iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

I have known librarians like this haha.

Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 21/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 20/04/2025

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

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

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

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

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

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

Defund, privatize, criminalize. Then rebuild a university.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 18/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

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

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

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.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

The ultimate attack? The shift from universalism to targeting. Instead of libraries as collective right, they’re reframed as services “for the needy.” This isolates us, stigmatizes users, and undermines public solidarity. Austerity begins by redefining who is worth serving.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Public choice theory treats public servants as self-interested actors, justifying constant scrutiny and disempowerment. Librarians are framed as “bureaucrats” hoarding resources. It’s a paranoid economics that erodes trust in public expertise.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Cost-benefit analysis—a central tool in neoliberal governance—fails libraries. How do you measure the worth of free internet access for asylum seekers? Or local newspapers for the elderly? You can’t. So they’re cut. Not because they don’t matter, but because they don’t profit.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Under human capital theory, value is measured by market productivity. A child reading for pleasure? No quantifiable ROI. A reference archivist supporting grassroots historians? Intangible. So: devalued. Libraries suffer because they can’t be monetized cleanly.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Library defunding isn’t random—it’s rooted in New Public Management (NPM): a late-20th-century doctrine that applies corporate management models to public institutions. Libraries become “cost centers,” not cultural commons. Efficiency replaces equity.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

We must reject the narrative that libraries are “nice extras.” They are critical infrastructure for democracy, literacy, and justice. Framing them as social infrastructure (à la Eric Klinenberg) gives us leverage to demand proper investment.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Budgets reflect ideology. The chronic underfunding of libraries isn’t an accident—it’s the outcome of a post-Fordist shift where information is privatized and librarians, once stewards of collective memory, are sidelined. We need radical reinvestment.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Librarianship is not dying—it’s being starved. Neoliberal austerity policies frame knowledge as a commodity, not a public good. What we’re watching is not decline, but engineered erasure.

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Reposted by Mohamed Hussein

Matthew Noe @noethematt.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

"“You don’t get paid enough to meet your basic needs. Your autonomy at work is consistently under threat. People who think that they know better how to do your job are trying to get the power to push you out of your position,” @edrabinski.bsky.social said." 📚 www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

theguardian.com

Being a librarian was already hard. Then came the Trump administration

Already facing burnout and book bans, librarians face a ‘catastrophe’ for institutions deemed central to democracy

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Mbembe: “Necropolitics is the power to dictate who may live and who must die.”

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

Crosswords in ink, glasses on a chain.

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Reposted by Mohamed Hussein

Musa Okwonga @okwonga.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

It really is the final form of capitalism that we wake up every morning to be subjected to the innermost banalities of the world’s wealthiest-ever human being. Never before in human history have so many had to look at so little.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

China rewards discipline and strategic investment. The U.S. rewards quarterly profits, dopamine hits, and clickbait.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

China is building industries. America is building apps, bubbles, and debt.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

China is out-planning America in every sector precisely because the U.S. confuses consumption with leverage.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

The American psyche is built on spectacle. But the opposite of fame isn’t disgrace—it’s forgetfulness.

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Reposted by Mohamed Hussein

Musa Okwonga @okwonga.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

As a citizen of an imperial nation, that, with Brexit, had its own unforced implosion: I think the thing that will hurt Americans most in the end isn’t the mockery, it’s the indifference as people move on from you. “We are the world’s laughing stock!” “No. They’re not even thinking about us.”

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

De Tocqueville warned: the American myth was not power, but providence.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

You were taught your trigger was you—that the rupture belonged inside. But Lacan reminds us: the ego is a misrecognition. They projected their chaos onto your mirror, then called it love. You are not helpless. You are not their fiction.

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Mohamed Hussein @mhusseinlibrarian.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

They’ve made distraction the opiate, and called it “news.” Meanwhile, they extract the marrow of the planet, quietly, efficiently. This is not incompetence. It’s choreography.

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