HI larious Wednesday, Jun 25 2008

omg, don’t you completely want to read this book now.

is it stereotypical of me to love this below?

love,

jessica

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they know something that no one else does Tuesday, Jun 24 2008

This is the Bosporus in Turkey.

I am reading Bomb magazine again today: books. Army of One by Janet Sarbanes. Make Loneliness by: J. Reuben Appelman.

I finished the last and final Proust “Finding Time Again” and had to return it to interlibrary loan yesterday and therefore cannot share passages. It was great, though. Now I start over from the beginning again!!

Now that Andrew is home, I vow to never, if I can help it, drive a car anywhere by myself ever again. Planes, trains, and shuttle buses, and regular buses. But no car alone. Ever. Again.

Library Journal Magazine: (the editor-at-large is one of my professors!) “In Search of an Emotionally Healthy Library” by: Nancy Cunningham.  http://liscareer.com/cunningham_eiq.htm

Basically this blog is the seed for what I may eventually want to look into doing: RA services. Responsive Readers’ Advisory … “knowing what is big (and when it is coming); finding great reads, listens, and views we shouldn’t miss; making connections between new and extant titles; and identifying what patrons see and predicting what they might request. With these strategies, we can make wider-ranging and more creative suggestions, build better displays, expand title possibilities for booklists, and inspire book discussion choices.”–Library Journal mag. p. 42

Collection Development and Readers Advisory Librarian–would be awesome jobs.

Barbara Ehrenreich – This Land is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

Marie Winn – Central Park in the Dark: More Mysteries of Urban Wildlife

good thing i found this website: www.readersadvisoronline.com, which has this, which i think is fantastic

“

TIPS AND FUN STUFF

Planes, Trains, and Lanes

June 21, 2008 Our peripatetic spies spotted the following books being read by their fellow travelers this week. We decided just for fun to try categorizing the readers by age and gender to see if we could spot any patterns. This is what we came up with. Any comments?

Teenagers
William Faulkner – Absalom, Absalom!

20-Something Casually Dressed Women
Raymond Chandler – The Long Goodbye
Junot Diaz – The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Timothy Ferriss – The 4-Hour Workweek
Laurie Notaro – There’s a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell: A Novel of Sewer Pipes, Pageant Queens, and Big Trouble
James Patterson – Third Degree
Jeffrey Sachs – The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time
Tom Stoppard – The Real Thing
Eckhart Tolle – The Power of Now

20-Something Professionally Dressed Women
Kim Edwards – The Memory Keeper’s Daughter
Malcolm Gladwell – Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
Debbie Macomber – Country Brides
Ian McEwan – Atonement
Marion Nestle – What to Eat
Jodi Picoult – My Sister’s Keeper
Ayn Rand – The Fountainhead

20-Something Casually Dressed Men
Paulo Coelho – The Alchemist
Robert Greene – The Art of Seduction
Robert E. Howard – Kull: Exile of Atlantis
Cormac McCarthy – Outer Dark
Bill and Carol McGann – The Story of the Tour de France
Ben Mezrich – Rigged: The True Story of an Ivy League Kid Who Changed the World of Oil, from Wall Street to Dubai

20-Something Professionally Dressed Men
Dee Brown – Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West
Robert Jordan – New Spring
Will North – The Long Walk Home

30-Something Casually Dressed Women
Ayn Rand – The Fountainhead

30-Something Professionally Dressed Women
Bernard Cornwell – Sword Song
John Grisham – The Appeal

30-Something Casually Dressed Men
Mark Bowden – Killing Pablo: the Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw
Stephen King – The Dark Half
Eduardo Mendoza – El Misterio de La Cripta Embrujada
Ayn Rand – Atlas Shrugged

30-Something Professionally Dressed Men
Philippa Gregory – The Other Boleyn Girl
Garth Nix – The Keys to the Kingdom, Book 3: Drowned Wednesday
James Redfield – The Celestine Prophecy

Middle-Aged Casually Dressed Women
Joe Hill – Heart-Shaped Box
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird

Middle-Aged Professionally Dressed Women
Clive Cussler and Jack Du Brul – Plague Ship
Philippa Gregory – The Boleyn Inheritance
Linda Howard – Son of the Morning
Joseph O’Neill – Netherland
Zadie Smith – White Teeth

Middle-Aged Casually Dressed Men
Deepak Chopra – Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old
Lorna Freeman – The King’s Own
Steven Millhauser – Dangerous Laughter
Haruki Murakami – The Elephant Vanishes

Middle-Aged Professionally Dressed Men
Steve Berry – The Alexandria Link
Lee Child – Nothing to Lose
Roderick Gordon and Brian Williams – Tunnels
David Halberstam – The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War
Sue Monk Kidd – The Secret Life of Bees
William Martin – The Lost Constitution
Joseph McBride – What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?”

I’ve read those in bold.

This is the movie poster for the new book I started yesterday called “The Book of Revelation” by: Rupert Thomson. Just started it, so I’ll let you know, the movie trailer looks cool.

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Take a straight and stronger course to the corner of your life. Wednesday, Jun 18 2008

Yes, I have that Yes song in my head all the time. All the time. What does that mean??? Anyway, I finished a book (wow, that almost never happens these days). Its because I spend all day watching The Wire, which I wouldn’t do if Dominic West wasn’t so damn good looking. Heir to the Glimmering World is one of Cynthia Ozick’s fictions, very readable. Her writing comes more alive when you read it out load. Otherwise, there were some loose ends, tied up quickly ends, and predictable ends. The intrigue is to some extent kept under wraps, and I don’t know if that was purposeful. I would have liked to have had an inside look, a hint, a tip. I’d recommend it as a quick read and an introduction to Ozick as an essayist. I don’t know if I would pick up her other fiction though.

Question: what is the specific job of the Interlibrary Loan Office. You’d think that they receive a request. File it. Receive an answer from another library. Follow up on it. Receive the item. Deliver the item requested. I would fairly give this process 3 weeks to be completed. Unless the item is rare, hard to find, etc. I waited over 4 weeks for the last Proust book. Finally received it and was told that it had been delivered and returned twice before I actually received a notice about it. My question is: what else could possibly be happening in the Interlibrary Loan office besides this straightforward task of loaning between libraries. You’d think it would be their main objective and that the item wouldn’t be tossed back and forth between libraries like a hot potato. I don’t know, its very mysterious. It could very well be that they are swamped with other types of work/problems/tasks/etc. and my request for a loan was put on the back-burner for a few weeks. Maybe they should change the name of the department. Or maybe its just this library–the land of calling in sick/vacation/personal days.

Anyhoo–I have received the last Proust–Finding Time Again and will attempt to finish it in 1 week. If not, I’ll have to track down a copy in NYC when I get there. If I get there.

Love,

Jessica

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Friday Magazines from Magical Periodical Department in Library Friday, Jun 13 2008

New York Magazine:

• “Martial artists convened in Union Square to voluntarily beat each other senseless.”
• An article discussing different egg bought from the Union Square Greenmarket. I am so excited about this Greenmarket and these organic eggs. The egg that won is from Flying Pigs Farm.
• Movie to check out: The Go-Getter directed by Martin Hynes.
• “NYPL’s Donnell foreign-language library is closing and will be replaced by a hotel.” Say what? I also heard that the Mercantile library is going to be gone by the time I get there… hello? Where will the Proust Society meet?
• Another movie to check out: Operation Filmmaker.

Bomb Magazine:

• The PoPedology of an Ambient Language by: Edwin Torres
• I really enjoyed the Lydia Millet/Johnathan Franzen conversation…both writers I have trouble with, but I think that his ending comment was a little bitchy.?
• Sway by: Zachary Lazar. Becky might find this interesting? Lots of stuff about The Rolling Stones?
• The word conceit has been used twice so far in this magazine…to mean idea. I can’t decide how I feel about that.
• There is an ad for a reward: $25 dollars for any European Starling captured in the 5 boroughs of New York and $5 dollars for any European Starling’s egg found in the 5 boroughs of New York. www.starlingmigration.info is the website given. Maybe I should keep my eyes open and make some extra cash. Bizarre. Keep a look out for this bird!
  
• This exchange is fantastic. The translator and the translated. I’m couldn’t be more intrigued… “The possibilities of English, to a writer whose mother tongue is English, feel limitless. Everyone’s mother tongue feels infinite. So follow me here: if one’s mother tongue is infinite, the great works written in other languages exist in separate galaxies. Ergo, translation is a subgenre of science fiction.” Raja Alem and her translator Tom McDonough. The book is My Thousand and One Nights.

Library Journal:

• Yes, I am a dork.
• Becoming a champion of Library of Congress Subject Headings? Becoming a Radical Reference Librarian? Yes, please! radicalreference.info is the place to go. Here are some of the headings they came up with: Bollywood Films, Net Neutrality, Folksonomy, Organic Foods, Freeganism, and Posthumanism. You see: if I need to come up with subject headings and they are not authorized: I can’t used them! It gets really annoying after a while.
• There has been a 44.5% increase in enrollment in ALA accredited master’s degree programs… hmmmm….
• This is all fascinating to me because I have no idea what I want to be a part of, what I want to specialize in, what will make me money (it shouldn’t be important, but it is). The ALA conference was held in Anaheim, California this year. I can’t wait until I can go to a conference with other librarians and go to some of these talks. An example of what is most interesting to me is: Cataloging and Metadata: basically the future of cataloging… and I guess I will be involved in this future when it comes… There is a library in Arizona that has abolished the Dewey system in favor of a ‘bookstore’ like model. There is a question about whether library catalogs will even be needed in the future. Apparently by next year, the AACR2 is going to be replaced by the RDA (Resource Description and Access) and I don’t know what that means for me, but I’m excited to be involved in the middle of this change. There are so many weird abbreviations for everything…. ALA, LIS, RFID, etc.
• The most awesome library blog in the land: hours and hours of joyous reading is http://scanblog.blogspot.com/
• “S. R. Ranganathan, known as the “the father of library science in India,” and respected by librarians all over the world, proposed five laws of library science. Most librarians worldwide accept them as the foundations of their philosophy.^[These laws are:
• Books are for use.--basically, shelves are open to the public and books are not chained to the stacks.
• Every reader his [or her] book.–Multiculturalism?
• Every book its reader.–If something is not being used, it needs to be utilized in order for the person who needs it can find it. Even if they don’t know they need it.
• Save the time of the User.–Efficiency, timeliness, respect.
• The library is a growing organism.–change is good. newbies like me!

–taken from Wikipedia.

• There are three workshops on how to deal with the ‘difficult’ and the ‘weird’ in a library setting. Love it.
• I think it would be advantageous for a budding Library Science student to attend one of these conferences and just sit in and absorb. However, I don’t think anyone would pony up the cash to give me that opportunity. Not likely. My goal is to meet and pick the brains of as many librarians as humanly possible. That’s where the metropolis of NYC helps a great deal.

This is hilarious. Thus, the last magazine… The New Yorker

• The Running Novelist by Haruki Murakami… a cartoon of a running Haruki-san and this quote so far…”I just figured that since failure was not an option, I had to give it everything I had.” And “Now I felt as though I’d reached the top of a steep staircase and emerged into an open space. I was confident that I’d be able to handle any new problems that might crop up. I took a deep breath, glanced back at the stairs I’d just climbed, then slowly gazed around me and began to contemplate the next stage of my life.”
• This is so sweet: “But, at that point, I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person but with an unspecified number of readers. My readers would welcome whatever life style I chose, as long as I made sure that each new work was an improvement over the last. And shouldn’t that be my duty–and my top priority–as a novelist? I don’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense my relationship with them is a conceptual one, but I’ve consistently considered it the most important thing in my life.” Aww, I love you too Haruki-san.

I have to admit that I didn’t read the rest of this New  Yorker today… but I will another day. This has been fun!

Till next time, Adios Amigos!

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Hiatus–Disrupted! Friday, Jun 6 2008

This is where I was for the past 3 days… Tybee Island. The trip was great–except for the drive home. I drove through the worst weather imaginable and it was terrifying and I hate inclement weather, especially in the land of God’s wrath… East Central Georgia. I finished one book while at the beach: Butterfly Stories by William T. Vollmann. Interesting to say the least. I mean, if Cambodian hookers interest you at all. Yet, even with the off color subject matter I still enjoy his writing. I am also reading Cynthia Ozick’s Heir to the Glimmering World, which is way cool. And started William H. Gass’ The Tunnel, which I am probably not going to continue reading… he has described this 600+ page book as a “lump of darkness.” I am enjoying another poetry book by Zagajewski and have a new favorite poem, would you like to read it? It is called “Lullaby”

“No sleep, not tonight. The window blazes.

Over the city, fireworks soar and explode.

No sleep: too much has gone on.

Rows of books stand vigil above you.

You’ll brood on what’s happened

and what hasn’t. No sleep, not tonight.

You inflamed eyelids will rebel,

your fiery eyes sting,

your heart swell with remembrance.

No sleep. The encyclopedias will open

and poets, dressed carefully,

bundled for winter, will stroll out one by one.

Memory will open, with a sudden hiss

like a parachute’s. Memory will open,

you won’t sleep,

rocked slowly through clouds,

an easy target in the firework’s glow.

No sleep: so much has gone on,

so much been revealed.

You know each drop of blood

could compose its own scarlet Iliad,

each dawn author

a dark diary. No sleep,

under the thick blanket of roofs, attics,

and chimneys casting out handfuls of ash.

Pale nights row noiselessly into the sky,

their oars silk stockings delicately rustling.

You’ll go out to the park, and tree limbs

will amiably thump your shoulder, making

sure, confirming your fidelity. No sleep.

You’ll race through the uninhabited park,

a shadow facing more shadows.

You’ll think of someone who’s no more

and of someone else living so fully

that her life at its edges changes

to love. Light, more light

gathers in the room. No sleep, not tonight.”

I like that poem. I’m glad I survived to share it with you.

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At Dad’s House Tuesday, Jun 3 2008

I am at my Dad’s teaching grown ups how to use the internets.

Love, Jessica

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