Paper Baubles

One night at the reference desk

2011-01-26T17:54:00.000-06:00

I had an interesting night at the Reference Desk of Mighty Library last night, so I started jotting down the questions. It was a night that showcased the variety of questions we get in one of the departments of a multi-story downtown library.

- I need help with a job hunt.

- I need Immigration Forms printed. What is Immigration Form I-551? How much does it cost to apply?

- Please cancel my computer reservation.

- The computer is "acting crazy and jumping around."

- I'm trying to fill out a job application for CSL Plaza. Several tries with no luck. I finally got her to show me the envelope she was holding. CSL Plasma. Problem solved.

- Where does my color print job go?

- The new $5.00 bill doesn't work in the printer coin box. (A known and aggravating problem.)

- I need a book about Ph levels in the body.

- I'm looking for a casino gaming job at Mystic Lake.

- I need a renter's rebate credit form.

- What is a Lidoderm patch? What is Polysubstance?

- Please cancel my computer reservation.

- I don't have my library card with me, and I don't have ID, can I still get on the Internet? Sorry no. Really. Really. Really.

- Printer out of magenta toner.

- Job won't print.

- Do you have an area with special job hunting resources?

- I was on Crag's list . . . [long story.] Had closed Internet Explorer window, needed to get it back.

- Did anyone turn in a pacifier?

- Need info about personal loans and grants from the government.

- What was the name of the women's dress shop in the 1970's on the corner of 9th and Nicollet?

- Do you have environmental impact statements from 1984?

- The color is off on the 4th floor printer. Can you reprint this for me free on this floor?

- Looking for primary sources (government documents) on the Little Rock 9.

- Need career info and textbook/study info on Physical Therapy

- Help me find this book: "Danger and Survival: Choices about the bomb in the first 50 years."

- The computer is not recognizing my USB drive.

- Asked customer to take cell phone to lobby or use a quieter voice.

- Spoke to customer about cell phone voice volume again.

- Asked customer to use headphones while listening to music.

- Looking for an online fashion design school.

- Looking for an online course for MN real estate license.

- Looking for books about labor law. Actually was looking for a particular book, "State of the Union; a century of American labor."

- No library card. No ID. Sorry, can't give you your library card number without a picture ID. Really. Really. Really. Really. Really.

- Need the phone number and any info for Springboard foundation.

- I'm looking for some books that I left out on the table last night.

- I'm looking for a phone number for Mr. L--- O--- , maybe near Crookston. His wife's name is Mary.

Meanwhile, my colleagues at the desk were handling as many questions, including several government document questions, a library tour, and question about a source for Venetian blind cordage, and a lengthy set of questions about the national debt and the Minnesota state debt.

A busy night at the library!

The dream of the novel

2010-11-03T18:51:00.001-05:00

Tom Chatfield’s “Do writers need paper?“ (Prospect). As the comic novelist Julian Gough told me:

“One of the jobs novels used to do was to create a universe for characters, one that felt believable and complicated. But the complexity of life at the moment is such that no writer is able to keep up. The novel once had a dream of itself as this universal art form that could describe to the world to everybody in a way that everybody could understand, and that no longer rings true.”

Up until the minute I read this, I still had that dream, that the novel could describe the world to everybody in a way that everybody could understand. Now I may be convinced otherwise. It was a startling thought!

I think the better a book is, the better it succeeds at that dream.

But I find it freeing to think that novels no longer have the burden of being universal.

Link to original post on Book Blog!

Malcolm Gladwell on Social Media

2010-10-02T13:19:00.000-05:00

Author Malcolm Gladwell on Twitter, Facebook, and social activism in the New Yorker:

[Social media] is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. The instruments of social media are well suited to making the existing social order more efficient. They are not a natural enemy of the status quo. If you are of the opinion that all the world needs is a little buffing around the edges, this should not trouble you. But if you think that there are still lunch counters out there that need integrating it ought to give you pause.

The Casual Optimist - Books, Design & Culture

This passage from Malcolm Gladwell, quoted in "The Casual Optimist Blog," is a refreshing change from the good/bad dichotomies that usually arise when discussing social media. (OK, a little good/bad. . . ). What do you think?

Ratio: the simple codes behind the craft of everyday cooking

2010-06-03T19:16:00.001-05:00

I went through a long drought during which I couldn't get interested in books, but lately I've been reading up a storm again. I haven't felt moved to blog until I found Michael Ruhlman's Ratio: the simple codes behind the craft of everyday cooking. This is such a neat concept, and I've been pursuing this idea for years. Ruhlman gives us the ratio, by weight, of ingredients to each other in doughs, batters, sausages, sauces, custards, and more. The only hurdle to using the ratios is that you have to have a good quality scale to measure the ingredients. Even though I've been pursuing this idea for a while, I really hesitate to buy a $25 scale that I may not actually use that often. (Enthusiasm: high! Follow-through: iffy.) Ruhlman makes the point that volume measurements are inconsistent:

"A cup of flour can weigh anywhere between 4 and 6 ounces. This means that if you are making a recipe calling for 4 cups of flour, you might wind up with a pound of flour in your bowl or you might end up with 1 1/2 pounds. That's a 50 percent difference in the main ingredient, which will have a substantial impact on the finished product."

OK, OK, you've convinced me, Mr. Ruhlman, and I may never use the ratios in your book, but I still like knowing what ratios of ingredients combine to make cookie dough, and how it differs from biscuit dough.

The actual ratios occupy only two pages in the introduction. In the rest of the book he explains the theme and variations. Here are several, to make things more concrete:

Bread = 5 parts flour : 3 parts water (plus yeast and salt)

Pasta dough = 3 parts flour : 2 parts egg

Pie dough= 3 parts flour : 2 parts fat : 1 part water

Cookie Dough = 1 part sugar : 2 parts fat : 3 parts flour

Remember, though, before you rush in, it's weight, not volume.

Once you know the ratios, you can vary the recipe. Cookies? You can add vanilla, or almond extract, or melted chocolate, or chocolate chips and nuts, or lemon zest and ginger. You can use brown sugar or white sugar. Ruhlman gives you variations, scientific background, and cooking methodologies for each type of dough, batter, sausage, etc. Way fun.

Why is this so fascinating? It's like knowing what makes a Monet a Monet, what makes Beethoven so different from Bach, which intervals and instruments signal Chinese music and which are hallmarks of Celtic music.

I'm terrible at knowing how machines work, but I love learning how cooking, art, and music work. I love reading "how to" books but seldom have any real intention of following through. I like the ideas, and I often put them to use in other ways, once they'e been composted and mixed with other ideas. Or not. It doesn't really matter to me. I like learning a little bit about a lot of things. I like reading about the creative things other people do. The ideas and possibilities are enough.

Top Books of 2010 So Far

2010-04-11T14:55:00.000-05:00

BookPage offers us a list of the Top 20 Books of 2010 So Far based on the number of hits on their web page. Besides being a rough guide to books that might be worth reading, this gives you a chance to get caught up on your best-seller reading. Kind of like going to movies throughout the year so when Oscar time rolls around, you have seen one or two of the nominees for best picture. Except a lot fewer people will be doing this so don't count on anyone being impressed!

Note that the list is based on popularity, not critical reviews. But people who are clicking on BookPage are likely to be enthusiastic and discerning readers.

I just finished Chris Bohjalian's Secrets of Eden, (click for extensive review) which is on the list. I liked it, but though I'm usually clueless when reading mysteries, I guessed the ending about halfway through the book. Bohjalian's Double Bind had an unreliable narrator, and the blurb indicated Secrets of Eden would too, so my spidey senses were alert and tingling and I was able to guess "who done it." I prefer to be mystified.

A much better book, also on the BookPage list, was Heidi Durrow's The Girl Who Fell From The Sky, a complex tale of family sorrow and racial identity, which I recommend wholeheartedly. Rachel, who like the author is half Danish and half African-American, survives a tragic fall in which the rest of her family dies. She moves in with her African-American grandmother, and learns how to fit in this mostly Black environment. The characters she interacts with are insightfully written.

You can click through to reviews of all the books on the list, and there are several I'm going to take a look at. I'll keep you posted!

Happy reading!

60's candy

2010-01-24T17:00:00.000-06:00

I've been looking for pictures of candy from the 60's for a project I'm working on. Remember these?

Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim, reprise

2010-01-19T15:38:00.001-06:00

Here are some more mangled headlines from "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim; and other flubs from the nation's press," edited by the Columbia Journalism Review, compiled by Gloria Cooper.

"Corection"

CIA Reportedly Sought to Destroy Domestic Flies

Crash prompts change in rules; planes must clear mountains first

Beating Witness Provides Names

Old Miners Enjoy Benefits of Black Lung

WAR DIMS HOPES FOR PEACE

Ban on soliciting dead in Trotwood

Fish & Game to Hold Annual Election

Complaints about NBA referees growing ugly

Columnist gets urologist in trouble with his peers

Dr. Tackett gives talk on moon

Stud tires out

Lawmen From Mexico Barbecue Guests

Bishop defrocks gay priest

Teen-age prostitution problem is mounting

Difference between day and night found on tour of Torrington Schools

Cabell Democrats Have Two Heads

Lucky man sees pals die

Mrs. Gandhi stoned at rally in India

Nixon to Stand Pat on Watergate Tapes

Former man dies in California

Religion: Synod of ishops rejects most of it

Do it in a microwave oven, save time

Marital Duties to Replace Borough Affairs for Harold Zipkin

Well, if you haven't laughed yet, you're not likely to. When I read the book the cumulative effect has me laughing out loud. Hope you got a grin out of one or two of these.

Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim

2010-01-17T09:01:00.000-06:00

Cindy and I had a conversation this morning that reminded me of one of my favorite books, a book of goofed-up headlines collected by students at the Columbia School of Journalism, "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim."

Some other favorites from the book:

"Milk Drinkers Turn to Powder"

photo caption "Horse, on far left (not visible in photo) . . ."

I'll add some more when I get home and have access to the book.

In the meantime, here's another quote you might like:

"The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely." T. S. Eliot

Enjoy your day!

Piano Puzzler

2010-01-14T13:19:00.000-06:00

Yeterday I heard Piano Puzzler on MPR for the first time! Great music nerd fun!

Composer Bruce Adolphe selects a tune from folk, popular, or classical music, and uses it as the basis for a short composition "in the style of" a different composer. The one I heard yesterday was Gershwin's "It Ain't Necessarily So" in the style of Stravinsky! Man, did that thing move! Adolphe quoted phrases from some of Stravinsky's work as well as other Gershwin quotes, and wove them together into a wonderful piece. The Puzzle is done as a quiz show, with someone from the radio audience trying to identify the tune and the composer. Yesterday's contestant got both!

One of my favorite Christmas CD's uses the same trick, using carols as the basis for "in the style of" works. The best one is "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" in the style of Tchaikovsky. You hear the celestina and think you are listening to the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, until gradually it dawns on you that something is a little different. It's great musical humor.

Click on the title or the link below it to visit their archives.

More quotations, some silly

2010-01-12T16:31:00.001-06:00

I love this. It is very silly:

"The deep, deep peace of the double bed after the hurly-burly of the chaise longue."
Mrs. Patrick Campbell

And now, something completely different:

" . . . my music teacher offered twittering madrigals and something about how, in Italy, the oranges hang on the tree. He treated me--the humiliation of it--as a soprano.

"These, by contrast, are the six elements of a Sacred Harp alto: rage, darkness, motherhood, earth, malice, and sex. Once you feel it, you can always do it. You know where to go for it, though it will cost you.

"In Sacred Harp we are always singing for our fathers, our mothers, our lost. We altos hug the ground, splay out our legs, and cry from the belly; we are suspect even among our own. 'I can't sing next to one of them,' complains a pretty treble, moving down the square."

Joan Oliver Goldsmith. How Can I Keep From Singing?

Aren't you glad you're an alto? Or don't you wish you were?

And finally:

The "six most dramatic mistakes" made by people in the course of their lives, from Cicero, a Roman stateman and orator:

The delusion that individual advancement is made by crushing others.
The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.
Insisting that a thing is impossible because we ourselves cannot do it.
Refusing to set aside our own trivial preferences.
Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and studying.
Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

Amazingly durable ideas.

That's all for now!

Great quotations

2010-01-09T12:42:00.000-06:00

Quotes I've collected:

"On recalling the first time he read The Arabian Nights, Dickends found 'all things become uncommon and enchanted to me! All lamps are wonderful; all rings are talismans!'"
    from Victorian Fairy Tale Book, ed. Michael Patrick Hearn, Introduction

Reminds me of Nikos Kazantzakis, (author of Zorba the Greek) describing his childhood "buzzing bee and honey-filled mind." Our internal life of imagination and wonder.

BTW, my sister tells me that MLA standards no longer include underlining of book titles. Imagine that! But I forgot to ask if we are now to use bold or italic. If I've got it wrong, I'm sure the deity has forgiven.

"Letters are the great fixative of experience. Time erodes feeling. Time creates indifference. Letters prove to us that we once cared. They are the fossils of feeling."
     journalist Janet Malcolm, from
More Than Words: Illustrated Letters from the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art

"no organism can survive very long without externally originating cutaneous stimulation."
     Ashley Montague. Touching: The Human Significance of Skin.

If anyone wonders why you want a hug, you can use this fancy way to say that we all need touch.

And finally,

"If freedom means anything, it is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."
     George Orwell

I have a few more which I will save for another post.

Rethinking Bubbles

2009-12-15T14:53:00.001-06:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation by Helene Blowers:

Rethinking Bubbles

View more presentations from hblowers.

A Quick Work in Praise of Slowness

2009-11-30T16:17:00.000-06:00

In Praise of Slowness: how a worldwide movement is challenging the cult of speed. Carl Honore.

I had to read this book quickly. And now I have to blog quickly because my home internet isn't working, so I'm at the library, with one hour to complete my tasks.

Need I say more?

Honore makes a compelling case for the costs of a speed-driven life, and describes the historical development of the "cult of speed." Of less interest to me were the descriptions of "slow" alternative medicine, tantric sex, and slow food. I was familiar with his examples and he didn't present much new material.

If you're looking for a reason to jump ship, and a rationale, you might enjoy this book.

"Landslide" by PS22 youth chorus

2009-11-18T17:26:00.001-06:00

This is beautiful. I love their expressions when they sing, "Can I handle the seasons of my life? Oh, I don't know." They look so wise and wistful.

You can check out their blog for many more songs, and interviews.
http://ps22chorus.blogspot.com/

I Regret Everything

2009-11-16T19:54:00.000-06:00

One of my theme songs!

I can't remember the name of the woman I heard perform it, but the Divine Miss M is a fantastic substitute.

The video seems a little out of sync (or it could be my computer download speed.) If it's too troublesome, just close your eyes--it's the song that's key.

Wolcome Yule!

2009-11-12T10:40:00.005-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

This is the time of year I'm most enthusiastic about Christmas. That nagging "Should I fake some sort of costume?" Halloween question has been resolved in my traditional fashion (costume, no; 50's hat with plastic grapes, "Harvest Goddess," yes.)

I haven't made a Thanksgiving meal in years because I travel to visit my sister. Thank you, Darcy, thank you, thank you, thank you!

After Thanksgiving I must actually prepare for Christmas in whatever minimal fashion I can muster. Jarrett hates holidays (actually he hates change, and disruptions in routine) so ours is Very Minimal! After Thanksgiving I must start reminding myself that Mom had the help of several enthusiastic kids for cookie baking and tree decorating, and that it was usually Dad's growl that got our rears in gear to start cleaning (no one here to whom I can delegate growling.) And since it's just the same old me, I shouldn't expect Christmas miracles beyond the oft-prayed-for sense of humor.

But right now is when I love Christmas most, when I browse through women's magazines, and just for a fleeting moment of insanity think of repainting one living room wall to make a better foil for decorating. Or read in "Last Minute Christmas" a plan to make one or two or five incredibly beautiful wreaths of embossed cream velvet leaves, each wreath requiring 100-150 individually crafted (in 6 steps) leaves. I know, but it's really pretty!

And I temporarily pretend that Jarrett can tolerate Christmas music, and that I'm not diabetic, and that I'm not broke. Because where, I ask you, is the fun in any of that?

In American pioneer days Christmas was celebrated with much drunken revelry, firecrackers, and gunfire. Most people lived in isolation, and everyone lived in quiet, and no one had nearly enough sugar. So a holiday, a change of pace, was filled with longed-for community, celebrating, and general whooping-it-up, as well as an extra egg, a pat of butter, and a tablespoon or two of sugar in the bread.

As recently as my parents' youth, we were in the midst of a great depression. My mother-in-law remembers watching a little girl across the street sit on her stoop and eat an orange, and you can still hear the longing in her voice when she tells the story.

Now we are in the peculiar situation of being surrounded by a merciless torrent of people, information, worldly goods, sugary delights, seasonless grocery shopping, and entertainment. Most of which I kind of like, truth to tell. But what is it we lack?

My point here is not to moralize, but to say, let's give ourselves a break from the idea of a bigger, better, faster, shinier Christmas. We've got a lot of big, fast, and shiny already. That's not what we long for.

Besides the obvious -- enough money, enough time, a healthy portion of sanity and courage -- what I want is time with family and friends, and quiet moments at home. Christmas exists to serve us, lightening our darkness, not we to serve it. Christmas is the time I put on the silly "Christmas in Sweden" music and dance around the living room. As well as the time I put on the tender "Christmas in Germany" music and sit in the firelight and cry for beauty and memory.

Cue the music, begin the dance. And duck and cover --- it's coming!

50% of U. S. kids will use food stamps

2009-11-11T23:31:00.007-06:00

Image via Wikipedia

Nearly half of all U.S. children and 90% of black children will be on food stamps at some point during their childhood.

Economic woes stemming from the current recession will probably push those numbers higher. The report was based on analysis of data from 1968 to 1997.

For a family of four to be eligible, their take-home pay can't exceed about $22,000.

This info was released Monday, November 2 in the November issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine.

Pediatrician Paul Wise, in an editorial in the same issue of the journal, wrote,

"The current recession is likely to generate for children in the United States the greatest level of material deprivation that we will see in our professional lifetimes.

"I find it terribly sad but not surprising."

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Silver and Gold

2009-11-09T11:01:00.011-06:00

Neither an early post about Christmas decorations, nor a comment on economic conditions: Silver and Gold is Norman Hartnell's book about his career as British fashion designer, most notably as Dressmaker to the Royals.

The book is illustrated with photographs and Hartnell's sketches, and each description is a little morsel of deliciousness. Here is Her Majesty the Queen in an afternoon dress of duck-egg blue and brown printed taffeta; there, an evening dress of swathed and gathered peach-pink organza. Another sketch shows the young queen in a mimosa tulle dress, and, for a Royal Visit to Norway, June, 1955, an evening dress of embroidered ice-blue satin with plain satin drapery and panel.

Oh, Swoon!

Hartnell began designing costumes for theater in the 1930's. His career as designer to royalty began when he designed the wedding dress for Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Gloucester in 1935, and reached its apex with the design of Queen Elizabeth's coronation gown in 1953.

If you are interested in fashion, fashion design, textiles, embroidery, or theater you'll enjoy this book, with its gossipy backstage glimpses of the Royals, descriptions of wartime shortages and improvisationg

This book may not appeal to everyone, as suggested by its storage at the Minnesota Library Access Center (MLAC -- virtual tour here), the huge climate-controlled storage area at the U of M.

To get a glimpse at some of the sketches and illustrations, go to this post on Hartnell on the blog "Worn Through--Apparel from an academic perspective," where Heather Vaughan has posted 18 wonderful pages of sketches scanned from the book.

I like Hartnell's enthusiastic and slightly loopy prose style:

". . . [at the Coronation] I took my seat in the Queen's Box whither I had been ushered by Gold Staff officers.

". . . I was thankful to be early in getting to the Abbey to witness the arrival of all these noble men and women so gorgeously arrayed. Why didn't every one of them, every day, dress like this at breakfast time? What is the merit of choosing the drab when beauty hangs in the wardrobe?

"I have never seen anything so transcendentally beautiful in my life. One after another the peeresses glide up the bright blue carpet, trailing their robes of crimson velvet, and hasten to their allotted seats like rubies in a hurry. Opposite are row on row of peeresses mounting towards the very roof. They look like a lovely hunk of fruit cake; the damson jam of the velvet, bordered with the clotted dream of ermine and sprinkled with the sugar of diamonds. On my left are the peers, attired in their masculine version of ermine and velvet, their jam puff coronets nestling in their laps."

You might enjoy this sweet and a little silly (a lovely hunk of fruit cake? jam puff coronets?) trip back in time to Hartnell's world of color, textiles, fashion design, and royalty.

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Burning books and frying chicken

2009-11-01T19:09:00.008-06:00

Hate, Fear, and Southern Hospitality

Well, as long as it's friendly-like! Here's an interesting juxtaposition of hate, fear, and Southern hospitality!

From The Minnesota Independent, A Center for Independent Media site,
"Religious Right Watch: Happy Halloween, Heathens."

"A church in North Carolina . . . is marking Halloween with a book burning. Called “Burning Perversions of God’s Word,” Amazing Grace Baptist Church will be torching books and CDs it deems evil. “We will also be burning Satan’s music such as country, rap, rock, pop, heavy metal, western, soft and easy, southern gospel, contemporary Christian, jazz, soul, oldies but goldies, etc.,” the church website says. “We will also be burning Satan’s popular books written by heretics. We will be serving fried chicken, and all the sides.”

Here's more

". . . one writer for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network warns parents that witches curse Halloween candy.

“[M]ost of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches,” wrote CBN’s Kimberly Daniels. “I do not buy candy during the Halloween season. Curses are sent through the tricks and treats of the innocent whether they get it by going door to door or by purchasing it from the local grocery store. The demons cannot tell the difference.”

Daniels continued, “Halloween is much more than a holiday filled with fun and tricks or treats. It is a time for the gathering of evil that masquerades behind the fictitious characters of Dracula, werewolves, mummies and witches on brooms. The truth is that these demons that have been presented as scary cartoons actually exist."

Aren't all the witches too busy dancing skyclad under the harvest moon to bless all that candy? There's a lot of candy bought and sold for Halloween, and not that many witches! Just sayin'.

Fall photos

2009-10-27T12:46:00.002-05:00

Fall on Cleveland Street

Thirsting after truth

2009-10-27T12:34:00.002-05:00

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."

Gustave LeBon (1841-1931) French psychologist and sociologist

Thanks go out to l. k. hanson, who illustrated this quotation in his "you don't say" in the Star Tribune.

Life Among The Lutherans

2009-10-19T09:00:00.012-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

If you don't have time to read the whole post, just know that Garrison Keillor is a comic genius and go ahead and read the book already.

If you're still here, welcome back for more book enthusiasm. Have I ever expressed my admiration for Garrison Keillor? I have? Huh.

I include some favorite passages below, but there's plenty more: Pastor Ingkvist's salary negotiations, his midadventures at the Sidetrack Tap. Deer Hunting, Ice Fishing, cars, brides, and the National Usher's Competition.

I used to identify with the Lake Wobegon kids, young adults recently moved to the city. Once I had kids, and increasingly as the years go by, I'm turning into Arlene Bunsen, Margaret Krebsbach, Judy Ingkvist, and Marilyn Tollerud. Heck, there's a lot of Clarence Bunsen in me, and Carl Krebsbach, Hjalmar Petersen, and the rest of the crew. In fact, every single one of them.That's part of his comic genius. He sees clearly the smallness of our dim, silly, dull, Midwestern lives and hearts, sees us as we are, the dark and the saving grace. His writer's eye takes us apart, shines a light on our flaws, yet in illuminating them, makes them ok, even funny, and we can sigh and laugh and move on. There's acceptance and love for all his characters, the young and old, men and women, pastors and barkeeps and women with badly permed hair. He's not uncritical. The writer is different from the man. There are people in real life Mr. Keillor thinks ill of. But he loves his characters.

I take a lot of heart from GK the DJ, and think his writing is deeply spiritual, though he may or not agree. It blesses us. While causing us to chortle, repeatedly, and read proclaim to anyone nearby, "Hey, listen to this."

Now we can jump into the good part, a chance for you to read some excerpts.

From "It Could Be Worse":

"A sensible person seeks to be at peace, to read books, know the neighbors, take walks, enjoy his portion, live to be eighty, and wind up fat and happy, although a little wistful when the first coronary walks up and slugs him in the chest. Nobody is meant to be a star. Charisma is pure fiction, and so is brilliance. It's the dummies who sit on the dais, and it's the smart people who sit in the dark near the exits. That is the Lake Wobegon view of life."

From "PK" (pastor's kid)

A pastor's child learns that you treat all these people with the same quiet kindness: you offer congratulations to some and condolences to others, but you say it in the same kind voice, not interfering with people's feelings or trying to analyze them, offering the simplest comfort of a hand and a voice, the presence of another human being, here in their extreme moment. And you bring a hotdish.

Twentieth Anniversary

The clergy fought this out for two years . . . People got all hot about it in that silent glacial way that Norwegians have, and the fight got so unpleasant that people would've gladly avoided heaven if it meant they'd have to talk to the others, and the Lutheran church [of Stavanger, Norway] split into factions, and the Ingqvists were glad to leave. . . the misery of this terrible argument cured him of all homesickness or regret. Norwegians are no fun to fight with because they do it silently: they know they're right, so why should they bother arguing about it? This can go on for years.

Ice Fishing

Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery was crowded yesterday morning with ambitious people buying pimientos and whole cashews and canned oysters and exotic cheeses, like Gorgonzola and Camembert, and odd spices and exotic mushrooms, and you could tell they'd gotten hold of a magazine article with beautiful color photos of dishes. They were throwing caution to the wind and putting the candied yams and turkey aside in favor of gourmet cuisine, and you knew that some of these cuisine adventures were going to end in heartbreak, in smoke-filled kitchens with frazzled cooks weeping into their aprons and coming unhinged."

The Herdsmen
(at the National Usher's Competition)

. . . it was a motley crowd. A thousand people and there were a lot of Episcopalians in there, and they always take more time, and a group of blind nuns, the Sisters of Helen Keller, and that slowed things up--old ladies waving white canes and whacking people with them, and some guide dogs growling and barking and there were 140 members of Lutheran Weightwatchers, and the kids from St. Vitus's School for children with ADD, kids who come with a fast-forward button--it was like herding fruit bats and water buffalo.

So go and read it, already, and then tell me your favorite parts. I'll even let you read them out loud.

The Case for God

2009-10-17T19:49:00.007-05:00

The Case for God, by Karen Armstrong

Click on the title link to read an excerpt from the introduction to the book.

All I've read is this excerpt, but Armstrong is no lightweight -- the intro has plenty of chewy ideas. In fact,

"'That book was really hard!' readers have told me reproachfully, shaking their heads in faint reproof. 'Of course it was!' I want to reply. 'It was about God.'"

I love her description of music's transcendence:

"Music has always been inseparable from religious expression, since, like religion at its best, music marks the "limits of reason."

"It is the most corporeal of the arts: it is produced by breath, voice, horsehair, shells, guts, and skins and reaches "resonances in our bodies at levels deeper than will or consciousness." But it is also highly cerebral. . .

"Yet this intensely rational activity segues into transcendence. Music goes beyond the reach of words: it is not about anything. A late Beethoven quartet does not represent sorrow but elicits it in hearer and player alike, and yet it is emphatically not a sad experience.

"Like tragedy, it brings intense pleasure and insight. We seem to experience sadness directly in a way that transcends ego, because this is not my sadness but sorrow itself. In music, therefore, subjective and objective become one.

". . . Every day, music confronts us with a mode of knowledge that defies logical analysis and empirical proof. . . Hence all art constantly aspires to the condition of music; so too, at its best, does theology."

(I broke up the dense pararaphs to make it easier to read online.)

From the Random House blurb:

"Karen Armstrong details the great lengths to which humankind has gone in order to experience a sacred reality that it called by many names . . .

"[She] examines the diminished impulse toward religion in our own time, when a significant number of people either want nothing to do with God or question the efficacy of faith. Why has God become unbelievable? Why is it that atheists and theists alike now think and speak about God in a way that veers so profoundly from the thinking of our ancestors?"

P. G Wodehouse's Birthday

2009-10-15T14:42:00.008-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

P. G. Wodehouse, author of the Jeeves and Wooster books, was born on this day, October 15, in 1881.

Hugh Laurie portrayed rich, dim, and hapless Bertie Wooster and Stephen Fry played the inimitable, implacable butler Jeeves in the "Jeeves & Wooster" TV series. The line I remember most fondly had Bertie (Laurie) asking if a certain august personage was angered by his (Bertie's) antics.

Jeeves replied, "His face suffused a darker hue, and he attempted to kick a passing cat."

And yes, for those like me who struggle with Actor Non-recognition Syndrome ("Oh, he's that actor guy from that one show!") Hugh Laurie now stars as "House" on Fox TV.

There are many more clips and several interviews on YouTube. Here's another favorite, "Jeeves Disapproves."

Thank you, P. G. Wodehouse!

Amgansett and the passage of time

2009-10-08T17:35:00.005-05:00

"'Conrad, Conrad . . .'

"The first light of dawn was creeping over the horizon when Conrad was roused from his slumber by Rollo's hollering. Conrad only ever slumbered, he never slept, not the sleep of a child, dead to the world, its oversized surroundings. One small part of his brain kept constant vigil, snatching at the slightest noise or shift in smell. It no longer bothered him. He accepted it for what it was: a part of him now, like the scar in his side and the remorseless throb of his damaged knee.

"The boards groaned under his feet as he shuffled from his shack onto the narrow deck that ringed it. The sharp salt air stabbed his lungs, raw from too many cigarettes the previous evening. As if in reprimand, an overflowing ashtray still sat on the arm of the slattted wooden chair out front. A book lay facedown on an upturned fish crate beside the molten remains of a candle and an all-but-empty bottle of cheap Imperial whiskey.

"He had read deep into the night, the bugs dancing dangerously close to the candle flame until it had finally sputtered and died. The waxing moon, so high and prominent at dusk, had long departed, having run her early course: and for a further hour he had sat in the deep darkness, breathing in time to the beat of the waves beyond the high beach-bank, sleep rising up around him like the unseen tide, his mind numbed by the liquor, his body by the blanket of night dew settling over him.

"Conrad stared at the chair, unable to recall the short stroll he must have surely made from the abandoned perch to his bed.

'Conrad, Conrad . . . '

There's more: turning tides, a right whale, a full breakfast, setting off to fish.

Did you notice anything? It's such a short excerpt, it may not strike you. Once I noticed, I kept looking, and pages and pages went by before I found what I was looking for.

There are no references to time other than natural time. No alarm clock, no watch. Also no morning TV or radio news, no phone, no Internet. Once I started to notice the lack of clock time and electronic references, I thought I'd entered an enchanted world.

I'd forgotten: the book is set on Long Island, where Conrad lives on his fishing boat, in the late 1940's. Realizing that set off one of those violent internal conceptual reconfigurations that occur when you realize your assumptions couldn't be more wrong.

It's good to have that happen every now and again.

Mills, Mark. Amagansett. 2005.

Winston Churchill and the Russian Front

2009-08-28T14:33:00.008-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Catherwood, Christopher. Winston Churchill, Flawed Genius of World War II.

I've been reading about World War II again, circling around the subject as an ongoing topic of interest. The book is Winston Churchill, Flawed Genius of World War II. I thought you might like this update from the famous last few lines of Churchill's speech to the House of Commons on June 30, 1940.

We shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.

Catherwood writes,

"Not many people know an unofficial part of the speech that, during the cheers, Churchill whispered to his new deputy, the Labour leader Clement Attlee: 'We'll fight them with the butt end of broken beer bottles because that's all we've bloody got!'"

I'm only half-way through the book, but a section on the Rusian front interested me, and I wanted to post about it here. For a more encompassing review of the book, there is a review from Booklist at the end of the post.

The other allies were aware at the time of the tremendous casualties on the Russian-German front, but in Churchill's entire six volume history/memoir of World War II, the siege of Stalingrad, in which over one million people died, is never mentioned. Here again, from Catherwood:

"[Churchill's] visit to Stalin in 1942 betrays this same lack of understanding of the difference between the two fronts: in Stalingrad the Red Army lost half a million men, at El Alamein the British and Allied forces saw 2350 dead, or just about one-fortieth of the losses suffered by the Soviets. As one of Churchill's biographer records, the entire six volumes nowhere mention the siege of Leningrad in which over one million people died -- mostly civilians--a death toll higher than that of the entire British and American casualty rate combined. All this is quite a horrifying lack of perspective from one of the key leaders of the war . . . [emphasis author's own]

"This was, Norman Davies and others now remind us, also the beginning of a major distortion on how we read and understand the war itself. As mentioned earlier, a battle like Kursk was far more important in the defeat of the Axis than countless other battles that were turned into movies or made the subject of myriad books by Western historians.

"To be fair, much of this is because of the sheer inaccessibility of Soviet archive material, which took until the advent of Gorbachev to be opened to outsiders . . . But a great deal was known during the Second World War itself about, for example, Stalingrad and the comparative death counts; it is very clear, for instance in reading Churchill's brief references to the Eastern Front, that he was well aware of the scale of the Soviet sacrifice and of the paucity of Western casualties in comparison. It is also why we still tend to think of the Second World War as a "good war," for reasons we have discussed elsewhere. [Refers to comments that it was not a "good war" for Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc.]

Catherwood goes on to note a conversation between Stalin and Churchill about the Stalin's "murderous elimination" of the kulaks (the richer peasants). "To the dictator it seemed a simple matter of improving the food supply."

"In fact, more kulaks were killed on Stalin's orders because they were the wrong social class, than Jews were murdered by Hitler for being the wrong race, a perspective that was all too lacking at the time, since, for reasons of wartime propaganda, Stalin was portrayed benignly as "Uncle Joe". . . In fact, between "Uncle Joe" and "Uncle Adolf" there was little moral difference, something that the needs of war disguised, and that was also hushed up and even denied in the USSR itself until Khruschchev . . . let the cat out of the bag in the 1950's." (emphasis mine)

What tales of blood and carnage.

I'm halfway through with the book, and these are the things that have interested me so far. Even though I've read about the Russian front before, and the siege of Leningrad, I still overlook them sometimes when I think about WWII. I'm interested in the stories of my father and uncles; their war experiences. Dad fought in France and Germany; Uncle Perry was at the Battle of the Bulge, and Uncle Keith flew bomber missions over Germany. As the war in Europe wrapped up, Dad was sent home for retraining to fight in Japan. He has remarked to me that the odds are good he would have died in Japan if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.

The atom bomb is one of our ultimate symbols of evil. But in fact the Japanese Emperor didn't surrender until we dropped a second bomb. Think of all the civilian and military casualties that would have resulted from close combat in Japan. Unthinkable choices all around.

Catherwood's book describes the choices Churchill faced, how he made the decisions he did, and the lingering consequences of his choices.

================================

You can listen to the "We will fight on the beaches" speech on the BBC site and many others.

================================

Review of "Winston Churchill; the Flawed Genius of World War Two" From Booklist

Catherwood emphatically rejects the school of revisionists that blames Churchill for carrying on in 1940, which they tend to connect to the decline of the British Empire, and asserts his own criticisms of Churchill’s subsequent war leadership. The latter boil down to two points. Churchill, Catherwood argues, shouldn’t have halted a 1941 offensive against the Italians in North Africa to save Greece from the Germans (an effort that disastrously failed), and he should have accepted the American military’s preference to launch D-Day in 1943. Catherwood maintains a 1943 cross-channel attack not only would have shortened the war and spared millions of lives from the Nazis but also might have obviated the cold war by ending World War II with the Western Allies rather than the Soviet Union in control of Eastern Europe. From such leanings into what-if territory, Catherwood reverts to how the year’s delay of D-Day came about; it originated in FDR’s acquiescence to Churchill’s Mediterranean fixations. . . --Gilbert Taylor

If that was a bit murky for you, rest assured, Catherwood does a masterful job of laying it all out with enlivening detail.

A Devil to Play

2009-05-21T13:14:00.005-05:00

Image via Wikipedia

Rees, Jasper.
"A Devil to Play; one man's year-long quest to master the orchestra's most difficult instrument."

". . . Luckily the home stretch is easier. On we all surge toward the tape. A beat's rest, a huge breath, and then we hit it in a slow seventy-strong fanfare.

"HAAAALLEEEEELUUUUUJAAAAAAH!

"Suddenly I am swept back in time, like someone tumbling down one of those laundry chutes in the movies, to a feeling I last had when I was not yet an adult. I recall immediately that there is nothing quite like it. I am a small part of a huge elemental force. A torrent of man-made sound swirls around and through me. It ferrets under me and seems to raise me. It is almost impossible not to burst out laughing at the sheer exhilaration of it. All that music, all that unison.

"Amazingly, the walls are still standing as the applause peters out from an audience far outnumbered by our ensemble. I find an emotion welling up in me with which I have had only a nodding acquaintance in recent years, those years when routine traditionally sets in like a stubborn winter fog. . . when horizons close in and clouds lower dully overhead, when pipe dreams . . . shrivel and wilt in the face of steady remorseless blasts from the blowtorch of life. The swell of emotion is unfamiliar. It isn't any of the usual irritants. It isn't lust or envy or a low-grade self-hatred, a thin film of sadness or a personal brand of existential apathy. I think I recognize it as elation."

This is the start of Jasper Rees's year-long quest to conquer the French Horn he abandoned 22 years ago, and play well enough to solo at the British Horn Society's next annual meeting. If you play/ed an instrument, especially a horn; if you've ever performed; if you've embarrassed yourself in public; if you have had a mid-life crisis, you'll chortle over this book. Rees can be a bit self-involved, and yes, it's another entry in the "my-year-of-doing- a-weird-thing" genre, but it rewards the reader with horn tales galore, musical history, and the ongoing tale of a man's love for the music of his horn.

Visit Horn Notes Blog!

The video below is of a recording session with Paul McCartney referenced in "A Devil to Play."

Which Jane Austen character are you?

2009-04-29T20:12:00.002-05:00

Anne Elliot of Persuasion!

Let's face it; you're easily persuaded, particularly when friends and relatives try to use "the Elliot way" against you. But this doesn't mean that you don't have conviction. Actually, your sense of duty is overwhelming. And though you won't stick your neck out too often, you have learned to speak up when it counts. To boot, you know how to handle sticky situations. You love deeply and constantly.

All possible results: Elinor Dashwood, Marianne Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, Catherine Morland, Anne Elliot

Take the Quiz here!

Laughing out loud at "Elements of Style"

2009-04-19T13:17:00.019-05:00

I have been laughing out loud at books lately. I should preface this by saying that I laugh easily, but even I was surprised when I found myself chuckling over the pages of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

The 50th-anniversary edition of Elements of Style is reviewed by books editor Laurie Hertzel in today's Minneapolis Star Tribune.

She directs us to skip to the back and read Strunk and White's advice on developing an ear for good writing, particularly their alternate possibilities for

"These are the times that try men's souls."(Thomas Paine)

Here we have eight short, easy words, forming a simple declarative sentence.The sentence contains no flashy ingredient such as "Damn the torpedoes!" and the words, as you see, are ordinary. Yet in that arrangement they have shown great durability; the sentence is almost into its third century. Now compare a few variations:

Times like these try men's souls.

How trying it is to live in these times!

These are trying times for men's souls.

Soulwise, these are trying times.

It seems unlikely that Thomas Paine could have made his sentiment stick if he had couched it in any of these forms.

That made me grin, as did this:

Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. The businessman says that ink erasers are in short supply, that he has updated the next shipment of these erasers, and that he will finalize his recommendations at the next meeting of the board. He is speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest ordinary events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers, caparisoned like a knight. We should tolerate him -- every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse. The only question is whether his vocabulary is helpful to ordinary prose. Usually, the same ideas can be expressed less formidably, if one makes the effort. A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express his precise meaning.

. . . even the world of criticism has a modest pouch of private words (luminous, taut), whose only virtue is that they are exceptionally nimble and can escape from the garden of meaning over the wall. . words that at first glance seem freighted with delicious meaning but that soon burst in air, leaving nothing but a memory or bright sound.
---
I'm sure you noticed that the business buzz words scarcely seem unusual any more.

Let me emphasize that reading lightly through part of Elements of Style will not have created a noticeable improvement in my writing. Don't even go there. See, not an EoS-approved phrase. Nor that. Nor that.

OK, on to the laughing part:

Or take two American poets, stopping at evening. One stops by woods, the other by laughing flesh.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

I have perceived that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough . . .

Because of the characteristic styles, there is a little question about identity here, and if the situations were reversed, with Whitman stopping by woods and Frost by laughing flesh (not one of his regularly scheduled stops) the reader would still know who was who.

* * *
Not one of his regularly scheduled stops.

* * *
Take a look at the picture of lilac buds in the last post. When I posted it, the buds on my lilac had not begun to swell. Today, they are a perfect match for the picture. Spring is one of the rare times when the passage of time is enjoyable.

* * *
Sorry, I had tremendous difficulty with those block quotes and ultimately gave up and removed that formatting.

Garden Tips from Park Seed

2009-04-05T13:10:00.008-05:00

Image by Eva the Weaver via Flickr

I'm sneaking a few gardening tips into this book blog because it's almost SPRING! It's another snowy Palm Sunday. Reminds me of my years in Duluth.

Here are some prize-winning tips from Park Seeds's blog:

-- Plastic knives make a great, cheap plant marker. Write plant name with permanenent marker.

-- Watch the lilacs before you plant. When the lilacs start to show bloom tips, you can direct plant onions, garlic, peas. When the lilac blossoms are open, plant potatoes, carrots, lettuce, all cole crops and turnips, etc. When the lilac blossoms begin to fade, only then can you set out tomatoes, peppers, etc. Now is the time to plant beans, corn, squash, watermelon, cantaloupe, and all tender vines, either from seed or setting out plants. 

-- Cut the bottom almost all  the way off 2-liter bottle. Leave an inch or so to act as a hinge. That way you can lift the flap to add water, but keep insects out. Loosen the bottle cap enough to get a slow drip. Push the neck of the bottle into the soil a few inches from each tomato plant. Push down until the cap is at root level. Fill the bottle with water. You can add water-soluble fertilizer on your schedule. This way the water gets all the way to the roots where it is needed. Good for tomatoes and other thirsty plants!

Books I've Just Read

2009-03-15T15:06:00.005-05:00

I've been doing a ton of reading, to the detriment of sleep and housecleaning, but with great enjoyment.

Kate Atkinson, Case Histories. Good mystery.

Jacobs, A. J., The year of living Biblically. Funny and thoughtful; my favorite combination.

Hodgman, John, The Areas of My Expertise. Densely written compendium of invented trivia. Very funny! but impossible to digest in one sitting. Hodgman is an occasional panelist on the MPR quiz show "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."

Lamb, Wally. I know this much is true. A deeply satisfying story. This is the one I stayed up all night to finish.

Jordan, Toni. Addition. A witty woman with obsessive compulsive disorder forges a life. It's a romantic comedy! And it works, because it respects difference.

Cleave, Chris. Little Bee. A sad tale that opens your heart and eyes, about an underage illegal refugee to Britain. Why she fled her country, her experiences in Britain and beyond.

Cleave, Chris. Incendiary. Claeve's first novel, less polished, but more deeply moving. And also funny. How does he do that? A heartbroken British Mum who lost her son and husband in a terrorist explosion writes to Bin Laden.

Goodman, Carol. Night Villa. Intrigues among the academics excavating Herculaneum, buried by Vesuvius (near Pompeii) in A.D. 79. Literary thriller by a good storyteller. I've also read and enjoyed Godman's The Drowning Tree and Lake of Dead Languages. Her books are set in colleges, art colonies, private schools, and have complex plots and often creepy atmospherics. Yum.

Iraq War: The Gamble, by Thomas E. Ricks

2009-03-04T18:15:00.000-06:00

I heard Thomas Ricks interviewed about his book The Gamble on MPR. I haven't read it yet (I have it on hold), but I want to share one line from the interview.

Ricks says the policy changes in Iraq created "not new ways of killing people, but new ways of talking to them."

Can't think of a better idea, myself.

Bill Holm's Obituary

2009-03-02T17:42:00.000-06:00

Here is Bill Holm's obituary in the Star Tribune.

Bill Holm, Barton Sutter, Carl Sandburg

2009-03-01T11:10:00.008-06:00

The great Bill Holm died last week. Today the Star Tribune reprinted Minnesota poet Barton Sutter's wonderful poem
"Not Sleeping at Bill Holm's House." I'm going to take the liberty of copying it here:

Not Sleeping at Bill Holm's House

In the corner of my narrow room,
There's a double-barreled shotgun,
Which will not go off in this poem.
Reclining on the bedclothes:
A small stuffed bear and pink flamingo,
Which I set aside. Turning back the spread,
I am greeted by red flannel sheets
Bearing a Frosty the Snowman motif.
This bed is too loud to sleep on, and I am
Too wired with coffee and wild ideas to dream
But settle in, anyhow, with a volume by Sandburg,
. . .

Click here to continue

From Players to Guides

2009-02-28T13:33:00.002-06:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation from Helene Blowers, librarian and creator of the original "23 Things." I'm following her on Twitter (hblowers) and she posted a link to this slide deck from her presentation at a recent conference: "From Players to Guides: Learning Strategies for a 2.0 World."

Usually I post "web 2.0" stuff on Ex Libris 2.0, but this is interesting enough that I'm posting it here, too.

Be sure to visit slides 8, 12, and 20!

Slide 8: The New Digital Divide (it's a big one, and a lot of us are on the wrong side)

Slide 12: using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source(s) that can create new knowledge tailored to a new situation, in real time

Slide 20: Only subscribe to five blogs:
Librarian in Black.net, Lifehacker, LibraryStream, Wired, Learning 2.1

From Players to Guides

View more presentations from hblowers. (tags: ice excellent)

One Love video

2009-02-19T20:31:00.004-06:00

I've had a cold dragging on for far too long, day after day of no voice, low-grade fever, and hacking cough. This video is going to be my ticket out of this limbo into a warmer, better place!

Playing for Change is a multimedia movement created to inspire, connect, and bring peace to the world through music
.

Go to Playing for Change for more information on the making of the video, the Playing for Change documentary, and the Foundation. Follow these links to some of the other Playing for Change videos available on YouTube, including Don't Worry Be Happy, and Stand By Me.

Recession: Down Harley Street

2009-02-12T10:21:00.001-06:00

Sometimes you just have to whistle!
Sometimes you just have to sing.

Down Harley Street

The butcher's boy whistles down Harley Street
Whistles out of a broken heart
His girl has jilted him
And the butcher sacked his job on the butcher's cart
No girl
No job
It isn't pretty that life is so rotten that once was sweet
The butcher's boy whistles down Harley Street

I worked on this song in high school, but I never performed it because there is a lovely whistling section, and I'm not a stellar whistler, The words have stayed with me and every once in a while they come to mind as being particularly pertinent.

Today job news has me down and I'm whistling.

from "Contemporary Art Songs: 28 songs by American and British composers"
Down Harley Street - Composed by: Charles Kingsford - Copyright 1942
Lyrics by BenjaminFrancis Musser

Baseline Scenario; economics blog

2009-02-11T16:29:00.001-06:00

I heard about the Baseline Scenario web site and blog on MPR this morning and it looks like just the kind of detailed and wide-ranging--yet not too technical-- economic information I've been looking for. Its banner motto is "what happened to the global economy and what we can do about it." The authors pull no punches as they describe the current economic crisis as they see it, yet their tone is moderated and reasonable.

If you're watching Charlie Rose and the Sunday morning news shows, listening to MPR and watching PBS, yet crave even more financial analysis, you might enjoy this blog. You can subscribe to the RSS feed or have it delivered by e-mail.

The current post, "Why Axelrod and Emmanuel were right (on the American bank oligarchs)" starts with this: "When you cut through the technical details and the marketing distractions, sorting out the US banking fiasco comes down to one, and only one, question. How tough are you willing to be on the people who control the country’s large banks?" and give their tough recommendations.

Besides the daily blog, there are two main sections: The Baseline Scenario, describing "what happened to the global economy and what we can do about it," and The Financial Crisis for Beginners page, which covers the baseline scenario ("what happened . . . ) in an expanded form. Included here are articles on securitization, CDO's, banking capital, credit default swaps, bank recapitalization, de-leveraging and other once-exotic but now familiar terms. There are also links to radio programs (mostly MPR), video, and other web sites, including a list of recommended blogs.

Start by reading the daily posts, and then tackle the expanded coverage when and if that sounds like a good idea.

While authors James Kwak, Simon Johnson, and Peter Boone have impressive credentials, one thing we've all learned since September 2008 is not to take anyone's advice or wisdom at face value. As we Unitarians say in our stiff little way, "We ask all alike to think, not all to think alike." So visit the site! I think you'll find it valuable--but remember to question authority.

Bookmobile: I have a key

2009-02-11T07:41:00.008-06:00

After many years of constantly changing short and long-term temporary jobs, I'm delighted to have landed in one library for four months. I have a desk of my own, a phone extension, and keys! Today I was once again the first one into the library, so I got to turn off the alarm. Oh, the power! The thrill! The pride of ownership! I'm lovin' it.

Yesterday was more story time fun. I did a story time for a group of Somali immigrant children and their parents. Many of the kids are still learning English, so struggled to answer some of my questions, but one bright little girl in the back row piped up with an answer every time. What a delight! You go, girl.

The rather reserved moms laughed at the funny parts of the story. That felt wonderful!

Bookmobile: Jelly Beans

2009-02-10T17:27:00.011-06:00

What's not to like in a job where you get requests like this?

"I need books about cats, rabbits, jelly beans, rainbows, and kites."

Bookmobile. Lovin' it.

Bookmobile! Epaminondas, & funny books

2009-02-03T18:49:00.027-06:00

I'm working on an Early Literacy bookmobile (books and resources for kids ages 0-6 years) as a long-term temp until the end of May. This is totally fun. Except when it's totally sad, such as today, when we visited a poorly run day care, where the teachers yell at the kids and the kids are out of control, and where their language and pre-literacy skills lag far behind their peers.

Yesterday's site also featured mean and crabby teachers. It's not Dickens, but when you see other classrooms where there is enough structure that yelling is not "needed," you know that these kids could be a lot more calm and happy with more skilled teachers.

On the other hand: yesterday after a story-time that went "ok" but not great, one little girl started clapping! She continued solo for 10 awkward seconds, and then the other little Minnesota Nice kids joined her. Then they didn't know how long they should clap, so they just kept on and on. Sweet and hilarious.

The rhythm and rhyme of song is good for pre-literacy skills, so we sing! Today we sang "I got me a cat," the folk song with all the strange and fun animal sounds: ducks quack, cows moo, and horses neigh, but the pig says griffy, gruffy, the goose says swishy, swashy, the hen goes chimmy-chuck, chimmy-chuck, and the cat goes fiddle-i-fee. All this repeats cumulatively, like the House that Jack Built, or the Twelve Days of Christmas, and by the end of the song they were exhausted. Another learning experience for the teacher, and I hope they didn't suffer too much. But when they were putting their coats on to go out to the bookmobile for books, I heard one little guy singing "the hen goes chimmy-chuck, chimmy-chuck." Word fun rules!

Do you remember the story of Epaminondas? He visits his aunt each day, and she gives him something to take home.

The Story of Epaminondas and His Auntie

Epaminondas used to go to see his Auntie 'most every day, and she nearly always gave him something to take home to his Mammy.

One day she gave him a big piece of cake; nice, yellow, rich gold-cake.

Epaminondas took it in his fist and held it all scrunched up tight, like this, and came along home. By the time he got home there wasn't anything left but a fistful of crumbs. His Mammy said,--

"What you got there, Epaminondas?"

"Cake, Mammy," said Epaminondas.

"Cake!" said his Mammy. "Epaminondas, you ain't got the sense you was born with! That's no way to carry cake. The way to carry cake is to wrap it all up nice in some leaves and put it in your hat, and put your hat on your head, and come along home. You hear me, Epaminondas?"

"Yes, Mammy," said Epaminondas.

Next day Epaminondas went to see his Auntie, and she gave him a pound of butter for his Mammy; fine, fresh, sweet butter.

Epaminondas wrapped it up in leaves and put it in his hat, and put his hat on his head, and came along home. It was a very hot day. Pretty soon the butter began to melt. It melted, and melted, and as it melted it ran down Epaminondas' forehead; then it ran over his face, and in his ears, and down his neck. When he got home, all the butter Epaminondas had was ON HIM.

Mamma instructs him that he should cool the butter in the creek; the next day he cools the puppy in the creek and nearly drowns him. Then he puts a string around a loaf of bread and drags it home behind him. On it goes.

That's how I've been feeling as we tour the Bookmobile sites. The site schedule tells the age of the kids in each classroom, but that's only part of the story. I always seem to have the perfect story time for the group I just visited, but not quite right for the group I'm reading to now. Once we come back for second and third visits, I think I'll have an easier time of it, but for now? Epaminondas.

Yesterday there was no heat on the Bookmobile, and we froze. I outwitted the cold and wind predicted for today by wearing boots, two pairs of socks, two sweaters, and even long underwear. Naturally the heat functioned fine and it was 94 degrees in the sun-warmed passenger seat. Epaminondas. When I heard that story as a kid I thought it was hilarious. Now I'm living it. Don't let me kid you, though. This is a good gig.

All through Dear Son #1's school years, I begged teachers to accommodate him and his volatile behavior. When he was finally diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome and got into an appropriate program, things fell into place, but that wasn't until he was 14 years old. Now when I deal with kids who can't sit still, or can't stop talking, or who can't stop crying, or who absolutely must have their way, or can't make transitions, or can't stand the noise of singing and burst into tears, I have a renewed appreciation for all the stellar teachers who gave so much to my boy. Props to you!

Let's end this thing with by making note of two funny books.

No No Yes Yes, by Patricia Patricelli.
On the left page: pulling the cat's tail, hitting another child with a hammer. No! No! On the right page: petting the cat, hitting pegs with a hammer. Yes! Yes! Simple outlined pictures of a baby in a diaper are easy on young eyes, but Patricelli manages to put a world of hilarity in those simple drawings.
Note RE: my ongoing rant about subject heading in cataloging, this is cataloged as

English language -- Synonyms and antonyms -- Juvenile literature.
Conduct of life -- Juvenile literature.
Moral education (Early childhood) -- Juvenile literature.

Doggies, a Counting and Barking Book, by Sandra Boynton.
Boynton has a gift for humor. In this book, kids count to ten with ten dogs and different barks.

1 Dog. Woof!.
2 dogs. Yap yap! Woof!
3 dogs. ...nnn...nnn...nnn . . .Yap yap! Woof!
4 dogs. Ruff ruff! Ruff ruff! ...nnn...nnn...nnn Yap yap! Woof!

Hilarity ensues.

Rolling Paper Graphics

2009-01-21T23:49:00.009-06:00

I love this quirky book, a visit to the wide wide world of Rolling Paper Graphics! (subtitled El papel de fumar.) This book by Jose Lorente is beautifully designed and produced by Gingko Press. Lorente has collected Spanish rolling paper (cigarette rolling paper) graphics for more than 20 years, ultimately collecting 4500 dated products from the mid-1800's to today. Only a portion of the collection is included, in chapters on nature, places, objects, people, typography, textures, and advertising. Graphic papers from other countries, from the collection of A. S. Dalmases, are also included. I've included a couple of slide shows from Flickr photo collections which feature graphics from the book. The second slide show focuses on the work of one artist, Julius Klinger of Austria.

Here are several graphics by Julius Klinger (Austria, 1918-1919) which are featured in "Rolling Paper Graphics." These are drawn from lamarde.wordpress.com, and his flickr photostream.

If you like reading about graphic design, check out How magazine. Here's their Typography blog, which is so exuberant and creative! and here's the home page for all the How Design blogs. You will enjoy this!

Money Talks

2009-01-15T14:42:00.012-06:00

"Money talks, but it don't sing and dance!"

File under "Things that make me happy:" Neil Diamond. I'm taking notice of things that make me happy, little antidotes to feelings of gloom and fear aroused by our cold winter and deep recession. I heard Neil Diamond on the radio this morning, and that made me happy. So does his idea that while money talks, "it don't sing and dance." But we do!

Today's non-profound words of hope.

Kickin' Chunks

2009-01-15T09:30:00.008-06:00

Kickin' chunks. Ice chunks, that is, the frozen chunks of slushy mush that build up on your car's mud flaps. Kicking chunks of ice off the mud flaps is one of my winter amusements.

To pass the long winter, I've become an urban phenologist, keeping track of winter's progression: "firsts" such as the first day the sun sets after 4:30, and the conversational slide from "we need the moisture" to "isn't the snow beautiful" to "My God, will winter never end!" When I rang the Salvation Army bell this Christmas, I was able to track the progressive addition of layers, ending up with three pairs of socks, long underwear and pants, a shirt and two sweaters, coat, fleece-lined ear-covering hat, 6' scarf, liner gloves, mittens, and choppers, and three layers of cardboard (to stand on)!

Today I have a new entry in my phenology list:

it's too cold to kick the snow off the flaps! It's frozen solid!

It's -20 degrees, a great day to reread Shackleton's Endurance, Jack London's short stories, or Robert Service's tall tales of the Yukon. Click to read my booklist in Hennepin County Library's Bookspace.

There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.

Robert Service

Book Reading Stats Up

2009-01-12T21:07:00.003-06:00

For the first time since 1982, "the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen [to 50.2%]," according to a National Endowment for the Arts study being released today, reported by the New York Times.

The increase was most notable among 18-24 year olds and involved novels and short stories more than poetry or drama. Literary reading also increased among Hispanic Americans.

For the first time, the study included Internet reading, which some thought might have helped boost rates, although the AAP's Pat Schroeder suggested that some people don't count reading online or on e-readers as "book" reading.

Other possible explanations for the jump: one community, one read programs; the popularity of the Harry Potter and Twilight series; and "individual efforts of teachers, librarians, parents and civic leaders" to promote literature and reading. Booksellers, too, we'd think.

The study is called "Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy" and is based on data from the Census Bureau compiled last year.

--from Shelf Awareness: Daily Enlightenment for the Book Trade, the free e-mail newsletter dedicated to helping the people in stores, in libraries and on the Web buy, sell and lend books most wisely, January 12, 2009

Libraries rock!

2008-12-16T22:26:00.002-06:00

Library use is up in hard times

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Say Uncle

2008-12-15T15:48:00.005-06:00

I've been hanging onto Kay Ryan's "Say Uncle" way past its due date, in order to post a poem or two here. Kay Ryan is the new poet laureate of the United States. "Say Uncle" is not her most recent book; it came out in 1991. But it was the one that came through the library request system most quickly. Cutting edge, I'm not, but you'll like her poems.

SAY UNCLE

Every day
you say,
Just one
more try.
Then another
irrecoverable
day slips by.
You will
say ankle,
you will
say knuckle;
why won't
you why
won't you
say uncle?

WEAKNESS AND DOUBT

Weakness and doubt
are symbionts
famous throughout
the fungal orders,
which admire pallors,
rusts, grey talcums,
the whole palette
of dusts and powders
of the rot kingdom
and do not share
our kind's disgust
at dissolution,
following the
interplay of doubt
and weakness
as a robut
sort of business;
the way we
love construction,
they love hollowing.

FAILURE 2

There could be nutrients
in failure--
deep amendments
to the shallow soil
of wishes.
Think of the
dark and bitter
flavors of
black ales
and peasant loaves.
Think of licorices.
Think about
the tales of how
Indians put fishes
under corn plants.
Next time hope
relinquishes a form,
think about that.

Thanksgiving 2008

2008-11-25T17:48:00.012-06:00

Isn't it interesting that in all these past years, few of us have said, "I'm thankful for my 401K balance"? So let's skip right past that downward trending balance and move on to 2008's "I'm Thankful For" list!

I'm Thankful For:

E. B. White

The list of authors I'm thankful for could be a year's worth of posts, but today I'm thinking about E. B. White, one of my writing heroes, who wrote for children and adults with equal style. Here's the quote that brought him to mind today:

If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. It it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.

He wrote Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little, updated Strunk's Elements of Style (it became Strunk and White's), and was the most important contributor to the The New Yorker magazine at the height of its influence.

The Usual Suspects

And I'm thankful for the usual things we muse on at Thanksgiving: Bach, Mozart, mitochondria, mashed potatoes, the Internet, da Vinci, color, sunlight, shelter, bed, sleep, naps, cheap gas, no low back pain, stuffing, apricots, olives, walnuts, squash, green beans, Brussels sprouts, Great Art, Great Literature, Great Music, newspapers, Keillor, Shelf Check, books, libraries, librarians, and people to talk to about all of the above. I'm thankful I'm still above ground. I'm thankful I don't have to make an exhaustive list of things I'm thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving!

2008-11-11T12:03:00.009-06:00

I'm exhilarated at the possibilities of freedom these days. The boys are launched, or launching, and I have so much more quiet time than in the past. It's a fertile empty space, waiting to be filled up in a way not available for twenty years. The changes are small for now. Today I'm noticing that I watch a lot more news and PBS (and PBS news) and listen to the Minnesota Public Radio news channel far more than I could get away with before.

Today I heard a recording by an artist I love, who I haven't listened to in years. Long-dormant ideas about what I'd like my life to be like are emerging. New channels are opening.

We're post-election, and the sudden absence of Vital! Daily! News! about! the! Campaign!, and the beginning of the Obama transition, add to this feeling of expectancy and waiting. Calm stories about puppies and presidential visits fill the news. This Monday the Viking win was the lead story at the Star Trib. After all those angsty days, it's nice to take a breath. Yes, we still have a national economic meltdown. Yes, I'm still in my own personal economic meltdown. But it's nice to take a break once in a while. Our worries and hand-wringing don't change anything.

It is a cloudy November morning. The light filtered through the clouds is calm. My silent house is calm. Now it's off to work, re-entering the world, and so the moment passes.

* * *

It must be hard to write a calm book. I can't think of many. One writes, after all, to share one's passion. So let's go with "grounded," a deeper calm in the author's voice.

Goldberg, Natalie. Long Quiet Highway; Waking Up in America.
The story of Goldberg's spiritual and intellectual development as she studies Zen Buddhism and begins to write. A book I have loved and returned to many times over the years since it came out.

Tarrant, John. The Light Inside the Dark; Zen, Soul, and the Spiritual Life.
Tarrant is a Zen teacher and a Jungian therapist. Now you're talkin' my language. Grounded times two. A challenging read, this book will support the reader through dark times and point him toward deep joy in the dailiness of life. Not sappy or easy-cheesy.

Lightman, Alan. Einstein's Dreams.
Lightman starts with a brief imagined excursion into the mind of Einstein, tired after another exhausting night of dreams about time. He then unfolds chapter after chapter of intellectually and metaphysically challenging vignettes, playing with time in "Einstein's dreams." One reviewer wrote "It passes some of the tests of classic work: it provokes immediate rereading and a description of it cannot replace the experience of reading it. It's tantalizingly short but lives long in the memory."

Hass, Robert, and Stephen Mitchell. Into the Garden; A Wedding Anthology; Poetry and prose on Love and Marriage.
This collection draws from Native American, old Chinese, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, Sufi, and Zen sources, as well as traditional European love poetry and contemporary poets and essayists. It entirely avoids the sappy, presenting words of deep love, exhilaration, and thoughts of a long future for better or worse. It is a reminder of the joy of love, while remaining deeply grounded in the realities of everyday life.

These books, with a little more action, also come to mind:

Ueland, Brenda.
Me
Strength to Your Sword Arm
If You Want to Write

Lanvik, Lorna.
I'm in love with Lorna Landvik, who writes sweet, funny books filled with the unexpected losses and hard-fought victories of very real lives. She really "gets it." Three of my favorites:
Patty Jane's House of Curl
Tall Pine Polka
Oh My Stars

Jubilation! Obama!

2008-11-05T17:29:00.010-06:00

O-BA-MA!

I am giddy over this election. I cried when I cast my ballot. I cried when Obama was declared president-elect. I cried during McCain's speech and during Obama's speech. I was thrilled for my son E, who was at Grant Park with that beautiful and ecstatic crowd.

I've turned into a church lady over Obama. My belief in God is shaky, but I pray every day for his safety and that of his family.

I'm so proud of the new generation that has stepped up in style to become whole-heartedly politically involved. Thank you so very much.

To my Republican friends and family: rest easy in the thought that the Dems do not have a congressional super-majority. We'll have to work together to get things done, in what I dearly hope will be a less polarized and bipartisan environment.

Earlier this year (9/25/08) I posted a review of "The Black Swan," Nassim Taleb's book about unexpected events, such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, that completely reset all our assumptions. I remember when many predicted a permanent Republican majority, and empire on which the sun would never set. Since then, events such as the 9/11 attacks, the Iraq war, and our financial debacle changed our world in ways we never anticipated.

I am happy about the political change that has swept our country, but even if you are not, I hope the thought of Black Swan events can give you hope for our future, particularly our economic future. For better or worse, whether we like it or not, unexpected events (as well as planned-for and worked-for events) continue to re-shape our lives.

This is one of the unexpected benefits of aging: my perspective has changed from pessimism to optimism as I have seen so many difficult situations change for the better. Yes, I'm sometimes Future Shocked, and I'm not a Pollyanna: I fiercely protect my right to cynicism.

Here are some of the changes I've experienced:

I was in on the beginning of the Internet (was married to an Internet pioneer). The Internet, as "Wired" magazine predicted, has changed every significant institution in our lives. A Black Swan event!

I used to work on large-scale software development on huge mainframe computers -- a field that no longer exists.

I'm in on revolutionary change in librarianship, change that has shifted our focus from our bread-and-butter reference work (superseded by Google and Wikipedia), to social software and computer access. (The books survive!) The field is changing and shrinking.

My son's diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome came at a time when schools, doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists, and families were almost completely ignorant about it. For long years he and a cohort of similar kids were misunderstood, punished, and placed in school settings that were exactly wrong for them. They were the leading edge of a phenomenon no one understood. The changes here were both an increase in incidence of the AS, and in our understanding of it. For J and for many other kids, the diagnosis came as a relief, and it changed everything.

Now a new political coalition has been forged around a remarkable man, a man for this moment. Whatever does or does not happen from here, we have been witness to a pivotal moment in history.

H. P. Lovecraft describes (spooky) candy

2008-11-01T14:28:00.007-05:00

I missed getting this up for Halloween, but it's only a day late. I might have posted this before, but it's worth another look. McSweeney's, a literary magazine, posted this confection in which Luke Burns imagines H. P. Lovecraft (an American writer of humor, horror, and science fiction) writing copy for Whitman's Sampler. I posted two descriptions below; click on the link for more fun. There are just six more candies described -- but what starts as a short jaunt to investigate candies may turn into an obscene voyage to Hell itself !

Or maybe just a click, a quick read, and a laugh.

Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter
By Luke Burns

White Chocolate Truffle

What black arts could have stripped this chocolate of its natural hue? The horror of the unearthly, corpselike pallor of this truffle's complexion is only offset by its fiendish deliciousness.

Chocolate Cherry Cordial

You must not think me mad when I tell you what I found below the thin shell of chocolate used to disguise this bonbon's true face. Yes! Hidden beneath its rich exterior is a hideously moist cherry cordial! What deranged architect could have engineered this non-Euclidean aberration? I dare not speculate.

MayBow's Book Arts Jargonator

2008-11-01T13:56:00.011-05:00

For your pleasure, may I present MayBow's Book Arts Jargonator! I found this gem on BibliOdyssey, about which I have written before (October 4, 2008, BibliOdyssey).

Click on the picture for an enlarged view. It's similar to the Business Buzz-speak generators and Shakespearean Insult Generators, but for book lovers.

For instance, would you like your work to be described as post-monkish errata? Or a mechanically umlauted mutton-thumper? I thought not. I prefer erotically gilded incunabula, if given a choice.

Print 3 copies, cut out the circles, and put them together with one of those little pointy brass things, for hours of fun.

Raspberries

2008-10-09T22:58:00.007-05:00

I wrote this on October 9, but forgot to post it. I continued picking fresh raspberries until the middle of October!

On October 9, I am still picking fresh raspberries and harvesting tomatoes. Remember when we used to have frost in September?

I'm also endlessly painting doors (screen door insert, storm door insert.) Muntins. That's what I've been painting. Muntins.

I'm not a tidy painter but I have adopted the motto "Progress, not perfection." It's better to have a primed and painted door than one with peeling paint. I'll get out the razor and the Goof Off and clean up when I'm done.

By the time I get home the day is cooling fast, and I worry that it's getting too cold for painting. So I slap some paint on and when I get cold and the light is fading I quit until another day. The E.N.D.L.E.S.S. P.R.O.J.E.C.T. . .

The trouble with beginning any deferred home maintenance (or cleaning) is that you suddenly see all the other projects that need attention. Sometimes I could do without a new clarity of vision.

Gnod, Gnooks, Literature Map

2008-10-09T22:54:00.002-05:00

Check out this interactive Literature Map - the tourist map of literature. You key in an author name and it shows other authors you might like, or that are similar. You can click on any of those names and keep going. Very fun. I find associative lists endlessly fascinating, since they are reflections of how we classify things -- there's more than just alpha order or LC or Dewey, as we know, so I love looking at other systems of relationships.

It is part of a Literature Site called Gnooks, which has an author recommendation engine too. You type in the names of three authors you like. I typed in Garrison Keillor, Lorna Landvik, and Elizabeth George, and it recommended Jon Hassler. A good recommendation, except I've already read all his books!

Gnooks in turn is part of Gnod, an AI project developed by Marek Gibney. Here's what Gibney says about Gnod:

Gnod is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. Its a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don't know about.

Gnod has recommendation engines for music, books, movies, and people.

(Note: I cross-posted this to Sub 2.0.)

Happy Ant People

2008-10-08T22:19:00.006-05:00

I'm working in a room with 90 other (quiet, pleasant) people, scoring reading comprehension and writing tests which are required for graduation from State "X." It's a crowd of word people, ranging from introverted to extremely introverted. People really do look at their shoes when you say hello. I feel right at home!

I can't think of the last time I worked in a job that was so intensely focused. We work individually on writing samples we pull up on our computers. We're, apparently, the sort of folks who are easily sucked in by the screen. We arrive on time, get right to work, and keep at it. It's not draconian--we certainly can chat, or get up and walk around, or get coffee, but there tends to be more coffee-getting than chatting.

There are six rooms of about 90 people working on this project, so breaks are necessarily scheduled. Our room breaks from 10:00 to 10:15, lunches from 11:30-12:00, and breaks again from 2:00-2:15.

We get caught up in the writing samples and have to be told, "It's break time!" Then 90 people burst out of the room (in a quiet, orderly fashion, naturally) and line up at the coffee urn, the bathroom, the microwave. The walkers scurry outside and scatter in every direction. The break room fills up from the corners in; people prefer to take a single tables along the wall for quieter reading. Newspapers and novels come out; people make phone calls; there is quiet conversation. At 10:14, 11:59, and 2:14, the ants scurry home to Room 3 and the next group of ants bursts out of the next room to walk, get coffee, file into the bathroom, and read.

Most of us choose to start at 7:30, so at 4:00 there is a mass departure. This one is equally polite but more hurried: half of us form a line a block long as we wait to make a left turn onto a busy street, and all of us would prefer to be at the head, rather than the tail, of the line. Nevertheless, as we wend toward the one parking lot exit, people scrupulously take turns merging from several aisles and calm order is preserved.

People bring candy to share and anything chocolate is gone by lunchtime.

It's a congenial group of ants and I enjoy their company.

BibliOdyssey

2008-10-04T20:50:00.013-05:00

(http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.com/)

I remember years ago when the Internet was new (and I'm talking Gopher and alt- groups), you almost felt you could put your arms around it and keep up. Now I find thriving web sites and blogs that I CAN'T BELIEVE I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT, and BibliOdyssey is a prime example.

BibliOdyssey is an ongoing e-exhibition of long-forgotten imagery, now surfacing on the Internet as libraries, museums, and other institutions digitize their collections, collected and published by the author PK. The range and variety of images is absolutely amazing, from familiar architectural, anatomical and botanical drawings, alchemical and occult engravings, creepy things that are supposed to be creepy, drawing styles that creep me out even though they aren't intended to, to darling whimsical drawings of children at play, the Nepal horse book, and on and on. RUN DO NOT WALK (OK, CLICK RIGHT NOW) to this site. Give yourself some time.

It gets better -- BibliOdyssey, The Book! is now available.
BibliOdyssey: Amazing Archival Images from the Internet, by PK

Here is blogger and author peacay's description of the book:

The book (like the site) covers a very wide spectrum of styles, time periods and subject matter. You can expect everything from astronomy to zoology and from Art Nouveau to the Renaissance, in something reminiscent of what I call a multi-post (except on steroids and growth hormone and with better grooming habits and no noisy computer fan in the background). I like to think that the trajectory of the book aims somewhere roughly between our internet users' penchant for a concentrated package of beguiling ephemera and as an introductory overview of the cultural wealth accessible from web archives for luddites. [redacted marketspeak: ~~"making it the ideal Christmas present for everybody"~~] As a final point I'd offer that, while it might sound like a totally haphazard collection of unrelated visual material, the book is in fact much more of a cohesive and interrelated survey of illustration history than any loose-canon wording here might suggest. The book is also a beautiful product - FUEL have done a wonderful job in the designy-printy stakes, and my objectivity is of course unimpeachable as I was on the other side of the planet and had no role in this facet of production.

My library doesn't have this ordered yet (or at least not available in the online catalog), and if yours doesn't, you can go to a bookstore and browse the book.

Color Junkie Alert!

2008-10-04T18:33:00.006-05:00

Color junkie alert!

Dale Chihuly : 365 days / [editor, Margaret L. Kaplan]. is FUN! Dale Chihuly, celebrated glass artist, makes play visible with his colorful, kinetic art. The book is composed with a brief quote or description of Chihuly and his works across from a full page photo.

Lovers of word play -- note the Lakawana Ichibana installation!

The mosaic is by SleepingBear on Flickr.

Moe's Diner, Almost World Famous

2008-09-30T00:21:00.000-05:00

Notes from a Wisconsin road trip.

Mouse Crazy Eyes, Black River Falls, WI

2008-09-30T00:15:00.001-05:00

Mouse Crazy Eyes, Black River Falls, WI
Originally uploaded by Debora Drower

Scenes from a Wisconsin road trip.

Orange Moose, Black River Falls, WI

2008-09-30T00:14:00.001-05:00

Orange Moose, Black River Falls, WI
Originally uploaded by Debora Drower

Scenes from a Wisconsin road trip.

Wisconsin Public Radio

2008-09-29T23:04:00.006-05:00

I drove to Chicago this weekend for Family Weekend at Loyola University. I listened to Wisconsin Public Radio most of the way out and all the way home. They had some great programs! I listened to two hours of To the Best of Our Knowledge, or TTBOOK. The first hour was entitled "Libraries."

"Libraries" included Maryanne Wolfe, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, and author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain" who talked about the decline of "deep reading" today. If you love to read, you will love her description of what happens during what she calls "deep reading."

Science fiction and fantasy author Ursula Le Guin reiterated her thoughts on reading, which recently appeared in an essay in Harper's Magazine called "Notes on the Alleged Decline in Reading."

Geraldine Brooks, author of People of the Book, recounted some of the amazing history of the Sarajevo Haggadah.

Alberto Manguel has a personal library of some thirty thousand volumes. Manguel talks about his library and his latest book, "The Library at Night." His other books on reading are "A Reading Diary" and "A History of Reading."

In hour two, "The Horror, The Horror," Andrew Davidson, author of Gargoyle, read from the opening of his novel, a harrowing description of a burn victim's suffering that is definitely not for the squeamish or faint of heart. In fact, I had stopped reading it but started again after hearing the interview. It's good.

This hour also featured Kelly Link, who writes teen/young adult horror (Pretty Monsters), Richard Hand, author of "Terror on the Air!: Horror Radio in America, 1931 - 1952." and Glenn Kay, author of "Zombie Movies: The Ultimate Guide," with audio clips from radio shows and zombie movies.

What a great lineup! If you click through to the web site you can listen to the interviews, see a listing of the CDs and books featured, and go to authors' web sites.

Next I listened to University of the Air, which on this day was a chatty program with John DeMain comparing recordings of the same piece conducted by two different conductors, with a lot of cheery backstage anecdotes on the roles of the conductor and orchestra in creating a sound.

Finally, a fantastic program on "Simply Folk" featuring songs about Fall. The selections were wonderful. Unfortunately, they don't have it available online for listening, but here's the playlist.

Everything Changes

2008-09-25T10:45:00.006-05:00

Every September for the last 14 years I have had children starting school or preschool. This year, to celebrate my freedom from the school schedule, I took a long-desired trip to Hawk Ridge in Duluth to see the Hawk migration. The conditions were perfect that day: it had rained for two days and was now sunny, so all the hawks that sat out the rain were ready to move on. It was warm enough to create thermals for soaring, the wind was from the west, and it was the peak of Broad-wing hawk migration season. We saw so many hawks! It was absolutely amazing, and if we hadn't been properly amazed, the howls of exuberance and joyous disbelief from the young staff spotters would have clued us in that this was an amazing day. In just one hour, more than 21,000 hawks flew over! (Compare to a total of 35,277 total observed so far this September --about 64% of the month's total flew over in that hour.)

Broad-wings fly high, so we would look through our binoculars to see little pepper specks, which eventually grew to be the size of grains of rice. They came across in "kettles," groups of hawks streaming across the sky, then stopping for a while in large circular whirls that looked like boiling water or, as Mom put it, "it looks like World War II up there!"

I talked to two of the staffers, explaining that this was my first visit to Hawk Ridge, and asking how this compared to a "normal" day. The first response was, "You can never come back! It will never be better than this, or anything like this!" The second response was, "Come back in October, when different hawks migrate. There are fewer, but they fly lower, so it's a different experience."

Mom and I talked about other extraordinary natural wonders we've seen. Both of us remember with awe a tree covered in migrating Monarch butterflies in Elmore, Minnesota. The tree seemed covered in living moving leaves. Absolutely amazing, and beyond my words to describe.

The other great experience of natural beauty, for both of us though on different occasions, was seeing the Northern Lights in particular glory. I still remember that I experienced this great wonder on August 3, 1972. I was a camp counselor, and we woke the kids up to see the lights. My cabin and I dragged our sleeping bags outside and stayed up for hours watching, long after the rest of the camp had gone to bed. As with the Monarchs and the hawks, they were beautiful, but it wasn't so much that they were green and blue and pink moving sheets of color. It was their abundance, their glory, and the fact that we were mere witnesses to an awe-inspiring phenomenon not arranged for our pleasure. These were spiritual experiences.

Mom and I drove home, dazed with pleasure, to the news that the stock market was collapsing.

Everything changes, nothing stays. My lovely children growing up, not needing my daily presence in September. My new geographical freedom, the fleeting incredible glory of the day on Hawk Ridge, the apparently fleeting glory of Wall Street. The ramifications of some of these changes will play out over years and decades, in ways we can't imagine now.

May you live in interesting times!

Book Picks:

The black swan : the impact of the highly improbable (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

Taleb is concerned with black swans, i.e., unpredictable and improbable events that have great impact. Among the examples of these he cites are the rapid spread of the Internet and the 9/11 attacks. People endeavor to explain black swans after they occur, but they cannot do so in advance. Despite the crucial effects of these events, economists and other supposed experts in prediction fail to allow for them; indeed, their theories often deny their possibility. Because of this failure, Taleb maintains that much business forecasting is useless. —David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., OH Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
And his sarcasm is highly entertaining!

1491 : new revelations of the Americas before Columbus (Charles C. Mann)
The arrival of Europeans was the quintessential Black Swan event to the native Americans. Disease, probably carried by the pigs the Spanish brought with them, decimated the population. Some estimate that as much as 95% of the population was wiped out.
***
"Mann shows how a new generation of researchers equipped with novel scientific techniques have come to previously unheard-of conclusions about the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans: In 1491 there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe. Certain cities -- such as Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital -- were greater in population than any European city. Tenochtitlan, unlike any capital in Europe at that time, had running water, beautiful botanical gardens, and immaculately clean streets. The earliest cities in the Western Hemisphere were thriving before the Egyptians built the great pyramids. Native Americans transformed their land so completely that Europeans arrived in a hemisphere already massively "landscaped" by human beings. Pre-Columbian Indians in Mexico developed corn by a breeding process that the journal Science recently described as "man's first, and perhaps the greatest, feat of genetic engineering."--From publisher description.

Medieval Help Desk Video

2008-09-12T17:18:00.001-05:00

I think you'll enjoy this!

Find more videos like this on 23 Things on a Stick

"Torture" in the Library

2008-09-09T17:19:00.007-05:00

Working in the library today has been almost torturous. It's been aggravating and frustrating. The reason? I've run into an unusually high number of books I want to read, but I just can't check out any! more! books!

We're coming up on Banned Books week, when libraries make displays of banned books. When I saw the stacks of books being readied for display, I thought they had been pulled for a "classics" or "Great Reads" display! Here are a few (formerly) banned books:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)

Catcher in the Rye (J. D. Salinger)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee Harper)

Beloved (Toni Morrison)

A Separate Peace (John Knowles)

I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou)

Diary of a Young Girl (Annd Frank)

Enough of that; you get the idea -- lots of books for me to lust after, but I already have 37 books checked out. Four of them are due today and I'm going to keep at least two of those because I really want to read them.

Another display, about 10 feet away from me, is "Books about Books." I want to take at least five of those home.

In large families, I've heard, the slogan is "eat it to protect it," because food won't be there when you come around for it later. If you want it, or might want it, eat it now. That's my philosophy with library books. If you see it, check it out, because otherwise who knows when you'll get back to it?

While walking around the library with patrons, I've also seen three books that want to leap into my hands, all of which I've long intended to read. Though the "intend to read" list is approaching infinity, as I've said before.

One of the books I know I will succumb to because it is directly in front of me when I look up from my desk. It's the last in its row, so I can see the cover. I'm gonna break, I'm gonna crumble, I'm gonna check it out. Resistance is futile. It's like being in a cloud of buzzing bees or a crowd of toddlers -- too much commotion! I have to put my head down take a deep breath, and ignore those persistent thrills of "Take me take me/I want you I want you." And people say the library is dull.

It is probably more notable to say that today I found a book I didn't want to check out. It was a book lamenting the demise of reading, and the blurb was short on information and long on alarm. But I wavered--it might be interesting to check it out to see what his arguments are . . . maybe I should read it . . .

BTW, twice in the last few days I've seen lists of great or important or hot authors, almost none of whom I recognized. Truly, it's hard to keep up.

Trinities, Holy and Unholy

2008-09-07T19:11:00.005-05:00

sex, drugs, and rock and roll (60's)

a shoeshine, a clean windshield, and a full tank of gasoline (Firesign Theater, 70's)

sweet rejectamina, museum of the misunderstood, beauty out of season
(Faith Sullivan, descriptions of objects in second-hand stores, 90's)

money, fuel, guns (video game, 00's)

Father, Son, and Holy Ghost (God, 0000's)

A Random Walk through August's Books

2008-09-07T16:23:00.015-05:00

Due Dates: the advantage of library books!

This is the message I hate to see on my library account: "Due in 2 days. Waiting list. No renewals." Here are some of the books I've skimmed, examined, and even read this August:

Inuksuit; silent messengers of the arctic (Norman Hallendy, 2000, 0 requests). This is another of my serial obsessions. Here are some online pics of inuksuit, the stacked rock cairns of the arctic. They fascinate me. And hey, I did read quite a bit of the text. And I looked at ALL the pictures. I'm not the only one fascinated by inuksuit:

"Inuksuit have definitely struck a chord in Canada. In both the North and the South, they have become icons used to sell telephone and financial services, beer and sugared drinks. The figure adorns ball caps, sweatshirts, and coffee mugs, and is much sought after as an objet d'art."

Remember the cliche about "Eskimos" having seven words for snow? Now I've read that's unfounded word legend, but based on the list of words for caribou, I have to think they have multiple words for snow.

"When I asked a wise old hunter the name for caribou . . . I was greeted with the question: 'Which name? Is it the name of a bull, a fully-grown bull, a bull yearling, a cow, a pregnant cow, a cow with fawn, a cow with no fawn or antlers, a fawn, a fawn shedding its hair, a yearling having just left its mother, a male whose antlers are beginning to grow, a male whose antlers have not yet emerged, a caribou of late summer when there is skin on its antlers, one in early fall when it sheds the skin on its antlers, or perhaps one in late fall when its antlers have the reddish cast of blood?'"

The Art of Racing in the Rain (Garth Stein, 2008, 123 requests) Dream, dogs, and determination! A charming book that occupies a place somewhere in the "uplifting but not cheesy" section; one read-alike that comes to mind is Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. It's a moving, humane story of a family's struggles, told through the eyes of their dignified, philosophical dog Enzo. Dennis, Enzo's human, marries Eve and they have a baby girl. Dennis is a race car driver with big potential who's trying to make it into the racing circuit and still be a loving, present parent. Then Eve gets sick and everything starts falling apart.

This is a book to read when you need to stand up and cheer for someone with the quiet grit and determination to gut it out through the longest, most difficult set of circumstances. Dennis dreams big dreams and won't let them go. Enzo watches Denny apply the art of racing in the rain--balance, anticipation, patience, and the extension of the self into oneness with the car, the track, the world -- to the attainment of his dreams.

Garth Stein avoids cheap sentiment by using Enzo's philosophical, funny, doggy point of view and Dennis's dogged nature. I have never been interested in car racing, and I like cats, not dogs, but I loved this book. How's this for good writing: Mr. Stein has taken this reader inside a dog's mind, and I am convinced that now I understand dogs in a whole new way.

This book currently has 123 requests at Hennepin County Library, so it's got good buzz. Put in your hold request soon!

Peace, the biography of a symbol (Ken Kolsbun, 2008, 0 requests) Traces the beginning of the peace symbol, the story of the man who created it, and how it became a symbol understood and used around the world. Lots of good pictures from the '60's and 70's (Kent State, protests, hippie fashion) reproductions of trippy psychedelic posters, peace-symbol art, and more. An interesting story of peace, hope, and graphic design, and the place of art in dreams, activism, and resistance.

Library Mascot Cage Match; an Unshelved collection (Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum, 005, 0 requests) For library geeks and those who love them, tales of life at the Mallville Library. Based on the popular internet cartoon Unshelved. ROTFL.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (Louise Erdrich), 2001, 0 requests) Oh, such a writer, such a teller of tales. How does she know so much about the human condition; how can she know so much and still write with such love? In this book, Father Damien is indeed making his last report on the ambiguous miracles at Little No Horse, a remote Ojibwe reservation. The tale spins out fantastically with plot twists and turns, a little magic, a little miracle, a lot of loss and heartache, the power of music, and the complexities of human beings.

Go ahead, just read everything Louise Erdrich ever wrote. Her non-fiction Books and Islands in Indian Country is a marvel, one of my favorite books.

Here's a little "why do we read what we read" note: if I love Louise Erdrich's writing so much, why am I only getting around to this 2001 book in 2008? 1) someone I don't like praised it highly. Silly but true. 2) the suffering of the Ojibwe people in her book is based in fact. I expect a tough read because I forget the grace and wholeness of her writing. 3) As time elapsed, it got pushed lower and lower on the to-read list.

The Open Door (Elizabeth Maguire, 2008, no requests)
(SB, Skimmed book.) An adequate book, the story of Constance Fenimore Woolson, her friendship with Henry James, and her artistic struggles. Based on the real-life Constance Fenimore Woolson, one of the most widely read American novelists of the nineteenth century, and grand-niece of James Fenimore Cooper. It didn't seem luminous to me, as the blurb proclaimed, and I didn't find anything that hasn't already been said, and better, about women artists and writers. (A Room of One's Own.) It's possible that by skimming I lost the opportunity to see the worth of the book. Still, I'm easy, and countless times I've started to skim and ended up reading a book cover to cover, caught by a well-turned phrase or an interesting development. That didn't happen here.

Traffic; Why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us) (Tom Vanderbilt, 2008, 120 requests) (SB-Skimmed Book) I would probably enjoy skimming this more slowly but I don't feel a need to read the whole book. Good, research-based information about our driving behavior.

The Bush Tragedy (Jacob Weisberg, 2008, 16 requests) Weisberg assumes the Bush presidency is a failed presidency. He's not interested in proving it, but in how exploring W's complex relationships, particularly with his parents, and his personal history and characteristics, led to his downfall. An evenhanded and compassionate analysis of George W. Bush, the man and the president.

New Moon (Twilight Saga, Book 2; 140 Requests) and Breaking Dawn (Twilight Saga, Book 4, final; 474 requests) (Stephenie Meyer)

I surprised myself by loving Twilight (Twilight Saga, Book 1; published in 2005 and has 499 requests!), Stephenie Meyer's huge teen fiction hit. It's boy meets girl with a clever twist: the perfect, unattainable boy is a vampire! Meyer created the world where this could happen, one just like our own with divorced parents, awkward, self-conscious teens, the cafeteria rules (who sits where), and the classic girl-drives-beater, boy-drives-hot-car trauma.

As fate and requests lists would have it, I haven't read Book 3, Eclipse, but I don't think it would have made a difference. I found New Moon and Breaking Dawn completely uncompelling. They moved too much into the world of vampires, and a protracted power struggle between "our" vampires and dangerous intruders. PUH-lease. If I want battles with vampires and werewolves, I'll watch Jarrett play video games. Once she moved out of the normal-with-a-twist, fish-out-of-water scenario, the whole series went collapsed like a souffle. (While the books got bigger and bigger.)

Thanks! If you read this far, I'm grateful!

New post

2008-09-07T16:10:00.002-05:00

Hey -- I posted something new today. But since I created it and saved it as a draft on August 30, it has now posted with that date. So scroll down a little and see it. I was getting messages that I might not be able to save it as a draft (today) so I just posted the whole darn thing. It's too long and I will edit. But by then you will have read it. So maybe I won't bother.

Time and permanence are fluid constructs here!

Impotence of Proofreading

2008-09-05T14:01:00.001-05:00

Sorry, I couldn't resist: this is great.

The Impotence of Proofreading

Cindy and Mom, this one's for you!

Soda or Pop?

2008-09-05T13:24:00.005-05:00

I'm at work and the book I want to talk about is at home. For now, here's some random eye candy from Oranges and Peaches, from a post on "Strange Maps": the distribution of usage of "Pop," "Soda," and other terms for fizzy beverages. (Click on map to see larger version.)

BTW, the current post (9/02/08) on Oranges and Peaches has "word nerd" resources!

How to talk about books you haven't read

2008-08-30T09:12:00.017-05:00

Note: This is an unedited draft. It's pretty long! But I was getting a message that my attempt to save as a draft might fail. So I posted it. And that worked. Go figure.

Pierre Bayard's "How to talk about books you haven't read" is a delight. At first I thought the book was a hilarious spoof, but I became persuaded that though hilarious it's not a spoof: his words ring true. Bayard, a lecturer at the University of Paris VIII and a psychoanalyst, is very clever and very funny.

Reading the "classics" would already take more years than we have, and more books are pumped out every month, as every book lover knows to her joy and despair. Bayard describes three cultural canons about reading: the obligation to read (one must!), the obligation to read thoroughly, and the agreement that one must read a book thoroughly to discuss it well.

He finds, rather, that a close reading of a book can hinder, not help, one's understanding of it; that skimming the book for highlights, listening to other people talk about the book, and reading reviews and discussions often serve admirably.

"The result of this repressive system of obligations and prohibitions has been to generate a widespread hypocrisy on the subject of books that we actually have read. . . Among specialists, mendacity is the rule, and we tend to lie in proportion to the significance of the book under consideration."

Bayard uses a shorthand code when he refers to books.

UB book unknown to me
SB book I have skimmed
HB book I have heard about
FB book I have forgotten
++ extremely positive opinion
+ positive opinion
- negative opinion
-- extremely negative opinion

Is a book which you have read and forgotten still a book you have read? Bayard writes,
"Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable."
This is where the book really pulled me in. I'm an avid reader, but the more books I read the more easily I forget. Why do we book lovers then strive to read more, to spend our reading time on "good books?" Why to we read lists of the classics, the 1000 Books to Read Before You Die? What are we so afraid we'll miss? What loss or lack is we don't read, read, read? So many books, so little time, indeed.

When I was in library school, I started to read outside my habitual genres and topics. I wanted to be ready for any reader's question about books. I soon saw that was impossible, but I found new topics of interest, new books to add to my "someday" list. That was when I started to read the New York Times best-seller books. Just so I'd know if someone asked. Has anyone asked? Only a few times. But that didn't stop me. I wanted more, more, more. I browsed the internet for book review and book recommendation sites. I subscribed to Powell's newsletter. More books! More books! I quickly found I couldn't read them all, but I still requested more books than any human could read. Now I planned to "examine" them. Read the first chapter, a random section from the center, and the last chapter. It's become like the Sorcerer's Apprentice, a flood of books.

Ask people about their all-time favorite book. If they can pick one, it is usually one from childhood, or early reading years. When we hadn't read so many books, each one had a more profound impact. If we took a breath between books, and lived with it for a while, it stayed with us. Now we swim in information and entertainment. It's a commodity. Something else to acquire and consume, almost indiscriminately. If we forget what we read, why read?

Most of the book choices I make now are based on reviews. I read so many new books now, or old ones that have been called to mind by something else I've read, or a list of don't miss classics. I used to browse. Remember browsing? Not many people browse anymore. I used to pick out a lot of books that turned out to be just average. The great ones stood out more.

Now I read more really good books in a month than I used to in a year, more well-written and cogent non-fiction, more award-winning fiction. I feel lucky that this is so; that reviews can at least point me in an interesting direction. I close the cover of another great book, relishing what I've just read. What a standout! This will stay with me. But I forget. I've always said that if books were men, I'd have a hundred children. I just can't say no. But there's a downside to this voracity. There's always another encounter and another.

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the village our feelings about books . . . went beyond love. It was as if we didn't know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became them.
Anatole Broyard, When Kafka Was the Rage. Vintage Press, 1977.

I love this quotation from Broyard, though I can't help but notice that he is speaking of a time in his youth, 30 years past. We open our hearts more to books when we are young. Now we have lived into the answers of so many questions we used to have.

It might be true, then, that the more we read, the more we forget. Montaigne was a forgetful reader, and Bayard (yes, I'm back at "How to talk about books . . . ") quotes from Montaigne's Essays, "And if I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness." Further, Montaigne writes,

"I leaf through books. I do not study them. What I retain of them is something I no longer recognize as anyone else's. It is only the material from which my judgment has profited, and the thoughts and ideas with which it has become imbued: the author, the place, the words, and other circumstances, I immediately forget."

In fact recent research on memory has shown just that: we do not accurately recall the source of our ideas and opinions. The opinion formed may remain, but the memory of the source drops away. So dreams, articles from the New York Times, someone's blog, talk radio, textbooks, movies, and more, all contribute to our opinions and ideas, and over time, all come to be weighed equally as sources of truth.

I read that somewhere. I can't just now remember where, but I think it was a good source. [Found it: Robert Burton, On being certain: believing you are right even when you’re not.)

The House of Paper (Carlos Maria Dominguez) is a parable (103 small pages) about the same remembering and forgetting, Brauer, a book-lover and book-collector, acquires so many books that his skimpy cataloging is overwhelmed with the sheer volume of his volumes. He can no longer find anything; can no longer trace sources of ideas and opinions. In despair and madness, he builds a house of his books; hires someone to lay them in cement like bricks and lives in this bleak house until one day his fury mounts and he hammers gaping holes into the house. He regrets this and hires the mason again to repair the house, but it can't be fixed, and eventually all that is left are a few scattered remains of books on a cold windy beach.

The story is narrated by man trying to put the story together some years later, and he talks to one of Brauer's neighbors, Delgado, who also collects books. Delgado says, "To build up a library is to create a life. It's never just a random collection of books. . . they seem to constitute a collection, but I would say that's an illusion. We pursue some topics, and at the end of a certain length of time we find ourselves defining worlds, or if you prefer, we are tracing the steps of a journey, the advantage being that we can conserve its traces. . .we start with a reference to a book we don't have, then when we have acquired that one, it leads us on to another.

The most famous example of this pursuit is in 84 Charing Cross Road. Helene Hanff begins a project of self-education with a book by Arthur Quiller-Couch. When she comes to a reference to a book (idea, opinion, author) she doesn't know, she writes to the bookstore at 84 Charing Cross Road in London to order the sometimes-obscure texts. At the time she wrote the book the transatlantic correspondence, and the self-education project, had lasted 25 years.

Elisabeth Ellington (A year of reading : a month-by-month guide to classics and crowd-pleasers for you and your book group ) calls this "serial obsession." You are intrigued by a subject and pursue it avidly -- "and then the fancy passes by, and nothing shall remain (A. E. Housman)." Some of the things I have been serially addicted to reading about are Byzantine mosaics, Belle Epoque New York, graphic design, survival stories, seasons, Brenda Ueland, the Sages of Chelm, fools, tricksters, Art Nouveau, mixed-media artists, Prague, the Vatican Archives, and folk art.

Then there are the perennial obsessions that start as hot infatuations but continue over time. For me, and many of my ilk, this includes books about books, reading, writing, authors, libraries and librarians, manuscripts, publishing, paper, book plates, book collectors: everything book and print related (hence the title of this blog, Paper Baubles). (A year of reading was thus a double hit: a book about seasonal reading. ) Asperger's and autism, gardening, color, and phenology -- there's more to the list but you get the point. I find a happy glow spreading through me just contemplating this list. These are lists of some of my great pleasures.

And that brings us back around to answer the question, why do we read? And read so much? And feel the pressure of so many books, so little time? It's not difficult really. We did I even ask? We read to make new friends, enter new worlds, and experience both new and familiar pleasures.

Stone Arch Bridge, the Guthrie, and Gold Medal Park

2008-08-24T10:22:00.009-05:00

I took these photos last year about a week after the 35W bridge went down. I went to the Stone Arch Bridge early on Sunday morning. There were already people there and more were coming, because at that time the 10th Street bridge was still closed and this was the only place you could see the bridge ruins.

There was a solemn air of worship. People conducted themselves with decorum and respect. We were participating in a funeral, and the twisted wreckage of the bridge was the graveyard. It was difficult to see the ruins even from the Stone Arch Bridge, and people did crane to see, but not "rubbernecking." They were bearing witness to a tragedy.

You will see in some of the photos how low the river is. The water level was lowered to aid recovery efforts.

It was a beautiful sunny day, as are many funerals and cemetery visits. The sun relaxed and warmed us. A lot of people started on the bridge and then walked around to Gold Medal Park, Mill City Ruins, and the Guthrie, enjoying the river and the beautiful day. Death, especially random and senseless death, reminds us to be grateful to be living. At the top of the gentle green hill in Gold Medal Park, reached by a path spiraling to the top, was the the spontaneous memorial to those who died when the bridge collapsed, filled with flowers, pictures, signs, and notes.

Beloit Mindset List

2008-08-20T19:42:00.002-05:00

It's almost fall, and that means it's time for the Beloit College Mindset List!

The Beloit Mindset List is composed annually to help college faculty and staff understand the mindset of college frosh. This year's list includes:

WWW has never meant World Wide Wrestling.

Girls wearing head scarves have always been part of the high school fashion scene.

Gas stations have never fixed flats, but most serve cappuccino.

What I Haven't Been Reading

2008-08-08T10:48:00.004-05:00

I thought it might be worthwhile to note what I'm not reading -- the books that come home from the library and are returned unread.

The Order of Things; an archaeology of the human sciences

I wrote earlier about David Weinberger's "Everything Is Miscellaneous." He praised Michel Foucault's The Order of Things; an archaeology of the human sciences," so I decided to read it.

Here's a random sample from the book:

IV. Duplicated Representation

However, the property of signs most fundamental to the Classical episteme has not yet been mentioned. Indeed, the very fact that the sign can be more or less probable, more or less distant from what it signifies, that it can be either natural or arbitrary, without its nature or its value as a sign being affected--all this shows clearly enough that the relation of the sign to its content is not guaranteed by the order of things in themselves. The relation of the sign to the signified now resides in a space in which there is no longer any intermediary figure to connect them . . .

You get the idea. It's more or less understandable, kind of, but now realize this is one of the more lucid passages and multiply it to get 387 pages.

As the punchline of the old joke goes, "Up in the hills where my people come from we speak of little else!"

The Siege

The Siege, by Clara Claiborne Park, is one of a series of books I've been reading for a book list on autism and Asperger's syndrome. The Morton Grove Public Library hosts the Fiction-L book lists (fiction Reader's Advisory) and they have a great list on Autism and Asperger's in Fiction, compiled by the subscribers of the Fiction_L mailing list.

However, when I was looking for anything I could read about autism/Asperger's Syndrome, it was memoir that really helped me cope and understand. (My oldest son has Asperger's Syndrome, and though he's come a long way, it was a hard slog for a long time.) I found a treasure trove of such memoirs in the downtown Minneapolis Library and am working my way through them. Or maybe I'm not.

"The Siege," written in 1967, is one of the earliest popular works on autism told from the family's point of view. (As opposed to works by professionals about children in institutions.)

I read the first 70 pages and found it entirely too evocative of those painful early years. I wasn't as ready to revisit it as I thought I was. I'd like to return to it, but for now I've put it aside.

Soul Thief

2008-08-07T10:50:00.007-05:00

Soul Thief, by Charles Baxter

I tremendously enjoyed the beautifully written "Soul Thief," almost to the end. And though I'm unhappy with the ending, Baxter's writing is so enjoyable I recommend "Soul Thief" anyway.

Here is a book with a blank and tender hero, a book of mirrors, doubles, identity theft, of voiceless people finding voice and others silencing themselves. We are introduced to Nathaniel Mason, drifting through grad school in the early 1970s. (Baxter nails his descriptions of the 70's.) Nathaniel meets Theresa on the way to a party, and she introduces him to Jerome Coolberg. Soon he hears his distinctive life history parroted back to him as Jerome's. Then books and clothing begin to disappear from his apartment and migrate to Jerome. The identity violations climax in a final brutal incident.

The second half of the book opens years later. Nathaniel is a contentedly married man with two teenage sons. From out of the blue, he gets a phone call from Coolberg, asking for a meeting.

The ending has a twist I can't reveal, but I was disappointed. I read book reviews, as I did after "Divisadero," to see what others thought. The New York Times reviewer didn't mind, but the Powell's Books reviewer says, "it saddens me to report that the climax is a hackneyed bit of metafictional whimsy, which more or less sinks the novel."

In reading "Divisadero" and again with "Soul Thief," I assumed the fault was mine, that I wasn't a sophisticated enough reader to "get it." I have enough confidence to say "I didn't like this book/ending," but not enough confidence to think that fault is not solely mine. I wonder when that confidence occurs.

Here are the two reviews I read:

New York Times Review

Powell's Books Review-a-Day

Divisadero: and the critics are divided

2008-08-06T14:49:00.006-05:00

I've been gulping down books like water. When I stop reading I start worrying, so I just keep reading long into the night. With budget cuts looming in the county library, it's not a good time to be a substitute librarian. I'm sad, too, that my kiddo is taking off in two weeks (!) for Loyola University in Chicago. I'll miss him.

So, back to reading!

I've been reading "better" books, and fewer mysteries and thrillers, and enjoying them greatly. Mostly. I just finished Michael Ondaatje's "Divisadero," and found it a slog. The characters in the contemporary part of the book seemed wooden and two-dimensional. I got to page 153 before I felt a jolt of interest in the book. The last third of the book is devoted to the story of Segunda, a French writer whose history Anna is studying, and that was the section that felt most solid and real.

I read several reviews of Divisadero, trying to find out what others saw that I did not. This one was helpful:

From Bookmarks Magazine (cited on Amazon.com)
How do we account for the critics' varied reactions to Michael Ondaatje's latest novel? Is it "a beautifully crafted tale" (Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel) or a "strangely broken-back beast of a novel" (Seattle Times)? Critics uniformly praised Ondaatje's graceful language and poetic imagery, but agreed on little else. Some applauded the nonlinear plot structure, while others found the constantly shifting times, places, and narrators confusing. Characters were pronounced both well-drawn individuals and flat, indistinguishable stereotypes. Several critics lamented the sudden, unexpected shift to Segura's life story, which left the previous plot unresolved. Readers should note that the critics who enjoyed Divisadero the most were those who approached it as a work of art rather than a conventional novel.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Here's my final answer: the time and place shifts were handled well, and I noted several lyrical passages, but it was the flatness of the characters and the storytelling, except for the historical look at the writer Segura, that made reading a chore.

***
Here's a plot summary from "What Do I Read Next?"

At age 16, Anna lives on a farm in Petaluma, California, with her father, an orphan named Claire, also 16, and a hired hand named Coop. The three young people are as close as siblings; however, their bond is broken when violence erupts on the farm. Anna runs away, and Coop uses his card playing skills to make a living playing poker. The novel traces the adult lives of the trio as they cope with the abrupt and violent end to their "family." Claire becomes an investigator for a public defender, Coop continues to play poker, and Anna becomes intrigued by the life and work of French author Lucien Segura, in whose house she resides. As the novel shifts focus to the life of Segura at the turn of the century, Anna finds remarkable similarities between his life and her own.

Middle-Class Lifeboat, Part Two

2008-08-04T18:48:00.006-05:00

I got an e-mail from Paul and Sarah Edwards, authors of
Middle-Class Lifeboat!

They write:

"You may be interested to know that we will be breaking it into three eBooks (with some updating for the dramatic changes we foresaw in our economy but that are taking place at a more rapid rate) and the eBooks will be published our forthcoming Middle Class library site. Our policy proposals will be ready soon, too."

The Website: Middle-Class Lifeboat.com

Last Books of July

2008-07-31T16:03:00.008-05:00

Minnesota 150 : the people, places, and things that shape our state / Kate Roberts.
This book includes the usual suspects plus some surprises. The Minnesota Historical Society received 2,760 nominations for a sesquecentennial list of 150 topics, and narrowed the list down to this 150. SPAM, Jesse Ventura, the Mayo Clinic, Charles Lindbergh, and Itasca State Park may not surprise, but did you expect Gratia Alta Countryman, Seymour Cray, Fanny Brin, Burma Shave, and the Socialist Opera House?

Le, Nam. The Boat.
A short story collection so strong it embarasses all your dreams of writing. Don't bother, Nam Le has it covered. His settings and characters include a young Vietnamese writer in Iowa, high school students in Australia, a ship of Vietnamese refugees adrift on the sea, Hiroshima just before the bomb, an aging artist in New York preparing to meet his daughter for the first time, an American tourist on an ill-timed visit to Tehran, and a moment of truth for a 14-year-old assassin in Columbia.

Holm, Bill. Prairie Days.
Finding this book was a real serendipity. I'm not sure what moved me to take it from the shelf, but it turns out to be a book I read long ago, and have looked for unsuccessfully for years. I thought the book I was looking for was written by Garrison Keillor; turns out it was by the other tall humorist, writer, and singer from Minnesota: Bill Holm.

Holm's essays are beautifully illustrated with black and white photos of old churches, prairie fields, a hymnbook swollen with water damage. The book was originally released as "The Music of Failure," about which I have written here before. (September 5, 2007)

Middle Class Lifeboat

2008-07-31T15:34:00.005-05:00

Middle-Class Lifeboat; careers and life choices for navigating a changing economy, by Paul & Sarah Edwards.
I've checked this out twice, but didn't get to spend much time with it either time.This time it got lost in the painting and entertaining which took up most of July.

"Middle-Class Lifeboat" identifies over 50 careers the authors feel are financially secure, many of which you can do from home. Here's one option that caught my eye: Disease Management. With diabetes and other long-term chronic illnesses on the rise, jobs have emerged to work with patients "proactively managing a chronic medical condition that brings together physicians and support services to assist patients in taking better care of themselves." The job-holders duties range from direct patient contact, ordering supplies, providing education about the disease, to running groups, keeping in contact with physicians, nurses, family, and neighbors, or daily monitoring of statistics (e.g. blood sugar for diabetics.)

For each career, the Edwards provide an "Economic Reality Fit." Is the work/product necessary or discretionary? Can it be replaced by technology? Can it be sent offshore? What is the status of the industry?

They also list "Personal Reality Fit" factors such as start-up costs, overhead, potential earnings, flexible hours, overall stress, and ease of bartering, give a "Durability Rating," list likely transferable skills, give suggestions on what to charge, the best ways to market the skill/product, and give tips for getting started.

Finally, they list associations, books, and web sites to turn to for more information.

The career information forms the bulk of the book. In addition there are ideas about financial planning, simplifying, moving to a place with a lower cost of living, and staying "financially afloat whether the economy is up or down."

I'm going to check this out again. I'm definitely not done with it.

July, July

2008-07-30T13:34:00.014-05:00

What a whirlwind month!

Prepping and painting the living room, dining room, and kitchen grabbed all my attention for a while, and then I enjoyed a 10 day visit from Marius, our foreign exchange student from two years ago, which included a weekend in Duluth and a visit from his parents. And that was the month!

Here's what I read in July:

Ha Jin. Waiting. I was disappointed.

Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. My first Austen novel, though I've seen the movies! This was an annotated edition for teens, and it defined obscure words and outdated concepts, which slowed me down in the past. Very helpful and just the nudge I needed. This is part of the "DK Illustrated Classics" series.

Donna Tartt. The Secret History. Deliciously creepy! An elite group of students in a New England school get in trouble when they experiment with Dionysian rituals, but their solution lands them in trouble that haunts them all their lives.

Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis. A graphic novel about growing up in Iran as Satrapi ages from six to fourteen, during which time the Shah was overthrown, the Islamic Revolution triumphed, and the war in Iraq battered Tehran.

Shannon Hale. Austenland: a novel. Very funny take on Austen and her fans. For Jane Hayes, no man can compare to Mr. Darcy, and it's ruining her love life. Her great-aunt sends her to the expensive Austen Land resort, where women act out their Austen fantasies, hoping it will help her get over Mr. Darcy. The story unfolds in echoes of several Austen tales. If you like Austen, you'll enjoy this!

Monette, Sarah. The Bone Key. More good creepy fun! A series of short stories about a man who attracts the supernatural. Very well written.

Jennifer Lee Carrell. Interred with their bones. The search for a missing Shakespearean play, with the standard elements: clues in dusty books and archives; codes and double meanings, the race against another group also looking for the play. This one's stroke of originality lies in setting part of the search in the desert Southwest. This is at least the second "Missing Shakespeare play" book I've read this year, but I still enjoy them.

Lee Child. Nothing to Lose. I've been a Reacher fan for years, but the series is getting stale.

Oh, Freedom

2008-07-08T09:25:00.011-05:00

I had a wonderful 4th of July. Dear Sons and Dear Ex were out of town, and I declared my independence from chores and housework, and read all day long. Oh, bliss, oh joy!

It was the most perfect day imaginable: warm and sunny, low humidity, a breeze ruffling the leaves; the sounds of cheerful extended clans gathering next door and across the alley, the smell of barbecue. A day straight out of e. e. cummings:

i thank You God for this most amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of tees
and a blue true dream of sky, and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

Digression #1: I went in search of another e e cummings poem, which was in itself a digression, and searched through a paper file of clippings and cartoons I've saved, stuffed full of New Yorker cartoons, many from my high school years. It was a three minute flip through a lifetime of good laughs, layered backwards through time. I hope that when it's time for my life to flash before my eyes it will include some of these cartoons.

Digression #2: The poem I was looking for was on a greeting card I'd received many years ago. I looked through a notebook stuffed with poems, started in junior high; through the clippings file, which also dates back to junior high, and a brief glance through a set of monthly files that I used a lot when the kids were little, with pictures and activities sorted by month. My point, and I do have one, is this: how much nicer it would have been if those assorted lifetime collections of good stuff were dumped in one big data folder, and tagged.

I just finished reading David Weinberger's "Everything is Miscellaneous; the power of the new digital disorder. " He describes "three orders of order." The first order is the physical arrangement of things. The Bettman Archive, a collection of historic photos, is a vast first-order organization: a collection of actual objects, arranged in an order to facilitate finding. The photos, stored in a cool underground vault, are arranged by collection, in the order in which the Bettman acquired other smaller collections over time. Within collections the photos are often arranged chronologically. Other examples of first order collections are silverware in drawers, books on shelves, and clippings in file folders. The enormity of the Bettman Archive means that finding a given photo, or a photo with certain characteristics ("a civil war soldier eating a meal outdoors,") is incredibly difficult and nigh unto impossible. (Note: some of the Bettman photos are now available online.)

The card catalog in the Bettman Archive is a second order of order. Information about the objects is stored separately from the objects themselves. This is a great improvement, but still insufficient. Not all the photos are cataloged; some are in yellowing ledgers waiting to be cataloged. Even the items cataloged do not contain all the information one would wish: to find a civil war soldier eating a meal outdoors, one could could eliminate thousands of photos not cataloged with the subject "civil war," but one would have to look through thousands of civil war photos in hopes of finding a soldier eating a meal outdoors. And there might be some great photos that aren't cataloged at all, or don't include "civil war" as a catalog subject.

Enter the third order of order. If the photos were digitally scanned, they could be tagged with as many key words as desired. Current library catalogs are based on a model of scarce digital storage space, and before that, the size of a 3x5 card limited entries. Now we have all the room we want, and the next generation of card catalogs will reflect this, probably in a combination of professionally selected subject and keyword settings, and tags and reviews contributed by readers/patrons/customers.

The photo we're looking for might be tagged with Civil War, soldier, mess tent, eating, outdoor meals, the type of camera used for the photo, the photographer's name, the date, the name of the original collection and any subsequent collections it was part of. Oh, and the name, rank, and regiment of the soldier and his home state. And the state in which the picture was taken. Lots of room for everything! Corbis, the Bettman's parent company, has a digital photo archive, a third-order organizational method.

So we should be able to go to Corbis and find that Civil War soldier. Weinberger did, but I couldn't duplicate his search. I looked for about five minutes without success. We're still not in that perfect digital world!

For examples of tagging, if you aren't familiar with this, see Flickr.com or click to my links on del.icio.us.

This is what Weinberger means by "everything is miscellaneous" -- this uncoupling of data from second-order systems, the creating of multiple "leaves" heaped on the floor, accessible in any order the end user wishes to sort them or use them.

His book is a great introduction to new ways information is shared and used. Three key points: * Information is most valuable when it is thrown into a big digital "pile" to be filtered and organized by users themselves.
* Instead of relying on experts, groups of passionate users are inventing their own ways of discovering what they know and want.
* Smart companies do not treat information as an asset to be guarded, but let it loose to be "mashed up," gaining market awareness and customer loyalty.

When I went to library school, I was thrilled to be able to take a class called, "The Organization of Knowledge," and then bitterly disappointed when it wasn't a description of varieties of ways to organize knowledge, and how those organizational schemes affect how we view "reality." Instead it was a course in cataloging, a "how to" to put materials into organizational cubbyholes with the Library of Congress or Dewey Decimal system.

Weinberger provides a lot of anecdotal description of the ways knowledge has been organized, which book geeks, library geeks, and info geeks will enjoy. You know who you are.

Back to the Fourth of July

I intended to blog about Fareed Zakaria's The Post-American World on July 4th, thought it would be very fitting, but it was too lovely to even think of hanging around a computer, so we'll have to settle for a Post-July-4th blog about The Post-American World.

I've been hearing predictions of the demise of America's greatness for as long as I can remember. Not only in the sense that many of us have whenever our party or our candidate is not in power, that we're headed in the wrong direction, but a deeper fear of financial ruin, joblessness, lawlessness, powerlessness; the comparisons to the Roman Empire are legion (excuse the pun.) I've had those fears myself. During the financial crises in the 80's (the only near-term example of a time in which the "misery index" of joblessness and inflation surpassed our current deep financial woes), businesses all around my neighborhood were closing. Britain seemed to be circling the drain, with strikes and financial chaos.

And anyone who has watched the fantastic growth (not without social and environmental costs) in China, or in India or southeast Asia, has felt the tremors rocking our assumptions that we are the best, period.

Zakaria says, "I began to notice things that a short time ago were unimaginable. The richest man in the world lives in Mexico City. The tallest building in the world is in Taipei, and Dubai is building a taller building. . . The largest factory in the world is in China. The largest refinery is in India. I was in Las Vegas one day and thought, At least we have this. It turns out we don't. The largest casino hotel in the world now is the Venetian in Macao, and Macao just overtook Las Vegas with the largest gambling revenues in the world. Shopping, America's greatest leisure time activity? The last time I was in Beijing they showed me the largest mall in the world, which has since been eclipsed by another Chinese mall. It turns out the top ten malls in the world are all outside the United States. Just three years ago almost every category I gave you would have been topped by America. The change is fast and has only just begun."

Zakaria foresees a world in which power and economic strength are more widely shared. His key message is that these changes are not about the decline of the United States but "the rise of the rest." He envisions the United States playing a key role in a world of negotiations and strategy -- a role only we can play, based on our military and economic strength. The book is a great read; Zakaria is a journalist, not just a policy wonk, and the book hurtles along on a wave of enthusiastic optimism about our future.

Coming of Age

2008-06-28T10:44:00.009-05:00

I've read two books that are loosely associated by being about "coming of age": Madapple by Christina Meldrum, and Fun Home; a family tragicomic by Alison Bechdel. In some respects, the two books could hardly be more different. Madapple is poetic tale that comes close to magical realism, Fun Home is a graphic-novel memoir composed of small real moments based on Bechdel's childhood diary. However, both weigh the cost of an absent or unresponsive father, and both contain challenging scientific and literary references.

Fun Home is an award-winning graphic-novel memoir of Alison Bechdel's complex relationship with her father, a distant and obsessive closeted gay man in the 60's and 70's, and her own coming out as a lesbian.

Bechdel immediately pulled me in with tale of her father's obsession with renovating and redecorating their house, and I never lost interest as her story unfolded. Partly because of the graphic format, she builds the story with carefully chosen anectodes, often excerpts from the diary she started in childhood. The truth of these small real episodes accumulate to tell a powerful story.

Bechdel is the creator of the long-running comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For."

Madapple is teen fiction where much is hidden. You must suspend disbelief from the start of the novel, but toward the end the universe the author has created collapses under the weight of too many unlikely plot turns.

That being said, it is an evocative, enjoyable novel, and is currently madly popular with the teen set. It has a cold and mysterious mother, an unknown father, newly discovered relatives, unrequited love, teen pregnancy, and and a happy ending, as well as herbal lore galore, and many fascinating asides into early Christianity, which drive one of the plot strands.

The story begins in a courtroom: Aslaug is on trial for double homicide. The events that led to the trial are told in a series of flashbacks. The author does a great job of hiding the real story behind the deaths until the end of the book. Chapters are titled with the name of a plant, and the uses, mythology, and properties of the plant move the action forward in the chapter. Aslaug and her mother have an extensive knowledge of local plants, and use them for food, tea, and medicine. "Madapple" is another name for the poisonous jimsonweed plant.

At this stage of my life, I'm more interested in what happens after "happily ever after," but the book pulled me in. As an older-than-teen reader, I particularly enjoyed the herbal lore and discussion of early Christianity.

People who liked "Madapple" more than I did:

"In debut novelist Christina Meldrum's mesmerizing literary mystery, Madapple (Knopf), the worlds of science and faith collide." —Vanity Fair

Madapple has been nominated for the ALA's Best Book for Young Adults (BBYA) list.
___
Meldrum provides a bibliography of books she used for research. Included are

The Jesus mysteries : was the "original Jesus" a pagan god? / Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.

The elegant universe : superstrings, hidden dimensions, and the quest for the ultimate theory / Brian Greene.

An obsession with butterflies : our long love affair with a singular insect / Sharman Apt Russell.

Discover Loyola!

2008-06-25T10:53:00.010-05:00

Last week I traveled to Chicago with Dear Son and Dear Ex for "Discover Loyola," a day and a half of instruction and training in how to be, respectively, a Loyola student and a Loyola parent. The information from the seminars was useful, the presentations often funny, but by far the best was watching all the other parents and children interact.

None of the kids had any interest in their parents. That's as it should be. The other parents had the same rueful reaction we did, and we shared a lot of laughs about our kids and our changing families. The families launching a second or third child into college were nonchalant, so I took my cues from them.

The weather was beautiful, and the campus, right on the shore of Lake Michigan, is lovely. The information commons (ranks of computers) is high tech; the librarians, housed in the library next door to the IC, are smart, kind, and funny.

I think this is going to work out just fine.

Here's a list of some books on The ABC's of Chicago: Architecture, Blues, Cubbies, and Crime --along with some Chicago fiction. (NOTE 7/8/08: somehow the contents of this list were deleted. :-( I will have to recreate it.)

The photo, "Carry it into the world," by babaoflia on Flickr, shows a view of Lake Michigan from Madonna della Strada chapel.

Graduation

2008-06-17T09:15:00.012-05:00

My younger son graduated last week from South High, home of the Gallant Tigers, in Minneapolis, MN. It was a great ceremony, with music, speakers that delivered on their promises of short speeches, and 480 students who processed across the stage in record time.

(Skip to the end for book recommendations.)

After each and every father, mother, sister, cousin, and aunt was wanded by security before entering the Convention Center, assistant principal Dagny addressed us sternly about the protocol for this "ceremony, not a celebration." It brought me back years, to being dressed down by former Hermantown principal Ray Wero. Even when he addressed the whole student body, and I wasn't culpable, I'd vow to straighten up and fly right.

There's a style, a cadence, and an "I expect to be obeyed" tone of voice that good school administrators have, and Dagny, with her short steel-gray hair, delivered the whole package. Inside sources tell me she has a heart of gold and sang in the Bach Society for a number of years, but in the moment I sat up a little straighter and vowed to do her proud. It was a strangely pleasant little nostalgia trip to be addressed in no uncertain terms by such a fine school administrator. Message received, we will not hoot 'n' holler when our grad crosses the stage. We will conduct ourselves with the dignity and decorum the occasion calls for. Yes, ma'am!

South High is a most wondrously diverse school, and rightfully proud of it. We were treated to an a Cappella choral version of the national anthem, and a solo a Cappella version of the Black national anthem, "Lift Every Voice and Sing." I would have preferred to join in on both, especially the moving "Lift Every Voice," but I'm old school. The First Nations students drummed and chanted a blessing, which for me was the emotional core of the ceremony. Our beloved "Star Spangled Banner" is stirring, "Lift Every Voice and Sing" even more so, but the drumming and chanting was spine-tingling. After the ceremony, my rock ribbed Republican dad surprised me by saying how very much he liked it.

I've formed a theory about the songs and speeches that form the graduation ceremony. They ground us in history, show respect for the cultures participating, and convey what wisdom the speakers can muster, but after last Monday I'm convinced that their primary function is to keep Moms like me, who were rocked by waves of emotion as 479 fine graduates and the one really important one processed in, from fainting straight away if we were to go directly to the diploma hand-out and actual graduation. They provide a breathing space and a chance to focus on the bigger picture.

I'd brought a delicate white hanky but did not surprise myself when I had to honk into multiple kleenex. Yeah, I'm tough all right. Tough as butter.

The speaker, David A. Walsh, took an anecdote I'd heard before and brought it to a new level. My systems analysis prof taught us that the the way a computer functions, searching in the background while other processing takes place, is analogous to the way the brain functions. On those occasions when you are reaching for a piece of information but just can't quite remember, the brain continues to do a background search until, finding the information in some remote file, gives the conscious mind a "priority interrupt" to convey the news that the name of that last dwarf, the one you couldn't remember, is "Sneezy."

Walsh described this as an example of how the brain is always wrestling with questions, looking for answers. So, he said, when you wake in the morning, don't ask yourself "What fresh hell is this?" (Dorothy Parker) Ask "who is the most interesting person I will meet today?" or "What would I do today if I weren't afraid?" That question will illumine your day. As long as you're processing a question in deep background search, make it a good one.

I believe that may be the most useful thing I ever took from a graduation ceremony. Thanks, David!

Leaders of the student government gave introductions to music performances or speakers, and two students gave brief addresses. All were women; all but one were African American women. You go, girls! It's good to see strong young African American women take their natural place as leaders of the world.

It's fitting, too, in a school that gave us two championship girls' basketball seasons. I was moved both years to see the entire school fill the Target Center, in full black and orange regalia and face paint, to cheer on these young, mostly African American, women. Just as it should be! But a far cry from girls' also-ran status in my youth. (South High's nemesis, the girls' state basketball champion this year and last year, was Central High in St. Paul, another urban team dominated by African American women.)

This is how change happens, before our very eyes, in joy and competition and hard work with other issues put to the side completely. At least in this arena, in this moment. I'm not saying the work of fighting racism and sexism is done, I'm just saying it was a wondrous moment, as was the graduation ceremony.

Then the 479 fine graduates and the one really important one processed across the stage at a rate of one every four seconds, accelerating gradually to one every three seconds and finally one every two seconds; they were pronounced officially graduated, the hats flew in the air, the mommas cried, the dads took pictures, and the graduates sang on the bus on the way to the all night party.

I want to tell you, too, about the delightfully cliche-packed student speeches (wouldn't have it any other way) and the small but important way those speeches have changed; and the story my friend told me about her daughter, who traveled to watch the "Ultimate" Frisbee competition with other Ultimate team mates on prom weekend, and the From, or "Frisbee Prom" they created, but this has gone on long enough; that will have to be another time.

And now at last, some book recommendations:

Chabon, Michael, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
This coming-of-age novel about a young college graduate stayed with me for years. Only recently did I revisit it and realize that it was Michael Chabon's first book! Like his other books, this is beautifully written, witty, and deep.

David Allen Walsh (click to link to his books in the HCL catalog) is a nationally known writer and speaker on developmental psychology, with a focus on children and media. He founded the National Institute on Media and the Family in 1996 and is also the author of the supremely useful "Why do they act that way? : a survival guide to the adolescent brain for you and your teen.

His children are South High alums, which is one reason he accepted the invitation to speak.

Click here for a sampling of a Cappella music.

Rule the Web!

2008-06-03T01:41:00.005-05:00

I devoured Mark Fraunfelder's new book, Rule the Web; How to do anything and everything on the Internet -- better, faster, easier which he describes as "a guide to getting stuff done on the web."

It's jammed with great ideas on -- yes -- better, faster, and easier ways to use your mobile phone, ipod, internet phone, landline phone, email (he recommends gmail); tips for downloading video and movies, and working with varying formats for video and music.

In chapter one he gives good, concise introductions to creating web sites, blogs, podcasts, and wikis; social networking, photography and video. The mid-section of the book consists of chapters with tips on turbocharging your searching and browsing, shopping and selling; using the web for health, exercise and sports, media and entertainment, travel and sightseeing, work and productivity, and communication. He also covers security concerns and includes some great tips from his favorite bloggers.

I am going to have to work my way through chapter by chapter; there are so many ideas here I want to incorporate. I might even have to buy this book, and I don't buy many books!

Mark Frauenfelder is a freelance journalist, author, and founder of boingboing, "a directory of wonderful things."

Manly Men and Marines

2008-05-20T10:44:00.007-05:00

Reading Lists click-throughs: in a recent (#221) post Emily Lloyd (Shelf Check) refers to 100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library on The Art of Manliness. I love reading lists like this that reflect personal opinion. They don't have to be right, wrong, or all-inclusive.

One of the comments had a pointer to the Marine Corps Professional Reading Program (click on Reading Lists in the right-hand column), the latest version of a tradition that's been around since the 19th century. Fascinating!

Here's the 100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man's Library on Amazon.com. The blog post has great photos of vintage books, but the Amazon list is much faster, so you might prefer it if you have a slow Internet connection.

Dairy Queen

2008-05-20T09:38:00.002-05:00

My grandpa Wenzel had a wonderful truck equipped with a Dairy Queen sensor. Whenever we passed a Dairy Queen, the truck would veer out of his control and turn in at the DQ for ice cream for his grandkids. Grandpa was a big, strong, gentle man, but he could never escape the gravitational pull of a DQ--at least when we were with him. It was fantastic! We begged Mom and Dad to get a DQ sensor too, but we never succeeded.

There's another DQ story about Grandma and Grandpa Wenzel: when the Minnesota Twins won, Grandma and Grandpa would celebrate with a bowl of Dairy Queen soft serve ice cream. When the Twins lost? They would console themselves with a bowl of Dairy Queen soft serve ice cream.

Catherine Gilbert Murdock's Dairy Queen, is not about that kind of Dairy Queen. Nor is it about a beauty pageant, which you might guess from the cover. It's about D. J.'s 15th summer on her family's dairy farm in Wisconsin, and about cows, football, hard work and not much talk.

D. J.'s family reminds me of the legendary Burkstaller family who farmed next to the Wenzels. The Wenzels would compete with the Burkstallers to see who could get the hay in first. The Wenzels, legendary workers, tipped their hats to the Burkstallers as "real workers." Both families, like D. J.'s, worked from "Can do to can't do," from dawn to dusk.

Dairy Queen, by Catherine Gilbert Murdock (Houghton, 2006).

D.J. Schwenk, while not really happy, never complains or questions her life on the family's small dairy farm in Wisconsin. After her father injures himself, the 15-year-old girl must do the farm work almost single-handedly, including milking the cows. She never really noticed the similarities between her life and the lives of the cows. D.J. is a jock, so on top of all her farm chores, she takes on training Brian, the quarterback on a rival school's football team. The summer they spend together changes everything as D.J. discovers that she has lots to say about her life and what she wants out of it. Not to be missed. Stephanie A. Squicciarini, Fairport Public Library, NY in School Library Journal

Celebrations and Festivities!

2008-05-12T20:01:00.017-05:00

May is chock-a-block with events and celebrations. Here are a few I've observed:

Minnesota's Sesquicentennial!

Minnesota became a state on May 11, 1858. One of the many aspects of our state-wide celebration is this slide show, Shines for All to See, commissioned by Roseville Visitors Association and MN150. I have lived in many places in Minnesota: Elmore, a tiny town on the Iowa border where as a small child I saw a tree shimmering with movement, completely covered by migrating Monarch butterflies; Plainview, a rural town near Rochester and the great Mississippi River bluffs, where my best friend's family had a dairy farm and where a brief walk out of town led one directly into the country. Hermantown, outside of Duluth, near beautiful Lake Superior, has a completely different northern Minnesota culture. My dad grew up in Park Rapids, in the heart of Minnesota vacationland, where family reunions are held every two years, and as an adult my family went to a resort near tiny Nevis, MN, for 13 years. And now for many years I've lived in the city of Minneapolis, and I love it here too.

I've created a Minnesota book lis t of some of my personal favorite books about, set in, or written by authors in Minnesota. Check it out!

Prom Night!

Last Saturday night was prom night for beautiful South High School in Minneapolis, Home of the Gallant Tigers, "where the administrators are strong, the staff is good looking, and the students are above average!" Or so Zee, our extraordinary parent liaison tells us, thanking Garrison Keillor.

Here's my Prom book list.

Spring!

Thank whatever merciful powers have brought us spring at last. Glory be! The best book about spring is found in walking outside on a spring morning, listening to bird song and if you are lucky, frog song.

I'm reading John Bates' A Northwoods Companion; Spring and Summer, edited from over seven years of newspaper columns describing the phenology of the north woods, from his home near Minocqua, Wisconsin. This is a companion volume to A Northwoods Companion; Fall and Winter.

Phenology is the orderly timing and progression of natural events. For instance, in Minneapolis, the peak bloom for lilacs, flowering crabs, and dandelions is typically Mother's Day weekend. This year, with Mother's Day just yesterday, the lilacs display small leaves but the blooms are still tightly budded.

In Duluth, however, the lilacs bloom for graduation in early June. Similarly, since trillium bloom before the leaf canopy fills in, they bloom in Eloise Butler Wild Flower Garden (Minneapolis) in April, but at Spirit Mountain Ski Resort (Duluth) for Memorial Day. And if you go far to the north, to Flin Flon, Manitoba, as I did one summer, you can welcome spring in June, and go to drive-in movies which start at 11:00, when it finally gets dark.

I enjoy the Fall and Winter volume of Bates' book more; the Spring and Summer version has a lot more birding information than I need. Both describe the progression of plant and flower life, animal mating and birth, bird migration, nesting, and hatching, the commencement of frog song, weather patterns, canoeing, snowshoeing, maple sugaring, and hiking rxpeditions, and particularly in the Fall and Winter volume, stars and the night sky. These would be wonderful books to have on hand if you lived north of Hinckley, but even for this city dweller they are a way to stay tuned into nature's rhythms. Spring moves north at a rate of about 17 miles per day, says Bates, so events unfold here about a week ahead of his timeline.

Here's a quotation Bates uses in his Fall and Winter volume:

"I go Up North as often as I can but it never seems to be often enough. My soul resides there. . . There is there a sacredness, a wholly otherness that I've found nowhere else. Those who know Up North know we take life from the depths of its water and breath from the far reaches of its open skies and peace from the quaking serenity of its birches."
-- Susan Wendorf

Another Minnesota phenology book is Through Minnesota's seasons with Jim Gilbert .

All three books can be found at urban and suburban Hennepin County Libraries.

Lemons Are Not Red

2008-05-07T12:20:00.009-05:00

I had a chance to work on the Children's Readmobile this Monday, which was really fun. Cute kids in small groups, only two seriously runny noses, and a beautiful day to be out and about. My "color junkie" recommendation from this experience is Lemons Are Not Red by Laura Vaccaro Seeger. Some seriously saturated crayola colors in this one! Lots of fun.

Lots of books!

2008-04-24T14:41:00.010-05:00

Recently read:

Asperger's from the Inside Out, by Michael John Carley.
This is a quick and fascinating read. Michael John Carley has been a playwright and a lower-level ambassador, and is now Executive Director of GRASP, the Global and Regional Asperger Syndrome Partnership. He was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome as an adult, when his then-four-year-old son was diagnosed. He writes movingly of "the whole tumultuous path" to acceptance and understanding of Asperger's, which "changes everything." You will like this smart, articulate, matter-of-fact tale of a powerful advocate for those with Asperger's Syndrome.

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, by Chris Crutcher

Eric, or "Moby" to his friends, is fat, and his best friend Sarah Byrnes is severely disfigured by facial burns. They bond over their "terminal uglies" until Eric joins the swim team and starts to lose weight. Fearing the loss of her friendship, he doubles his eating, trying to stay fat for Sarah Byrnes, until she finds out and reads him the riot act. Soon much more serious trouble comes into Sarah's life when she finds out the truth about her past, breaks down, and is hospitalized. In the past, bright tough Sarah has always been a couple of steps ahead of Eric and has helped him out, but now it's his turn to help her.

I have been reading a lot of teen fiction and have enjoyed much of it, but this one stands head and shoulders above the rest.

Colors of the World; a geography of color, by Jean-Philippe and Dominique Lenclos
This is the coolest book! Color junkies will love this, but so will those with an interest in geography, anthropology, and art. From the blurb:

"Colors of the World presents a chromatic journey through the colors of vernacular architecture from the United States to the far corners of the world. Based on the "geography of color" analytic method . . . this book examines the palettes of diverse habitats to reveal how geology, climate, light, sociocultural behavior, the traditions of local residents, and construction techniques uniquely shape a landscape's architectural personality and chromatic character."

To analyze each site, the authors and their students take photographs and create colored pencil sketches of houses, then plot the color patterns of houses onto a color grid showing the predominate palette. They have studied sites in Japan, France, Guatemala, Brazil, Russia, and South Africa, but it was the middle Eastern studies in Algeria, Morocco, Iran, and Yemen, with their desert palettes, that particularly fascinated me. If you read this beautiful picture-filled book, prepare to be drawn into a daydreaming trip to far-flung cities of pink, blue, gold, and white.

Spring notes

2008-04-24T14:21:00.005-05:00

Briefly noted:

More signs of spring:

- An uptick in the requests for Chilton's automotive repair manuals at all libraries
- First dandelions. The south lawn of the NE Library always has the first dandelion blooms.

Seen in passing:

- a young man with a Burberry plaid hat that belonged on someone at least 50 years older, and a New York Times tucked like a baguette into his backpack.
- turquoise cowboy boots and a matching turquoise blouse
- two young hipsters with their saggy baggy pants miraculously perched halfway down their rear ends, with full boxer display

Popular NY Times link: A clip from the Met Opera of Juan Diego Flórez singing 'Ah! Mes Amis,' with ovation and encore: nine high Cs! The link goes to the NY Times article, where you'll see the mp3 clips on the lower left side. Listening to this bright and stirring singing will boost your heart rate! Wow!

Signs of Spring

2008-04-16T17:19:00.007-05:00

Two important signs of spring!

1. First "Garage Sale" sign of the year

2. Linder's parking-lot greenhouse erected @ St. Anthony shopping center! Budget-bustin' blooms beckon!

k k k

My favorite new gardening book this year is The Bold and Brilliant Garden, by Sarah Raven. Her color palette: sky blue, Moroccan blue, deep blue, crimson black, red-purple, purple, bright pink, deep pink, magenta; carmine, scarlet, ruby, Indian red, Venetian red, vermillion, coral pink, tangerine, gold, lemon yellow. She mixes ruby red with acid green, purple with vermillion, tangerine with magenta, crimson with gold, and sets them all against a backdrop of acid green, blue green, silver blue, and and silver.

She uses attention-getting plants: parrot tulips, Oriental poppies, peonies, zinnias, dahlias, hydrangeas, callas, and scented plants like hyacinths, lilacs, roses, lilies, honeysuckle, and phlox. Wow! The color-saturated illustrations make this a fantastic book gray days.

You can read more about it on Amazon.

Slow Snow Slog; and Book Rec: "Feed"

2008-03-31T19:40:00.011-05:00

Here are the places I went as 3.5" of wet sloppy snow accumulated today, my only available errand day this week: Got a haircut. Target run. Took Evan to Verizon in Roseville to replace his broken phone. Dropped him off and went to the bank. Went back because I forgot to pick up Potamus, who stayed with Dennis and Jarrett while Evan and I went to Loyola in Chicago. Post office. Home for two hours; a time of inadvertent napping.

Got Jarrett and brought him to the dentist. (Dad picked him up.) Went too far north on Hamline and was funneled into Snelling going north. Got gas. Noticed windshield wiper was broken so went back down south to pick up a new wiper. Needed tools to install it so decided to skip it until I could get to the garage. Back up north to Mike's Discount Foods. And home.

WHAT I'M READING NOW: M. T. Anderson's teen/young adult book "Feed," set in a dystopian future.

In M. T. Anderson's "Feed," everyone is bathed in and entertained by a constant feed directly into their heads; it's 24/7 ads, music, video and gaming feeds, fads, fashion and hairstyle news, and telepathic communication with friends. People are happily distracted from concerns about the outside world, and can barely read, write, or think for themselves. During spring break, Titus and his friends go to the moon ("We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck") where he meets Violet, and where the group of friends is "hacked," ending up in the hospital without feeds for several days. After the feeds are reconnected, Titus and Violet continue to experience disturbing hacks on their feeds.

That's as far as I've gotten, though the blurb indicates that Titus and Violet will decide to "fight the feed." "Feed" reads like an unsettling and hilarious mix of George Orwell and empty "Valley Girl" dialog (which for this adult, is getting a little annoying.) It's a cautionary tale, and I'm eager to see if Anderson's ending is as bleak as Orwell's in "1984."

Any librarian who has watched dozens of people sitting elbow-to-elbow at long tables, riveted to their computer screens, will recognize the power of the Feed. Like the Internet, the Feed started as educational tool but quickly morphed into a business and pleasure emporium that delights, distracts, and captivates. Envision a constant silent cell phone link added, and it's easy to project into our own future a scenario in which virtual contact continues to eclipse the physical presence of all but our closest friends.

Good lines:

"Everything at home was boring. Link Arwaker was like, "I'm so null," and Marty was all "I'm null, too, unit," but I mean we were all pretty null . . ."

The grownups speak the same way. When Titus's dad visits the hospital, he explains that Mom is, "'She's like, whoa, she's like so stressed out. This is . . . Dude.' He said, 'Dude, this is some way bad shit.'"

The doctor who gets their feeds back online says, "Could we like get a thingie, a reading on his limbic activity?"

Easter Sunday

2008-03-23T17:22:00.006-05:00

Easter Sunday, and for much of the morning it snowed. The clouds are low and dark, more like November than Easter. I don't even remember Easters in Duluth being this grim.

However, I've made some nice food, I can smell the pot roast cooking, and I've spent a pleasant few minutes looking at the "White Flower Farm" summer catalog. The colors! Whee! and listening to "The Messiah." I'm re-enacting the Easters and countless Sundays of my childhood, with Mom cooking, everyone else reading (OK, so in my instance I'm reading and the kids are playing video games and watching "Red vs. Blue) while classical music plays. And since it's Easter, that means "The Messiah."

No extended family today, but I'm finding community in the imagined company of all the women doing "deep cooking" today; in those listening to "The Messiah," and gardeners eager for spring.

This reverie must now end; I have to finish my taxes so we can get Evan's financial aid application finalized, and then fill out a job application.

What I'm Reading Now:

Patrick Leigh Fermor's "A Time for Silence," "describing his several sojourns at some of Europe's oldest and most venerable monasteries." First printed in 1957, it seemed a natural for this Easter Sunday.

Just finished "Origin" by Diana Abu-Jaber, a mystery/novel most atmospheric, with a self-isolating fingerprint technologist, Lena Dawson, working on a mystery that seems connected to her own mysterious childhood. The plot could easily degenerate to hackneyed crap, but Abu-Jaber doesn't let us down.

The atmosphere reminds me of "The Thirteenth Tale" or "Ghost Writer."

What I'm Reading

2008-03-23T17:03:00.003-05:00

I've come to a turning point in my reading. For many years I have read to escape, reading mostly mysteries and thrillers, and avoiding the heavy literary works that bring on depression.

I had a breakthrough with "The Hours," Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel featuring Virginia Woolf, a 1940's housewife reading "Mrs. Dallowy" for emotional survival, and a modern "Clarissa Dalloway." It sounded like a landscape filled with too many depressives, but when I finally watched the movie I saw that it was above all about loving life.

I ventured to read the book, and went on to read Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." While I was on a roll, I read two more books I'd avoided: "The Kite Runner" and Toni Morrison's "Beloved." Loved 'em, loved 'em, loved 'em.

I feel liberated, free to read more deeply, no longer so afraid of triggering or exacerbating a depression.

Today's Joys

2007-09-18T22:56:00.000-05:00

Things I thoroughly enjoyed today:

Walking in light rain down to the Mississippi.

Watching the white heron I've been seeing lately. Watching the shimmer of waves in subdued light.

Taking off my shoes, standing barefoot in cool wet grass, and eating raspberries until I could eat no more.

Choir practice at First Universalist: both the singing and the joshing around. The basses as usual were the "troublemakers," the tenors had ready quips, the sopranos were thin and lovely, and the altos laughed at all the jokes.

An extended call to the help desk at work, because Tony cracks me up. I can feel myself on the verge of losing it laughing, and sometimes I roll right over the edge.

Sitting in a bookstore, drinking tea, reading a magazine, listening to the rain pound on the outside. (Vastly preferable to being stuck in extra-slow rush-hour traffic, on top of post-bridge collapse congestion, on top of our already crowded streets and highways. I waited it out at Borders Books.)
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I copied the picture of the heron from this blog entry about herons: http://qualiajournal.blogspot.com/2006/12/white-herons_8518.html

Credo, #2

2007-09-18T22:23:00.000-05:00

(The picture shows Bach's original manuscript for the Credo section of his B Minor Mass. Click on it for a larger view.)

Ever since I became acquainted with the "Credo" from Bach's Mass in B Minor, I've tried to determine what my credo is. What do I believe? Here is a not-very-serious but absolutely-for-sure list of some things I believe.

CREDO

• Always keep your sense of humor.

• Take your work seriously but don't take yourself seriously.

• Never make a decision at night. (Grandpa Ray)

• If you can't sleep, turn your pillow over so the cool side is up. (Grandpa Ray)

• There's always time to go to the bathroom.

• You get what you pay for.

• The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time.

• Take time for quiet time, also known as "To keep crisp, reroll inner bag." (Kellogg's Rice Krispies box)

• Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great Battle. (Philo of Alexandria, philosopher)

Books to avoid

2007-09-07T19:49:00.000-05:00

I was browsing the mystery section at my local library the other day and found a lot not to like. I might be considered fussy, though not by me. I don't like my mysteries too cute, but I've sworn off the ever-escalating "can you top this" violence at the other extreme. Why are serial killers of young women so popular? I find it disturbing on so many levels.

Books I avoid include features such as:

- horrifically mutilated corpses of young women, and I don't care how good the writing is. I'm just done with this.

And on the other extreme:

- blurbs which include descriptions of Westies, Wheaten Terriers, or any small annoying dogs
- blurbs in which people "stumble across a corpse." Uh-huh. Repeatedly, book after book. Uh-huh. Really.
- blurbs for fantasy books which include anyone "wise in the lore of" anything
- any combination of cooking and murder
- books where the protagonist puzzles through one scenario after another, with the most gossamer of rationales, reeling off theory after theory based on nothing at all
- any combination of the romance genre with the mystery genre.

Which brings me to some deliciously awful writing I've been meaning to post. This is from Andrea Kane's "Dark Room," a book with a fairly good mystery which in my humble opinion is completely ruined by overlaying it with romance. You don't need to know much about the story to -- well, enjoy it is not quite write -- er, right . . . but here: Morgan is the one who, yes, "stumbled upon" her parents' bodies. Her father's best friend and his wife Elyse raise her along with their own daughter, Jill, with whom Morgan now runs an upscale dating agency. Lane is the hunky love interest. And now, with a flourish: ~~~~

“Dressed in an emerald-green velour Lacoste running suit, with her frosted blond hair cut fashionably short and wispy, Elyse invited Lane in, took his coat, and asked what he’d like to drink.”

“A lump forming in her throat, Morgan studied her mother’s handwriting—the flowing letters, the achingly familiar use of circles to dot her i’s.” (!!! Hair standing on end!!!) =:0

“Lane wasn’t quite sure what he was expecting, but it wasn’t the fine-boned brunette who walked in. Shoulder-length hair. Pale green eyes. Fine features and delicate build that conveyed fragility. But with a take-charge self-assurance that completely contradicted the vulnerable image. No, actually it enhanced it. Sensitivity and strength, composure and fire, with a depth and expressiveness in her eyes that spoke of compassion and pain.
‘Hauntingly beautiful’ was the term that sprang to mind.”

(Feel free to permit yourself a small shudder at any time.)

“He glanced from her to Jill and back. ‘Two beautiful, intelligent women--one, charming and intuitive, the other vivacious and enthusiastic. It’s a pretty unbeatable combination. I can see why clients flock to your agency.”

This last reminds me of those clippings the "New Yorker" used to run, captioned, "Shouts we doubt ever got shouted." Things like "The crowd shouted, 'take your wife and your childen and your old green Chevy and get out of town." Not really pithy shouting material.

I can think of no proper summarizing remark. I'm at a loss for words.

Chiyogami

2007-09-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

I checked out a book about Chiyogami, a kind of Japanese paper, usually with a small all-over pattern. As is so often the case, I didn't have time to do much but skim it and look at the pictures. I did find out there are dozens of kinds of Japanese paper, but didn't really understand what differentiates them. Here is a particularly lovely example of Chiyogami from the internet. If you're like me, you'll recognize it as origami paper, but there seems to be a distinction. Maybe chiyogami is used for origami but other papers are, too? Who really cares? Isn't it pretty?

The Music of Failure

2007-09-05T08:45:00.000-05:00

I think about failure and success, having such a spectacular track record of failing to find a library job. I console myself with the character-building qualities of failure, and with the opportunity to develop spiritual robustness with all the time I save not having a demanding job. I regret my inability to provide more security and more fun for my children, and I don't have a silver lining for that.

I am attracted to stories of failure, its antecedents and consequences. Last night after a heavy day of resisting that insistent voice in my head chanting "loser, loser, loser," I reached for Bill Holm's The Music of Failure. He grew up in a small rural town and calls those a success who pass on a love of learning and beauty, particularly his friend Pauline Bardal and her brother and sister.

I'm an adult living in a wonderful city that values learning and beauty. Though I may occasionally inspire such a love, so do multitudes of other influences.

Here in the city, in my adult life, I count myself as a success those times I am kind, the times I am optimistic, the times I listen from the heart. These are qualities I possess that may be in short supply around me, and which could kindle another's heart the way the Bardal's love of learning kindled Bill Holm.

Is it spiritual discipline or cop-out to believe wholeheartedly that is enough? I work to believe that intangibles such as love can be my success, but keep a cynical eye out for self-delusion.

Here, for your reading pleasure, is an excerpt from The Music of Failure:

"Pauline, in American terms, was a great failure: always poor, never married, living in a shabby small house when not installed in others' backrooms, worked as a domestic servant, formally uneducated. . . gawky and not physically beautiful, a badly trained musician whose performances would have caused laughter in the cities. She owned nothing valuable, traveled little, and died alone, the last of her family. . . Probably she died a virgin, the second most terrible fate, after dying broke, that can befall an American.

Pauline shared a small house with her brother Gunnar and her sister Rose, and when she died, the last of the Bardals, there was no one to inherit it. Holm helped clear the "pack rat" house for the executors.

"They accumulated no cans full of bank notes, no hidden treasure, nothing of any genuine monetary value; the Bardals were, in that regard truly poor. But not poor in mind and spirit! They owned books in three or four languages: Plato, Homer, Bjornsson in Norwegian, Snorri Sturlasson in Icelandic, Whitman, Darwin, Dickens, Ingersoll, Elbert Hubbard, piles of scores by Handel, Bach, Mozart, George Beverly Shea and Bjorgvin Gudmundsson, old cylinders of Caruso, Galla-Curci, Schumann-Heink, John McCormack, cheap books reproducing paintings and sculpture from great European museums, organ, piano, violin, trumpet, manuals for gardening, cooking and home remedies, the best magazines of political commentary and art criticism next to Capper's Farmer, the Minneota Mascot, and The Plain Truth, dictionaries and grammars in three or four languages, books of scientific marvels, Richard Burtons's travel adventures, old text books for speech and mathematics, Bibles and hymn books in every Scandinavian language, Faust, The Reader's Digest, and "Sweet Hour of Prayer." That tiny house was a space ship stocked to leave the planet after collecting the best we have done for each other for the last 4,000 years of human consciousness. And none of it worth ten cents in the real world of free enterprise! The executors might as well have torched the house, thus saving the labors of sorting it, giving mementos to friends and peddling the rest at a garage sale on a sweltering summer afternoon. What one realized with genuine astonishment was that the Bardals piled this extraordinary junk not only inside their cramped house; that house was a metaphor for their interior life which they stocked with the greatest beauty and intelligence they understood. They read the books, played the instruments, carried the contents of that house in their heads, and took it off with them at last into their neat row in the Lincoln County graveyard."

"But not entirely . . . Anyone who carries a whole civilization around inside gives it to everyone they meet in conversations and public acts. Pauline gave me music; Gunner, the model of a man who read and thought . . . Rose, in her odd way, her crazed longing for God. Not one of them had so much as a high school diploma. "

Breaking News

2007-08-31T10:54:00.000-05:00

This just in. Today is my last day "alone" here. On Tuesday I'll come in and train the new secretary. Or so I thought until 15 minutes ago, when the new secretary's old boss called Yusef to see if she could stay another week. Yusef left it up to me--did I want to come back next week?

I've been mentally saying goodbye all week, and am ready to launch. I like it here and it's really hard to say goodbye. I don't really want to prolong the goodbye any longer. Plus there's those few unpleasant tasks I was looking forward to handing off.

On the other hand, it's a dollar more per hour here than at Barry & Sewall.

Sold.

I've got mental and emotional whiplash!