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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the captive and the fugitive Wednesday, May 7 2008

Today I finished The Captive and the Fugitive by Marcel Proust. This particular book is not as cohesive as the previous books in the series, you can kind of tell where the story was pieced together from different scenes and the parts where Proust was not involved in the editing. Proust died before finishing the revisions of the last couple drafts of the last few portions of the novel. His brother Robert edited the last three volumes, which were published after Proust’s death. This second to last book was an uphill climb and I think that I’ll miss it once I finish the next and last novel. Of course, thank you to copyright laws in which I cannot own a copy of the last book until I am 33 years old: I have to rely on interlibrary loan and they are as slow as Christmas.

I think that it is really great that Jack Kerouac cites Proust as one of his main influences and refers to In Search of Lost Time in his work. I had never really noticed that. I think that Proust is misunderstood in mainstream society. Alas.

I tried to register for classes, but I’m too early. I know that I will be taking these three classes starting September 2nd and I am very excited:

LIS 651 Information Professions: Introduces the fields of librarianship and information professions. Course material covers the evolving role of libraries in society, the legal and ethical aspects of the profession and the impact of rapidly changing information environments. Also included are the principles of management, development of policies and procedures, effective communication skills, types of libraries and information centers, and organizational and staffing structures. Three hours of field observation is required.

LIS 652: Covers concepts of reference service in real and virtual environments. The course introduces the selection and evaluation of resources in all formats, the development of searching techniques, strategies for user-centered service, matching user needs to resources and the provision of information services in changing technological environments. Six hours of field observation is required.

LIS 608: Human Information Behavior This course examines the concept of information, information needs, and the process of seeking information. Models of information behavior and major theories, paradigms, and perspectives related to information seeking are addressed. Characteristics of information seeking behavior are explored as they relate to individuals and groups in various social roles, demographic areas and occupations as well as issues related to user-centered services and system design.

I am really! anxious to register. Really!

Toodles, Jessica

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Persepolis 2 Tuesday, May 6 2008

Yesterday, May 5th, I finished in 1 hour Persepolis 2, a graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi. The movie that is out is based on the first Persepolis book and I really want to see it. Graphic novels are fun to read and fast as well. Go check it out!. I have less than 50 pages left to go on the 5th Proust and will probably finish it by the end of the day. Then there is the long wait for interlibrary loan to procure the last one for me. Hopefully they will all be finished by the time I leave the state, which is in 50 something days.

I tried to register for classes today but I am too early. I know exactly what I am taking and am anxious to sign up! Sigh Sigh Sigh.

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Sharing Proust so you don’t have to: Friday, May 2 2008

“Raising a corner of the heavy veil of habit (habit which stultifies us and which during the whole course of our existence hides more or less the whole universe from us, and under cover of utter darkness, without changing their labels, substitutes for the most dangerous or intoxicating poisons of life something anodyne which procures no delight), these memories returned to me as on their first appearance, with the same sharp, fresh novelty that each new season brings as it returns, changing our routine time-table and providing us, even in the realm of our pleasures-if we climb into a carriage on the first fine day of spring or leave the house at sunrise-with an exultant awareness of our most insignificant actions, which invests this one intense moment with more value than the totality of the days preceding it. As they recede, passing days gradually cover over those which went before and are themselves buried by those that come after. But each past day remains deposited within us as in some vast library where there are copies of the oldest books, which probably no one will ever ask to consult. And yet if this past day should pass through the translucent layers of the following eras, rise to the surface, then for a moment names will resume their former meanings, people their former faces and we our former souls, and we shall feel with a diffuse but newly tolerable and transient sense of suffering, the problems which remained intractable for so long and which caused us so much anguish at the time. Our selves are composed of our successive states, superimposed. But this superimposition is not immutable like the stratification of a mountain. A tremor is liable at any moment to throw older layers back up to the surface.”–The Captive and the Fugitive, Marcel Proust, page 509.

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A Room of One’s Own Friday, May 2 2008

Newsflash. I haven’t been posting because I’ve been reading too much! After the library asked for my books back because I am graduating, I had to go beg them to extend my borrowing privileges! I got a raise, Andrew is in NJ calling me from Geraldo’s home phone. My bowling pin burn is coming off. And: I am graduating!

On to the books: I really feel that I’m not doing this whole reviewing what I’ve read thing justice. Right now I am reading:

1) The Captive and the Fugitive by Marcel Proust–Almost done. This is the most disjointed book so far. There was a brief scene in Madame Vedurin’s house, where Monsieur de Charlus caused a stink over something and the rest of the book has been Marcel weeping, postulating, prostrating, and lamenting over Albertine. It’s very beautiful–don’t get me wrong. But it is not as graceful as Swann’s yearnings over Odette. I miss Swann. Let’s just say that I’ll be delighted when I am finished and will be able to take a look at the thing as a whole. Believe me, if it was too much or too awfully boring I would have quit by now. There’s something in it that keeps me going and it’s hard to explain. The language is enough to carry the sometimes nonexistent plot. I don’t even usually need a plot–books these days rarely have a plot. I just need something to keep me in the scene, something to make sure I don’t wander off. Elstir, Francoise, and Jupien and those kinds of characters are what keep me in the book. Marcel likes to lay around in bed and worry.

2) Art and Ardor by Cynthia Ozick–another book of essays. So far I have read a lot about Virginia Woolf and thus the portrait above. I am reading now about E.M. Forster’s secret homosexual novel. Bloomsbury is now interesting to me and I really want to read more Woolf before too long.

3) Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by: Lydia Millet–the three men who starred in the Manhattan Project have been brought back to life in the 21st century and are mooching off a married librarian in New Mexico. She believes in their plights and their hearts and her push over husband may not make it. I really like the way this is written and am savoring it slowly.

4) Master and Margarita by: Mikhail Bulgakov–Getting stranger and stranger. Margarita has shown up and she is horrible! I can only imagine that the way this novel ends can only be in the most unimaginable horror ever. It’s almost unbelievable. I love it.

5) The Virgin in the Flames by Chris Abani–just started it so I don’t have any idea how I’ll like this. So far, it’s interesting. Very contemporary.

6) Auto da Fe by Elias Canetti–yes, I’m still reading this because only one chapter at a time can be handled. This is not to say that I don’t like it, it’s just hard to swallow in large chunks.

I will try to finish one of these this weekend, so I can start something equally as wonderful and share it with you!

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This is TBR overload… Friday, Apr 25 2008

I have started Cynthia Ozick’s The Din in the Head, a collection of essays that are really interesting and thus have added more to my to be read list then I can handle. After finding this article…on The Millions Blog I have decided to use this process: I have put on LibraryThing all those books I want to read soon. So far, there are only 48! I will number each book and then randomly generate a number and then read that book! Soon, I will be through the list and be a super reader! Proust is going swimmingly and now I will quote from the Ozick which is spectacular

“I do not know who Patti Smith was; there was much afoot that I did not know as I sat in my room with its yellow wallpaper reading Henry James and volumes of Jewish history and The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Yet here I was, all at once, steeped in discord and chaos: oh, the novel, the novel! Authority was demanding that I cease to trust its familiar form, that its familiar form was broken forever, and that to continue to hope for it in the old way was to be exiled to the writer’s ultima Thule; only the marginal and the mediocre and the weak would fail to recognize this. Authority had wiped me out. And where was I, after all, and what was I, while Authority and its enviable sharers and minions were exulting in the great red-hot Downtown? In my room with the yellow wallpaper, writing, in defeat, a superannuated, superseded, and moribund novel that was already fouled by the stench of its predictable death throes.”

“Contemplating the unpredictable trajectory of Tolstoy’s life puts one in mind of those quizzical Max Beerbohm caricatures, wherein an old writer confronts–with perplexity, if not with contempt–his young self. So here is Tolstoy at seventy-two, dressed like a muzhik in belted peasant tunic and rough peasant boots, with the long hoary priestly beard of a vagabond pilgrim, traveling third class on a wooden bench in a fetid train carriage crowded with the ragged poor. In the name of the equality of souls he has turned himself into a cobbler; in the name of the pristine Jesus he is estranged from the rites and beliefs of Russian Orthodoxy; in the name of Christian purity he has abandoned wife and family. He is ascetic, celibate, pacifist. To the multitude of his followers and disciples (Gandhi among them), he is a living saint.”

I will try to update my TBR list accordingly. Have a happy Friday!

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The Forest for the Trees Friday, Apr 18 2008

I haven’t updated in a while because of various things going on and the lack of reading (however, some would say that there hasn’t been a lack of reading). If I’m not reading 8 books at one time, I consider that a lack of reading. However, I am reading Master and Margarita….which is pretty funny and very Russian (thanks: Becky!) I am reading The Captive and the Fugitive… the fifth in the Proust series In Search of Lost Time. I love it very much and don’t know what I’m going to do when I’m done with Proust besides pick up back at number 1 and read it over again. I am also still reading Auto da Fe, but promise to finish it soon.

I am thinking about picking up another Chabon, because I am anxious to read Maps and Legends, but want to finish everything else he has written first, as Maps and Legends is an autobiography I think. I am anxious also to read tons of other things once I am done with school and can manage more. One of these is Min Jin Lee’s Free Food for Millionaires and some books by Ryszard Kapucinski. I have created a LibraryThing page devoted to books I want to read someday… the covers look all pretty.

I am off to find more pretty book sites to read.

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There’s too many ostriches! Friday, Apr 11 2008

I found this picture on my new favorite blog that will be listed on the left, called www.maudnewton.com/blog. It’s very interesting literary talk and things. I have finished reading Possession by A. S. Byatt and I’m glad I’m done because I couldn’t help but thinking it would end up like I thought it would and so it did. The mystery letters were recovered and alls well that ends well. Except not a whole lot of things end well and such should be represented by literature. Which is why I must be attracted to things not Victorian. I am continuing on with Auto da Fe, content to have it slow going and savoring. The whole book is like a chess game and the readers are the pawns. And so with a chess game, thus the reader can take it slow.

For school, I am reading Omeros, by Derek Walcott and it’s also slow going but pretty interesting and I’ll be glad to finish the last book I will ever have to read for my undergraduate degree. I will be set free. Today I would like to start The Master and the Margarita, all things considered and go on from there. I have not been reading on the same rate as I was last year and I’m not sure why. With Andrew gone to New Jersey I should have more alone time to sit with a book, be that good or bad. I will also probably cook a lot. Becky is home this week thanks to large amounts of narcotics, not hers, of course and for that I am glad. What a rogue world!

I am know shamelessly bogarting recommendations from other blogs for my own enjoyment and reference. And after that almost horrific bout of Victorian romance and bad poetry, I need a little concrete postmodern and sanity–and I want to be sure to say that it’s not that I didn’t like the book Possession or that I won’t read the author again, but goodness: I need a new genre and quick!

“In the meantime here are five novels of ideas (3 classic and 2 that seem destined to become canonical), each revolutionary or anti-revolutionary in a way that describes their respective ages as well as anything else. They deserve to be read, or read again, on different terms: in light of their relationship to the novel itself.

1. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann. When Tony Buddenbrooks, a beautiful, divorced, woman of dwindling prospects dismisses a wealthy suitor because, “Er sagt mich stadt mir” (He says who <.em>instead of whom), and it’s not the beginning of a morality tale then you know you’re in a world of the sublime. In this case it’s the fluid, intellectually sophisticated, milieu of the early 20th-century haute bourgeoisie (Bildungsburghertum), with the shadow of aristocracy on one hand, and the tenuous nature of their own position on the other.

Mann, of course, was the last European master who could act with the underlying assumption that the intellectual, political and material wants of the society he was born into shared more than physical space — that his project and the values of his culture were one — without drawing suspicion of naïveté or worse.

He continued to believe this until he was living in exile. Claiming until the last that the betrayal of the rest of the society by its political custodians was an aberration. Historians might make other claims, however, as the arcs of the 20th century played out at different paces in the European capitals, the case can still be made for Mann as the last of the great realists, trusting unmediated literary representation and inquiry to make deep sense of the world. Never mind that it was already a modernist one.

2. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Ellison might be the single most important American writer of the last hundred years. Where others traded on well-established schools of thought he combined the protean modernist sensibility of Toomer with the formal perfection of the European novel to create an Erfahrungsroman for the 20th century. He is the fork in the road of American literature, one path leading to the well-behaved world of mannerism and craftsmanship, and the other diving down the rabbit hole into the gleeful madman lands of Reed and, only slightly less directly, Pynchon. Besides having a share to the claim Great American Novel, this book does even more than invent the jazz novel. This is funk before funk had a name.

3. The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. This is the epitome of a book whose failures show as much its triumphs. Durrell lays bear his ambition with the claim: “Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete [a novel] whose form is based on relativity. Three sides of space and one of time. … I have tried to turn the novel through both subjective and objective modes…” Post-modernism avant la letter. And that’s just the hand he reveals. Among a great many other things this is a project that also happens to be Cosmopolitan, devious (Sadian, Lawrencian, that is to say before the pill) and sexy as hell.

If his worldly gaze strikes the contemporary reader as chauvinistic, or as sharing a border of Empire with Kipling, well nothing can transcend its age entirely. Here is a writer whose meridional creativity grasps with a beautiful ease of intelligence the relationship between the fleeting and the permanent in a single sentence. Between the body, language and the fragile invisible they may sometimes express, or summon into being.

4. By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolaño, translated by Chris Andrews. Latin American artists tend to look further afield for inspiration and models than their northern counterparts. Certainly they tend to be more Europe-facing. So much so it might be argued that between the anxieties of whiteness and so-called Magic Realism the following generation had a hard time taking shape. It turns out, in the best of cases, it’s because they were out wrasslin’ with the biggest problems they could find.

For Roberto Bolaño the essential, atlas-like question is the nature of creation and the genesis of evil itself, both its personal and historical manifestations on a global scale. As might be imagined ambition like that needs a language of its own, and Bolaño creates a startling poetry to carry his meaning over.

If Bolaño is one of the great artists of his generation (and his core achievement seems to me on a level with Achebe — Sui generis), he has found in Chris Andrews the ideal translator. Where other interpreters seem to miss a beat, Andrews displays an intensity and lightness that get to the poetic and metaphysical reaches without losing, or attempting to sweep away, the spaces and silences of what cannot be translated.

5. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Post-modernism taken seriously has become the province of the grand old men, playing out the bittersweet end of what was the game of their times. It is not equal to the codes or experiences of our moment. While Coetzee — viewed with mutual suspicion by most black African writers, who suffer a different double-blind — tries to balance the equation while describing magnificently and, in the end quite revealingly, the noble and tortured last wall of the old school, several writers have already scrambled over to the other side. Among the many conceivable solutions none is quite so sly as the one offered by Kazuo Isiguruo (who shares many concerns with Coetzee, but feints to the zeitgeist as often as the canon). His deceptively simple sentences contain whole other worlds, vast unspoken epistemologies, beneath their surface. Among other things Never Let Me Go is a haunting disquisition on whether love or art can explain our world, or save us from inhuman fates.

The most frequent complaint against this book is: Why don’t they make a run for it? Opening onto the larger: Why don’t we all?”

http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/

This is where these particular recommendations come from and I think that it’s a new treasure trove of things to read! I really need more things to read. Update: I gave up on Against the Day for now. Maybe forever. We’ll see how the rest of the year pans out. I still have not received the 5th Proust and I’m not sure if I ever will. Hopefully, NYC has a copy of it floating around it’s hallowed library halls.

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