I love writing that sounds like exactly the words you would have chosen if you’d thought of it. Simple and clean. I love it when there’s an underlying coherence to the language — a rhythm, a lilt, a metaphor. Nothing that bashes you over the head, but there if you look for it.

Recently, as NPR cajoled me into wakefulness one morning, I heard an interview with Tina Brown talking about what makes a good columnist and these two quotes jumped out at me:

“Columnists speak in a voice readers understand — their own, but just a bit better.” (Quoting the introduction to Deadline Artists, edited by Jesse Angelo, Errol Louis and  John Avlon)

“It’s really about how they think and their ability to empathize in a unique and interpretive way, in a sense, both with their readers and the culture,” Brown says. “You really want to feel that the writer is both absolutely in tune with what’s happening in the culture but also has a kind of counterintuitive response to it.”

This is what I like best about my favorite bloggers’ writing. This is even what I like in those few formally published articles that I’ve enjoyed not only for content but also for style. In fact, this is what I enjoy most in fiction, as well. Basically, this is the kind of writing I love.

For lending libraries, of course there’s an economic benefit to the community that comes from sharing books. And I imagine that this was a core benefit to the People’s Library, too. It’s easy to see how the protesters would have wanted to carry out simple acts of sharing with all who were in want.

I think there’s also a nice metaphor of cultural exchange that happens with lending libraries. Ideally, more than one person will have read each book, and that means that those people will have experiences in common to discuss and build upon.

I think a library, any kind of library, is also a statement about belonging and longevity. “We are here,” they help us say, “and we plan to be here for a while.” And it’s not just belonging and longevity, but also a statement about progress. “We know things,” they help us say, “and we will continue to learn new things and add those things to this collection.”

I have been having a hard time feeling outrage about the dismantling of the People’s Library, but maybe it is in part because I have been thinking of it as a collection of books in a tent. Maybe it was more than that.

Arguments wear clothes, he said. When you bring an argument out into the world, it should be clothed for the appropriate occasion. There do exist argument nudist colonies, but in the end these remain on the margines. Appropriately clothed arguments, on the other hand, have power and sway in all areas of society.

The library’s heavy duty stapler had died under the constant stress of massive eReserves printouts and student frustration. The library had decided that handing out large paperclips was the better way to go considering the expense of a new heavy duty stapler and the amount of time we spent fixing it every week. Then we got an email from a (fictional) history prof on campus who had forgotten that librarians might be on the all-campus email list and had sent out a passive-aggressive plea supposedly behind our backs asking for the campus to chip in and help buy a heavy duty stapler. (Man am I glad this guy doesn’t actually exist.) This prof hinted that the library must not care much about the history department since our decision hurt them the most. He also said that only one model of stapler would do and that he intended to collect the money and then hand it over to the library so that we could make the purchase.

When we looked into it, it turned out that this model of stapler was discontinued (and yet we knew we’d have to find one anyway). Not only that, but the staples that it required were only available in small quantities at auction, and each set of 100 staples came in its own display box, much like the little boxes watches come in, with the staples hanging from a display stand. As you would imagine, the staples weren’t a bargain.

At this point, I woke up in a cold sweat.

“How do I use an ebook,” one of my faculty asked me this week. “I see them listed in the catalog, but then what?”

Turns out he has and loves his Kindle, but library ebooks are impossible. “Well, you see,” I start explaining, “You have to use it on a browser because this particular kind of ebook comes from EBSCO, which doesn’t work with your Kindle, and which doesn’t actually work with YOUR browser because EBSCO uses its own PDF reader that doesn’t work with Firefox on a Mac unless you download this extra plugin that you haven’t downloaded yet because otherwise yes, you’ll have to download single page by single page and open them in Preview. So let’s go find that, and now we have to restart your browser, and shoot… it’s still not working. I wonder why. I’ll look into that for you. For now why don’t we try it in Safari. So yeah, now we know that if you go to Safari, and be sure to log in for off-campus access, and THEN go to the catalog and find your book… shoot… it checked that book out to your other browser that wouldn’t open the book. So you’ll have to wait until tomorrow and then use Safari and log in for off campus access and find the book in the catalog and click the link. Then it should work.”

But this is not actually my definition of “work” unless you mean the kind of work that people pay you to do. But no, this is the kind of “work” that I pay for, and that still isn’t easy or fun, even though he owns an ebook reader he loves.

And somehow this whole time it’s like I’ve got some sort of mental block. It’s like I can approach that point at which thoughts fall into place and a framework emerges, but I can never quite get there. All the component parts are lying there in a heap on my mental floor, and I can’t seem to disentangle them enough to pull one out, turn it this way and that, and watch it map itself onto the final structure. And so I’m left with a fragile jumble of interesting facts and ideas and a growing sense of frustration and failure.

The other rhythms of my life — sleeping and waking, energy and resting, socializing and curling up with a book, talking and staying silent — these have all been uprooted in the last few years. The rhythm of the year, though, marches on. September is the beginning, June the ending, and July and August the yearly interregnum. And every year it seems like I have less and less of a clean slate in September, more projects carrying over, more tasks left to catch up on, and yet the feeling that this is the beginning remains.

Happy beginnings to you all, and may this year be whatever you need it to be.

But having the opportunity, and even agreeing that the population could benefit from knowing a lot more about what you and everyone else knows, doesn’t necessarily mean that you have good enough motives for including all that information in any given session. I think of my classes, which I try to keep to 3 learning goals, ruthlessly cutting all kinds of useful and interesting stuff. I think of our first year seminars, which have to push back against requests to please make sure “all first year students learn x” from every quarter.

Motives are important things and not all motives are created equal. Opportunities may be fickle, but strong motives make or break the case.