Hugh Blackmer

...is an anthropologist by training (AB Harvard 1965, MA Stanford 1972, PhD Stanford 1976) and taught for 18 years at Acadia University in Nova Scotia (Human Geography, Peoples and Cultures of Asia, Cross-Cultural Studies in Music, among other subjects). In 1990 he thought better of it and repotted himself as a reference librarian (MSLIS Simmons 1992), specializing in silicon-based life forms. He was Science Librarian at Washington & Lee University from 1996-2005, and since then has been living in splendid otium in midcoast Maine.
He says:
What I do, what I've always done, is find interesting things and connect people with them.

I do it over a very wide compass, often via finding out what interests people have and watching for stuff that fits or --ideally-- is at the fringes of those interests. Success is discovering something and conveying it to its somebody, and finding that it is new, or novel, or unexpected. Another frame:
if x interests you, then
what will you make of y?

I can become interested in a lot of different things. I have a taste for the bizarre and the vivid. I aspire to be a connoisseur of context, a metasource,
a serendib.

60th Class Report augmented (2025)
55th Class Report augmented (2020)
50th Class Report augmented (2015)

on Musical Engagement and
links to FIVE albums of musical improvisations (with Daniel Heïkalo)

Photographic Work (2024)
Joint Shows of Photographs with Broot:
Imagining (September 2020) and
Patterns and Personalities (September 2022)

tracking Convivium, 2021-present-

Day-to-day maunderings can be followed via
oook blog
and
Links to past enthusiasms can be found under
Current Work and The Old Home Page