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The Conservative Agenda is Incoming

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I didn’t live through the 50s but it’s a thoroughly recorded and re-mediated time in America. It is the fantasy of Baby Boomer conservatives: family, God, anti-Communism, free markets, and the economic prosperity that followed WWII made America great, and then liberals and hippies and counter-culturalists and atheists and Commies and free love and abortion and taxes and regulation and racial politics ruined it all.

They tried to get the 50s back in the 80s, in another version of the fantasy: Ronald Reagan cut taxes, won the Cold War, and made everybody feel better about being a family-oriented, religious, free-market patriot, but then welfare and crack and racial politics and abortion and women and gay people and liberals and the savings-and-loan crisis ruined it all.

And now, here we are. The conservative agenda is coming fast. It’s laid out in the new Mandate for Leadership (Project 2025) with excruciating enthusiasm for ending abortion, removing all federal regulation of business and energy interests, undoing government acknowledgement and support of LGBTQIA people, retrenching Christian religion in public life, and rejecting environmentalism.

I don’t know exactly what to do. Multiple worst-case scenarios exist for my family and me in those P2025 goals, along with oppression and chaos for people and parts of society that I cherish. Obscenity trials are coming back, folks, along with gay-bashing, dirty water, and probably measles. It’s time to make a plan. I wish I had better ideas about how to resist the nostalgic reactionaries.

Teaching podcasting in ENGL1101

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I teach a podcasting session. One class had a collective Twitter list for their three sections, and I was able to see reactions to my teaching throughout the process after the sessions, and I was delighted by the students’ response:

How Charlie Gets Things Done

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The Productive Librarian is a cool project run by Jess, a library director in North Carolina with a self-described “productivity obsession.” She interviewed me for one of her recent posts on how librarians get things done, i.e. how they keep productivity up and despair down.

I really enjoyed doing the interview — we exchanged emails to do the interview, so I had time to really consider my answers: how do I keep track of things? What do I do when I feel like the day is getting out of control? Here’s a small chunk from the interview:

How do you make sure that you have a productive work day?

Deciding what I will do is the biggest part of a productive work day. What task am I focused on? Am I working on this until it is done, or for a specified amount of time? The most insidious enemy of productivity is being unable to choose which project to engage.

How did you develop your productivity habits?

Through constant, desperate experimentation. I have been working this way for the past couple years after a very bad, overwhelming year. I’ve taken some of the Getting Things Done principles and made my own version that fits my personality.

Often librarianship requires time spent with patrons that isn’t always scheduled. How do you deal with that? How does it affect your productivity?

I never, ever, ever plan to finish something the day it needs to be finished, so I always have a buffer in case someone just drops by my office. If I’m ever pushed into that corner of finishing a deliverable on the day it’s due, then I’m out of the office or hiding in the stacks. And I let people know that I’m unavailable in that emergency time, so that someone can handled unscheduled events.

You can read the whole thing here.