Digestible

Ever wished you could move yourself through works of public domain fiction and non-fiction just a bit at a time? Nostalgic for the days of serialization? Just want something to read on your e-mail when you’ve finished reading the Internet? Then sign up for one of the hundreds of books available on DailyLit and have small chunks sent to your email at the frequency of your choosing.

I’m trying out Alice in Wonderland in daily chunks — I haven’t read it since I was a kid, and it seemed somehow appropriate to the medium.

You can read more about the DailyLit project here.

[Tiny book photo comes from here.]

What’s WACK? No index.

Ever since the WACK! catalogue hit the shelves of my museum’s gift shop a few months ago I have been pretty obsessed. So thick it is with information about feminist art! And so lovely to look at! The different sections of the book are printed on different types of paper, so you get that nice stripy effect when you look at it from the side**. The book jacket features Martha Rosler’s Body Beautiful…, 1966–72, and there has been a bit of a hubbub over all those naked ladies (totally busted staring at it by coworker). But the thing about the catalogue that gets me in a huff is this: NO INDEX!.

Maybe the editors felt that the organizational structure of the catalogue was sufficient. Maybe critical essays are too much of a pain to index. Maybe they ran out of money and/or time. Now, I did not see the exhibition at LA MoCA and it isn’t scheduled to dock on the east coast until this Fall, but from what I’ve read the exhibition is purposely dense and loosely organized, freeing the visitor from the didactic chains of, say, wall text or chronology. Maybe the indexlessness of the WACK! catalogue is supposed to mimic this experience–which is said to mimic the experience of the feminist art movement itself–forcing its readers to re-experience what Carol Armstrong in May’s Artforum depicts as “the thrilling (and exasperating) chaos of the moment, the all-over-the-place-free-for-all that was those two decades,” liberated from “lame categories.”

I could talk forever about whether or not categories are lame, but there is a general expectation that any volume hovering around 500 pages should have an index. It’d be nice if, for example, while reading Howardena Pindell’s bio on page 281, I could flip to the index, learn that she’s in an essay on page 429, and see shiny reproductions of her works on page 167. I propose that, in the spirit of the movement, we organize a collective indexing effort. Contributions welcome. I’m serious.

**color reproductions of the art (white glossy); brief bios of the artists (beige matte, purple text!); critical essays (off white matte, black text and purple footnotes!, color reproductions); a chronology of all-women group shows and WACK! checklist (beige matte, purple text!)

 

Summer dispatch

You may have noticed that this blog, like so many fashion magazines, has slowed to a halt in the middle of summer. As for me, I’m in the midst of a cross-country move, a career-track change, (more later) and some fun times visiting friends abroad. (I write this from a cafe in Istanbul. No joke!)

But I can earnestly say I’ve missed this, and great stuff around:

• Sara Piasecki of Historical Notes from OHSU  posted a bit about this year’s RBMS preconference, including a post about a session on Minimal Processing . For those unfamiliar with the divide,  the Rare Books and Manuscripts Section  of ACRL covers a lot of the same ground as archival organizations, but there are precious few who are truly active in both spheres- thus, transparency and communication is, in my opinion, so necessary.
• archivematica has a post about ICA-Atom’s GoogleMaps mashup. So cool. This isn’t the first foray into integrating geographic data with finding aids- I seem to recall a UNC project that integrated GIS data with finding aid indexes. Moreover, I’d look for more work in the near future that does this sort of thing- linking physical spaces and places with related archival materials.
• And not really related but long overdue, check out Jeanne’s post on (and Google Code page for) ArchivesZ, a tool for visualizing collections.

And, I hate to even bring this up, Hip shushers. Sheesh! I’m not going to try to track the wide and varied, over-serious and goofy reactions to this. But I’m gonna give in and spill mine. The article seemed to deal first and foremost with NYC area LIS grad students, and not working librarians. I bristle at the idea of trying to live anywhere in America, much less in gentrified Brooklyn, on what NYPL and BPL pay their entry-level librarians. But what I haven’t seen addressed is that the newfound preciousness of going to library school isn’t about anything job or education related- it’s about a mass of college graduates, mostly female, with both real and percieved lack of career options casting their lot onto an arcanely feminized public serivice sector with a lot of inherent problems. I think that any enthusiasm or momentum coming to libraries and archives is ultimately good, but I also think that we should be talking about these things really critically.