Mohamed Hussein

I have known librarians like this haha.

Let’s be real: Giles’ library isn’t a commons. It’s a sanctum. No signage. No catalog. Access is relational, not structural. You need to be in the circle to know what’s even there. That’s classism in action.

The ideal librarian holds space between order and rupture—they preserve structure (Ranganathan), but break it when it excludes. Hierarchies aren’t sacred; people’s stories are.

True LIS magic isn’t about hoarding rare books. It’s about knowing when to bring them to light—and for whom. It’s archival intuition paired with ethical timing. It’s stewardship without ego.

The ideal librarian isn’t a gatekeeper. They’re a conversation catalyst—curious, participatory, radically open. They don’t just “give access”; they co-create knowledge with their community.

But what about Ranganathan’s 4th law: “Save the time of the reader”? Giles does that with terrifying precision. His failures are systemic. His instincts? Pure LIS magic.

Pope Francis spoke of the poor not as objects of charity, but as bearers of divine knowledge.
May he rest in peace — and may we inherit his refusal to look away.

So where do we go from here? Rebuild the mythic imagination. Teach novels like sacred texts. Let students enter the labyrinth of story. Because inside, there are mirrors. And minotaurs. And meaning.

We think wisdom lives in data or debate. But it often lives in the stories we re-tell to survive. Myth is a survival code. Fiction is where the unlivable gets symbolized.

Psychoanalytic pedagogy reminds us: repetition, fantasy, projection — these live in literature. Literature isn’t for escape only. It’s for recognition too. Without fiction, the inner world gets flattened. No mirrors. No monsters. No rites of passage.

There's broad agreement that students aren't reading enough literature. I wrote about Ralph Ellison's approach to teaching American fiction just after Brown v Board. Learning from him might help us think about where to go from here.

libertiesjournal.com/articles/ell...

Obscurantism isn’t just about hiding facts; it’s about creating a world where questioning becomes too exhausting to bother.

Dillard does not idealize the human spirit, but she elevates the material world. The rock, the river, the insect — each is a vessel of meaning, if only we care enough to listen without preconceptions.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard pulls us back to earth. Her materialism is not one of cold facts, but of an engaged witness to the struggle between beauty and brutality, the sacredness in decay.

Philology was once a bridge between language and history, between meaning and form. Its fall is not just disciplinary — it signals a cultural unwillingness to dwell in uncertainty, contradiction, and the dense beauty of language over time.

As funding shifted toward STEM fields and the metrics of research became quantifiable, philology’s slow, archival work was seen as inefficient. Its rigor could not be graphed, its impact not easily measured.

Post-war structuralism and later deconstruction reframed texts as systems of signs, displacing the historical rootedness that philology demanded. The text became surface; the manuscript, irrelevant.

The decline of philology begins in the late 19th century, when it splintered into specialized disciplines: linguistics, literary studies, anthropology. Its holistic methodology was seen as imprecise in the emerging positivist academy.

PEN International speaks of freedom, but who will speak of slow decay? Of the forgotten scripts, the orphaned dialects?

A boy stumbles in the field and is helped to his feet; a girl stumbles and the whole town hears it as a prophecy.

When knowledge is framed as a threat, surveillance becomes pedagogy.
What’s at stake isn’t one institution—it’s the soul of higher education itself.

Defund, privatize, criminalize.
Then rebuild a university.

The modern university was once a semi-autonomous site for dissent, imagination, & internationalism.
For the state, that’s a liability.
Revoking visas, surveilling students, criminalizing protest—these are not excesses. They’re blueprints.
The academy is being retooled.

The trucking slowdown is a quiet fiscal alarm.
Less movement = less final demand = lower sales tax intake.
States will tighten before the Fed pivots.
Powell is watching real-time tax receipts more than he admits.

In Nox, the sibling elegy becomes a textual reliquary.
Its dialogic structure—between Latin, memory, and image—disrupts linearity.
This is not just a book about death; it’s a poetics of epistemic rupture.

Carson’s Nox situates itself at the interstice of poetry, translation, and visual art.
It is a hybrid work emblematic of 21st-century lyric experimentation.
Its influence is not only literary, but archival and philosophical.

Nox belongs to a lineage of American poetics that valorize absence and intertext.
Carson fuses classical philology with contemporary lyric innovation.
It is both artifact and elegy—bound by loss, not form.

Anne Carson’s Nox redefines elegy through fragmentation, lexicon, and palimpsest.
It resists closure, memorializing grief as a living, destabilized archive.
Few American texts articulate mourning with such epistemological finesse.

“Kayfabe” is a term from professional wrestling. It refers to the illusion of reality.

If you’ve ever felt a library was sacred, Palaces for the People explains why. Eric Klinenberg makes the case that libraries are democratic infrastructure—quiet, radical, and irreplaceable.