Beyond the Shelf

1. Name: David Tkach

2. Year: One

3. Stream: Librarianship

4. Hometown: Winnipeg

5. What is your favourite book? It’s changed several times over the years. Age of 10: Books Of Blood, Clive Barker. Age of 15: my subscription to Thrasher. Age of 20: For Whom The Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway. Age of 25: War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy. Age of 30: Complete Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges. Honourable Mentions: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Leguin, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller, Italo Calvino, and Watership Down, Richard Adams. I still adore all of them (especially the stack of Thrashers). We’ll see what 35 will bring. AACR2? I should also add the book which I have banged my head against for more than a decade and only now have the faintest inkling of understanding (so perhaps ‘favourite’ doesn’t apply): Being And Time, Martin Heidegger.

6. Do you own an eReader? If so, is it cool? No, although I’m looking into purchasing one right now. I have quite a few philosophy books in .pdf format that I’ve avoided reading due to potential back-lit eye strain, so it seems necessary.

7. If you weren’t in library school, what would you be doing RIGHT NOW? Probably teaching philosophy part-time, attempting to conduct research in order to try to secure one of the dwindling handful of positions available in Canada, and simultaneously loving and regretting every minute of it. Hopefully still in Montreal, I might add.

8. What is your dream job? Something that is intellectually stimulating, something that contributes to the promotion and democratic dissemination of human knowledge, and something that permits me to enjoy the occasional pint on the terrasse at Vices et versa.

9. What is your dream sandwich? It exists: the BLT on chiapati at Aux vivres! Or something that gave you super powers.

10. What is your favourite thing about living in Montreal? The summers, the winters (I know it sounds absurd, but it’s so mild compared to Winnipeg!), the fruitful and dynamic tension between Quebec and the ROC, learning French mostly through cultural osmosis, the music scene, especially the punk and hardcore scene which I finally connected with after years of living here, biking all over and realizing how small the island really is, walking down Parc on a Sunday and seeing a half-dozen friends enjoying coffees at various cafes, watching around 80% of Habs games at the same semi-terrible bar on St-Zotique year after year. See also: responses to 8 and 9.

11. Living or dead, who would be at your imaginary potlatch? Carl Sagan, Socrates, Leo Strauss, Martin Heidegger, Blake Schwarzenbach, Ian Mackaye, and Bruce Dickinson. Not sure how well the group conversation would go, but I’d corner each of them in the kitchen in turn.