mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social
Academic and Museum Librarian.
Focus on epistemology, data librarianship, specialised libraries and archives.
Bookish. Music enthusiast. LFC. African/Brazilian culture.
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I have known librarians like this haha.
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Let’s be real: Giles’ library isn’t a commons. It’s a sanctum. No signage. No catalog. Access is relational, not structural. You need to be in the circle to know what’s even there. That’s classism in action.
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The ideal librarian holds space between order and rupture—they preserve structure (Ranganathan), but break it when it excludes. Hierarchies aren’t sacred; people’s stories are.
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True LIS magic isn’t about hoarding rare books. It’s about knowing when to bring them to light—and for whom. It’s archival intuition paired with ethical timing. It’s stewardship without ego.
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But what about Ranganathan’s 4th law: “Save the time of the reader”? Giles does that with terrifying precision. His failures are systemic. His instincts? Pure LIS magic.
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We think wisdom lives in data or debate. But it often lives in the stories we re-tell to survive. Myth is a survival code. Fiction is where the unlivable gets symbolized.
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Psychoanalytic pedagogy reminds us: repetition, fantasy, projection — these live in literature. Literature isn’t for escape only. It’s for recognition too. Without fiction, the inner world gets flattened. No mirrors. No monsters. No rites of passage.
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Dillard does not idealize the human spirit, but she elevates the material world. The rock, the river, the insect — each is a vessel of meaning, if only we care enough to listen without preconceptions.
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Philology was once a bridge between language and history, between meaning and form. Its fall is not just disciplinary — it signals a cultural unwillingness to dwell in uncertainty, contradiction, and the dense beauty of language over time.
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As funding shifted toward STEM fields and the metrics of research became quantifiable, philology’s slow, archival work was seen as inefficient. Its rigor could not be graphed, its impact not easily measured.
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Post-war structuralism and later deconstruction reframed texts as systems of signs, displacing the historical rootedness that philology demanded. The text became surface; the manuscript, irrelevant.
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A boy stumbles in the field and is helped to his feet; a girl stumbles and the whole town hears it as a prophecy.
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Defund, privatize, criminalize.
Then rebuild a university.
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The modern university was once a semi-autonomous site for dissent, imagination, & internationalism.
For the state, that’s a liability.
Revoking visas, surveilling students, criminalizing protest—these are not excesses. They’re blueprints.
The academy is being retooled.
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The trucking slowdown is a quiet fiscal alarm.
Less movement = less final demand = lower sales tax intake.
States will tighten before the Fed pivots.
Powell is watching real-time tax receipts more than he admits.
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In Nox, the sibling elegy becomes a textual reliquary.
Its dialogic structure—between Latin, memory, and image—disrupts linearity.
This is not just a book about death; it’s a poetics of epistemic rupture.
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Carson’s Nox situates itself at the interstice of poetry, translation, and visual art.
It is a hybrid work emblematic of 21st-century lyric experimentation.
Its influence is not only literary, but archival and philosophical.
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Nox belongs to a lineage of American poetics that valorize absence and intertext.
Carson fuses classical philology with contemporary lyric innovation.
It is both artifact and elegy—bound by loss, not form.
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“Kayfabe” is a term from professional wrestling. It refers to the illusion of reality.
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If you’ve ever felt a library was sacred, Palaces for the People explains why. Eric Klinenberg makes the case that libraries are democratic infrastructure—quiet, radical, and irreplaceable.
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The ultimate attack? The shift from universalism to targeting. Instead of libraries as collective right, they’re reframed as services “for the needy.” This isolates us, stigmatizes users, and undermines public solidarity. Austerity begins by redefining who is worth serving.
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Public choice theory treats public servants as self-interested actors, justifying constant scrutiny and disempowerment. Librarians are framed as “bureaucrats” hoarding resources. It’s a paranoid economics that erodes trust in public expertise.
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Cost-benefit analysis—a central tool in neoliberal governance—fails libraries. How do you measure the worth of free internet access for asylum seekers? Or local newspapers for the elderly? You can’t. So they’re cut. Not because they don’t matter, but because they don’t profit.
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Under human capital theory, value is measured by market productivity. A child reading for pleasure? No quantifiable ROI. A reference archivist supporting grassroots historians? Intangible. So: devalued. Libraries suffer because they can’t be monetized cleanly.
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Library defunding isn’t random—it’s rooted in New Public Management (NPM): a late-20th-century doctrine that applies corporate management models to public institutions. Libraries become “cost centers,” not cultural commons. Efficiency replaces equity.
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Budgets reflect ideology. The chronic underfunding of libraries isn’t an accident—it’s the outcome of a post-Fordist shift where information is privatized and librarians, once stewards of collective memory, are sidelined. We need radical reinvestment.
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Librarianship is not dying—it’s being starved. Neoliberal austerity policies frame knowledge as a commodity, not a public good. What we’re watching is not decline, but engineered erasure.
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Crosswords in ink, glasses on a chain.
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China is building industries.
America is building apps, bubbles, and debt.
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China is out-planning America in every sector precisely because the U.S. confuses consumption with leverage.
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The American psyche is built on spectacle.
But the opposite of fame isn’t disgrace—it’s forgetfulness.
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De Tocqueville warned: the American myth was not power, but providence.
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You were taught your trigger was you—that the rupture belonged inside.
But Lacan reminds us: the ego is a misrecognition.
They projected their chaos onto your mirror, then called it love.
You are not helpless. You are not their fiction.