The Arrogance of the Librarian

I am a librarian. I like my job a lot. Unlike my previous career, it doesn’t require sixteen-hour shifts of hard labor plus homework, so I view it as my retirement. But sometimes I have to deal with other librarians, and then my job borders on intolerable.

I have just returned from one of those self-congratulation sessions that librarians euphemistically call “conferences.” Because librarians’ egos are inversely proportional to librarians’ relevance, they currently border on god-complex, and this particular conference was perhaps the worst example of librarian narcissism I have yet witnessed. Last year, I was at a conference where the attendees were invited to applaud themselves for the heroic virtue of being librarians, but this conference was even worse.

The keynote speaker was James LaRue, who is both a stuffy elitist and extraordinarily dishonest, and whom I might discuss at length in another post. Most of the sessions were spews of empty jargon, but the worst was the final session I attended, on large language models, which have unfortunately been dubbed “A.I.”

The presenters had little to say, though they showcased some fascinating new software such as Perplexity, Connected Papers, and Scispace, which can amass, analyze, summarize, and show the inter-connectedness of academic papers, as well as determine if a consensus exists.

What was striking about this presentation was not the tools it showed off but the naïve optimism of its presenters. It is no secret that the use of the library has been declining over the last few decades largely because of the rise of the internet. In response, librarians have invented what they call “information literacy,” which nobody can quite define but which every librarian writes or talks about. Supposedly, perhaps because they are surrounded by books all day, librarians have a unique ability to winnow fact from fiction and identify “fake news.” Everybody would realize how important librarians are if we could just get those poor, benighted, Google-using souls back in through the library doors.

In reality, anyone who’s spoken to a librarian for more than five minutes knows that librarians have no special powers when it comes to discerning facts. The aforementioned James LaRue, a rather prominent librarian, can’t even make an argument without ad hominem, a red herring, or whataboutism, let alone keep his facts straight. Once you cut through the jargon and wade through the self-righteous academic articles on the topic, “information literacy” is little more than a desperate attempt to prove that the library, and the librarians, are still relevant in the information age.

But according to the presenters of this talk on “A.I.,” software like Perplexity will finally–finally–bring our patrons back to us. Now, at last, everyone will need librarians again: After all, how could anyone figure out how to use the new software without Dear Librarian to show him? How could he type a question into a prompt without a librarian looking over his shoulder and suggesting better keywords?

This claim was baffling, and it was made all the more baffling by the impenetrable jargon it was couched in (librarians, we were told, will become “conveners of communities of practice”). But it reached the heights of absurdity when the presenters displayed a new program they had “designed” and “written” without knowing how to compose a single line of code: They simply asked ChatGPT to write the program for them, and–ta da!–it worked.

You read that right: People who cannot write a single line of code believe they will be the new A.I. experts. This prophecy will no doubt prove as prescient as the prediction, back when the internet was new, that everyone would need librarians to catalog it. If these fellows did not hold their profession in such inflated esteem, they might have soberly realized the real implications of the A.I. software they were showing us: “Information literacy” can be automated. Librarians went all in on information literacy as proof that people will always need them, but now machines can do that, too.

Tragically, our librarians could have retained their relevance if they had only known their place. Despite all the recent misguided attempts to redefine it, what the library is, at its heart, is something everyone will always want or at least want to know is there: It is a warehouse for all the books that people want to have access to but do not want to buy. By extension, the librarian is a glorified book shelver. That’s it. Everything else is hubris.

But I have a master’s degree! a librarian might object. Yes, I have one too. That degree is worthless. It is nothing but an expensive piece of paper that serves as a magic pass for getting a library job. Librarianship was one of the earliest casualties of American credentialism, the mindset that has wrecked our universities and turned them into overpriced extensions of high school. If we librarians are honest with ourselves for a change, we will admit that any reasonably intelligent person could take over our jobs tomorrow and do them as well as we do within a month. Perhaps he could do our jobs better than we since he would do them without writing any faux academic papers about convening communities of practice.

But because librarians have refused to know their place, they have not only made grandiose claims about their importance but have alienated their natural allies–that is, engaged parents who want to impart early literacy to their children. Keeping the parents around should have been simple, but for at least two decades now, or perhaps more, librarians have treated parents as their sworn enemies. Oh, they don’t say that outright, of course; they couch it in diplomatic language. But even a cursory familiarity with the literature on such subjects as children’s libraries or book challenges will leave a reader with the strong impression that librarians view parents as little more than a hostile force to be circumvented. This underlying hostility has finally broken out and become explicit in the absurdity of “drag queen story hours,” which are an overt, no longer subtle, effort to defy parents and corrupt children. And this is not guesswork on my part, either: There are academic papers specifically describing drag queen story hours as having that purpose.

Of course, this open hostility from the librarians has met with an equally open hostility from parents. Still, the librarians will learn nothing from the encounter because their gigantic egos make self-reflection impossible. In fact, James LaRue was there at the conference to complain about (and misrepresent) those angry parents. His conclusion, at the end of his hour-and-a-half speech, was that we need to groom their children even harder.

Those angry parents would be gone tomorrow if the librarians would take just one drop of humility and go back to sleepily cataloging their books and shushing their noisy patrons. But they won’t because, to an egomaniac, that one drop looks like poison.

Revisiting the Landscape with Dragons

A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child’s Mind by Michael D. O’Brien. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. 1998. 261 pages.

Years ago, I started my blogging career on my other, now happily defunct, website for the sole reason that a book had annoyed me. I wanted to create a site dedicated to refuting that book, but because I am paradoxically contrary by nature yet also conflict-averse (as well as scatterbrained), I never did much to accomplish that task. I want to turn to it now: I am going to discuss the book that started me on my blogging journey and then, I hope, have done with it for good.

The book in question is A Landscape with Dragons by Michael D. O’Brien, a little-known Catholic novelist who writes dense, religiously themed, and very niche works. He is a well-read and intelligent individual. A monk of my acquaintance, who knew him personally, once called him a living saint. In his nonfiction, however, O’Brien comes across as plum crazy, and it was his apparent craziness that irritated me.

But O’Brien, I have found, is a Cassandra: He has told the truth and made accurate predictions, yet he has done it so unconvincingly, and has made such poor arguments, that he is easy to ignore, dismiss, or mock.

So I am here to say: Mea culpa, Michael O’Brien. You were right about everything.

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Why ‘Sailor Moon’ Is Not Feminist

The hot take to end all hot takes.

I have sometimes argued that Sailor Moon fans give Tuxedo Mask a bad rap, treating the character as if he is utterly useless when he in fact makes an important contribution to the Sailor Moon saga, albeit in a role that becomes more peripheral as the story advances. Because of my unorthodox view of this subject, I recently made a tongue-in-cheek comment on Twitter. Then, to my surprise, all hell broke loose—and I’m not sure that’s a metaphor because some of my interlocutors act as if they’re demon-possessed. This is not the tweet I would have selected to go viral, but beggars can’t be choosers:


To give some context, @t_unmasked is an account dedicated to Sailor Moon trivia. It revealed that an old Sailor Moon video game had two modes, hard and easy, which it facetiously listed as “boy” and “girl.” It’s not clear what joke the game’s designers were trying to make; possibly, and indeed most likely, they were referring to the fact that, in the Sailor Moon universe, girls have the most powerful magical weapons. But another possibility, assumed by @t_unmasked and most of her readers, is that the designers were implying that girls are bad at video games.

My cheeky comment was supposed to point out that, contrary to the beliefs of many of the franchise’s American fans, such a joke would fit right in with Sailor Moon’s sense of humor, as I’ll explain below. But nobody understood what I meant, and @t_unmasked’s followers quickly dogpiled me, ranting and raving like a pack of banshees.

I was flabbergasted by this response because I thought what I said was obvious, being right there in the show. But @t_unmasked, to my surprise, went so far as to claim my comment was “factually incorrect,” as if empirical science had refuted my opinion about a Japanese funnybook.

And that was the nice, civil response. Most of the responses I got were more along the lines of, “I HATE YOU YOU BASTARD YOUR MARRIAGE ISN’T REAL YOU’RE GOING TO DIE ALONE JUST SAY YOU HATE GIRLS I HATE YOU I HATE YOU I HATE YUUUOOOOO!!!1”

I started this blog because I noticed that discussions of magical girls were, let us say, philosophically monolithic, so I thought a fresh perspective was warranted. Since I write in a niche genre and am bad at SEO, I get few interactions. Doing my own little thing in my own little corner, I sometimes forget that a lot of you are crazy.

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Why Men Don’t Read Books by Women

A writer for The Guardian, M. A. Sieghart, has asked the perennial question, “Why do so few men read books by women?” Curiously, the people who always ask this question never follow up by asking how women authors might better appeal to men or how the publishing industry might get a better share of the underserved male-readership market. No, the assumption is always that men have something wrong with them and need to change. It’s not the books that are the problem, it’s you. The customer is in the wrong.

Sieghart notes that the top-selling lady novelists have a disproportionately female readership, but though she treats this as a mystery with sinister implications, it’s not actually hard to understand what’s going on when she names who those top-selling authoresses are: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Danielle Steel, and Jojo Moyes.

She proposes the answer that men don’t take women seriously. The actual answer, obvious to anyone outside Sieghart’s elitist cultural bubble, is that men aren’t interested in what those women write. Danielle Steel writes trashy romances. Jojo Moyes writes trashy romances. Jane Austen wrote non-trashy romances. Atwood writes a variety of things but is best known for a pearl-clutching feminist screed that confuses Baptists with the Taliban, though she also churns out an occasional apocalyptic science-fiction novel disturbingly obsessed with child pornography.

To put it briefly and bluntly, men don’t want to read that shit.

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‘Gangsters in Space,’ or, What even Is Science Fiction?

An author among my mutuals recently made a comment on Twitter with which I disagreed, and only too late, after expressing my disagreement, I realized I was diving back into the endless debate over what defines a genre.

So, here is the original comment from Misha Burnett:


And this was my reply:


My further discussion on this subject follows after the break:

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On the Emasculation of Men’s Entertainment

Adam Lane Smith, an energetic and prolific author as well as a psychologist and self-help guru (two careers I consider deeply suspicious, admittedly) has an interesting essay on the degeneration of some beloved franchises in an essay entitled “The Scheduled Murder of Men’s Entertainment.”

In particular, he discusses the Star Wars sequels and what they did to Luke Skywalker, but he goes into greater detail about the God of War video-game franchise, which I admit I’m not familiar with.

Kratos slinks away from Greece in shame, finds a wife, has a son, and then neglects and abandons them both. When he is around them, he spends all his time agonizing over how ashamed he is of himself and everything he’s ever done. He’s hiding from the entire world and from himself. The makers originally intended to show him fat and out of shape. His (now dead) wife lays out a plan to reunite the verbally abusive deadbeat dad with his resentful son but she has to trick them both into doing it.

Following the tendencies of two of his professions, Smith delivers an analysis of this that is compelling:

The problem is that the creators are espousing a very specific post-modern nihilistic outlook brought about by weak fathers or absent fathers. Modern creators supported by Hollywood and big corporations have crushing attachment problems and broken relationships with their own fathers for a variety of reasons. They’re used to their saintly single mothers conditioning them to despise their own fathers. Men grow up worshipping their mothers, and women grow up seeing all men as worthless children incapable of real love.

As I read this essay, I keep hearing in my head the line from Fight Club: “We’re a generation raised by women. Maybe another woman is not what we need.” Of course, Fight Club meant this as a nasty joke (every generation ever is raised by women, as the audience is supposed to realize when hearing Tyler Durden pontificate), but Lane is serious, as have been many other commentators on the same subject.

The concern that the current trajectory of civilization is emasculating has been around for a while, going back at least to the publication of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest but probably predating that. The Fight Club novel, also, immediately predated several nonfiction works on the same theme, and the film adaptation became a movie of choice for a lot of Gen-Xers probably because that theme was already in the forefront of the national mindset: The director intended the movie to be ironic, but many of us viewers treated it as dead serious.

Back at the end of the 1990s, these fears of emasculation were easy to dismiss—but that is no longer the case; now that the American Psychological Association has come right out and declared manliness a pathology, claims of attack on manhood cannot be called mere paranoia.

Sharp observers have noted for years that popular entertainments consistently treat fathers as worthless deadbeats or at least fools. This probably traces to Freud, but it has become most pronounced in the last three decades. Smith makes keen observations of the otherwise inexplicable destructions of characters such Luke Skywalker and Kratos: The storytellers responsible for these works simply cannot imagine a man growing old without also becoming crotchety, worthless, and a deadbeat. It is an ugly mixture of self-hatred and, more importantly, hatred for daddy.

Smith’s suggested solution to this problem is more stories that showcase manliness and masculine virtues, some of which he’s written himself. He’s correct that we now have a dearth of these: Simply browse the latest children’s books available at your public library, and you will see a quite a selection of grrrl power (and a peppering of smut, which blue-haired librarians love to give to children), with very few works designed to interest boys.

Admittedly, I prefer to write stories about girls myself, but I begin to think it’s time to ressurect the classic pulp genre of manly male adventurers who have young boys for sidekicks, in the vein of Terry and the Pirates or even Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I don’t think any of the “pulp revival” authors have shown much interest in writing child characters, so maybe I should consider filling that gap.

Tropical Pedo Beams, or, The Danger of Roman Polanski

I recently came across a thoughtful and challenging essay entitled “Slippery-slopism and False Gods” by Paul Lucas. I will summarize his thinking in order to make my own comments, but I am unlikely to do him justice, so I invite you to read his own words.

The case he makes is that it is morally wrong to consume the art of morally depraved artists both because this gives the artist further financial support to practice his depravity, and because that depravity is almost certainly injected, perhaps in a subtle fashion, into the artist’s work.

That is an extremely brief summary; if you are inclined to dismiss that out of hand, I again urge you to read the original.

Lucas makes his case well, using Roman Polanski as a concrete example. Polanski committed a variety of vile acts, including drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl, before he escaped justice. He also regularly got standing ovations and spirited defenses from Hollywood types—the same Hollywood types who would later, hypocritically, throw Harvey Weinstein under the bus when they realized which way the wind was blowing.

Lucas argues that defending the art of a wicked artist leads inevitably to defending the wickedness of the artist himself, hence the “slippery-slopism” in the title of his essay.

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‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 3: The Director’s Cut

Before we get into a further discussion of the themes of Alien, I want to spend a little time on the director’s cut, which released in 2003. Ridley Scott went back over the film, tightening up parts and adding in a few deleted scenes. Unusually, the end result was a minute shorter than the original theatrical release.

My personal opinion about “director’s cuts” in general is that I don’t like them. In my experience, more often than not, a director’s cut is analogous to a novelist who goes over the head of his editor and includes a bunch of material he was advised to take out. More often than not, it’s material the final product was better off not having.

The biggest change in Alien is a scene near the end in which Ripley finds two of her crewmates cocooned into a wall by the alien’s secretions, a scene that anticipates the alien hive full of ill-fated colonists in the sequel—a concept James Cameron apparently came up with independently. Although kind of a welcome detail in hindsight, it disrupts the tension of movie’s climax, and for that reason the film is better off without it.

Also, I have twice now seen fans interpreting this as depicting human victims transforming into alien eggs, something that would contradict the alien life cycle that the franchise ultimately developed, though I admit this interpretation does not appear to me to be warranted by anything in the scene.

The only included scene that I thought made an improvement is after the first crewman, Brett, gets killed: Two others rush in to see the alien dragging him away, which makes for a better transition to the next scene.

Aside from that, most of the changes are almost impossible to notice except to someone who’s memorized the film.

I thought something similar when I watched the theatrical and director’s cut versions of the sequel Aliens side-by-side. Aliens is an action movie, and the theatrical version is faster-paced and more intense. The added scenes—a monologue by a marine, a pointless subplot featuring automatic gun turrets, a lengthy scene featuring the doomed colonists—accomplish nothing except slowing down the action. Again, there’s one exception, the detail that Ripley had a daughter who died while Ripley was in suspended animation, which anticipates her relationship with the orphan girl Newt.

Also, I have to add one additional curiosity: I have never thought Alien, with its deliberately slow pacing, was very scary. I recently showed it to the magical girl for the first time, and she made the same comment, that it was an impressive film but not particularly frightening. She was clearly much more moved by Aliens, which made her jump or squeal several times and during which she showed a lot more emotional engagement.

‘Alien’ vs. ‘Bloodchild,’ Part 2

Today, as promised, we continue to compare and contrast the famous and influential film Alien with the less well-known but nonetheless celebrated short story “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler. In this essay, I will tease out some of the themes and concepts behind Alien.

For much of the content in today’s post and in subsequent posts, I am indebted to Xenopedia, the Alien vs. Predator wiki, where hardworking fans have compiled a lot of history and trivia, as well as an essay I read many years ago and have not (alas) been able to relocate.

It was this essay, of unknown title and authorship, that first made me aware of the sexual symbolism behind the creature designs and situations in the Alien movie. The premise of the essay was that Alien is ultimately about “fear of female sexuality” (that men are terrified of horny women is one of feminism’s most popular canards). Although exhaustively explaining the film’s imagery, the essay failed to make its case, and I came away from it with the opinion that Alien is a mishmash of sexual menace with no real point behind it—an opinion I still hold, and which I will ultimately defend.

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The Missing Cuteness of ‘Doom Eternal’

Featured image: “Drinks, Blood, and Vacation!” by WMDiscovery93.

(Spoilers.)

The highly anticipated Doom Eternal, which treads some of the same ground as Doom II: Hell on Earth, released today, and some mad lads have already played through the whole damn thing.

I’ve long been intrigued by Doom and have often wished for a respectable interpretation in another medium such as movie or novel, though most such attempts have been flubs. There was the series of Doom novels by Daffyd ab Hugh and Brad Linaweaver, which reinterpreted the demonic invasion as an invasion of space aliens, thereby entirely missing the point, and there was also the widely panned movie starring Dwayne Johnson, which reimagined the demons as genetic mutations.

do understand there is a novelization of Doom III, which I only learned of recently, but aside from it, interpretations of Doom into other media have shied away from the core concept of an invasion from hell—which is to say that they’ve missed the entire point.

Doom Eternal made some waves because of its promise that you might fight angels as well as demons, though the final product, if the cutscene movie posted above is any indication, suggests that the designers ultimately moved away from that idea. In place of God is some being called Khan Maykr, and in place of angels are the Maykr’s servants, who don’t do much except shoot beams of energy out of their heads. The story, too, seems sketchy, suggesting either that this cutscene movie is incomplete or that the game’s creators failed to flesh out all their ideas.

Trying to piece things together (I may have some of this wrong), it appears that Khan Maykr is doing what the UAC did in the first game, using “Argent Energy” to power her world, which would die without it. Argent Energy is created in hell from damned souls, so Khan Maykr lets demons destroy other worlds so she can preserve her own, though the demons cannot enter her own world, and she cannot enter theirs. The world of Argent D’nur formerly worshipped her as a goddess or prophetess, and she ultimately betrayed them, turning three Argentians into “hell priests” who assist her in the invasion of Earth, which is intended to gather more souls to provide her with energy.

Perhaps most interesting to longtime Doom fans, Doom Eternal makes it explicit that the “Slayer” who first appeared in Doom 2016 is in fact the same as the “Doomguy” of the original games. Somehow or other, the Sentinels of Argent found him and made him one of their own, and some continue to oppose him even after the Khan Maykr betrayed them. Doom Eternal not only refers to him as the “Doomguy,” but also uses some of his dialogue from the goofy “Doom comic.”

Perhaps most interesting, at least to me, is that Doom Eternal contains some Easter eggs referencing an obscure bit of lore from the franchise. The original Doom game ended with an image of a rabbit’s head on a stake; this image was meant to indicate that the demons had invaded Earth and therefore set up for Doom II. However, fans quickly got the idea that this was the Doomguy’s pet rabbit, and that he was slaying demons to avenge the rabbit’s death.

Rabbit head on a stake.

This got (semi?)canonical affirmation in the expansion Thy Flesh Consumed, which ended with a brief scene indicating that the dead rabbit was indeed the Doomguy’s pet, and that its name was Daisy.

There were a few small gags making reference to Daisy in Doom 2016, and she apparently appears in some gags in the new Doom Eternal as well.

Everything I’ve heard about the gameplay on this game indicates that it’s superb, but I’m not a gamer myself; I’m a story guy, and from what I’ve seen so far, I do think the story should have been fleshed out in parts. I started exploring Doom Eternal with the question, “What is the Khan Maykr?” and having sat through a cut-scene video of the game, I find I’m still asking the same question.

The game’s ending, too, seems anticlimactic to me. Although it looks like an epic boss fight, that’s pretty much it: The Slayer himself has personally gained nothing from all this hardship despite warnings and promises from other characters. It almost makes me think the Slayer should have had a love interest—but since that isn’t right for the character, it makes me think he should have had something else to to care about, maybe a pet or mascot character.

interestingly, because of a delay, Doom Eternal ended up releasing on the same day as Animal Crossing: New Horizons. This coincidence led to a lot of fan art depicting the Doomslayer with Isabelle, a fan-favorite character from Animal Crossing.

The Doomslayer carries Isabelle on his shoulder.

To me, images like this just look right, as if this is what Doom is missing. The protagonist of Doom needs something personal to fight for, perhaps something to protect or avenge. Daisy could have served this purpose, and that may be why the brief image of a rabbit so captured fans’ imaginations in the first place.

There is, I understand, a “hidden” bunny in each level of Doom Eternal, a nod to the fan-created lore, but of course that isn’t anything quite like a fully developed character.

This isn’t a serious criticism of the game, but I think the Doom reboot may have missed an opportunity by failing to make Daisy the rabbit the cute mascot sidekick of this franchise.