Subject/Object

I haven’t been writing too much lately. If we look at the problem on a long time frame, I’ve had a severe case of writer’s block since the end of my grad degree. In the part of my brain that makes rational justifications, I think about how skeptical I’d become of “scholarly” writing. The debate around writing and academic should be held for another time. But it was as if I’d come to the realization–first proposed by bad academic writing, actually–that there was nothing but “discourse” and “language”. And then I came to see the writing was way, a fierce trade in jargon fuelled by “publish or perish”.

At the same time, I’ve become largely disillusioned by Internet culture. I don’t know if the rise of Twitter coincides in my apathy for social media, Web 2.0, and the hype around software in libraries. My Facebook page is as empty as a development of pre-Financial Crisis houses, with dead leaves blown from uncut lawns strewn around imitation hardwood floors in mansion-like houses.

People are beginning to speak of Twitter as if it is this tap into some collective consciousness. I can’t deny that some amazing things have been done with the medium. The troubles in Iran alone are enough to convince anyone. But it is not the actor of the story. It is not the miracle. It doesn’t shed blood. Or, to put in a another way, the French Revolution happened without Twitter.

Ever day around the world people are fighting a struggle for their lives, and it just seems a little shallow to be focusing on the golden halo around these technologies. In my current field, libraries, you’d think the computers were going to make every student successful. A student who doesn’t know how to write, and isn’t motivated to put serious time in studying, isn’t going to be graduated by a interacting with the library through Facebook. It will be done by the library unfolding the world of ideas before the student. By showing her all these wonderful creations and inviting her to make her contribution. By all means have a presence, but can we now talk about something else.

Or perhaps I am doing the wrong thing. Part of the stress of this writer’s block is trying to really figure out what I am interested in. In one sense I have had so much trouble reading, because every time I want to do directed research or reading on something I lose interest almost immediately.

On the other hand I do so much free reading. From the Dune series to histories of Modern China, from the poems of Charles Bukowski to Northrop Fry’s Anatomy of Criticism, my reading has been far and wide and completely at whim. Part of my writing has always been bound up in directed reading, and I don’t know how to connect such disparate inputs with my outputs, or whether they should be connected at all.

More than once I have thought about intellectual work in itself. Perhaps I would like to be chopping wood somewhere and reading books in my off hours. I was at a provincial park for a wedding the other week and I remembered my two wonderful summers at the park. In the mornings I would show up at 6 am. I made coffee in the cantina, stole a cookie from the jar, and listened to Weather Canada’s report on the marine radio information channel. I would then write the weather down–the wind speed, direction, forecast, etc–on a chalkboard by the boat launch, so boaters and fishermen could see it as they go. Sometimes I would cut grass all day on a robotic riding lawnmower. Often I would drive around in this rugged golf cart with six wheels, picking up picnic tables, moving barbeques, or jumping around the hills on the way to the beach.

To combine the two, I would really love to build a library from scratch. To physically build the shelves, finish the wood with my own hands, then select the books to fill them. It is a postcolonial colonialist dream to go over to other places to help “fix” them. But perhaps to give someone a library is to help them fix themselves. You know at one time in North America there was a libraries movement. It become the right of every democratic citizen to have access to a library. We give food aid, and we build schools and hospitals, but you never hear about libraries. Maybe it is because society has moved on. Once the wealthiest individuals donated their fortune to establish them. Now our governments can barely keep the lights on. Or the twitters tweeting.