Essays of an Information Scientist, Vol:6, 1983

by Eugene Garfield

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0894950320
• ISBN13: 9780894950322
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Isi Pr
• Length: 673 Pages
• Weight: 1.74 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Garfield Keeps It Real

Soon after receiving this volume as a college graduation gift (Cornell University, Class of 1989), the Gulf War errupted in the Middle-East and I was drafted for military service aboard the U.S.S. Jacob Javitz stationed off the coast of Italy. Like most young men my age I was fiercely patriotic and knew, by god, that lest the heavens fall I would defend my country. I remember The Javitz well because she was the last ship still in active service that had a fully carpeted galley. The carpet, badly stained and worn by nearly two decades of use, had been deemed a health risk and was scheduled to be removed in the fall of '87, but because of the ulterior motives of a smallish military appropriations auditor who's brother was the ship's captain, it remained there (and perhaps still remains there) well into it's third decade. Captain Bloom was often heard to remark, in his inimitable way, "that galley carpet needs to be either replaced or removed altogether." He did not to my knowledge ever say this to any one person directly, but would instead sheepishly hint at it during meals when his mumblings, by their very nature blaring on the side of incoherent grunting, would be quickly swollowed up by the deafening chatter of the feasting crew. His face would flush for a moment with the realization that he was in fact talking to himself and he would then return to his meal, or perhaps continue working on a model ship if he happened to be not in the mess hall but alone in his quarters on the lower deck at the time. Of course given the situation, such grievances were not uncommon but this particular complaint was met inauspiciously by his superiors and he was dishonorably discharged in 1967 on account of an unrelated incident involving a Turkish whore he met on shore leave in Tahiti. I often thought about Captain Bloom, and what it might have been like to serve under him. Frustrating perhaps, but also exciting. The ratio of the amount of excitement generated by taking orders from a man of such extraordinary resolve and the frustration of not beining able to consistently understand those orders was difficult to assertain, but my best postulations would usually hover around a figure of of 7 to 4 (I might be willing to soften this a bit to 2 to 1 if I were explaining the situation to a very small child and needed to ralate such details in a more straightfoward manner, but only if the child was especially under developed mentaly, as the discrepency in no small way undermines the gravity of my approximation of my imagined experience). Fighting alongside "Porcelain Bloom" in the flowering countryside of 1940's France was a recurring theme in a series of poems I wrote for The New Yorker in the years following the Gulf War. The poems, while never actually published, were exceptional and quite poetic, save for those written when I was feeling particularly obsequious towards the notion of urban development set aga