Scriu iar, limba nemaicontând, după atâta amar de vreme. Scriind voi fi obligat să consult dicționarul pentru că, din câte observ, infrecvența scrierii deformează imaginea mentală a unui cuvînt. Lipsa practicii dezalfabetizează.

Was horrified to see I how I spelled a word in a certain context, and what came out of that sentence. Need to practice.

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.

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

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.)

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…

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!

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?

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?

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.