New Worlds: Responses to Crisis
Aug. 22nd, 2025 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
(originally posted at Swan Tower: https://is.gd/sLMd43)
Or maybe not.
Only over the past day or two there have been various things on listservs and social media relating to research I have done and published (and not just my research, much lamented Canadian historian in the same area's work) and I realise that this was Back in the Day and maybe it has fallen off the radar.
But how is this thing that this thing is that - I suppose this comes with working in a particularly niche area - that people are not aware of the Horrible Hystorie of the Heinous Synne of Onan?
I am almost tempted to go forth and offer a conference paper WOT.
I'm not sure I have anything in the way of startling new research to offer but a lot of the same anxieties have been popping up again around Precious Bodily Fluids etc.
On another paw somebody was advance-mentioning a book they have coming out and that made me think, though it's not directly related, that there's a piece of research I keep meaning to get back to that's a similar sort of story.
Meanwhile there is something a bit weird going on, I fear, with conference I have been invited to speak at next month, having had rather cryptic message from person who was liaising with me. Shall get on with book reviewing before investing any more energy in paper-prep.
In which Shaun learns something significant late in Feed that he canonically doesn't find out until Deadline, and everything goes very (very, very) differently.
A few days ago Ask A Manager posted stories of co-workers overstepping their expertise.
And I guess this is not quite the same thing but I had a massive flashback to That Morning of Hours I Will Never Get Back when the whole library staff had a session with an outside consultant.
I am honestly not sure what the rationale was for having us give up an entire morning of our precious closed period - during which we did all - well, seldom actually all, but as many as we could manage - of those essential backroom housekeeping tasks which cannot be undertaken when the place has actual readers coming in and USING THE COLLECTIONS dammit.
Possibly we had either just undergone, or were just about to undergo, one of the restructurings of which I saw many during my years there, distinct from the physical relocation upheavals.
But anyway, consultant.
Had consultant been briefed? Had consultant done any due diligence about what sort of institution this was?
Okay, did know it was a LIBRARY.
Had not the slightest apprehension that this was a world-renowned RESEARCH collection and that, you know, we were not lending out books and stamping them with return dates (I am not sure that this practice, by the date in question, even pertained in public libraries).
We were sitting there cringeing and wincing, wondering when it would all be over.
Were we not very restrained by not going, in huge chorus, in the manner he would doubtless have anticipated we learnt as part of our professional training, SSSSSHHHHHHHHHUUUUUUSSSSHHHHHH!!!!?
What I read
Finished Dragon Harvest.
Read the latest Literary Review.
Read Angela Thirkell, What Did It Mean? (The Barsetshire Novels Book 23) (1954), which, I depose, is the one where Ange, sighing and groaning, realised that she was going to have to write The One About The Coronation, like what everybody else was doing. (The title alludes to a cryptic prophecy by one of the local peasantry.) So there is a fair amount of phoning it in, but on the other hand, some Better Stuff than one might expect for that period of her output.
On the go
And it's back to Lanny: Upton Sinclair, A World to Win (Lanny Budd #7) (1946), in which WW2 is raging but so far, USA is not in it and Our Hero can still pootle about Europe under the guise of being an art expert while mingling in very elevated company indeed.
Up next
Once that is done, I should probably turn my attention to the very different WW2 experience of Nick Jenkins in the next one up for the Dance to the Music of Time book group, The Soldier's Art.