- The candidate for Associate University Librarian for Scholarly Research and Collection Development has, in the case of one department, less experience in that field than the least who he would supervise on the day he would start. That department is to a soul (but one, who's lukewarm) adamantly against the candidate's hire. Obviously details aren't forthcoming, and this is a gross simplification of complex and informed opinions of people (some - a few - who I like and respect), but this particular argument I hear fascinates me: you want a boss who starts convinced he knows more than you about what you do and might be a jackass adjusting to your culture and/or worse is an asshole who makes everyone adjust to his? You don't want to hire someone who has excelled in what he knows and has learned (so I assume his references will say) what he needed to in an impressively compressed time so you have the chance - a chance: it's a risk, he may be a dick - to train him to help you do your job better and with better resources? Whose success on the job doesn't hinge on your success? There are legitimate concerns about this guy - this shouldn't be one, and shouldn't blind your judgment on more legitimate concerns. But I'm obodynay. Fine metaphors and fart. So the gif, now saved to all hard drives, now to be posted every time I want to write directly, secondarily, tangentially, fart-whiffingly about work and stop myself. See new tag.
- And thus complicity: if it can't get Kind, I wank for Competent in the slaugherhouse, neofuckingliberal me.
- Oh, this is my second ride through this committee, the first: O fuck....
Yes, I've been using this gif forever, the assignment is new, I have plans, gif plans, to create a language that uses only gifs, I..
- Gifs stolen from Station Manager Ken's playlist. But you knew that.
- Szymborska: a word on statistics.
- In which they fail to mention that.
- The pain of the children.
- How can a new social subject come to exist?
- This week in water.
- I have no idea why I woke up with Starflyer 59 in my head, but good!
THE LIBRARIAN
Charles Olson
The landscape (the landscape!) again: Gloucester,
the shore one of me is (duplicates), and from which
(from offshore, I, Maximus) am removed, observe.
In this night I moved on the territory with combinations
(new mixtures) of old and known personages: the leader,
my father, in an old guise, here selling books and manuscripts.
My thought was, as I looked in the window of his shop,
there should be materials here for Maximus, when, then,
I saw he was the young musician has been there (been before me)
before. It turned out it wasn’t a shop, it was a loft (wharf-
house) in which, as he walked me around, a year ago
came back (I had been there before, with my wife and son,
I didn’t remember, he presented me insinuations via
himself and his girl) both of whom I had known for years.
But never in Gloucester. I had moved them in, to my country.
His previous appearance had been in my parents’ bedroom where I
found him intimate with my former wife: this boy
was now the Librarian of Gloucester, Massachusetts!
Black space,
old fish-house.
Motions
of ghosts.
I,
dogging
his steps.
He
(not my father,
by name himself
with his face
twisted
at birth)
possessed of knowledge
pretentious
giving me
what in the instant
I knew better of.
But the somber
place, the flooring
crude like a wharf’s
and a barn’s
space
I was struck by the fact I was in Gloucester, and that my daughter
was there—that I would see her! She was over the Cut. I
hadn’t even connected her with my being there, that she was
here. That she was there (in the Promised Land—the Cut!
But there was this business, of poets, that all my Jews
were in the fish-house too, that the Librarian had made a party
I was to read. They were. There were many of them, slumped
around. It was not for me. I was outside. It was the Fort.
The Fort was in East Gloucester—old Gorton’s Wharf, where the Library
was. It was a region of coal houses, bins. In one a gang
was beating someone to death, in a corner of the labyrinth
of fences. I could see their arms and shoulders whacking
down. But not the victim. I got out of there. But cops
tailed me along the Fort beach toward the Tavern
The places still
half-dark, mud,
coal dust.
There is no light
east
of the Bridge
Only on the headland
toward the harbor
from Cressy’s
have I seen it (once
when my daughter ran
out on a spit of sand
isn’t even there.) Where
is Bristow? when does I-A
get me home? I am caught
in Gloucester. (What’s buried
behind Lufkin’s
Diner? Who is
Frank Moore?
Frank Moore?
Thanks for the Starflyer 59—a new one for me. Good stuff. Now in my head.
ReplyDeleteOlson!!!
Go to work, sit at your desk, process your paper, eat your wax-paper wrapped white-bread sammich and apple, collect your paycheck, go home to EG, listen to WFMU. Rinse, repeat. Oh, and rail about the less shitty in politics.
Oh, and link to the cool blogs of your lessers.