Shhhhhhh! Happens

About the Book

What’s next for libraries now that books are slated for extinction? What’s next for librarians? Confronted by a rapid series of events—from the demise of the card catalog in the La Brea tar pit of inefficiency to the explosion of an asteroid known as the Internet—the whispering handmaidens of knowledge are struggling to decide whether they are a dying breed, an emergent species, or hopefully the third sex. What is the profession’s genetic makeup? How much makeup is genetic to the profession? How does it fit on board the brave new Information age? Or does it? And if so, how many cats should be allowed to come along?

Ordinarily you’d ask a librarian for answers to these questions, and she (or he) would ordinarily recommend—of all things—a book. She might even recommend this one. Except for the fact that, well, you see, once upon a time there was a succubus...

From the Introduction:

This must be how Joan of Arc felt: a voice inside that wouldn’t shut up, saying something she couldn’t ignore.

There are differences between Joan and me, however, some of them obvious. For example, she never faced such big issues as determining adequate double-rub ratings of upholstery fabric for the reading room of a public library. Nor did she ever consider quitting her day job (when it started double-rubbing her the wrong way) to follow the ineluctable career path leading from professional wrestling to action figure to governor. In fact, of course, she did leave her day job, but she made the jump to politics too soon and ended up a martyr, which doesn’t have much to offer in the way of retirement benefits.

Joan, Joan. What a shame she burned out so young! What a crusader she’d be against the McDo malbouffe that threatens French palates. Of course she could still, even at this late date, attempt a comeback by closing a deal with Disney, but she and the mouseketeers are pretty far apart on the issue of her voices and visions. On the one hand, Disney would like to use them as an opportunity for subliminally sky-written endorsements of safe sex. On the other, Joan has a problem with any external rendering of a spiritual entity, which seems to her in effect to concretize the abstract and thereby constitute an ex post facto deconstruction of an immutable meme.

For us too it’s the voices and visions that are the big difference. She didn’t hesitate to follow hers, whereas I don’t hesitate to run away from mine (when I’m not trying to figure out how to shut it out by implanting a pillow in my brain to cover my inner ears). She got grilled at the stake for hers, whereas mine couldn’t convince anyone that I am what people are looking for these days in a good soy substitute. Most importantly, her unshakeable faith very clearly understood that her voices, trailing clouds of glory, were heaven-sent, whereas my unfaithful shakiness makes it statistically likely that the sputtering, noxiousness-billowing noises I hear inside my head come from a succubus.

No, a succubus has nothing to do with decrepit mass transit. For the überwired among us, a succubus is like a computer virus attached to an e-mail that, when opened, melts down the hard drive by dancing around suggestively in front of it to the bump and grind of a down and dirty algorithm. In real-time actuality, of course, a succubus is a computer virus attached to an e-mail that, when opened, dances around suggestively to the bump and grind of a down and dirty algorithm, but it’s all a dream, and it’s your brain that’s melting down, folks. (If you’re doubtful that a dream has the right software to open an e-mail attachment, all I can say is it’s still in beta testing.)

The first time with the voice started out OK. I mean, it was a little weird getting a library science lecture from someone sounding like Margaret Thatcher and looking like Xena in full conqu

About the Author

Jud Barry is a bona fide librarian whose master’s degree in librarianship is from Emory University. At present he works for the State of Tennessee as director of the Watauga Regional Library in Johnson City. Watauga’s creative approach to providing networked services to its member libraries won for it the Tennessee Library Association’s Resource-Sharing Award for the year 2000. When not himself inhabited, Barry lives in Kingsport, TN.