You are currently browsing the category archive for the 'Diary' category.
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).
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.)
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…
…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!
To my unknown, yet faithful, few readers I will say, “I will be back and more invigorated.”
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 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.
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.
It appears as if I’ve given up on writing: I haven’t. It’s been quite hectic here, especially in the last two months, but I’d rather say no more. I wish I could master describing the trivia, but I don’t and, likely, I won’t.
Though not an event, or series of events, doing some reading was quite enjoyable, particularly when I got somewhat tired of job hunting—which, usually, happens in the evening. A few days ago—or what is yesterday?— I realized that I have not done any search with Dialog for quite a while, and that worries me because when I don’t practice a skill, I tend to believe that almost forget it. It might have been this concern that almost pushed me to buy a book about online searching for librarians—not bad at all, the book, I mean, considering that I still need to hone my searching skills.
For some reason, I have the feeling that I may end up working in US, although I prefer to stay here, where I am. Will try to rationalize– or attempt a sensible explanation of — this thought, but I believe that’s too early now (for reasons that I prefer to keep to myself).
Will finish this book, “How to talk about book you haven’t read,” by Pierre Bayard, in a couple of days. It appears that, when talking about books without reading them, we can get away with some astucity. The author thinks that the so-called non-reading is even better, because we all have our “inner” books, whether they are individual or collective. My understanding is that, if this is the case, our cultural being can be so rigid that we impose our own cultural grids on any book. Well, what if we just glorify the power of incommunicability? Meaning that a clash of cultures is almost inevitable, or, to put it nicely, a dialogue of the deaf. In this case, it is a dialogue of non-readers– will they be ever understanding what is the Other’s marked identity? That is the Other’s writing, speech, and rhetoric…
Librarians would be saviours since they don’t need to know the content of books, but only their relationships, or how books are positioned within a cultural chain–according to Bayard. Yet, a book may have its own personality, so distinct in fact, that putting it in a relation with other books, or in a subject category, would make us play, unknowingly, Procustes’ role.
It’s been quite a break since I have written an entry in my diary: for various reasons, one more—or, perhaps, less— compelling than another. First of all, one should have seen me answering interview questions by phone while I was surrounded by boxes of books and personal items: at that time, I was in the process of packing. Understandably, I had to postpone any packing as it was imperative to prepare for those interviews. Even if I may not get a job with those employers, I can still say that the lessons learned are invaluable. It seems to me that my expertise is fine, but there is an obvious (to me) issue with how I present the final product. The effort that must be put into a sort of presentation feels so close to an ordeal: well, so be it–it’s worth it.
Update on 20 July 2008. I finally moved to To, facing some situations that some people might characterize as extreme. One major lesson is that I need to do a thorough background checkup of movers, especially when a recent acquaintance suggests their services.
Overall, I like the new apartment and its location. Now, it remains to be seen whether I will finally stay here or move somewhere else.
