Our band could be your life (real names’ll be proof) -The Minutemen, “History Lesson Part II“

In his comment on Meredith Farkas’ post “A model for the future of online learning“, about the Five Weeks to a Social Library experience, Joshua Neff wrote, “You guys are seriously punk rock.”

Which might sound like a funny thing to say about an online learning course for librarians. But he’s right: Five Weeks had the DIY spirit and work ethic, the “here’s three chords, now form a band” approach to education, and a very blurry line between “performer” and “audience” or between “expert” and “student.”

So when I kind of gave a nudge to Walt Crawford’s notional post on “personal heroes among libloggers,” I immediately started to regret it. “Heroes” or “heroines” aren’t very punk rock (we’ll leave “heroin” aside for the purposes of this discussion; this is a straight edge blog post). One of the great things about blogging–at least in libraryland–is that you can engage with bloggers as equals; it’s expected.

But I have been listening to the great punk band the Minutemen a bit lately, and watched the Minutemen documentary We Jam Econo (if you care even a bit about the Minutemen, you should watch that movie). There was a great, low-key Minutemen song called History Lesson (Part II) about the band itself. “Our band could be your life (real names’ll be proof)” sings D. Boon (or “truth” depending on the performance). “Punk rock changed our lives.” A little while later come some namechecks: Bob Dylan, E. Bloom, Richard Hell, Joe Strummer, John Doe.

So if D. Boon could do it, I can do it. Blogging changed my life. Here is who I pretend I am when I sit behind the keyboard:

  1. Jessamyn West: Sure, she got here first, but no one would care if she wasn’t awesome. Jessamyn has a generosity of spirit I want to emulate (which doesn’t mean she isn’t tough, as anyone who reads MetaTalk can attest (here is a recent (hilarious) example)).
  2. Dorothea Salo: For being the best kind of crank and for sheer brainpower. And for “Elseviley Verlag” and “M-ch–l G-rm-n” and “beat things with rocks” and other Saloisms that lodge in my brain and make me wish I could come up with something as good.
  3. Sarah Houghton-Jan: The first blogger I ever met in person, at Internet Librarian 20072005 (thanks, Jessamyn). She had no reason to know who I was, and every reason to think a guy following her up the escalator would be a creep. I thought she was a rock star, but she treated me like a person instead of a groupie, which helped set the tone for my entire experience of blogging.
  4. Meredith Farkas: For indefatigablity and over-prolific alpha librarianship. For a while there, I would work on a blog post, then check my feeds to see that Meredith had already written something very close to what I was writing, only she’d said it better, and already had a lively discussion going in the comments.
  5. Iris Jastram: In Walt’s post that got this ball rolling he mentions the idea of “unsung liblogging heroes.” I know Iris much better than the other women on this list, so it seems a little funny to call her a “heroine.” But she is constanly interesting, always thoughtful, humane, and memorable. And as for unsung, I’m appalled when I compare my FeedBurner subscriber count with hers; she’s been writing great stuff while I have been phoning it in lately. So if you are reading this blog and have some kind of weird one-blog-quota for humanities-types at small, private, liberal arts colleges, please go ahead and unsubscribe from See Also… and pick up the feed for Pegasus Librarian

So those are the libloggers whose names I’m painting on the back of my leather jacket. This is a meme, people, and Dorothea has already tagged you. Don’t make me tag you again.