  Cannot escape this impression that, at least in this area of the city, some dwellers and city workers (well, OK, the city hall) don’t seem to grasp the idea of respecting everyone else’s right to a good night sleep. And, yes,  garbage trucks work full steam, so to speak, at midnight.

Did a lot of lit searching, as I need as much as I could get before I will start the usual combing.  Although I know how I will classify the results, since this is an imposed research, I have to struggle with finding a balance between being just factual and creative.

More to come.

(They stopped making that noise.)

Will I ever learn?

Have been somewhat surprised, as I was browsing a library’s Web site.  Yet, one cannot escape a feeling of dèja-vu.

Now, I have to do some more professional reading and reacquaint myself with doing some research because one of those rare days is coming closer; but the closer it is, the further my hope that I will settle in this city is.

Glad, though, that I know where some things, whose names I will not force myself to resurface to my working memory,  stand. Will name them sometime…

Somewhat tired…

…after a long day in the trenches. (They are really imaginary.) It’s been a while since I have not written anything here.  Things seem to settle down slowly and surely.

It was yesterday when, while I was was semi-attentively listening to a fellow describing his relatively old–or new, depending on one’s perspective–library, I realized that I simply need to get back to my habit of writing.  Well, voilà!

Silviu will be back

To my unknown, yet faithful, few readers I will say, “I will be back and more invigorated.”

Not a new year resolution

Quite a few months have passed since I have not written anything in this diary, or in any diary. These months have been quite interesting, and they, or rather my experience during them, would have been worth uttered, even vaguely, in this journal. But where does self-censorship begin, and, equally important, where does it end? Not that this so-called censorship would have been an impediment for me to write. At times, I asked myself whether I would have the will–and, perhaps, the strength–to resume writing, any kind of writing, after the MLIS graduation, or during the wearing job hunt. One could find any self-justification to give up.

Obviously, one does not have to write every day, but there has to be a commitment–the commitment to continue jotting thoughts here, on this electronic page. In  one of my readings, I encountered an interesting position, which, in the meanwhile, it became mine since I have most likely unconsciously changed it into a series of questions: is blogging a fashion– and, for some, it is– or some sort of exhibited drivelling with an intellectual pretence or, more popularly acceptable, an expressed need to discover oneself in one environment or another? In my case, I have started to blog because some of my colleagues at the library school were doing it, so I gave in to fashion. Not unusual, here. As for the second question, I do not know: I hope not, or not as far as I am concerned. Yes, I will go with the third one, which I can think of, metaphorically, as a mental seed that grew somewhere in some corners of my mind, and I found some answers while I was writing my previous entries. But I feel that I need to write again, and, I hope, not after significant gaps. Oh yes, I could always find a reason to avoid writing: in fact, finding reasons not to write is one of the easiest tasks, a sweet self-deception. Understandably, though, as writing is truly difficult.

And, although I can keep these entries to myself, I have decided to write in the open, as if an exhibition of this sort will almost force me to write. How else can I explain this?

The imperative to leave behind a colonial mindset

For the sake of being relatively cyber-protective, and for many other reasons, I will have to navigate smoothly between words describing recent experiences—having already written an account for my relatives and friends, I have been running out of creativity.

One of someone’s thoughts, perhaps written in a moment of fatigue, but later corroborated by others’ expressed feelings, confirmed what I’ve been guessing all along, since I could write little stories, out of thin air, to friends and relatives, or anybody who’s patient to listen—that I love telling stories. But this so-called self-discovery has some implications; for one,  I will have to spend time, as soon as I settle down, on doing research, so I can write about what seems to pique my imagination, or goad my present or past obsessions—more about culture, or cultures, it seems.

It’s interesting that John Ralston Saul, our former governor general’s husband, whose some thoughts were quite recently written somewhere (“A fair country: telling truths about Canada“), mentioned something about Canada’s two competing underlying cultural values: one that is coming from its distant, indigenous past; the other, post-1867, colonial and imperial, seems to have prevailed, or won, and created our present institutions. Now, someone from the Canadian elites is saying something that needs to be elaborated in our future history books. What does that mean? What can we do to reconnect with the spirit of the pre-1867 institutions that were more accommodating to cultural and ethnic diversity than the present institutions? We need to distance ourselves from the myth of so-called two founding European cultures…But how can that be done?

Person Stephen Clarkson

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Sometimes, the Providence

The more I read scholarly papers, especially those written by professors of humanities, the more I realize that people such as myself, that is, people coming from another linguistic and cultural background, will never be able to catch up, no matter what, with well-educated native English writers. It is an insurmountable handicap, no matter how hard some psychologists would try to find some sort of feel-good theoretical frame.

It looks like it paid off to spend a whole term on sweating a cultural essay about the Romanian alphabet; but the news only reopened a window through which I could see some hard work ahead: rephrasing ideas, smithing words,  giving birth to more elaborate sentences (what other metaphor can one think of when writing is such a painstaking effort?) and rechecking bibliographic references (mostly, citations).  I’ll see.

What I found scary was when a word, or group of words, was used to comprise the notion of “one year;” whoever will have read this message, and is in the business of librarianship, will understand quite well what I mean.

Variable literacy, permanent loss

I was scanning a few articles from several issues of Canadian Social Trends,  when my eyes fell upon an intriguing title of an article, triggering a thought from an almost forgotten past, ; late as it was, I had the energy to be patient (yes, yes, because I’m taking time to save paper and ink) to print the article, and read it feverishly, as its outlined ideas seemed to bring forth, or phrase well, my thoughts about variable literacy.  My understanding is that we acquire this literacy in our earlier years, and we’ll likely loose it later on if  we do not work on it; forever we must tend it, as though we tend a plant, or we raise a child. What about those with multiple reading and writing literacies? What do we loose, what do we gain? Or is it tertium datur (as opposed to the conventional Latin expression)?  Or are we doomed?

As I finished Bayard’s book, “How to talk about books…, ” I must admit that I could not avoid that guilt feeling, as if he knew what my problem was, being intensified by his final words–its’ not the book itself that we read that counts, but our idea of it, as that idea, or string of  ideas, defines who we are, deep inside. And what can shape our ideas better than our writing them, as simply reading a book, any book, is evanescent, at best, one proof being that I never remember precisely the books, but barely my reactions to them.