Xenograffiti

by Robert Reginald

  Why? Why found Borgo in the first place? Why end the experiment in the last place?

  I have come to believe in the cycle of life, in the surge and release of energies, as simply a natural thing, a part of the working out of our respective existences. Each life contains within itself, I think, both sorrows and joys, troubles and elations. Some individuals seem to get more of one than the other at various times in his or her lifespan, but all of us experience our due share of ups and downs.

  We started Borgo Press for a variety of reasons, some having to do with the reinvestment of the large royalty checks that I was then earning for my reference books, others being the perceived need to fill a niche, and to provide for the world a place where genre critics, then just coming into their own, could have their words circulated and preserved in library collections. We made our share of mistakes, no doubt, but we also contributed a great many books to the world that would never have otherwise been issued—and some of these were well worth the effort.

  And we closed the press twenty-four years later for another assortment of reasons and self-rationales, justifications that were equally as valid as those of initiation. Among them were the necessity of preparing seriously for retirement from my university position, the gradual loss of satisfaction with what we were accomplishing, uncertain health, and the sense (true or not) that we were little appreciated for our work. In other words, the time had finally come, as it always does, for everything.

  During the next four years Mary and I worked on other lucrative writing projects, I took up the study of ancient coins and published my first essay on the subject, and we lived through a series of personal crises that had nothing to do with the business, as we gradually began clearing away the impediments (as we saw them) to our eventual retirement. An uncomfortable, suffocating entanglement with another writer was swept away into the trash heap of bad experience. Good riddance. Our only granddaughter, Whitney Louise Rogers, was killed on November 9, 2001. Terrible, unfathomable tragedy. A long-time family problem was finally resolved through separation, although it will re-emerge, we know, at some later date. And so forth.

  They’ve been hard years, but somehow we’ve slithered through the worst of them, albeit not wholly unscathed. Throughout this period we’ve somehow kept each other sane, and we’ve tried to maintain a positive face as one difficulty after another battered at the fortress of ourselves.

  And then, quite unexpectedly, we were given the opportunity in the spring of 2003 to slip through the back door of publishing again, and revive in a small way the Borgo Press imprint, under the aegis of another house, Wildside Press. How long and to what extent this revival will sustain itself, well, who can say? There are never any guarantees.

  But to be pulling on the strings again, to be back in the game again, if only marginally, is energizing and invigorating and, well, just plain fun! It’s one of the few things that I’ve missed from my previous life during these past few years.

  Not the business, but the editing. Not the demands, but the creativity. Not the yin, but the yang. At least for now.

  So I’ll do what I can one more time to bring people together, to facilitate the publication of worthy works that otherwise wouldn’t be preserved or read, to measure the marigolds anew.

  And perhaps, just maybe, the ghosts will leave me alone at last.

  39. ON BE(COM)ING A LIBRARIAN

  (2003)

  Of the twin contrails of my career (viz., my life), I have considered perhaps overmuch the leavings of my first and seemingly more exciting path, that of editing and writing and publishing; and have scarcely bothered even to mention the secondary and somewhat humdrum road that I have wandered during the past three decades, namely, the profession of librarianship.

  After all, as one pundit would have it, who but an old dog could love a librarian? We are become (and have long been) the butt of idle jokes and the distress of the academic community. Those who profess commonality with all subjects are privy to none—or so the self-proclaimed gurus of academe would have us believe. Nonetheless, we are the last remnants of the Renaissance Man and Woman still to inhabit the modern world, and that world has ever failed to appreciate our role and even our sheer necessity.

  For if Dante had to have his guide through the entangled underworld of the Inferno, displaying and interpreting to him the wonders and terrors of that unique underground universe, so too must the modern wanderer through the fields of knowledge possess his or her librarian as a constant companion, both to sift away the detritus of uncouth opinion and unsound fact, and also to point out the highpoints of the journey, sights that might otherwise be missed by those who have little more time on their hands than their own limited existences.

  Librarians serve as the active intermediaries between the student and the g(l)ob(u)s of information that permeate(s) the æther surrounding modern civilization. Some of that data can be found on the Internet, some exists in printed form within the millions of volumes housed in the great university libraries of this land, and some, well some derive from the irreplaceable judgment that an experienced librarian can bring to the interchange. It is not enough to find one disconnected fact buried in some obscure tome or entangled idly on the web. That ort of knowledge must be related to other bits of information to form a theory, a supposition, perhaps even a thesis.

  Librarians excel at such interventions. In a world which seems to be sliding ever deeper into triviality, fragmentation, specialization, and into noise, the ever-present noise substituted for careful thought, they represent one of the few elements that cries out for unification, common sense, yea, for some basic understanding of how things fit together and impact each upon the other. They represent an element of sanity and stability amid chaos and corruption.

  I had none of these thoughts when I first entered the world of librarianship. I had majored in English literature at Gonzaga University during my undergraduate years, and minored in classical Greek. The only possible profession to be reaped from such rampant nonsense was profession itself. In a rare moment of brilliant insight into my own character, I realized that I was not, perhaps, exactly suited to the role of instructor, even at the college level, and so I sought some other possibility for myself. I also disliked manual labor and general business, so the digging of ditches and pinching of pennies were ruled out at a very early stage, oh yes.

  What then? What career could possibly suit a young naïf devoted to the collecting and reading of books?

  I found myself most comfortable lurking in the stacks of the Crosby Library, where I could follow whatever bits of curiosities I was then pursuing to their logical ends—or at least to the limits of the resources held at Gonzaga, which (I understood even then) is not quite the same thing. This is where I belonged, I suddenly realized during my sophomore year. This is what I should be doing with my life.

  I had, of course, no idea whatever of what librarians actually did. The lust of books and the quest for knowledge drove me into the profession. I burned for them, and had done so, really, from about the age of four, when words suddenly and magically made sense to me. The magic enthralled me from the beginning, and it has never released its grip on my soul through the ensuing decades. Thus, I decided, I would surround myself with an academic library, a large library, and figure out the rest at some later date.

  School was never a problem for me: I could ace any tests and absorb any knowledge with astonishing ease. I had an almost eidetic memory for details, and I understood the relationships between complicated pieces of information almost instinctively. The University of Southern California offered me a graduate fellowship to attend their master’s program in library science, and I headed to Los Angeles in the summer of 1969.

  I was terrified. I had never actually been away from home for longer than a week or two in my entire life to that point, and I had no idea what to do. I borrowed a little money from my parents, stopped at a motel nearby, and looked immediately for housing somewhere off campus. I finally rented a
room in the house of an African-American engineer in the Adams District, a couple of miles distant from USC.

  This was not a happy time in America. I had no transportation, and walked to the university, or took buses to the outlying fantasy land of Hollywood. I lived through a number of unpleasant incidents and confrontations with the Black Panthers and others, but received more of an education than I had ever anticipated.

  The classes themselves, however, seemed somewhat funky, for the lack of a better word. Rather than hearkening forward to the onset of computers and their soon-to-be impact upon the library universe, they retrogressed me and my fellow students into a world that was part and parcel of the Depression era. The instructors were in their dotage, and their instruction at best failed to inspire. Was this the true reality of librarianship: the bland leading the blind?

  Well, of course it wasn’t. I completed my studies in 1970, and was interviewed for three positions, at USC itself, Occidental College, and California State College, San Bernardino. I deliberately restricted my choices to Southern California, which offered a warm winter climate, loads of great bookstores, and good career possibilities; and further narrowed my options only to positions in academic libraries. San Bernardino offered the best pay and the promise of much future growth, and so I started my stint there on September 1, 1970, at the well advanced age of twenty-two (a time of life in which one knows everything about everything).

  I have never left.

  In those days I was “green behind the gills,” as they say, bright and opinionated and intolerant of others’ views. I was hired as Periodicals Librarian, but the new building we were supposed to occupy in the summer of ‘70 had been delayed due to heavy rains, winds, and labor strikes, and we didn’t actually move into the six-storey structure until June of the following year. In the meantime, I worked the reference desk along with my compatriots, and learned how to catalog books. (I thought I already knew how to perform the latter task, but I soon discovered, as with so much else in life, that the application was vastly different from the theory.)

  Cal State was five years old and had about 2,300 students at the time that I joined the faculty; it now has 17,000. Automation was unknown in 1970; now everything that we do is affected by the pervasiveness of computers and data systems. One thing that hasn’t changed appreciably is the size of our staff: we had ten librarians (four of them half-time) when I started; we now have eleven full-time faculty, and three or four part-timers.

  But the world as a whole and the world of academe have altered in quite significant ways, and we librarians have had to move with them. When I started within the profession, we had the leisure to contemplate the long-term implications of administrative decisions and the changes that they might work; now everything must be handled on an ad hoc basis, because the time to think about the philosophical aspects of what we do no longer exists. This leads at times to unfortunate choices with unforeseen consequences.

  At the same time, the requirements for librarian promotion and tenure have been severely ratcheted upwards since 1970. Present-day hires must perform to the same standards in professional growth (i.e., publications) and campus service as the teaching faculty; and evaluations themselves are conducted at the higher levels of review by a committee composed of senior professors on campus. I was promoted initially based only on my performance as a working librarian; the standards changed for the Cal State System during the early 1980s.

  Of course, raising such performance standards is not necessarily a bad thing. The quality of the library faculty that we have hired in the past decade at CSUSB is superior on the whole to what came before. And the librarians themselves have benefited both from higher pay and access to the perquisites previously available only to the instructional faculty.

  But the flip side to this reality for most of my junior colleagues is a severe squeezing of the time available for them to do anything job-related, beyond the bare necessities. Once one subtracts reference desk hours and the time required to prepare, teach, and evaluate bibliographical instruction sessions, how many hours remain within the average work week to do service and growth? The answer usually is: not enough.

  Yet somehow the institution—and I—have survived and prospered, despite several hiccups along the way. At some point during those decades, I learned cataloging well enough to instruct others in the process. At another point, I developed sufficient administrative skills to run a major department successfully, although the stress ultimately had severe consequences on my health. Maybe I was even able to acquire a little wisdom along the way.

  Now I spend most of my days acting as collection development officer and mentoring the junior faculty, trying on the one hand to enrich and build our collection with very few financial resources, and simultaneously attempting to make the evaluation process less of a mystery to those entering it for the first time.

  After my near-fatal heart attack in the summer of ‘03, my tasks were reconfigured just to include acquisitions, while removing the overall supervision of Technical Services. For me this one action has revitalized and reinvigorated my library career. But I don’t have many years left to devote to the profession. In ‘05 I intend either to retire completely or to drop to half-time status. Thirty-five years is perhaps long enough to have served at one institution. Time to do other things, if I live so long.

  So why do we exist? What was so important about my three decades at CSUSB, or any librarian’s contributions to the profession? This is what I’ve come to understand:

  Librarians exist as a bridge between students, the teaching faculty, and the general public, and the almost innumerable resources currently available through any academic library. Those resources are now so extensive, both in print and in on-line form, that the average person cannot possibly find his or her way through the myriad of materials available, and make any sense of them.

  A Google search is not a substitute for effective research. Random facts do not create by themselves a reasonable and reasoned exegesis. There is a vast difference, a difference little perceived by most students or even by some teaching faculty, between “data” taken as a whole, and the use of that material to produce a structured thesis. And it is precisely in this arena that librarians can be our guides.

  Like Dante wending his way through the world of the Inferno, we need such guides to explain, explicate, and extend our vision of the information available to us, and what it actually means. During the past five years, I have increased the Cal State community’s access to full-text, on-line journals from nothing to over 24,000 titles. Even keeping track of these offerings presents a major challenge to my staff; actually delineating how each periodical is presented in their respective databases is a far more difficult task. And this particular problem represents just the very beginning of the problem of information overload.

  This is not to say that the knowledgeable individual cannot find his or her way through the myriad of data resources that the average university library now offers. As an undergraduate, I delighted in ferreting out obscure tomes situated in remote parts of the USC collections. But students today have on the average as little free time to explore the vast vistas of knowledge as do their instructors.

  Librarians can provide significant help, when they themselves know the resources under their tutelage, and when students or teaching faculty bother to inquire. All too many times, of course, we never see them. Reaching our core audience has long been one of the great challenges of modern librarianship.

  Still, it’s been a fun ride. Being the spider at the heart of the web of knowledge throughout all of these years has given me an access to the world of learning that most writers or researchers can scarcely even imagine. I have learned so much—and have so much to learn—that my life as a librarian and author has been enriched beyond any reckoning that I can now make. This is what I was born to do. This is what I live to do.

  And when I have finally retired from Cal State San Bernardino, I will continue to use the collectio
n to bolster my writing skills and my personal knowledge. One does not just walk away from a lifetime of learning.

  40. KO’D AT THE OK CORRAL

  OR, THE PERILS OF PULLULATING PSEUDONYMITY (2003)

  In a previous life I was once (true confession time now, my kiddie-cats!) just a whit more ambitious than I am in these latter days of post-near death experiences; and I was then much more eager to do that which was necessary, whatever that might be, to achieve my (self-perceived) overdue share of literary fame and fortune.

  O tempora, o mores! What a foolish creature is made of a little literary f(l)op.

  And so I allowed myself to be seduced by the dark side of the farce.

  When a well-known writer asked me to create a detailed background for his fictional world, I was flattered enough—and oh so willing, for I saw therein the many possibilities-to-be—to perform like the trained monkey that I had now become; and I produced in quick-quack time a set of somewhat marvelous (or so it seemed to me) vignettes and stories and creative schtuff in general, all for the use of this individual who was much better known in Literary-Lollipop-Land than lowly moi (but not for long, I knew, oh, not for long!).

  And then I was asked by this same individual to put to paper a full-length fiction set in this same milieu, which le grand auteur would peddle under our joint bylines (his having primacy, of course), and for which he would inhale half of the mucho moolah that would soon miraculously appear (since it would be his name and his agent selling the novel)—but, but, my career would suddenly blossom beyond my wildest imaginings (and they were pretty wild, let me tell you), and well, well, further possibilities were certainly possible, weren’t they?