You’ll see a comment by me… two, if they approve my last one. Not that I doubt it’s rationality, but it’s close to the 2,000 character limit they put on comments, so it may be held in moderation. Or then again, it may have been flushed down the toilet. It’s in response to a commenter named Adriana who takes me to task for bringing up the taboo of the “facts” Prof. Chapman’s economic publication lacks.

Here is my follow up, in case they don’t publish it:

Adriana,

The facts Prof. Chapman presents, but does not cite are:

1. Not only does he not cite his source of data, but Prof. Chapman attributes US Government expenditures on AIDS to a support of what he deems “a homosexual lifestyle.” Though he recognizes that the disease is spread by many means, he still presents it as a moral issue. But regardless, a librarian must state where his numbers come from and what “expenditures on this disease” encompass.

2. He cites as fact that behavior he deems immoral taints our blood supply without support of fact.

3. Chapman also claims that rape of male inmates by fellow males is a drain on taxpayer dollars. Does he cite how many of the offenders are homosexual? It may seem unthinkable to you, but heterosexual males rape men. I see no citations to established facts to support his claims that homosexual men are draining US tax dollars in this way.

4. At long last, the educated librarian cites an external work, “Do Domestic Partner Benefits Make Good Economic Sense?” by The Corporate Resource Center. He claims that it is available on a web site, but does not provide a URL. He does not even qualify where this center is or what affiliation it has, if any, to a larger organization. I challenge anyone to find this work available on the web. For this fraud alone, Prof. Chapman should be censured, at the very least.

5. Finally, the learned professor closes with a long list of ways that heterosexual entitlements may be diminished by the acknowledgment of same-sex relationships. There are no numbers given. There are no longitudinal studies cited. There is only the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) tactics of a frightened man with no other defense. The last paragraph reminds me of the FUD tactics of white families in the 1960′s who would incite neighborhood hatred against black families moving in, in the name of “decreased property values.”

I am not arguing against Prof. Chapman’s points. He has none.

The student furor over his blog post has led to calls for his dismissal from the university. Not surprisingly, this isn’t the first antigay blog post he’s written.

Update: I totally forgot to thank the dude who alerted me to this fiasco! Rob at wakingupnow.com is a really great blogger who has a fierce, but reasoned approach to civil action. Thank you, Rob. You set a good example.

Imagine if you had that power at home. The power to record and re-record at will. The power to add effects to your stage performance. The power of karaoke-social-networking. Mwah-ha-ha-haaaa….

I even bought a gold membership for six months before actually saving any of my recordings because it adds reverb and compression to your voice recording. I’m a sucker, I know. But listen to my first lame attempt. I can do better, I know, but I wanted to get this up for my friends suffering from heat exhaustion at the Library Leadership Institute for Massachusetts. Reports say that they spent the day in a non-air conditioned room all day when it was 90 degrees outside. It may have been upwards of 105 degrees inside!

• Michael Cunningham – dashing, elegant, hilarious author of The Hours and A Home at the End of the World, of which I personally hand sold hundreds of copies when I worked at Books & Company in the early nineties
• Thrity Umrigar – a surprisingly frisky Indian novelist and memoirist who wrote The Space Between Us and more recently The Weight of Heaven
• Lynda Barry – the iconic cartoonist and author who, among her many achievements, inspired the best musical theatre song of the 21st century (so far)
• Barbara Hoffert – Library Journal book review editor, super-smarty, and uncanny Tracy Wright lookalike
• Our awesome publishing friends Talia Scherer and Virginia Stanley

I am so lucky that my husband is so fearless and is such a big dreamer. He gave me the wonderful gift of the opportunity to chat with Lynda and Thrity about menopause and to smoke with Talia and Michael Cunningham in the rain. Does that rock or what?

The Graveyard Book

Me and Neil

Some of you may remember that I got my literary thrill last June at BookExpo America when i got to meet Mr. Gaiman, a thoroughly accomdating and generous chap who put up with my gushing and even posed for a picture with me.  You can read’s Neil’s amusing report on finding out about his Newbury win at his blog.  Oh yeah, and don’t miss CORALINE, the 3-D film adaptation of Gaiman’s outstanding young adult novel that opens in theaters near you on February 6.  Check out the first trailer for the film that Neil liked below.

Y’all also probably know that the whole world is facing a budget crisis. And what gets hit first in governmental belt-tightening? Not the police or fire departments, of course. “Non-essential” services like those the library provides.

So, we’ve been doing a lot of financial naval-gazing of late at work and I was reminded of this Unshelved comic strip by Bill Barnes and “Gene Ambaum” (not his real name).

Well, I decided to add up just how much my time is worth. I took the Boston city budget for FY 2008 and figured out what percentage went to the library. (That’s 1.6%.) Then I took the state budget, and since I’m generous, figured out how much went to all libraries in the state. (0.1%. I felt okay about using the figure for all librarys because a. It’s a really small amount and b. I wasn’t going to figure out how much sales tax I paid, so I figure it evens out.)

Next, I figured out how much I made from BPL after taxes. I divided that up by the number of hours I’m meant to work in a year to arrive at an hourly monetary value for my expertise. Next, I figured out how much I paid in city property and excise taxes. I also figured out how much I paid in state taxes from both my sources of income in FY 2008. ( I also teach a course at Simmons College.)

Well, what do you know? According to my figures, if we ran things by the amount of money a person puts into “the pot”, I am entitled to 70 minutes of my time a year. I would be entitled to a much smaller portion of the president’s time a year and a bit more of an entry-level librarians’ time. But I think it all evens out to about 70 minutes of staff time overall.

Now, of course, I am not recommending that we cut service off after any period of time per person. That’s crazy talk. But I do hear a lot of unusual, personal suggestions for changes in service from the same few individuals. Ironically, some of those individuals don’t even live in the city. Guess how much time I’d get if I lived in, say, Cambridge? About nine minutes.

What I guess I’m saying is that I hope people are ready to face the fact that their concerns are part of a larger collective. We pay taxes in order to fuel collective goals, not to make sure our tiny piece of ground is cared for according to our specific terms.

Anyway, food for thought.

***UPDATE***

Since this post has been picked up by a few other blogs, I really guess I better be sure to point out that it’s entirely tongue in cheek. Well, not entirely. We do want to offer more user-participatory services on the BPL web site. But dating services and personals are not part of our current goals.

See?      

Augusten Burroughs came to the Boston Public Library last night and it was one majorly successful event.  We filled the 350 seat auditorium and piled an additional 50 – 100 people in the overflow area who watched Augusten read on video.  Then they all had the opportunity to get their books signed and have their pictures taken with the very popular author.  This is what the BPL needs, more big author events that appeal to a young audience.  I’m on the case.

The craze began with the lead up to the 14th Annual Chlotrudis Awards. If you’re reading this, I trust you know about the Chlotrudis Society for Independent Film. For those of you who don’t, you just need to know that it’s a film society that I started up about 14 years ago to teach audiences to view films actively. This past March 30 we celebrated out 14th annual awards ceremony at the Brattle Theatre with special guest Alberta Watson in attendance. We presented Alberta with an award for her career-so-far, and she was a delightful guest. Lots of fun to hang out with, very down-to-earth, passionate about the Chlotrudis-cause, and she gave a moving and heartfelt speech to boot. We gave out a host of awards, including Best Movie to ONCE, Best Short Film to Maria Gigante for GIRLS ROOM, and our own very special Buried Treasure Award (for a film that made less than $250,000 at the domestic box office and we feel deserves another look) to 12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST. Also receiving a new awards called The Cat’s Meow, was board member extraordinnaire, Bruce Kingsley, without whom Chlotrudis might have dissolved during difficult times last year. (Maria, Alberta, and Bruce are pictured left). And on top of all that, we performed not one, but two fabulous musical numbers. Hopefully they will be online soon, as will pictures from the awards.

Preparing for the awards is a massive undertaking, and one that pretty much consumes my life for weeks prior to the event. Fortunately, in recent years, friends and fellow Board members have stepped up and removed much of the burden from me. Beth, Allison, Scot… there’s no way this thing would happen without you.

Shifting into work mode, anyone who has read the paper or listened to WBUR in the past six months or so know that there are big, disruptive things afoot at the Boston Public Library. This is not my forum to talk about work, but let me just say about the BPL in general, it takes up a lot of my time, both actual and mental. On the broader subject of librarianship and careers, let me mention last week’s trip to San Francisco to attend the annual spring meeting of the International Coalition of Library Consortia (ICOLC). This was my first trip to ICOLC, which has been meeting for about 15 years, and for my job as Regional Administrator of the Boston Regional Library System, ICOLC is actually pretty relevant. Like any conference, there are moments where you wonder why you’re there, but overall, I learned some stuff, networked with a lot of great people, and really gained a valuable perspective about possibilities in my job. So while there was an emphasis on negotiating with vendors for consortial database licensing, I did get to generate some lively discussion on my favorite library topic du jour, using open source solutions in libraries. I’m still amazed at the resistance to even consider this among librarians, but it’s changing.

The trip to San Francisco wasn’t all work however, as I got to meet an online pal for the first time. Chriso is one nifty fella. He’s the drummer for a very hip band; he’s a total superhero comic book geek; he’s warm, friendly and a super host; and he’s adorable as all get out. We got together a couple of times and he showed me some different SF neighborhoods, including the Armory building where he works, the Mission District, the Castro, Moby Dick, and a couple of cool comic book stores where we spent a lot of money. We also shared some way fun conversation about the high points of the Legion of Superheroes (where I discovered that he’s my long lost comic-twin) and muxtape. Hey, you nice boys out in SF… he’s single. (I used the picture Chris took of of us because it came out better than the ones I took.)

Of course, when you’re out for nearly a week, returning to work can be hellish; and it was, but only for one day before I conveniently took off for a long weekend with my peeps (that’s hubby Scottie, and our best friends Gianna and Sarah) to Wellfleet on Cape Cod. Those of you who know me well know that the Cape (and particularly Provincetown) has been taking on a great significance in my life and may have a great impact on my future plans. Any chance to go to the Cape is a welcome one, so when a friend of Gianna’s offered us her vacation condo, we jumped at the chance. The four of us travel incredibly well together, and we’ve got a beautiful weekend to do it. True, we did spend a frightful 40 minutes or so meandering along backroads in South Shore suburbs after getting a little lost trying to find Route 93, but we took care of that and made our way to Wellfleet on Friday night. Saturday was a beautiful day, where we remarked on that oh-so Cape quality of light. It’s unique and just stunning. We spent the afternoon in P-Town, grabbing lunch, strolling and doing some shopping (both couples making some fun impulse puchases at M.G. Leather. Then we sent some time on Herring Cove Beach (we were not nude, as it was not nude sunbathing weather!) before returning home for tacos and a mini-David Lynch film festival. (We watched the European pilot for ‘Twin Peaks,’ which was pretty lame in our opinion, and Mulholland Drive.) And now it’s Sunday. What will we do today? It’s another beautiful day. We’ve got lots of movies to watch (like GODZILLA VS. MOTHRA and FOUL PLAY!) and an extra day off tomorrow. Of course, Gianna and Sarah aren’t awake yet, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Then it’s back home and the next couple of big events. Next week is the Independent Film Festival of Boston, which happens to coincide with both my mother’s birthday and my friend Mameve’s book release, just to make things even more hectic. And the week after that is the Massachusetts Library Association’s annual conference, which Gianna and I run. Maybe I’ll be able to take another moment to relax when that’s over.