Hereafter in Fields
The adventures of an up-and-coming librarian plunked down in the American heartland.
May 6, 2008 at 12:22 pm · Filed under Rural
“The interaction between educational level and type of jobs available has become a vicious cycle for many rural communities. The opportunity structure of the community—the types of jobs and investment opportunities available—affects the character of the local labor force. The local labor force in turn affects the community’s success in attracting or supporting new business enterprises. Communities that invest heavily in education see the more educated young people leave because of the lack of opportunity, unless community leaders and citizens work collectively to generate jobs that they would like their own children to take. Those that do not invest in education rely on assembly plants for jobs—industries that depend upon the less educated workers who are willing to accept lower wages. These jobs offer young people little motivation to invest in education.”
- from Rural Communities: Legacy and Change, 3rd ed. (2008)
May 1, 2008 at 7:03 pm · Filed under Librarianship
A couple of months ago, I got an e-mail from a retired faculty member who encouraged me to think about acquiring the African American National Biography for the library where I work. The AANB is an example of reference publishing at its finest—co-editor Henry Louis Gates has called it “the most important recovery project in the history of African-American studies”—but it was being offered for the introductory price of eight hundred bones, before going up to a cool thou on April 1. That’s, like, 7% of my book budget.
So I told the professor that I thought the cost of the books might be prohibitive, and he said, hmm, OK, let me make a few phone calls and get back to you. Two weeks later, he showed up at the library with $800 of pledges in hand. I was thunderstruck. According to the statewide union catalog, we’re only the third library in the state to add the AANB to our collection—and the only library in southeastern Kansas. So I figured that the least I could do was to organize a little open house where we could officially present the books to the community and recognize those who had contributed. I asked the college’s interim president and the chair of the history department to say a few words, and then I bought some pecan tarts and crossed my fingers that anyone would bother to show up.
We got five out of six trustees—and the mayor. Not bad for a Wednesday night.
April 25, 2008 at 7:58 pm · Filed under The Great State of Kansas
If and when you think about Kansas agriculture, you probably think about sprawling megafarms raising wheat and corn, low-margin commodity crops that have gotten to the point where they are profitable only in the presence of massive economies of scale. You probably do not think about fourth-generation family farms selling organic produce directly to local consumers. You probably do not think about the Mitchell Family Farm.
The Mitchell farm sells most of its produce through a community-supported agriculture, or CSA, scheme. (They are, as far as I know, the only CSA farm in southeastern Kansas.) I ponied up $90 for a quarter-share of the farm’s yield this season, and, in return, I get a generous basket of seasonal produce once a week for the next 20 weeks. In a sense, I am sharing in the risk that the Mitchells have taken on by operating a farm. If they have a good year, then I will have a bountiful supply of delicious vegetables. If they have a lean year, then I will not have as much, but my stake in their operation will help to tide them over until the next growing season rolls around.
My friend Leslie and I drove out to the farm yesterday to pick up our first batch of produce: arugula, spinach, mint, green onions, and a nice bunch of beets. We talked with Josh and Jena Mitchell (who can’t be much older than I am) until it started to rain. On the way out, we got a good glimpse at three baby lambs flanked by their mama. If these frowsy little critters do not give you a serious case of the cutesies, then you are clearly in the service of Lord Voldemort.
April 20, 2008 at 10:12 am · Filed under Academia
On more than one occasion, the organizers of this week’s symposium about death, murder and mayhem on the Plains jokingly apologized for choosing a conference theme that was such a downer. But you could tell that none of them were really all that sorry, any more than camp counselors are when they scare the snot out of the kids in their charge with a round of especially blood-curdling ghost stories. It’s just plain old fun, sometimes, to delve into dark, twisty things, and intellectually productive besides. After all, I think that part of what shocks us about stories like In Cold Blood is the juxtaposition of brutal violence with the perceived wholesomeness of the American heartland: “That happened in Kansas, of all places?” We understand violence to be a constitutive part of the (implicitly racialized) inner city, but if serial killers are roaming the farmsteads of Middle America, then surely the end times are upon us.
Diane Quantic kicked things off on Wednesday night with a keynote about the deep roots of violence on the Plains, and I cribbed the title of this post from her talk—it’s apparently the name of the last chapter in an epic novel about Norwegian homesteaders, although I think that it would also make a pretty sweet zombie flick. I gave my paper on Thursday morning, to a small, but appreciative audience, and then I got to kick back and enjoy the rest of the conference. Highlights, in my mind, were Donald Worster’s talk on how global warming will affect the Plains (profoundly), and Friday night’s reading by poets Neil Harrison, William Kloefkorn, and Jim Reese. Although Saturday morning’s papers on Hmong vampire folklore and post-apocalyptic Plains horror fiction were also nothing to sneeze at.
Along the way, I made an awesome conference friend, Alison, who worked in corporate IT for ten years before deciding to go back to school and get the Ph.D. she always wanted. Alison’s from small-town Nebraska, originally, but she went to college in the Pioneer Valley, which meant that we could bask in our mutual admiration of The Montague Bookmill, among other things. She and her partner live in Chicago, where the 2009 ALA Annual Conference is to be held, so hopefully we’ll bump into each other again then.
On the way home, just south of Burlington, Kansas, I could see prairie fires burning along the edge of the highway. This was the image with which I closed the paper that I presented at the conference, a powerful image of both destruction and renewal. “The fire is blood-red and tranquil,” Scott Heim wrote, in the final paragraph of his second novel, “and Sarah, driving away, smells it. She blushes against its lovely swooning heat.”
April 16, 2008 at 9:24 am · Filed under Academia
I don’t like Maureen Dowd’s writing. I think that it’s often glib to the point of insincerity, favoring the cheap crack over thoughtful engagement with the ideas of others. I don’t think it is writing that will stand the test of time.
That said, her column about Bittergate in today’s New York Times interests me, if only because of the assumptions that it makes about anthropology as a discipline. Barack Obama’s mother earned a Ph.D. in anthropology, Dowd points out, and did her fieldwork in Indonesia. And much like his mother, Dowd suggests, Obama has “often appeared to be observing the odd habits of the colorful locals” out on the campaign trail. Here comes the inevitable zinger, a staple of Dowd’s writing: “Obama comes across less like a candidate in Pennsylvania than an anthropologist in Borneo.”
This is not the place to dissect Obama’s “clinging to guns and religion” thesis, although I’d love to see some anthropologists who have written about social trauma talking about this issue in the media. My point is this: notwithstanding the profound methodological shifts that have taken place in the field of anthropology over the past thirty or forty years, notwithstanding the tortured conversations that we have in journal articles and conference papers about the ethical quandaries of representing the Other, intelligent people like Maureen Dowd still think that anthropology amounts to “observing the odd habits of the colorful locals.” Or, even if she doesn’t think this, exactly, she is still trading on a sense in which anthropology continues to signify this in the popular imagination.
Update: The good folks over at Savage Minds are writing about this, too.
April 15, 2008 at 8:20 pm · Filed under Librarianship
This afternoon, I met with the head of my college’s business office to talk about the library’s budget for FY09. (Mind you, I still have a hard time remembering whether FY09 starts in 2008 and ends in 2009, or starts in 2009 and ends in 2010. Remember, I was a humanities concentrator.)
Anyway, I knew that the college’s institutional budget would be pretty flat, so I tried to propose a set of numbers that were conservative, but still included a budget for things like office supplies and travel that weren’t funded last year. Can you imagine running a library without a budget for office supplies? Here’s your book, ma’am, I’ve laminated it with the membranes of a fish I caught out back. This ink pad that I’m using to stamp the due date? It’s actually suffused with the juice of wild blueberries.
I was too dumb to think of this beforehand, but it turns out that the library’s FY08 budget numbers were based on the salary of my predecessor (considerably higher than mine) and that of another woman who worked at the library, whose position they decided not to fill when she retired. So on paper, at least, there’s all this extra money lying around. I wish I’d known that in advance, because I would have tried to keep as much of it within the library budget as I could. As it is, though, we got in a pitch for a half-time person at the circulation desk, which is effectively unstaffed at this point, and I sent a follow-up e-mail when I got home to see about earmarking a few thousand dollars for physical plant improvements.
Driving a hard bargain is totally not my strong point, but I think I did OK for my first time around. At least we’ll be able to afford staples.
April 12, 2008 at 9:26 pm · Filed under Arts and Letters
On Monday afternoon, the Daily Yonder published the second piece in my new Backroad Librarian series. It’s a review of Scott Heim’s most recent novel, We Disappear, which was published by HarperCollins in February. The paper that I’m giving next week at the conference in Omaha is also about Scott’s novels, so writing this review seemed like a good opportunity to get warmed up.
In other news, it’s been a busy week! I was in Wichita on Wednesday and Thursday for the annual conference of the Kansas Library Association, where I sat in on a great workshop about 2.0 instructional tools and got to chat for half an hour with Denise Low, the Poet Laureate of Kansas. I also dropped by Oeno, this oh-so-chic wine bar in Old Town, for a nightcap on Wednesday night. I probably would have hated the place if I’d walked by it in Boston, but given my present surroundings, I was sort of grateful for the dose of yuppie glitz and glamor.
April 7, 2008 at 9:02 pm · Filed under The Great State of Kansas
Hello, dear reader. Sorry I’ve been such a slacker about posting lately, I’ve been obsessively working on this paper that I’m giving next week at a symposium in Omaha sponsored by the University of Nebraska’s Center for Great Plains Studies. I even went up to KU on Saturday to raid Watson Library for books on trauma and corporeality. Of course, the entire campus was gearing up for Saturday night’s Final Four game against UNC, which meant that I was huddled in a coffee shop reading about impossible mourning even as frat boys in Jayhawk caps were tearing up and down Massachusetts Street, bellowing into bullhorns.
It’s been a grumpy couple of days. So, rather than unloading my grumpiness on you, dear reader, I thought that I would post a picture of my house. I live on the first floor, so the door in the lower-right corner of the photograph is mine. If you were to ask me why most of the house is robin’s egg blue, except for the grassy green area up by the roof, I would not be able to tell you.
April 1, 2008 at 9:48 pm · Filed under Librarianship
When the husband of one of the faculty members at the college where I work told me that he had 500 books he wanted to donate to the library, I was leery. When I went to look at the books and saw that they included a dozen or more copies of 100 Things I’m Not Going To Do Now That I’m Over 50, I was even leerier.
Happily, we hit upon the idea of having the guy donate the books to the library and then selling them. We’d keep the proceeds, while he’d get the tax write-off and the extra space in his garage. Given the leanness of our operating budget, I really couldn’t say no. So we hauled in eight-foot tables and stacked paperbacks on top of the reference shelves and, this afternoon, the interim president of the college brought over his personal copy of John Grisham’s latest novel, which he said that he had finished and was happy to let us resell.
It’s taken some work to set up, but I’m hoping to pull in enough money with the sale to replace the row-seven-on-the-optometrist’s-chart signage in our nonfiction section and the straight-out-of-the-Spanish-Inquisition new book rack that currently menaces everyone who walks in the door. Besides, the chair of the library board in Longton (population 394) came in yesterday and bought $50 worth of hardcover fiction for the Longton Public Library. I personally boxed up the books and carried them out to her car.
Update: The final tally for the sale came out to $659.00.
March 30, 2008 at 2:27 pm · Filed under Arts and Letters
The New York Times reports that French architect Jean Nouvel has won the prestigious Pritzker Prize, joining a list of heavyweight recipients that includes I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, and Rem Koolhaas.
Nouvel’s Institut du Monde Arabe, pictured above, is one of my favorite modern buildings in Paris. The latticework that you see is modeled on traditional Arabic architecture, but the tiles actually open and close as the day goes on to modify the amount of sunlight that enters the building. The seventh-floor terrace also opens up on a lovely view of the Seine and the Right Bank.
Next entries »
