its the reading modes, stupid
Wayne Weigand, University of Wisconsin, gave us an afternoon lecture on the library as a place. He wants to shift the attention of the library profession to focus on the library as a place for reading, for social interaction and for the building and exchange of social capital.
It was a great lecture. Wayne says the library role in mediating debate and organizing reasoned social reponse can be strategic. When someone asked if the other public forums of, say broadcast services or TV talk shows don’t have a more apparent influence, he responded in an interesting way.
Yes, he said, the televised images of an attack on the Trade Towers have a more dramatic, widespread influence but they may not mean as much as the reasoned and elaborated understandings of the events that will appear as books. And, Wayne said, it is not particularly apparent that the less dramatic behaviors of reading, across all the modes of reading, don’t provide more potent understanding and insight.
Further, he said, librarians can prove this latent fact by a focus on all the behaviors of reading. The library can be the place where reading modes are defined, refined and brought to bear on complex issues. Moreover, libraries transcend disciplines and polarizied positions. Libraries are the perfect place for effective public debate.
And, communities use libraries. Did you know that library attendance is three times greater than movie attendance? Libraries are an invisible infrastructure of social fabric.
its the economy, stupid
Is the attack collapsing our economy? If it is we should defend ourselves. Enterprise, cooperative response, resolve and hard work.
Forget the miliitary response. That will only engender more attacks, no matter who is calling who “evil”. Besides, we cannot afford military response at the moment. Anyone want to invest in the enterprise of bombing the mountains of Afghanistan?
Better to invest our remaining resources in better cockput doors. The perception of safe air travel is worth more to our economy than the bombing of the mountains of Afghanistan.
Incidentally, the money spent on one mission to bomb the mountains of Afghanistan would rebuild a strategic network of rail mail and passenger services in the US. Such a network could have buffered our economy last week or in the event of any other distruption in air service. Our national security depends not only on capacity for response, but on redundancy and the resiliance of our infrastructure.
***“love is not pretty”
This last line in a poem told of the burden of each of our dealings with the last week. A teacher came up to me and said that she could not have gotten through the last week without the
help that Craig provided every day. For a moment I wondered why she didn’t say so in an email, but then a second later I understood.