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April is National Poetry Month! Wislawa Szymborska: "The Onion"
Wislawa Szymborska,* "The Onion."
The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhead
fill this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
At peace, of a piece,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there's a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one,
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.
Nature's rotundest tummy,
its greatest success story
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.
*That's a fun name to cutter for, I'm telling you.
Speaking of LIS, I was reading a Stargate SG-1 fanfic the other day that was told from the viewpoint of a librarian/cataloger hired to catalog the highly classified reports and all that random shit they bring back through the Stargate all the time. It was only okay to begin with, but what killed it for me was that the librarian character's refrain was "Sometimes, LCC is not the answer."
Oh, honey. LCC is never the answer. LCC is a lousy system designed to do only one thing: classify the LoC. It's mainly enumerative, the schedules were designed independently of each other (! Christ!), it relies waaaaay too much on cuttering to make up the notation, and the motherfucking thing doesn't even have a comprehensive index. It's a total shitstorm of a scheme, and it does not adapt well to anything besides the collection on which it was based.
The idea that anybody would actually use LCC as even a STARTING point for cataloging ALIEN ARTIFACTS was so unfathomably stupid as to totally kill the fic for me. I mean, for god's sake, if you're not going to develop your own system, you could at least start with UDC or something. Or haul out Colon Classification and give it a brush-up. We have the technology!
The onion, now that's something else.
Its innards don't exist.
Nothing but pure onionhead
fill this devout onionist.
Oniony on the inside,
onionesque it appears.
It follows its own daimonion
without our human tears.
Our skin is just a coverup
for the land where none dare go,
an internal inferno
the anathema of anatomy.
In an onion there's only onion
from its top to its toe,
onionymous monomania,
unanimous omninudity.
At peace, of a piece,
internally at rest.
Inside it, there's a smaller one
of undiminished worth.
The second holds a third one,
the third contains a fourth.
A centripetal fugue.
Polyphony compressed.
Nature's rotundest tummy,
its greatest success story
the onion drapes itself in its
own aureoles of glory.
We hold veins, nerves, and fat,
secretions' secret sections.
Not for us such idiotic
onionoid perfections.
*That's a fun name to cutter for, I'm telling you.
Speaking of LIS, I was reading a Stargate SG-1 fanfic the other day that was told from the viewpoint of a librarian/cataloger hired to catalog the highly classified reports and all that random shit they bring back through the Stargate all the time. It was only okay to begin with, but what killed it for me was that the librarian character's refrain was "Sometimes, LCC is not the answer."
Oh, honey. LCC is never the answer. LCC is a lousy system designed to do only one thing: classify the LoC. It's mainly enumerative, the schedules were designed independently of each other (! Christ!), it relies waaaaay too much on cuttering to make up the notation, and the motherfucking thing doesn't even have a comprehensive index. It's a total shitstorm of a scheme, and it does not adapt well to anything besides the collection on which it was based.
The idea that anybody would actually use LCC as even a STARTING point for cataloging ALIEN ARTIFACTS was so unfathomably stupid as to totally kill the fic for me. I mean, for god's sake, if you're not going to develop your own system, you could at least start with UDC or something. Or haul out Colon Classification and give it a brush-up. We have the technology!
no subject
I can't remember (dang!) the name of the reference we used to classify objects when I was doing inventory on a collection at a former job, but *it* would be a great place to start, as it catalogs objects according to use and function.
...Come to think of it, that would make a really funny short story that would probably be funny only to museum people who read and watch SF, that is nothing but a list of classifications and notes on various artifacts:
Weapon // electronic // energy-based // handheld // cutting // lightsaber
Note: when accessioning objects please make a note of whether they are functional or nonfunctional! Bill for shelving attached. -- Collections manager.
Aaaaand now I'm obsessively trying to decide what characteristics of a light saber should be cataloged in what order - does it have more in common with other energy weapons, like blasters or ship-based photon torpedoes, or does it have more in common with hand-held energy weapons like swords? Where would you expect to see it - next to a blaster, a photon torpedo, or a sword?
no subject
Hell, ISDB, which is a descriptive thing, not a classification thing, would be a better model than LCC. My prof made us write "self-ISDBs" last semester, to show how amazingly flexible it is--you really can describe anything with it, not just books. If you're mainly cataloging objects, not information resources, you need descriptive tools more than you need to worry about subject expression.
Ideally, you'd use a faceted classification with a good computer system--I mean, you'd still have to pick a shelf location, so somewhere along the line, you make a choice, but there's no reason not to switch around your citation order when it comes to searching.
For physical storage, I think I would go with "hand-held energy-based weapons" as a first choice--with blasters and laser guns and the like. But where to put those? They're related to hand-held projectiles and hand-held edged weapons or hand-held blunt instruments, but of course, they also belong to the category of "energy-based weapons" and "energy-based technologies."
A polyhierarchical thesaurus is definitely in order.
no subject
ETA: Chenhall's Revised Nomenclature for Cataloguing Systems! The book where I found my favorite object: the barking spud! (Something to do with forestry, rather than yappy potatoes, but the NAME, the NAME! XD)
no subject
One does not quibble about other people's ceremonial objects. It's like with AACR2: we're not gonna get picky about authorship of spiritual texts. If you say God wrote it, that's cool. We won't argue.
(My favorite thing about the Dewey Decimal Classification? It has a Table of Last Resort. How sweet is that?)