Jeffrey Bell on Sleep

Jeffrey Bell has a good post and an unusual video of Yogananda—whom I've never seen outside of photographs, though like all Yes fans I know his Autobiography of a Yogi.

Jeff makes the point that academics lack a culture of switching off from productivity or as Deleuze puts it, “becoming imperceptible.” I like this formula very much and it made me think about libraries, especially since I'm the system wide library rep. for UCD this year. We have a meeting coming up in Oakland.

I'm going to say that libraries aren't simply delivery services. They are huge piles of books that no one reads. And a good thing too.

1) We lack public spaces for introversion

2) OBJECTS lack spaces for introversion. There should be old things preserved from destruction, let alone new things like Ataris and Salman Rushdie's Amstrad computers (at Emory). New media is also fragile and ephemeral.

3) Imagine how we would feel if we realized that some head librarian at Oxford had decided, back in 1550, to convert all the manuscripts into printed books—and then burned the originals, in the name of space/progress/service/access/vomit.