So I haven’t blogged since June. It’s now October. I’ve been studiously ignoring this blog. I just found a wonderful comment that I missed from said studious ignorance (thank you Ellen). I am so immersed in MSU Libraries and our emerging technology efforts, Facebook, Twitter, and Virtual Reference. Honestly, I’m tired of it. Maybe even burnt out. We aren’t going to be able to do the MS Library 2.0 Summit this year because of the current economic climate–even though there has been passionate interest in doing it again. Maybe it’s because I didn’t make a more compelling argument?

Lately all I seem to be interested in is poetry and art. Fourth Fridays. The cre8tive warehouse. Launching a new graphic novels bookclub in Starkville. Housekeeping. I’ve even started writing poetry again when I get exhausted from writing academic papers on Virtual Reference.

I just found myself sitting at my desk, trying to figure out how I could push the information I’m gathering about these topics. I thought about Facebook, but I needed an RSS feed. I thought about Twitter, but I needed more than 140 characters. Then I remembered this long neglected blog. Could I really do it? Aren’t I supposed to be a professional/librarian online? Am I allowed to have a personal-ish blog? More struggling with Online Identity. Is it better to have a dead blog if I can’t think of anything to say anymore about 2.0 and Libraries? Should I just kill it altogether and make this site a CV?

But then I remembered that my goal is to experiment always. My job is to find new ways of using technology–sometimes they have applications for libraries and sometimes they don’t. I was reminded about Carol Greider, who had been conducting “irrelevent” basic science research–quietly studying an enzyme with no application in mind. An enzyme which eventually became critical in understanding cancer and aging.

So maybe everything I do doesn’t have to have an application. Maybe it’s okay to just do something to do it and let the cards fall.

Well, I haven’t blogged for an entire semester. I took the Graphic Novels class (excellent), did costumes and crewed our Community Theatre’s entry in the MS Theater Competition (won that competition, won the regional competition, and headed to nationals in June), and appeared on a panel at a national conference among other things. But I’m back to blogging, largely as a result of giving up on peer-reviewed publications on social networking topics. I’ve moved on to the much simpler Virtual Reference topics for which I have copious data. With that in full swing, I don’t have to feel like I’m cheating on my research by blogging. Or that is what I currently believe.

So I’ve been bottling up tons of ideas hoping to turn one magically into a paper, and now I need to get them out. So here they come…ready or not.

–Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus (Victoria Terminus), Mumbai (Bombay) in August 2005

I’m still in the middle of finishing my third year review (though I have started Dark Knight Returns on the sly). However, today’s news has shocked me back three years to the month I spent in Mumbai and traveling through parts of Southern India. I was about to move to Mississippi and start a new life, and thought I’d just do a complete system restart by spending a month in India. I’d always wanted to go to Bombay, primarily because of Salman Rushdie’s novels, and it seemed like the right time to do it. No one else had the time/money/interest to go with me, so I went alone. Alone, except that I blogged it. It was the start of this blog, actually. I’d hidden the category, since this blog had become something else in the meantime, but I’ve pulled it back out today.

I have to get back to editing my review (it’s getting close!). But my thoughts are of fruit juice vendors in Colaba and lazy dogs in the street with the shouts of men hawking their carved Ganeshes in booths outside the Leopold. Even the OMG awful crush of the “Ladies Compartment” on the train from Mumbai to Hyderabad that I caught at the VT. And I will be thinking of the Gateway to India with the (persistent) guides hawking their services alongside the forbidding elegance of the Taj Hotel.

I will be conjuring that Colaba tonight. Maybe it will do some good.

I am almost done with the Watchmen, and I have really turned a corner with it. I have been amazed by the intricacy of the storylines, and the characters at some point became real (no, real is the wrong word…tangible? sympathetic?). I’m going to go back and do a more in-depth analysis when I have a little time. My third year review for tenure is due December 1st, and I’m overwhelmed and a little bit obsessed with it. Probably what I’ll do is just put snippets of observations up that I can do during my study-breaks.

I’m trying to decide what to read next. I was thinking The Dark Knight, but now I’m not sure. Someone (you know who you are!) has promised the NYTimes “cartoons” that he has compiled on CD Rom, and that might be a fun break from the statistics and compilation of everything I’ve done here for the past three years…yikes!

So, I lost my mind a little bit…I get grandiose…

I’m reading Watchmen, and it’s very challenging. I was never a comic book fan, so there’s that element. I also love words, so I’m always looking for the words first, then going back and trying to match them with the pictures. I don’t know if you’ve ever read Watchmen, but it’s a graphic novel, interspersed with longer essay-type entries of various sorts (or at least it is so far). Definitely disconcerting…and purposefully. At times, it reminds me of Ulysses in the way you have to track so many threads at the same time. It’s as though it’s hanging in time, space, and between various worlds (including its own comic book world that one of the characters is reading and which occasionally intrudes into the narrative) as well as straddling various media.

The only parallel that I can imagine would be if Thomas Pynchon had added pictures and color into Gravity’s Rainbow. Pynchon wrote in a vivid, eye-popping, comic style that I think might lend itself to visual aids. There is much more required from the reader’s part reading (viewing? experiencing?) Watchmen, though. Gravity’s Rainbow let the reader float around in the complexity of its language and multiple narratives. Watchmen grabs the reader by the throat and forces him/her along violently.

I think I’m comparing it to Ulysses and Gravity’s Rainbow because it is pushing me in a similar way–out of my comfort zone to a place where reading is an intellectual pursuit, rather than an immersion in narrative. So many threads. I’m not actually sure that I like Watchmen. Maybe I’m too old to be challenged? Or too set in my text-only ways to appreciate the additional information from visual media? Or maybe I didn’t grow up experiencing the world in this way, so it’s just an adjustment.

To be honest, I got so frustrated this weekend I went and read the end. To see if it was worth going on. Which is something I’ve done before. Quite a confession, lol. But so far I’m hanging in there…the experience of reading it is good for me, I think. Like vitamins.