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.

Wheat and chaff

Simply put, it’s  madness: packing, preparing for interviews (and they just keep coming), then having to answer questions either face to face or by phone, and dealing with other, more personal affairs—unquestionably, the latter one is not a subject to depict in this blog.

 

In the rest of the time, in addition to reading articles of  philosophy, psychology, education, and—of course—writing, I continue to look at lib lit. As for the last one, there is a plethora of research that– as my chance to discuss with several kinds of librarians that I would like to meet on a regular basis is currently slim– substitutes for an understandably, more desirable professional contact. And all of a sudden I realize that the time seems to have compressed to the point that I live now with the perception that there is no time for anything else: one task continues with another, without my having any restful intermezzo.

 

It’s funny how some people undermine themselves by displaying behaviours of greed when they see that you could give them some business somewhat regularly. Specifically, I used the services of a print shop for some personal business (I will leave other details aside), the last time charging me $0.06 per copy, although it was clearly specified in their ad that for more than a thousand copies one is charged $0.04 per copy. When I made this observation in my second to the last use of their services, they have changed the figures, and I gladly gave them the benefit of the doubt. This time, though, I didn’t– justifiably so, and, since I do not believe that being too assertive is always the best approach to solve problems, I paid the full amount, promising myself that I really do not have a reason to go to that printshop anymore (as I’m leaving the city sooner rather than later).

 

 

I found Charles Taylor’s article, “The dynamics of democratic exclusion,” interesting in the sense that he sees that people (whether majorities or minorities) in simultaneously democratic and multicultural societies operate politically on two not-so-mutually-exclusive models: the procedural one (we look at each other from the most basic perspective, as humans, but we ignore what really makes us individuals) and the Herderian model (we are complementary to each other precisely because our differences). First, he describes patterns of exclusion of minorities in different Western societies (Germany, Canada), before he proposes his two-prong model. He goes on to say that the two models share linguistically some elements with the  “postmodernist” discourse (namely, some of its terms seem to be semantically close to those used by procedural liberals—seemingly ideological enemies of the “postmodernists,” but it would have been interesting if Taylor had come up with some examples to better support his assertion. What Charles Taylor actually does is to clearly define terms, propose an ideological model of how a Western democracy should work, admit that the matters can get worse before they might get better, but he ends up with some gracious generalities (e.g. “we must fight free of some of the powerful philosophical illusions of our age,” pag. 156).