Sobering Thoughts

I've been having a rough time with brain weasels of late--student move-in started on Sunday, and we're all looking at it like the ticking time-bomb it is. Although admittedly everything has been manageable on campus and so on, and again I have a significant safety cushion by way of limited on-campus hours and such.

Anyhow, there was a meeting yesterday where a couple of unit heads, including my boss, got into it over re-opening services to the public. Colleague A was adamant that the virtues of our field of archives and special collections are the material texts which can only really be accessed in person. My boss's reasoned response was that there's No Such Thing as a Rare Book Emergency and that students and teachers should be thinking about projects to pursue safely first and foremost.

So today my boss and I had our monthly one-on-one and we talked about all this and she said, "The thing I find most awful and frustrating is how we're gonna lose a generation of librarians, not just because of the pandemic and its mismanagement, but to their own self-sacrificing tendencies. We do not need to put our lives on the line just to make other lives easier."

A Book a Day: Sontag

 Every day (ish) I'm sharing an image of a book I like. I finished reading this heavy biography after Christmas; it had a bit of a controversy around it since Moser claims that Sontag likely ghostwrote her ex-husband's most famous book, along with various other credits to his name. Mostly the book tries to combine biography and intellectual history, and largely succeeds, though there's an awful lot of gossipyness to it as well (which, I enjoy that sort of thing, but I know a lot of folks don't). What I did admire was how Moser went into heavy biographical territory for a woman writer in a way a lot of biographies of women simply don't: he gives exhaustive details on everything, not just love affairs and whatnot. Which, you know, should be normal by now, but of course isn't.