Baseball, literature and life make for a great story. I just love a good book and hated to put this one down. I’m still missing Henry and Schwartz.

Another hard year has come and gone. Let’s just let 2011 die.

I hate to feel this way. When I had a chance to read this small part of the longer In Memoriam  by Lord Alfred Tennyson I was comforted and inspired to be more hopeful.

2011…
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

If it were that easy…
Ring out the grief that saps the mind

Look up and strive to be better…
Ring in the nobler modes of life

Help me remember my blessings…
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

During this political year…
Ring in the common love of good

Everywhere…
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

In me and in you…
Ring in …the larger heart, the kindlier hand

In Memoriam [Ring out, wild bells] by Lord Alfred Tennyson
CVI

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind,
For those that here we see no more;
Ring out the feud of rich and poor,
Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,
And ancient forms of party strife;
Ring in the nobler modes of life,
With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,
The faithless coldness of the times;
Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,
But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,
The civic slander and the spite;
Ring in the love of truth and right,
Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;
Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;
Ring out the thousand wars of old,
Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,
The larger heart, the kindlier hand;
Ring out the darkness of the land,
Ring in the Christ that is to be.

I have to laugh! My dad used to tell me to “roll with the punches.” Now, every morning, I am greeted by this sign as I exit my train platform to walk to my Metro platform. It’s a good sentiment until you feel like a punching bag. You know the kind I mean. The full body blowup size kind that you punch and then it rebounds and hits you in the face. Yeah! Life is a lot like that these days.

How do you measure – life, job, relationship? Do you measure by happiness, by satisfaction, by goodness? I’ve blogged about this before, maybe too often? [F2F Inspiration, N+1 or N-1, By the Numbers,  Embracing Complexity] I have a new, scary, perspective after a “magnitude” event like the earthquake last week, and the “category” hurricane last weekend. I measure myself…very lucky, but a little unsteady.

I find I am walking gingerly expecting that rumbling tremor to start again any minute. Yet, I also regularly get on the Metro here in DC and travel underground and over bridges trusting the infrastructure of this place. This makes me feel foreign and naïve in my everyday life setting. This may be what the Freshman on campus experience, now known as First-Year’s, and now having their very own FYE (First Year Experience.)

I get to talk with a group of these students tomorrow. The very best part about working at a University, for me, is working with students of all ages – faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates. All of us, especially me, always learning. As Michelangelo is oft quoted “I am still learning.”  This is the joy of the work at the University.

I’m reading what our First Year students are reading in their ENG101 course.

“A story of education – seventy years of it – the practical value remains to the end in doubt, like other values about which men have disputed since the birth of Cain and Abel; but the practical value of the universe has never been stated in dollars.” From The Education of Henry Adams, Chapter 1

And in unrelated, but succinctly relevant online reading I came across Happiness, Philosophy and Science by Gary Gutting.  He points out the good sense of studying philosophy as it is “the origin of most scientific disciplines.”  We search for data and measurements to explain happiness, and when that doesn’t work we fall back to philosophical theories.

Gutting reminds us of the intrinsic value of the humanities as he implores us to “engage philosophy with the other disciplines – history, art, literature, even theology…”

“That is not to say that, as Plato thought, we can simply appeal to expert philosophical opinion [that] tells us how we ought to live. We all need to answer this question for ourselves. But, if philosophy does not have the answers, it does provide the tools we need to arrive at the answers.”

The First Year students are here to answer the question – how to live – for themselves. They will determine their own tools, whether scientific or philosophical, for measuring their lives.

I am their Librarian.

Give the man his thinking space. Late August, and people must be talking about the President’s vacation. I was lucky enough to have a vacation this summer – first one in two years – and I feel better. Rested and refreshed in body and, more importantly, in mind. So, give the President a break and get off the he-shouldn’t-be-going-on-vacation bandwagon. Let him rest and read [President Obama's reading list] and come back ready to lead.

I had a lot of thinking time this summer. Between vacation, a few 10+ hour road trips and hospital waiting room time [Mom's good - walking better than ever and standing & singing on risers again] …I did think. One of the topics on my mind all summer long was library space. I had the privilege of helping transform some library spaces in my jobs. It has been as much about furniture, as it is about hours, as it is about services like book clubs and Quidditch Matches and IM Reference. There were many articles about this, including the very thoughtful: Libraries As the Spaces Between Us: Recognizing and Valuing the Third Space Jun 20th, 2011 by RUSQ.

As we begin the Fall 2011 semester, I wish my students and faculty and staff the time and space and access to think about information. I want them to see their Librarians a partners in this adventure.

It is the end of the semester…almost. Which means people are stressed and cranky and everyone needs a break. When I think of taking a break, it always involves reading a book. Reading is my de-stressor. But, I’m a little stressed thinking about reading these days. Since the ACRL 2011 conference I have been reading “scholarly” papers. [See Proceedings of ACRL2011 for all articles.]

Library metrics in all their madness:

• Stop the Madness: The Insanity of ROI and the Need for New Qualitative Measures of Academic Library Success James Neal

Recommended reading from Raj Patel keynote speaker at ACRL2011:

• The Tragedy of the Commons by Garrett Hardin 1968
• Tragedy of the Commons: The Meaning of the Metaphor by John Vandermeer Science & Society Vol. 60, No. 3, Marxism and Ecology (Fall, 1996), pp. 290-306
• The Tragedy of the Commons: twenty-two years later by Feeny D, Berkes F, Mccay BJ, Acheson JM. Hum Ecol. 1990 Mar;18(1):1-19.

Just for fun:

• Public Attitudes to Science 2011

And, now I’m trying to read a new genre of book [See  A Truly New Genre May 3, 2011 By Alexandra Juhasz] -  a video-book – and it is very stressful. Maybe I need that tactile feel of the book in my hand.

I did find an article this morning about students and Kindle use – they weren’t big fans of using textbooks on Kindles. The article states:

The digital text also disrupted a technique called cognitive mapping, in which readers used physical cues, such as the location on the page and the position in the book to find a section of text or even to help retain and recall the information they had read.

I need a real…fat…book!

Luckily, in my reading today, I found a poem that decreased my stress…maybe it will help yours!

The Libraries Didn’t Burn
by Elaine Equi

despite books kindled in electronic flames.

The locket of bookish love
still opens and shuts.

But its words have migrated
to a luminous elsewhere.

Neither completely oral nor written —
a somewhere in between.

Then will oak, willow,
birch, and olive poets return
to their digital tribes —

trees wander back to the forest?

Life is complex. Do I really need to say that? Yes, because this is the age of “sound bites” and complexity does not fit well into a sound bite. The book is dead…makes for a good sound bite. The Bible is dead…makes for an even better sound bite. We are witnessing the death of higher education…that gets people in my world talking. But we know that life is more complex than any of these sound bites.

I like complexity. And even though, sometimes, it makes me tired, it helps me know the world is real. I like real. I don’t deal well with absolutes, I like life complex. I like the idea that life is “a library of questions.” So says Timothy Beal in his article The Bible is Dead, Long Live the Bible.

Attachment to the cultural icon of the Bible is similarly debilitating. It’s a false image, an idol. If you see it, kill it. The Bible is dead; long live the Bible. Not as the book of answers but as a library of questions, not as a wellspring of truth but as a pool of imagination, a place that hosts our explorations, rich in ambiguity, contradiction, and argument. A place that, in its failure to give clear answers and its refusal to be contained by any synopsis or conclusion, points beyond itself to mystery, which is at the heart of the life of faith.

Like religion in all of its complexity… reading, books, information and higher education are all in danger of succumbing to sound bites when we should be celebrating the complexity of these issues and be curious and imaginative enough to participate in the conversation…in more than 140 characters.

The book is not dead, all ages are the age of information, liberal arts and higher education are worthy scholarly pursuits. In 5 Myths of Education we are reminded to take the historical view. And though “the world is digital” – I can’t quite believe what I read in Shift Happened when I long to sit with a real book and enjoy the physical and cerebral heft of the book in my hands and in my mind.

Would we rather not be free, to think and question for ourselves? Sapere aude! proclaimed the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. “Dare to know” or “be wise,” to release yourself from your self-incurred tutelage under the authority of others and think for yourself, to trust your own reason and imagination. To be sure, such a calling is both empowering and intimidating. Would we rather be told what to do and think? Do the questions make us nervous? Do we thirst for the answers that will put our restless spirits to rest? Is that what we really want religion to be, or rather do, for us? Is that what we want from the Bible? From Timothy Beal The Bible is Dead, Long Live the Bible.

Is that what we want from information?

See also: Paper is dead or long live paper?

The Association of College & Research Libraries – ACRL 2011 conference was held in Philadelphia, PA March 30- April 2. I attended most sessions with my on-the-cusp Library Administrator hat. There was not much smiling, much less guffawing, in the sessions I attended. If there was a theme – it was assessment. One presenter tried to take the sting out of the word assessment…think of it as “critical consideration,” he said…still, not very smile worthy.

I have pulled the ACRL 2011 papers I want to read from this conference and the list is daunting. I have pages of notes on assessment management systems, from sessions and from vendors. I did learn that embedded librarians are now known as integrated librarians. I want to go back and read everything on IL (Information Literacy) and Reference Services – all the sessions I didn’t attend. And I need to find time to see all of the  ACRL Virtual Conference sessions.

Both keynote speakers, Raj Patel “these are dark times” ; and Jaron Lanier “Google and Facebook are the consumer, we are the product” urged librarians to re-envision libraries to save the world – as one tweet put it – no pressure. I did buy their books:

The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel

You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto by Jaron Lanier

Technology at this conference didn’t “WOW” me – but again this was a serious issues conference – in this serious time – and it looked like the “fun stuff” was on the periphery. I didn’t see many QR codes and only used 2 other session twitter hashtags – #acrl2011 #revorevacrl11 -  @KMH_nowinVA.  Though, I heartily agree that according to  PAscibrarian “Caffeine and sugar [act] as elixirs to scholarship.” #acrl2011 and RT @cclibrarian: If you can use “fun” things in a relevant way, great! But I think worrying so much about being “cool” isn’t always useful. #acrl2011. Good to know, as I am seriously uncool. I am disappointed that I didn’t get to bump anyone’s smartphone! I did pass out lots of cards and received many to contact this week.

The highlight of my conference was lunch on Friday with Holly from Webster University in St. Louis at the Reading Terminal Market – Pearl’s Oyster Bar. As Holly and I discussed the friendly midwest and how much I missed it; two ex-Chicago and now Philly residents across the bar from us advised me to embrace East Coast living. That Lobster Bisque I had for lunch was very good – along with the smiles and laughter we shared.

Maybe that was the point. These are serious times and we need to humanize and celebrate the human connections.

I drove to Philly from DC – and got lost in NJ going home. Figure that. Getting from here to there…is hard.

http://mclean.patch.com/articles/fairfax-county-rescue-team-starts-operations-in-japan#photo-5249175

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.  Meditation #17 By John Donne From Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623), XVII:

As we watch Japan, with tears and prayers, we are reminded again that we are all one human family. It is with great pride that I follow, my now hometown, Fairfax County Search and Rescue Team as they assist in Japan. They landed at Misawa AFB…where I was born.

Pray and learn and support the Red Cross in their humanitarian efforts.

If I could blog in Twitter hashtags only, this week would look like…#fail #fail_wife #fail_mom #fail_aunt #fail_momofgirlfriend #fail_friend #fail_coworker #fail_lib #fail_losingweight #fail_kneestillsore #fail_eloquence. Not to mention #fail_wordpressapponandroid. You get the picture. It is #fff feeling failure Friday.

However, how kismet-like that I have subconsciously “seen” the connections of these failures all week long and just didn’t recognize what was going on – except, emotionally I did. Hats off to David Brooks – he really got this right in his new book The Social Animal.

I like David Brooks’ measured, practical Republicanism, but I like his writing more. He always makes me think. Christopher F. Chabris says The Social Animal is “David Brooks’s report on how scientific research is changing our understanding of human nature and human experience.” As much as I have enjoyed Brooks’ essays before the book was published about trusting and educating our emotions…I really like how he writes.

“he shows genius in sketching archetypes and coining phrases. Here we learn of the “composure class” (who earn their money “by climbing the meritocratic ladder of success”), “sanctimommies” (mothers who critique their peers’ parenting skills) and “extracurricular sluts” (kids who participate in too many organized after-school activities). And we get a new word to describe what a woman might feel upon bringing the wrong purse to a social event—the shame of being “misbagged.” Word-market investors should take a serious look at anything Mr. Brooks comes up with.” [Source: Christopher F. Chambris, March 5, 2011; The Mind Readers - In search of success, do we overvalue intelligence and undervalue emotion, intuition and social cues? ]

Also see an alternative review of the book by Will Wilkinson writing for Forbes March 10, 2011 The Social Animal by David Brooks: A Scornful Review, who says it is ”a spoonful of human interest to make the medicine of science go down.” BTW, I will fail if people in this country believe in that view of science as a tough swallow!

In an essay The New Humanism, (March 10, 2011)  Brooks outlines areas of happiness or personal success: (I especially liked these as I had to go to the OED for etymologies for these words…have you ever used limerence in a sentence? Now I have!)

Attunement:

the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise:

the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis:

the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy:

the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence:

This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

I have been feeling none of the above, but instead this vague but palpable sense of unease and failure all week long. After, cleaning my office (which should have made me feel better and more productive) I got out my David Allen book about Getting Things Done – which is the best, most practical management book I have read- thinking I had to get back on track. Obviously, I didn’t read the right part because #failcontinued.

On this #fff (not #ff Friend Friday, but #fff feeling failure Friday) I am reading how academicians might measure success. Jason B. Jones (from the Professor Hacker blog) channels – who else?  David Allen! – and reminds us how to measure success.

#gtdguy  David Allen author of Getting Things Done:

Research: What needs to be true for your research project to feel successful? You’ve won grants? Published an article as lead author? Written a book? Launched a new digital tool? Been quoted in the national press? Solved some mystery that’s been bugging you for years? What steps could you take to make this condition true?

Teaching: How will you know when your teaching is working? Student job placement? Final projects? Engaging discussions, in-class or online? Overflow classes? Small, devoted classes? How would you know whether a particular strategy was successful or not?

Faculty Governance (“Service”): How can you tell whether you’re being a good member of your department or university? By virtue of getting tenure? By winning departmental or university-wide elections? By identifying a policy that needs to change, or be adopted, and seeing those changes through? By being on every conceivable committee that fits into your schedule?

Career: What would be a signal to you that your balance among research, teaching, and faculty governance is appropriate? Is it wholly external? (Job offers? promotion and tenure?) How would you decide to rebalance your attention among these various priorities?

Family: How you would know that your family life is going well? What would help you predict the impact of a new responsibility at work on your home life?

So, how do you know anything is going well?

I will #som (start over Monday!)

PS You can follow me on twitter KMH_nowinVA, and I am following gtdguy David Allen – but while looking for David Brooks on Twitter (does he or doesn’t he?) I did find his column on Cellphones, Texts and Lovers …

The opportunity to contact many people at once seems to encourage…

It also seems to encourage an atmosphere of general disenchantment. Across the centuries the moral systems from medieval chivalry to Bruce Springsteen love anthems have worked the same basic way. They take immediate selfish interests and enmesh them within transcendent, spiritual meanings. Love becomes a holy cause, an act of self-sacrifice and selfless commitment.

But texting and the utilitarian mind-set are naturally corrosive toward poetry and imagination. A coat of ironic detachment is required for anyone who hopes to withstand the brutal feedback of the marketplace.

I also #fail_ironicdetatchment.