Middle age is an occasional intense yearning to be home, even though home never existed, it's just an indefinite search for peace and safety.

UCLA Spec coll regularly loans to LACMA, and I helped a fair amount with the new show (selecting, meeting, presenting). It is rather my experience with art curators that library curators are just not considered for things like... openings and previews. Anyways, if you are in a museum, do better.

That all said, the UC system is one of the few library systems that pays competitive wages, so I'm never leaving. (You can view our salaries online! Do it!)

In my 7 years or so as a curator, I have earned individuals and institutions my total salary in revenue several times over. We have cute little stories about these jobs, but bottom line: we are asset managers who generate wealth. Curatorial salaries are criminally low - they should not be.

The is a book I helped a private collector get off ebay in 2019 or so. If it sells, I will have given him a 300k+ k profit (counting comission).

This takes longer, ofc. But here at UCLA we actually do believe CJK materials should be catalogued as carefully as other materials. Wild, I know.

A simple example, but you can see the toc of vol 2, which is in the hand of Huang Siyong 黄思永 next to the ch in the hand of Wang Renkan 王仁堪. I have never seen a litho that recruited famous artists like this! It's listed in any description anywhere.

One example of a book I'm looking at now: catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/...
search.worldcat.org/title/609231...
A seemingly basic litho from 1893 (a catalog of painters). However, a close look reveals each chapter was written by a different, famed calligrapher - 7+ contributors no one has noted

This quarter I am not teaching so as to catalog rare Chinese books. Descriptive standards are so wildly subpar, that it's rather shocking. A couple of things we are doing:
1) Counting leaves per chapter (a sort of way to collate)
2) Making lists of other contributors aside from the assigned author

Happy, "our tax rates are higher than the wealthy" day!

Was very glad I only owed a small amount in federal taxes this year on my *checks notes* public sector librarian salary.

At ucla we only hire Virgo as processing archivists

About every ten weeks my boss says, "Devin...." in a certain tone. It's great to work in a place where they embrace my mental illnesses

My office is peak chaos atm. But i did just return 100 books!

Rare book curators are either 1) chaos monsters with hoarded offices or 2) incredibly organized with a great attention to detail.

I refuse to believe anyone with a moderate temperament gets into this job

God I hate this genre. These kids who protested Gaza got arrested, expelled, beaten up, doxxed, lives ruined by outside agitators and were utterly betrayed by the administrations that should have protected them at any cost. Shut the fuck up.

This thread!!!

Once again, the national average pay for adjunct professors with PhDs is a flat fee of $3900 per course.

Carcrastinating is the word I have needed

It's Tuesday, you know what that means!

Sit in your work parking structure listening to Pet Sounds as you heave a sigh that says, "I should probably go in now."

The football Devin Fitzgerald is the one who really dominates Google results these days. I'll tell my nieces and nephews about how in the great before, it was me, a librarian. But then the world lost its sense of purpose.

These are two poems I mostly perform (because they are funny).
Remember, you too can say fuck it to scholarship and write things to amuse your friends at bars.

Even vampires get to reinvent themselves

I’m leading this London Rare Book School course on the history of collecting. Ideal for anyone interested in studying the history of libraries and how and why books have survived. We’ll be looking at why special collections are special. 22-26 June. #bookHistory👇📚📖

ies.sas.ac.uk/study-traini...

Lolol so real.

So socially manipulative, asking questions etc.

I am also convinced we are unmoored as a society, since I have had people describe this as love bombing.
Curiosity is so rare, it has become toxic!

Everyone says men are bad at listening and asking questions. Trust me, there is no gender to shitty date behavior. Everyone sucks at asking questions and listening

On a date last night, someone said, "wow you are good at dating."

All I did was ask questions and maintain awareness about speaking balance to make sure we both took about 50% of the space. (It is a trick if you are a natural listener to make sure you speak. Then you weed out narcissists

This killer hack guarantees dating success:

Ask questions and listen to the answers

I'll never do a better shit post than this.

Lol. Chicago?!?