How to Recognize a Library Science Student...

So, in all the time since graduation last spring, I have not talked at all about what I am doing, now that I have my B.A. in History. So what am I doing? I am in library science school. And I can tell you that library science students are a unique breed. But how can you tell when you've invited a library science student over to your house? Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

1) They comment on the organization of your movie/book collection.
There have been quite a few times where one of the first comments from my guests has been, "So, you alphabetize your movie collection." This then leads to a discussion of the relative merits of different organizational schemes, possibly followed by shifting the conversation to the organization of my bookshelves.

2) They will offer to lend you any books or movies that they own.
This might be more common when you visit the apartment/house of a library science student, but let's face it. We like sharing our books and movies. The evening isn't complete unless they've offered to lend you at least one thing.

3) If you ask them a question they can't answer, the reply will be "Why don't you try Ask A Librarian?"
Here at IU, we have an online reference feature called Ask a Librarian, where you can have a live chat with a reference librarian. It seems that library science students enjoy coming up with special questions to pose to the poor librarian on the other end.

4) If they invent a serial killer, this serial killer will choose his/her victims alphabetically.
Naturally, when you and your friends get together, you will do fun things like making up a serial killer, simply because someone has decided that Silent Angy sounds like a good name for a serial killer. Well, when this happens, your library science students will decide that said serial killer will kill alphabetically by first name. It will then take them half an hour to realize the irony of this.

None of these are foolproof, of course, but they should give you a good start toward recognizing all those future librarians in your life.

Score One for the Humanities

An op-ed in today's New York Times argues why it is important to study the humanities in college. Makes me a tiny bit proud to have a degree in a humanities field, and I agree with the points he makes.
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To whet your appetite:
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"Studying the humanities improves your ability to read and write. No matter what you do in life, you will have a huge advantage if you can read a paragraph and discern its meaning (a rarer talent than you might suppose). You will have enormous power if you are the person in the office who can write a clear and concise memo.
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"Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod....
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"Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison--Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and gibbon, you'll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.
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"Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy."
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"One Cubic Centimetre Cures Ten Gloomy Sentiments"

When I first read Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, I had recently read 1984 and I was curious about the drastic differences between Huxley's and Orwell's visions of the future. 1984 focuses on the soul-crushing dangers of totalitarian government. Brave New World takes the future in a different direction, instead focusing on the dangers of science and consumerism. At the heart of this futuristic society is a drug called soma. It is "euphoric, narcotic, pleasantly hallucinant." In essence, it is the perfect, side effect free drug.

Huxley published Brave New World in 1932. Twenty-two years later, in 1954, he published The Doors of Perception, a work describing his experience with the drug mescaline. I had always wondered what inspired the drastically different approaches to the future taken by Huxley and Orwell. I knew that 1984 was inspired by the political climate in which Orwell lived, but reading The Doors of Perception finally gave me some insight into the creation of Huxley's future. In his tradition of borrowing his titles from other works (Brave New World took its title from Shakespeare's The Tempest), this work's title (which inspired a certain 1960's band) came from a poem by William Blake:

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

But the book is more than a celebration of drug use. It explores many issues, including mental illness and religion, among other things. And when I read it, aspects of Brave New World made so much more sense. People who are familiar with Brave New World might recall the community sings. These sessions were designed to reinforce class solidarity through the use of soma and orgies. In The Doors of Perception, Huxley discusses the role of peyote (which is essentially mescaline) in Native American religious rituals. His belief was that one of the reasons religion seemed to be falling by the wayside was that most people could not achieve truly transcendental religious experiences. This is partially because modern religion frowns upon the use of intoxicating substances (with the exception of a tolerance of alcohol). As not everyone can realize religious transcendence through ritual, he believed that the creation and use of an intoxicating substance with no ill after affects would bring religion into the present and bring people back to religion.

Now, he wrote this belief after Brave New World. One is led to believe in that book that the boundless use of soma is one of the evils of that future. And yet, years later, Huxley advocated almost exactly the same thing in The Doors of Perception. So, had the actual use of drugs changed his mind, or was the point of the earlier book that the use of soma had gone to far, to the point of swallowing up a healthy life? I would like to believe it was the later, moderation in all things. Yet I cannot help but find it interesting that underneath the hellish reality of his dystopian future, just barely beneath the surface, lies a future he might actually have wished for. Which I suppose underlines the truth: our idealistic views of what life could be tend to be corrupted in the making, unless we are very careful.

Young Americans Embrace Rigors of the Bolshoi

This really fascinating article about two Americans, 15-yr old Joy from Texas and 12-yr old Julian from Montana, who are studying ballet at the Bolshoi Academy in Moscow was in the New York Times this morning. Read it here. There's also a slide show and a video (and in the latter, there were lots of Moscow landmarks that I've seen in person :)

Now which is more likely to happen: Ten Page returns to Russia or Ten Page becomes a ballet dancer (again)?

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