A friend of mine, JC, recently started selling her fun home-made earrings online, so I ordered myself a bespoke pair bearing my Saint Evelin avatar. I shall be able to wear them at conferences so that people from this parish might recognise me at a single glance.
I'm an earring now!
Eagle-eyed visitors to JC's Bizzarrea site may notice that I also appear on one of the prêt-à-porter designs. So you too could wear me dangling from your lug-holes!
For the last four years, the staff at the library where I work have donned fancy dress for Children in Need. Last year I went as Cheryl Cole, and it was hard to know where to go after that. It was a last-minute rediscovery of my cloche hat last weekend that gave me the inspiration for this year's outfit:
Saint Evelin in the Office with the RFID Scanner.
Geeky fashion notes: The cloche is a Primark job I picked up in a charity shop, with a feathery fancy from New Look stuck to the side to liven it up. The dress is one of my favourite charity shop finds, a gorgeous lacy number by Berketex. Most of the accessories came from Claire's. I struggled to find some suitably '20s shoes, in the end settling for a pair from New Look which look the part from the front but have a somewhat anachronistically high heel. I took a change of footwear with me in case the tall heels became wearisome, but as it was I saw them out. I also added a cardi (H&M) and a pair of tortoiseshell cats'-eye glasses from Claire's for a dash of vintage (if slightly anachronistic) library chic.
This year we raised £192.50, which, considering it was a reading week at our place, was a pretty healthy sum. More importantly, we had a lot of fun and plenty of home-made cake!
Taking a few moments in our wonderfully efficient Sorting Area.
Succentorship without Sneers is filmed in front of a live studio audience.
Thing 18 of CPD23 gets all A/V on us, and as editor of the (seldom updated) website extravaganza that is A/V Woman Productions, I really ought to be up on that sort of thing. My friends and I were sticking mp3s of our radio show on there as recently as twelve years ago, back in the days of dial-up when one had to be particularly careful about bitrates and file-sizes. I would've cobbled together some audio for you today but I've lent out my microphone. As it is, you can enjoy (above) a quick screencap film I prepared at a pretty crumby bitrate. I did the above using VLC Media Player which is a far better media player than it is a video-capture device, but which serves my needs this evening. Were I wanting to do something a little more impressive and tutorial I would have to dig out something a little more flexible, but tonight this will suffice as lipservice to what is clearly a handy piece of A/V ammunition.
And so we come to Thing 19: a moment to reflect on how my life has changed since starting CPD23...
Without a doubt, this project has helped open up some of the perceived clique-gates that I once felt separated me from my library peers: I've received so many encouraging comments that have empowered me to skip over the troll-bridge and silflay in the verdant sæter of succentorship that lies beyond. With so many excellent CPD23 bloggers out there it became necessary very early on to start making use of a dedicated reader (I went with Google Reader, which was pretty good at the time, though I am not loving that inch of wasted space that accompanies the retrogressive re-design), and as I have begun to gently feel my way within the online library community, I find myself spending more and more time on Twitter as @SaintEvelin where I occasionally even have something to say. I still have some considerable way to go, I realise, but I wouldn't've made it even this far without the gentle prodding of the (19/)23 Things.
I have been to two conferences in my library career, and it is fair to say that I would have been aware of neither were it not for them having been brought to my attention by @rachel_s_b. Quite how she finds out about them remains something of a mystery to me. In the case of the former, the fact that she was speaking at it probably had something to do with how she got to find out about it (though raises yet further questions), while the latter was, I believe, a chance discovery on Twitter.
The grapevine has not sounded like this for over a year.
I am not well-connected. My ear is seldom grafted to the grapevine. I joined CILIP over the summer and have received two or three A4-ish magazines from them (that I cannot recall the precise number is telling). I've flicked through them, but one could not call it reading. I have spent more time (three quarters of a bus journey) with the A5-ish little annual from CILIP's Local History group, which was altogether more inviting and had a lovely piece in it about the Godfrey Edition. I'm already looking forward to next year's, and find myself wondering what other group I joined and whether they'll send me anything as appealing. But generally I am not someone who is particularly drawn to such membership publications: I might flick through the National Trust mag if I remember, but the Unison publication is lucky to get opened at all. I am not a member of these organizations for their fine journalism.
Rather, I rely on Twitter to keep me posted of all the latest happenings, though there again I have some considerable blind-spots. Conference season remains something of an enigma. Luckily, I have some good friends to help me out.
Life would be simple if it weren't for Succentorship without Sneers.
So where these conferences come from is a bit of a mystery; and it's a nice surprise when the opportunity arises to actually go along to one. Having had two positive experiences, I am keen to seek out a third. I wonder what it'll be.
It might even be nice to speak at one one day when I'm all grown up.
This brings us, if we walk a bit once we alight, to Thing 16 of CPD23: Advocacy, speaking up for the profession and getting published.
I have not had published, and do not anticipate having published, any library-related writing. But you never know. I would be more keen to have a novel or a play published (were I to ever finish one that lasts longer than a minute), though that seems increasingly unlikely in a world where something like Unbound needs to exist. Of course, this here blog has a potential online circulation in excess of most library journals, so *sticks tongue out at library journals, wrinkles nose, and makes like a Sopwith Camel with hands*. I have built it, so perhaps they will come...
And this is the written medium: the one in which I am at my most cosy. Ask me to speak (unscripted) and you are unlikely to have anything so deftly engineered: rather you will be left with a string of semantic fillers and some garbled argument or other. Perhaps it's something to do with being an only child that I'm crap at live conversation, but, by whatever means, I tend to think more at writing pace than speaking pace.
This means that, unless I'm particularly switched on, or particularly full of facts on the matter, I am probably not the ideal advocate in a spoken debate or picket-line confrontation. I'm happier shouting at the radio than talking on it.
Good v Evil.
That's not strictly true. A friend and I used to write, present and perform a part-improvised comedy radio show, and it was great fun until we were thrown off for poking fun at the station's ramshackled infrastructure, mocking an SRN DJ, ironically suggesting that an occasional sponsor were evil, and describing the station controller as ruling with "an iron fist" (something which proved demonstrably accurate). The moral here is not that this is indicative of my unsuitability as an advocate (because I am likely to describe the WI in unfavourable terms or caricature CILIP's leadership tyrannical) but rather that I work better with somebody to hold my hand: the pressure is diluted somewhat, and I don't have to keep rambling away: there is time to marshal ones thoughts as the other speaks. The trouble then is that I don't speak at all: the conversation strays from the point I have been perfecting in my head; my wingman has the base covered (to merrily mix military metaphors).
But advocacy is not limited to local radio slots and confrontations with zealous, intransigent mayors. There are, doubtless, myriad opportunities for me to promote the bibliotechnic cause in print and pixel. Or I could even simply turn up to a campaign event and make a physical show of support. I have a small pocketful of excuses for why I haven't got involved in any of the Save Libraries activities (beyond the odd tweet of support and a petition signature). Here is a (somewhat fluffy) flavour of them:
The only public library of which I am a member is Manchester City. Even there, my status is unregistered and I have yet to pick up my card. My membership is predicated solely on access to the Naxos music collection. Membership of two academic libraries means that I have never felt a need to join a public library. While I make intermittent use of Sheffield City Library as a meeting-place, I am otherwise unaffiliated to the body and would feel a fraud protesting there. That it is an hour away from where I live makes attending the likes of a momentary 'shush-in' or similar something of an inconvenience. As for my local library, no cuts have threatened it, so I have not been called to that more convenient barricade.
Dani Behr.
Here we see a hypocritical blend of irrelevance and idleness. To reduce it to its starkest terms: they came for the libraries and I did nothing.
Why do I do nothing? Because I'm idle; because I'm not a confident, out-going, go-getting, well-organized political machine and juggler of realms. Mine is not the coffee-morning mentality. I'm an armchair protester just as I am an armchair human. In some ways I blame something in my upbringing (probably in my schooling) that fostered the notion of a meritocracy that would seek for lights under every bushel: that the cream of me would rise to the top of society and be scooped off by the discerning observers of this Brave New World; in short: that I could sit here and eventually have somebody discover my wealth of talents and give me money for sitting here. I don't know who instilled me with this deception (possibly somebody who didn't want me to make anything of my life). In the same mental box is the sentiment which finds exaggerated expression in the words of Jarvis Cocker: "We were brought up on the space race / Now they expect you to clean toilets." My generation were brought up on the abortive race to Mars and were expected to work in telesales, but the principle held, depressingly, and helped generate a good deal of inertia in the graduated me of a decade ago. At that point many of my hopes had had their brains dashed out on the grim rocks of reality (see my post for Things 10 & 11 for a somewhat opaque depiction of the period, and my opening broadside for yet more gore), and this only served to further foster my disinclination to engage with the outside world. It does not seem unreasonable that my reluctance to man the frontier and fight for the right to library is an after-effect of this period of self-imposed insularity. But just as I eventually gritted my teeth and got a job; just as I got myself into Library School; just as I have made some inlanes into the wider library community: so must I do something, no matter how small, to assist in the opposition to those despicable forces that would seek to further overthrow the hard-won advances of the last 66 years (if not the last 666, such is the creeping New Feudalism of the Big Society).
Quack.
Perhaps I need to start small (tiny acorns and all that, eh?). In lieu of any confidence in my ability to harangue with my mouth, perhaps I should begin by writing some panegyric right here on my blog. That would make some kind of sense, would it not? And yet I rather fear that in such cases I would be preaching to the converted: Ned's old echo-chamber reverberating once more. Such thoughts, if extended to paranoid limits, can get one into some trouble: where does the chamber end? The readership of The Guardian seem just as cavernous. Even Skinner's audience in The Times sound a bit resonant. In that regard one can soon argue away the use of such pamphleteering as I might hope to produce. But in the absence of an alternative one must take whatever anechoics one can get. This blog may be a rather cavernous place, but I've sellotaped a bit of egg-box to the wall (above). It will have to do for now.
