My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 1, #1, July, 1996

INTRODUCING MYSELF

John Ciardi once wrote about the perfect way to insure peace and quiet on a plane trip. When his seatmate asks, "What do you do?", Ciardi replied, "I'm a poet." End of conversation.

But the second-best conversation-killer surely has to be "I'm a librarian." Now, notice, we do not say, "I'm a librarian--SHHHHH!" But that's what they're thinking. They're thinking librarians are little old ladies in sensible shoes with their hair in a bun, dedicating their lives to hiding the books on reproduction away from the children, leaving only the cryptic notation in the catalog, "For sex, see librarian."

Hey, guys, that's not us. Honest.

One of my favorite cartoons is of a rat maze, with a little lady rat at a desk in the middle with a sign saying "Information."

Now, THAT's us, your guide through an increasingly overwhelming maze of information, your finder of needles in haystacks.

As a consequence, I can't think of a single librarian whose brain is not filled with a totally random collection of odd bits of information. Many of us can passionately recite, with or without sock puppets, the entire works of Dr. Seuss ("I meant what I said and I said what I meant--an elephant's faithful, one hundred percent!).

I know the cost of burning a heretic in 13th century England (ten shillings sixpence). I know three separate formats for footnotes and bibliographies. I know about the New York theater riots of the 1800's. I know who the lead singer of Metallica is, how to read a box score, what the defenestration of Prague was, where to find financial ratios, and who to read when you've finished reading everything Dick Francis ever wrote.

An odd thing about librarians is that most of us got here by accident. Not a one of us was a starry-eyed ten-year-old thirsting to become a librarian. Most of us spent our college careers reading Euripedes, painting still lifes, and pondering on how we know we exist (to which our parents naturally responded, "I pay your tuition, therefore you exist"). Then we graduated and discovered that employers had very little need for people who understood the finer points of dialectical materialism. So we went back to college and became librarians, because librarianship is the last remaining profession for the generalist, the last place where one can be a dilettante for fun and profit (though not a whole lot), the only possible career where all the odd things we know might actually be of use someday.

So, yes, I am a librarian, but I think, in spite of that, or in fact BECAUSE of that, I have some interesting ideas I'd like to share with you.

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NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

I'll write columns here whenever I really want to share an idea with you and can find time to write them . If you want to be notified when a new one is up, send me an e-mail and include "My Word's Worth" in the subject line.