[MUSIC PLAYING] Party people in the place to be! This is what you've all been waiting to see. Electric Boogaloo, the ultimate show with Kelly, Ozone, and Turbo. Electric Boogaloo is break dance, too. So don't miss it. Break dance too. If you forget it, you'll regret. Electric Boogaloo. A Golan-Globus production. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: You are listening to WREK Atlanta, and this is Lost in the Stacks, the research library rock and roll radio show. I'm Charlie Bennett in the virtual studio with Wendy Hagenmaier, Fred Rascoe, and Marlee Givens. Each week on Lost in the Stacks, we pick a theme and then use it to create a mix of music and library talk. Whichever you're here for, we hope you dig it. FRED RASCOE: Happy New Year, everybody. CHARLIE BENNETT: Happy new year, Fred. MARLEE GIVENS: Hey, happy new year. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Happy new year. FRED RASCOE: Well, OK. It's been two weeks since the year actually started. But like everything else these days, we were delayed by COVID, and Omicron, and all those things. But we're still going to do our traditional what's going on this year episode. MARLEE GIVENS: Our show today is called 2022, the Electric Boogaloo. Just as Breakin' 2, the Electric Boogaloo was the unnecessary, unwanted, and mostly ill-received sequel to the film Breakin', so does this year appear to be a repeat of last year, or even the year before that. WENDY HAGENMAIER: The newscasters are saying the phrase, "raging pandemic" with the same casual tone one might use to say rainy weather, or spring training. Things seem both the same and completely strange at the same time. CHARLIE BENNETT: So let's forge ahead, shall we? WENDY HAGENMAIER: Let's talk about what we hope and fear about the year ahead, and what we might imagine could improve the situation. MARLEE GIVENS: We might even find some optimism and peace in there somewhere. CHARLIE BENNETT: Sure, Mali. FRED RASCOE: Yeah, here's hoping, though. Our songs today are about how the past year made us feel and what we might look forward to in the new year. I admit the last handful of years have really set the bar low as to what might constitute a good year, but hope springs eternal. So let's start with a song about facing fears and surviving. This is "This Year" by The Mountain Goats right here on Lost in the Stacks. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: That was "This Year" by The Mountain Goats and this is Lost in the Stacks. Today's show is called 2022, The Electric Boogaloo. We're kicking off the newest year with our traditional reflection and projections show. CHARLIE BENNETT: The other potential title was Groundhog Year, but I think 2022 The Electric Boogaloo has more poetry to it. MARLEE GIVENS: It certainly rhymes better. Why don't we start with this past year? How did it go for everybody as librarians or archivists? FRED RASCOE: OK, I'll go first. I can say that it went well in the sense that I did not catch COVID, just like the year before I did not catch COVID. Nobody in my family caught COVID. CHARLIE BENNETT: This is that low bar for-- FRED RASCOE: Yeah, I got to chalk that up as a win. Yeah. Any small victory. And to keep it on the positive note, I was-- we have kind of an adjusted schedule. We're working remotely a lot more. And I found that I really do like working remotely, which I did not think that I would when this all started. I think I've talked about that on the show before. But before the raging pandemic, or rainy weather, whatever. CHARLIE BENNETT: Spring training, yeah. FRED RASCOE: Right. I would have thought, man, I've got to go to work in person. But I have adjusted-- I feel I've adjusted very well to working remotely. And so any other raging pandemic, or spring training pandemic, or whatever kind of pandemic comes along, I feel like, oh sure, I'll just hunker down at home in a little pillow fort. It'll be fine. WENDY HAGENMAIER: For me, it's almost hard to remember what happened last year. I know it was recently, but it was such a blur with the year before, but I think I'll just echo some of what you said, Fred, that I feel like I continued to gain fluency in working from home and I think that the continued disruption did offer opportunities for rethinking how I work and how we're working in the archives. And the pausing of some work opened space for other work, there are other priorities to be considered. And then I think in fall when we came back to campus and we started picking up a lot of things that we had paused, and it was really overwhelming. But I think that was a really good learning experience of how do we carry some of this fluency we've gained working from home in this strange time and merge it with some of the physical world things that we want to sustain. So I think it was a really iterative learning experience for me, of taking on too much, letting some things go, and continuous reevaluation of what can be sustained. CHARLIE BENNETT: Is there a priority, Wendy, that you're thinking of when you say, let one go or take one on. Is there something in particular? WENDY HAGENMAIER: I think there's just so many things that we could work on, that I could work on. Thinking about digital archives, there's so much that we need to figure out. And that's changing all the time. So it's sort of letting some of those things go and being comfortable with knowing that we'll address them eventually. And by then, they will have changed. But yeah, challenging my own instinct to just do everything right away. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. I've had to rethink who I am, professionally. I mean, obviously I've had to rethink who I am just generally. The pandemic's been very good at forcing self-reflection. But also I got my promotion this year. I went from two to three. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Woo-woo. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, thank you. And it's not exactly a halfway point, because you shouldn't get to four and then retire. You should keep working for a little bit longer. But I feel like as a transition-- this is my second of three promotions that I can have in my career at Georgia Tech. And I feel like I left a lot of things behind in the previous two levels, and now I can really get into what I think of as the academic side of academic librarianship. I really to-- I want to write more, I want to concentrate more, I want to research more. Which was never a thing that was very important to me. I really liked being out on the floor, and being among the students and doing stuff, and helping people build things, and doing radio shows and all that. And now I find that I very much want a quiet thinking space, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I've been working at home with three children and another work at home parent. And I've learned that I like the office. The office is where I want to be to work. MARLEE GIVENS: I think I found a good office at home balance. I started in the fall working from home two days a week and coming into the office three days. And I have-- I feel like that's a really good balance for me. This past year was great. I rounded out a leadership role in the library faculty organization. I ran a search committee, which successfully hired someone that I think is doing a great job. I won an award. I got-- CHARLIE BENNETT: Well deserved. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. One of our-- our colleague, Sonya and I completed a book manuscript and-- yeah. I feel like-- oh, and I applied for a promotion. So I feel like that's kind of on track. And even though this is something that happened just very recently, but I applied to grad school and was-- I'm one more step closer. So they did get back to me and we'll move to the next phase. CHARLIE BENNETT: What grad school, Marlee? What are you doing? MARLEE GIVENS: This will be an EDD in learning leadership and organizational development. We'll see how that goes. CHARLIE BENNETT: You can pretend that an EDD is not as crazy as going for your PhD, but it is the same thing, Marlee. MARLEE GIVENS: It is, but-- CHARLIE BENNETT: You're out of your mind. MARLEE GIVENS: Well, yes. Yes, but I-- hopefully not. One of my friends, who is a psychology professor, said that PhD programs are designed for 20-somethings, and this looks a lot more reasonable. FRED RASCOE: One step closer to a University administration job, Marlee. MARLEE GIVENS: Oh God, no. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Please, Marlee. CHARLIE BENNETT: This is Lost in the Stacks. We'll be back with more librarian and archivist talk after a music set. WENDY HAGENMAIER: File this set under BJ1581.2.S16. [MUSIC PLAYING] MARLEE GIVENS: You just heard "Happy New Year" by Beverley Martyn, and before that, "Sad Days, Lonely Nights" by Spiritualized. Songs about how we felt last year and looking forward to the new one. [MUSIC PLAYING] WENDY HAGENMAIER: This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called 2022, The Electric Boogaloo. And in the last segment, we looked back on 2021. Let's turn our attention to 2022 and its potential. FRED RASCOE: Could be good. MARLEE GIVENS: And could be bad. CHARLIE BENNETT: Who's to say? WENDY HAGENMAIER: Yeah. But that's not enough for a show segment. FRED RASCOE: Oh, you want more. WENDY HAGENMAIER: OK. We can do more. Marlee, what are your plans for this year? MARLEE GIVENS: Oh, gosh. Well, see, this is where it gets boring, because after such a momentous 2021, I'm looking forward to not doing quite as much in 2022. Some of what I have to do is make updates to things that I had done before. I have several video tutorials that are just feeling stale, and we're going to make a change in our library catalog interface that I think is going to require just upgrading the screen captures for those. All of my teaching requests so far have been from people that I've taught in their classes before, so I don't think there's going to be anything-- there will be some chances for me to kind of refresh my teaching materials and things like that. And try to focus a little bit more on the asynchronous learning modules that are designed to be reused. CHARLIE BENNETT: Marlee, when I put in my promotion list, my promotion dossier, I found that all the time between submitting it and getting the feedback just felt like not wasted, but just up in the air time. Like none of this matters. I'm not going to put this on a performance review and my promotion stuff's already in. Do you feel that kind of loose feeling or was that just me? MARLEE GIVENS: No, it feels very loose to me. And mostly because this will be my last promotion. I mean, if it goes through. And fingers crossed, but never say never. But anyway, yeah. It's kind of like-- yeah, a little bit of a floating feeling. Because six months after I did my promotion package, I did have to do an annual evaluation. And some of that was just like, I feel like I just talked about this. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. MARLEE GIVENS: But it is kind of nice to only be thinking about things in terms of one year at a time at this point. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. This year, for me, I have to shake off that sort of-- the interregnum time of library work. I had my promotion, and the first year of the next five years feels a little bit like I can say I've been dealing with COVID, I've been dealing with the death of a family member, I've been trying to figure out my way in the world. But now, 2022, get it together, Charlie. That's what it feels like to me. And actually do the things that I've said are important to me to add to my professional identity, or professional mindset. So I think I have to figure out a time of the week that's my reading time, and a time of the week that's my writing time, and I have to plot out what I'm going to do in terms of that articulation of library science concepts, or articulation of instruction concepts that are important to me. I have to learn how to be a faculty member, which is scary, but also like, well, at least I know the story behind what I have to do, and now I just have to figure out the steps. FRED RASCOE: You sent some prompt questions before the show, Charlie. CHARLIE BENNETT: I did. FRED RASCOE: And that relates to this segment. And the prompt question that you sent was like, what do you want to discard and what do you want to take on? And when I thought about it, I didn't really specifically think of it in my professional life terms, is more broad than that. And I thought about what would I discard? And the analogy that my brain came up with was it's like my house. If you walk through my house, or when I walk through my house, I look at all the stuff that's here. There's me, there's my wife, there's three kids, there's animals, there's stuff. And I just think 10% of all this, whatever it is, stuff could just disappear. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. FRED RASCOE: And things would be a whole lot better. And it doesn't matter what, but 10% by weight, volume, by count, whatever. Just 10% out. CHARLIE BENNETT: And you'd be grateful. FRED RASCOE: Yeah CHARLIE BENNETT: You'd be grateful if 10% just disappeared. If there had been a rapture of things, you would have been like, oh, thank goodness. FRED RASCOE: That's so hard to-- it has to be random and ordained from above. Like, asking me to just get rid of 10%? And I think about that, too, as my own identity. And I said, like, as a person, there's probably 10% of my identity that I just need to clear out. And I don't know. It's going to be very hard to pick, but you've got to start. Just take one thing to goodwill, and I got to start somewhere. CHARLIE BENNETT: Just stop thinking one thing. Just forget 10 phone numbers. FRED RASCOE: And the thing that I thought that I would take on, I have really neglected any kind of creative outlet. So writing something, playing guitar more regularly, something like that, I think, would probably be a good to-do. And I just have not done anything like that regularly in a really long time. So that's-- I'll check in with you 2023 to let you know how I did on that one. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Fred, is the band coming back? FRED RASCOE: Oh, man. We're going to start a new band. And you guys are in it. Rehearsals start next week. WENDY HAGENMAIER: So yeah. Charlie, when you asked us, what do you want to discard and what do you want to take on? I think I have one resolution for the year. And it's related to letting go and picking up something, I think. But I think it relates to my professional work, but also just everything going on, which is really to sort of interrogate the self-critical voice in my head. I think that's been my resolution for a long time, but just a renewed emphasis on that. I think I want to be able to be more curious and more failure resilient, and just sort of try things knowing that I'm not an expert, or even where I thought I was an expert, that I will fail. And to be able to move through that. And I've been just reflecting a lot on self-criticism and perfectionism as outgrowths of oppression and systemic forces. And that's helped me, I think, get some distance from that voice in my head to not sort of buy into the BS that is a system that's keeping a lot of people down. Anyway, just reflecting on that and just really trying to think about that on a regular basis that I'm going to fail and that that's growth. Hopefully. FRED RASCOE: You are listening to Lost in the Stacks, and we'll talk more about the new year, 2022 The Electric Boogaloo, on the left side of the hour. [MUSIC - DEF LEPPARD, "ROCK OF AGES"] I know for sure there ain't no cure. JOHN LINDAMAN: Hi, I'm John Lindaman from the Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Obsolete Library Science, and you're listening to Lost in the Stacks on WREK Atlanta, more wattage in the cottage. Tune it in and tear the knob off. [MUSIC PLAYING] I want rock 'n' roll. You betcha. Long live rock 'n' roll. CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called 2022, The Electric Boogaloo. And in the prep for this show, I found a poem that gave me a bit of comfort about this upcoming year. This is an English translation by Clare Cavanagh of the poem "Try to Praise the Mutilated World" by Adam Zagajewskim the Polish poet who passed away last year. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: Try to praise the mutilated world. Remember June's long days and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine, the nettles that methodically overgrow the abandoned homesteads of exiles. You must praise the mutilated world. You watched the stylish yachts and ships. One of them had a long trip ahead of it, while salty oblivion awaited others. You've seen the refugees going nowhere, you've heard the executioners sing joyfully. You should praise the mutilated world. Remember the moments when we were together in a white room and the curtain fluttered. Return in thought to the concert where music flared. You gathered acorns in the park in autumn, and leaves eddied over the Earth's scars. Praise the mutilated world and the gray feather a thrush lost, and the gentle light that strays and vanishes and returns. File this set under BS2825.L36. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: You just heard "Will You Evolve" by Loose Tooth. And before that, "I Ain't the Same" by Alabama Shakes. Those were songs about being something or someone new. [MUSIC PLAYING] WENDY HAGENMAIER: This is Lost in the Stacks, and today's show is called 2022, the Electric Boogaloo. We are kicking off the year with a celebration, sort of, of the new year. Let's try to praise the mutilated world, everybody. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah, let's open this up to predictions and wishes for the new year in the world at large. Wendy, what do you think is going to happen? And what do you wish would happen this year? WENDY HAGENMAIER: OK, I have maybe a simple answer, but it feels comfortable. So I'm going to say what I think is going to happen is uncertainty. And what I wish would happen is comfort with uncertainty. Because I feel like we should all be so change-savvy by now, or flexible by now. But it continues. As the pandemic evolves and as our culture evolves, it continues to be a lot to juggle and adapt to. So I hope for increased comfort with uncertainty, which hopefully can bring more well-being for people. FRED RASCOE: I like that answer, comfort with uncertainty. I feel like when it comes to my views on the world at large, pandemic, military conflicts, things like that, I wish I felt more uncertainty. I feel a bad level of negative certainty that-- CHARLIE BENNETT: That's called pessimism, Fred. FRED RASCOE: Yeah. I think we've explored my pessimism on this show before. I guess to bring it down a little more locally to the research library level, just in our own particular library, I think-- well, I think we're going to talk about reorganization at the library. And my own view on that, when I came to the library about 10 years ago, pretty much the same time you did, Wendy, just a little couple of weeks after you, I think. The library was organized in very small groups. Lots of different departments. And then over the next few years, a lot of change happened. It got very flat. And now I think I am going to speculate that it's going to go back to more kind of a small groups kind of cluster organization. And then we'll be like that for a few years, and then in 2028, we're going to do the show and talk about how it's going to a flat organization. CHARLIE BENNETT: We're going to retry that matrix thing. Yeah. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. I have been thinking about the waves of how things happen, and that's one of them, Fred. And I was here-- I had been here for about two years when you started. And so I did see that same transition happen. We've just recently gone through a leadership transition, and I think we're going to see a little bit more-- I don't know, in a way, return to how things used to be, in some sense, just how the library is run. What I'm hoping is that we'll get more people back to bring the size of the organization back to what it used to be. Because every person I talk to, and every time someone asks me how it's going, I just think about how we're all stretched so thin. I think about how difficult it is to ask someone to do something, because I know that they're already working at least two jobs. And so I feel very optimistic that we have some-- that we're filling some vacancies right now. And hopefully that will continue. And reorganizations are only going to take us so far if we don't have enough people to reorganize. I feel also the same way about this comfort with uncertainty, which I think-- I don't know, I like to think also comes with age. Just trying to get-- even as I get older and older, to get more and more zen. That's how I want to be. I know that another path that I could take is just to get more and more angry at how things have not improved over the past 50 years. So I've got to spend some time thinking about that. CHARLIE BENNETT: Yeah. That very much reflects my own internal struggle, Marlee, to become angrier or less angry. Because the more carefully I look at how things are structured and what has happened to us as a country-- I'm going to say as a country, I'm going to get outside the library here, the angrier I get. Especially when I see the reflections or the echoes of the Gilded Age in what's going on right now. And as we all know, the Gilded Age led up to the Great Depression. And after the Great Depression was the Great Investment. And after the Great Investment, was the Great Rejection of the investment, and that's how we got here. So I feel a little bit like oh, is life as cyclical as it appears? And maybe this is now what I wish would happen, I've noticed that people are a lot less susceptible to the larger for the good of the economy, for the good of the country kind of narratives. Much more susceptible to narratives like there's microchips in the vaccine. But the larger mainstream narratives appear to be crumbling under the weight of their own failures. So it should be interesting to see a Civil War and a Great Depression while there's also Twitter and Facebook simultaneously. I'm sorry, the Metaverse simultaneously. FRED RASCOE: That's an apocalyptic future, Charlie. MARLEE GIVENS: Yeah. CHARLIE BENNETT: It's all apocalypse in here, man. It's apocalypses all the way down. WENDY HAGENMAIER: We thought Fred was pessimistic. MARLEE GIVENS: Well, let's mull on that. This is Lost in the Stacks, and it is time for some music. FRED RASCOE: Thank goodness. File this set under PZ7.T33. [MUSIC PLAYING] WENDY HAGENMAIER: You just heard "This Too Shall Pass" by OK Go and before that, "Journey" by Duncan Brown. Those were songs about trying to leave the past behind and move on ahead. [MUSIC PLAYING] CHARLIE BENNETT: Today's show is called 2022, The Electric Boogaloo. It's our New Year's show, and we've tried to explore our reactions to 2021 and our plans or predictions for 2022. On our way out of the show, I would like to hear from the show team about any New Year's traditions you might have, either for the Eve or for the day, and I hope that this will be a soft place for us all to land. So I have one to start with. Every New Year's Eve at about 8 o'clock, we have a balloon drop for the kids where we count down to the new year. And we do the balloon drop-- I tear open a whole bunch of trash bags and I attach them to the ceiling. And we fill it with balloons and then we count down. And we tear the tape off the middle, shower them in balloons, and say, happy new year. And then they go to bed and then all the pressure's off us. And we don't have to do anything to celebrate the actual midnight of New Year's Eve. FRED RASCOE: How long do you think that's going to last, Charlie, before they actually start to want to stay up to midnight? CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh, they want to, desperately. And we tried to let them one time, and the next couple of days we're really bad. So we don't do that anymore. WENDY HAGENMAIER: I want to do that balloon drop. I love it. This is maybe foreshadowing of something to come later in the show, but my family generally makes black eyed peas, some kind of black eyed peas recipe, which I know is a southern tradition. But I was reading a little bit this year. I didn't realize it's also a tradition in Indian cooking and I think maybe Jewish cooking. So there's a lot of traditions that use these peas. So I cooked them this year with some Indian spices and they were really yummy. Good luck. CHARLIE BENNETT: Very nice. FRED RASCOE: So a few years ago on New Year's Eve, the kids wanted to start right in the morning, just because they had the day off from school, obviously, and they wanted to just watch movies all day. And so it was either-- me or my wife had the idea, OK, well, let's just put on Lord of the Rings. There's like three movies and the extended versions are four hours each, so just start, put it on, and they loved it. And they want to do that every New Year's Eve. So for the past, I don't know, five, six years, however long it's been, it's been a Lord of the Rings movie marathon. CHARLIE BENNETT: Oh my gosh. I am so into that. Much more than I'm really willing to admit to myself. MARLEE GIVENS: I know, that does sound great. We usually drink something bubbly, and this year it was French cider. And we usually eat something fancy, and this year it was Camembert and prosciutto. And it doesn't matter if it's New Year's Eve or new year's day, just around that time. We just like to do that. CHARLIE BENNETT: And with that, let's roll the credits. [MUSIC PLAYING] FRED RASCOE: Lost in the Stacks is a collaboration between WREK Atlanta and the Georgia Tech Library, written and produced by Charlie Bennett, Fred Rascoe, Marlee Givens, and Wendy Hagenmaier. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Today's show was edited and assembled by Charlie on a pretty tight schedule, so I hope it turned out OK. CHARLIE BENNETT: Me too. MARLEE GIVENS: Legal counsel and an excellent recipe for Hoppin' John were provided by the Burrus Intellectual Property Law Group in Atlanta, Georgia. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Special thanks to anybody doing their best to praise the mutilated world and thanks, as always, to each and every one of you for listening. MARLEE GIVENS: Find us online at lostinthestacks.org. And you can subscribe to our podcast pretty much anywhere you get your audio fix. CHARLIE BENNETT: Next week's show is a rerun, and we'll be back with a new Lost in the Stacks on January 28. FRED RASCOE: It's time for our last song today. And I think it's good to close on an optimistic note. CHARLIE BENNETT: Sure you do, Fred. FRED RASCOE: Regardless of all the yuck of the past couple three years, maybe more, I'm going to predict a good year coming our way for all of us. So let's wrap it up with "Good Year" by Marc Benno, right here on Lost in the Stacks. Have a great weekend everyone and Happy New Year. CHARLIE BENNETT: Happy New Year. WENDY HAGENMAIER: Happy New Year. MARLEE GIVENS: Happy new year. [MUSIC - MARC BENNO, "GOOD YEAR"] Good year, a good year coming my way.