Back to a room more full of books

It has been a very long time, and I apologize to anyone who was on pins and needles waiting for the next entry (doubtful). In the last month and a half, I finished library school and - finding myself without a job quite yet - have moved from my Boston dorm back to my mom's house in the Chicago suburbs.

The culture and various other shocks have been mitigated by the fact I've been kept quite busy: applying for jobs, preparing to go to the ALA conference in Anaheim at the end of the month, making trips into the city. I revisited places in Chicago I like (Wrigley Field, the Intelligentsia on Jackson St.), and went to ones I've been meaning to visit: the National Museum of Mexican Art, the main (Harold Washington) branch of the Chicago Public Library.

Now, I can't help but compare the main branches of the CPL and the Boston Public Library. They're very different, and I didn't actually try to locate items at the CPL, but it feels like it functions better as a library. The BPL has its two buildings - the old and beautiful and the new and stark - and the shelves are always a big mess.

The Harold Washington, however (at left) has apparently been redone lately. It was clean and orderly, but still lovely, with an indoor courtyard sort of thing on the top floor (it has nine smaller floors to the BPL's sprawling four or five). There's just almost a feeling in the new BPL building that this is what you get - good luck finding what you need. The staff is always pretty grim-looking, too. This is probably a funding issue, I would imagine. I will say, though, there's nothing at the CPL on the order of the BPL's reading room (pictured in an earlier post). (The image is a public one from flickr.)

I've also managed to read a little bit - I'm almost done working through a Christmas present, David Foster Wallace's collection of essays Consider the Lobster. Every time I read DFW's writing, I wonder why I bother reading anyone else. The one I found most interesting (of course) is "Authority and American Usage," a sort of descendant of "Politics and the English Language" (which he quotes and acknowledges). Everything that he writes about receives the same scrutinizing and humane treatment. If he's a snob, he examines the reasons for that (especially in "Authority and American Usage").

He also manages to write about politics and voting without coming off all soapboxy; I will leave you with an example from a 2000 article for Rolling Stone.

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

from Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, Back Bay Books, 2007.