hitherto

maura @ 10:19 pm

We had a lovely time on our midwest vacation recently, plenty of opportunity for relaxation plus surprisingly pleasant, even coolish, weather. The adults slipped off to Chicago for a couple of days too. I’ll never turn down a visit to Chicago, though as I get older such trips tend to come with All The Feels. I still love the city as much as I ever did in college, which means nostalgia of course, but also I feel concern about recent troubles that the city’s going through. Driving in I feel like a huge nerd from that first glimpse of the Sears Tower, ogling the industry and trains in Gary, past the beautiful Chicago Vocational School building on the South Side, up the expressway next to the El and past IIT, over through McCormick Place and up Lake Shore Drive. Even with traffic it’s amazing.

I think the fact that Chicago’s probably the place that most explicitly falls into the Road Not Taken category for me adds to the emotions when I visit. There are the Actual Roads — like when I didn’t go to grad school there just after college, or didn’t apply for the Assessment Librarian job there a few years ago (still the only job I’ve even passingly considered applying for since I started at City Tech). Then there are the Possible Roads — like pretty much anytime either Jonathan or I was at a job change point, a time when we could have picked up and moved someplace new without too much disruption beyond the hassle that is moving. Chicago could have been a logical place to move for any number of reasons.

All of this means that I walk through the city feeling like there are other, ghostly versions of me hanging around as well. Of course the ghostly me wouldn’t be doing all of the touristy things that visitor me does. Really, sometimes touristy me just wants to ride the Brown Line on the El for a couple of hours (Best Views Evar), or take my laptop down to the Mansueto library reading room at UChicago (as the kids call it these days) and get some writing done. But touristy me who is not alone does other things, which is okay (and more social).

This time we did the self-guided donuts, art, and books tour. We started by taking the Brown Line to Merchandise Mart and stopping for breakfast at a donut place we’d never been to called Glazed and Infused. Flavors sampled included coffee glazed, maple glazed w/bacon, old fashioned, and chocolate frosted banana cream filled (yuck, that last not for me). I still like Do-Rite’s bacon donut best, but this one was pretty tasty. The next morning before leaving we went to Do-Rite and all they had was one gluten-free maple bacon donut, which is just not the same, I’m sorry to say, mostly because it’s a cake donut rather than a cruller. But the cinnamon sugar old fashioned was terrific.

Then it was off to the Art Institute for much of the day. We spent lots of time in the European galleries which we hadn’t seen recently, but also hit some old (and new) faves: the Chagall stained glass windows (still incredibly gorgeous despite their oddly-uninspiring new location in a dark corner near the bathrooms), the Cornell boxes in the (still) new to us modern wing, and the Ando room in the East Asian wing. On our way down to the ever-amusing Thorne Miniatures we swung through the kind of hilarious paperweight room — who knew there were so many different artistic paperweight eras?

For the books portion of our trip, we stopped by the new location of the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park, where we are still members despite not having purchased anything since the mid-90s (judging by the address they had on file for me). I’d forgotten how nice it is to browse a bookstore with both loads of fiction as well as scholarly books — two whole shelves of Anthropology! And the realization that I am now more familiar with the titles on the two shelves next to them, which held Education books. Course books are still in the basement, mostly empty now for the summer. We had to restrain ourselves from buying all of the new Oxford “Very Short Introduction to…” books (we got: Math, Archaeology, Probability, and Nothing [which is mostly Physics]). It was rad.

And eating, woah, did we eat. Aside from the aforementioned donuts we had dinner at Endgrain, where the sprout kimchi and pork belly appetizers were highlights. We also ate at Publican which was super meaty and delicious: harissa pate, boudin blanc, and head cheese, yum, though also tasty peas and avocado spread on toast. Then breakfast at Little Goat on our last day to top it off, with pork belly, kimchi, and eggs on a biscuit (and my realization that I can rarely resist ordering kimchi or pork belly if they’re on a menu). Then we rolled on home, all at once fat + happy + sad.

in a room in a house in a dream

maura @ 4:43 pm

I’m reading a book called “Facing the Other Way” about the history of the record label 4AD, and looking through the photos made me realize that I never wrote about the Throwing Muses show we went to last March. March! Can’t believe it’s already been that long. In some ways it’s kind of a boring thing to write about. I mean, it was terrific, full stop. Plus they’ve continued on tour and lots of other people have written about the shows in much better detail than I will here, especially now that I’m 4 months out.

But seriously: amazing. Tanya Donelly opened with a short set of new stuff and old stuff. The new stuff was okay — I have to admit that I’ve lost track of her in the post-Belly years. And the old stuff — Belly as well as some Throwing Muses — was delightful. As I mentioned back when I wrote about the Amor de Dias show we saw in March, Sam from Magnetic Fields played bass (or was it cello?) for Tanya Donelly, which was fun. I guess he’s the itinerant strings person for bands of a certain age playing live in NYC.

Part two of the show was Throwing Muses in its current lineup — Kristin Hersh, David Narcizo, Bernard Georges — playing entirely new songs from their most recent record (released as a book + CD) Purgatory/Paradise. The new stuff is phenomenal if dark, and it was pretty powerful to see it live. I keep telling people that it’s a concept album even though that sounds weird and old people prog rock, but it really is, at least in the sense that it all hangs together as a complete record to listen to start to finish. But the songs worked well live, too, especially beginning and ending this part of the show with “Glass Cats.”

Part three was old school Throwing Muses in which Tanya Donelly came back up on stage. There’s no way, of course, that they could ever play everything you want to hear, but I was super happy with the songs they did choose, especially “Green,” which I’m not sure I’ve heard live before, and “Flying,” which was my favorite track on their 2003 Throwing Muses album.

Looking back at that Amor de Dias post I’m reminded that I got all nerdy when Purgatory/Paradise was released. I got the record for xmas but didn’t end up even listening to it until January, because I made myself listen to every Throwing Muses EP and LP in order of their release before I could listen to the new record. I was also happily surprised to see that they thanked every Strange Angel by name in the record’s book — because there I am!

eggs and their shells

maura @ 10:14 pm

So I had jury duty today. It’s been a long time — nowadays you only get called for service every 8 yrs and I could swear I had jury duty after I’d already started at City Tech, but that was only 6 yrs ago so maybe I’m wrong? Maybe I was still in library school.

(Woah, checked my files and it was actually 2005! Time, flying, etc.)

A million years ago when we moved to NYC the jury duty thing was different. I got called probably in my 2nd or 3rd yr of anthropology grad school, pretty much as soon as I changed my drivers license from DE to NY. There was no limit to the deferrals then so I think I deferred something like 5 times — they kept calling me around finals week and I always had exams to proctor and grade. The director of grad studies in my dept wrote me a letter every semester to get out of it. Then I took some time off and was called right away, but I didn’t get picked for a jury.

I didn’t get called in Brooklyn until after Gus was born, and Jonathan and I had this incredibly complicated work + childcare setup that kept us both out of jury duty for a while (though required us to bring Gus and/or his birth certificate to the courthouse repeatedly). When I did finally do jury duty in Brooklyn I got to the questioning stage, which was new for me, though I was released before being assigned. They only keep you for a couple of days before they let you go if you haven’t been assigned, which is decent.

Now they automatically let you postpone once, which I did when I was called to report in last December, not the least hectic time of the year. I picked today, May 22, figuring that it’s the end of finals and that things would be slowing down, regularly scheduled commitments ending, and that it wouldn’t be the worst time in the world to be on a jury. Which is sort of true, though of course other things have come up in the interim. Our Chief Librarian is retiring in a few weeks and his retirement party is today (which I may miss the very beginning of). We’re hiring for a couple of positions and I’m on the search committees. By next Friday I’ve got to grade students’ final projects for the grad course I co-taught this semester, and prep a conference presentation for that date. And the usual end of semester meetings which result in end of semester meeting minutes to be written up and distributed.

So far it’s not so awful. The waiting rooms have somewhat decent wifi. The one I’ve been hanging out in has windows that overlook the street which is reasonably pleasant, though it’s kind of weird to be able to see my workplace from here (City Tech is just up the block from the courthouse). Since switching to a mostly-standing desk I’ve become mostly bad at sitting, which is a little weird in a waiting room situation, but I was able to find a table near an outlet in a corner to hang out in. I feel like people are looking at me a bit funny for standing, but what can you do. I’m caught up on twitter (a rarity for me these days) and catching up on other reading. I’m writing this blag.

On the downside, lunch was a bit late at 1pm. And, you know, it’s a waiting room. Sometimes the anthropologist in me enjoys looking around at what people are doing and eavesdropping on the conversations strangers are having, and sometimes I just want that young guy with the PSP to turn down the volume of his game so I can concentrate on what I’m reading. It’s sleepy, even after my afternoon thermos of coffee. But in some ways that’s nice, too — I don’t typically have much time to zone out and daydream, and the older I get the more I enjoy those opportunities when they present themselves.

Postscript: There was a big lot of no announcements at all when we got back from lunch, then bam, at 3:50pm they announced that everyone left in the room would get to leave, service completed. Woot! Later on someone noted that they probably didn’t have many cases just before Memorial Day weekend, which wasn’t what I’d planned for at all but seems like useful info to remember for next time. And *then* the officer who dismissed us pronounced both my first AND last name correctly which practically never happens. See you in 8 yrs, Supreme Court of Kings County!

from cave to cave

maura @ 10:32 pm

Art! There is suddenly lots of art right now, of varying expiration dates. The whole of it seems very springy, beginning as it has last month and this month when spring is finally here. The botanic gardens have been nutso — the long late winter made lots of flowers bloom at the same time that don’t usually bloom together, a couple of weeks ago we went and there were tulips and cherry blossoms and the beginnings of lilacs. Everything seems to be happening in an intense brief burst right now with a short timespan.

Art can be tricky for us: the spawn has a limited tolerance for some but not all art, and the precise combination of factors that produce a successful visit is not always predictable. Luckily I have a few get out of jail free cards I can cash in around this time of year, Mother’s Day and my birthday. I used the MD card last weekend to take us to the Brooklyn Museum to see Submerged Motherlands, a huge installation by Swoon. I’ve loved her work ever since the woodcut pasteup graffiti down by the Gowanus that we used to see on the way to Gus’s elementary school. This piece is incredible — she’s taken over a large room with a vaulted ceiling and built a huge tree covered in cloth and paper cutouts in the center. There are two handmade wooden boats around the tree, plus lots more woodcuts and a neat little hut with cardboard honeycombs which I found utterly charming (and took bad photos of). I tweeted that you could look forever and not see everything and I think it’s totally true. Luckily this one is open through August so I could go back, conceivably, when I have a summer Friday off and Gus is in camp.

The other two exhibits I hope to see are much more time-sensitive. One is the Kara Walker installation A Subtlety at the old Domino sugar factory in Williamsburg. From the photos and descriptions it looks amazing, and the line was pretty long today as I was driving Gus to parkour so it’s definitely generating lots of interest. This one might work for Gus — we’ve had some conversations about her work when we’ve seen it in the Brooklyn Museum, and I think we could have some good conversations after seeing this. But I don’t think an hour wait is really feasible for him, so I might have to figure out how to get to see this on my own. I also love the painted ribbon-like stripes (kind of wallpaper patterny) on the plywood around the construction site, though they’re so pretty as to be a bit distracting as I drive by on Sundays.

Last but absoLUTEly not least is a Lynda Barry show at a gallery in the city! OMGxinfinity!!! This is in anticipation of a new book with collections of all of her old stuff, fittingly titled Everything Part 1. I have lots (maybe all?) of her old books of comics but I will probably buy this one too because she is one of my favorites ever. That Marlys doing the funky chicken comeek was on our fridge in our 57th St. apt. for at least a year. And then when she did the 100 Views of Marlys that you could buy and she’d autograph them Jonathan bought me Top 40 Marlys and she signed it and added “Am I doin’ it?” in a speech bubble because she is the greatest. All the grownups in the house want to see this one so we’ll have to figure something out some weekend, maybe there’s a tasty eatery nearby that we can go to? Looks like it’s near the Central Park Zoo, that might do it.

homebodies

maura @ 11:11 am

It’s spring break week here, and while we initially had various plans for traveling, as it turns out we are on vacation but staying put. Looking back through this blag I think this is the first time in many years we haven’t traveled during the break, so this is kind of new for us.

Gus is midway through his break, me a bit moreso (I’m going back to work on Monday next week). So far it’s been delightful. We’ve seen two movies (Captain America and Divergent) and watched some TV we’d been storing up (read: hadn’t had time to watch). I’m reading 2 books and have another queued up for when I finish them (probably today). Gus has been playing videogames til his eyes bleed, watching Bob’s Burgers, and reading the Divergent books, plus a smidge of homework (though there’s more to do before the break’s out). We’ve had some fully inside days and haven’t hurried to get out of pjs even on the days we have left the house. We went to the AMNH and saw the poison exhibit (which was fantastic) as well as the new Dark Universe planetarium show, and spent some time in the always awesome reptiles and amphibians room (How to Get Bitten By a Snake!). We ate lunch at the incredible Food Court 32 Asian food mall on 32nd St. I’ve gotten 8 hours of sleep each night, did some work on an article my research partner and I are finishing, and got back to playing Papa & Yo, one of the videogames I got for xmas.

Today might turn out to be an inside day — it’s sunny but very cold (seriously April what is with this crazy weather?) — but other plans for this week include going to the Bronx Zoo, getting my bike out of the basement and ready to ride to work on Monday, and working on a conference proposal. Plus the aforementioned reading and videogaming. We could walk over to the botanic gardens or through the park. We could go to the fancy ramen place in our neighborhood for dinner one night.

Really there are lots of options for things to do, though the staying-in options are also tempting. This is somewhat new territory for me — whenever we travel I want to make a giant list of all of the things we could do, and often have to fight against my tendencies to march us through the list without time to relax in between. Partly that’s because I worry (especially if we go someplace far away) that we’ll only ever have one visit to that place, and I want to be sure we see the interesting stuff. But also I think I do better when I’ve had some physical activity, even if it’s only walking around. Or standing around — I can’t play Papa & Yo while standing, but I can read and type just fine.

The nice thing about taking time off but not leaving town is that there’s no pressure to run around and see everything, because it’s all here for us on any normal weekend. That Swoon exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum? Definitely want to see it, but it can wait. It’s been a busier semester than usual so maybe that’s helped me accommodate to relaxing this week, too.

So my staycation verdict? Two (relaxed) thumbs up, five stars, would do it again. But now I’ve got to run, I have a book to finish.

i used to wander in the empty road

maura @ 9:04 am

March is almost over, and like most folks in the eastern half of the US I can’t help but think good riddance. It’s been a long weirdly cold winter, so cold we all bought balaclavas (which we can’t help but call baklavas). There was some good snow, so I hate to complain too much, but it was often during times that were difficult to enjoy fully, like overnight or during the commute to work. I’m ready for spring.

Two bright spots in March were concerts! First was Throwing Muses, about which I’ve been writing an epic post in my head for a few months actually, starting to before I got their new record for xmas. So more about that later.

Second was the first night of the Chickfactor shows, the only night we went to because babysitting is expensive. We picked this night because of Amor de Dias and the Jim Ruiz Set, and we were not disappointed even though we were almost late because I read the schedule backwards. The correct schedule was a good thing, because school night curfew is midnight so we ended up having to miss the last band.

To go backwards now, Jim Ruiz Set were great, similar to the last time we saw them two (I think?) years ago. They played the oldies and goodies, “Stormtrooper” will always be a favorite of mine. And the band had a xylophone this time around which was very fun. As they were leaving the stage Jim claimed that this was their last show, that he’s retiring, though I’m pretty sure he’s said that before. We’ll see.

Amor de Dias were fantastic, well worth the wait. We’d tried to see them last year on a tour to support their then-new record, but the entire tour ended up getting canceled when their visas didn’t come through in time. (I just saw on Twitter that the same thing’s happening to Ben Watt right now. What gives with the visa weirdness, US government? It’s just pop music!) Last year’s cancellation made me sad sad sad — Pipas was and Amor de Dias is one of my favorite bands, and while of course we got our tickets refunded it was a huge giant bummer.

They played a good long time, maybe 45 minutes, mostly stuff from the new record but a few gems from their first, including “Bunhill Fields” which I love. Lupe and Alasdair were joined by several special guests to supplement their guitars, first Sam from Magnetic Fields on cello (and the second time this month we’ve seen a show in which Sam was a special guest), then someone from Comet Gain on bass, and finally Pam Berry on vocals. Their music is mostly quiet and contemplative and it was gratifying that folks were into that, there wasn’t much excess talking.

(Wow, this is totally an old person reviewing an old person concert, right? It was so quiet, we didn’t even need earplugs, and we were home by midnight! My bunions were so relieved!)

maybe see me there

maura @ 9:37 am

By now everyone has seen the news about Amtrak’s writing residency trips, right? It’s been all over mah twitterz, though since I (unsurprisingly) follow a whole pile o’ academics* and journalists and other writerly folks perhaps that’s just me. There was this article about the joys of writing on trains,** then this one about the practicalities of the whole residency thing. Both are fascinating.

* Shocking, I know, that academics would even use twitter, because we don’t like to talk to anyone but ourselves. Nope, we don’t blog in multiple places or have websites for our research projects or send op-eds to the Times (to get rejected) or nothing, why would you think that? </Kristof rant>

** Though I have to say, her trip on the Lake Shore Limited sounded much more pleasant than when Jonathan and I took the train to Chicago many (eep, more than 15?!) years ago. That’s the sleeper car for you — 18 hrs (one-way, with delays) in the cheap seats was, at times, somewhat unpleasant.

I am, as regular readers know, a huge fan of both train travel and writing on trains. When I think about the writing I’ve done in the past almost-6 (next month!) years since I’ve been a full-time librarian + professor, what I’ve written on train trips stands out. It was on one of our 9 hour Amtrak odysseys to northern Vermont to visit family that I wrote the very first IRB application for what ended up being our huge (because we couldn’t stop collecting data, it was so interesting) research project on how commuter college students do their academic work. I took the train to DC and back a few years ago for a conference, and wrote several blog posts and other small things. And the first book proposal that emerged from the aforementioned research project was also (partially) written on the train, when I took a trip up to Saratoga Springs for another conference. Last month I took the train to Delaware for a family thing and also got lots of writing work done, this time on the theory part of chapter 1 of the book, which was particularly challenging to write. The train helped.

I love writing on trains for all of the same reasons the author of the Paris Review piece does. Travel by train is so pleasant, compared to other forms of travel, that it seems to free up more mental space to accomplish other things. Perhaps most importantly (though also perhaps most difficult to describe), there’s the suspended animation dreamtime aspect of train travel. The time component is critical: with a set amount of time to write, it’s easier to write (that’s why people use pomodoros and all of those other writing strategies). Also, on a train you are physically moving forward: if you get stuck or need to take a break it’s easy to look out the window and let the pleasant scenery rush through your brain and unstick you. On the quiet car it is even more awesome, because there tend to be other folks who are writing (and as the students who participated in our study were quick to tell us, it’s easier to work when the people around you are working too).

All of which has me wondering when my next train trip will be. Really I’d love for us never to fly or drive again when we travel anywhere east of the Mississippi river, but unfortunately train travel is still a smidge too expensive for that to happen in all cases (esp. the sleeper car, and esp. now that the kid is big enough that he’d need his own room). But it’s worth researching for sure.

through the curtains

maura @ 10:29 pm

Last weekend we went to see the Indie Essentials videogame exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. It was a great exhibit — I played lots of games I’ve been curious about as well as lots that were new to me. It’s open for another month or so and if you’re in/around NYC it’s *totally* worth a trip.

At some point I’m going to write up a review for the CUNY Games Network blog, so I don’t want to talk too much about the overall exhibit right now. What I do want to think on is what happened with my spawn and his pal. They were drawn immediately and inextricably to a cabinet multiplayer game called Killer Queen Arcade, and once they were sucked in they were hooked for the practically the entire two hours we were there. It’s a five-on-five team-based game that looks and plays a bit like the 80s classic Joust. There are three win conditions and several different kinds of characters to play, each with different actions and weapons. It’s loud, fast, and busy.

I know that’s a pretty weak and colorless description of the game — in truth I didn’t actually play for very long. I have to admit that I kind of hated Joust. I wasn’t very good at it, no matter how hard I tried, and back in the day it could represent a significant investment in quarters to get good at a game you naturally kind of sucked at, which I didn’t really have the patience for. I was much more awesome at Tempest and Centipede so those machines got my quarters. I did try to play Killer Queen with Gus and his pal, but I just couldn’t muster the reaction time to make a significant contribution in the time we had.

Though jeez, the boy loved it. LOVED. It was a great example of flow, because OMG the time we had available to spend there just flew by. I think the three different win conditions kept the game fresh and interesting; that many ways to win allowed players to try different strategies for each game and not simply try to memorize the patterns or game space. Since this was a museum gallery there were folks coming in and out of the game as they walked through the exhibit, which also added novelty and kept things from getting stale.

But I was also struck by the way in which a game that was at its core a team-based competition was actually *not* super-competitive. Yes, the game ends when one team wins, pretty much the basic requirement for competition. But the game doesn’t keep track of points either in each contest or cumulatively. And that seems to have created gameplay in which the players cheered their wins and moaned their losses, but only for an instant, really, because then it was on to the next game. The ways that cooperation and competition meshed in the game were fascinating, and I’m sure that’s a huge part of why folks found gameplay so compelling.

Wish we’d had Killer Queen back when I had the reaction time of a 12 yr old.

floating out on the echo

maura @ 9:08 pm

So as it happens, the hardest thing about writing a book isn’t the writing part. That sounds kind of snotty — like “Oh, writing is so easy for me, I just sit down at the computer and the words stream out of my head through my fingers and onto the screen. And they are awesome amazing words that are perfect the first time.” That never (well, okay, very very rarely) happens — writing is hard work, sometimes very hard. I do all the things that everyone tells you to do: take it bird by bird, keep your butt in the chair for a set amount of time, outline, prewrite, shitty first draft, keep the argument in mind, track of my progress to help motivate me, revise revise revise, etc. But the thing about writing is that, while it’s hard work, at this point I’m old enough and have written enough that it’s hard work that’s known. I know it’s difficult to write a book, but I also have a good sense of the steps and tasks required. It’s challenging — sometimes very challenging — but not an unknown entity.

This is in contrast to trying to find a publisher and get a contract for the book. Which, it turns out, has been really really really hard. Since this is my first book, of course my utter lack of experience with this type of academic publishing is certainly one reason for our difficulty. But there are other likely causes too. Our book isn’t just about libraries, but about commuter students doing their academic work in lots of places. So we’ve sent proposals to university presses rather than library publishers both because they seemed like a better fit and because we’d like the book to be distributed more widely than seems likely with library publishers. It’s been a struggle to figure out how to pitch the book, too, because it’s interdisciplinary and occupies a space that doesn’t seem to have many other published studies. We’re using anthropological methods and theories, but we’re studying higher education, and we do have recommendations/strategies to suggest. So it’s not pure research but not pure policy either. I also think, which has been hard to admit as a recovering academic snob, that we’ve probably aimed too high thus far, sending proposals to fancy university presses that are frankly a stretch for faculty at a public commuter university.

The most frustrating thing about the book thing as opposed to the journal thing is the deafening silence with which proposals are sometimes greeted. I think we’ve finally figured out how to get a better response, which is to send our two-page project overview as an inquiry rather than a full proposal. But it’s taken us a long time to get here. And academic book proposals are MASSIVE — honestly I think the first one we sent in (via postal mail, also not unusual) was over 100 pages including the sample chapters. And when you send something that massive, even the relatively easy ones to those presses that accept submission via email, and don’t ever hear anything back, even after following up, sometimes multiples times… Sigh. I know university presses are strapped — as a librarian, I’m probably more familiar with the contraction of the market for academic monographs than are many faculty in other departments. But it sucks to send a huge number of words that you worked really hard on out into the unresponsive ether.

I’ve also probably slowed us down a bit, too. In my perfect dream world our book would be published open access and freely available to anyone who wanted to read it. We’re working on a website to accompany the book to showcase some of the visual data from the project, and it’d be great if it were easy to connect the two, to go back and forth between them. But books are not articles, and for lots of reasons there just aren’t that many OA monograph publishers yet, especially in the social sciences (things are starting to pick up in the humanities). And we want to go through both peer review and editing, so self-publishing is out. So I think my focus on OA has led us to be too conservative in sending out proposals so far.

Which will change. We’ve revised our original plans somewhat to give the book a tighter focus, and are almost finished with a full draft of the manuscript. We’ve identified some presses that seem like less of a stretch and we have our project overview to send along as an inquiry (along with an offer to send a full proposal). I’m trying to concentrate on looking forward to contacting new presses, as well as the excitement of being almost! finished! with the entire manuscript, and the opportunity to work on the website in earnest once that happens. But it’s hard work with an uncertain ending. Hard hard hard.

button button who’s got the button

maura @ 9:20 pm

Last week we took a field trip at work to visit Interference Archive in Gowanus. It’s a neat space and project focused on collecting print and other artifacts from social and activist movements (and fully run by volunteers!). It was interesting to hear about the origins and mission of the archive — it began with the collections of two activists — and their goals to preserve the past via use. They collect multiple copies whenever possible, but they don’t focus on conservation of materials and everything can be taken out and examined. My colleagues and I noted some interesting parallels between their mission and our own, since we’re a teaching rather than a research library.

One of the things I found most fascinating about our visit is the sheer variety of materials in the archive. Books, flyers, pamphlets, zines, posters, banners, and other paper items, but also records, videos, t-shirts, buttons, etc. I’m much less familiar with the content in Interference Archive (and it’s on my radar to become moreso), but the buttons grabbed my attention right away. I love buttons (what the British call badges). While I’ve thinned my collection over the years I still have a fair number of indiepop and other music buttons. And my librarian self has a couple of open access buttons, a librarians against DRM button, and a set of 6 library buttons from the University of Chicago. I even have an old hippie button promoting breastfeeding that was my mom’s when I was little.

Not all of the buttons at Interference Archive have been cataloged, but the ones that have are stored in long boxes that look a bit like individual card catalog drawers. Inside each button is pinned to an index card and they’re arranged alphabetically. The effect is really neat, sort of like a 3D card catalog.

I’ve found myself thinking of the buttons a lot since our visit, wondering about those buttons specifically and my buttons specifically and buttons themselves more generally. When were buttons invented? Has there ever been a history of buttons in general written, or buttons for particular uses — activism, politics, music, etc.? If not, someone should write one. And maybe when I’m finished with all of the projects I’ve currently got on my plate, that person will be me.