Like the issue of competing standards, that question of values can be answered only in terms of criteria that lie outside of normal science altogether, and it is that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary. –Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p.110

Do you remember reading The Secret Garden? It was one of my favorite books and movies and I loved everything about it. As a fairly willful girl-child in rural Mississippi, I could easily imagine myself ripped from a luxurious life in India, and transported to the damp chill of the English countryside to ramble around in a decrepit manor house. Left to fend for myself, surely I would be triumphant, encouraging health and vigor around me and learning the mysteries of the heath. And although I loathed all forms of yardwork and whined piteously when my mother forced me into the open air, I knew that in the proper environment, the life I was meant to have, I would immediately understand how to judge the wick from the dead and coax gorgeous rose gardens back to life…and win the hearts of everyone in the process, in particular the handsome simple-in-his-wisdom country ruffian.

What I really turned into is a woman who loves a metaphor. And the wick-ness of dead-seeming things is one that I cherish. And tonight I found that a long-dark, petrified piece of my brain still had some life in it….and had indeed been waking up without my noticing it at all.

I’ve been treating this blog like a bottle tree…just a structure on which to hang my shiny, colorful bottle-shaped (let’s go with this metaphor please) triumphs. And lord knows I love a bottle tree. Love a bottle tree. Would love to have a real one in my yard. (There will be some future discussion about bottle trees and nkisi and fetish objects and Southern culture at some point in the future, but I digress.)

I started this blog in July of 2005 as a way to share my solo trek through India with my family and friends (I have been preoccupied with India my entire life…it may have started with The Secret Garden, but Rushdie contributed a great deal). After I got back from India, I did all of those things on that “Most Stressful Things To Do or Have Happen To You In Life” list. I finished grad school, quit my job, sold a house, bought a house, got a divorce, moved from Massachusetts back home to Mississippi to start a new career on the day Katrina hit. Afterwards my NOLA refugee (and yes, I know it’s not the right word) brother, sister-in-law and nine-month-old nephew moved in to my new home in time to greet the 18 wheeler who arrived with my belongings. My gas was in my brother’s name forever because he was the one around during the day to go get it hooked up.

They ended up in Savannah (10 hours instead of 5 hours away), and my brother went to SCAD and became a documentarian. I moved again after a year to a rental house with a roommate, sold the house in Mississippi, and I’ve been hiding out since. I believe I’ve been spinning some sort of cocoon, but I’d forgotten that eventually I was going to emerge.

Tonight I went to the bookstore on campus looking for The Watchmen. Apparently it’s either library-use-only or checked out at every place our Interlibrary Loan folks tried. It’s part of a new project I inadvertently started via Twitter, but it may be the first non-librarian brain-project I’ve had in years. It was hard to find. It wasn’t in the Graphic Novel section, but I knew they had it (I’d called ahead). Like all our patrons, I’m loathe to ask for help, and I had some time to kill. So I started wandering. And I wandered all the way up to the econ / science / technology / neurology / section-ish area on the second floor all the way in the back. And then I started finding books that were in my Amazon shopping cart. First, Everything is Miscellaneous, and then Here Comes Everybody. And right there, on the very same shelves was Kuhn. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. And I realized that part of my brain was waking up again.

And I owe it all to the Mississippi Library Association and Twitter and this strange Graphic Novels project.

So, that’s what this blog is going to be now. I’m going to document this part. Some of it will be about libraries. Some may be about Graphic Novels. Or revolutions. Or “that recourse to external criteria that most obviously makes paradigm debates revolutionary.” And maybe we will see what emerges from the cocoon. And if it’s nothing more than a pair of silk pjs, that will be fine. I’ve been looking for a nice set to go with the embroidered dragon bathrobe Kathi got me in Beijing.

*McCloud, Understanding Comics, p.8