al as therapeutic and diagnostic

The AL as Therapeutic and Diagnostic Library Blog

Now that it's settled who I'm not, I can get on to the exciting

business of telling you who I am. I can get on to that exciting

business, but of course I won't. Instead, I want to talk about one of

my favorite subjects, me, or at least my blog.

This is nothing earth-shattering. I've just been ruminating as I

sometimes do on why I bother writing this darned blog. After a couple

of martinis of a Saturday evening, I sometimes think I should just

give it up and do something good for my career. So I've been trying to

justify the time spent writing this thing to myself.

Personally, about the best thing I can come up with is that the AL is

therapeutic. Writing this is a good way to let off steam and have a

little fun. When I began that's pretty much all it was, letting off

steam and having a little fun, mostly for the entertainment of myself

and the handful of cranky readers I gathered early on. I still write

the blog mostly for those reasons, even though I now know more people

read, and certainly a lot more people respond to the posts. The

readers and comments certainly help keep me going, but the therapeutic

value is also worthwhile. Better write a blog than take pills, though

my critics might disagree.

It may be the case that others read the AL for therapy as well. I get

comments and emails along the lines of, "I thought I was the only one

until I found the AL" or "Reading the AL got me through the morning."

It's nice to hear, and I only wish my little team of assistants and I

could crank this stuff out more quickly, just in case some poor

librarian goes crazy one morning waiting for an AL fix that never

comes. Thus, the AL is possibly therapeutic for more librarians than

just me, especially some of the more, er, disturbed readers of the AL.

I think it's obvious based on the comments that I've got a handful of

readers who are very unhappy or angry. Some librarians are dismayed by

some of the comments, but the comments offer people a way to vent

without going crazy at work. They provide a service not available or

allowed elsewhere. Fortunately for us all, the existence of the AL

means that we'll never have to hear people use phrases like "go

librarian" the way we now have "go postal." All part of my public

service.

But it also seems to serve a diagnostic function for the readers as

well. I'm sure you'd love to diagnose me sometime (the AL:

narcissistic personality disorder and megalomania, combined with a

large portion of irony and apathy, sung to the tune of "Ebony and

Ivory"). But it's clear that how you respond to the AL says as much

about you as it does about the blog.

Early on there were the regressive librarians, who used to fume like

crazy that there was someone reasonably articulate who made fun of

their silly attempts to politicize the ALA with their totalitarian

stylings. Lots of librarians of many different political persuasions

don't want to politicize the ALA, and say so in comments and emails.

The regressives sputtered, as one prominent regressive once said of

himself, and just came off looking ridiculous. Since their ass-kicking

at ALA last midwinter, I haven't heard much from the regressives.

You've been diagnosed as a regressive librarian if you get angry that

someone makes fun of attempts to politicize the ALA.

Then there are the twopointopians. You've been diagnosed as a

twopointopian if you get irritated by the term rather than think it's

amusing. If it makes you mad that someone is criticizing something

called the cult of twopointopia, then you're probably part of that

cult. If it doesn't bother you, then you're not part of the cult, no

matter how "2.0" you might be professionally. The AL's just a

Rorschach Test. You see what you want to see in it.

Oh, and of course there's the handful of pseudonym-haters, the ones

who get so upset both that the AL is pseudonymous and that I allow

anonymous comments and rarely delete any (though I do delete the ones

that are nothing but ad hominem attacks or that use language

inappropriate for this family blog). Some people just get so bothered.

But since most people don't seem to be bothered, I think that says a

lot about the people being bothered. Is it a lack of control that

they'd like to have but don't? They don't have to read, of course, but

they don't want anyone else to read either. They just get so

frustrated. I'm sure there's something in the DSM-IV-TR that would

cover their condition, but their attitude says as much about them as

about the AL.

We shouldn't leave out the ones who just really don't want to know who

writes the AL. I suppose for them the AL is more therapy than

diagnosis, though. They think they'd be disappointed if they found out

who the real author was. They very well might be. One of the things I

found amusing about the speculations that Meredith Farkas writes the

AL (which I like to think of as the Farkas Fracas) is the assumption

that when/if the AL is unmasked, it will turn out to be someone you've

heard of. Maybe, maybe not. I don't want to spoil it for you. But what

if the AL turned out to be just some bored librarian or group of

librarians sitting around having a lark? Would that lessen the impact?

Or what if the AL turned out to be someone ensconced in ALA

headquarters? Does it matter at all who writes the AL? Does the

identity of the author(s) somehow change what's written? All questions

I might consider when I write my memoirs, tentatively entitled, of

course, Relaxin' with the AL. I might as well use the title now that

the blog is defunct.

For me, all this just adds an extra and fun dimension to writing the

AL. As you read the AL (or anything else, I'm not being egocentric),

to a great extent you project onto the AL what you want or hope or

fear. The fun part is that as you're reading the AL, I might just be