I will be on the ballot this coming election, November 7, 2023, as a candidate for Trustee for Wells Branch Community Library District.
I’ve served on the Board as a Trustee since November 2021 when I was elected unopposed. I currently serve as the Vice-President of the Board.
Here’s what I stand for:
Free speech and the first amendment. Library employees and trustees are often asked about this issue, but for our library it hasn’t been a major topic because we are truly independent (not a division of city government or a larger library system). The last word sits with the Director of the Library and the Board of Trustees and so far we have agreed and not faced many (if any) real attempts to ban books. But, if this does become a significant issue, you want Trustees who are willing to stand up for their beliefs. In my case that means protecting freedom of speech and not banning books. I support the American Library Association’s statement on the Freedom to Read.
Equitable access – this means that the public library should work to accommodate access to materials for everyone in the District: homeowners, renters, the elderly, the home-bound, people with disabilities, people without a car, children, LGBTQIA people, the unemployed, etc. They all deserve equal access to library materials.
Access to physical media – Our Library does a LOT! We are so lucky to have the wonderful programs and spaces to meet, computers, storytimes, the list goes on. If you have not checked out an ebook or audiobook from Hoopla, you are missing out! But at its core, I still believe that a Library should be full of printed books. Full accessibility includes print and electronic materials, braille, and other accommodations.
About Me
For people who don’t know me, I wanted to share a little bit about myself here. I’ve lived in Texas for the past 18 years and in Wells Branch for 17 years. My wife Jordan and I have two boys, ages 13 and 16. They have attended Round Rock ISD schools all their lives: Wells Branch Elementary, Deerpark Middle School, and McNeil High School.
I currently serve on the Board of the Deerpark MS PTA, the McNeil Wrestling Booster Club, and I’ve served on the Board of the Wells Branch PTA for several years in the past. I work in the marketing department of Charles Schwab and have a degree in English from the University of Denver. I’ve previously worked in educational assessment, textbook publishing, and book publishing in New York. I’m also a writer and podcaster in my spare time (among many hobbies). I’m a member of the Texas Library Association and I serve on the Board of the International David Foster Wallace Society.
What a Trustee Does
Over the past two years I’ve learned that a Trustee’s job is mainly about good governance. In our case, one of the primary roles of the Board of Trustees is to provide oversight for the Director of the Library. We are lucky to have an excellent Director. Our Director has enjoyed the full confidence of the Board for many years. This makes the Trustee’s job much easier. Replacing the Director would cause a lot of disruption and uncertainty in our Library. But if it ever does become an issue, Trustees should have a good working knowledge of how the Library functions in order to find a suitable candidate.
Another part of good governance involves oversight of finances. Again, our Library is lucky to have a financing model that relies on sales tax collected within the District. Sales tax revenues have been high the past few years. This allows us to fund projects such as Library renovations, increased programming, and pay increases for the staff. So, it really is important to shop local and keep your spending close to home when you can. It makes a real difference! You can read more about the Board and see our agendas and minutes on the Library’s website.
If you are interested in learning more about what a Trustee does or doesn’t do, I’d be happy to speak with you! matt@mattbucher.com
Election Day
If you live in the District, I’m asking for your vote. You can select up to 2 candidates for Trustee.
Early voting begins October 23 and election day is November 7.
One thing I didn’t mention there is that Braverman includes a scene filmed at the corner of Eastern Parkway and Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. For a while, I lived a block north of there on Bedford. That intersection has changed a lot over the years so it was very cool to see it back in 1968.
You can see the old Town Hill Restaurant in the background.
That Texaco station is long gone.
I also wrote about David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King and the character of Toni Ware over on Medium. The Pale King’s Trailer Park Queen.
This has been an interesting year in reading for me. I read a lot of books, about 65. I didn’t track them all, but I reviewed 25 books for Publishers Weekly, read 6 books in manuscript form, Â 3 books for the Texas Book Festival panel I moderated in October, 6 books for our book club at work, and I got about 10 other books for free (review copies). I checked out 140 books at the library so far this year, but many of those were children’s books or books which I read only a portion of. Â Several of the books I reviewed will not be published until 2015 and many of the books I read for personal pleasure were published in years past. I’m not counting those for this list, but if I did, the blue-ribbon would go to Reif Larsen’s I am Radar. I’ll save that one for 2015. Here are some of the best things I read this year, published in 2014.
1. The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
This was probably my most-anticipated book of the year. And I found it fairly disappointing. The first three fifths of the novel were excellent and Mitchell had me in thrall, gliding along on the expectation of a tight conclusion. But I could not find the urge to care enough about the science fiction angle of a supernatural battle. The first section, about Holly Sykes, sort of goes off the rails when Holly discovers a brutal murder caused by some sort of spirit or apparition. But I stuck with it for the next section, which is centered around Hugo Lamb. The story of his pursuit of Holly in a Swiss ski resort is expertly told, Mitchell at his best.
This, along with the Mitchell novel, was at the top of my list for 2014 novels. I adored Lerner’s first novel and had high hopes for his Atocha-Station-set-in-NY and there are parts of this book that are fantastic, but overall, I didn’t feel that the book had the narrative coherence Lerner was able to establish in Atocha Station.
3. My Struggle, volume 1, by Karl Ove Knausgaard
4. Women by Chloe Caldwell
5. Sister Golden Hair by Darcey Steinke
6. Fancy by Jeremy Davies
7. The Smartest Kids in the World by Amanda Ripley.
Over at The Howling Fantods, Greg Carlisle and I were interviewed by Nick Maniatis about the history of Greg’s books Elegant Complexity and Nature’s Nightmare.
Over at the Austin Chronicle, I reviewed this zine from Monofonus Press. It’s a companion piece to Gertrude Stein’s classic Tender Buttons, which turns 100 years old this year.
I’ve also started writing some reviews for Publishers Weekly, but I’m not supposed to reveal which ones I wrote.
I just published an essay on Google Sightseeing about the state of art projects using images from Google Street View. The essay was a long time in the making and I hope to move on now and post more location-specific stuff about Street View.
1) My essay on the “Year of David Foster Wallace” originally published in Fiction Advocate has been translated into Spanish by Maria Serrano and published online under the new title “DFW, DT, y Yo.”
2) The Found Poetry Review recently published an issue dedicated to works from David Foster Wallace and I had a small contribution titled “David Foster Wallace Titles Roughly Translated into Other Languages (and Roughly Translated Back Into English).”
I contributed a short piece on The Pale King to an Italian DFW site for their Pale Winter project. It was kindly translated into Italian by Roberto Natalini and Andrea Firrincieli.
A lot has changed in the online world since I got my first email address in 1995. A lot has changed in my own expectations of a creative and successful career. My day job is working as a Project Manager for Pearson Assessment. My main job is being a dad to two little boys, and wooing my wife. All of my creative projects are thus relegated to “side” projects, pretty much all of them online at this point. The metrics for what makes a successful project (or even a good day spent online) are somewhat subjective and personal to me. I don’t go by pageviews or hits (unless they were all astronomical numbers & I had ads – then I would care!), so here are a few things that make me happy online:
– when one of my Metafilter comments or posts gets 100+ favorites
– when Emily Gould “likes” one of my posts on Tumblr
-when one of my Tumblr posts ends up on the Tumblr radar or Staff Blog
– when Hari Kunzru retweeted one of my tweets (though he doesn’t have as many followers as @sarahw or @goldman or @noradio who have also retweeted me). I’ve also had twitter interactions with people I admire like Craig Newmark, Anil Dash, and Rogers Cadenhead.
– any time my name appears on kottke.org
-a pic I post on mlkshk gets 1000+ views or 100+ likes
Maybe this is gauche to admit, maybe it’s not cool to admit you like “favorites” or stars or karma or whatever, but I don’t care. This is me.
