i see posts all the time about how services explicitly offered by u.s. libraries are harmful for u.s. libraries and then people comment like “no i think that’s good and you should use it actually” & everyone starts weighing in and disagreeing so here’s my suggestion:
while i’m someone who generally assumes that using a service offered by my local library is good or at least neutral for my local library,
if you’re unsure how to best support & exploit your local library, you could always ask a librarian at your local library. you could go right up to the counter to talk about it or use the email form on the library’s contact page.
now you may think, “uh oh. this post is encouraging people to go and pester their local librarians. that may be a bad use of the library’s time & resources…”
Hi! I'm a librarian! Ask us! Go to city/county/state council meetings and say you support us! USE THE SERVICES WE OFFER! As I've said before, we run on numbers! If we can justify the service to the government bean counters with the numbers of people who are using it, then we can continue to offer it! We do not offer anything that is detrimental to us. I promise.
And if you want something that we don't have? Pester us. We can use your pestering to be like "Hey, [amount] people in the past [time] have asked for [thing], is that something we can look into?" The worst that happens is we get told no. It's not a waste of time. We're literally there for you.
one of the weird things i noticed watching the phantom menace yesterday is that when he first meets and fights darth maul, qui-gon and obi-wan both use it/its pronouns for maul. not sure what was going on there
the simplest explanation is the filmmakers want you conceive of maul as not-quite-human, some sort of demonic entity, being as he is an evil space wizard. the funnier answer is that the force gives jedi the ability to perceive people's pronouns and maul has some boydyke shit going on
Male Scifi and Fantasy writers: Look at this !Strong! female character! She can fight and solve puzzles, and ends up with the sidekick not the hero! Isn’t she a great character?
Everyone: No, she’s one-dimensional and still only exists to please the hero’s ego
Male scifi and fantasy writers: You’re never happy! This is how characters are written! Besides, it’s much harder for us to write women because we are men!
Terry Pratchett: *creates a female character who is literally the embodyment of a dog, sets her up to be the love interest of Protagonist Hero Man.* *writes her as clever, emotionally tortured, lonely and powerful* *uses her to explore difficulties of bisexuality and masculine dominated workforces*
Terry Pratchett: *Creates a pair of old witches, one of whom is a virgin and the other who has slept with lots of men.* *makes them best friends, never dismisses one lifestyle of the other, explains lifestyle choices based on characters history and personality, uses this to develop each character as the books progress*
Terry Pratchett: *Writes Sybil Rankin* *makes the powerful rich lady heavy set but beautiful, never plays her by her looks, develops her as she ages, acknowledges the way society views such people and then spits on their attitudes* *does it again with Agnes*
Terry Pratchett: *Writes a book about an entire army secretly being women, creates complex female relationships, introduces same sex relationships completely naturally*
Terry Pratchett: *takes old joke about female dwarves and uses it to explore gender identity without making it seem forced or unnatural, carefully discusses some of the issues and complextities whilst still making funny and witty observasions and maintaining genuine fantasy tropes*
Terry Pratchett: *DOES THIS ALL OVER AND OVER AGAIN, DEVELOPING CHARACTERS AS HIS VEIW OF THE WORLD DEVELOPS AND CAREFULLY APOLOGIZES FOR EARLY MISTAKES*
to pretend that horrible people cannot make good art is another way to conflate beauty and talent with integrity and morality. the works of monsters are best examined with knowledge of the author in mind but art is not inherently reflective. human beings are creative, and habitual liars- it'd be stupid to pretend art must always be a portrait of its creator
it's also a convenient oversimplification of humans to believe that a person who is horrible in one way will be horrible in every way. people can hold terrible views in one area and have something thoughtful to say in another. people can do terrible things to one person and tremendous acts of kindness and empathy to another.
Library goblin rant incoming and yes, I'm about to ruin your dream. I also work there, so I am going to try to assist you in realizing why you need to access the bigger, better dream.
Okay, so I have seen this stupid post swirl around a few times now and it has had time to marinate and really turn into something I genuinely hate. The idea here isn't really a bad one, mind you. Having libraries open late enough that you can just enjoy reading and have a nice community oriented place to go is not bad at all. The thing is, this post very clearly has but one type of community in mind and it isn't going to be the one that shows up, most likely. This post also seems to have a weird idea of what it is that happens in a library, though to be fair, this isn't surprising for people who don't spend much time there. Let me explain.
For one: libraries are the last community centre that you have access to. It is free and welcoming of everyone and that includes a lot of people you probably aren't planning on inviting to your Saturday Night book club. Our homeless patrons are going to be a big part of who shows up to these late night hours and while most of them are wonderful patrons who are kind and respectful of the space, that doesn't mean that some of them aren't going through major mental health crises, drug withdrawals, conflicts among each other and various other parts that make up life without a home to go to. These are going to be a part of your library at night experience and yes, sometimes that means it's going to be scary there. Scary in a way that isn't necessarily going to be true at a coffee shop or a bar, where people who are deemed a problem are kept out on purpose. The library is for everyone and while I can't stress enough that our homeless patrons are most often among our best behaved, that doesn't always hold true for everyone.
Speaking of which, there are going to be other people attending these evening hours too and some of them aren't going to be people you want to get to know at night. People screaming and swearing and crying is going to be a part of the background of that time of day and those of you who aren't in the library during the day when it happens are probably going to find it pretty alarming. Likewise, when someone decides to go on a massive racist tirade, or just decides that they are going to try to hit on everyone who is feminine presenting, or someone decides to get into your face because they were forced to hear the word pronouns today, that is also something that happens on the regular, but will be a part of your evening experience. Drug use is also going to be happening in the bathrooms and you can expect that this may lead to people overdosing within the building. For the record, again, all this happens during the day, but if you only ever come to the library to pick up your holds before close, you probably didn't know this.
All of this probably has led you to believe that I don't think that there should be funding for later hours in the library, but the truth is a little more thorny. Having later hours wouldn't be a bad thing at all, except that people who are advocating for this fantasy are directly leaving out some crucial issues. For one, as the last community centre available to the wider public, that means that not only is this a shared space among the whole community, it is a space that has to take up the cause for everything the rest of the community doesn't provide. That means everything from people who are looking for shelter when the established ones that remain have no room, to places to safely inject, to places that they can find resources that they desperately need, to spaces where children can go to play in safety, to places where you can print off resumes, to places where someone can try to learn to start speaking English. All of this means that what you might imagine "well funded" looks like is a lot different. This isn't just about having adequate staffing, but also security and access to resources, including professionals who can take the burden off the front line staff who are going to deal with the bulk of it all. Those extra hours are within reach but convincing the people who hold the purse strings to shell out for any of this is going to be the bigger issue. More importantly, should the library really be this kind of resource?
This brings me to the two aspects of this dream that I hate the most: the lack of interest and advocacy that it reveals. As a library goblin, I am happy to help my community and I would love to offer more, but I can't pretend that this dream isn't entirely frustrating to me because nowhere in it does this take into account how it would play out for us or the community. If you want better options for after work and Saturday nights, you should be advocating for better community resources and spaces. There are means to get there. There are people you can elect and put pressure on to built that infrastructure. The library shouldn't be the only game in town where people can take care of their needs but we carry it all right now and we are seeing even more closures of community welfare sites. This means you need to be a part of that community and voice your concerns. This means you need to demand better from people. This means you need to show up and find or build those resources in your own community and help by being active. Community resources don't just appear, they are part of an effort that you have to be a part of.
The second aspect of this dream that I hate more than the first is the fact that if you want this dream to come true, you have to make sure that you are showing up for your libraries and your librarians, especially right now. Libraries have their funding under attack always, but right now a lot of them are facing reductions in their funding if they aren't being threatened with full closures. If you are in America, this is the time when you need to show up for this and demand access to your library. Demand that your money go towards keeping this resource alive. Get angry and make sure that you show up for community meetings about spending. Is it boring? Yes. That is so you won't bother and they can take away more hours from this resource. And if you do care about getting together in your local library to discuss books, you better also be hitting back hard against these book banning groups that have made it their mission to keep certain topics from anyone's eyes. Most book bans happen from the concerted efforts of very few people and if you believe that the library should be a place for you to gather and enjoy after work or on Saturday nights, you need to be a lot more openly hostile to those people who are actively trying to take it away from you. You want that funding? Demand it. You want those extra hours? Get out there and tell those people who are deciding the budget that this is what your community wants. You want those books on your shelf, show up and drown out those puritan assholes who are trying to ban them.
Libraries are for everyone and they have consistently taken on so much of the needs of the communities who rely on them. If you dream of a space that you can live out your dark academia fantasies and ignore the real issues that define the way we in the library operate, you are likely to be sorely disappointed. You are also likely to see the death of that dream if you aren't active about keeping your libraries alive. There's nothing wrong with dreaming, but I would ask you to dream bigger. Include other people in that dream. Make it so that even if the end result doesn't look like this, it also won't end in shuttered buildings and the end of your last community resources.
One of the best stories I ever read as a child was a fantasy novel by some local dude selling books out of a suitcase on the sidewalk downtown, and I don't remember what it was called or who the author was, and it's so obscure that no matter how many elements I remember, I've never been able to find it through web searches. I only vaguely remember the story - it was a love story, something about a tower on an island and two characters on a quest to discover their forgotten past. They fall in love and at the end the only way to stay together is to allow themselves to forget again, and you realize that they're right where they started, in the exact same tower, and they're doomed to go on this same quest over and over again, never completed, but that also means they'll fall in love over and over again forever. And I remember how that ending blew up my little child brain into a million pieces.
I don't know what happened to the book, and I'll probably never read it again, but if you're somewhere out there and you were once selling fantasy novels from a suitcase on the sidewalk in the suburbs of Chicago, and if you ever felt like your writing never meant anything or went anywhere except a hundred copies you had printed yourself and sold for almost nothing, please know that your story buried itself in my young brain and has probably shaped my worldview in ways even I don't understand.
There are a lot of sweet, well-meaning folks in the notes advising me on how to search for this book, and I want you to know that I will never find this book. And that's okay.
This author self-published, which at that time meant he paid out of his own pocket to print 100 copies and sold some but not all them for cash on the sidewalk in one small town. E-books weren't a thing. There is no digital record to find. Even if I remembered any of the names or details, it wouldn't be searchable. No librarian has it in a catalogue.
The vast majority of books written before the modern day are lost media. Countless artists poured their hearts into stories that were read by few and lasted only as long as the paper they were printed on. Most of the art ever made has been destroyed or thrown away. Most of the music ever written will never be heard again. The expectation of permanence in art is very new, and even now, there are millions of works of art that will never be recorded or posted or shared. Millions more that will never even be completed.
Creation, with few exceptions, is a mandala. A vulnerable song performed for dear friends by a campfire, but the singer soon forgets how it went. A poem shared in a coffee house that rattles the audiences' bones but will never be heard again. A sketch of a lover on hotel stationary that the maid will throw away tomorrow. Our current reality exists by the influence of art that no one remembers.
now say it with me: authors/artists dont owe you moral purity. an author/artist job is not to hold you by the hand & tell you exactly what is Good™ & what is Bad™. you should be able to think for yourself
Opinion Here’s how to get free Paxlovid as many times as you need it
When the public health emergency around covid-19 ended, vaccines and treatments became commercial products, meaning companies could charge for them as they do other pharmaceuticals. Paxlovid, the highly effective antiviral pill that can prevent covid from becoming severe, now has a list price of nearly $1,400 for a five-day treatment course.
Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, Americans can still access the medication free or at very low cost through a program called Paxcess. The problem is that too few people — including pharmacists — are aware of it.
I learned of Paxcess only after readers wrote that pharmacies were charging them hundreds of dollars — or even the full list price — to fill their Paxlovid prescription. This shouldn’t be happening. A representative from Pfizer, which runs the program, explained to me that patients on Medicare and Medicaid or who are uninsured should get free Paxlovid. They need to sign up by going to paxlovid.iassist.com or by calling 877-219-7225. “We wanted to make enrollment as easy and as quick as possible,” the representative said.
Indeed, the process is straightforward. I clicked through the web form myself, and there are only three sets of information required. Patients first enter their name, date of birth and address. They then input their prescriber’s name and address and select their insurance type.
All this should take less than five minutes and can be done at home or at the pharmacy. A physician or pharmacist can fill it out on behalf of the patient, too. Importantly, this form does not ask for medical history, proof of a positive coronavirus test, income verification, citizenship status or other potentially sensitive and time-consuming information.
But there is one key requirement people need to be aware of: Patients must have a prescription for Paxlovid to start the enrollment process. It is not possible to pre-enroll. (Though, in a sense, people on Medicare or Medicaid are already pre-enrolled.)
Once the questionnaire is complete, the website generates a voucher within seconds. People can print it or email it themselves, and then they can exchange it for a free course of Paxlovid at most pharmacies.
Pfizer’s representative tells me that more than 57,000 pharmacies are contracted to participate in this program, including major chain drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens and large retail chains such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco. For those unable to go in person, a mail-order option is available, too.
The program works a little differently for patients with commercial insurance. Some insurance plans already cover Paxlovid without a co-pay. Anyone who is told there will be a charge should sign up for Paxcess, which would further bring down their co-pay and might even cover the entire cost.
Several readers have attested that Paxcess’s process was fast and seamless. I was also glad to learn that there is basically no limit to the number of times someone could use it. A person who contracts the coronavirus three times in a year could access Paxlovid free or at low cost each time.
Unfortunately, readers informed me of one major glitch: Though the Paxcess voucher is honored when presented, some pharmacies are not offering the program proactively. As a result, many patients are still being charged high co-pays even if they could have gotten the medication at no cost.
This is incredibly frustrating. However, after interviewing multiple people involved in the process, including representatives of major pharmacy chains and Biden administration officials, I believe everyone is sincere in trying to make things right. As we saw in the early days of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, it’s hard to get a new program off the ground. Policies that look good on paper run into multiple barriers during implementation.
Those involved are actively identifying and addressing these problems. For instance, a Walgreens representative explained to me that in addition to educating pharmacists and pharmacy techs about the program, the company learned it also had to make system changes to account for a different workflow. Normally, when pharmacists process a prescription, they inform patients of the co-pay and dispense the medication. But with Paxlovid, the system needs to stop them if there is a co-pay, so they can prompt patients to sign up for Paxcess.
Here is where patients and consumers must take a proactive role. That might not feel fair; after all, if someone is ill, people expect that the system will work to help them. But that’s not our reality. While pharmacies work to fix their system glitches, patients need to be their own best advocates. That means signing up for Paxcess as soon as they receive a Paxlovid prescription and helping spread the word so that others can get the antiviral at little or no cost, too.
Holy shit, please reblog this. This is incredibly useful information! Paxlovid not only helps reduce the severity of covid but also goes a decent way to preventing long covid. I cannot stress this enough — even if you think this isn’t relevant to you because you’re perfectly healthy, you could get covid TOMORROW and permanently have long covid a month from today if you got unlucky.
And, of course, if you suspect you have covid, take a test or see a doctor ASAP. Paxlovid MUST be taken within the first five days of developing symptoms. The Paxcess copay card seems really easy and quick to fill out, though!
sorry that you think my fictional ship is illegal. I actually consulted a fictional lawyer about it and he had a talk with a fictional cop about the fictional laws and then they both looked at me, and very seriously said "we'll allow it because it's hot."
As an art major, while I know Fountain is a valid piece of art that accomplished exactly what it set out to do, I also think it’s one of the stupidest things. We have a urinal in a museum display. I have yet to see a work I think is dumber.
The thing I love most about Duchamps urinal piece is that it was so “low cost” in terms of creative labour (compared to say, a large scale oil painting or sculpture for example), but it’s absolutely FULL of rage against the traditionalists and the world at that time and it’s SUCH a statement, it’s like, “oh just a mass manufactured item with a signature” but the reality of it is so many layers of meaning and without understanding the history at the time you don’t get it.
It’s an incredibly clever “fuck you” and I love it
An old professor of mine, an expert in Duchamp who has written several books, has a theory. In part, “Fountain” was a prank, a personal “fuck you” to the organization looking for artworks. It’s importance cannot be overstated, and this importance stems from the fact that “Fountain” is /ridiculous/. It is enraging, it is hilarious, and it is very fascinating.
Aside from Duchamp’s readymades, I love “Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even”. Pictured below, the work invokes a complex machine, one my professor spent a great deal of time studying. Eventually, he reached his conclusion. My professor had been pranked. He believes “Bride Stripped Bare” is a joke about masturbation, hidden to all except those study it excessively.
At first blush, Duchamp’s works are stupid. Upon further study, they’re very complex. And, upon true understanding, Duchamp is laughing at you. To me, it seems the closer you come to truly understanding Duchamp, the more he slaps you in the face with a large fish.
Let me rage about “traditionalism revival” here. This is a dogwhistle.
As a lover of art, there are many complex and technically impressive works being created today, which both embrace different artistic traditions and break from them. To ignore those is to ignore contemporary art.
Here, OP is raging against conceptual art, which stimulates thought and challenges tradition. He wants his followers to believe that art has “degenerated”, because the West has “degenerated”. OP is intentionally engaging with fascist ideas of “degenerate art”.
If OP wanted to be accurate, he would seek to restore the Salon System, the Beaux Arts Academy, and classical training in the arts. The collapse of this specific system allowed for Modernism to evolve. Of course, that’s not what OP is talking about. He’s evoking beauty as a moral standard, telling his followers to “restore Western tradition”, to fight against aesthetic “degeneracy” in culture.
(By the way, Duchamp is commenting ON MODERNISM with “Fountain”. Duchamp submitted the work to the Society of Independent Artists’ salon in New York, who would accept any work by any artist, for a small fee. In part, Duchamp is saying, “Is this what you Modernists want? A urinal? Look me in the eyes and prove this is not art.”
If OP dared to use his brain, perhaps he would agree with Duchamp here.)
The thing is that it isn’t even a urinal! It doesn’t match any model manufactured at the time. Also Duchamp was an accomplished ceramicist. It’s likely that he made the sculpture and absolutely everyone is like “I know what a urinal looks like. This is sufficiently urinal-shaped for me to assume it is one without looking at it closely!”
Duchamp had other readymades, like his snow shovel, where if you actually look at the photos, the handle is square and the bowl is way too flimsy. Why would manufacturers make a snow shovel with a squared-off handle? It’s impossible to hold! Duchamp slapped the “readymades” label on all these items and the hoity-toity art people who were so good at looking at things didn’t see it (probably because they’d never had to do labor like shovel snow imo, amongst other things).
Marcel Duchamp. In Advance of the Broken Arm. Museum of Modern Art. (4th Version [Ed.!!!] after lost original of November 1915)
My favorite thing about Fountain (besides the fact it has been pissing off fascists for over a century, natch) is that the original was lost and he made a bunch of official editions to sell to various museums (after the original was lost, possibly on purpose).
And they’re different! If it was a real “readymade” he could have just bought some more at his local hardware store, but no. He changed them in OBVIOUS WAYS.
See the triangle of holes?
Here’s the one from the Tate Modern:
Oh hello, cross-holes. Fancy seeing you here.
SFMOMA’s edition has the triangle holes, but it also has a line of holes at the top that are completely different from either other version.
Here’s one from Moderna Museet. Line and a circular set of holes!
Duchamp definitely intentionally made these different on purpose. It’s a “readymade” but it’s not, really, each of these is a specific custom creation.
It’s not even clear if he made it! He wrote a letter to his sister claiming that a female friend sent it to him, and he just enrolled it in the art exhibit under his own name. There’s also a possibility that that female friend was himself, since he later had a female pseudonym of Rrose Sélav.
This whole piece of art is a fractal troll, and it’s a beautiful one.
oh to be a pretentious jerk, with your uncomfortable companion, bent over a crime scene, making wild claims and refusing to elaborate while belittling the on scene detectives., , and then to have some random guy come in and do those exact same things but with Panache and Nuance and a Flair for the Dramatiqué and also everyone loves him and also he’s faking being psychic which is one of the most infuriating things you’ve ever encountered in your entire comically British life
