Am I back? I have no idea.

I have had my better job for one year. Better pay, better benefits, a demanding but fair boss, better commute, occasional telework... Let's try to keep this up. Now I need a car that's not twenty years old and needs new parts.

Chinese Letter by Svetislav Basara; textbook rant

I finished Chinese Letter by Svetislav Basara. Wha-huh. I'm not sure there's an actual plot and nothing really happens. Definitely not for everyone. Guy rambles on and on about existence and fearing death but wanting to kill himself. He has been ordered (probably by imaginary people) to write a statement of about 100 pages and he writes down whatever occurs to him. There's conversations with his mother, his sister's marital woes, the neighbor girl's shenanigans, his visits to his pathologist friend, and lots of introspection. The main character is obviously insane and this is the reason for his crisis. His very existence causes him pain but he cannot bring himself to end it. It's a little funny, a little obnoxious, and a little unnerving. I didn't not like the book. That's really all I can say for it.

Now for a small rant on textbooks. Textbook publishers are parasitic asshats who make a living feeding on the earnings of a captive audience. They are part of what's making it so hard for anyone not supported by well-off parents to get a higher education. They deserve to be pressed with their own product. Preferably an introductory medical-surgical nursing book; those things are huge.

I have 4 editions of Karch's introductory pharmacology text and I decided to look through the first chapter to see if the older editions would still be useful for the students and I made a (not so) shocking discovery. They are all the same. Oh, they changed the font and re-designed the diagrams and charts but the information is practically word-for-word. A few paragraphs were given a couple extra words or a new sentence but not in such a way as to add content. I then looked through Jarvis' physical examination pocket companion for 1997 and 2008. Again, identical. All of the paragraphs were identical except for maybe a few words every couple of chapters. Nothing that added content. If the nursing diagnoses (listed in a little box at the end of each chapter) hadn't changed in the intervening years there would be no need for a new book at all.

New editions every year or two also means that students can't easily go out and buy a used copy of the text assigned which is what I did as an undergraduate. (Of course I studied art history. Less new information really.) If the class the year before used edition 8 and this year they are assigned edition 9 there goes your opportunity to buy something cheaper.

Now, I understand the need for new texts, especially in fields where information is regularly updated, but the changes being made do not justify the amount by which they raise prices. These texts cost $100 - $150. How are poorer students supposed to afford this? When a student comes in looking for a book to study from I just give them an older (by maybe a year or two) edition with a warning. They don't care; many of them are working with families to care for and they're just glad to have something to help them in their studies. I don't care because I know all the relevant information they need to pass their class is there.

I'm going to do a comparison of some of the other texts. I have some that date back to the '80s. (No, they are not on the shelf for the students.) I'll look at them next to the newer editions, from the past 5 years, to see what's changed.

Too much documentation

I get to work yesterday and find out that my boss sent me about 20 emails over the weekend. Each one was on some point that she wanted me to fix in my section of the accreditation self-study narrative the school is pulling together. Since I am the whole library department I am in charge of all library related queries. That's reasonable. Many of the points she wanted clarified were reasonable as well. But 20 emails, each 2 sentences long is not reasonable.

Many of the questions, too, were frustrating. The self-study asked what classification system the library uses and I answered Library of Congress. So in one of the emails she asks me what that is and why I picked it. What is it? If the accreditation committee doesn't know then they certainly shouldn't be doing this particular job. And why shouldn't I use LoC? Most academic institutions do.

In the section about library improvement I wrote that we will get subscriptions to nursing journals. She asks why haven't we, send her the information. Why? Because the emails I send about pricing information to the Director of Education fall into a black hole, that's why! I send emails out and get no response. I have no idea what they want or how much money they are willing to spend.

She wants to know why I put the late fee at 25 cents a day. Then she sends me three emails with cut and pasted library policies from other universities along with several links. She says I should research ways to get students to turn in books on time so they don't take class texts out and keep them the whole semester. If she'd bothered to ask or even looked at the catalog I've set up she'd know that they can't take textbooks currently in use by a class out of the library. Because I'm not an idiot. The overdue fine is supposed to be the incentive to return the book. If they keep the book out too long they have to pay for the cost of the book. What more can you do? I have a loan policy. I don't need someone else's. She knows I have one! She asked me to email it to her last week! I write her weekly reports!

She's trying to do my job for me. She hired a trained professional so all this would be taken care of. I understand that the accreditation process if stressful and time-consuming but she needs to let me do what I was hired for. Revising the report and answering her further emails took up half of yesterday, time I was going to spend cataloging the rest of the books I got last week and creating a second sheet of call numbers. Instead I found she bought me more books to catalog but I didn't have time to get to them all. The accreditation committee will understand why I'm using LoC. They will be less impressed if the library is not organized. I haven't even had time yet to catalog the journals that keep getting donated or the videos that are already there.

Oh, it feels good to rant. I really do understand that this is very important to her but I feel as though she has no idea what I'm doing.

And I'm back; First Drop by Zoe Sharp

Well, that was remiss of me. I should have written sooner.

Work has been interesting. The students and faculty are checking out books and asking for help with research so I guess things are headed in the right direction. I've created an access database to keep better records of the resources and Populi has upgraded their ILS feature which has made my life a little easier. I can delete resources and change cover pictures now! Very exciting stuff. My boss would be harder to deal with if we worked in the same building but fortunately we don't. She's a driven woman and I believe she's a nice enough person but her idea of management is to criticize every time she sees you. I think it's her way of letting you know she's watching. This would be very depressing if I wasn't getting a lot of positive feedback from everyone else.

My project of "put call numbers on book spines" is going nicely. The only thing I'm really having a little difficulty with is getting more support from the faculty. There are a few full-time staff that are really including me in the academics but without an order from above the rest of them have no incentive to incorporate what I can offer into their lesson plans. I've sent out emails and posted on the Populi news feed but I don't think a lot of people are paying attention. I'll work on it.

Now on to First Drop. Much like the movie Shutter Island seemed to last six hours, First Drop seemed to last about five years. This was not a good book. Now I don't say this because it was badly written or plotted. I say this because Sharp's characters are some of the most obnoxious, flat, and self-absorbed I've ever read. Charlie Fox has her first job as a bodyguard watching out for a fifteen year old Floridian boy named Trey. She got the job from her boyfriend/boss , Sean, the only character who isn't completely unlikable but this may be because he has no personality and is hardly in the book at all. Anyway, Charlie has come over from England for her first American job. The author obviously did some research or took a vacation in Florida or something so that aspect wasn't too terrible. The dialogue though wasn't particularly good and that was rather distracting. All the teenagers sounded like fake Californian valley girls and Ms. Sharp doesn't seem to realize that certain grammatical rules apply even to speech filled with "like" and "totally". The retired CIA agent Walt and his nephew were constantly calling Charlie "missy" and "little lady" which was just inappropriate under the circumstances and just in general most of the dialogue was filled with colloquial American English that would be right in certain cases but that she didn't know how to use properly. There were a few things that were obviously British in-jokes, like having a character named "Randy" and having the teenagers not understand sarcasm (or as she called it, "irony". Here's an interesting post on the difference between the way the two countries look at this topic http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2009/05/sarcasm-and-irony.html) Teenagers are generally the masters of this form of communication. The other thing that stuck out was the plot point wherein Charlie and Trey are on the beach and oh no! they are in trouble because the police are checking everybody's IDs (due to a murder committed nearly 200 miles away) and once the police get to them they'll be finished! They've got to get away! And I'm like, wait, what gives the police the right to randomly demand all beach-goers to present their IDs? Oh, and apparently Ms. Fox and Trey rode the 240 miles from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona on a motorcycle. And not on I-95 which would make sense but on a state road which would lengthen their journey to about 6 hours. They must've needed an alarm clock and smelling salts just to wake their backsides up enough to not fall flat on their faces as soon as they dismounted.

As for Charlie herself. She was utterly unprofessional: She expected the adolescent she was supposed to protect to do her job for her. He's her charge and she should expect nothing from him. She's utterly without the ability to empathize or put herself in another's shoes: When Trey gets upset and storms off during a conversation where it becomes clear that his father may have hired people to kill him she huffs and thinks to herself that she doesn't have time to deal with "a stroppy teenager". She's incompetent: When things started getting dangerous, instead of dragging a fifteen year old around with her while she tries to clear her name she should have driven to another state, dropped him off at a police station and then made her way to the British embassy. Trey would have been protected, fewer people would have died, and things would generally have been less of a mess. She's completely self-absorbed: When Trey, who has understandable trust issues, questions her commitment to protecting him after she uses him as a human meat shield, she gets angry that he would question her ability to do her job.

Charlie Fox is basically a horrible human being. When she gets upset at Trey's inability to deal with all the mayhem she tells him that people died because of him and that she herself killed a man for his sake. That is not cool. She argues the semantics of sex with him and angrily blurts out her gang-rape in the hopes that further traumatizing him might make him think twice before participating in one himself (I have no idea why she thought he might to begin with.) Her feelings are the only ones she allows to be valid. She's always in the right. She's a bad ass fighter who gains fanboys and can pass for a teenager. She's basically a really weird self-insert character.

Anyway, the majority of the characters were horrible people, the main character being the worst. I also have to remark on the female characters. There are only three other females in the book among the multitude of guys. One is a matronly female who makes pancakes. She's of no consequence. The other is a teenager who acts as support to Charlie; buying her supplies, smoothing the mood, and doing a little fangirling. The other is a hard nosed cowardly bitch who acts (badly) as a red herring and is summarily shot. Charlie is not allowed competition.

Okay, I just need to get that off my chest. I don't know why I bothered finishing the book. It was teeth grinding-ly bad. It was so bad I don't think I could make a semi-humorous post about it though I might like to try.

I'm re-charging with other books. I read Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, an alternative interpretation of the series. I don't quite like the way he portrayed Watson but for a Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper book (something that's been done to death by now) it's quite good.

The Terra-Cotta Dog by Camilleri; Poison Study by Snyder

Still no tape, still a wonky printer situation. The students only seem to be able to print from one computer so I'm reserving it for that purpose.I checked out four books yesterday; two to a faculty member and two to a student. Now to see if I eventually get them back. I could've printed them out a receipt if I had a frickin' printer.

Still doing catalog entry. I want to put the journal and magazine collection on it but the Populi catalog isn't very good for that. It insists on having a bar code for every item and I'm not putting bar codes on the journals. They're not available for check out. Same with some of the other media. Partially I just don't want to hear my boss complain about how long they take to get here when I need to order more bar codes. Brodart orders take forever. They don't make it clear that when you order something that they give the jobs to outside vendors who then take months to get things done. And I can't even call to complain because I don't know who they are. I've been waiting for my outside book return for a month and a half.

CamStudio was a bust. It wouldn't start on my machine and I didn't feel like babying it. So I downloaded Microsoft Expressions 4 which, so far, is working fine. I'm not quite ready to record as I don't have a place to do audio yet. I have a headset here at home I could use but I'd have to record the video there, watch it here and do voice over, and then put the both together there due to where the software is and the fact that I can't be assured quiet there. I'll figure it out. In the meantime I've started a school library blog to give tutorials on research and such using images from the problem step recorder. www.ghntslibrary.blogspot.com.

Also, I am the person in the building to go to with tech problems now that admin is across the street.

I'm reading The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri. I enjoyed the last book of his and this one is just as interesting, maybe even more. Inspector Montalbano is intelligent and something of a ass at times but he's an interesting ass with redeeming qualities. In this book he has to contend with a fishy grocery store robbery and the secret imparted to him by a dying big crime figure. It's an easy read and again there are cultural notes at the back.

I'm reading Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder. This is a fantasy book about a young woman who gets a stay of execution if she'll agree to be the Commander's food taster. The writing is pretty decent and it reads easily even if the author has the annoying habit of ending chapters when something dramatic has happened or been said and then just picks up in the exact same place in the next chapter, often with the next line of dialogue in the conversation. This book might turn out to be a romance disguised as a fantasy but well-enough done to hold. The world she's created of a kingdom taken over by what's basically a military dictatorship is interestingly different from over books with the same feel. The Commander isn't arbitrarily tyrannical, he's a ruler. It's not a place I'd want to live but it's not stupidly harsh. You can understand his reasoning behind his laws even if you think they're too much. It's easy to imagine resistance naturally coming about as people grow tired of the strict laws rather than like other conquered fantasy worlds where an underground resistance movement headed by one savior defies cackling despots who kick puppies and molest children. Anyway, it has been a good read so far.

I haven't given up on First Drop though I sincerely want to drop kick it into the river.

I think the Title is the hardest part really

Me and my Grandpa.

I can now close the stacks part of the library while keeping the computer lab open so I can more easily go to lunch when I want. It's wonderful to have more control over my schedule again.

I've been doing catalog entry. I've done about 100+ books at his point and there are at least 300 to go. And then, once I get tape I can label them all! Yippee! I've been using the Populi library system that's connected to their college management software program since that's what the school already uses. Adding resources to the catalog is pretty simple. It lets you enter something by ISBN number and it pulls information from Amazon. This gives you a more or less full description of the contents for your resource page along with the authors and publisher. You have to enter all other data by hand. The resource page when created is not particularly streamlined but there are a lot of different field options. Except a series field for some reason. And you can't delete a resource or change it's status between available and unavailable. Apparently they're working on changing that. Sometimes it just refuses to enter things correctly at all and you just have to work around it.

You can, of course, assign multiple subjects of your own wording to each item and to be honest I only sometimes use LCSH or MeSH. I don't have thousands of books and I don't want there to be fifty different subject headings with only one item linked to them. These things are to help users find similar items or to let them browse for a useful topic. The wording needs to be something they'll think to look up. There's no way I'm putting the APA manual under the heading "Psychological Literature". Who's going to look for help with citations under that? Also, there's no reason to limit myself to three subjects when four will be better. I want things to be interconnected in such a way that when students browse the catalog they find things they hadn't thought to look at but find useful. I'll have to conduct a survey after they've been using it for awhile to make sure it works.

Yesterday I created an APA citation help sheet for the students and I've helped a couple that were sent by their teacher for instruction. I'm looking into how to make video tutorials for using online databases and to help teach reading comprehension and evaluative skills. I have no budget so I downloaded Windows Live Movie Maker and I'm thinking about getting CamStudio. I've also come to the realization that since the library is one of the only open doors on the hall I'm going to have to be ready to help not just students but anyone else who wanders in looking for information of whatever nature.

I'm almost done with Red Lights. It's just one long night for Steve the protagonist. He gets progressively drunker as he and his wife make the trip up to Maine to pick up the kids until eventually he decides his wife needs a lesson in understanding him when she objects to his stopping at bars along the way. He takes the keys with him into the bar to prevent her from driving off without him, which she threatened to do, and comes back out to find her gone. More drinking, one escaped convict, and lots of embarrassing drunken rambling about being men later and Steve wakes up in the car with a flat tire, missing luggage and wallet, a bad hangover, and no idea where his wife is. When he reaches a phone it turns out she never made it to where she was going. So he has to find her.

The narrative kind of feels like the passing of the highway under tires and also, unsurprisingly, like a drunken night out. It's a monotonous, nighttime journey, where roadside places are indistinct and very human emotions of hurt, annoyance, and confrontation come to the surface as the road wears on with nothing to do but watch traffic. Things start out very clear and get more and more blurry and less cohesive as Steve loses it, until he wakes up painfully alert with a squirrel watching him through the windshield. And then comes the shame, because he made a fool of himself, and the anxiety at being far from home with his wallet gone, and then the panic because he can't find his wife.

It's Friday!

The picture is my grandma and my mother.

I have the bar codes I need to put on the books so now I can enter them all into the catalog with the number of copies along with all their information. What I still can't do is put call numbers on them because 1) I can't print (although I may have fixed that, we'll see) and 2) I have no tape, still. I have put in a purchase request for Scotch book repair tape again and now hopefully I'll have it by next week. Oh please, oh please, oh please. Then everything will be ready for checking out. You know, once the students have ID cards. But that's not my problem!

Also, I'm coming to the conclusion (actually, I came to it weeks ago) that we may be able to afford only one online journal with full onsite access. AJN seems like a good bet but it's $500+ just for one user. Having an EBSCO product would have been great but all of their databases are over $8000. However, the nurse reference center they have is very similar in content on a number of points to Medscape's free content. Obviously the EBSCO version is much better but for a small institution Medscape seems like a pretty good alternative. Geez, education really is for the well-off. It's too bad there are no alternative pricing arrangements for small places.

I've also put in my first book request to the Director and the Director of General Education. The books I chose were mainly on subjects that faculty members told me students had trouble grasping. I included a few books to help with faculty development as well. The faculty I've talked to really like the idea of having professional development resources so I can use that if questions are raised about why we should buy them.

A student opened up to the copy/printer yesterday, grabbed a sheaf of paper, stuffed it into her bag and walked out. I didn't see it happen but a student who had been in the study room where the machine is told me. She and another student were just as flabbergasted and angry as myself. Paper isn't exactly expensive and there's a Staples right across the street. I'm going to have to keep a very small amount of paper in the machine and let people come to me if they need more. For every ten good students you get one bad one, you know? They're just stealing from their classmates.

I have finished Treasure Island. Pirates, treasure, mutiny, fights, ships; they all make for a great adventure. It's an action-driven story, not much for dialogue or character development. The atmosphere often takes center-stage.

I am now reading First Drop by Zoe Sharp. This is the first book in a British series to be printed in the U.S. about a new bodyguard named Charlie Fox (a woman) who comes to America to take her first job protecting the son of a computer programmer in, apparently, Florida. I'm only in about 60 pages and I already hate Ms. Fox to bits. She is massively unprepared for both her new job and a new country, she is incredibly unprofessional, and she is very petty and self-centered. I may abandon it, I may just save it to read by the computer.

I've also started Red Lights by Georges Simenon which will, of course, be better. His stories have not failed me yet. This one is not a Maigret mystery though. It takes place in '50s New England. A couple is driving up to Maine to retrieve their children from summer camp. So far they've fallen into their usual summer routine which has been marred only by the husband sneaking a double rye when he pulled over to use the restroom. Now there's a bit of tension between them and we'll see where that goes.

Yay, weekend! The drive to and from Cleveland (or the environs around Cleveland anyway) and everything in between was exhausting. I hate open casket funerals. I think they're demeaning. The makeup is never right, the flesh sags, the hands are stiff. I can understand people wanting to say goodbye but it just seems so degrading. Well. It was wonderful to see my family and next year one of my cousins is getting married so that will be a happy reason to have to go to Cleveland.

Edit: I can't print from my computer, but I can print from the student computers on my log-in. The tech guy said something about 32 and 64 bit and how something has to be changed which just sounds far too complicated. Oh, and Charlie Fox is one of the most uncompassionate, unsympathetic, self-centered, unprofessional little half-wits to masquerade as a bodyguard ever. The only time I've felt such annoyance and disgust for a character was when I was reading the first two Dexter books. (The show, however, is awesome.) Henry Miller doesn't count because he's amusing and the writing's much better.

Three day weekend

I'm taking care of the animals while my parents sort things out at our other house. Our dog has an infected cut on her foot and an ear infection so I have this entire regimen for treating her twice a day. Poor thing hates being left alone; she insists on being wherever I am, even waiting outside the bathroom door while I shower. She takes it hard when my parents are gone. She does wake me up in the middle of the night, however, and that gets old quickly. Then this morning my mother's alarm went off at 5:45. Half-asleep, fumbling with the buttons on that huge-ass thing she calls a clock radio I thought I'd managed to shut it off but it started up again a few minutes later and...well I think I might need to buy her a new one.

Work is tiring and a little bewildering. I still have no idea how much money they're willing to spend on resources. They want databases and journals but anything you buy for institutional use is hellishly expensive. Even a subscription for a once every two months journal from LWW through Ovid costs $1088 for full onsite access. If you pay $288 you can onsite access for one IP address. One! You may as well buy an individual subscription for the print edition if only one person can use it at a time. There are far fewer options for small institutions and I'm going to have to convince my bosses that free resources can be just as good. Make use of everything you can. Many journal sites allow you to view a number of free articles and Medscape and Pubmed are free to use. Netlibrary seems to be reasonably priced but they already have ebrary. I'm in contact with EBSCO about a couple of their databases so we'll see how that pans out. I'm just a little tired of talking to these people when I know we probably don't have the money to afford what they're offering.

I still need a new computer and the IT guys haven't fixed the printer for the students. I can use the printer fine which means I can print out call numbers but I have no tape. I've requested book tape so we'll see if I get that in a timely manner. I am also apparently in charge of faculty development so I've been looking for good books on curriculum and syllabus creation and planning seminars on using internet resources like ERIC. I want to find out more about the student population to judge what would be best useful for them.

Less reading, more movie watching. I finished Tropic of Cancer. It was amusing and I liked the writing though it wasn't always stellar. This was an early book though so maybe it improves. I'll have to read Tropic of Capricorn. The Tao te Ching was excellent; I'll have to read a more literal translation though for comparison purposes. Kismet was entertaining. There were cultural things that I didn't quite get. The Hessian, Frankfurter, Berliner stuff was confusing. Or maybe Frankfurters are Hessians? To Wikipedia! Okay, yes they are. And wouldn't you know it but some of my ancestors were from Hesse, Darmstadt to be exact.. Course they were Jewish. Anyway the tone of the book is noir-ish at times with its barely scrapping by private detective going after the bad guys to settle a personal matter. The writing is wry, sly, and friendly though sometimes the sentences are a little convoluted. The main character, Kemal Kayankaya, goes after a protection racket when he and a buddy end up killing two of its members while helping a local businessman. He wants to know what's going on and why these two people had to die. He gets beat up a lot and blunders around investigating (seriously, I think most of it was less detective work and more being really lucky) until he reaches the conclusion. It was a decent book and Kemal was an interesting character. He was blunt, a little unethical, and grumpy but a decent guy for the most part.

I'm reading The Fire Engine that Disappeared and it's not as good as the first few books in the series but it's still a good read.

I watched District B13, a French action film written by the director of The Fifth Element and wow, this is an awesome movie. It's short and not too complicated; the fight scenes are highly watchable and the two main characters are pretty hot. This is not a movie to spend much time thinking about; it's pure entertainment. Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance however, is a movie to think about. Done by the director of Thirst it tells a story about desperation and revenge and ultimately shows how the drive for payback can lead to utter annihilation. The actions of the characters just seem to send everything spiraling into a black void of nothingness. Again, it could have used editing. Long shots of people sitting around eating or staring into space can set the mood or show the mindset of a character but you need to distinguish between the necessary shots and the self-indulgent ones. Anyway, good movie and Oldboy is next.

I also watched a French zombie movie called The Horde because, well, French zombie movie. It was eh. The characters were mostly 2-d and the action was so-so. The plot was only half told. The one thing I found odd was when the African guy was killing the zombie who killed his brother. He started screaming about how he was Nigerian. I wasn't quite sure what his nationality had to do with anything. Maybe Nigerians have a reputation in France of being bad-ass? I don't know.

I am reading Lao-tzu's Tao te ching and it's like woah

There are very few people around on Fridays so I spent most of the day by myself. That was fine. After four days of activity it's nice to have some alone time. I spent the morning putting the books I've already cataloged into some semblance of order so people can use the books in the library even if there's no OPAC up and they can't check them out yet. I need the new computer I've been promised; the old one keeps having conniption fits and it no longer lets me enter books correctly into the OPAC. I need the adapter to allow me to use the scanner to speed things up but that's a fairly low priority. I need the bar codes I ordered. I called the lady at Brodart and she said that the vendor will have them ready in 2-3 weeks. I had no idea it was that hard to print bar codes! I thought there would be some computer that could calculate what they should look like and just print them out. At some point, when I'm really bored, I should learn more about the complex world of bar code production but as long as I get them I'll be happy.

More pressing is that I need a printer to make call number labels and book tape to affix them to the spines. I could at least organize things better then. Everybody who comes into the library now looks at the shelves of books at marvels at how fast everything's coming along. Seriously, a collection of books on shelves does not make a functional library. After that there's policies to create and journals to subscribe to and instructional sessions to plan. Oy. I'm glad people seem happy though.

A co-worker has loaned me her Stephen Mitchell translation of the Tao te ching and I'm loving it. Some of it meshes with how I think anyway but makes clearer things I haven't been able to articulate. Some of it seems unattainable to me; I hold onto certain possessions very hard and I don't think I would be able to face death with such peace but it sets out something to strive for. Or not strive for as the case may be. To let happen. "...just do your job, then let go."

Getting close to finishing Tropic of Cancer. I've said enough about him already, I'm sure but he's fascinating in a way. His philosophical ramblings and clunky metaphors are mush and his attitudes towards other people, cultures, and religions show him to be a close-minded, juvenile little tit but the extent to which he opened himself on the page is captivating. I don't think he meant for it all to be there. He's like one of those teens who write fanfic self-inserts, making themselves to be clever and cool, looked up to and catered. They have a put on tortured facade but really seem like children pretending to be world-weary adults. He attempts to paint himself as some tragic figure surrounded be imbeciles. He's so silly but for all that he's very human in his need to make himself the hero. For some reason it's very interesting.

I'm reading Kismet by Jakob Arjouni. A Turkish detective in Germany gets involved in figuring out who's behind a bizarre new protection racket in the station district in Frankfurt. Kayankaya is a little grumpy and something of a smart-aleck. I'm about 90 pages in and it's been a good read so far. Quite a bit about the immigrant situation in Germany. The English edition was published last year but the book takes place in 1998. I don't know when it was first written.

I wish my appliances would stop nagging me

Library is almost done, furnishing-wise. Now I just need a computer with the scanner hooked up and I'll be set to get everything into some sort of working order. Oh, and some way of fixing the labels to the spines. I'll use scotch tape if I have to but there must be some better clear tape. The desk is big and dark and the chair is black leather. It all looks so shiny and important. One of the drawers even locks. I can have a locked desk drawer, how cool is that? I know, my standards are pretty low. Of course, I'm still getting used to the idea that I can decide when I'll eat lunch. I can use the restroom when I want without calling someone to break me and I can go home without being relieved from my post. I'm no longer constantly on camera. I find I don't know how to behave in such an unstructured setting.

Henry Miller amused me today in a way that may or may not have been intentional. His avatar character self-insert talks about how he lost his job. He has no home and roams about cultivating people he can attach himself to so he can leech money and food off of them. One of them gives him a wad of cash and while for a while he resolves to find a place to live, he instead starts blowing it on food and whores. The last woman, he steals the money back while she's out of the room. Next chapter he's talking about a friend who has invited Henry to live with him for a bit. Only this friend Fillmore has trouble with a woman he picked up, Jackie, who won't leave. As Henry says about Fillmore, "He had a genius for attracting homeless bitches." Yes, apparently he does. Fillmore gives him pin money each morning and leaves him to his writing. Henry feels pressured to put out (pages, of course) and muses that it would be easier if he were a woman because then he could "slip [Fillmore] a piece of ass." He only thinks this, of course, because he knows it will never be expected. Much easier to brag that you'd totally do something many people think is unpleasant or demeaning when you know that it will never be an option for you. Still, if he were serious he could still totally "slip him a piece of ass." Maybe the reason it hasn't happened is because Fillmore knows Henry wouldn't be worth it.

I think it's hilarious that some people see this character as a portrait of a nihilist, a free spirit doing only what pleases him, damn the constraints of bourgeois society, living without pretension and what I see is a nebbish little man with the impulse control of a five year old.

It's damp out

Work, work. Walls are coming down, carpet being laid, walls painted. That chemical mix of paint, drywall, and adhesives that doesn't actually smell good but does because it is associated with newness. The admin offices across the street are done but no one can move in because the internet hasn't been hooked up yet. Staff are floating, sharing space. Everybody is busy, harried, and tired. I try to stay out of the way and work on my cataloging list. There are a lot of donated books for the start of the library. Hopefully that means more money for more specialized books and for other subjects. A well-rounded (and accredited) library has more than just one subject.

The only thing I'm a little concerned about now is hours. They want the library to be open at all times they have classes. They have classes seven days a week, from about 8am - 9pm. Yeah, I can't work that often. A student could get a break on finances if they help out in the library but if that doesn't happen right away the hours are going to have to be shorter. Besides, school libraries aren't open that often. No library is open like that. Most close on Sunday, open a few hours Saturday, and close early Friday. I don't get paid to work lawyer hours.

I can't wait to actually move into the library. I'll have a space to put the resources I have already to organize them. I would like to get the students access to AJN and Nursing2011 if possible. I still have no idea how much money they are willing to spend on this. Database subscriptions are expensive but I don't know which ones they can afford. Cochrane Library? Something from Gale or EBSCO? Uptodate? That last one comes recommended but the cost can be about $25 per student. I don't know if the students really need something so sophisticated for their reports.

I feel like I'll be able to concentrate better when I have a permanent space with my own computer. Somewhere I can order books into piles to keep track rather than storing them in someone else's office. Maybe it won't feel so much like people are watching me. I know they don't quite understand what I'm doing. One of the women referred to my cataloging efforts as "your little project." You can't just slap a random number on the spine and stick them on the shelf.

I finished The Widow Killer by Pavel Kohout. The first part of the book was pretty good but the second half lost focus and became something else entirely. The killer lost focus as well, switching from murdering "whores" (his definition of "whores" was basically the same as "women") to murdering Germans. The uprising of the Czechs at the end of the war provides a backdrop of chaos that the German, Buback and the Czech, Morava have to contend with. Only they spend a lot of time dealing separately with the revolution and almost none looking for the killer. Buback turns out to be an entirely worthless character, good only for repenting of what Germany did to Europe. His character is almost purposeless to the plot. He questions his nationality (he's half-Czech) and eventually goes on and on about how horrible the Germans have been. You could have cut him out and assigned the few investigative parts he played to Morava and still have a solid story. That is if the author hadn't interrupted his own plot. If Kohuot had wanted to write about the chaos at the end of the war then that's what he should have done. A tense, dramatic story could have come out of that. The search for the eponymous Widow Killer would have led to a good story by itself if it wasn't derailed by the main characters losing focus halfway through. There were two good story ideas but instead they got mashed together into an uncomfortable mix.

Tropic of Cancer is still interesting. The writing style is meandering and loopy but I like that. The main character is disagreeable and very immature but he's stopped going on and on about "cunts" and started talking about more interesting things. Losing his job, mooching off the friends he cultivates for the express purpose of a free ride, exploring the city, going out to eat. It's weird. I don't often come across a book I can appreciate even when I think the main character is utterly obnoxious. He reminds me of something the Nostalgia Critic said about Bella Swan in his Bum review of Twilight. "I think I'm tortured but I'm just pretentious." That's Henry. Oh, and for those who are curious because this book is known for it's explicit sex scenes? (I certainly was.) There really aren't any. There is talk about sex in an almost self-conscious 'I'm breaking the rules kind of way' but no real "scenes". When he does talk about it his descriptions are mechanical, focused on just hammering it home and it gives the impression that he must have been a crap lover. When he talks about what a woman wants there is only mention of her desire for 'that package of love shuttling between her thighs.' I'm paraphrasing a bit but that euphemism is his. At least he hasn't used the word wand, I suppose.

If Henry Miller weren't dead already I'd hunt him down to punch him in the mouth

I did my first bit of cataloging today. We haven't ordered any books yet, no where to put them, but they have extras to give the still being born library. The walls were knocked down today, everyone is getting displaced. People are office-less, wandering, sharing the computers in the faculty office where I've been placed. I listened to a student cry about her grade today; I just wanted to give her a hug. The fridge was moved across the street and there was a wheelchair and handicap toilet in the hallway. I think this will be the norm for a bit, though no longer than necessary with the director in charge. She knows what she wants and how to get it. For now I'll work at all the little various things that need doing and than, I'm sure, discover all the things I should have done. When things are less hectic I'll need some feedback on the books I've chosen. I think they look nice and I know they're pretty good but I don't know if they're great. I'll get better with practice.

One thing that struck me is the sort of images I'm coming across. I was looking for a free medical videos website and came across one that seemed likely. First page has a selection of stills from the archive that you can watch and one was a how-to for inserting a catheter into a man. Right smack in the middle of the page, hand gripping the goody and I hit the back button real quick while making sure no one was looking. Then I realized that they practice this stuff on dummies and there's no need for a NSFW tag. It is for work.

I've dug out Taylor's Introduction to Cataloging and Classification to take to work tomorrow so I can look up specific points about AARC2r. There is much tedious and anal work to be done.

I finished Six Geese A-Slaying. It was eh. It was bland and mainly inoffensive. Those damn city dwellers with their snootiness and their inability to deal with weather. Why, if they had weather like rural folk have weather, nothing would ever get done. They'd spend all day on the internet writing letters to the editor about how they can't be expected to work under such conditions and basically diva-ing up the place. Because everyone knows how big city Washington DC is. Drive ten minutes and you're out the other side dodging deer. And geese.

Henry Miller. Oh Henry Miller. Tropic of Cancer was quite revolutionary for its time, (mainly because of the sex), but now you can find more raunchy stuff for free with a simple Google search. Granted, you still don't find this sort of stuff in most printed matter, but it just doesn't have the same illicit feel. Back in 1934 you could get in big trouble for having something like that sent to you through the mail. (The guy who was basically in charge of America's morals was Anthony Comstock, who was batshit. Wikipedia him.) So the sex is there but the shock value that made it such a "thing" in the '30s and '40s is gone. What you're left with is wonderful, brilliant prose wrapped around a disgusting little turd of a man who thinks he's too clever for this world. Let's see, what have I written about it in my notes.

Cynic of the more annoying sort. Enjoys portraying everything as filthy and then wallowing in it. Smug, believes he sees more than most people and feels clever about it. Starts off the book by telling us about the "cunts" he's fucked and how big his dick is, if that gives you an idea. Declares he no longer has a need for societal norms, how they hold him back and mean nothing, like he's practicing the defense for his own rape trial. Inwardly mocks all his "friends" who actually work while he sponges off them.

He talks about needing to do anything to survive, like he's been done a great wrong and is just barely getting by, but refuses to work which just makes him seem silly. Actually, his entire attitude and the way he and his "friends" interact puts me more in mind of a bunch of teenagers.

Oh, and he's a misogynistic, racist pig. All women are "cunts". There are two subspecies, the slut and the whore. That's it. Of course, he has great disdain for all people not himself but his supreme contempt is saved for the ladies. Seriously, I'll usually let this slide if it's one character that's a jackass but all the men in this book talk the same way. It's a very heavy layer of I want to stomp his head in, yes. Overall he shows a very dim understanding of people.

However, the book is interesting. I just have to grit my teeth and try not to laugh at the parts that are on the emotional level of a thirteen year old.

I like the book, I'm just not wild about the author.

Watched Fritz Lang's M, a German film from 1931 . Damn that's a good movie. This was one of the first modern movies. Peter Lorre plays a child murderer who's actions have started a city wide manhunt, creating terror, suspicion and paranoia among the populace. The police have the problem that any serial killer creates; he strikes at random and people don't notice him. Eventually the criminal syndicate, angry at the increased surveillance disrupting their business, decides to catch the murderer themselves. The whole thing is well-paced and at times very tense. Lorre gives a riveting speech at the end about his compulsion. I seriously recommend this movie.