My sister died last month, two weeks to the day after she went to the ER with a stomach ache. Call the cause complications of surgery or infection, both of which it was, her death was also surprising and, now, disconcerting. I have lost the last person who shared with me my early life and its obscure references and who could keep me honest when I wafted off into the embellishment of Irish truth, a gift I learned from my father. I will miss her.
Charyl's chair with favorite view; coffee, book, and drowsing, too. Good times.
Otherwise my almost perfect (Maine-less) autumn and warm, early winter days have been filled with the big skies of my 12th floor aerie and the arcane tidbits the (mostly) NYT offers one ever searching for news of moving information: how it moves and who can move or change it and why someone would do so. Others follow the money. (Remember Robert Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s All the President‘s Men?) I follow the (recorded) information which is never dead — though maybe dormant — and never neutral, says the searcher which most librarians are. And the trails may be amazingly circuitous. But to the tidbits:
First I have ready next to read Stephen Greenblatt’s book, The Swerve, which I expect to illustrate that recorded information is never dead, though nearly eternally dormant if not for a Renaissance book hunter who found it lying on a shelf and brought it back to life. Should be fun.
Then the nifty NYT story about Matthew White, the guy who searched for and collated information about skulls, buried because of conflict, anywhere or anytime. He found and accessed information from secondary sources, then gathered, evaluated, organized and distributed the results in his new book, The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities. Wow! Results don’t interest me much, so I hope he also publishes an “appending volume” of search strategies because his is a nifty mind with a whole lot of searching know-how. If quality of sources determines or hugely affects or (name your level of influence here) the outcome of an argument, then transparent searching/collating sophistication is key. The critical comments in the story reflect the differences among accomplished content people — but no librarian/searchers on this point. I love searching and remembering that there are few (if any?) single right answers.
A favorite searching book is William Mitchell’s Clear Pond, though one friend thought him obsessive and a long-ago NYTBR reviewer thought the author’s meager findings made the book not worth the effort. I ordered it right away. Thomas Hoving’s King of the Confessors is another favorite search book, but skip over his dreams.
Christmas greetings from lobster buoys to those who wish they were nearer.
Searching tidbits, if anywhere noted, are often only in footnotes, e.g. what you tried to find and how, but couldn’t; where you looked and found a surprise So it is always fun to read a knowing argument for footnotes. They often tell a second story which may be too project-specific, under-valued, or under-validated for prime-time inclusion but which make the major argument richer, e.g. the footnotes of research reports in Science. And Anthony Grafton’s book, Footnotes, is not to be forgotten.
But I natter. So more tidbits another day. For now, enjoy a treasure from an anonymous giver in Edinburgh, Scotland made available to all of us with a click on these words. Then join me in figuring out the perfect read for family and friends this holiday season. I have been asked not to give any more library books without mentioning the due date, and I can’t mention the perfect read I found for Charlie because he might read this. But stay tuned.