It’s by K. Zhu, and it’s called Spaces of Holomorphic Functions in the Unit Ball, and it’s apparently not a resurrected New Wave of Science Fiction title revived from the early 70s but is instead a work of serious mathematical scholarship.

Does Spiritualized’s Live at the Royal Albert Hall tend to pop up on those best albums of all time list things? Because it really, really should. Can’t believe it’s at least two years since I’ve listened to it.

I think the afterglow makes it even better. Wink.

Check out this post at Kung-Fu Monkey. It’s funny and righteous, but that’s not why I’m asking you to look. After you’ve read the post, start skimming through the comments. Stop skimming and start paying attention when you get to the first comment by the aptly yclept “imperious rectum”. Read, and admire, the response to the (apparent) flame by the site owner, Rogers. Then read what Mr. “rectum” meant to be a rebuttal. Keep on reading for the rest of the interchance between “rectum” and Rogers.

I am grateful to Rogers for his responses, as they’ve caused me to realize something I’d never before considered: When hateful, angry, empty-headed people make what they intend to be pointedly humorous statements, they genuinely don’t realize that in both content and appearance those statements are indistinguishable from non-intentionally-humorous accusations and insults. Further, the angry person’s sense of humor (if it can be ennobled by being called such) depends on a sense of entitlement to its subject’s/victim’s deference, on the idea that a person insulted will recognize that the insult was couched in (what was intended to be) jest and say nothing stronger than “boy, you sure got me!” in response.

I reckon this may stem from the angry person’s failure to really grok some common social conventions and niceties. When someone unsuccessfully but in good faith makes what is obviously intended to be a funny, it is incumbent upon the audience to react as if the funny had been at least marginally effective–a polite smile is required, even if one cannot manage a chuckle. There are two prongs here, though, and at best the angry person only recognizes one: the performative act must be immediately recognizable as a funny, which requirement I suspect most angry persons would acknowledge but don’t really seem to understand, but the act must further appear to be presented in good faith, a requirement that appears to be universally unknown to angry persons (which may, in fact, help explain why so many of them are so damned angry all the time).

What constitutes “good faith” in matters humorous is of course highly context dependent, determined by the preexisting relationship between teller and audience. If the two parties are wholly unknown to one another, as were Rogers and his pest, then it is incumbent on the joke teller to observe the most rigorous standards of politese and nicety. If the two are long-time buddies who have built up a history of mock-insulting, then the gloves are still not entirely off (there will always be off-limits areas, after all) but the standards are relaxed enough to be practically non-existent.

(This also, by the way, is an approach to understanding why it’s sometimes OK for two gay men to call each other “fag” or two African-Americans to call each other “nigger” but not for out-group members to use the same words. It’s not the whole story, but it’s a piece of what some people claim to find a puzzle.)

The angry person, it seems, just doesn’t get that it’s not kosher to say insulting things unless it has already been firmly established that insult probably won’t be taken by this person in this context on this subject. By failing to understand and act in accord with this prong, the angry person violates the “laughing at unfunny things” social custom and is therefore not entitled to laughter and is, in fact, open to response in kind by the insulted person.

This is where things get really fun, in a stomach-churning and entirely un-fun sense of the word. The angry person says something hostile, thinking sie’s making a funny, and instead of getting a polite smile or chuckle in response finds hirself the recipient of hostility, possibly even insults, in return. The angry person does not realize sie has broken the contract underlying the “laugh at the insult” convention, being unaware of the “good faith” prong, and feels that the returned hostility is way out of line. This makes the angry person even angrier than normal and leads to…well, nothing ever good.

We can see, then, that even if an insulting statement is couched in a recognizable joke form, it can still be legitimately received not as a funny but as an attack by an audience lacking rapport with the speaker. The situation is further complicated by the fact that angry persons don’t really seem to get the concept of “recognizable joke form”.

Once we move from the realm of setup/punchlines toward anecdotes or “satire”, we find that the distinction between intentionally-funny and intentionally-serious rapidly blurs. Totally serious statements often contain humorous elements, after all, and satire is really only effective if it is distinguished from sincerity only by a vanishingly small number of ironic markers or by the heavy use of unambiguously over-the-top concepts. (Here’s another place the angry person, like the fellow in the Kung-Fu Monkey comments, gets confused: humor is denoted by over-the-top concepts, not over-the-top language. Despite what Dennis Miller might want us to believe, ranting is not inherently humorous. The rant form can be a vehicle for comedy, but it is not comedic in itself. Many angry persons don’t seem to get that, or at least claim not to after having been called on their bullshit.)

Ugh. There’s more, but I’ve exhausted myself. I’ll try to follow this up later.

Thanks to an email update from telecharge.com, I see that there’s a new revival of Company, one of my favorite shows-I’ve-never-actually-seen. No way I can afford a trip to NYC any time soon, and Company is, alas, guaranteed a short run even though the producers optimistically say it’s time on stage is open-ended. Grr grr grr.

I finally screwed up my courage and typed my ZIP into the store-finder utility on target.com. Turns out there’s a whopping three locations within 200 miles of me, the nearest being about 70 miles away.

Some thoughts emerge so forcefully that the bypass the brain’s contemplation centers entirely and are born directly on the tongue. The quote above is one such, and it is the thought that may indicate I might truly be on track to become a genuine professional.

Fall mornings, around sunrise, are good times to drink coffee and smoke cigarettes on your porch in Missouri. The steam from the coffee mingles with the smoke from your lungs, and their interplay is foregrounded against the dimly lit frost on the windshields below. It’s a perfect complement to twilight, this dim gray world where the day’s potential is still unknown and unknowable.

That’s where and when I was when I started thinking about the program that predated my arrival and of which I’m now in charge. The reference department here provides for students what we call RAP sessions, a title that should suggest to you the program’s inception twenty-some years ago. “RAP” stands for Reference Assistance Program, and in our sessions a librarian works one-on-one with a student in solving some information-gathering problem. Typically, it seems, RAP sessions are requested by first- and second-year students beginning work on a major paper.

So I was thinking about the program over coffee and cigarettes, and it occurred to me that we’re failing in implementing one of the key aspects of any well-run initiative: we have no institutional means of gathering or recording feedback. There’s no follow-up, no request for evaluation from the students, no nothing. This is very bad, and I’m speaking with my department head about it this morning.

While I was working out a feedback process that would be both useful and acceptable to my colleagues–I favor a two-pronged approach, one immediate request for feedback after the RAP session and another after the paper’s due date–an even more serious failing in the program’s structure burst through and spilled out, spoken to no one and leaving me a little shaken: We don’t record any sort of usage or performance statistics whatsoever. None. We don’t know how many RAP sessions are being requested, how many are being performed, or how many sessions any given librarian is performing.

We have no real idea, then, how well-known the service is to students, how often they’re requested, or how the workload is distributed. We have no way to use this program effectively in justifying our department’s funding. We got, in short, nuthin’.

Yikes.

OK, so yesterday I called IT, gave them my newly minted employee ID, and asked for my system-wide user name and password to be set up. IT guy was very nice, asked for a personal email address through which interim communication could be conducted, and left us both to go our merry ways.

Last night I got an automated alert that I had filed a help desk ticket. Just now I decided to click through the link on the alert and see what the status on my request might be.

You might at this point be able to guess that instead of a status update I got a log-in box asking for my system-wide user name and password. Which have not yet been divulged to me. Which is why I was clicking through in the first place.

Snerk.

The film and stage classic Arsenic and Old Lace is pretty much The Texas Chainsaw Massacre done up as a genteel comedy, made slightly more disturbing in that the family of remorseless murderers is meant to be seen as endearingly dotty rather than homicidally insane.

So, yeah, things come together in the most fascinating ways.

Once I’d finally got a grasp on the librarian thang during grad school, I decided that my long-term career goals, research and praxis and such, would center around what is generally called outreach. Why? Because outreach is the most vital practice to be pursued in insuring the continued existence of the profession and the institutions it serves. Why? Because while I’d bet most of you reading this will agree that libraries are very very important and good things, I’d wager that many of you (actual librarians excluded) couldn’t really mount a good argument for why they’re important and good beyond “they make information freely and easily available.”

“They make information freely and easily available” sufficed as an argument for centuries, and it was during those centuries that the profession of librarianship emerged. Because of this, the profession did not become lazy and complacent over time, it was born into laziness and complacency. This set the whole Ouroboros into action, leaving the public unaware of the other, deeper purposes of libraries and librarians because the librarians themselves, cognizant of the fact that their publics were generally willing to continue funding libraries in support of the most obvious purpose, didn’t feel a pressing need to work additional PR campaigns into their already overburdened, underfunded schedules.

And so then a few decades ago politicians like Al Gore began creating and (more importantly) funding initiatives that would make the information networks already in use by the military and academies increasingly available to the general public. Simmer for a few years, let the cost of personal computers come way down and the prevalence of high-capacity cabling and wiring go way up, and suddenly we all gots tons of information freely and easily available in our living rooms. In the process, the overriding rationale for promoting library funding suffers a critical hit.

So! Here we are, early in the 21st century, and our libraries facing a likely crisis. Our publics in general don’t know about the many valuable and not-easily-replaceable services we offer, and the things they do know we offer seem to many of them to be outdated and old-fashioned and irrelevant and certainly not worth voting for when a tax initiative is on the ballot.

Something, it is clear, has to change, and I want to be part of that change.

It seems self-evident to me that a crucial step is changing the way publics think of libraries. Briefly, we in the profession have to find a way to make people think of libraries as relevant, crucial, and (most importantly, most difficultly) of-this-time. Telling people about all the nifty stuff we provide simply won’t cut it if they still think of libraries as houses of pain and dust.

All this was going through my head as I began my Adult Services in Public Libraries course last spring. It was percolating when I approached the major assignment in the course, the planning and designing of a series of presentations in a fictional library. It was all brewing when at work one day I listened to an episode of This American Life featuring a piece on a Michigan librarian who organized a series of after-hours rock concerts in public libraries across the state.

And a vision came to me, and Libraries Out Loud! was born.

The problem: people still think of libraries as quiet and dull and stiflin, despite a good ten years of libraries’ moving away from that venerable standard. It is clearly enough not just to make libraries sites where energy and activity are welcome, steps must be taken to implant the notion of that reality into the the public mind. Secondary problem: You really can’t just start a campaign of posters and radio spots saying, “Libraries aren’t dull, really, they aren’t” because that’s worse than unconvincing, that’s lame. You have to get the point across while doing public outreach in service of (what appears to be) something unrelated.

The solution: rawk! Promotion is, and has always been, integral to the rock experience; in fact, I’d daresay it would be fairly simple to develop a convincing and intellectually honest case for promotion actually being more important to the rise of rock than the music itself.

But what the hell does rock have to do with libraries? What the hell doesn’t rock have to do with libraries! Libraries are committed to, libraries are about, providing and promoting access to information regardless of content and context. People in our publics have demonstrated a desire and need for popular music, desires and needs we already service through provision of CDs and DVDs.

Libraries are also committed to providing access to locally created information, like genealogy and art, and to providing access to otherwise hard-to-find info. So, really, it seems valid for a library to take as part of its mission provision of access to, say, the work of and information on local bands. And how better to provide access to local music than the hosting of an occassional concert by a local artist?

But the occassional concert isn’t enough to build a PR campaign around. Given expense and general pains-in-the-ass, hosting of concerts would have to be very, very, very occassional, too infrequent to keep the library’s provision of such as a selling point in the public’s mind.

Enter that potential library killer, the Internet!

Web hosting is cheap, and in-house infrastructure already exists within the library. Most local bands already make some sort of recording of their materials and are hungry for exposure. Library culture has already begun embracing podcasts as a means of public outreach, but they really have yet to figure out good things to do with them.

Once you see them, the dots practically connect themselves, don’t they?

So, yeah, I have An Initiative in mind. I’ll be arranging a meeting with our other young, tech-happy librarian next week. Things will be in motion soon. Yes.

So it occurs to me I really don’t quite get what “moral relativism” means to the people who are all het up about it, who blame it for undermining the very foundations of society.

I get the impression that those people would have no beef with the common distinction between murder and manslaughter, for example, and that seems a textbook example of what I would personally assume “moral relativism” to mean. Judging the morality of an action within the context in which that action occurred is apparently not necessarily morally relativistic, then, and I am left without an inkling of what the phrase might otherwise mean.

I honestly and sincerely don’t want to accuse those people who harp on the eviltude of “moral relativism” of being hypocrites or abusers of rhetoric, so I ask y’all if any of you might have a good, solid clue re: what the phrase is meant to mean and what it means in common usage.