Blaxploiting!

In my volunteer cataloging job I am working on a donation collection of 8000 videos given to the library by some guy who is seriously into all kinds of film. Classics, Westerns, thrillers, romantic comedies, foreign films, old TV shows, erotica--you name it, he had it, and now we do. Among the things I do when cataloging a video is assign a genre heading from a list controlled by the Library of Congress. Every time I browse that list looking for the right heading, I pass by "Blaxploitation films" and look forward to the day when I can use it.

That day has come. The collection is organized alphabetically by title and I'm in the midst of the B's, which brings me to such great films as:

Black Caesar
Black Heat
Black Voodoo
and
Blackenstein.

The titles are subtle, I know, but using my amazing librarian skills I figured out that they are all examples of the Blaxploitation genre. The seventies must have been a crazy time to live.

Don't you wish you had my job? (Except, you know, for the fact that I don't get paid for it.)

The Problem With Taking Classes Outside of My Program

My European studies professor's comment on my introduction to a paper on public library service for immigrants in Denmark, Sweden, and Spain:

"But why should we care about library services for immigrants? What can libraries do for them?"

Me:

"What can't they do?"

It seems I need to be more explicit about the assumptions of my profession.

What I Want For Christmas

So considering my profession, I probably should have heard of the Amazon Kindle before now, but I tend to be out of the loop that way. At any rate, wow. I like it. I've seen other attempts at portable reading devices, but I'm really impressed by this one. It seems to be lightweight and easy-to-use (or at least Amazon says so), and it uses ultracool technology that gives the screen the look of printed paper. And it makes perfect sense that Amazon.com would be the people to make the portable reading device that is actually going to work, since they already dominate the market in all kinds of related media so they're in a position to back the device up with a service that makes it usable, but for some reason the idea never occurred to me.

Considering Marvel Comics' recent foray into digital comics (and DC is sure to follow sooner or later), I'd say it's only a matter of time before I'm reading my weekly comics on the Amazon Kindle that you're going to get me for Christmas (yes, you--c'mon, it's only $400).

And you know what? I'm okay with that. Call me a traitor to librarianship. Yes, there will always be books that I want to have in a tangible form on my wooden (well, plywood) bookshelf, but I'd say the majority of what I read I'd be just as happy to read without paper. Why kill another tree?

Things That Have Made Me Happy in the Last 24 Hours

• Last night I wrote a short story that I'd been wanting to write for a couple weeks. I like it. The title is "The Changing of the God," a pun that according to Google only eight people have thought of before, ever, and even several of those seem more like coincidences of syntax than intentional puns. I hereby declare myself clever. Given my co-editors' approval, it'll be in the forthcoming Fob Bible, about which you will hear more in the near future.
• A very intelligent friend asked for help with a cataloging question this morning. I was quite flattered.
• I registered this morning to take advanced cataloging next quarter from one of the leading researchers in the field of cataloging and knowledge organization.
  
• I watched parts of a very funny movie this morning while cataloging it.
• This afternoon S-Boogie and Little Dude went to a friend's house while Foxy and I went on a date.
• We saw some very cool exhibits at the Bellevue Arts Museum, which has free admission on the first Friday of every month.
• We ate some very yummy avocado eggrolls and Thai chicken pasta at the Cheesecake Factory.
• We are now going to eat the very yummy cheesecake that we brought home with us.
  

It's a Small Gay Mormon World

A month or so ago I cataloged an anime movie called Akira. For some reason about half of the voice actors in the English dub of Akira use pseudonyms here that they pretty much don't use anywhere else. One of those is a guy credited as Jimmy Flinders, who IMDb says is really Cam Clarke. At the time I cataloged the video I checked the Library of Congress's Name Authority File and found no record for Jimmy Flinders and only one record with the name Cam Clarke. In the citation for that record Clarke is listed as the illustrator of a picture book adaptation of Carol Lynn Pearson's My Turn on Earth, which I thought was an interesting coincidence (because I happen to have seen that particular cornerstone of 70s Mormon pop culture), but also took as evidence that the Cam Clarke in LC's NAF was not my Cam Clarke aka Jimmy Flinders, voice actor for everything from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to He-Man: Master of the Universe.

So I set aside the info on Mr. Clarke until this week, when I finished the training that authorized me to create my own name authority records to be put into LC's file. As I did research in order to create a record for my Cam Clarke, though, I came across this Wikipedia article, which says that Clarke is best known in Latter-day Saint circles as the original "Jimmy Flinders," one of the lead characters of the other cornerstone of 70s Mormon pop culture, Saturday's Warrior. So he was Mormon, after all!

Then I came across this CD that Clarke recorded in the 90s, a collection of popular love songs recast from a gay perspective. Clarke, as it turns out, is a gay Mormon. (By which I mean that he has identified as gay for at least part of his life and he at least grew up Mormon, but I don't presume to say anything about his current identity in terms of the two things.)

He is also the stepbrother of Lex de Azevedo, popular LDS musician, which makes him the uncle of Rachel Coleman, the creator of Signing Time, a DVD series that S-Boogie watched nearly every day of the first two years of her life and of which Little Dude is now a devoted fan.

So I still don't know that voice actor/singer/gay Mormon Cam Clarke is the same as picture book illustrator Cam Clarke, but I do know that the former is related to Lex de Azevedo, who wrote the score for My Turn on Earth, and it's not unlikely that gay Mormon Clarke has some connection to Carol Lynn Pearson, the matron saint of gay Mormons everywhere. So I suspect the two are one and the same. I've emailed Mr. Clarke to ask him to clarify the issue, so hopefully he'll be kind enough to respond.

What I do know that I didn't know yesterday morning is this:

1. Leonardo is a gay Mormon.

2. He-Man is a gay Mormon.

(Apologies to L for the provocative pictures.)

I can't imagine anyone being very surprised about He-Man being gay. I mean really, all the man wears is furry underwear. Leonardo is a bit of surprise, as I would have suspected it first of his brother Donatello, but hey, for all I know, all four of them are. But it certainly never occurred to me that either He-Man or Leonardo might be Mormon. I'll tell you one thing for sure: neither of them went to BYU dressed like that.

100 1_ |a Fob, |c Mr., Master of the Universe, |d 1979-

400 0_ |a Mr. Fob, |d 1979-
400 1_ |a Fob, |c Master, |d 1979-
500 1_ |a Christensen, Ben, |d 1979-
670 __ |a His Possible topics of this post, http://www.fobcave.com, 25 Oct. 2007 |b (Mr. Fob; after finishing authority training will become master of the universe); sidebar (Ben Christensen; Seattle, WA; author of Getting out/Staying in)
670 __ |a His Self-demastery, http://www.fobcave.com, 25 Oct. 2007 |b (Mr. Fob; formerly known as Master Fob)
670 __ |a Personal interview with B. Christensen, 25 Oct. 2007 |b (Benjamin Glade Christensen; uses Ben Christensen in print publications, Mr. Fob online; b. 3 Nov. 1979 in Honolulu, HI)

First Day of Class

Today was the first day of the antepenultimate semester ever, of my life. I'm only taking one library science class this semester, and we don't meet until next week. It's a class on metadata, which intrigues me because metadata is cool and cutting edge, and it excites me because I know it'll be good for my career, but it scares me because I honestly don't have more than a very shallow idea of what it's all about.

Today I had a European studies class on migration and citizenship, which was cool because the students are from all kinds of majors and backgrounds, but also kind of intimidating because those majors are all things like geography and political science and international studies, which I think are cool, but I also know nothing about. I think I'll enjoy the class as long as I don't say something that betrays my ignorance in a horribly embarrassing fashion.

I expected my other class today to be an equally mixed-feeling experience, but in fact I loved it. It's a class on Spanish Golden Age drama, which is something I studied a little while at BYU and is one of FoxyJ's many specialties. I was worried about taking a class in Spanish when it's been almost three years since my last one, and I honestly don't speak Spanish very often anymore. As it turns out, though, I felt quite comfortable jumping back into Spanish literature--almost embarrassingly so, actually, as two or three other students and I pretty much dominated the discussion. (As a side note, I'm bothered by the knowledge that male students are called on by teachers twice as much as female students because just about every class I've ever taken has had twice as many women as men but it's always always always the guys who do all the talking. I'm bothered by this not only because of the cultural values it points to but because it makes me feel like I should talk less, but then I feel awkward because the professor is sitting there waiting for someone to say something and I have something to say, so I do, and then I feel guilty because I'm one of the four guys in the class who are dominating the discussion while the women keep their thoughts to themselves. Sigh...) At any rate, I felt confident and I had fun talking about literature, which is one of my favorite things to do.

Oh, and by the way, there's a reason BYU's Spanish program is considered one of the best in the nation and UW's isn't, but that doesn't prevent me from enjoying a few Spanish classes while I'm in the Library and Information Science program here, which does have a pretty good reputation.

Turning My Badge In, But Keeping The Gun

This morning was my last shift on a public service desk--possibly forever, but at least for a long time. It was a difficult decision to give up my student reference job, but at this point I have four years of experience doing reference and three months of experience doing cataloging, so if cataloging is what I want to go into, then volunteering in cataloging, even though it pays nothing, is more valuable to me than continuing to work in reference. And doing both isn't an option if FoxyJ is going to be working also, and experience has taught us that life is better for everyone when both the money-making and child-rearing responsibilities are shared between the two of us, so FoxyJ working is very important to me. Add to this the fact that teaching experience will look good on Foxy's upcoming PhD applications and the fact that I'm getting paid this year to go to school, and quitting my reference job was clearly a good decision. But a little sad nonetheless.

The aspect of the reference job I will not miss is the "public" part of public service. I've worked in public service for just about all of my working life, and while I think I'm pretty good at it, I don't particularly enjoy it. This can be attributed to the following three oh-so-charming aspects of my personality:

• introversion
• faux-intellectual snobbery
• social awkwardness

One of the most appealing aspects of cataloging, besides its anal orderliness, is the idea of being holed up all day behind a desk in a subbasement of the library.

What I will miss about my reference job is the regular interaction with the reference librarians and student reference specialists I worked with and the thrill of finding an answer to a difficult reference question. Ideally a year from now I'll get a nice cataloging job that has a few hours a week of reference desk time, which is not too uncommon nowadays. That way I can get out of the subbasement once in a while, but not have to deal with too many crazy people looking for books on building pipe bombs.

Mr. Fob the Prescient

In honor of Ingmar Bergman's death yesterday, I cataloged one of his movies on Friday.

Q&A with Mr. Fob

Boy, those mailbags are piling up here at the Fobcave! Let's see if I can answer a few of my faithful readers' questions:

Dear Mr. Fob,

Here's a random question not related to the current post. I notice that as the subject heading for "Fob," you've got this:

610 27 Fob (Friends of Ben writing group) |2 fob (11)

I have a question about the 2nd indicator. According to OCLC Bibliographic Formats and Standards, the 2nd indicator should be "0" if the subject heading comes from LCSH, but doesn't LCSH not include proper names, with the exception of fictional characters? Is a proper name considered to be part of LCSH if it's authorized by that venerable institution (even if it doesn't make it into ClassWeb or the red books)?

Also, I always thought that FOB was capitalized . . .

Sincerely,

Mentally Ill in Illinois

Dear Ms. Ill,

I was pretty sure I knew the answer to this one, but I checked with OCLC just to be sure. The rule says that a zero in the second indicator means that the heading conforms to LCSH, which means that it might be found in an LC authority file (which includes not only LCSH but also name authorities), or that it is "construed following AACR2." Technically speaking, Fob (Friends of Ben writing group) is construed following AACR2--it's formed exactly how an official LC name would be formed, and if there were literary warrant it could be submitted to the name authority file. But I'm pretending there's a Fob thesaurus and if there were then all the variations of Fob would certainly be in it.

As for capitalization, FOB and FoB are both acceptable forms when referring to the name of the writing group (but not when referring to the family name or the term designating members of the group or the verb describing what members of the group do), but I like to think that the name has transcended the letters from which it was formed and so I treat it as a proper noun rather than an acronym. In this sense, Fob follows the lofty tradition of such normalized acronyms as radar and snafu.

Dear Mr. Fob,

That was an excellent post in a series of...how do we count? four? five?

Love,

Conthused

Dear Conthused,

Well, that depends on what you're counting, and honestly I'm not sure what you're counting. Usually I start with one. All the same, thanks for the compliment.

Dear Mr. Fob,

I say you're "neosexual." ;-)

And if anyone has a problem with you staying married, screw 'em.

Yours truly,

Profile Not Available

Dear PNA,

That's an... interesting solution, but I'm not sure how my wife would feel about it. And frankly, I'm not sure I'm up to it. (But I do have a friend who's rumored to have accomplished a similar feat.)

I'll consider the neosexual thing, though.

Best wishes,

Mr. Fob

And that's all we have time for today, folks. Keep fobbing!

The Adult Version of Cataloging

This afternoon I cataloged a movie called The Adult Version of Jekyll & Hide, in which a man finds the famous Dr. Jekyll's notebook and makes his own potion, which manages to turn him into Ms. Hide (not Hyde). He then proceeds to have sex (in both his alter egos) with lots of women, kill a bunch of them, and castrate a man. In the course of the title credits--which I watch in order to catalog--there are like three sex scenes. I can't say I've ever watched porn at work before, and I can't say I ever want to again.


In case you're wondering, I chose the following subject and genre headings:

600 10 Stevenson, Robert Louis, |d 1850-1894 |v Film and video adaptations.
650 _0 Murderers |v Drama.
650 _0 Sex crimes |v Drama.
650 _0 Transgenderism |v Drama.
655 _0 Erotic films.
655 _0 Horror films.
655 _0 Feature films.
655 _0 Feature films |z United States.

Fobheadings OR The Extent of My Geekiness

The observant among you will notice that I've updated my post labels, which I refer to in the sidebar as Fobheadings. I did this because I'm a geek.

The subject and genre/form headings all come from the Library of Congress Subject Headings controlled vocabulary, except for a few headings that are specific to this blog--these exceptions are noted with "|2 fob" after them, as is the standard form of noting non-LCSH headings (and technically, I could put "|2 lcsh" after all the LCSH headings, but in practice that's usually assumed). The first three digits are MARC fields, referring to the kind of heading it is:

• 440=Series title
• 600=Subject (personal name)
  
• 610=Subject (corporate name)
• 650=Subject (topical)
  
• 651=Subject (geographic name)
• 655=Genre/form

In other words, 600-651 say what or whom a post is about, while 655 says what it is.

The two digits following the first three are called indicators; they are codes that tell us something else about the heading, depending on what kind of field it is. A "0" in the second indicator slot, for example, often means that the heading comes form LCSH, while a "7" often means that it comes from another thesaurus that will be named in subfield 2. (Technically, I could have put non-LCSH headings in a 653 [Index term--uncontrolled] field, but in a sense I am using my own controlled vocabulary here, and besides I just like it that way.)

In a real library catalog, of course, you don't see all these codes; they get translated into text like "Subject headings" and "Genre/form headings." But I'm not using the codes so much for their functional value as for their nerd value.

The hardest part of all this has been finding LCSH terms that corresponded to all the labels I had. I'm particularly proud of the one I used to replace Metablogging: 650 _0 Blogs |v Blogs. The first part means that the thing we're describing is about blogs. Subfield v is a form subdivision, meaning that the thing in question is a blog. A blog about blogs. Which, you'll notice below, is what this post is.



Note: Fellow library geeks are welcome to outgeek me by pointing out errors.

650 _7 |a Clergy impersonaters |z Italy |v Drama. |2 Fobheadings

(That title is for you, Katya. I don't think anyone else will get it.)

Today I cataloged a video of an Italian movie called Acqua e Sapone. It's about a janitor who poses as the priest who has been hired to teach a beautiful fashion model. I was having a hard time deciding on a Library of Congress Subject Heading to capture the idea of posing as a priest--I had Impersonation, False personation, and Impostors and imposture to choose from, but I was disappointed not to find a heading specifically referring to the act of impersonating a clergy person, as this seems to be a common theme in film. Off the top of my head, I can think of a handful of others:

• Sister Act and Sister Act II, where Whoopi Goldberg plays a showgirl posing as a nun.
• We're No Angels, where Robert DeNiro and Sean Penn play criminals posing as priests.
• Nuns on the Run, where Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane play criminals posing as nuns.
• Suits on the Loose, where Brandon Beemer and Ty Hodges play criminals posing as Mormon missionaries.

Surely there are others? Maybe if I get enough titles, I'll convince my supervisor to submit a new heading to LCSH.

Chat Reference

I've started doing chat reference for the library. The nice thing about this is that I can sign up for an hour and work from home. I can get paid to sit in front of my computer in my jammies. The bad thing is that I need to overcome my chat anxiety. This might be easier to do if someone had actually asked a question during the hour I was watching.

Decisions

Today I visited the library I worked in for three years. It was wonderful to see many of my friends there and to see the library itself--I love that library. I admired the newly-remodeled wing and caught up on all the gossip. I was happy (and somewhat disappointed) to find both that the library is doing fine without me--not that there was ever any serious doubt that it would, but still one can imagine--and that the library still suffers from all the same problems and silly politics it did for the three years I was there. I still love the library as much as I ever did, but it's so much easier now to see the things about it that made me miserable and would have continued to do so as long as I stayed. I left today feeling nostalgic for all the good memories the library brought me and pleasantly free of regrets over my decision to leave for Seattle.

I wish I could go back in time seven months, to when I was torn over the decision to stay in a place I was very comfortable or leave for something potentially better but terrifyingly unknown, and assure myself that this really would be for the best. I wish all decisions, big and small, could be made with the advantage of hindsight. Making them without it is scary as hell.

ALA Midwinter in Seattle

I went to the American Library Association's Midwinter Conference in Seattle this morning. Some highlights:

• The Washington State Convention Center is built on top of the freeway. And I was there. How cool is that?
• The reason I paid to go: I got to be there at the Youth Awards press conference where they announce the Newbery, Caldecott, and Printz winners. Most significantly, American Born Chinese, a graphic novel, won the Printz. Very cool.
• I was happy to learn that Allison Bechdel's Fun Home won the nonfiction Stonewall award.
• Lots and lots of vendors in the massive exhibition hall. They all wanted to sell me stuff. "Yes, ma'am, I'm quite impressed by your automated checkout system, but I'm afraid I don't need it for my home library."
• Free books. Nothing great, but they were free--today's the last day of exhibitions and nobody wants to haul them home, so they were giving them away for free or selling them at half-price. I picked up a couple free books, plus a free Transformers comic.
• There were cinnamon rolls, but, as per Foxy J's and my New Years goals making today a No Treat Day, I abstained.
• I finally got myself a Nancy Pearl Librarian action figure, and it only cost me six dollars. They were selling it for fifteen in the ALA store, but the Library of Congress booth had it cheaper in the first place, then half off.
• I got to observe the Best Books for Young Adults committee debating about which nominees to include on this year's list, then did obseved the Great Graphic Novels for Teens committee do the same.
• I spent the morning in downtown Seattle, which is just a cool place. I haven't spent a lot of time there since moving here, and whenever I have been downtown I've had little people in tow, which meant I couldn't spend a lot of time wandering around and enjoying the sights.

A Good Point

This evening my supervisor at the library was asking the standard questions about what I plan on doing after graduating, whether I want to go public or academic, and I gave my standard answers about how I love working in an academic library because the reference work is challenging, but politically and socially I am very much in love with the idea of the public library, to which my wise supervisor replied:

"Well, yes, but you can love the idea of the public library and still work in an academic library. You don't have to work in a public library to support the concept, you know."

Hm.

Crashing into the Library

It's the sense of touch. In any real city, you walk, you know? You brush past people, people bump into you. In L.A., nobody touches you. We're always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something.

--Crash

This morning Tolkien Boy, S-Boogie, and I caught the bus to the Seattle Central Library. We only made it there because TB's sharp eye noticed that the bus we needed to transfer to stops ON THE FREEWAY. I've never heard of such a thing, nor could I hear anything at all while we waited at the stop on the side of the freeway.

The downtown library is rather overwhelming. For a building whose architect was thinking so far outside the box, the inside feels very boxy. TB put it best when he observed that the library feels more like an airport than a library. It's very big and metallic and cavernous. That said, I really like how the sixth through tenth floors, which house the nonfiction collections, are built on an alternating slope that allows you to walk in a circle from 000 to 999--five floors--without walking up a single step. I'm also wowed by their automated book return and sorting system, which uses machines not only to check books in but also to file and sort them on carts.

After an uneventful busride home and a Veggietales episode about robots taking the place of humans (well, actually vegetables), S-Boogie went to her room to feign napping while TB and I watched Crash, which he had checked out from the library. I had wanted to see the movie since it won three Oscars, but I was also hesitant because I had heard that it basically showcases the worst of humanity, and who needs a movie to tell you that people suck? As the movie began, my suspicion seemed to be confirmed--thirty minutes into it, there didn't seem to be a single likeable character. Then, once a truly good character was established, TB and I agreed that he would be dead by the end of the movie--either him or his five-year-old daughter, anyway. I dreaded watching that scene, and then when it came it really was painful, but then the movie throws in a twist and suddenly the overall tone becomes a lot more hopeful. By the end of the film, just about every character comes across sympathetically, even the sickeningly racist cop who at one point felt up another man's wife in front of him, just because he could. Ultimately, the moral of the movie--or rather the moral I'm imposing on it because this is the conclusion I came to while watching it--is that even people who do horrible things are people. And people, really, aren't all that bad.

That, and that I should thank God every single day that I moved to Seattle and not L.A. People shoot each other in L.A.

Between spending the day with Tolkien Boy and S-Boogie, having dinner with the neighbors (who turn out to be rather cool people), and talking to my mom for an hour when we got home, today was a much better day than yesterday. And tomorrow night Foxy J and Little Dude come home. Life is good.

And speaking of socialism...

The other day I was working at the information desk with a reference librarian. She asked where I did my undergrad, and when I said BYU she asked if I'd ("what's it called? I can't remember the right terminology") served a mission, explaining that she was from Idaho Falls so she had a friend who was Mormon. Later on, she asked about my career goals, and I said that I was interested in the idea of working in an academic library, but my socialistic tendencies pushed me in the direction of the public library. She laughed and said that she'd never heard someone "who's done a mission" talk about his socialistic tendencies. Her Mormon friend, apparently, was rather conservative. (Imagine that.)

We all do missionary work in our own way.

iFob @ the iSchool

Look at me multitask: I'm writing this post while listening to an online lecture on gathering information. The online lecture is actually not for the distance course I'm taking, which is the sort of course you'd expect to have an online lecture in, but for a residential course called The Information Life Cycle. Besides this online lecture, I also have to listen to another online lecture and read 40 pages of text before the next six-hour class on Tuesday. Thankfully, this course only lasts two weeks, and after that it'll be replaced by two courses that only meet for two and a half hours each, two days a week. This all adds up to thirteen credits I'm taking this quarter, alongside about thirty-five hours a week of work. I am insane.

Thursday was the first day of class. That first class, coming right after Monday's new student orientation, has convinced me that much of this program is going to frustrate me. Don't get me wrong--UW's Information School is one of the best in the nation, right on the cutting edge of everything that's happening in the world of information. Which is sort of the problem. I am absolutely fascinated by the things all my professors are studying: the role of information systems in a digital world; the effect of online corporations like Amazon.com, iTunes, and Netflix on the way people interact with various kinds of information; and the information use habits of Zulu sub-tribes wandering in East Antarctica. I find these sorts of things interesting, but they're not what I came to library school to learn.

See, the fact is, I didn't really come to library school. I'm in a library and information science program, with enthusiastic emphasis on the information part, and a sort of techno-savvy, snooty frown on the library part. I certainly see the value in the study of non-library-related information science, and more than anything I think the faculty is trying to get us to broaden our horizons to other information careers beyond libraries, but I already know what I want to be when I grow up: a librarian. (All right, I'll admit that I wasn't so sure of this about eight months ago when I was hoping to get into an English PhD program, but that's in the past now, so let's just not talk about it, okay?) What I think the iSchool needs to do is create two programs--an information science program for people who want to grow up and work for Google, and a library science program for people who want to work in a good old-fashioned library (or even a new-fashioned one).

I take hope in the promises of the various faculty members that once we get past this first year we'll move beyond abstract theory into practical practice, and I confirmed this today when I attended the one and only live meeting of the distance course I'm taking. See, I'm not supposed to be taking any courses besides the three introductory courses intended for first-year students, but I'm impatient so I'm taking a course on youth services for public libraries. The course is taught by Seattle Public Library's youth services coordinator, and we're talking about all sorts of real life, real library issues. And this, my friends, is the reason I'm in library school--to learn how to be a librarian.

So I'll enjoy the information theory classes for the curious oddities they are, knowing that once I get through them I'll be able to take cool courses like collection development and cataloguing and intellectual freedom and advocacy for public libraries and even an ultra-cool course on readers' advisory taught by the librarian action figure herself. (Please note, Christmas shoppers, that I don't yet own a librarian action figure.) And then, one day, I'll be a real librarian in a real library, and I'll do real librarian things. And maybe some day, somebody will make a Master Fob librarian action figure. And then I will die a happy man.