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26/11/2021

4 ways college students can make the most of their college library
If you’re a student about to go to college, then perhaps you’ve scanned college orientation websites and social media feeds for glimpses of your new life. As a college librarian, I believe you should explore your college library, too.

This is based on countless discussions I’ve had with graduating college seniors who told me they regret they didn’t learn more about the library back in their first year of college. To help students avoid a similar fate, here are four things to know about libraries now.

1. Libraries can save you money on course readings
According to the College Board, colleges estimate that students spend approximately $1,200 per year on books and supplies. Students can cut down on that cost by borrowing books from the library instead of purchasing them from a bookstore.

Library staff work hard to make textbooks more affordable. One of the things we’re doing is putting assigned readings on reserve.

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What’s “reserve”? It’s a place where we keep course materials that faculty request for their classes. The print reserves collection is for physical books and, in some cases, printed “coursepacks” – which are photocopies of readings that have been bound together like a paperback book. Usually you’ll be able to check out reserve items for a few hours at a time. Sometimes the library will have several copies of each title.

In most libraries you’ll find print reserves at the circulation desk. The circulation desk is the place where all books are checked out, and it’s usually near the library entrance.

Many libraries also offer electronic reserves, with e-books and digital copies of book chapters and journal articles. You’ll usually find a link to electronic reserves on the library homepage.

Not all faculty members use reserves, so you’ll need to sleuth out how to find books and articles elsewhere in the library, too. Go to the library website and look for a link to the catalog, where you’ll find the titles and locations of all the books that the library owns.

For articles, look instead for links to journal indexes and databases. Unfortunately, these may be labeled with a variety of different names. You can always ask a librarian for advice.

2. Using the library can help you earn better grades
Research has shown that students who use the library tend to have higher GPAs than those who don’t. For this reason, it’s helpful to overcome any library anxiety – a term that describes the discomfort some people experience when they imagine walking into a library that is larger or more complex than any to which they are accustomed.

One of the best ways to overcome library anxiety is to get to know the library staff. Librarians regularly teach students how to find and use library resources. Educators who analyze student outcomes have found that making connections with staff and faculty bolsters students’ social capital, and social capital helps students succeed. Social capital is an asset that you earn by having a connection with another person.

Most librarians are accessible via email, chat or in person.

3. Libraries offer ideas for study breaks
Studying all night might seem efficient, but it doesn’t always work. Cognitive science says that when you memorize something, then set it aside, you’re helping your brain absorb the new information. You can start to envision potential study breaks at the library now.

Browse the library events calendar for yoga classes and stress-management workshops. Search the library catalog for self-help books, graphic novels and blockbuster movies. Follow the library’s social media feed and be alerted to stress-buster activities with board games, crafts and even cuddly puppies.

Since libraries now provide resources and services to promote student well-being, it’s easier than ever to take a study break when you’re at the library.

4. Get a job at the library to become a library expert
College can be expensive, even for students who receive financial aid. While some campus jobs make it difficult to carve out enough hours for both homework and paid work, library jobs can help you combine these two essential endeavors. When you work at the library, you’ll get paid to learn how to use the library. Then, you can apply what you learn in your classes.

Go to the college’s student employment website to search for part-time jobs at the library. There’s often a lot of competition, so be sure to contact the hiring manager at the library, too. If there aren’t any openings now, ask if your name can be put on a list to be considered for jobs in the future.

Students who work at libraries can list many benefits of their jobs. Students who staff service desks are taught how to use such essential library resources as the library catalog, article databases and interlibrary loan. They become power library users. They often tell me that they’re the go-to experts among their friends.

26/11/2021

Freud, Nietzsche, Paglia, Fanon: our expert guide to the books of The White Lotus
Freud and Nietzsche may not be what you have in mind when thinking of pool-side reads, but they are among the books flipped through in The White Lotus — the tense, new TV drama about the lives of the rich and privileged as they overlap at a Hawaiian resort.

Are Paula and Olivia truly delving into the mind of the anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon, or indeed, into Camille Paglia’s deconstruction of the Western literary canon? Or are they just books for show: an intellectual performance to hide secret glances and gossip?

Either way, frequent book covers speak loudly in the show. So here, then, is what the experts think you should know about these props and the stories they tell.

Maybe you will find one to pick up the next time you fly off for your island holiday. Just try to avoid the White Lotus resort.
The Interpretation of Dreams, by Sigmund Freud
“If I cannot bend the heavens above, I will move Hell.” Sigmund Freud quotes the poet Virgil to describe his aim in this book of explaining the meaning of dreams — by recourse to his theory of the unconscious mind.

The Interpretation of Dreams
Freud always considered Interpretation of Dreams his masterpiece, and ensured it would be published in 1900 to mark its significance.

Dreams had traditionally been viewed as either senseless or vehicles of communication with the divine. Freud instead contended all dreams involve the fulfilment of a wish.

In adults, he wrote, many of the wishes we have are of such an “edgy” nature their fulfilment would wake us up if staged too directly.

So, in order to at once fulfil these unconscious wishes and stay asleep, the “dream work” of the sleeping mind distorts the wish, using mechanisms of displacement (making insignificant things seem important, and the other way around), condensation (bringing together multiple ideas in single images), and transforming words into the seemingly random images.

Packed with striking dream analyses, and containing perhaps the best systematic statement of Freud’s theory of the mind, this book is an influential classic.

—Matthew Sharpe, Associate Professor in Philosophy

Read more: Unravelling the mysteries of sleep: how the brain 'sees' dreams

The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon
Psychiatrist and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon was born in 1925 in the French colony of Martinique. After the second world war, he studied in France. Later, in 1953, he moved to Algeria, joining the Algerian National Liberation Front.

The Wretched of the Earth
The Wretched of the Earth (originally published as Les damnés de la terre in 1961) was written at the height of the Algerian War of Independence. Based on Fanon’s first-hand experience of working in colonial Algeria, it is a classic text of postcolonial studies, examining the physical and psychological violence colonised people experience.

Fanon’s book is a lucid and damning account of the impact of colonialism: the ways it irrevocably changes people, their societies and their culture.

A passionate call to resist colonisation and oppression, The Wretched of the Earth was seen as dangerous by colonial powers at the time of its publication. It is still an important anti-colonial work today.

—Isabelle Hesse, Lecturer in English

Read more: Why Fanon continues to resonate more than half a century after Algeria's independence

Sexual Personae, by Camille Paglia
Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) is a provocative survey of Western canonical art and culture.

Sexual Personae book cover
On its publication, Sexual Personae was considered iconoclastic, groundbreaking and subversive for, as Paglia wrote, its focus on “amorality, aggression, sa**sm, voyeurism and po*******hy in great art”.

The book was both lauded for its insights into s*x, violence and power; and labelled anti-feminist and sinister in its views about gender and s*xuality.

Sexual Personae discusses the decadence and enduring influence of paganism in Western culture. Paglia connects s*xual freedom to sadomasochism and argues that our self-destructive and lustful Dionysian impulses are in tension with our Apollonian instincts for order.

Named after Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), Paglia’s book charts recurrent types in the Western imagination, such as the “beautiful boy”, the “femme fatale” and the “female vampire”. Through these personae, she discusses works such as the Mona Lisa, Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Particularly famous is the chapter on Emily Dickinson and Paglia’s analysis of the brutal and sadistic metaphors in Dickinson’s poetry.

Paglia’s Sexual Personae is both electrifying and divisive; still one of the most important texts in 1990s s*xual politics.

26/11/2021

Five books that will change how you think about the environment and climate change
We are constantly being bombarded with dire warnings about the environmental and climate emergency. Act now, we are told, or face an unprecedented global catastrophe. But while the solutions proposed – solar panels, heat pumps, eating less meat – are no doubt necessary, they are for the most part unimaginative and uninspiring – and isolated from a wider system of beliefs whereby they might acquire genuine meaning.

The following five books offer an alternative perspective. In contrast to the simplistic idea that all we need to do is implement a set of technological and lifestyle changes, they offer a new way of understanding and relating to nature.
Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)

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In his 1979 book, James Lovelock offers an entirely new understanding of the earth as not just a planet on which life has evolved, but a self-regulating system capable of correcting any significant fluctuations that tend towards making it uninhabitable, such as increases or decreases in global temperatures or ocean salinity.

Lovelock shows, for example, how the environment has contributed to driving down atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to compensate for a steadily warming sun. This has kept global temperatures in a habitable range.
Ultimately though, the importance of Gaia lies not just in its bold scientific claims, but in the way it opens up the possibility of bringing together science and spirituality, the true and the meaningful. What does being a part of Gaia mean for us?

Should Trees Have Standing? by Christopher D. Stone (1972)

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No law, Christopher Stone claims, can be created until we begin to challenge its non-existence. And just as it was once “unthinkable” for corporations to be given the same rights as people, the same is true today of living beings and ecosystems. Nature itself has no rights, only the people that own it or use it. Against this, Stone argues that certain natural entities – trees, forests, rivers – should be treated as people and granted “rights”.

This radical idea is increasingly being implemented. In 2008 and 2009, Ecuador and Bolivia became the first countries in the world to recognise nature as a legal person in their constitutions. And in 2017, New Zealand recognised the legal personhood of the Whanganui River.

Developing these insights in the 2010 edition of the book, Stone asks if the climate should also be granted legal standing. He sees this as problematic but not impossible, though it would require a legal system that goes beyond the current nation-state structure.

Biomimicry by Janine Benyus (1997)

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Few would deny that technology will play a major role in achieving sustainability. But for the most part, we concentrate on individual technologies – such as electric vehicles or biodegradable packaging – without pausing to rethink technology as a whole. A significant exception to this is Janine Benyus, who argues that sustainability calls for an entirely different approach: innovation inspired by nature, or “biomimicry”.

The book explores the practice of imitating nature to solve human design challenges and offers many case studies showing how biomimicry can apply to almost every field of innovation – from solar energy generation based on natural photosynthesis to cereal farming modelled on the native Kansas prairie.

But perhaps the deepest significance of the book is the way it calls on us to view nature not just as something we learn about, but also as something we learn from. And in that case, we must cease to think of ourselves as the sole possessors of intelligence and knowledge and instead also come to recognise the genius of nature.

26/11/2021

26/11/2021