Class War, Part 3: And the Winner Is...

The auditorium was filled with the sound of people murmuring about Mr. Phillips' "perfect" classification system. I had always known Mr. Phillips was nuts. But I had never, until now, realized exactly how nuts he was.

"The man is insane," I said, scarcely able to speak. "The man is literally in...sane!"

"I have to admit, I really don't get this," said Ivan Large, puzzling over the photocopied handout of the Greater Perfect System. "Am I crazy, or does this make absolutely no sense?"

"No!" I said, no doubt sounding slightly delirious. "You're not crazy!"

There were a few more presenters after Mr. Phillips, but I didn't pay much attention, as my mind was reeling from the unsettling realization that I had been the apprentice to a mad librarian for the last four months.

My classification system was the last one to be presented. When Ivan and I had discussed the contest earlier, he had casually mentioned that I would be required to present my idea before the conference. Sensing my alarm at the prospect of speaking in front of a large audience, he had willingly offered to present it for me, "because," he said, "I really believe in your idea and I think it needs to be heard." However, after the revelation of the true nature of the GPS (and of Mr. Phillips' mental state), I no longer cared so much. I'm not sure why. Maybe it was because, after initially thinking of Mr. Phillips as a great genius, the realization that he was actually crazy made me feel more confidence in my own ideas. I hadn't even been completely serious when I thought up my system, and even now I wasn't sure that I meant it completely seriously, at least not for use as an actual library classification system (everything is shelved under "X"?... come on!). But I did feel that there was an important and valid idea behind it, and that beneath its absurdist and seemingly nihilistic surface, there was a deeply significant truth about human knowledge and its limitations, and that truth was what I, and Ivan, believed in.

I told Ivan I wanted to present the system myself, though I would still like for him to introduce me, an unknown non-librarian. "It would be my honor," he said.

We proceeded to the stage. I felt a little nervous but surprisingly calm. Ivan Large took the podium first. "Our final classification system was created by a good friend of mine, Curtis ----. Curtis does not have an MLS, but in my view that should not dissuade us from considering his ideas, for it is, in my opinion, the ideas themselves that we should consider, and not the official credentials of the person who has conceived those ideas. For credentials, though they may mean something in our world, are not in themselves what give thought and originality to a human mind. Curtis has much experience working in libraries and has been developing his own ideas about classification while being assigned to help develop another classification system, which for everyone's benefit shall remain unnamed. His idea may seem shocking at first--though I don't think it will appear as shocking as certain other systems that have been presented here today--but I ask you to look beyond the surface and see what it is that Curtis is really trying to express. I think that if you keep an open mind, you will agree with me that his system--let's call it more a theory or a philosophy of classification--embodies great insight into the very nature of what it is that your noble profession strives to do: namely, to attempt to comprehend and organize human knowledge. I will tell you offhand that this system--Curtis has dubbed it "System X"--is not meant to provide a practical framework for an actual library classification. It attempts to do something else, and that is to make us think about classification itself, indeed human knowledge itself, and the limits of both. Take it, if you will, as a bit of perspective. I've said enough. Now, to speak for himself, I present to you Curtis ----."

I had to admit that was the most comprehensible utterance I had ever heard from Ivan Large. I stood behind the podium and looked out at the hundreds of librarians who stared back at me, waiting. I'm sure that I didn't speak as eloquently as Ivan had, but I think I spoke well enough. I remained calm and presented my thoughts in a logical way. The exact words aren't important, and there would be little point in reproducing here ideas which I have already told you elsewhere in this blog. Suffice it to say that I presented my realization about the infinite complexity of the universe, and how classification is based on perceiving relationships among various entities, and that ultimately all classifications are incomplete. I assured them that this did not mean that there was no value to classifying things--that classifying was, in fact, a necessary and essential part of human life, both in and out of libraries. We have to have a system of understanding the world and what things are and how different things relate to each other. My point, I said, was simply that we realize that all such systems, devised as they are by human beings with incomplete knowledge, are bound to be themselves incomplete, and that this knowledge--about the limits of our knowledge--should keep us humble. I had come to the conclusion, I told them, that classification systems can serve either of two purposes (not mutually exclusive): they can be practical, or they can be works of art. (That was one point on which I had come to agree with Mr. Phillips, though his own work of art was evidently no more than the scribblings of a madman.)

"And so," I said, "I am here to present to you my work of art. As Ivan told you, it is not meant to be a practical system. It is simply an expression. At first glance, it may appear nihilistic, but I can assure you that it is not. Somewhat tragic, perhaps, but not nihilistic. But to me, more than anything else, it expresses the vastness and richness of the universe in which we live, that we can never completely know because we can never get to the bottom of it. Anyway, I won't explain it any further. Here it is."

There was a laptop at the podium for the presenters to use, and I typed something quickly before having it projected. The audience saw a blank white screen with one short line of text in the center:

EVERYTHING=X

The audience was silent. I couldn't tell what they were thinking. I didn't really have anything more to say about it, or at least I didn't want to say anything more about it (that is, I didn't want to overexplain it), so I thanked them and walked off the stage. The audience applauded, with something less than standing-ovation enthusiasm yet something more than mere politeness. It didn't matter, though, what the professionals thought, or if I won one of the top three prizes. I had presented my idea, and that was enough.

"That was absolutely brilliant!" said Ivan as I left the stage. "You really floored them!"

"Well, I don't know if I would say floored, exactly."

"Trust me, you floored them."

"If you say so."

Sometime later, they announced the winners. Third place went to something called the White-Edwards Characteristic Ontology. Second place went to the Automated Referential Metadata Schema (or ARMS). These were a couple of the ones that I hadn't paid much attention to when I was still in shock over the depth of Mr. Phillips' dementia. Was he honestly delusional enough to hope, at this moment, that he would win first prize? Yes, I nodded to myself, he probably was.

"And the winner of Class War III is..." said the presenter, opening the envelope and taking a moment to make sure he had read it right. "System X, by Curtis ----!"

I just sat there, stunned. "Go, go!" said Ivan, pushing me. I stood up, half-dazed, and walked up to the stage. The audience applauded, much more enthusiastically this time. I didn't notice, but I can be sure that Mr. Phillips was none too pleased.

So there you have it. I, the librarian's apprentice, won Class War III. Not that I had much in the way of formidable competition, least of all from my mentor and his "perfect" (perfectly demented, that is) classification system. Ivan, Monica, and I celebrated by going out for drinks that night. The next day we flew back to St. Louis. On Monday Mr. Phillips called me into his office and told me my apprenticeship was complete. I think this was his polite way of saying "you're fired" (not from my job as a shelver, but from my apprenticeship). That was fine with me. And so this blog must come to an end, since it is, after all, my blog about that apprenticeship. I have decided I'm going to go to library school and get my MLS. I've learned all I can learn from Mr. Phillips and at any rate if I want to work as a professional librarian for anyone other than him (which I most certainly do), I need the credential. But I have a feeling that the most important part of my education in librarianship will always be what I learned this summer while I was the apprentice to the great librarian Walter J. Phillips.

THE END

Class War, Part 2: Perfection Revealed

The second presenter was a long-haired woman named Julie wearing an inordinate amount of bracelets. "I'm here to speak to you today," she intoned in a high, airy voice, "of the Harmonic Synchronicity System. I prefer not to use the term 'classification' because it implies a hierarchical order that embodies privilege and prejudice. A classification system is exclusive, whereas my system is inclusive; it is bound by logic, whereas mine is guided by intuition; it is rigidly structured, whereas mine is organic and free. On my Website, anyone can contribute to the Harmonic Synchronicity System by adding intuitive tags to items and linking items together according to his or her innermost feelings. No ideas will be rejected; all ideas will be welcomed and considered of equal value and validity. Through this welcoming, truly democratic system, a great harmony will be achieved and result in an awakening to potential and possibility."

"I couldn't understand a darn thing she was saying," said Ivan Large. He swooshed his hand over his dome. "Right on over it."

The third presenter was Mr. Phillips. "I am here today," he announced importantly, "to present the Greater Perfect System of Library Classification. That's GPS-LC for short, or just GPS, if you prefer. The Greater Perfect System represents a radical evolutionary step beyond the so-called Perfect System that I presented last year, and which I now call the Lesser Perfect System. I am having a handout passed out that shows a simplified diagram of the system."

A few conference volunteers moved down the center aisle, handing each row a stack of papers (for each attendee to keep one copy and pass the rest to the next person). The paper handouts were necessary, of course, because Mr. Phillips refused to touch a computer. I don't know how much money he spent on photocopies.

I looked at my copy of the diagram. It was actually the first time I had seen the overall structure of the system to which I had supposedly been contributing for the last three months.

My jaw dropped.

Here, in simplified form, is Mr. Phillips' idea of the perfect classification system:

Class A: Things that exist.
Class B: Things that do not exist.
Class C: Things that are large.
Class D: Things that are small.
Class E: Things that are visible.
Class F: Things that are invisible.
Class G: Things that are red.
Class H: General information.
Class I: Theories of Walter J. Phillips.
Class J: Books about horses.
Class K: Things that are simple.
Class L: Things that are complex.
Class M: Things that are Chinese.
Class N: Books written by Democrats.
Class O: Books written by Republicans.
Class P: Books written by Bolsheviks.
Class Q: Books written by the Chinese.
Class R: Fairy tales.
Class S: Things that are certain.
Class T: Things that are uncertain.
Class U: Things that matter.
Class V: Things that do not matter.
Class W: Things that are known.
Class X: Things that are unknown.
Class Y: Things that make sense.
Class Z: Things that do not make sense.

"I don't get it," said Ivan Large.

No further comment is necessary.

Class War, Part 1: Here Come the Robots

Saturday was the big day: Class War III, the classification system contest. The contestants took turns giving a brief presentation/explanation of their system. The first one was some bushy-haired, bearded, bespectacled guy named Mark with a laptop.

"My system is called ClassBot 2.0, based on the prototype ClassBot 1.0 that I presented last year," Mark said. "It is essentially an artificial intelligence program that not only classifies objects according to preprogrammed criteria, but also learns as it goes and further develops the classification system on its own. So ClassBot is essentially the world's first robot librarian."

Mark proceeded to demonstrate ClassBot's artificial intelligence. His computer screen was projected onto a large white pull-down screen so that the audience could see what was happening. He started by opening the program. A cutesy-looking robot face appeared and said, "Hello, I'm Classy! What can I classify for you today?"

"Hello, Classy," said Mark. "I'm going to ask the audience for a suggestion." He then asked us to suggest a classic book, one that would be old enough (i.e., out of copyright) to be likely to be found online. Someone suggested The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, and Mark repeated this to Classy the robot.

After a pause, the robot said, "Let me make sure I heard you right. Did you say, Theoragen Of Speeches?" (The robot's speech was also presented in text at the bottom of the screen.)

The audience chuckled in amusement, Mark more nervously. "No."

Another pause. Then, "Okay, let's try again. Please repeat what you would like me to classify for you today!" (The robot, besides being annoyingly cute, spoke in an irritatingly chipper tone.)

Mark tried again, speaking more slowly. "The.. Origin... of... Spe-cies."

Pause. "Let me make sure I heard you right. Did you say, The Origin of Speeches?"

"No," said Mark, evidently trying to hide his embarrassment with a bemused smile.

Pause. "Okay, let's try again. Please repeat what you would like me to classify for you today!"

Mark stated the title a third time, speaking even more slowly and loudly than before. He practically yelled: "The... Or-i-gin... of... Speee-sheeez."

Pause. "Let me make sure I heard you right. Did you say, The Origin of Species?"

Mark heaved a sigh of relief/frustration. "Yes!"

"Okay! Give me a moment while I classify The Origin of Species!"

The audience waited. And waited. Mark explained that Classy was conducting an Internet search for information on The Origin of Species, after which it would run an algorithm by which it would determine how to classify the work. Finally Classy had completed its task.

"Okay! I have successfully classified The Origin of Species! Would you like to know the results now?"

"Yes."

"Okay! The Origin of Species is classified as: Variation. Domestic. Selection. Struggle for Existence. Difficulties. Imperfection. Recapitulation and Conclusion."

The audience members just looked at one another, puzzled expressions all around. A few people giggled.

Mark said, "Uh... obviously there are still a few bugs that need to be worked out... but the basic system is there."

Classy chirped in with, "Have I served your classification needs successfully today?"

Mark said quietly, "No."

Pause. "I'm sorry, I didn't hear you! Have I served your classification--"

"No!" Mark turned to the audience and chuckled. "I don't mean to sound harsh to Classy here, it's just that he only understands simple 'yes' or 'no' answers to questions."

Ivan Large shook his head. "So much for artificial intelligence," he said to me.

Friday: Ivan Large Speaks

I started Friday by attending the presentation called "Relevance Optimization in Search Algorithms: A Systems Approach". It was kind of interesting though a bit technical. It was attended mainly by the type of people Mr. Phillips likes to call "tech gurus".

The next event was Ivan's speech, which was officially titled, "What Can It Possibly Mean?: Thoughts on the Future of Literature". When Ivan appeared on stage, he took the microphone in his hand and leaned casually against the podium. He started off by saying, "Good morning. I hope you all are enjoying the conference so far. I just came from a seminar called 'Maximize the Potential'. I have no doubt that your esteemed colleague Mr. Jackson had some really wonderful things to say about that, but I have to admit I couldn't understand a darn thing the guy was saying. Went-- [he moved his hand swiftly over his bald head and made a swooshing sound] -- right over my head. Right on over it. Anyway, I've been invited here today to say something about the future of literature. Now why they chose me to speak on the future of literature, I don't know, but I'll try to make my best guess as to what that future might be."

And so on from there. His speech was largely (no pun intended) incomprehensible, almost as much as his novels, and I'm sure many librarians in the audience were wondering who this guy was and why he got invited to speak at the conference, and, most of all, what the heck he was talking about. Here are some choice snippets:

Writing, as I'm sure you all know, implies a sort of underlying linguistic plenum, as though we--which is to say the collective reader/writer/auditor/speaker--were awash in a sea of endless symbols, infinitely combinatorial and permutational in its ever-changing array of interrelationships, mutations, and symbioses of meaning and indefinite levels of meta-meaning.

When we speak, we assert the efficaciousness of ideation and articulation in the project of establishing an epistemic base from which we may then proceed to act as knowing agents in a determinately knowable world-space.

The production of meaning-centered taxonomies is the fundamental project of the human species, and it cannot be argued that there is anything more essentially human than this.

You get the idea. At the end, the audience clapped politely. I don't think anybody was sure what they had just listened to. I know I wasn't. And I'm sure they were all wondering, as I was, what any of it had to do with the future of literature. Books went pretty much unmentioned.

Later that afternoon I attended the presentation "Ontology and Description: Orienting Metadata with Global Classificatory Schema". This one was even more technical than the first session, but I found it more engaging, perhaps because the subject matter--classification--held some interest for me. Ivan Large attended this one, too. He told me that he had convinced the judges to enter my idea into the contest.

"No way," I said. "They accepted it?"

"How could they not? Like I told them, it just makes sense!"

I don't know if Ivan Large is the most trustworthy expert on things that make sense, but whatever. My "system" (or perhaps it would be more accurate to call it an anti-system) was in the running!

Thursday

I returned home yesterday from Lib Con 08. It may take me a few days to tell about everything that happened. The flight was uneventful (always a good thing) and we arrived at our hotel in Orlando on Thursday afternoon. That evening we (meaning Mr. Phillips, Vivian, Monica, and myself) attended the opening meeting of the conference, which entailed sitting through some rather pointless speeches, followed by an informal meet-and-greet. Monica and I spotted Ivan Large among the crowd and, after waiting a few minutes while he was occupied talking to other people, we introduced ourselves. He's a really friendly guy, not standoffish at all, and he was surprisingly easy and fun to talk to. He didn't act the least bit like a self-worshiping celebrity, but just like an ordinary person. Strangely enough, we hit it off so well with Ivan that the three of us went out for coffee afterward. During the course of our conversation, the topic of the classification contest came up, and at one point I mentioned that I had thought about entering my own idea into the contest. Monica and Ivan were both very curious as to what my idea was, so I told them.

"It's silly," I said.

"Tell us!" they said.

"All right. You have to understand, I'm half-joking. But only half."

"Are you gonna tell us, or not?"

"Okay. My system is exceedingly simple, but it's based on a lot of thought. Here it is: Everything... is unclassifiable."

Ivan regarded me with a frown of deep perplexity.

"I told you it's silly," I said.

"No, not at all!" said Ivan. "This is very intriguing! Please, tell me more... Why is everything unclassifiable?"

"Because everything exists with many different relations to many different things, making a specific classification impossible. So you can only classify things in the most superficial way. When you go deeper, you encounter this incredibly tangled web of relationships that prevents you from ever being able to fully describe how any two things, let alone everything in the world, is related to each other. Therefore, everything in my system can only be classified as X."

Ivan stared at me as though he were in shock. "Curtis!" he said at last. "You... are a genius!"

I snickered. "A genius? Come on."

"I'm serious! That is the most brilliant thing I have ever heard!"

"You really think so?"

"Absolutely! And you say you're not even a librarian?"

"No, just an apprentice, supposedly."

"Well, guess what, kid, I'm getting you into that contest."

"I don't know... I'd feel like I was betraying Mr. Phillips."

"Well, if his system really is as perfect as he thinks it is, then he has no reason to worry. Your idea deserves to be heard."

And so Ivan Large decided that he would persuade the judges to allow my crazy idea into the contest. When I went to bed in my hotel room that evening I felt a mixture of nervousness about what Mr. Phillips would think and excitement.

Off to Orlando

Well, today's the day we travel to Orlando for Lib Con 08. I've finished packing and am ready to leave for the airport. Should be an interesting weekend. That plane crash in Spain yesterday kind of freaked me out, but what are the chances of something like that happening two days in a row? I guess life is always a gamble, no matter what you do or don't do. The odds are usually stacked in your favor, though (after all, out of I don't know how many thousands of days I've been alive thus far, I haven't died on a single one of them). Anyway, I don't know if I'll be able to post much this weekend, since I'll be pretty busy at the conference and won't have access to my own computer, so I may not post again till after I get back. We'll see how it goes. But I'll be sure to give a full report next week.

A Dream Come True

Today Mr. Phillips finally gave me his response to my work on the GPS. Even though I had long since stopped caring about the project, I couldn't help feeling a bit nervous when he called me into his office to discuss it. I sat facing him across his large wooden desk and braced myself. Mr. Phillips looked at me intently.

"Brilliant!" he said.

I was stunned. "Really?"

"Absolutely brilliant! I knew you were the right man for the job!"

I had no idea how he "knew" this, since I knew nothing whatsoever about classification at the start of the project (and more or less made it up as I went along), but I knew that to point this out to Mr. Phillips would have been, well, pointless.

"I believe," he stated, sounding more tremblingly excited than I had ever known him to be, "that you and I, Curtis, will emerge victorious in Class War! We have created the Phillips-[my last name] Greater Perfect System!"

At this point I was reminded of my dream where Mr. Phillips shouted, "I have achieved perfection!" Uncanny.

Well, I must admit I do feel relieved, though I'm afraid that if the GPS does not win first prize, Mr. Phillips will be terribly crushed. It also makes me feel torn about entering my own idea into the contest, even though I would have absolutely no expectation of it actually winning. The judges would surely think it was a joke, and in truth it isn't meant to be completely serious. The only way it would stand any kind of chance is if Ivan Large were one of the judges.

A Man With No Class

This will be a short week at work since we're traveling to the conference on Thursday. I submitted my work on the GPS to Mr. Phillips last Friday. He said he would study it over the weekend. I had no idea what he would think of it, or how exactly he planned to integrate it (assuming he approved of what I had come up with) with his own work on the project. I'm telling you, the man is nuts. At any rate, I'm way beyond caring about his classification system. As far as the conference goes, it'll just be nice to have a change of scenery for a few days, and I have to admit I'm incredibly curious to see both Ivan Large and the classification contest.

Speaking of our favorite avant-garde author, I found another book of his this past weekend. It's called 26 Persons. It features a cast of characters numbering... you guessed it... 26. And, in true Ivan Large style, the characters are known as (in order of appearance) Person A, Person B, Person C, and so on, all the way through Person Z. I only skimmed through the book at a bookstore (I'm still busy burrowing my way through Harmless Banter, so I'm not quite ready to launch into another Large novel at this point), so I can't say much more about it, but the entire novel appears to consist of dialogue among these 26 persons. Because it's apparently all talk, it seems at first glance that it could just as well have been written as a play. In a play, however, one would not get the author's highly informative commentary, such as this typical non-description:

"Where are my trousers?" said Person D, a man of uncertain height, indeterminate weight, unascertainable occupation, unknown creed, indistinct race, and vague motives.

You just wouldn't get that if you were watching an actor, who would at least be of a certain height and weight and racial makeup. Though any of these features could be modified to make him appear otherwise, the point is he would still have an appearance. You could never translate Ivan Large to the stage or the screen because he delights in making his characters and settings seem as nondescript--no, as non-specific--as possible, and that's part of his point. It's as though he refuses to... you know, I don't know why I never thought of it this way before... he refuses to classify things.

Wow. It's all become clear now. Suddenly I know why I must meet Ivan Large.

Dreams of Perfection

This morning I had a strange dream. I was in a laboratory with Mr. Phillips. We both wore white lab coats and were somehow supposed to be working on the classification system. It was as though Mr. Phillips was Dr. Frankenstein and I was Igor. There were books and sheets of paper strewn across a long table, and I was rummaging through them really fast, sorting and organizing them into stacks, and it seemed to be a race against time. Finally Mr. Phillips raised his hands toward the thundering, lightning-flashing sky and proclaimed, "I have achieved... perfection!"

After this I dreamed I was at Vivian's house. I've never been there in real life, so I have no idea what it actually looks like, but in the dream it was an old Victorian townhouse. She told me to classify everything in her house--books, dishes, clothing, you name it. It was an arduous task because Vivian made sure that I got everything perfect.

Boy, was I glad to wake up.

Getting Ready

On Friday Mr. Phillips expects me to submit my work on the GPS. I haven't really worked on it lately, ever since I became disillusioned with the project, but I had already done enough work over the first two months that I still have something substantial to show him. I don't know how good it is, but he's the one who decided to have me assist him with this quixotic project, so he gets what he paid for.

We travel to the conference next Thursday, and return on the following Sunday. This year the conference happens to be in Orlando. Why they chose a Florida location in August is beyond me. Ivan Large is giving his speech on Friday and Class War III is on Saturday.

I've been looking over a brochure for the conference and trying to figure out which presentations I might want to check out. Some of them I can rule out by the title, especially ones written in business-speak nonsense like "Maximize the Potential: Forging Impactful Library Services for 2010 and Beyond" or touchy-feely nonsense like "Affirming Values, Embracing Change: Diverse Perspectives for Today's Librarian". The titles alone are enough to make me shudder, so I think I'll steer way clear of those. More intriguing, if still a bit hokey, are the pretentiously technical-sounding presentations like "Relevance Optimization in Search Algorithms: A Systems Approach" and "Ontology and Description: Orienting Metadata with Global Classificatory Schema". I don't think I'll be seeing Mr. Phillips at these presentations, since this is exactly the kind of library or information "science" that he detests. One does have to wonder if the titles are as meaningless as the statements of that Ivan Large character, but they at least sound interesting (at least to a classification nerd like me).

Unfortunately, since it is taking place during Class War III, I will have to miss the scintillatingly-titled "Regimentation or Referentiality: Toward a Theoretical Framework for the Organization of Information".

Darn.

Mostly Harmless

Well, I have to say that Harmless Banter gets slightly more comprehensible as you go. By chapter 3, some kind of actual narrative begins to show through. It was in this chapter when I realized that the main character, who is apparently a businessman, is the person always referred to as "he", whereas other characters are called "someone else" or "a third person", etc. I've also begun to realize that there might actually be a method to Ivan Large's madness. In a bizarre, absurdist sort of way, he seems to be putting forth some kind of theme about the uncertainty of knowledge. For some reason, however, he chooses to do this through writing that alternates between the extremely boring and the outright incomprehensible. For an example of the former, consider this inspired stretch of prose from page 22:

He opened the drawer. He looked for a pair of socks. He looked over many pairs of socks, how many he could not say since he wasn't keeping count. The objective of looking for a pair of socks that matched the rest of his clothes outweighed, for him at this moment, the objective of counting the number of pairs of socks that he surveyed. With each pair, his brain considered for a variable period of time--exactly how long in each case was impossible to say without scientific monitoring in strict laboratory conditions--the color, texture, and pattern of the socks, and matched this information with the criteria that he had chosen as to what would constitute an appropriate pair of socks. The whole process took about fifteen point three eight seconds. At the end of this time, he had selected a pair of gray socks, which he then proceeded to put on.

This is the kind of passage that makes me want to throw this book against a wall. I have just two words for Mr. Large at this point: Who... cares? I mean, what is the man thinking, writing a whole paragraph on someone looking for a pair of socks? More interesting, at least, are the incomprehensible passages. Just try to make sense out of this scene from page 29:

The speaker stood behind the podium and spoke in the most dignified tones. "In these latter days," quoth he, "whatever!"
A man in a gray suit, notepad and pencil in hand and serious expression on his face, said, "Is that a fact?"
A man who knew nothing spoke. "According to the Roberts-Green Hypothesis, the massive equivalent q of the ascending r tangential, relative to the p-sub-mu declination, would seem to indicate a recurring g-quality pseudo-Linian meta-ontology in the v quadrant." He made this up completely and it meant absolutely nothing.
"There are some things," said a fourth person, shaking his head. "There are some things."
A fifth person, swishing his cup of coffee around, said, "This is damn good coffee. Damn good!"
A sixth person, who happened to be wearing argyle socks, said with a twinkle in his eye and a cheery smile, "Our sales indicate that Progress is being made!" He did not attempt to define what he meant by "Progress".
"Hey man!" shouted a seventh person, who wore a green shirt, slamming his hand on the table. "What is your basic?" It was unclear who exactly he was addressing, or for that matter what exactly he was asking.
"Furthermore," said the man who knew nothing, again ad-libbing, "if my calculations are correct, the h-prime set of k-variable sub-elements in the Weismannian spectrum of entities should not... I repeat, not... affect our profit margins adversely, at least not in the short term." This statement, too, was absolutely meaningless.
The secretary entered the conference room. "More coffee, anyone?"
The fifth person, still swishing his cup of coffee around and around, said, "This is damn good coffee. Damn good!"

"Will you just?" shouted the person in the green shirt. Again, it was unclear who he was addressing or what he was asking.

"I've got to be sure to remember to pick up my wife's dresses from the dry cleaners after work," said the man in the argyle socks, addressing primarily himself.

"Your theory has been entirely discredited," said the man who knew nothing smugly, "whereas mine is backed up by the facts!"
The man in the gray suit said earnestly, "Is that a fact?"

Ivan Large is obviously not going for any kind of realism here, but is evidently making the literary equivalent of a Warner Brothers cartoon, except that Looney Tunes makes a lot more sense.

A Thought, Part 2

As I said in the last post, a classification system (library or otherwise) can be thought of as a sort of map or guide to a certain field of knowledge or a certain group of items. It helps map out the territory, which then helps guide you to the specific item or place or bit of knowledge that you seek. So, if a library classificationist is the one who writes the guidebook to all human knowledge, this assumes that he knows where various fields are in relation to each other, which further assumes that he knows at least something about all of these fields of knowledge. But how can anyone really know how every subject relates to every other subject, if there even is an objective answer to such a question? I said last time that all classification systems are guesses. It might be more appropriate to say that all classification systems reflect the preferences (intellectual or aesthetic) and the practical needs of whoever designs the system. For example, the old edition of Roget's Thesaurus of Words and Phrases that I've been using divides all words (which is to say, ideas and/or things) into six classes:

I. Abstract Relations

II. Space

III. Matter

IV. Intellect

V. Volition

VI. Affections

The whole system descends in a hierarchy, from these six main classes to sub-classes and sub-sub-classes and so on, till you get down to the most specific ideas. This is all fine and dandy, and it gives the whole realm of knowledge a comforting sense of order and structure. However, in a more recent edition, called Roget's International Thesaurus, the categories are not nearly as hierarchical. It is divided into 15 main classes, but within each class, the order of sub-classes is what librarians call "enumerative" (i.e., a listing), rather than hierarchical (which can be thought of as a family tree). Is this an indication that Roget's (and, by extension, the rest of us) have given up on the idea of structuring human knowledge into some kind of logical order? The enumerative list is just that... a list. It doesn't attempt to understand or explain how ideas are related to each other, except in the simplest sense of grouping similar concepts together and putting similar groups under a general category. Worst of all, however, is the alphabetical style of thesaurus, which simply lists words by how they happen to be spelled. This can be very useful, of course, but that's the whole point... it is merely practical, without making any attempt whatsoever to classify our ideas and therefore to provide a sort of road map to all knowledge. Whereas an old-style thesaurus can be used in a similar way to a library classification system (except that it is a guide to words instead of books), the modern dictionary-style thesaurus serves no such purpose, leaving one just as lost amid the sea of words and ideas and things as without it.

One reason the classification project has held such allure for me is that, at some level, I have seen it as a way of locating things in the world. I mean "locating" both in the sense of "finding" and in the sense of "placing", as in "let's locate it here". And, although I mean "finding" in the sense of discovering something new or recovering something lost, I mean "finding" even more in the sense of discovering where something is in relation to everything else. Instead of something being lost in the flood of ideas, images, and experiences that we encounter each day in our 21st century lives, or floating adrift in the vast sea of knowledge, a classification system is a way of "locating" or "finding" its place in the world. Perhaps, ultimately, it's a way of making the world more like home, by organizing the random, chaotic clutter of our experiences and knowledge into a meaningful and beautiful order.

In my previous post I mentioned an uncertainty principle (specialization vs. generalization). What I have been talking about here leads me to what I might call an incompleteness theorem of classification. It goes something like this: In order to know how to organize knowledge and experience, one must already remember everything that needs to be organized. If you forget something, then that thing gets left out of the system, and the system is therefore incomplete. But in order to find everything that needs to be included in the system, we first need a system; without a system, we are left to the whims of memory, which is always incomplete and leaves things out. We can never be sure that we have included everything that needs to be included. In other words, we can't make a complete system without already having a complete system. Therefore, all classification systems are incomplete, and in fact it is impossible to create a complete classification system.

A Thought, Part 1

Today it occurred to me that one of the primary purposes of classification is to help us find things. This might seem obvious, but it bears some thought. If you have a library where every book has its place in a logical scheme, it's much easier to find something than if you have a room full of books in no order whatsoever. So classifying things is not only a way of mapping out the structure of reality, but, like any other map, it is also a guide to help you get to a certain article of knowledge.

This brings up some interesting questions. Librarians, like philosophers, don't make it their business to know everything. They focus instead on the big picture, and on attempting to understand the interrelationships among different things and to make out the grand structure of reality. So librarians classify books on the basis of some kind of general understanding of how different topics are related. But the problem is that having this general understanding requires at least some degree of knowledge about the subjects themselves. Think about it. If you know nothing about a given field of knowledge, how can you possibly know how to map out its contents? For that matter, if you know nothing about a given topic, how can you be qualified to say how it relates to other topics?

The upshot of all this is that there seems to be a sort of uncertainty principle at work here. The more you know about a certain field of knowledge, the better you are able to classify its contents. But the more you know about the field, the less you can know about all other fields (since time and mind are finite). Therefore, the more specific a system gets, the less general it can be, and the more general (or universal) the system gets, the less specific it can be. Which brings us back to the old conundrum of having to choose between specialization and generalization. You can't have it both ways.

So how is an ideal (by which I don't mean perfect, but simply the best possible) classification system to be constructed? No single person can know everything, so a single person can't know how all subjects relate to each other. Conclusion: it is impossible for a single person (or two, or any small number) to create an adequate classification of all knowledge. No wonder I was feeling overwhelmed. No wonder I think Mr. Phillips is crazy. Forget about perfect. Adequate isn't even possible... at least not with a small number of people.

But what about a large team of experts? The problem here is that if everyone is an expert (and, for the sake of argument, let's just say that everyone is, since no single person can possibly master all of human knowledge), then no one is qualified to say definitively and authoritatively how all the various fields of knowledge relate to each other. This would be an almost God-like perspective.

The heart of the matter is that the overarching structure, the grand scheme, of reality must in some way forever remain hidden from us. All classification systems are guesses.

Taking a Break

I guess one thing I've realized about classification systems is that they can be of two basic types: philosophical and practical. It's not that they are mutually exclusive--philosophy can have an effect on practice, and practice can reflect philosophy--but they represent different emphases and purposes. What I call a philosophical classification is the kind I have been striving for--an attempt to chart the grand structure of reality, with practical application in an actual library being of secondary importance. The other type of system, the practical kind, is what most library classification systems are, I think (librarians being, on the whole, a supremely practical lot). It exists for the primary purpose of putting the books in order on the shelves so that they may be found as easily and quickly as possible, with the aid, of course, of a library catalog. Perhaps because I am of a more philosophical bent (I majored in a field of the humanities, after all, which isn't very practical), I am more intrigued by the philosophical sort of classification. And that's why Mr. Phillips' scheme appealed to me at first, with its aim of "perfection". But after spending weeks obsessively thinking about it and working on it only to run into seemingly insurmountable difficulties, I have to admit I'm a little burned out on the whole thing. Lib Con 08 (the library conference) is only two weeks away and I've lost all enthusiasm for the GPS. I'm thinking that maybe library classifications should just be practical after all, that there is no such thing as a perfect classification system, and that when you're creating a system to classify things, the nature of the system will depend on the nature of whatever it is you're classifying, as well as on your own practical needs. Or perhaps on your own aesthetic preferences. Which is what Mr. Phillips is doing, I suppose, in attempting to create a work of art. But that's his work of art. Sure, I'm just the lowly apprentice, like an apprentice painter, but somehow I'm not content in this role. Am I too sure of myself, thinking that I no longer need a master to teach me, eager to strike out on my own? No, I don't think that's it, because I don't feel sure of myself at all. If anything, I feel disoriented, disillusioned, completely unsure how to approach the problem or even if there is any point to approaching it. I feel that I've come face to face with the limits of human knowledge, and it's enough to make me wonder why we seek knowledge.

You can tell by my posts this week that I've been more interested in the "literature" of Ivan Large than in Mr. Phillips' (or my own) classification project. I guess my mind needed a break. And there's nothing better for sending your brain on vacation than reading a little Harmless Banter.

Headaches

I read another chapter of Banter on my lunch break today. I honestly don't know what this book is supposed to be. Two chapters in and there hasn't been one named person, just a bunch of meaningless "dialogue", if it can be called that, among nameless characters (described vaguely, if at all) in some unnamed setting (also described vaguely, if at all). I'm trying very hard to "get it" and am evidently failing miserably. On page 10 I came across this stirring passage:


He said something. No one else heard or at least did not understand, or at least did not pretend to understand, what he said.
No one else said anything for the next five minutes and thirty-six seconds. Then someone else said something. No one quite knew, or at any rate no one really cared, what this other person said.
"Did someone say something?" said someone.
"I don't know," said someone else.
After that, no one else said anything for a while, at least not within earshot of any of the aforementioned people.


Not exactly Shakespeare here. I can only shake my head in dumbstruck disbelief. How in the world did this guy get published? How does he get interviewed on talk shows and invited to speak at library conferences? Are people insane? Have any of these people actually read his books? I don't see how anyone in their right mind can admire, much less enjoy, passages such as the following (page 15):


An unidentified person ran. Another person, who looked vaguely familiar to one or more of the bystanders but whose identity could not be positively determined, ran after the first person. They ran in a big circle, round and round. Dogs barked, somewhere, near or far no one could say with any degree of scientifically verifiable certitude. At any rate one would have to first define what one meant by "near" and "far" before one could say to what degree some entity (such as the sound of the dogs barking) was near or to what degree it was far. It was because these simple yet crucial terms remained undefined that the truth value of the proposition "the dogs barked nearby" was undecidable, as was the truth value of the proposition "the dogs barked far away".
The two unidentified persons, both of unknown political persuasion, continued to run around in a big circle, for no reason that was apparent to the naked eye, nor, for that matter, for any reason that could be determined based merely on objective, unbiased observation and deductive logic.


Where's the Tylenol?

Living Large

Tonight after work I stopped by the public library and checked out a copy of Harmless Banter by Ivan Large. I read the first chapter. It's pretty weird stuff. The best way to explain it is just to give you a sample passage (page 3):

He screamed. Someone else screamed. A third person screamed. Within five seconds everybody started screaming.
They screamed. After they had screamed for a full minute and paused for breath, they screamed again. In each moment when they had been screaming for a period of time greater than zero and less than x, where x=the total duration of their collective scream, it was a true statement to say that they were, at that moment, screaming. However, in a strange twist of fate, the statement was no longer true once they had all stopped screaming.
"What," someone said.
"In," he said.
"The," he said.
"World," he said.
"Are," he said.
"We," he said.
"All," he said.
"Screaming," he said.
"About?" he said.
"I," someone else said.
"Don't," someone else said.
"Know!" someone else said.

If your head is spinning, so is mine. And take this gem from page 6:

"Are you kidding me?" said a man who was tan. "You have got to be kidding me!"
"If only," said someone who was paying no attention to the man who was tan. "We had something," the other person continued. "To look forward to!" He started bawling uncontrollably.
"You moron!" said a third individual, slamming his cup of coffee to the hard table. "Don't you know that you never, ever, under any circumstances, end a sentence with an infinitive!"
"Tell me you're kidding me," said the man who was tan, addressing neither of the above-mentioned individuals. In a low, menacing tone: "You better be kidding me..."
"What you should have said was: If only we had something... to which... to look... forward!"
"If you're kidding me I'll... well... you have got to be kidding me!"
"Whaa-aaa!" said a fourth person of unknown race, ethnicity, or creed, somewhere in the dark, sounding like what people once thought Dracula sounded like. "Whaa-aaa-aaa-aaa!"
"You better be careful out there," said a fifth personage of undeclared gender, sitting at the bar. "In the night... in the dark."
"Ahh, night," said a sixth character, of indeterminate socioeconomic background. "That is when all the unknown quantities come out."
"You have got to be kidding me! Tell me you're kidding!" The man who was tan's voice rose into a pitched scream: "You... have... got... to be... kidding... MEEEEEE!"

I don't know. All I can do is whistle under my breath and say, "Okay then."

What I want to know is, is this guy for real? Is he just pulling our leg? Why did the library conference invite him to speak? Do they really take this man seriously? I mean, is this what passes for high literature these days? I have to admit, though, whatever else you might say about it, I find it hard to stop reading it. It makes for a fascinating, if grotesque, experience. It's like a surreal dream where you never know what's going to happen next because it's absolutely, completely devoid of logic. I sure can't figure out what any of it means. I guess I just need to take Ivan Large's word for it and assume that meaning--at least in the novels of Ivan Large--doesn't really mean anything.

Meaningless Banter

Today Monica told me about this guy who's going to speak at the library conference. She's really looking forward to hearing him speak and eagerly wishes to meet him. He's some writer named Ivan Large. Sounds made-up if you ask me. A lot of these writers use pseudonyms. Anyway, he's this avant-garde novelist and he's supposed to be giving a speech about the future of literature. I've never heard of him, even though I was an English major (albeit years ago), but he's apparently hot with the more literary set of the hipster crowd (of which Monica, as I've alluded to before, is decidedly a member).

Monica showed me an online video of Ivan Large making an appearance on a local talk show somewhere. He is a very odd man. He's quite thin and completely bald, and was wearing a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black-framed glasses. During this whole video clip he sat back in his chair with his legs crossed and his hands clasped around his knee, and leaned his head to one side. I mean his head was practically sideways. He sounded like a bit of a nihilist, yet displayed a cheerful, smiling disposition. At one point the host asked Mr. Large about the meaning of his latest novel (Harmless Banter). The author leaned his head way over to the right and said with a grin, "Allow me to let you in on a little secret, Mike."

The host, one of these local-television celebrity types with perfect hair and seemingly made of plastic, leaned forward earnestly.

After a dramatic pause, Mr. Large said, "Meaning... doesn't really mean anything."

Mike, the host, sat back as though floored by the profundity. And--this is what really got me--keep in mind this was no university symposium, but a local television talk show--the audience cheered. I was flabbergasted. Mike, aka Mr. Plastic, shook his head with a chuckle and said, "Whoa! Now that's deep!" The audience continued to cheer. "Deep!" repeated Mike.

Whatever. I don't know if this guy is a hack or if he's just a bit zany, but I'm intrigued enough, or perhaps just morbidly curious enough, that I'm thinking I might check out a copy of Harmless Banter. Should be interesting to see him at the conference.

Crazy from the Heat

Maybe the heat is getting to my head, I don't know. It was like a hundred degrees today in St. Louis. Or maybe I've just reached the breaking point in attempting to achieve the perfection that Mr. Phillips seeks. At any rate, I've had a sort of epiphany about the classification system. It's incredibly, beautifully simple. Some would say it's crazy and, well, maybe it is crazy. I'm not sure how it's going to work with Mr. Phillips and the contest. I'm thinking I might do something pretty radical and enter my own idea in the contest. I know Mr. Phillips would never go for my idea. It's not even worth bringing up to him. I'll just keep it to myself and pretend I'm still working on his misguided project. That's right. I've come to believe now that Mr. Phillips is misguided in his striving for perfection. What does that mean, anyway... "perfection"? How is it humanly possible, and how would you know it if you saw it? Who will be the judge of perfection? Does Mr. Phillips think his colleagues at the library conference are trustworthy arbiters of perfection? The way he talks about his colleagues, I'm surprised he puts any stock in their opinions at all. He is always so scornful and dismissive of his fellow librarians, as though they are all a bunch of idiots. Maybe he just wants to prove something. Maybe he just wants them to bow down before his genius. I don't know. All I know is, I'm through trying to make something perfect.

Perfection

Today I was sitting at a desk working on the classification project, with thesauri, dictionaries, and encyclopedias spread out before me, drawing diagrams with a pencil and notepad and doing a lot of erasing. Vivian was shelving some books nearby, and at one point, having long since lost my ability to concentrate on the work at hand, I started watching her. Not overtly staring, mind you, just sort of surreptitiously, casually glancing every now and then while I pretended to look busy. I found myself captivated by the way she shelved the books, so... I don't know how else to put it... elegantly. Just like when she stamped the due date cards. Every motion seemed perfect. I don't mean in a mechanical way, but in a graceful way. It was almost like watching some kind of ballet. And--well, I know this is going to sound funny, since Vivian is probably 15 or 20 years older than me--she seemed, in that moment, strangely beautiful. I don't mean to say that I like her, not in that way anyway. I just mean that she appeared to me to possess the kind of beauty that a ballerina does. It's not so much sexual as it is aesthetic.

Anyway, this got me to thinking about culture and civilization, and how they are by definition a human addition to nature. In case you don't see the connection, I'll explain. Vivian's elegance, it occurred to me, isn't so much her "natural" way of moving as it is a cultivated sophistication, just as a ballerina's movements are. Like music, poetry, architecture, or for that matter any kind of technology, her movements are human constructions, "improvements" upon nature if you will. But aren't human beings themselves part of nature? If so, how can anything we do or make be un-natural? To distinguish the artificial from the natural seems to suggest that human beings can somehow transcend nature. And if we can transcend nature, isn't that an amazing thing? Perhaps it is human nature to transcend nature, if "nature" means that which is given to us, and to add something of our own creation.

I see that Mr. Phillips takes this approach to classification. He doesn't care so much about his system being a mirror of nature as he is interested in creating a great work of art... beautiful yet arbitrary. Well, there's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. But my approach has been to try to figure out nature itself... the way things are. I can assure you this is easier said than done. Science and philosophy attempt to do this, and they are famous for being intellectually challenging disciplines. Scientists at least have physical stuff to work with, things they can observe and verify. Philosophers deal in abstract ideas, logical relationships, metaphysical entities. Perhaps it is too much for me, or perhaps for anyone, to attempt to construct a library classification system by simultaneously constructing a philosophical system, rather than basing it on already existing philosophical principles.

At any rate, I don't see why Mr. Phillips thinks of his system as a work of art and yet strives for it to be "perfect". I don't know why I never noticed this apparent discrepancy before. How can one say that a work of art is perfect? Does he just mean in an aesthetic sense, as we would say that a certain song or painting is perfect, by which we would mean that it is flawless and perfectly executed? Up till now I have thought of a "perfect" classification system as one that perfectly expresses the structure of reality. By now I'm starting to become disillusioned with the possibility of attaining such a thing. I do believe that reality has a structure, but I've come to realize that it's a lot more complex and intricate than we can ever hope to understand. Is Mr. Phillips right? Should classificationists (if that's what we're called) consider what we do an art more than a science?