A Room Full of Books

Every book its reader

2012-02-11T18:04:00.004-05:00

The conventional wisdom about an exercise program goes: if you miss a day or two, don't dwell on it - just start again. Substitute "blog" for "exercise program" and "six months" for "a day or two," and here I am. I cleaned up the blog roll a little, and now I'm just going to jump back in. And let me tell you: this entry is about a lot of really big ideas that greater minds than mine have considered. So, caveat: I know that I'm just a person who likes to read, and read some articles and books, and has opinions. I'm not claiming to be an expert of any kind. Oh, and one more caveat: this is gonna be long.

Okay, caveats gone. Here's the sequence of events that led to what I wanted to write about:

1. I read Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, and loved it.
2. I read about the comments made by writers Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult about the New York Times Book Review's bias toward white male readers. Some firsthand stuff, some secondhand. My initial reaction, to be honest, was defensive annoyance. (Keep reading; stay with me.)
3. Over a year passed, during which I heard a couple of friends say they hadn't enjoyed Freedom, one of the main reasons cited being the way Jonathan Franzen wrote the female characters in it, particularly Patty.
4. I read this article in the Phoenix about NPR's own lopsided ratio of male-to-female author coverage.
5. I decided that before I made any more judgments about this whole thing, I should read one of Jennifer Weiner's books, so I checked out Good in Bed from the library.
6. After I finished it and I was thinking about this entry, I caught up with an episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour, an NPR podcast you should be listening to, where they were talking about some of these very issues. Namely, they discussed fiction and the ways it can be enjoyable and difficult, and what constitutes "literary" fiction.

I've been thinking a lot about all this, and let's just get a few, perhaps contradictory statements out of the way first: I enjoyed parts of Good in Bed, but ultimately did not like it very much. I consider myself a feminist. While I love Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own" and believe in its pragmatic message of "just try harder," I also don't think that's the only piece of the moving-toward-equality puzzle. And (this may be the most revealing of all, but not a surprise to those who know me), yes: I was an English major.

Because I was an English major, and taught by faculty who focused heavily on language, I came out of college thinking that in literature, the style of a novel or story or poem should support the substance. Words should do the double duty of conveying literal meaning, but also characterizing a person, or creating a mood, or pulling a thematic thread throughout the work. I think the best books do that. But even writing that phrase "best books" feels reductive. Maybe great books is a better phrase. Even by saying "great books," I realize I'm making a personal judgment sound like an abstract one. It's still personal. The books I personally love best do this: Mrs. Dalloway. The Poisonwood Bible. A Visit from the Goon Squad. Possession. And yes, The Corrections. (All, with one glaring exception, by female authors.)

I think it was Glen Weldon on the episode of Pop Culture Happy Hour that described Isaac Asimov's prose as "workmanlike." That's how I felt about Good in Bed. When describing a character, Weiner sometimes (not always) gave a list of physical characteristics or clothing that (I felt) were meant to help me visualize the person rather than help to characterize the person. Early in the book, the main character literally looks in the mirror and describes herself. That's all fine; it's just not what I enjoy reading.

I also feel that great books should be, in some way, challenging. Take A Visit from the Goon Squad. Did the chapter told in PowerPoint slides put me off? Yeah. But the rest of the book was so creative and good, and gave me so much to think about, that I accepted it. I guess I can let slide a lot of other things if I feel like either a) the prose is beautiful enough to carry me through, b) I feel like I can trust the author when things get a little screwy, or c) both. Sometimes there are things I might not get; sometimes there are insights a reader might have that the author never thought about. No two people will ever really read the same book.

Also, one of the reasons I read is to learn about, or live for a little while with, ideas or people I didn't know anything about before - to have new experiences. I don't always want to read about people like me, though I have, and that's fine too. I guess I could contrast that with the fact that I don't necessarily want to read a kind of fantasy fulfillment plot, which is how I felt about Good in Bed. I was totally on board with a book about a woman I didn't have too much in common with, until unlikely coincidences and great fortune steered the book into romantic-comedy territory. I am not knocking romantic comedy - I guess I just prefer it in film.

Coming back to the gender question, I didn't feel one way or the other about how either Franzen or Weiner wrote their female characters. I didn't particularly recognize myself or any of the women I know in either Cannie Shapiro or Patty Berglund, but that wasn't central to my enjoyment of either book. (I will say, though, that I wish the daughter Jessica in Freedom had either gotten more attention or been left out entirely.) I don't think that either was a "truer" representation of women. I also know several intelligent people who would probably disagree with me there.

I have no doubt that there is male bias at both NPR and the New York Times Book Review, because there's male bias in every part of our society. Both men and women are guilty of it, and women should demand equal coverage in these outlets. Equal coverage, but honest reviewing. And this is where it gets tricky. Because what gets a good review? Are reviewers privileging male voices by reviewing male authors' books well? Maybe there is some of that going on, but I think the problem is that there's an idea of abstract goodness or badness.

I read book reviews in a professional capacity - I have to decide what to buy for the library. That's why I appreciate review publications like Library Journal, that identify books as "for fans of X author" or "readers of Y type of fiction" rather than ranking them in some kind of literary hierarchy. They're subscribing to two of S.R. Ranganathan's five laws of library science: Every book its reader; Every reader his [or her] book. There are readers who like Good in Bed; I don't happen to be one of them. There are readers who like Freedom; I happen to be one of them. I don't think anyone should be forced to read something they don't enjoy just because some outside person or publication says it's the best book ever.

I'll leave it there. I could go on even longer (!) about several ideas in this post, and I probably will in the future. If you're still reading, thanks for indulging my desire to write about things I think about. That's what I really love. A Room Full of Books: back with a vengeance!

Summer reading

2011-08-21T19:50:00.002-05:00

Even though I'm no longer a student and have the summers off, I do work at an academic institution where the summers are quiet and there's a rush of activity in September. So I still like the concept of tackling a long book, or a book I've been meaning to read for a long time, in the summer. When I was in high school, the books were assigned - Bleak House, In Country, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Later, I took on books that seemed to need the boundaries of summer to push me to finish them: The Brothers Karamazov, Pale Fire, and last summer (as chronicled here) Infinite Jest.

This summer, I read James Gleick's book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. When I bought it, I unabashedly judged it by its cover. Usually, I'm not really interested in books whose titles follow this model - e.g., Cod: The Fish That Changed Everything, or The Tipping Point: Whatever its Subtitle Was. But this book didn't seem gimmicky or patronizing. And in this case, judging the cover was correct. While reading The Information, I was often challenged. I had to stop and read passages multiple times to understand them. And, despite having an advanced degree in a subject that includes the word information, I realized that I didn't expect a lot of what the book was going to cover, especially in the chapters covering the present day. There was a lot more about numbers than I expected, which just shows my bias toward verbal information - not the majority of information around today. Even the words I'm typing will be posted by some process involving a lot of zeroes and ones.

In any case, this is definitely a summer reading book: long, challenging, and probably best broken up with a shorter, lighter work here and there. There were (as usual) a couple of passages that stuck out to me. Two are related to information skills, or verging on information literacy (a documented professional and personal interest of mine). The first is a quotation from Gregory Chaitin, a mathematician and computer scientist:

"The computer does not have that capacity [of a friend], and for our purposes that deficiency is an advantage. Instructions given the computer must be complete and explicit, and they must enable it to proceed step by step." (p. 349)

This is what I have a hard time communicating to college students. In their minds, Google understands what they're thinking, and in a lot of cases, it does. But it doesn't occur to them that there are imperfect processes, that don't involve intuition, going on behind that search. Which leads in to the second quotation, from Lewis Mumford:

"Unfortunately, 'information retrieving,' however swift, is no substitute for discovering by direct personal inspection knowledge whose very existence one had possibly never been aware of, and following it at one's own pace through the further ramification of relevant literature." (p. 404)

In library stacks, of course, one would call this "browsing."

The last one - and I just now realized that all of these are Gleick quoting someone else - is from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia (and points out to me what a huge hole I have in my reading, having never read any of his plays). It's about the burning of the library at Alexandria.

"You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind. The procession is very long and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it. The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language." (p. 379)

I don't know exactly what I think about this idea, but I found it very interesting and moving.

Anyway. I recommend the book - it's full of things I didn't know before - but you may want to wait until you have a long stretch of time to devote to it.

"The specificity and strength of my relation"

2011-08-17T20:43:00.004-05:00

This week, I read a book I've been meaning to read for a while: Maggie Nelson's Bluets. I first came across Maggie Nelson's work when I was working at my college library, shelving on the level with the Ns and Ps. Since I was working on my own senior project writing poems, I often pulled volumes straight from "to be shelved" to read, and this was the case with Nelson's book The Latest Winter. I loved reading that book, her later Jane: A Murder, and now this one.

After reading a review of Bluets, I wasn't sure where to look for it at the bookstore - literary nonfiction, poetry, fiction? As it turns out, I had to have it specially ordered anyway, but I guess what I would call the short, numbered pieces in the book are meditations. In fact, that may have been what the reviewer called them, and I'm just plagiarizing. They're meditations on blue: the color, but also the concept, and other, related concepts: depression, heartbreak, drowning, holiness. It's a very moving book. The writing is literate and honest. There is a lot to think about, and I'm still thinking about a lot of it.

Aside from all that, though, the experience of looking for it in the bookstore, and of reading it, underscored a transition (?) I've been going through lately. I've talked to a couple of people recently who asked me, "Are you still writing poems?" And I am, but far fewer than I used to. Often I find myself with thoughts I want to write down, but at a loss for their proper vehicle: they just don't make a good poem, or even part of one. Reading writers like Maggie Nelson and John D'Agata make me wonder if I should just accept this, write, and then shape whatever it is, whether it turns out to be a poem, an essay, or something else. I'm reminded of the retrospective essay I had to write to complete my English major. I wrote about taking a fiction writing class as a freshman, how it made me realize that I wasn't cut out to write fiction - that I cared so much more about individual words and sentences than plot and dialogue, and should probably concentrate on poetry instead. I wonder if this a similar shift is going on now.

Within Bluets, Maggie Nelson comments on what she's writing and how she's writing it:

"...I imagined creating a blue tome, an encyclopedic compendium of blue observations, thoughts, and facts....I thought I had collected enough blue to build a mountain, albeit one of detritus. But it seems to me now as if I have stumbled upon a pile of thin blue gels scattered on the stage long after the show has come and gone...." (91)

And (referring to Leonard Cohen's song "Famous Blue Raincoat"):
"...I have always loved its final line - 'Sincerely, L. Cohen' - as it makes me feel less alone in composing almost everything I write as a letter. I would even go so far as to say that I do not know how to compose otherwise, which makes writing in a prism of solitude, as I am here, a somewhat novel and painful experiment." (41)

And finally:
"It does not really bother me that half the adults in the Western world also love blue, or that every dozen years or so someone feels compelled to write a book about it. I feel confident enough of the specificity and strength of my relation to it to share." (61)

The thoughts I have, the ones I want to write down - about street names in New England and human behavior and adulthood and a bunch of other stuff - I don't know yet which ones I feel confident enough in their and my specificity to share. But I think I'm going to have to stop tying them to one form to find out.

All quotations from Nelson, Maggie. Bluets. New York: Wave Books, 2009.

Father's Day

2011-06-19T14:25:00.003-05:00

So, life has been busy, and it's about to get busier in the next few months. I have some topics in mind to write about later on. This entry is not about books.

Today is Father's Day, a day I don't normally give too much thought, other than wondering where the apostrophe goes (I think it's where I put it). This year, as usual, I bought a card and sent it to my dad. It's mostly a ceremonial gesture, and not doing it would be more trouble than it is to do it.

I don't hate my dad. He's a human being who's made mistakes (like me). Most of his big ones are in the distant past, and I've forgiven them. When I at long last came out to him two years ago, though, he didn't speak to me for six months. It seems to me like we've both decided to keep it cordial, and not to excavate emotions and history and all that. Sometimes people just aren't close to one or both of their parents. I get it.

So I wasn't thinking too much about today - just another silly holiday to sell barbecue aprons or whatever - and to make people who don't have fathers feel bad. But then I turned on the radio yesterday and "This American Life" was airing a Father's Day show (the show will be posted at 7:00 on Sunday evening, here: http://www.thisamericanlife.org/). One of the stories was a remembrance by Michael Ian Black of his father, who died when he was a kid. Near the end of the story, he said something to the effect of: he didn't miss his father any less as time went by; he missed him more. And that got me thinking about the person who, for me, comes closest to what people talk about when they talk about what makes a good dad: my stepfather, Jeff. I know I've probably written a lot about him on this blog; I know I've written a lot of poems about him. He was only in my life for four years, but they were formative years, and I do miss him more now than when he died over ten years ago. He wasn't perfect, and we disagreed on a number of subjects, but we respected each other. He was interested in the things I liked because I liked them. He came to my orchestra concerts and left college brochures in my room with Post-its attached in his terrible handwriting; he thought I should apply to Wellesley and Middlebury.

One of my favorite memories of Jeff is a time we were watching TV and an infomercial for this fancy pen set came on. Fancy pen sets were the kind of thing that got me excited in high school. Fancy pen sets, Indigo Girls, and The Mists of Avalon: that's the kind of teenager I was. Wellesley and Middlebury, indeed. I commented that they looked cool, or something along those lines. He picked up the phone and ordered them right then. I'll be thinking about him today, grateful for his enthusiasm and love.

What librarians do

2011-05-01T08:55:00.004-05:00

Lately, I've been reading columns about librarians that trade in bold statements like "reference is dead" or "if libraries don't catch up, they'll be dead" - lots of death language, actually, now that I think about it. I have to catch my own reactions to these, because I don't want to be reactionary in a self-preservation kind of way. But I have this instinct that the recommendation, personalization, and monetization aspects of much online information (which I guess is supposed to replace resource description and reference) doesn't apply to every information need. What librarians have always done is just being called by new words now - curation, for instance. And you can post all the books and images online you want, but without good metadata, search does you no good.

Anyway - if the first paragraph is all my own ranting, this one is about the validation I found in the introduction to All Facts Considered by Kee Malesky. For those of you who don't listen to NPR around the clock (even the credits), she is a reference librarian there. FIRST of all, Malesky refers to librarians as "generalists, people who know a little about a lot of things" (2). She took the words right out of my mouth/blogger profile! Then she gets at one of the fundamental functions of librarianship:

"Knowledge is inherently ambiguous and any system of classification is arbitrary; one could argue that it's absurd even to attempt to sort things into categories. But sort we must because it's in our nature, and because it's necessary to make information manageable. (Managing information is something that all librarians do every day.)" (4)

Leaving aside the huge amount of information that is neither online nor machine-searchable, and leaving aside the access (financial and physical) much of the country, and world, has to broadband or mobile Internet, there has not yet been a substitute invented for helping people adjust their searching keywords or techniques based on a good reference interview. That reference interview can be through e-mail, chat, text, or the brain-chip instant-communication I'm sure will be here soon. When the consequences of finding the right information matters to people (whether it's health information, articles for a research paper, or correct facts for a NPR piece), the way information is organized and having someone to help you is where librarians thrive.

This is a "rah-rah librarians" post. I admit it. I needed to create my own antidote to the gloomy "the Internet always knows exactly what you want" stuff I've been reading lately. (Which doesn't preclude adapting and learning new things...see below!!) And I'll close with it, too. Kee Malesky, take it away:

"I've always believed that being a librarian is a vocation, a calling, and not just a job. What we do matters in the world. Every moment of the day, I must be open to learning something that will help me to be a better librarian." (5)

All quotations from Malesky, Kee. All Facts Considered: The Essential Library of Inessential Knowledge. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010. Print.

Talisman of the Moment: Peggy Olson

2011-04-22T11:44:00.005-05:00

Roger Sterling: Peggy, can you get me some coffee?
Peggy Olson: No.

-from Mad Men, Season 3, Episode 13

In my cubicle at work, I have a Mad Men calendar, and the April picture is the one at right, of Peggy Olson. I have found myself looking up at it a lot, thinking that she is the appropriate character to accompany the month I was born. I can relate to Peggy's pragmatic feminism. She doesn't have lofty ideals about civil rights like Paul Kinsey; she's just tired of being treated like crap because she's a woman. In this picture, she knows that guy in the shadow of the subway stop is staring at her - but what else is new?

Is Peggy sometimes abrasive? Does she know she's working for The Man even as she makes inroads for women? Does she have a lot to learn? Yes, yes, and yes. I'm grateful for this calendar month; it reminds me that I am still learning how to be an adult and a person in the world. Peggy is far from perfect, and so am I.

Sex at Dawn: An Exercise in Evaluating Information (Part 1)

2011-03-20T15:20:00.004-05:00

Writing an entry that includes "Part 1" implies that there will be a Part 2. Fair warning that this may or may not happen.

Okay. So I recently finished reading Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. I had heard Ryan as a guest twice on Dan Savage's podcast (one of my favorites, which can be downloaded here). I was intrigued by its central concept (basically, a takedown of what is commonly thought of as "natural" about human sexuality). In terms of content and style, it was an enjoyable and thought-provoking book, though I wish there had been more about homosexuality.

As I was reading, however, I found myself thinking about work. That is, the part of my job where I try to think critically about information and research I encounter, and ask students to do the same. You know, what librarians call information literacy. With each point they made, I tried to ask the questions I'd expect students to ask: Is this argument sound? Do I trust the sources the authors are citing? Are they citing where they need to be? What follows are some preliminary thoughts and examples, with (possibly) more to come.

My first thought is my first problem. If you're writing a book that says that many accepted "experts" have drawn incorrect conclusions, and that even the ways they collected data were often flawed, it's not easy to apply tests of authority and accuracy to the sources authors cite. In other words, how can you compare against established sources when the central argument is that many of those sources are wrong?

That being said, I have some minor quibbles with citation. Sometimes statistics are not cited. Sometimes a citation will be nothing but a URL, with no corresponding entry in the list of references, which raises my librarian hackles; URLs are changeable things. There are also some examples of different standards the authors have for accuracy: for example, looking at two studies on sexual arousal, they point out the importance in one of reported sexual arousal versus measured physical arousal (gone unnoted in the original study). But the next study mentioned studied only reported physical arousal, and used a different method to measure. (pp. 276-277)

That's an example of one place where I think the book's argument could be tightened up. Also, while I accepted the argument about agriculture being the advent of war, competition, and concern with paternity, I didn't think the authors explained as well as they could have how that led (in their view) to the subjugation of women.

In any case, this entry is long enough already. More in Part 2 (maybe), but I do just want to say this. I am nitpicking because I think the argument in this book is extremely important. Even if it's not the most logical or most "true" interpretation of anthropological and evolutionary data, I think that if people even considered it as a point of view, we might be a lot less unhappy. I'm not (and they're not) advocating dishonesty in any way (i.e., lying to your partner about sleeping with someone else or violating an existing monogamous agreement). But if people (and politicians) could acknowledge that sexual monogamy is neither easy or natural, maybe we could stop running people out of office and berating them for it.

"The grand test of virtue"

2011-02-20T17:10:00.002-05:00

I finished Down and Out in Paris and London a week or two ago. Until I started reading it and saw the category "Fiction" on the back, I had assumed it was a memoir. From what I can gather, it's based on Orwell's experiences, but Orwell generally had money and family to fall back on, unlike his Down and Out protagonist. I may be the last person on earth to read it, but if you haven't: the first part is basically a depiction of the working poor (in Paris), while the second is a depiction of the homeless (in London). The book was first published in 1933, but some of his observations about poverty are no doubt still true, and the book in general felt modern - as Orwell seems to be able to do. I can't help comparing his language and ideas with those of Virginia Woolf, whose diary I'm picking back up (Volume 2). Woolf is an admitted snob and a total classist, even as she worries about money and writes some of the most beautiful and universal prose I've ever written. Orwell, on the other hand, knows the lives and humanity of all "classes" of people, and writes in a straightforward way that I also admire. It's interesting to read them so close together.

Anyway, here are some passages out of Down and Out that I found the most thought-provoking.

Orwell describes the life of a plongeur, a restaurant worker who washes dishes, among other tasks - a life with long hours and one lived day-to-day:

"...they have simply been trapped by a routine which makes thought impossible. If plongeurs thought at all, they would long ago have formed a union and gone on strike for better treatment. But they do not think, because they have no leisure for it; their life has made slaves of them." (p. 116)

If the working poor have no time to think, the homeless have been ground down to either an inability to think, or sheer boredom:

"He was probably capable of work too, if he had been well fed for a few months....He had lived on this filthy imitation of food till his own mind and body were compounded of inferior stuff. It was malnutrition and not any native vice that had destroyed his manhood." (p. 153)

These last two passages get at the heart of the class system and capitalism, and I think they apply equally to present-day America:

"Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year [middle class?], and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty." (pp. 119-120)

"Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised? --for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except 'Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it'? Money has become the grand test of virtue.
...
A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a business man, getting his living, like other business men, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modern people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich." (p. 174)

All quotations from Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. New York: Harcourt, Inc.: 1961.

Ghosts, machines, etc.

2011-02-02T14:55:00.003-05:00

The other day, I finished reading Matthew Zapruder's book of poetry Come On All You Ghosts. There are many reasons, both trivial and not, for me to like it. The trivial ones include our shared alma mater, and references in the poems to artists I like (Neko Case, David Foster Wallace). The non-trivial are the poems themselves and how they're written. While I occasionally lost the thread reading a poem, I always assume that's my failing. One of my biggest problems in writing poems is slavishly sticking to narrative form. This is not a problem (at least in the final product) for Zapruder.

Okay, so now I'll let the poems speak for themselves, in excerpts, anyway, below. I also recommend the poem "Letter to a Lover," one of my new favorite love poems, which can be found in its entirety on the Copper Canyon Press website.

I can't help but love this one:

"...Come home
those who love a librarian aspect. I am one,
for give her time and she will answer any question
no matter how spiral, no matter how glass,
so slow to judgment you can sit among her
like a reading room and read and think
until the docents come, they move as trained,
as trained they place a careful hand on our shoulder."
-from "Never Before," p. 38

I like these opening lines that get at postmodernism and reality TV:

"In old black and white documentaries
sometimes you can see
the young at a concert or demonstration
staring in a certain way as if
a giant golden banjo
is somewhere sparkling
just too far off to hear.
They really didn't know there was a camera.'
-from "Global Warming," p. 83

The last lines of the book refer back to Zapruder comparing a poem to a machine:

"Come on all you ghosts,

you can tell me now,
I have seen one of you becoming
and I am no longer afraid,

just sad for everyone
but also happy this morning I woke
next to the warm skin

of my beloved. I do not know
what terrible marvels
tomorrow will bring

but ghosts if I must join you
you and I know
I have done my best to leave

behind this machine
anyone with a mind
who cares can enter."
-from "Come On All You Ghosts," pp. 107-8

All quotations from Zapruder, Matthew. Come On All You Ghosts. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010.

That New Year feeling all year long

2011-01-30T11:37:00.004-05:00

The first month of the year is almost over. For me, it's been a challenging one. Between the weekly blizzards (and all the slowing and hazards they create), dreams that make me think about stuff I don't want to, and a rocky start to taking steps to be healthier, my simple-sounding New Year's resolution ("manage stress better") is taking a beating. And one thing that is keeping me determined is this playlist I made. I know it sounds trivial, but the lists I make myself help to propel me forward and reinforce what I need to tell myself. I had actually just made one in December, so this one is more of an EP-length, so to speak, and it doesn't have a specific order, which is a departure from the usual. There are two songs on it by the Decemberists, whose new album I really like, a lot. (It's something new, but it's still them.) I'm going to put the list below.

Sorry for the short, non-book-focused, entry. My reading lately has been for specific purposes (book group, writing an entry for a reference book), but I'm chugging along in Down and Out in Paris and London, as well as Matthew Zapruder's latest poetry collection Come On All You Ghosts, so hopefully I'll write about those soon.

Oh January (order should be shuffled):

"January Hymn" - the Decemberists
"Medicine Wheel" - Aimee Mann
"Dia de Enero" - Shakira
"Don't Carry it All" - the Decemberists
"This Year" - the Mountain Goats
"Calendar Girl" - Stars

"Calendar Girl" really should be my personal anthem - focusing on being alive rather than worrying about how and when one is going to die. And I have this episode of This American Life to thank for the Mountain Goats song.

Ring that bell

2010-12-16T10:23:00.004-05:00

In prior years, I have been known to slip change into the Salvation Army bucket. But I just don't think I can do it anymore. I had heard a lot about the SA being anti-gay, but I thought I'd check it out for myself. Here are the secondary sources I consulted about the SA's policies (which talk about homosexuality, but also about checking IDs and immigration status of those they help - which they seem to have stopped doing once it was publicized).

"The Salvation Army: Naughty or Nice?" by Phil Bronstein in the San Francisco Chronicle

"The Salvation Army: Good Works, Questionable Politics" by Shea O'Neill in SF Appeal

"Salvation Army in Chicago..." (no author listed) in Huffington Post

And finally, let's go to the source: Salvation Army's own policies on many issues, including homosexuality (which is OK as long as you don't sleep with anyone). The Salvation Army says they won't discriminate against anyone in need, but reserves the right not to hire anyone who doesn't share their beliefs.

I know that the SA has helped a lot of people all over the world, but they're not the only ones. So this Christmas, instead of dropping money in the red buckets, I'm giving a donation to Rosie's Place, a homeless shelter serving women in Boston. I urge my legions of readers to find a worthy local charity in their area and follow suit.

Um, that's all...no books in this one, just liberal propaganda. :) Happy holidays to all.

Middle ground

2010-12-11T15:14:00.004-05:00

Well, looks like I'm slowing down in posting from previous years to about one post per month. I think I can live with that, if my legions of devoted readers can.

I've had this book - The University of Google: Education in the (Post)Information Age by Tara Brabazon - on my desk at work for a long time, and in the spirit of clearing things out before the new year, I finally read it (or most of it, anyway). I found it to present the best balance between two attitudes I normally encounter when it comes to information and learning: on the one hand, that the Internet/social media/Google are intellectually ruining us, and one the other hand, that Google/crowdsourcing /anything 2.0 have changed everything, and we don't need stodgy forms of information like books or indexes anymore.

Instead, Brabazon, a professor media studies in the U.K. (her website is here), combines her observations from teaching with studies and articles about online learning and related issues. This combined approach, also, is a breath of fresh air. One of my bugbears in this area is when people take their own experiences and generalize them without any outside support. There are two passages from the book at which I found myself nodding particularly vigorously; here's one:

"The second assumption of flexible learning is that 'new' technologies intrinsically create a productive learning environment....Technological platforms require care in their introduction. Only the applications that assist student learning should be mobilized, and this requires clear learning rationales to be determined. Technology does not create high quality learning resources: teachers and librarians do....Technology does not create learning. Teachers do not create learning. Students do not create learning. Instead, the space between students and teachers summons the transformative dialogue of an educational encounter. In that space may be an internet connection or a PowerPoint presentation, but just as likely it could be a soccer ball or a guitar. The best of teachers are able to deploy diverse sources to tease open these spaces between teachers, students and learning outcomes. They are not being valued in a flexible age." (emphasis mine; pp. 82-3)

Basically, there are no easy answers, especially when it comes to education. This, to me, is self-evident, but it's clear from discussions about technology and education, especially in the United States, that my view is not a widely held one. Here are the other lines, taken from later in the book:

"Information has no value in and of itself. It must be sorted, contextualized, and evaluated. When information is the aim, when information becomes a commodity, the interests of those groups already in power are reinforced. ... The consequences of digitisation are that it increases the speed and spread of information. Yet the quantity of trivial data that survives also increases. The crap of a culture is stored on multiple hard drives and endlessly returns through Google." (emphasis mine; p. 162)

Writing things down and providing access to them used to be much more precious and costly, so people wrote down only what they felt was most important. Current technology allows us to save virtually everything (though not necessarily find it as easily - you can't search for the subject of a photograph unless somebody labels it). Is this a re-definition of what's important? If so, prepare for the next generation's heads to explode with the sheer mass of it.

Anyway, I know that was a bit of a long post, but I highly recommend the book. It's well-written, concise, and insightful.

All quotations from Brabazon, Tara. The University of Google: Education in a (Post)Information Age. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.

Precisely

2010-11-07T16:43:00.005-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about language. And my forthcoming thoughts might not be the most eloquent thing I've ever written (I'm under the weather and can't find the initial notes I made on this topic), but I'll do my best.

First of all, I've been reading (as I've been meaning to for a long time) Naomi Baron's book Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. It was published in 2008, and is already out of date in some ways - she talks about instant messaging and text messaging in totally separate ways, when the iPhone and its ilk have basically combined the two. Baron doesn't bemoan the degradation of language or anything over-the-top like that. She is trying to study the effects and evolutions of language online. But the following passage struck me:

Suppose I'm looking for some information on evolution. But it's late at night, or I'm feeling lazy, or I'm not sure of my spelling, so I type 'cHarlz dARwon" into the search box. Google politely inquires, "Did you mean charles darwin?" Sure, Google, that's exactly what I meant (give or take some capitalization). Thank you for obviating the need for me to express myself clearly. The problem is that if I come to rely on Google to figure out what I meant to write, what is my motivation for expressing myself precisely in the first place? (page 179)

I'll leave aside the information literacy implications of this paragraph and stick to the subject. The last sentence resonated with me, since precision in language is something I value very, very highly. I associate precision of language with thoughtfulness; the writer or speaker cared enough to think about how to say exactly what she meant. It's why I like reading (good) poetry. I get frustrated when I hear students or reality show actors utter barely constructed sentences with phrases like "it's almost to the point where" or so many "likes" and "I guess"es that any meaning is obscured. This lack of precision manifested itself in politicians and pundits over the past week, too. "Does the president get it?" "The American people are saying we need to turn this baby around." What do those sentences even mean? The more abstract and vague these talking points, and the more they are blindly repeated in the face of thoughtful, specific questions, the more frustrated I get.

I think that's all I have to say for now on the subject.I'm certainly not perfect, and I don't always say exactly what I wanted to (especially when speaking), but I try. And I just wish that people in general (but especially public figures) were more thoughtful about their words.

Quotation from Baron, Naomi S. Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

We now pause for matrimony and long novels

2010-10-25T11:10:00.004-05:00

I'm always pleasantly surprised when people complain to me that I haven't updated the blog in a long time. And I haven't, due to several factors. These include: The beginning of the academic year and its attendant workload. Having to finish a library copy of Jonathan Franzen's 562-page Freedom in four weeks.

And probably most of all, being involved in, and traveling to, three weddings. As calzone (in my blogroll) pointed out recently, these things are a lot of work. They also provoke a lot of thought and bring up a lot of emotions. First of all, there's the whole tradition of marriage, with its patriarchal overtones and its being recognized for same-sex couples only in a small handful of states. Wedding #3, for example, was a traditional Catholic one, with a lot of talk about children. Wedding #2, on the other hand, had part of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision about same-sex marriage printed on the back of the pamphlet. And then there was the crying. I cried at all three weddings. I had met the couple of Wedding #1 once, but the groom's vows were so touching I teared up. One of the readings, along with the unrestrained happiness on the couple's faces, got me at Wedding #2. And it was a double feature at Wedding #3 - the groom started crying when he saw the bride, so I did too, and then when there was a prayer for "those not with us today," I lost it thinking about my stepdad. He's been gone for ten years, but every now and then a memory or thought of him overwhelms me.

Anyway. That's what I've been doing lately. I highly recommend Freedom, by the way. I recommend, with reservations, Jonathan Safran Foer's Eating Animals. It is a deadly serious book - no jokes or inspirational moments or letting you off the hook (read Michael Pollan or Mark Bittman for that) - Foer presents a raft of facts and comes to what seems like the only logical conclusion. The whole thing is pretty depressing, but fascinating, and urgent.

There's your random-thoughts post. I promise to post more regularly this fall and winter.

Poet Persona

2010-08-31T21:08:00.003-05:00

Last summer, my big heavy book was the correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. I kept thinking about Bishop's work and her life. Her poems (and I'm sure I'm repeating myself here) are nearly perfect; I would probably kill to write poems like that. But would I have wanted her life? She had sorrows early and late in life, suffered from asthma and alcoholism, and seemed always to be worrying about money. In the letters, she is always promising to take trips to see Lowell and other people, and rarely follows through - whether due to money, the vagaries of the Brazilian government (she lived in Brazil for many years), or something to do with Lota, her longtime partner. I got the sense that sometimes she felt stuck in Brazil. On the other hand, her isolated geographic position allowed her to be dismissive of things like awards, readings, and teaching honors - all of which she seems to have disliked.

This got me thinking about some of my favorite poets' lives, and whether I'd like being in them. While I certainly wouldn't say no to James Merrill's independent wealth (read: time to read and write and travel all the time), it doesn't sound like his childhood was any picnic. And even though he had lots of friends and lovers, there's something lonely in his poems, especially the later ones.

Then there's Philip Larkin, a fellow librarian. I love his sharp, dry poems, and his Collected Poems is the book I give to friends who claim not to like poetry. According to the Poetry Foundation, he hated the limelight even more than Bishop, and grew more and more reclusive after publishing his last book in 1974 (he died in 1985). He appears to have been a serial romantic partner (sometimes monogamous, sometimes not, but apparently with the agreement of the other parties). I admire that he managed to be both a good librarian and a good poet. But it does seem like he was terribly cranky most of the time.

And finally, there is Amy Clampitt, whose appearance on an episode of the Poetry off the Shelf podcast I was listening to this morning jump-started this whole line of thought. I had never heard of Clampitt until we studied her in a class I took my senior year in college. My professor invited a critic who'd known her to talk to the class, and the details of her life delighted me. She published her first book at age 54 - a fact that comforts me when I get all Sylvia Plath-y about how time is ticking away on me as a poet and a person. (Notice I left SP out of this entry altogether. Clearly.) And Clampitt was also a reference librarian, for the Audubon Society. The visiting critic told us that she met her partner at a Communist rally when they were both on the older side, and that they kept separate apartments. They only got married when one of them was dying (can't remember if it was him or her) so there wouldn't be legal trouble. There was a poet on the podcast who's currently living in her house in Western Mass. on a residency. (I kind of want to apply.)

And her poems - while they don't blow me away every time - are really good. They're about - and I swore I wouldn't mention the David Lipsky book about DFW till later, but I have to - about the kinds of things DFW said, in that book, that poetry needs to be about for people to care about it again: the 9-to-5, and married people sleeping in the same bed. (I can't seem to find the exact quote.) So yeah, I guess Amy Clampitt is as close to a poetic idol as I'm going to get.

(All these poets are bio-ed and critic-ed and bibliographied very well over at the Poetry Foundation.)

Infinite Jest Diary #9: Final Thoughts

2010-08-04T11:09:00.003-05:00

So I finished the book last Thursday night, and had to plunge the next day into a series of social engagements and obligations, so could not post to the blog.

I finished the book around 11 PM, then spent about an hour and a half searching online (and reading a lot of the Infinite Summer posts) to see what various members of the community of readers thought about the ending and the book as a whole. There is a quote by DFW about the end that I kept coming across, and that I think is very appropriate, but it sort of spoils it from the beginning if you read it and haven't read the book. So I'll just link to one of the places I found it, a blog post with some other interesting ideas about the book. Scroll down to just below the image of a map.

What I can say without spoiling anything, I think, is this: what's insane about this book is that it immediately demands to be read again. Not because it was so much fun the first time around, but because in order to understand it, you really do have to read it again. At least the way I'd been reading the book. Maybe if I'd read it in a shorter amount of time, I would have been more aware of what to be looking for and how to be reading. Also, DFW's original title for this book was A Failed Entertainment. That works too, I guess, but Infinite Jest is a perfect title. It works on many different levels, more than I thought in the middle of the book.

I'm glad I read Infinite Jest. Yes, I have questions without answers. Some things in the book lead nowhere. Some are only suspected of leading somewhere. DFW withholds some information, and gives you what feels like way too much of other information. People and events and tragedy and comedy and violence and consumerism and entertainment are all exaggerated, because that's the kind of world the book is set in. I believe the book is meant to challenge its readers, and that meeting all the book's challenges as a single reader is impossible. It demands study and speculation. And for that, I have to say, I come away from the experience with more awe than annoyance.

Infinite Jest Diary #8: Home Stretch

2010-07-28T18:20:00.002-05:00

Progress: currently on page 938

That's right, ladies and gentlemen. 43 pages to go. I think I may finish this thing tomorrow. I have to say, I'll feel relieved when I do, though I've enjoyed the experience very much. The only problem? It's becoming clear to me that this is a book that demands a second reading. NOT back-to-back; that's for sure. Maybe someday in the future when I've read some criticism (I'm interested to see if there's been anything written on the multiple narrators in the book). (Or maybe the many uses of the word "entertain.") And maybe after I've re-read Hamlet. I'm going to try not to give anything away as I report on the final pages of the book.

Here are some quotes, passages, etc....

"This so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom [this] invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise." (p. 696)
Well, here's me being presumptuous, but this sounds awfully like someone who knew what that feeling was like. And it's really sad.

Endnote 304 is all about a student doing research - the incredible machinations one goes through to plagiarize something successfully vs. spending that time writing the damn thing yourself. It's an interesting passage for someone interested in information literacy...like me.

There's a passage that starts on page 896 where Hal considers all the times he'll repeat a given task, and all the times he'll breathe in and out, and all the food he'll eat - and becomes overwhelmed and discouraged by the thought. I've often thought about this too; so much of what we/I do is maintenance and repetition. This can depress you if you think about it too much, which of course is Hal's forte.

Then I don't know what I think about this:

"It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle...that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end....We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately - the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly. The games or needles, to some other person." (p. 900)

This seems to me to be sort of a statement on both addictions and pseudo-addictions, and maybe the unavoidableness thereof. Maybe this is the antidote to thinking too much about thousands of breaths and breaded chicken cutlets...and some people take it to a dangerous level.

Okay, word time. Note: I am not including the barrage of vocabulary words on page 832 partially because I think you're not supposed to know what they mean along with the character who's hearing them, and partially because I'm tired.

1. hanuman (n.) An Indian monkey, Presbytis entellus, venerated by Hindus.
2. veronica (n.) A large genus of scrophulariaceous plants (herbs or shrubs) having leafy stems and blue (rarely white or pink) flowers borne in racemes or spikes.
3. gonion (n.) The outermost point on the angle of the lower jaw on each side.
4. entrepôt (n.) Temporary deposit of goods, provisions, etc.; chiefly concr. a storehouse or assemblage of storehouses for temporary deposit. Also fig.
5. colposcope (n.) Entry for colpo- prefix: comb. form of Gr.

womb, used = vagina in terms of Path., Surg., and Anat.

6. parturient (adj.) About to give birth; in labour; (of a plant) bearing fruit (obs.).
7. olla podrida (n.) 1. A highly spiced stew of Spanish and Portuguese origin, made from various kinds of meat and vegetables - or - 2. A diverse mixture of things or elements; spec. a mixture of different languages.
8. strigil (n.) An instrument with a curved blade, for scraping the sweat and dirt from the skin in the hot-air bath or after gymnastic exercise.
9. hulpil (n.) According to the Infinite Jest wiki, "probably a misspelling of "huipil," which is a kind of thin Mexican blouse"
10. parotitic (adj.) related to the inflammation of either of a pair of large salivary glands situated just in front of the ear
11. atheling (n.) A member of a noble family, a prince, lord, baron; in OE. poetry often used in pl. for ‘men’ (viri); in later writers often restricted as a historical term to a prince of the blood royal, or even to the heir apparent to the throne.

Infinite Jest Diary #7

2010-07-18T17:16:00.002-05:00

I think I'm going to set this one up in fragments, since that's about all my brain can handle in this humidity wave.

Progress: currently on page 687

Thoughts:
Obviously, in my profession, I read a lot about e-books. I've long thought the format lends itself better to some kinds of books than others. I think this would actually be a great book to read on something like an iPad. It might reduce the weight (the Apple site specs put the iPad at 1.5 pounds), and would definitely reduce the bulk. You could pop out to the dictionary or the Infinite Jest wiki; you could track characters and organize notes. I'm not saying I find the print version of the book difficult to do all these things, just that this particular book would be a good candidate for electronic form, in my opinion.

On a totally different note, characters utter a lot of malapropisms in this book; I think my favorite is Gately referring to a poet named "Sylvia Plate" on p. 593.

And here's a sentence I think sums up a lot of DFW's narration, not just in this book: "All this appraisal's taking only seconds; it only takes time to list it." (p. 609)

Quotes:
"At a certain level of abstraction it's like the brain recoils." (p. 570) Said about a science class, but obviously applicable to all disciplines. I reached this point in calculus.

"[P]eople of a certain age and level of like life-experience believe they're immortal: college students and alcoholics/addicts are the worst: they deep-down believe they're exempt from the laws of physics and statistics that ironly govern everybody else." (p. 604) This one was particularly authentic for the description of Boston-area pedestrians who cross the street whenever they feel like it - more than other cities' pedestrians, I think.

"Mario'd fallen in love with the first Madame Psychosis programs because he felt like he was listening to someone sad read out loud from yellow letters she'd taken out of a shoebox on a rainy P.M., stuff about heartbreak and people you loved dying and U.S. woe, stuff that was real. It is increasingly hard to find valid art that is about stuff that is real in this way." (p. 592, emphasis mine) This, to me, is DFW articulating postmodernism in one sentence, and it resonated, a lot.

Words:
1. caparison (v.) To put trappings on; to trap, deck, harness. Also fig.
2. cathexis (n.) The concentration or accumulation of mental energy in a particular channel.
3. rhynophemic (adj.) According to the Infinite Jest wiki: "a misspelled reference to rhinophyma, the reddening of the nose common to alcoholics"
4. anomic (adj.) Related to a form of aphasia characterized by inability to recall the names of objects.
5. saltire (n.) An ordinary in the form of a St. Andrew's cross, formed by a bend and a bend sinister, crossing each other; also, a cross having this shape.
6. tektitic (adj.) Related to one of the small, roundish, glassy bodies of unknown origin that occur scattered over various parts of the earth.
7. anaclitic (adj.) characterizing a person whose choice of a ‘love object’ is governed by the dependence of the libido on another instinct, e.g. hunger; also in extended use, characterized by dependence on another or others (see quots.).

Infinite Jest Diary #6: Halfway Point

2010-07-07T18:49:00.003-05:00

Progress: currently on page 490

Okay, first of all, a warning to fellow readers. Don't read pp. 375-379 while eating lunch, as I did. This book, especially in the brutally honest stories of its many addicts, goes to very dark places, and this one is particularly horrifying. Really, one of the worst things I've ever read (in content, not style). The passage is actually an extreme example of a style I've been noticing here and there in Infinite Jest. I was going to call it "farcical" - passages that verge on the ridiculous and incredible, both comedy and horror. I don't think that's quite the right word, but I'll go with it for now. These are the passages that remind me of Tom Robbins, or of what I know of J.G. Ballard. They push you to that verge, but don't knock you off the edge of tossing the book aside in disgust. There is an ongoing scene, for example, between two characters (Marathe and Steeply) that, written in a different tone, wouldn't be out of place in a Tom Robbins novel.

I also just want to note a couple of other characteristics of DFW's "near future" that have parallels in the present. For example, this representation of today's TV and movies:

"...what if, instead of sitting still for choosing the least of 504 infantile evils, the vox- and digitus-populi could choose instead to make its home entertainment literally and essentially adult? I.e. what if...a viewer could more or less 100% choose what's on at any given time?" (p. 416)

And in endnote 166, DFW makes reference to a computer that can hold lots of "various killer apps" (p. 1031). At first, I really thought he might have coined the word, but the OED tells me it was used in 1985 and 1992. It's certainly in much more widespread use now, though.

One more thing, something that has been steadily bothering me as I progress through the novel (I am at about the halfway point, I believe). One of the reasons I love DFW's writing is the empathy that comes through, especially in his nonfiction essays. In these essays, and his stories (especially Brief Interviews with Hideous Men), there is a particular empathy for women that surpasses what I would expect of a male author. That's missing in Infinite Jest. This may be because several of the characters are teenage boys, who generally lack said empathy. But I'm a little disappointed so far with the women in general. There are really only two who could be said to be major characters, and one of them is very compelling. Maybe this is a picky place to find fault, and maybe I'm just being a whiny feminist. But there is a quality missing from this book that is in DFW's other works.

Okay, enough from me; let's have a vocabulary quiz. (I believe #7 is meant to be a play on Hal's name and his father's profession.)

1. apical (adj.) Of or belonging to an apex; situated at the summit or tip.
2. cunctation (n.) The action of delaying; delay, tardy action.
3. fulgurant (adj.) Flashing like lightning.
4. panatela (n.) A long slender cigar, esp. one tapering at the sealed end; or, slang for marijuana.
5. catastatic (adj.) Relating to the narrative part of a speech, usually the beginning of it, in which the orator sets forth the subject to be discussed.
6. cuirass (n.) A piece of armour for the body
7. halation (n.) The term used to denote the spreading of light beyond its proper boundary in the negative image upon the plate, producing local fog around the high lights, or those portions of the picture which are brighter than the rest of the image.
8. picric (adj.) picric acid n. a yellow crystalline acid with a very bitter taste, obtained by nitrating phenol and used in the manufacture of explosives and in dyeing; 2,4,6-trinitrophenol, C₆H₂(NO₂)₃OH.
9. morendo (adv.) As a musical direction: with the sound gradually dying away.
10. mysticetously (adv.) In the manner of a whale of the suborder Mysticeti of baleen or whalebone whales.
11. propinquous (adj.) That is in propinquity (in various senses); nearby, close at hand.

Infinite Jest Diary #5

2010-06-30T18:43:00.003-05:00

Progress: currently on page 364

The review of Although of Course You Always End Up Becoming Yourself that I mentioned in Diary #3 contained some speculation about DFW's experiences with addiction. As you may know, Infinite Jest is set partly in an addicts' halfway house. I just finished reading a long passage about the characters there (actually I'm still in it), which concentrates heavily on addiction and the AA program. And I've come to the conclusion that either DFW did some serious research which had to have included interviews (which I can readily believe he did), or he or someone close to him personally experienced this process. The passages, of course, are filled with careful and meticulous detail. DFW writes as one of the most careful observers I've ever read. He literally takes care with every detail, and you end up caring because he cares. And just when you think the detail is really getting a bit too much, he'll say something that will keep you going.

Anyway, for all their detail, the passages about AA come around a couple of times to the same conclusion: that the program works, even for those who find it horribly simplistic, but no one knows why or how. See the following quotations:

"What metro Boston AAs are trite but correct about is that both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it." (p. 291)

A variation, perhaps, on John Lennon's famous quote about life being what happens to you while you're making other plans - but really quite difficult to accept (especially for someone like me) when you think about it. And then, further on, DFW breaks AA's axiomatic program down further:

"How do trite things get to be trite? Why is the truth usually not just uninteresting but anti-interesting?" (p. 358)

I can't figure out if this is the character or the author talking. In either case, I'm going to have to think about it for a while.

And now, words:

1. nystagmic (adj.) Characterized by involuntary, rapid, oscillating movement of the eyeballs (most commonly from side to side).
2. Levantine (adj.) Of or pertaining to the Levant [basically, the Far East]; in early use, pertaining to the east, eastern. Also, recalling or resembling the manners of the Levantines.
3. lordotic (adj.) Characteristic of anterior curvature of the spine, producing convexity in front (occurring as a physical deformity).
4. ascapartic (adj.) According to the Infinite Jest wiki: "A word coined by Wallace, it means gigantic, as Ascapart was a giant depicted in the fiction of, among other people, J.R.R. Tolkien."
5. bilirubin (n.) A reddish pigment, C₃₃H₃₆O₆N₄, occurring in bile.
6. candent (adj.) At a white heat; glowing with heat.
7. felo de se (n.?)- One who ‘deliberately puts an end to his own existence, or commits any unlawful malicious act, the consequence of which is his own death’ (Blackstone).
8. mucronate (adj.) - terminating in a point, as an organ.
9. solander (n.) - A box made in the form of a book, used for holding botanical specimens, papers, maps, etc.
10. GAUDEAMUS IGITUR - Latin for "Let us rejoice"
11. prognathous (adj.) Having projecting or forward-pointing jaws, teeth, mandibles, etc.; having a facial angle of less than 90°.

Infinite Jest Diary #4: All-Vocabulary Edition

2010-06-16T18:17:00.003-05:00

Progress: currently on page 274

One comment before we get to the words: this book is full of names I would give a band if I had one: Madame Psychosis, Year of Glad, The Great Concavity...okay, I can't think of any more right now, but I'll start keeping track.

Well, page 223 didn't change much for me, though it is handy to refer to in times of confusion during the novel. No cheating; don't flip there if you haven't read 1-222 (plus copious footnotes)!

That said. My list of words penciled in the back cover has been mounting, so for your edification and for mine - here they are. I'm noticing a lot of words related to shapes and curves (expected from a mathematician) and specific anatomical words. As always, definitions come from the OED's electronic version, unless otherwise noted. And I just want to copy this quote I just happened to flip to:
"There are, by the O.E.D. VI's count, nineteen nonarchaic synonyms for unresponsive, of which nine are Latinate and four Saxonic." (p. 17) Hal Incandenza and David Foster Wallace: OED men.

1. guilloche (n.) An ornament in the form of two or more bands or strings twisting over each other, so as to repeat the same figure, in a continued series, by the spiral returning of the bands. See an example on flickr here.
2. aperçu (p. ppl.) A summary exposition, a conspectus. Also, a revealing glimpse; an insight.
3. murated (adj.) Surrounded by walls.
4. erumpent (adj.) That bursts forth.
5. ex cathedra (adv.) ‘from the chair’, i.e. in the manner of one speaking from the seat of office or professorial chair, with authority; also used attrib. = officially uttered.
6. rutilant (adj.) Glowing, shining, gleaming, glittering, with either a ruddy or golden light. [Fittingly, one of the quotations for this word in the OED entry is from Ulysses - another brick-weight novel.]
7. nacelle (n.) There are several definitions, most obsolete, but I believe the one DFW means is one of these (I've encountered the word twice in the book): 2. a. The basket or gondola of a balloon or airship. b. gen. Any hollow vessel or object resembling a boat in shape. rare.
8. superjacent (adj.) Lying above or upon something else; overlying, superincumbent. (Now chiefly in technical use.)
9. formication (n.) - that's with an M - An abnormal sensation as of ants creeping over the skin. [This is my new favorite word.]
10. meatus (n.) - A tubular passage or opening leading to the interior of the body; the external orifice of such a passage.
11. sephenoid - According to the Infinite Jest wiki, a misspelling for sphenoid (adj.) - a bone of irregular form situated at the base of the skull, where it is wedged in between the other bones of the cranium.
12. torticollic (adj.) - DFW seems to have made up the adjectival form of torticollis (n.) - A rheumatic or other affection of the muscles of the neck, in which it is so twisted as to keep the head turned to one side; wry-neck.
13. treillage (n.) - Lattice-work; a framework upon which vines or ornamental plants are trained; a trellis.
14. rostral (adj.) - Pertaining to a platform, stage, stand, etc., adapted for public speaking.
15. pia mater (n.) - 1. The innermost of the three meninges, consisting of a thin, vascular, fibrous membrane which is closely applied to the surface of the brain and spinal cord. 2. In extended use (chiefly humorous): the brain.
16. sulcus (n.) - 1. a. A groove made with an engraving tool. b. A trench
17. otiose (adj.) - 1. a. Of belief, principle, thought, etc.: having no practical result; unfruitful, sterile; futile, pointless. b. Having no practical function; redundant; superfluous. 2. At leisure; at rest; idle; inactive; indolent, lazy. [Depressingly, I found this word scribbled in an old notebook from when I was reading Consider the Lobster. I'm hoping that means I never looked it up, and not that I'm incapable of remembering a word I learned two years ago.]
18. glabrous (adj.) Free from hair, down, or the like; having a smooth skin or surface.
19. scopophiliacal (adj.) Pertaining to sexual stimulation or satisfaction derived principally from looking; voyeurism.
20. apotropaic (adj.) Having or reputed to have the power of averting evil influence or ill luck.
21. micturation (n.) Urination.
22. egregulous (adj.) According to the Infinite Jest wiki, "not a real word (possibly egregious + ridiculous."

Infinite Jest Diary #3

2010-06-09T18:56:00.003-05:00

Progress: currently on page 216

I was going to do an all-vocabulary entry, since I have somewhat limited time and brain power. I am, however, rapidly approaching page 223; I will probably read it tomorrow morning. This is the page touted by Matt Bucher in Infinite Summer as a landmark page, a key to the novel, with content that will make me think differently about what I've read before. So I'll dispatch some thoughts.

I just read a review in the New York Times Book Review of David Lipsky's memoir of DFW, Although of Course You Always End Up Becoming Yourself (which Brother K mentioned in my last entry's comments). In his review, Ken Kalfus writes succinctly of Infinite Jest:
"Set in a near-future America fixated by its tools for chemical and electronic self-gratification, the novel seems more prescient with the rollout of every new compulsively entertaining digital device."

As I read this book, written in 1996, I keep noticing things about DFW's "near future" that have come true, in spirit if not in letter, or at least pretty damn close. Cf....

"the Kemp and Limbaugh administration" (p. 177) might as well have been....
"[I]t takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds." (p. 202) Pretty much captures the spirit of the age.
"Or just down in Harvard Square at Au Bon Pain where all those 70s-era guys in old wool ponchos play chess against all those little clocks they keep hitting" (p. 212) - Okay, this is just currently still true.
"'Yes, but did you actually hop in the truck and actually go to a real medical library?' Hal's his mother Avril's child when it comes to databases, software Spell-Checks, etc." (p. 213). Hal's approach is one after my own heart - trusting self-selected over machine-selected information, but it runs counter to those of his peers (and, I think, most 17-year-olds today).

And the whole theme of entertainment and addiction and how they relate to each other is just very prescient. The next entry I write will be just quotes and vocabulary words, and some of the quotes I put in there will be on that theme. I do just want to point out one more thing. I was talking about influences last time, and there is a passage in the book that reminds me of a similar passage in Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Maybe it's just a common approach to list things like this; maybe not. In Infinite Jest, it's a list of "many exotic new facts" acquired in a halfway house. In Robbins' book, it's a more nonsensical, meta-ish series of sentences that all start out "This sentence." The one I can remember offhand is something like "Like many italic sentences, this sentence has Mafia connections."

All right, that's all for now. Next time (whenever that may be) - quotes and vocabulary.

Infinite Jest Diary #2

2010-06-02T18:29:00.004-05:00

The format of today's diary may be the format I choose to employ from now on, or it might not. My progress, a thought, a quote, and a list of new words may be appropriate or not for future diaries. We'll see.

Progress: currently on page 112

A thought:
I'm realizing just how much Mark Z. Danielewski's book House of Leaves owes to Infinite Jest. The invented parameters, the narrative structure, the endnotes and exhibits - it's not pure imitation, but there is a definite lineage. I was reading someone recently who reminded me of DFW who predated him, and now I wish I could remember - to point out the other end of the lineage. I was recently at Amherst College's Archives & Special Collections, whose exhibition "The Novelists of Amherst" highlighted DFW along with his "circle" and "influences," the only influence of which I remember was Don DeLillo. And I can see that, too.

A quote:
"Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise...You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned over and over again." (p. 84)

I've read this quote about ten times, and have tried to think about what exactly is going on in it. When I read passages like this, which (even as tennis is being used as an internal metaphor) are referring to Life in a metaphorical manner, I can't help thinking that the author is also talking about writing. DFW was certainly a writer who pushed limits to destroy them, who commented on their destruction and their very existence. He was so thorough and exhaustive, seemingly obsessively so. It makes me admire but not envy him.

Words:

(and let me just say - I very much admire how DFW has an exact meaning he wants conveyed, and so goes and finds that exact word. Not an easy or quick process.)

1. Latrodectus mactans - Latin name for black widow spider (definition via University of Michigan)
2. leptosomatic (a.) Having a type of physique characterized by leanness and tallness.
3. prandial (a.) Of or relating to dinner or dining; relating to or occurring during a meal.
4. quincunx (n.) A pattern used in which objects are arranged in one or more groups of five, so placed that four occupy the corners of a square or rectangle and the fifth occupies its centre
5. varicocele (n.) Varicose condition or dilatation of the spermatic veins.
6. plosivity (n.) Descriptive of a consonant that is produced by stopping the airflow using the lips, teeth, or palate, and then suddenly releasing an outward flow of air.
7. teratogenic (a.) Relating to the production of monsters or misshapen organisms.
8. ephebe (n.) Among the Greeks, a young citizen from eighteen to twenty years of age, during which he was occupied chiefly with garrison duty.
9. creosote (n.) A colourless oily liquid, of complex composition, with odour like that of smoked meat, and burning taste, obtained from the distillation of wood-tar, and having powerful antiseptic properties.

Infinite Jest Diary #1

2010-05-26T18:55:00.003-05:00

Hello readers! Sorry I let almost all of May slip by without posting anything. I'm going to make up for it with a vengeance this summer, hopefully, because this week I started reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. This has been an intended project of mine for a long time, and now I feel ready. According to Dave Eggers' foreword, I am two years older than the book's average reader.

There are several blogs and websites about people's experiences reading this novel, notably Infinite Summer, which provided a place for those reading it during the summer of 2009. I just now read the reading tips posted there by Matt Bucher, and am glad to see I was doing some of the things already, like:

Read the endnotes.
Use bookmarks.
Abuse your copy. (I already have quite a few dogears & underlines: part of what I'll share here.)
Keep notes.

One that I might do additionally is "Employ a reader's guide." One of the books Bucher recommends, for example, has a chronology. The book's chapters are arranged in a non-linear fashion, labeled with sponsored years such as "The Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar." I've been keeping a running list of the years to try to make my own chronology.

One note before I get into my own reading: I just looked up Infinite Jest in WorldCat, and it only has two subject headings: Addicts - Fiction and Compulsive behavior - Fiction. Is the second meant to describe the entire book, product and process?

I'm 60 pages in (921 + endnotes to go), and already I have so much to think about. I've already written quite a bit on this blog about how brilliant DFW's writing is, and what a tragedy it is that he won't write anymore, so I'll try to avoid generalizations like that. Why don't I start with something simple, like a quotation and a list of words?

"Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he's devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It's hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency." (p. 54)
(by the way, I'm reading the 2006 Back Bay paperback 10th anniversary edition)

To me, this is a classic DFW passage. A brilliant and concise observation that reflects a large theme but doesn't diminish the book's other details, followed by pull-back, a deflection that there might be judgment or superiority in said observation.

Okay, now for a list of the words I've so far encountered with which I was previously unfamiliar, and then I swear I'll stop. All definitions are (selectively) from the OED, unless otherwise noted.

1. wen (n.) A sebaceous cystic tumour under the skin, occurring chiefly on the head.
2. creatus (imagine a horizontal line over the a) "Latin for "creation," the line over the a indicates the vowel is pronounced as in "hate" rather than in "father." " (from the Infinite Jest wiki)
3. caries (n.) Decay of the bones or teeth or decay of vegetable matter.
4. amanuensis (n.) One who copies or writes from the dictation of another.
5. fantod (n.) A crotchety way of acting. ("gives her the fantods")

To Do

2010-04-30T10:14:00.003-05:00

Every morning when I get to work, I make a to-do list for the day. I have one for the week, and one for the semester/summer. I have a personal one on my iPod. I email myself things to do, write them down, and think about them on the bus and when I'm going to sleep. And Molly Peacock wrote a poem about this process that I wish I'd written. It captures both the anxiety and reassurance of having, and coming up with, things to do on both the smallest and largest of scales - a distinctly adult feeling, I think.

I got her book Raw Heaven last night, at the money pit that is Harvard Bookstore's extensive and wonderfully organized used section. I know the poetry section well enough to know that a lot of the books were new additions, and this was one of them. Anyway, on the last day of National Poetry Month, here's the poem for you.

Things to Do

Planning and worrying and waking up
in the morning with items on the list
clanking like quarters in the brain's tin cup,
this and that and what you might have missed
or who pissed you off, suspends you in a state
that wishes and hopes for its goal like some
little one wiggling in a chair who can't wait
for when her legs will reach the floor. The numb
knockings of anxiety are like the heels
of sturdy little shoes steadily beating
on upholstery. It's how anyone feels
having been put into a chair, meeting
responsibilities from a padded perch
too big for anyone's ass. As monarchs
we make ourselves small and govern in search
of what we'll grow into. Except we are
as big as we'll ever get and have gone as far.

From Raw Heaven by Molly Peacock. New York: Vintage Books, 1984. (p. 18)

Slapdash & vigour

2010-04-17T20:38:00.002-05:00

Though I finished Volume One of Virginia Woolf's diary a long time ago, I still have flags sticking out of pages everywhere, marking passages I wanted to record. (And you'd better watch out, because not only are there several more diaries, but I also picked up all six volumes of her letters for a very reasonable price at a used bookstore a couple of weeks ago.)

Without further ado, here are some thoughts V.W. had on writing.

"L[eonard] and I argued...about the worthlessness of all human works except as a means of keeping the workers happy. My writing now delights me solely because I love writing and dont [sic], honestly, care a hang what anyone says. What seas of horror one dives through in order to pick up these pearls -- however they are worth it." (20)

"It is fatal not to write the thing one wants to write at the moment of wanting to write it. Never thwart a natural process." (198)

"Its [sic] the curse of a writers [sic] life to want praise so much, & be so cast down by blame, or indifference. The only sensible course is to remember that writing is after all what one does best; that any other work would seem to me a waste of life; that I make one hundred pounds a year; & that some people like what I write." (214)

(That last sentence one of the understatements of the century.)

And finally, on writing her diary:

"[I] read as one always does read one's own writing, with a kind of guilty intensity. I confess that the rough & random style of it, often so ungrammatical, & crying for a word altered, afflicted me somewhat....And now I may add my little compliment to the effect that it has a slapdash & vigour, & sometimes hits an unexpected bulls eye....What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose knit, & yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace any thing, solemn, slight, or beautiful that comes in to my mind." (267)

Bitchy book review

2010-04-07T19:17:00.004-05:00

When I first saw the pile of copies of Marilyn Johnson's book This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All at ALA Midwinter, I was naturally very excited. Not so excited that it didn't get in line behind a lot of other books, but still. Anyway, now that I've finished the book, I have very conflicted feelings about it. A librarian writing on her blog about a book that's about librarians and blogs and books is either very meta or very insular. I can't decide.

In any case. Around the halfway point of the book, I was feeling really irritated with the whole thing. I wasn't sure why Johnson was choosing to concentrate on things that I personally find sort of useless, like Second Life and book cart drill teams. Eventually I accepted that Johnson wasn't writing a comprehensive or focused book. She was following the random threads and paths that research often takes.

And she's narrating her personal experience the whole time. I think part of why I reacted to the book so personally was because her tone is so personal. (I also reacted personally because I'm a librarian, but I'll get to that later.) I just occasionally found her tone (well-meaning, enthusiastic) a little irritating. One manifestation of this is the generalizing about librarians as a group. She refers to cupcakes as the "official snack of young librarians" (211). "The silver-haired librarians who got their library degrees way back in the twentieth century came from backgrounds in history and literature" (26). The word visionary pops up about every five pages.

Of course, I am a member of the profession being written about here, so naturally I want to correct what I see as generalizations or inconsistencies. Johnson, for example, dismisses cataloging near the end of the book as one of the more "bloodless" parts of librarianship, but is impressed by how archivists and librarians organize and describe information, both online and in paper. Which IS cataloging. And most librarians I know thought this New York Times article about "hip librarians" (which makes an appearance in the book) was cringe-inducing. It's now become a stereotype to think of librarians as stereotypes (old, shushing, blah blah). And those librarians are hip(ster) because they live in Brooklyn.

Okay, I don't want this to become a total jeremiad, because I do appreciate where Johnson is coming from. I enjoyed many of the interviews she did, and I think librarians need all the positive publicity we can get. There were a couple of chapters that lived up to the book's subtitle, about Radical Reference, the librarians who challenged the Patriot Act, and librarian "missionaries" training students from developing countries. I wish the whole book had been like that. Johnson does get across, for the most part, that librarians are far from being obsolete, and that we want to help people escape "information sickness" and discover the best information for their needs. And she cites her sources, too.

Quotations from This Book is Overdue!: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson. New York: HarperCollins, 2010.

A room full of books of one's own

2010-04-06T17:42:00.003-05:00

I promised to keep updating with things I liked from volume 1 of Virginia Woolf's diaries. So here are some things she had to say about books and libraries.

"L[eonard] found Desmond at the L.L. [London Library]: together they look up the word f--- in the slang dictionary, & were saddened & surprised to see how the thumb marks of members were thick on the page." (82)

On a London bookshop:

"He would not commit himself to name any probable price, from which I judge that he is calculating on the lust to possess it when I see it. And, after all, nothing gives back more for one's money than a beautiful book - obviously I'm slipping....These bookshops have an air of the 18th century. People drop in and gossip about literature with the shopkeeper who, in this case, knew as much about books as they did. I overheard a long conversation with a parson, who had discovered a shop in Paddington full of Elzevirs." (126)

Apparently the huge publisher Elsevier has been around for a long time, or else the name has been resurrected.

Then there's this slightly puzzling footnote by the editor, Anne Olivier Bell, about a librarian at the London Library who I want to know more about:

"Frederick James Cox (1865-1955) joined the staff of the London Library when he was sixteen and worked there until the year of his death. Installed near the entrance, he acted both as sentry and encyclopaedia." (177)

So there you go. As usual,

All quotations from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One 1915-1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.

Paper and electronic books - energy smackdown

2010-04-06T17:22:00.003-05:00

I thought this was an interesting comparison of the relative environmental friendliness of e-readers versus books. I'm not against e-readers (though I think I'll always personally prefer a book), and this comparison isn't quite fair, since one e-reader represents several books (though it would have to be replaced more often).

See the NY Times' "op-chart" here.

Accelerated consciousness

2010-04-05T12:04:00.003-05:00

Just a quick post. I've been catching up on issues of Poetry, and have had a page in the February issue dogeared for a while now. I've often wondered why poetry - a generally compact form - isn't more popular in a low-attention-span world. Is it because it takes time to create, unlike a Twitter update? Anyway, Durs Grünbein touches on this in a much more articulate way in his essay "Why Live Without Writing." You can read the whole essay here, but I liked this paragraph in particular:

"A few clusters of words express what the lavish epic draws out over hundreds of pages. Or to put it another way: couldn’t it be that poems, as long as they are alert and open to impressions, are novels by other means—and therefore do sterling service to readers short of time and hungry for intensity? What they have to offer are lessons in accelerated consciousness, machete slashes through a tangled world. For aficionados of the concentrated and powerful, they are distilled experience, abbreviations of existence, shocks and pronouncements in droplet form."

They published your diary, and that's how I got to know you....

2010-03-10T12:20:00.004-05:00

For the last couple of weeks, I've been reading volume 1 of Virginia Woolf's diary. Some of it is slow going (I can't keep straight all the people she mentions), but for the most part I am enjoying it very much. VW comes off unquestionably a snob and a classist; she really believes her servants are fundamentally different kind of people than she and her family are. That doesn't keep her, however, from saying wonderfully put things about books, ideas, and humanity (even the servants!). There are also lots of interesting details, especially about the Hogarth Press. Less than one hundred years ago, for example, she saw setting eight pages of type in one day as very fast and efficient.

I've dog-eared about every fifth page so far...so I'll give periodic updates on my favorite bits, hopefully grouped thematically (there are lots of visits to the library). Today, I'll give you the "unclassified" quotations. Also, bonus points to whomever can place the quote that serves as this post's title.

"What a terrible grip Xianity still has -- she became rigid & bigoted at once, as if God himself had her in his grasp. That I believe is still the chief enemy -- the fear of God. But I was tactful enough to keep this view dark." (165)
I think here VW is not criticizing Christians per se, but how the structure and power of organized religion can stifle progress.

"But I was glad to come home, & feel my real life coming back again -- I mean life here with L.[Leonard, her husband]. Solitary is not quite the right word; one's personality seems to echo out across space, when he's not there to enclose all one's vibrations." (70)

"The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think." (22)

All quotations from The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One 1915-1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1977.

Mirror, Lamp

2010-02-24T22:32:00.003-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a poetry reading by Dan Chiasson, an fellow alumnus who I've seen read before. He has a new book out called Where's the Moon, There's the Moon. I really like his poems; I could never write poems like his - there's something about them, I want to say detachment, but that's not quite right. The point of view is not dependent upon a personality, but it's not impersonal. I don't know. In particular, I liked this short section of a longer poem. I was trying to find a short version of "what M.H. Abrams called 'the lamp,'" but I guess I'll just have to check out from the library, and read, The Mirror and the Lamp. The poem is below. He may not have been talking about this, but it makes me think about fleeting and/or undeserved fame.

8. Abstruser Musing

To be no one at all, merely the latest
to have had his brain
turned inside out by vanity,
so that it shine entirely on itself--

is this what M.H. Abrams called "the lamp"?
I call it masturbation,
not as an insult but an accurate name:
it feels good doing it, and people like to watch.

From Chiasson, Dan. Where's the Moon, There's the Moon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010.

The miracle of adverbs

2010-02-13T13:07:00.003-05:00

I was going to write about Adverbs by Daniel Handler along with Jonah Lehrer's book in the previous post, but then I decided it needed its own entry. So here you are.

One look at the jacket of this book and you have an idea of what you're in for. Cover art by Daniel Clowes, blurbs by Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon, and a meta-blurb by the author on the inside jacket about how authors often write their own dust jacket summaries. Adverbs is subtitled "a novel." Each chapter deals with a set of characters, sometimes with the same names as characters elsewhere in the book and sometimes not. It's clear that some things in the book happen before others (that is, the chapters aren't in chronological order), and there are several repeated themes and places (volcanoes, a San Francisco bar, diamonds, birds, obscure cocktails).

I was at lunch one day reading it, and thought, okay, I need to stop and make a chart with all these people and places and times, and figure out what's going on here. And then in the very next chapter, I read this, in which Handler implies that the same name doesn't always mean the same person:

"...so many people in this book have the same names. You can't follow all the Joes, or all the Davids or Andreas....it is not any of the nouns. The miracle is the adverbs, the way things are done. It is the way love gets down despite every catastrophe...." (p. 194)

I can't decide if this is an admission that there's not a logical grounding in time and (fictional) reality - or if Handler's just letting his readers off the hook, while secretly encouraging the more ambitious among them to track those images. Either way, I decided to stop worrying about it and just read, the way one of my college Spanish instructors encouraged us to read in a foreign language - just take in the picture the writer is painting, and don't worry about every little word. As a former English major, that's a little difficult for me to do, but not impossible. Especially when there are so many other books to read, and I'm already a couple books past this one.

Despite this quality, which might be frustrating, I did like this book very much. It has clear relatives in David Foster Wallace's stories and Mark Danielewski's books House of Leaves and Only Revolutions - all of which I love. There are very moving parts, especially the chapter entitled "Soundly."

Decisions, decisions

2010-02-13T12:57:00.002-05:00

I can't remember how I noticed Jonah Lehrer's book How We Decide. I think I was searching for something else in the library catalog and saw it - or maybe it was on the new books cart. In any case, I was very intrigued and checked it out. As someone who is indecisive, and often rehashes old decisions, I thought - ah, this will offer some insight into what my brain is doing. Well, the book turned out to be more about decisions where there is a clear "good" and "bad" outcome - not the sorts of decisions I was thinking about. Not a lot in there about decisions that involve relationships with other people. The interesting thing is, though, I got to a certain point in the book, and one of the illustrative examples started sounding familiar. I realized I had heard Jonah Lehrer on some NPR show, and not remembered his name - but maybe that unconsciously figured into my decision to check out the book. (How meta!)

Anyway. It is a very interesting book and a quick read. A lot of it is about how the brain uses both emotion and reason to make decisions, and when is the "best" time to use each of those. There was also one sentence that stood out to me: "From the perspective of the brain, new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time." To me, this was very encouraging. To me, it means that innate ability and quick reactions mean very little without constant thinking and learning. That effort and study and actually thinking about things contribute to our ability to solve problems and make decisions. Maybe that's an obvious point. But I thought it bore mentioning.

Free thinkers

2010-01-13T15:43:00.001-05:00

I just finished tearing my way ravenously through A.S. Byatt’s latest novel, The Children’s Book. There was so much stuff in it that I’m still thinking about a lot of it and how it fits together. It’s about Victorian and Edwardian England, artists and how what they do affects other people, the idea of “having” children and what that means, and the whole idea of progressiveness and free thinking –the way it sometimes leads to absolutely nothing, its unintended effects. Take “free love” in an era without widespread access to birth control. Guess who bears most of those consequences? (I’ll take “women” for $400, Alex.) Anyway, I raced through the end, as I often do, and was disappointed (as I often am; see my last post). Part of that disappointment, though, I think, comes from how realistic Byatt’s characters are. They make decisions based on circumstances, whim, pragmatism; they die suddenly; they don’t think about how their actions affect others.

Well, I’m done reading it now. It’s received a lot of critical praise, and I think that’s warranted. Now, however, I’m ready for something completely different. This is how I tend to read. I don’t go on “kicks” where I read a lot of the same kind of thing. I just finished an exhaustively researched and detailed historical novel by a British woman, so what’s next? Eldridge Cleaver’s 1968 memoir Soul on Ice (sure to be unsettling in many ways), alternated with Molly Peacock’s book of poems Take Heart. Then on, perhaps, to my long list of “Books to Check Out”....

Endings

2009-12-15T11:49:00.004-05:00

I never had the desire to read Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones when it was first published. I knew it involved the rape and murder of a teenage girl, and I thought: No thanks! Not right now. But the book entered my consciousness again because there's a film adaptation coming out soon (which I've heard is pretty awful). I was in a bookstore in California last week and started flipping through it, and I found myself immediately absorbed, in a way I haven't been absorbed in a book in a while. So when I got back to the East Coast, I checked it out from the library and finished it in about three days. It's very well-written. The scene where the main character is killed, narrated by her, is particularly haunting. And though a lot of the book takes place in "heaven," there's no syrupy morality or religion to be found. I appreciated that there were few "justice being served" moments or big revelations for the reasons behind both horrible and wonderful events. The events just unfolded, sometimes as a result of a person's will, and sometimes against his or her will.

The trajectory of finishing the book was very familiar - after being very engaged for most of it, I didn't like the book's climax, and found the last chapter or so unsatisfying. This happens to me a lot, and I'm not sure whether it's due to each individual novel, or my own propensity to rush to the end because I'm so involved and want to find out what happens. Or - I suppose there's a third possibility, that the end of a novel will almost always be disappointing, because what I loved was the book, and the book is now over. Which fits sort of nicely into the themes of The Lovely Bones, in fact. Though the dead character is still conscious and observant, nothing, she says, compares to the feeling of actually being alive.

Progenitors

2009-11-24T09:55:00.002-05:00

Sorry, again, for the long gap. I've been taking a bit of a reading break to concentrate on another project...one I can't talk about just now.

Anyway, the last book I read was The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway. My first (and only, aside from a brief linguistic analysis in college) encounter with Hemingway was A Farewell to Arms, which I read as a junior in high school. I had very little use for the simplistic style and the macho factor; I much preferred Fitzgerald and Faulkner. Recently, though, Michelle convinced me to give him another chance, that this was his most readable novel. And I did like most of it, though I struggled to get through the bullfighting scenes. And the drinking! My God, the drinking! If I put away four bottles of wine in one meal, I'd probably make bad decisions, too. Actually, I'd probably be unconscious.

More than that, though, I could see clearly (much more than being told, or in high school) the influence Hemingway had on subsequent novelists. I can appreciate that. It's similar to how I feel about the Pixies. I never really listened to their music; I just knew of and about them. And I'm going to see them play their album Doolittle this Friday, in their hometown, Boston. I realize this is a big deal. Like Hemingway, I appreciate and recognize their influence. But listening to them, and reading Hemingway, feels a bit more like conscious self-education than pure enjoyment. (Though maybe that's good for me.) Does that say something about my generation or my personality - that I like the derivative more than the original? I don't know.

Numbers

2009-10-24T23:25:00.004-05:00

I was just thinking about two quantities: the number of posts I've made on this blog in the past few months, and the number of books I've read in the same time period. I've read at a steadier clip than I have in a while (though I suspect I might have missed recording a few in the August-September area). This might have something to do with the number of nonfiction books in the mix. Not only do they whiz along a little faster than Pale Fire or the entire Lowell-Bishop correspondence, but they tend to have large sections of endnotes. I'm talking about Anne Fadiman's The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down and Dave Eggers' Zeitoun (not strictly nonfiction, but based on a real story).

The thing that struck me about both of these stories was the profound effect misunderstanding can have. In Fadiman's book, there's a total misunderstanding between doctors and patients, which leads to an outcome that neither group finds ideal. (Interesting to read in light of the current health care situation; this was written in the '90s about events in the '80s). In Eggers' book, it's the paranoia and blinders in an emergency situation - the kind of pileup of small misunderstandings that leads to total disaster that I tend to hear on This American Life.

In any case, I recommend both of them. The Fadiman book is a journalistic piece (though the author clearly cared deeply about her subjects) and the Eggers book is a novel that veers close to sentimentality and preachiness, but never gets there.

Well, there are your mini-reviews. Speaking of mini, okay, I'm on Twitter. There, I said it.

Foxy Brainiacs

2009-10-01T11:14:00.002-05:00

Well, it has been a long time. That's how it goes at academic libraries in September. I've been busy showing students how to navigate American FactFinder and telling them where the printer is.

But I have been doing other things too. Last night I saw Nick Hornby read from his latest novel Juliet, Naked (about to check it out from the library!) and do a very funny Q&A. It's a week full of shows - the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Girlyman, and Brandi Carlile. I've read Pale Fire (more on that in a later post), and I just finished a really enjoyable book I bought a long time ago at the Friends of the Library bookstore - Only in London by Hanan al-Shaykh. I thought it might be a run-of-the-mill mediocre novel, but the characters were pretty wonderful, and the ending satisfying (something I can't say about most of the books I've read this year).

Anyway, I also wanted to share a very funny synopsis of Dan Brown's new book from Powell's Review-a-Day. The whole review (which was written by Jeff Baker and appeared in The Oregonian) can be found here.

"Does this sound familiar?

World-renowned symbologist and all-around cool guy Robert Langdon is summoned to an Imposing Architectural Landmark, where something Really Yucky has been left in a way only he can recognize. You know, as a clue. Langdon snaps into action, and it isn't long before he's uncovered more clues that lead to a Secret Society full of Famous Dead Guys. There's a Super-Duper Secret, and the fate of the universe is at stake, but thank goodness Langdon has help from a Foxy Brainiac, which he needs because he's up against a Major Freak. Langdon and the Foxy Brainiac race through more Imposing Architectural Landmarks, pausing only to lecture each other about symbols and whatnot, and try to win a Race Against Time against the Major Freak.

That's the plot of Dan Brown's new novel, The Lost Symbol. It's also the plot of his last novel, a little number called The Da Vinci Code. It's also, more or less, the plot of the novel before that, Angels & Demons."

Imagined works of art

2009-09-03T11:04:00.004-05:00

Sometimes you see people and you instantly know who you would cast to play them in the movie of their life. The other day I was at a meeting and as soon as someone started speaking, I had cast this character actor from In and Out and Six Feet Under. (For my part, people have variously suggested Anjelica Huston, Rachel Griffiths, and Tina Fey.) Not that anyone's going to make a movie out of either that professor's life or mine.

Then this morning as I was walking to the bus, I caught a glimpse down a side street of a truck slowly hauling up onto its base a big dumpster that said "BAY STATE" in big clean letters. Then I met the assembled truck as I crossed a different side street. And I just had this feeling that if Robert Lowell were alive and had seen it, he would have used it in a poem perfectly.

Do others do this - imagine good projects for people other than themselves? I just wish I could appropriate some of it for myself.

That's all for today. It's a lull in a very busy week at work, and I'm reading Pale Fire by Nabokov. I don't think I'm going to be able to tell you what I think of it until I'm done. I feel like I need a commentary on the commentary that is the book.

Word of the day (and it's a noun)

2009-08-26T11:26:00.003-05:00

Anthimeria: the use of a word as if it were a different part of speech. In other words, verbing nouns and nouning verbs. I was thinking about this recently because I heard "the reveal" one too many times on reality shows and commentary on reality shows. Why is this a thing? I guess the word "revelation" has connotations that reality show producers don't really want to convey. But what's wrong with "unveiling?"

Then, of course, there's "impact" as a verb, which I'm afraid seems here to stay. I understand that language changes and that no amount of prescription can halt large changes, that doesn't mean I have to use it for anything but wisdom teeth.

Other nouned verbs: compile ("I like that photo compile"), fail, spend, ask. I've never heard "ask" a a noun, but apparently it's gaining currency; see this blog entry.

Other verbed nouns: gift (hate this one!), leverage, action, friend, favorite (the last two very 'Web 2.0'), and incent (apparently a back-formation of "incentive").

Here's another take on anthimeria from Daily Writing Tips.

Water: libraries' worst enemy

2009-08-09T10:56:00.002-05:00

I'm going to be lazy about this, and just give you the link to Clare's blog post about how the recent flooding in Louisville affected the library there. And by affected, I mean devastated. I still think of Louisville as one of my homes, and of course any library is as well.

Clare's blog post detailing the damage

Rachel Walden's post about how to best help out

First one to identify the call number wins a prize

2009-07-22T17:55:00.001-05:00

I made this catalog card at a librarian blog's Catalog Card Generator. Make your own! It's fun!

Stereotypes of stereotypes

2009-07-20T10:58:00.001-05:00

Michelle pointed out the July 17th Cat and Girl to me. Librarians, NPR, and funny-because-it's-true. What's not to like?

Kee-kee, Mark Doty

2009-07-16T11:14:00.003-05:00

So I was looking around for a definition of "kee-kee," famously used in Paris is Burning, and it seems like the generally accepted meaning is something like "kibitzing." Among a spreading group of my friends, though, we've been using it to mean something more along the lines of bonding, or feeling an affinity, with someone. For example: remember that scene in Sense and Sensibility when Marianne says her favorite Shakespearean sonnet is 116, and Willoughby begins to recite it? And then Marianne joins in? They totally just kee-kee-ed.

Anyway, that long explanation is to set up what happened the other day. It was lunchtime at the library, and I found myself with nothing to read while I sat outside and ate. So I went upstairs to browse the late PS call number range, looking for some poetry I hadn't read. I finally settled on School of the Arts by Mark Doty, a volume I'm pretty sure I ordered for the library based on reviews of it. I read two poems in a row, and had a kee-kee moment.

The first, "Oncoming Train," is about the irrational, visceral urge to step in front of a moving subway train:

Not that I want to be dead, exactly, and certainly not
that I want to suffer, I have a great deal to live for--

But the idea of simply stepping out of forwardness
--that moment is the clearest invitation and opportunity

to strike against time, to refuse to accede, to win some power
over what no one controls....
(30)

The only thing that seems real and guaranteed, at times, is the forward motion of time - which, as Doty points out, has total control over all of us.

The next poem, "Heaven for Paul," can be found in its entirety at another blog, Bud Bloom Poetry. It describes something I'm mortally afraid of - a plane crash. Well, it actually describes being on a plane that probably will crash (but of course, doesn't, because Doty lived to write the poem). I have to admit, the first time I read the poem through I sort of missed its point, because I was imagining being in that position, and freaking out. What would it feel like to know you were about to die? In the poem, he finds himself somewhat at a loss (I think):

...I had no internal composure,

and any ideas I'd ever entertained about dying
seemed merely that, speculations flown now
while my mind spiraled in a hopeless sorrowful motion....
(33)

Anyway. I had heard the name Mark Doty a lot, but never actually read any of his poems, and I'm glad I've started, because not only are they good poems, but they speak many of my own thoughts and neuroses about time and death back to me. The Poetry Foundation has a nice profile of him, if you're interested.

All quotations from Doty, Mark. School of the Arts. New York: HarperCollins, 2005.

Epistolary!

2009-06-23T11:27:00.002-05:00

For quite a while now, I’ve been working my way through Words in Air, the recently published collected correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Even though I’ve already read Bishop’s published letters, this is quite a different collection…and besides, I don’t seem to retain much that I read anyway. (That’s why I write about it.) It’s really wonderful in all kinds of ways. Both of them write so well, even in casual correspondence. It makes me want to read everything about and by Bishop, and all the books they talk about with each other. That reading list alone would keep me busy for the rest of my days. It’s overwhelming.

One thing that comes through in the letters is the community of artists and writers that existed during that time (the letters cover 1947 to 1977). Maybe that exists now – maybe it’s just much more fragmented. But all the names you’d recognize from that time float around their letters – visiting each other, nominating one another for fellowships, getting married and divorced - Moore, Pound, Eliot, Huxley, O’Connor, Jarrell, Frost. (Neither of them seems to have liked Frost very much.) Robert Lowell, who (I think) was more famous at the time, writes about an “after-party” at the Kennedy inaugural:

Incredible dinner at the Eberharts’ with the Tates, Madam Perkins, K.A. Porter, Auden, Ted Spencer’s sister and Betty Eberhart’s German cousin. Allen, very tight, gave two identical very formal toasts to the memory of Ted Spencer, and Auden helpfully took out all our plates, still unfinished, to the pantry, and Katherine Anne announced that she was seventy. (Letter 228 – Feb. 15, 1961; page 350)

Lowell also tells Bishop (of the poem she dedicated to him, and one of my favorites of hers), “I carry ‘The Armadillo’ in my billfold and occasionally amaze people with it.” (Letter 212 – Apr. 28, 1960; p. 324)

But it’s not all like that. As Lowell writes, “What marvelous letters you’ve written me. You must tire of my dark inwardness and shop talk.” (Letter 271 – June 19, 1963; page 469)

Everything Bishop writes is “marvelous.” I’m going to just rattle off a couple of excerpts for your reading pleasure.

“The idea of a child overwhelms me a little – but then, people do have them.” (Letter 122 – Dec. 5, 1953; p. 146)

“It’s almost impossible not to tell the truth in poetry, I think, but in prose it keeps eluding one in the funniest way.” (Letter 127 – May 20, 1955; p. 161)

And finally, this excerpt, written near the beginning of her many years in Brazil, resonated a lot with me:
“I am extremely happy here, although I can’t quite get used to being ‘happy,’ but one remnant of my old morbidity is that I keep fearing that the few people I’m fond of may be in automobile accidents, or suffer some sort of catastrophe….” (Letter 128 – Jul 8, 1955; p. 164)

All quotations from Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008.

Yes, I'm checking my email and eating lunch while I write this post

2009-06-03T12:24:00.004-05:00

I was just going through Arts & Letters Daily and read this article, "In Defense of Distraction" by Sam Anderson, from New York magazine, which you can find here. It's really interesting - and, in its postmodern way, an in-depth piece of writing about not doing things in depth. Well, sort of. Anyway, it's refreshing in that the author neither laments that we're all getting stupid because of the Internet, nor proposes that we should all get with the program and Twitter already. (Never!) An annoying example of the latter: I recently attended the presentation of an e-book by its developers at the publishing company, and they were all talking about the "latest research" that showed students don't like to read entire books or even chapters. So, you know, maybe the professors could put in electronic pointers telling the students what's the most useful in the book. Okay, maybe this will sound like an angry old woman, but um...that's called taking notes. Deciding what information is important is part of learning. In my humble opinion.

Which leads nicely into the following paragraph from the article (mostly a quotation), which I found particularly interesting:

Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”

All the cool kids

2009-05-30T09:12:00.002-05:00

I recently saw this picture somewhere (maybe a library blog?), and thought I'd post it. It's from Pundit Kitchen.

And that's all for today. Soon I will post on the very long and heavy (but delightful) book I'm reading.

The good old days

2009-05-05T07:07:00.002-05:00

Just a quick post before I return my copy of Stephen Colbert's I Am America (And So Can You!). The following passage is a satire of something that frequently annoys me, which is a false sense of nostalgia. It's from a recurring section in the book called "Stephen Speaks for Me," by the "oldest man in the world."

"A lot of senior citizens will tell you that they miss the 'good old days.' Not me. I never cared for them much. Besides, what was so good about them? Between 1918 and 1920, close to 100 million people died of Spanish Flu. Whoopee! Break out the party hats.

Perhaps these same seniors miss the Great Depression, too. I know I have fond memories of beating a hobo for scraps of cantaloupe rind. Ah, if only that bloody bindle could fit in my scrapbook.

Oh, and let's not forget the joy of racism....No, the only good thing about the past is that the Chicago Cubs would occasionally win the World Series. Everything else was Nazis and disease."

(p. 28)

from Colbert, Stephen. I Am America (And So Can You!) New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007.

Attention young moderns: Reference work is a professional function.

2009-04-30T11:10:00.005-05:00

I can’t remember where I saw John Hubbard’s essay Cultural Images of Librarians originally – maybe one of the blogs I read. Anyway, one of the “images” he includes is a copy of the cover of Jinny Williams, Library Assistant (A Career-Romance for Young Moderns). I got the 1962 book through interlibrary loan, and it was all I hoped it would be. The combination of hilariously didactic writing, library themes, and general old-school-ness was right up my very specific alley. Let me just give you a sampling from the book jacket:

…after graduation she was offered the job of junior assistant at the library. This would not give her professional status, but once she learned the complex library procedures, she would be a qualified library assistant. For a girl who loved working with books and people, the situation was ideal.
…
But Joe Grant, who was in love with her, resented the inroads on her time and the job itself, which was making her too intellectual, he said, for an ambitious mechanic.

Does that sound entertaining to you? Then read on for excerpts.

Theme 1: Tension between “professional” and “paraprofessional” library workers – still an issue, probably in part because those of us with a master’s degree are very defensive about how much money we dropped getting it.

The reference librarian, Veronica Savage (paging Charles Dickens!) scolds Jinny for looking up a senator’s address for a patron. “Reference work is a professional function!” Miss Savage tells Jinny, and goes on to explain that when she had used the book in the past, “You were getting the book, and not giving out information from it!” (Emphasis not mine.) Jinny mutters to herself: “Professional function!...Big deal! I don’t need five years of college to get an address out of a book that I used in high school!” (27)

This next one also touches on what kind of reference librarians should provide. Jinny helps a woman look up her husband’s symptoms and gets this earful from Miss Savage, who shows off her knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System at the same time. (How do one’s eyes snap, I wonder?)

Miss Savage, her eyes snapping with ill-concealed satisfaction, said, “I’ll have to report this incident to Mrs. Bender, Miss Williams. I have spoken to you several times before this about your doing reference work, but apparently you do not think it necessary to follow my instructions. If I hadn’t noticed you going to the six hundred section, where the medical books are shelved, you might have caused a great deal of harm with your kind of reference service.” (116)

Theme 2: Fun with antiquated gender roles.
Part of Jinny’s job? Organizing the magazine shelves. “After she had sorted and straightened out the disorderly shelves, she felt a housewifely pride in their neat appearance.” (80)

Jinny tries to recommend a book about a female senator to a patron.
Mrs. Harding stopped her with a white-gloved hand and shook her smartly coiffured head. “No! I don’t want to read about pushing women. A woman’s place is in the home.” (69)

Theme 3: Bizarre class distinctions.
A woman comes in to ask Jinny a reference question (see above) and is indicated as looking like someone who doesn’t visit the library a lot (not sure what that means). She tells Jinny, “I never been in the libery before. My husband told me to come and look up his sickness.” I don’t know what’s up with this weird vernacular. (115)

Jinny has an on-and-off mechanic boyfriend, but has also been seeing college man Paul Cunningham on the side. Apparently, upper-class people don’t require as much food as their less educated counterparts, as Jinny makes the two following observations: “The Cunninghams obviously enjoyed music more than food.” “He was so nice-looking, so gallant, Jinny wondered why she didn’t feel more emotion when he kissed her.” (150)

Theme 4: The “Career” part of the “Career-Romance”
The whole book is filled with painfully detailed descriptions of Jinny’s work duties, I guess to give readers an idea of what they can expect as a library assistant. This description of Jinny filing cards in the catalog was one of the nit-pickiest. No wonder this is what people think we do all day.

…Mrs. Bender, her face clearly showing her annoyance, approached her. “You should remember by now, Jinny, that we file catalog cards word by word, and not letter by letter. You have filed ‘Americana’ before ‘American Art.’ That is letter-by-letter filing. Since we file word-by-word, it should have been ‘American Art’ before ‘Americana.’ Also,” she went on, her voice still cold, “you seem to have forgotten that the subject cards for American history are filed chronologically, not alphabetically, and you filed the cards for ‘U.S. – History – Civil War’ ahead of ‘U.S. – History – Revolution.’” (163-4)

Good times.

All quotations from:
Temkin, Sarah A., and Lucy A. Hovell. Jinny Williams, Library Assistant. New York: J. Messner, 1962.

Modern heresies

2009-04-28T14:12:00.004-05:00

There’s a theme that’s been cropping up in things I’ve read or heard recently, and it reminds me of a short passage in For the Time Being, an Annie Dillard book I read about six or seven years ago:

“Karl Rahner echoes this idea: it is a modern heresy to think that if we do right always, we will avoid situations for which there is no earthly solution.”(87)

I went to a reading the other week to hear part of an unpublished novel with pretty much this theme at its core, though it was specifically about the idea that modern science can explain and solve everything. And this morning on WBUR, there was a report on end-of-life care (part of a series) that mentioned Americans’ general attitude that death is always to be avoided, and that medicine will always help them do that. Last week, I finished watching Six Feet Under, which is sort of the antithesis to that attitude.

Finally, after taking a break to read an interlibrary-loaned copy of Stephen Colbert’s book, I’ve resumed reading Thomas Friedman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded. I have a couple of bones to pick with the book, starting with the fact that Friedman doesn’t cite the sources (besides interviews) of any of the facts he presents. That’s a red flag I haul in front of students all the time. One of his main points, though, is that coasting along on our current way of life and energy consumption model won’t just turn out okay. It won’t just cause us setbacks. It will be devastating. “Incremental breakthroughs are all we’ve had,” he writes, “but exponential is what we desperately need.” (243) And while that may sound alarmist, he also makes a really excellent point (which I think I’ll use in arguing): even if global warming is a “hoax,” think about the worst that could happen if we try to combat it, and think about the worst that could happen if we don’t.

Anyway, I've just been thinking about that idea lately. So, you know, gather ye rosebuds.

Books:
Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Knopf, 1999.

Friedman, Thomas L. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution, and How it Can Renew America. New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2008.

The dangerous waters of classification

2009-04-23T10:48:00.004-05:00

This morning, I was working on an online research guide for my library on LGBT studies, and I wanted to include call number ranges - as I tend to do for interdisciplinary research topics. So I walked over to the cataloging office and got me the Library of Congress classification books. There are some innocuous call number ranges in there - though of course you have to look in different places for the Ls, Gs, Bs, and Ts. But in the RCs, there's homosexuality, bisexuality, and transsexualism under "psychopathology" (along with things like sadomasochism). And in the HQs, it's under "Sexual deviations." Now, I was looking at 1997 volumes, so maybe LC has changed. I know it's been slow, and I know I'm just saying, in a less researched and comprehensive way, what Sandy Berman has written whole books about. It just frustrated me.

Also. Remember that recent Amazon de-listing fiasco? Well, here's a blog posting from an independent bookstore in Southern California about why that's just one of many reasons not to use Amazon. (I learned about it from my e-newsletter from Brookline Booksmith, one of the best bookstores around.) I agree with most of what they say. I admit to having used Amazon in the past - though I almost always end up buying from used booksellers. And I definitely don't use it to the exclusion of the plethora of bookstores in the Boston area, including the Booksmith and Harvard Book Store (with its amazing used-books basement, where I recently found An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton).

Coffee and oranges

2009-04-16T10:32:00.003-05:00

This morning I was sitting at my desk drinking coffee and eating a mandarin orange, and I suddenly remembered Wallace Stevens' wonderful poem "Sunday Morning." I love Wallace Stevens, a lot, and was reminded of this poem when Alison Bechdel put part of it into her graphic novel Fun Home.

"Sunday Morning" is a shining example of what can be done with repetition, with iambic pentameter, with themes that seem to have been exhausted (color, seasons, animals, death). I can only hope I ever write something as good as its first five lines.

Here's the first section (of eight); the rest can be found here.

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.
The pungent oranges and bright, green wings
Seem things in some procession of the dead,
Winding across wide water, without sound.
The day is like wide water, without sound,
Stilled for the passing of her dreaming feet
Over the seas, to silent Palestine,
Dominion of the blood and sepulchre.

Blogiferation

2009-04-15T13:38:00.004-05:00

Like Clare, I have found that one blog begets another. So may I introduce a new blog I just started, I Saw You Reading, which is simply a collection of what books I see people reading. I'll add it to the blog roll on the side. Check it out if it interests you.

Upcoming: posts on a '60s novel about a librarian, and the idea of there being a solution for everything.

New England: THE place for same-sex marriage

2009-04-08T11:26:00.005-05:00

I don't quite know what to say about this, but there were two very different stories in the New York Times today. One was about the murderous backlash against gay men in Iraq, while the other was about the legalization of same-sex marriage (not civil unions) in Vermont. (Not to mention Iowa last week. Iowa! Who knew?)

I took a class on the History of Homosexuality in college, and one of the most valuable things I took from it was the idea that history is not a constant upward trend of progressiveness, openness, and tolerance. It goes in cycles, and people become tolerant and intolerant of many different things. I know that bad things happen to gay people all the time, everywhere. So I don't want to be all rah-rah, the U.S. is so much more advanced. I am glad I live here and not there. I guess it was just the contrast of the two articles side by side, on the same date.

I also recently learned from Slate's blog Broadsheet that you can sign up to be notified when the California Supreme Court makes its ruling on Proposition 8. It's here.

This is all just FYI. I swear I will do a book- and librarian-related post soon.

Just say yes...to the status quo

2009-03-28T15:21:00.005-05:00

The shuttle I ride to work is usually playing the local soft-rock station over the intercom, and a song I've been hearing a lot of lately is Taylor Swift's "Love Story." As I mentioned in my previous post, the melody is awfully catchy. Whoever wrote it knew what s/he was doing. It's the kind of pop song that doesn't leave your brain and has a key change in the last chorus.

Every time I hear this song, I pretty much loathe it more. Maybe part of it is the tossing in of literary references with no consideration of context, like:

"'Cause you were Romeo, I was a scarlet letter,
And my daddy said 'Stay away from Juliet'"

Okay, there is a loose plot concordance with Romeo and Juliet as the song progresses , but what everyone forgets who idealizes those stupid teenagers is that they die at the end. (Oh sorry...spoiler alert.) The song also uses "thy" once and modern pronouns the rest of the time.

But those are minor things, you say, that would only bother a tight-assed grammarian or a librarian who needs to get out more. True. What really makes me queasy about this song are its themes of...

girl must be rescued by boy:

"Romeo save me - I've been feeling so alone.
I keep waiting for you but you never come"

if you wait long enough, your parents will come around to you dating someone different:

"Romeo save me - they're tryin' to tell me how to feel;
This love is difficult, but it's real"

then later

"I talked to your dad - go pick out a white dress"

Being alone is bad - try to fix that ASAP:

"Marry me, Juliet - you'll never have to be alone"

Marriage and proper gender roles are the way to go!

"You'll be the prince and I'll be the princess"

"I talked to your dad - go pick out a white dress
It's a love story - baby just say 'yes'"

There's something particularly gross and forceful about that last line.

The video is equally ridiculous, and I'll post it below. Maybe I'm thinking too hard about this, or overestimating the effect this kind of thing has on girls. But Taylor Swift is obviously a popular force; according to that same radio station, she sold out Madison Square Garden in 60 seconds.

Two reasons to reduce your meat consumption

2009-03-24T11:04:00.003-05:00

I recently read a book review by Sheila Ashdown of the book The Face on Your Plate: The Truth about Food by Jeffrey Moussaieff Mason which came closest to my explanation of why I don't eat meat other than fish:

"I had finally read enough about industrial-scale food production to reach a critical mass of information about the ramifications of what I put in my mouth -- the environmental and public-health impacts and the inhumane treatment of vulnerable animals -- that I had to put down the hamburger and pick up the garden burger."

and

"The bulk of the book explores the three reasons that vegetarians and vegans forgo meat and animal byproducts: "for their health; for the health of the animals; and for the health of the planet.""

Then I heard about this American Heart Association study linking daily consumption of red meat to earlier death. (One of the most striking lines in the article: "Red meat is associated with death in several ways.")

I try not to moralize about my diet. For one, it's none of my business what other people do and I don't judge them either way. For another, I'm not perfect and I could definitely improve my food choices in a lot of ways. Vegetarianism (or its variations) is not necessarily the answer. It seems to me that, as in many things, moderation is what's important.

Anyway, there's some food for thought for you...heh heh. Get it?

Next up will be a post on a song that attracts me musically and revolts me in every other way. Stay tuned!

The frustrations of reading

2009-03-06T12:17:00.005-05:00

I recently read a pair of books back-to-back: Zadie Smith’s On Beauty and David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. And in reading both of them, I found myself occasionally frustrated, but in different ways. This is a really fine line. A good book – a really good one, a great book – should be challenging. It should provoke emotion and maybe have parts that aren’t immediately understandable. But there is a contract any author makes with a reader. You agree to believe and accept certain things. (In one of Wallace’s stories, he actually makes this contract completely explicit, but of course, he would.) I felt that David Foster Wallace was faithful to this contract, while Zadie Smith wasn’t, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

Before I read On Beauty, I was reading a review of literary critic Gordon Wood’s book How Fiction Works, in which Zadie Smith is included in a list of “antirealists” (the others are DeLillo and Rushdie). At that point, I’d only read her other book White Teeth, and I thought, really? The book seemed pretty much situated in reality. Then when I was reading On Beauty, I started noticing all the coincidences and inaccuracies within the novel’s universe. Some of these were related to British traditions and phrases occurring in an American college. These range from the very small (college classes generally don’t last all year; Americans don’t call McDonald’s “Macca;” there is no train that goes from Boston to Amherst) to the more widespread – the undergraduate students in the book are so into university politics and academia and scholarly communication. Maybe that’s how it is at a place like Harvard, but not any college I’ve ever worked at or attended. I think the problem here is that Zadie Smith is really good at making realistic characters. It threw me off when these very real-seeming people engaged in behavior or said things that seemed unreal.

David Foster Wallace, on the other hand, dealt in this incredibly acute realism. The stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (many of which, but not all, are framed as interviews) include an excruciating amount of detail. He writes about the physical and mental processes that underlie everything we do, but that we rarely think about. There’s a thoroughness and granularity of thought that must have been exhausting to experience and write. One story in particular, “The Depressed Person,” spelled out the hopelessness of depression in devastating detail. It made me presumptuously wonder if that’s what it was like to live inside David Foster Wallace’s head…and if so, I don’t blame him for wanting to get out. Maybe I wasn’t so much frustrated during the book as exhausted. I read it, like everything, mostly in half-hour increments on the bus, and sometimes even that amount of time wasn’t enough to digest what I was reading – either the content or the form. One of the blurbs on the back of the book calls it a “full-scale harassment of the short story form,” which is dead on.

I’ll conclude with a link to a 1999 interview of David Foster Wallace (conducted by mail) for Amherst magazine by Stacey Schmeidel, who falls into the category of people I hardly know but really like. It’s really good.

This tornado-prone month loves you

2009-03-05T12:19:00.005-05:00

A few housekeeping items. I really am trying to catch up. I have a couple of posts planned for the next couple of weeks, so stay tuned.

I have dragged A Room Full of Books into the next wave of Blogger technology, and in doing so have cleaned up my links and blogs to reflect what I actually read. Especially exciting is the addition to my blog roll of a blog that recently started and that I even more recently learned about: A Matter of Fact, which is written by the librarians at NPR. (Coolest job EVER, incidentally.) I'm also toying with the idea of improving my tags. Are you on the edge of your seat now?!?

I wanted to respond to Thomas's long-ago comment and say that I'm very glad he is now a Poetry subscriber. The Poetry Foundation is so wonderful. Wander over to their website for their "Poetry Tool" (a poetry index! I tried to make one of those for one book and it took me a whole semester), the "Poetry Off the Shelf" podcast, and other lovely things (like lots of readings in Chicago, where I unfortunately - in that sense - no longer live). I also wanted to note that I have put Inkheart on my list of books to read. I love books about books.

Also, Neko Case's new album, Middle Cyclone, came out recently, and it's pretty rad. The two songs in particular I can't get out of my head are "The Pharoahs" and her cover of Sparks' "Never Turn Your Back on Mother Earth." I haven't listened to it enough to say this intelligently, but there's a lot of feminine imagery in it, but in a nicely subtle way. I think Clare in particular would like it. I'm going to stop now, because I live with someone who could write a thesis on Ms. Case, and I know my place.

Happy March, everyone. I started my month with a snow day that was everything a snow day should be, and I'm taking it as a good omen.

Massive Explosions of Gratitude Week

2009-02-10T15:38:00.002-05:00

Okay, I’m back, I’m back! I know you were all just holding your breath and crossing your fingers for the return of A Room Full of Books. Well, wait no more. I’m going to post again in a little while about different kinds of frustration when reading, so you can look forward to that as well. But for now, there’s this. I read my Free Will Astrology horoscope on a fairly regular basis, as you probably know. Back during the week of January 29, Rob gave Aries an assignment, which I decided to follow. Here’s the original horoscope:

Don’t tell me you have nothing to be thankful for, Aries. Your parents could have named you “Hooligan” or “Lightsaber” or “Flu,” and they didn’t. There are no photos floating around the Internet that show you riding a pig in the nude. No one has ever broken up with you via text message. Now please keep going in the direction I’ve pointed you. Count your blessings up to at least 101. Create an ongoing list of all the things in your life that work pretty well and make you feel at home in the world. Why do this now? Because it’s Massive Explosions of Gratitude Week for you – a time when you can attract even more good fortune into your life by aggressively identifying the good fortune you already enjoy.

I thought this would get repetitive and the meaning would start draining out of it, but that didn’t happen. This exercise, which I did over four days, actually did raise my gratitude level and ease my irritation with small daily things. I won’t post all 101 here (a lot of them are along some of the same themes), but how about a sample?

7. I don’t have to eat dining hall food anymore.

12. I grew up not being conscious of how much money my family had in relation to my friends’ families.

21. I can easily communicate with everyone I care about.

22. There isn’t a place from my life that I associate with bad memories so much that I can’t go back.

24. I’ve never had a broken bone or major surgery.

28. I’ve gotten away with a lot.

30. No one forces me to watch sports.

37. I possess the ability, if not the facility, for expressing myself in language.

51. I don’t have to navigate Cambridge sidewalks or the MBTA in a wheelchair.

61. I live in a liberal hotbed.

62. Kate Winslet is still making movies.

63. Dar Williams is still making albums.

67. I got an amazing education at a steep discount.

77. People seem to forgive my little stupidities.

88. I hardly ever get sick.

90. I was hardly caught on tape dancing at my sister’s wedding at all.

91. I was raised to value the intellectual over the physical.

93. I come from ethnic backgrounds with good food.

94. I’ve never tried to pull off leggings.

98. I’ve never been to New Jersey.

99. The things I haven’t done that I want to do are within my reach.

101. I’m still alive.

A few thoughts on December 31.

2008-12-31T12:26:00.003-05:00

My dear readers, welcome to my last post of 2008 and the 100th post of this blog. I have a faux-deep entry about family brewing on the back burner, but that's not how I want to end the year. My subconscious relies on heavy-handed symbolism, and so, to quote myself quoting Dar Williams two years ago, let's get into loving the false promise of the New Year.

I have to say, 2008 was a banner year for all of us (...by which I mean me) here at A Room Full of Books. It was full of dramatic revelations, grinding periods of limbo, and exorbitant blessings. It heaped possibilities and opportunities on me, and is daring me not to fuck it up in 2009.

A very happy new year to all who read this little navel-gazing endeavor. I hope it's a good one.

Completely inconsequential but maybe amusing

2008-12-14T09:44:00.003-05:00

Yesterday I was in Goodwill and I found a VHS of the Disney animated version of Robin Hood, which I had been thinking about all day. I'm not even joking. I really love this movie, for many reasons, some of which I won't get into for fear of judgment. ANYWAY. I was watching it and the cadence of Sir Hiss started sounding really familiar to me. If I were more technically savvy, I would put these images side by side and have accompanying audio, but...I guess you'll just have to trust me.

If I wasn't officially a nerd before....

2008-12-13T10:05:00.002-05:00

...I am now. I was doing legitimate collection development work and happened to come across two books I thought I'd take home for a little light reading. They are:

Google and the Myth of Universal Knowledge: a View from Europe by Jean-Noel Jeanneney

and

Why Buffy Matters: the Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer by Rhonda Wilcox

That's all. It's been a very eventful couple of weeks, in both bad and good ways. The best thing is that my niece was born on Wednesday, and I get to see her in a week. Yay.

Different people

2008-12-05T17:06:00.004-05:00

My, my , my. it's been so long and I have lots of things I want to talk about. But let's just take things one at a time.

After reading David Sedaris's When You Are Engulfed in Flames in a couple of days, I have moved on to one of my old friends-of-the-library-bookstore purchases, James Merrill's memoir A Different Person. I like David Sedaris. I have, and I will. But he is, in fact, a wildly successful, and apparently wealthy, writer - and some of his anecdotes now revolve around someone sitting next to him in first class, or going to live in Japan for a couple of months to quit smoking. I don't really feel particuarly resentful about it or anything, or that I can't "relate" to him. It's just an observation.

While I enjoy David Sedaris, I really love James Merrill. I'm grateful that the English language fell into his hands and he handled it with such mastery, grace, and music. And part of the reason he was able to do so was because he never had to work for money. A Different Person, which covers JM's early years (so far in Europe), contains sentences that most of us will never utter, e.g., "Donkeys bore Miss Beltrami and me to Tiberius's villa," or "Where I was content to find myself in a Faure song or a Degas interior, he identified manfully with a Zen scroll or the St. John Passion."

But I can skim over these things, because his writing is true and beautiful and funny. The way he uses the phrase "a different person" in each chapter in a different sense, for example. And of course, since I often read parallel to my own life, I can certainly understand a lot of the things he says about being young and trying to write and love and live in a way that feels right. For instance...."A precocious adolescent makes do with whatever odd conglomerate of wave-worn diction the world washes up at his fee. Language at this stage uses him; years must pass before the tables turn, if they ever do."

Lastly, I just want to talk about Lucy Wainwright Roche. A couple of months ago, I was making a mix for Michelle on which I wanted to include songs about Chicago, so I typed that city into iTunes to see what I got, and one was Roche's "Chicago." Then I saw she was opening for Catie Curtis in Arlington a couple of weeks ago, so I went. She was by far the best part of the show, and I bought her two EPs (8 Songs and 8 More) immediately. Her song "Snare Drum" is a nearly perfect folk song. That one isn't on her MySpace page, unfortunately, but "Chicago" and a few others are, as well as her tour dates.

Quotations from James Merrill's A Different Person. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

I'm gonna make it after all

2008-11-09T14:29:00.002-05:00

On Wednesday morning, I felt like Mary freaking Tyler Moore. I woke up to a sunny day in Cambridge and all these brand new things: new job, new apartment, new city, new president. It was a concatenation of the rare and beautiful moments when the new things are still shining and haven't become worn or debunked or taken for granted. I felt like I had luck pouring out of me.

The new job is at an academic library and is going well so far. I'm the new kid, definitely. But I think it's going to be good. I'm trying not to show that I've never had a Real Job before, that I don't know the difference between personal and vacation days, that I don't yet know my way around collection development databases or even really Excel.

In book news, I'm reading Sarah Vowell's The Wordy Shipmates, which is her very Vowell-y book about the Puritans. She is such a weirdo; I love her.

Anyway. I of course miss the Midwest and everyone I love who lives there, but I'm glad to be back here, riding the T and listening to WBUR, overhearing pretentious conversations and walking on brick sidewalks. I missed it.

Let us do something grand, just this once

2008-10-27T10:03:00.003-05:00

It's 10 in the morning and I've been up for a while. I am contemplating a second cup of coffee while I pack and organize and prepare to move in less than a week. (!) I'm not sure when the next time I update will be; my Internet situation may be sketchy at first.

I've packed all of my poetry books except for the one that was beside my bed, the collected poems of Frank O'Hara. I've been meaning to read them all, because I really like his poems. And they're filled with small daily details and descriptions of life in cities, which are things I'm thinking about lately. He was also one of the founders of the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, not far from my new apartment. So in my (probably) last dispatch from Illinois, here are two poems by Mr. O'Hara, "1951" and "To the Poem."

1951

Alone at night
in the wet city

the country's wit
is not memorable.

The wind has blown
all the trees down

but these anxieties
remain erect, being

the heart's deliberate
chambers of hurt

and fear whether
from a green apartment

seeming diamonds or
from an airliner

seeming fields. It's
not simple or tidy

though in rows of
rows and numbered;

the literal drifts
colorfully and

the hair is combed
with bridges, all

compromises leap
to stardom and lights.

If alone I am
able to love it,

the serious voices,
the panic of jobs,

it is sweet to me.
Far from burgeoning

verdure, the hard way
in this street.



To the Poem


Let us do something grand
just this once          Something

small and important and
unAmerican          Some fine thing

will resemble a human hand
and really be merely a thing

Not needing a military band
nor an elegant forthcoming

to tease spotlights or a hand
from the public’s thinking

But be          In a defiant land
of its own a real right thing

from Allen, Donald, ed. The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Eyes on whatever your prize might be

2008-10-12T21:21:00.003-05:00

Okay, bear with me because I don't exactly know what I want to say. But lately, I've been thinking about the way people interfere in the way other people live their lives. It's one thing for a friend to intervene when she thinks you're doing something that will result in sorrow down the road. It's another to be fighting others' preconceived expectations at every turn. Maybe I've just been living in the suburbs too long (and luckily I get to leave soon). I guess a lot of the thoughts I've had are similar to an entry I posted I think around Christmas, about how people live much more complex lives and have much more complex relationships then anyone likes to talk about. I think about the people I know who got married to socially acceptable partners and had kids, as they were expected to do, and then got divorced. Obviously the reasons for divorce are also complex, but would it have been as bad if there hadn't been a sense of failing those expectations?

Anyway, anyway. If anyone has any thoughts on these vague ramblings, let me know.

On another note: since muxtape as it was no longer exists, here's a text-only version of the latest playlist/CD I made myself. As usual, it's a mix of songs that won't get out of my head and ones that reflect my current state.

Eyes on the Prize

1. These are the Fables - the New Pornographers
2. Wash Away - the Chapin Sisters
3. Mamma Mia - Meryl Streep
4. Recommendation - Mirah
5. I Guess That's Why They Call it the Blues - Elton John
6. The Wood Song - Indigo Girls
7. Good to Me - Inara George
8. The Ballad of John and Yoko - the Beatles
9. Eyes on the Prize - M. Ward
10. Troubled Times - Dar Williams
11. I'd Have You Anytime - George Harrison
12. My Sweet Love - John Mellencamp
13. Goodnight Lover - Dawn Landes
14. It's Alright - Dar Williams
15. Dry the Rain - the Beta Band

Promised Land, redux

2008-10-08T16:37:00.001-05:00

Well, it's been a while. Sorry to those who have been missing my little updates. Things have been happening at a rapid pace, and it's very nice, at this moment, to be sitting quietly on the back porch at my mother's house, on a sunny, windy October day.

I've had visitors, eye problems, excursions to Boston and Louisville and Indiana, and interviews in the past month or so. And there's more coming, because I'm going to be moving back to Boston in less than a month. My first day at my new job will actually be Election Day (I'll be voting early). I swear, the Dar's-new-album-karma worked again. A couple of weeks ago, I was wondering why I hadn't just stayed there after graduation, and tried to get by living alone on my little jobs. But I'm really glad I had this summer, and now I'm returning to Boston better than when I left, employed and paired. Not that being unemployed and single is necessarily bad. But I am a lucky, lucky girl.

In book news. Ryan and Clare have talked enough about BookMooch to get me to join today. My name is LaBibliotecaria, if you want to be friends. I'm looking forward to getting rid of a lot of books I don't need anymore before I move. (Of course, if one of you dear readers would like one outside the system, just let me know.)

I finished Sister Carrie on Friday night. It was pretty unsettling, I have to say. Realism in every sense of the word, including the ways that life is boring and unfair and progresses in ways that don't make sense. The most horrifying part was reading about Hurstwood's decline into homelessness and pennilessness, because it was so easy.

Also, I spent most of the day finishing The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman. I could not stop reading it. These are pretty audacious books, and extremely entertaining. I'll probably spend most of the day tomorrow reading The Amber Spyglass. I just picked up my hold from the public library - the trade paperback of Alan Moore's Watchmen. So that's what's coming down the pike.

Okay. Now it's 4:30 and I should start thinking about dinner. I am going to attempt to roast some of the potatoes that Michelle gave me from her family's farm, and hopefully I won't mess up a good thing.

David Foster Wallace.

2008-09-14T18:25:00.003-05:00

I'm writing and talking about this all over the place, and I doubt I have anything to add to the conversations others are having, but I have to post briefly about the death of David Foster Wallace. I wrote in June about his brilliant and humane way with words, and I am so sorry for his family and the world that he is gone. I can't help wondering how he would comment on what's being said about him. Quite selfishly, I will really miss what he might have said about everything that's happening and is going to happen.

I think this article by Laura Miller is a lot more eloquent than anything further I could say. Like her, I think I would probably say that he was my favorite living writer.

Promised Land

2008-09-12T11:11:00.005-05:00

Earlier this week, Dar Williams' new album Promised Land came out. I've really been looking forward to it. I always look forward to her albums, but I'm also hoping that I'll get a parallel situation going: the last time I bought a new Dar album (My Better Self in 2005), I was also unemployed, and I got a job within a couple of weeks. Anyway, I thought I'd post my (probably rambling) thoughts on it, writing as an uninformed music critic, but a semi-rabid fan since 2000.

There's this trend, whether fairly or unfairly applied, about folk singers who stray from their young acoustic roots and end up in adult-contemporary territory writing only about their kids. Not that there's anything necessarily inherently wrong with that. I think Dar's 2000 album The Green World (my personal favorite) marked a transition from what I've heard her call songs written hunched over her futon. The same intelligent lyrics and emotional accessibility were there, just with sort of a wider range, thematically and musically.

Okay, I'm really starting to get pretentious now, but I'll just say I think Dar does the same things well on this new album. I like it better than the two albums that came after The Green World - this one is a lot more even, and I like the covers and guest musicians better. It seems like there's a confidence that wasn't quite there in My Better Self.

Okay, so let's get into the album. I'd heard a number of these songs before, at shows or on radio broadcasts. All of them benefit from additional instrumentation and voices on the album, especially "Buzzer" - except maybe for "The Easy Way." It's got this bouncy percussion that ups the tempo a little that I'm not a huge fan of. The Dar-and-Suzanne Vega oohs and ahhhs in the background, though, are lovely.

There are a couple of songs, as usual, about morally challenging times - "Buzzer," about Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments, and "Holly Tree," about the monetary motives behind the Salem witch trials. There are also two covers - "Midnight Radio" from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and "Troubled Times" by Fountains of Wayne. "Midnight Radio" is a lovely song and fits Dar's voice well; according to her liner notes, she went to college with the song's writer, Stephen Trask. "Troubled Times" is a nice surprise. Covers are a gamble, and I don't particularly like Fountains of Wayne, but I do like this song, and Dar makes it more buoyant, smoothes out the lyrics into actual musical phrases. There are songs that I wasn't that into on first listen that are seriously growing on me ("Go to the Woods" and "Book of Love") and ones that I can tell are going to be solid favorites ("You are Everyone," which is just beautiful, and "It's Alright," which was on an EP Dar released a couple of weeks ago).

The subject matter as a whole is a little darker and more conscious of mortality than her earlier songs. "The Tide Falls Away" and the last song, "Summerday," are both acknowledgments that everything erodes and passes and dies, that no land lasts forever. "Summerday" could have been a sentimental song about the afterlife, but instead, it's about the much more real way generations of people come and go and do different things to the world. Like, the only promise land or anything else can offer.

Sorry that was so long. You can listen to the whole tracks of "It's Alright" and "Troubled Times" on Dar's myspace page, and you can buy the album on iTunes. You can also buy the physical album, which has a lot of gorgeous artwork in it by various artists that live in the Hudson Highlands, Dar's neck of the woods.

Take a letter, Maria

2008-09-09T16:05:00.003-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I read most of a collected volume of Vita Sackville-West's letters to Virginia Woolf. I guess I was thinking there would be a lot of love letters. There are some, but most of them are full of news and "business" - the kinds of things people communicate by phone (though they did have phones, and called each other occasionally) and e-mail today. More than one professor I had in college wondered aloud if modern writers would ever warrant "the collected e-mails of..."

The thing about Vita's letters is that they're full of references to letter-writing itself, especially the time and distance involved. She was often in Persia, where she would finish letters quickly saying that the only post for a week was about to come. In January 1926, she wrote:

…letters are the devil, disregarding Einstein and being subservient to so fallacious a thing as time, e.g. if you write to me in Persia and say you have got the ague it is no use my writing back to say I’m so sorry, because by the time you get it you’ll have recovered, whereas if I write from the Weald you’ll still be wretched when you get it and my condolence will be of some slight grain of use, but my feelings will be the same, whether in Persia or the Weald. (p. 84)

In September 1925, she writes about the physical difference between writing and reading a letter:

I like the sense of one lighted room in the house while all the rest of the house, and the world outside, is in darkness. Just one lamp falling on my paper; it gives a concentration, an intimacy. What bad mediums letters are; you will read this in daylight, and everything will look different.” (p. 68)

Is there a parallel to this in modern communication? Certainly, there can be gaps of time between the writing and reading of a text message or e-mail, but it's always possible to read what's been written nearly instantaneously. Does this mean that the writer's meaning is more closely approximated? I don't know, but it's very interesting to me.

I just finished reading Northanger Abbey, in which Henry Tilney gives a typically Austenian backhanded compliment that women are superior letter-writers:

As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars….A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar. (p. 23)

I have to confess, I was a little bit surprised to find grammar and punctuation errors in Virginia Woolf's letters (especially absent apostrophes), but hey. Who cares, when the prose is so perfect? Vita knew what was up:

A curious fact: nearly all letters seem to contain at least one irritating phrase, but yours never. They leave one feeling more intelligent, charming, and desirable than one actually is. (p. 122)

Okay, I'm going to end this rambly post with one of Virginia Woolf's letters, from September 1929, reprinted in the volume, that I think is pretty awesome. Maybe few will agree with me, but there's something about it I love.

A thousand congratulations from us both.
I daresay these are the happiest days of your life.
No, alas, I go to London on Friday not Thursday.
Yes, very pleased about Kings Daughter.
Thank Goodness, no more dealing with Lady S.
Yes I’ve signed my name 600 times.
Yes, I’ve read Hugh.
Why need he say all his characters are dead, when its true?
How business this letter is!
And looks like a sonnet.

All quotations from:
DeSalvo, Louise, and Mitchell A. Leaska, Eds. The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1985.

except Jane Austen quotation, from:
Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2000.

I miss writing English papers....

2008-09-03T16:29:00.003-05:00

...so here you go. Today's poem on Poetry Daily was "It Is the Rising I Love" by Linda Gregg, and I just wanted to post it, in large part as a reminder to myself of the kind of poem I'd like to be able to write. The poem progresses in this seamless way; my narratives always seem either horribly predictable or abrupt and broken. Recurring elements like...well, the elements aren't heavy-handed or repetitive. The line breaks are pretty great, too. And the first two lines are so wonderful: they're a combination ars poetica and defense of poetry without sacrificing language or rhythm.

Those who know my proclivity for "depressing" poems and songs have a case for accusing me of the same with the subject matter of this poem, but I don't know that it's totally depressing. To me, it's an acknowledgement of what it's like to be human and mortal. Humans aren't gods, or elements, or animals (none of which can produce poetry). We are limited by struggle and suffering and desire. I love this poem because Gregg says all this, but she says it in an eloquent and subtle way.

It Is the Rising I Love
by Linda Gregg

As long as I struggle to float above the ground
and fail, there is reason for this poetry.
On the stone back of Ludovici's throne, Venus
is rising from the water. Her face and arms
are raised, and the two women trained in the ways
of the world help her rise, covering her
nakedness with a cloth at the same time.
It is the rising I love, from no matter what element
to the one above. She from water to land,
me from earth to air as if I had a soul.
Helped by prayers and not by women, I say
(ascending in all my sexual glamour), see my body
bathed in light and air. See me rise like a flame,
like the sun, moon, stars, birds, wind. In light.
In dark. But I never achieve it. I get on my knees
this gray April to see if open crocuses have a smell.
I must live in the suffering and desire of what
rises and falls. The terrible blind grinding
of gears against our bodies and lives.

The poem comes from Gregg's book All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems from Graywolf Press.

Answer: This is how Elizabeth spends her weekday afternoons.

2008-08-27T16:13:00.003-05:00

For the first month or two I was back in the Chicago area, I kept forgetting to watch Jeopardy!, since it's on at 3:30 instead of later in the evening like most of the rest of the country. Now I remember, and I've been watching every day for the past couple of weeks. I saw the end of the Tournament of Champions, the Teen Tournament, and right now, the College Championship.

I love Jeopardy. I really do. It takes me back to the glory days of my high school academic team, which was a really good time. I know it has its flaws. The judging of close-but-not-right answers is pretty uneven. The judges wouldn't accept "Memories" for "Memory," but allowed someone to pronounce "Colbert" in an Anglicized way. Its biggest flaw, as far as I'm concerned, is the "chat" section between Alex Trebek and the contestants. I usually mute this because I think it's just embarrassing for everyone.

The younger contestants seem to enjoy this part a lot more, which can make me either cringe more than at the older contestants, or endear them to me. There was one kid in the Teen Tournament that I particularly liked, because he was sort of gently making fun of the cheesiness of the whole thing - making an overly enthusiastic face for the camera, poking fun at Alex's puns. He was still into the competition, though, and he was really mad at himself when he wagered all his money on a Daily Double and lost it. (The question was about which Czech playwright later became prime minister - which was a staple in the Jefferson County Public Schools academic competition question sets.)

It also amazes me what some of the contestants can't answer. During the Tournament of Champions, no one could identify what band made the album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. The college champions were unable to name the director of Sicko, or fill in the blank in the following lyrics: "____ singing in the dead of night." I am terrible with pop culture references, but even I know those.

Authority control

2008-08-17T14:26:00.003-05:00

It's been a while since I got all library-geek in here, probably because I'm neither in school anymore nor working at a library (still) (yet). Two little news items caught my eye recently, though, about the automated matching of terms on the Internet. The first is from Steve Johnson's August 13 column "Hypertext" in the Chicago Tribune:

From the People Are Still Smarter Than Computers Department: After the Russians invaded the Republic of Georgia last week, the Valleywag blog captured Google News displaying alongside its story on the attack a Google Maps image of Savannah and environs. Does that mean they'd also have the details on Gen. Sherman's march to the Black Sea?

The second is from the BBC's website; it's a much longer article, so I'll just post the link - but the city council of Birmingham in England printed up a bunch of leaflets about recycling, and the picture of the city skyline on them was of Birmingham, Alabama. I don't know how the city council got the photo, but I imagine it had something to do with an Internet search that couldn't differentiate the two Birminghams.

For those of you who know this already, sorry to come off condescending, but librarians call this kind of differentiation authority control. You see it in the Library of Congress subject headings all the time - it tells you if a book is by this John Smith or that John Smith, or if the word "records" refers to LPs, archives, or electronic catalog records. The only way to get authority control in a vast amount of information seems to be to have humans do it - so far, anyway. I did read an article in cataloging class about assigning algorithms that would say, okay, when "apple" is near computer words, it's probably talking about Apple computers, and when it's near words about food or farming, it's talking about the fruit. That's certainly not foolproof, but on the other hand, no one's going to index the Internet. Librarians have definitely tried.

This could get very metaphysical, obviously. The meanings of words are personal, and political, and obviously up for debate. And no system is going to be able to control for metaphorical and other creative uses of words - what would that algorithm do with "apple of my eye?" I can't decide if this whole thing gives me hope that humans do a superior job of organizing information and people will recognize this, or if people will just be content with incorrect and incomplete information. Something tells me the latter is probably more likely.

The sands of convention

2008-08-09T16:59:00.004-05:00

Earlier this week, I finished The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall. And just to preface: I recognize that this book has been written about, a lot, by people much more intelligent and well-read than I, but I just thought I'd record my thoughts. This has been a summer of trying to fill in fundamental gaps in my reading, books that are foundations or landmarks or classics. The Well of Loneliness is a dubious sort of classic, I guess. It's one of those books that is remembered much more for its social impact than its artistic quality...which in this case I'd have to say is sort of justified. The writing is sentimental and melodramatic, and you can see the next event in the plot coming from a mile away. But the whole thing is just so earnest. As is made clear by events in the book, the issues she writes about are a matter of life and death to some, and of happiness and unhappiness at the very least.

And okay, I have to admit, a lot of the information I got about the book's publication history and its place in the gay canon came from its Wikipedia article. But the ciations are very good. The general consensus seems to be that the novel was groundbreaking, that those who publicly condemned it ended up only raising awareness of homosexuality - that at one point in time it was many young women's only accessible representation of lesbians. I'm sure that many people in 2008 find its various stances antiquated and harmful to understanding and civil rights. While Hall is insistent that "inversion" is part of nature and not chosen behavior (which I guess was part of what scandalized people), she also has this prescriptive "good gay" attitude that "inverts" should be model citizens to show the rest of the world that homosexuality isn't just one symptom of inherent weakness of character. Puddle, the main character Stephen's governess and a major closet case, imagines telling her:

“…you’re as much a part of what people call nature as anyone else; only you’re unexplained as yet – you’ve not got your niche in creation. But some day that will come, and meanwhile don’t shrink from yourself….above all be honourable. Cling to your honour for the sake of those others who share the same burden. For their sakes show the world that people like you and they can be quite as selfless and fine as the rest of mankind.” (173)

There is also, however, a repeated anger at the world's hypocrisy that could very well have been written today:

“Yes, it was trying to get her under, this world with its mighty self-satisfaction, with its smug rules of conduct…They sinned grossly; even vilely at times, like lustful beasts – but yet they were normal! And the vilest of them could point a finger of scorn at her, and be loudly applauded.” (289)

Then there's this sentence, which jumped out at me from the long descriptions of nature and the symbolism that tends to sledgehammer you over the head:

“Outrageous…that wilfully selfish tyranny of silence evolved by a crafty old ostrich of a world for its own well-being and comfort. The world hid its head in the sands of convention, so that seeing nothing it might avoid Truth.” (135)

This thought doesn't just apply to homosexuality, of course. I've been thinking a lot lately about conventions and how much people buy into them. I think it is getting better in a lot of ways. But a lot of people still have nostalgia for a simpler time that never actually existed. I'm reminded of a visit to the Susan B. Anthony house when I was thirteen or fourteen, and someone with me said, "They never mentioned her husband." I said, "Um...she was a lesbian." She said, "Elizabeth, they didn't have lesbians back then."

I guess I'll end there. I really have a lot more to say on the subject, but other people have said it way better than I would, and have actually done their research. So you get that muddled quasi-essay, and maybe I'll write again soon about Jeopardy or the book I'm reading now, The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, which is, in tone, the polar opposite of The Well of Loneliness.

All quotations from Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness. New York: Sun Dial Press, 1928.

Collision course

2008-07-28T21:20:00.004-05:00

I am basically just updating to link to my new "mix tape," Nothing Else Will Do. This playlist has, um, kind of a theme, and I apologize for that. It's very "love-ity-love," to quote Neko Case in Poetry. The word "love" is actually in 25% of the song titles. I didn't mean for that to happen, though.

One of the songs on there is a live version of a song I assume will be on Dar Williams' new album (which I heard was called Spring Again, but her official website tells me is called Promised Land). It's called "The Easy Way," and I can't stop listening to it. The line in the chorus is "I never took the easy way," which she follows in the last chorus with "because you know that easy's never easy anyhow." This got me thinking about a Wallace Stevens line (and I can't remember what poem it comes from) that I was reading the other day: "A revolution of things colliding." These two lines converging on each other lead me to the conclusion that things are never easy, even when (and maybe especially when) you try really hard to make them so; inertia is as volatile as intentional change; and what other kind of revolution is there, except when things collide?

That is pretty muddled, but it's a little snapshot of my state of mind lately. It's very mid-twenties-living at home-getting all kinds of advice from everyone.

A step into the unknown

2008-07-23T17:38:00.004-05:00

I've been reading Scheherezade Goes West by Fatema Mernissi, which Clare lent to me. There are a lot of interesting ideas in it about men and women and art and culture, some of which I'm skeptical of - but as Clare and I were saying to each other today, one of the author's main points is that travelers and scholars need to let themselves hear ideas contradictory to their own minds and cultures, maybe live in those ideas for a little while and get uncomfortable. So I'm trying. And, as usual, I tend to zero in on sections of books that I find the most relevant or interesting, regardless of their relation to the whole work, so here's a passage that I felt like coming back to:

One fourteenth-century writer, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziya, who took the trouble to count up the words in Arabic that can be used to say "I love you," came up with a list of sixty, which he compiled into a book....On his list were many words that refer to love as a dangerous moment of mental confusion (khabal), or disorientation (futun)...love as a plunge in to the void...as a privileged friendship....
Love pushes you to go beyond your usual routine and into directions you might not otherwise have taken. Which brings us back to our list. Many of the sixty words describe love as a compelling voyage (huyam), a step into the unknown (ghamarat), an adventure in alien territories.
(pp. 125-127)

This reminds me a little of an electronic conversation I was having recently about people's belief in the capacity of love to change situations, minds, or lives. It's something (in my experience) that people are often willing to believe in fiction (e.g., every ridiculous romantic comedy ever made), but not in real life - where sacrifice and upheaval for the sake of love can be viewed as weak or dependent. Then, of course, there are cases of real dependence, but - I think I'll stop this chain of backpedaling here. My point is: the second paragraph, especially, of the above passage resonated with me. Not that I'm thinking of anything specific.

I'm allowing myself to think that things are looking up. I have a few job leads, and a backup plan in case none of them pans out. Tomorrow, I'm going to the Newberry Library Book Fair for the fourth year in a row, though I probably shouldn't be buying a lot of books at this point. In the next month, I'll be traveling to Louisville and Rochester, and hopefully (finally) editing my school paper on indexing Sylvia Plath's poems down to a publishable size. I'm also reading (alongside Mernissi) Radclyffe Hall's classic The Well of Loneliness - which is a nice light beach read. So I'll let you know how that goes.

Also, just for fun, here's my last.fm entry about the Pitchfork Music Festival.

Quotation from: Mernissi, Fatema. Scheherezade Goes West. New York: Washington Square Press, 2001.

Johnny Sunshine

2008-07-07T18:06:00.003-05:00

See what I did there? I promised you an ALA update, or even multiple ones, and I did not deliver. Sorry. I actually don't really have a lot to say about it. As I said before, I was much more excited to see Ryan and Michelle than about the conference, though it did have its highlights. The trip is sort of this long chain of sun and driving and mountains and laughing hysterically. Now that I'm back (I have been since Friday), I'm feeling pretty lackluster. I got rejected from another job by mail, though I did make one possible employment connection at ALA (the California Department of Corrections).

Since I've been back, I've restarted my reading of Lolita. I'm sure this is the reaction many people have to it, but I find myself incredibly ambivalent and uncomfortable. It's obviously very, very, well-written. I'll be reading along and sort of slip into the voice and think, okay, I can see this guy's humanity, and then Humbert will say something to remind me, like, hey, he could use Lolita to breed a daughter and granddaughter he could also rape.

Well, there's your brief and cheery update. I have some backed-up stuff I could write about, like the Liz Phair show I saw right before I left - okay, it was awesome, there's your post about that. Aside from the obvious musical awesomeness, that woman can pull off a vest-and-shorts combo like nobody's business.

Traveling Again (Traveling I)

2008-06-24T08:25:00.004-05:00

Just a quick post; I have to finish packing for California. I'm leaving in less than 24 hours, and I'm excited to the point of being unbearable to other people, I think. My mom keeps talking to me about the conference, but I'm mostly excited for a week with my friends Ryan and Michelle. I haven't seen them in a month, but it feels way longer.

I'm really anxious about flying, though, as usual. And also about the flurry of interviews that's gone on the past few weeks. While I'm there, I might get offered a job in Louisville or Chicago. I might not, of course, but I'll tell you one thing - I am interviewed out. For once, I'm sick of talking about myself (though, apparently, not of writing about myself).

I re-read Harriet the Spy the past two nights; I came across it while cleaning out a closet. It's my mom's copy from when she was young, and the covers are missing and there's underlining throughout. I forgot how much I liked that book, and really, how sort of unusual and honest it is. There isn't a particularly happy ending or a moral. One of the last lines is "sometimes you have to lie" (which my mother underlined). Did any of you read this book when you were kids?

On another note, here's a link to my last.fm journal entry entitled "The Best Mix Tape Ever." Clare made it for my 18th birthday, and it definitely stands the test of time.

A little knowledge

2008-06-21T21:50:00.003-05:00

Just a quick post to give you the below Toothpaste for Dinner comic. I'm about to finish The Fall and possibly reread Harriet the Spy, so you may be hearing about those books soon.

toothpastefordinner.com

Kate Chopin and Elton John...together at last

2008-06-11T16:35:00.004-05:00

Right now, I'm trying to catch up on and update things. Here's an enumeration of some of those things....

1. I've updated my blogs on the sidebar to include my friend Ryan's new blog, as well as the resurrected Las Poetas Desesperadas. Check them out.

2. Periodically, I make mixes for myself that reflect my current state and whatever I've been listening to obsessively. Well now, thanks to the Internet, you can share in these creations. I'll have them at this site called muxtape. The current one is called "Don't let the sun..." The site only allows 12 songs per mix, so I had to leave off two songs ("Pitseleh" by Elliott Smith and "The Sun" by Mirah). But it's still a pretty good one, I think.

3. I'm trying to fill in what seem like unforgivable holes in my reading, and I'm starting with The Awakening by Kate Chopin - I'm about 75% through. I have mixed feelings about it, and maybe that's because I'm living in this quasi-post-third-wave of feminism. When I think about the novel in terms of a person who has been given no choices, deciding that she'll give them to herself, it is pretty powerful. The fact that Edna is so self-absorbed could be seen, I guess, as a product of that. It's hard not to like passages like this:

It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

I can also relate, having recently left one place for another, to this passage:

[T]he thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.

That's all for now. I may or may not write before the American Library Association conference at the end of June, but don't worry - you'll be hearing about it.

Back to a room more full of books

2008-06-03T09:26:00.004-05:00

It has been a very long time, and I apologize to anyone who was on pins and needles waiting for the next entry (doubtful). In the last month and a half, I finished library school and - finding myself without a job quite yet - have moved from my Boston dorm back to my mom's house in the Chicago suburbs.

The culture and various other shocks have been mitigated by the fact I've been kept quite busy: applying for jobs, preparing to go to the ALA conference in Anaheim at the end of the month, making trips into the city. I revisited places in Chicago I like (Wrigley Field, the Intelligentsia on Jackson St.), and went to ones I've been meaning to visit: the National Museum of Mexican Art, the main (Harold Washington) branch of the Chicago Public Library.

Now, I can't help but compare the main branches of the CPL and the Boston Public Library. They're very different, and I didn't actually try to locate items at the CPL, but it feels like it functions better as a library. The BPL has its two buildings - the old and beautiful and the new and stark - and the shelves are always a big mess.

The Harold Washington, however (at left) has apparently been redone lately. It was clean and orderly, but still lovely, with an indoor courtyard sort of thing on the top floor (it has nine smaller floors to the BPL's sprawling four or five). There's just almost a feeling in the new BPL building that this is what you get - good luck finding what you need. The staff is always pretty grim-looking, too. This is probably a funding issue, I would imagine. I will say, though, there's nothing at the CPL on the order of the BPL's reading room (pictured in an earlier post). (The image is a public one from flickr.)

I've also managed to read a little bit - I'm almost done working through a Christmas present, David Foster Wallace's collection of essays Consider the Lobster. Every time I read DFW's writing, I wonder why I bother reading anyone else. The one I found most interesting (of course) is "Authority and American Usage," a sort of descendant of "Politics and the English Language" (which he quotes and acknowledges). Everything that he writes about receives the same scrutinizing and humane treatment. If he's a snob, he examines the reasons for that (especially in "Authority and American Usage").

He also manages to write about politics and voting without coming off all soapboxy; I will leave you with an example from a 2000 article for Rolling Stone.

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

from Consider the Lobster by David Foster Wallace, Back Bay Books, 2007.

April is poem time

2008-04-14T21:14:00.003-05:00

Just a brief entry, I'm afraid. The time is draining rapidly from this semester.

Here we are again in National Poetry Month. We're halfway through it, in fact, and have I posted any poems? No. So here's one for you. As you may have guessed, it's by Sylvia Plath. I had a hard time picking just one - but a lot of the ones I've been marveling over are pretty long (Three Women, Poem for a Birthday, Tulips), so I just chose one whose skill I forgot about until I read it again. The last three lines are so good I can't stand it.

Blackberrying

by Sylvia Plath

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks ---
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

You and me both, kid

2008-03-27T17:49:00.002-05:00

Okay, entries have been a little thin this semester. Part of it's busyness, of course, but part of it is that I've been so much more enamored of others' words than my own. Lately, I've been encountering songs, poems, people, etc., that remind me of something either deep or superficial. This has always happened; it just seems more concentrated lately. On the superficial level, for example, a guy who looks just like my friend Andrew asked me for directions in front of MIT today. In the thick of my indexing project, I read the poem "Above the Oxbow" for probably the first time since I was thirteen and had no idea about the Summit House and the Connecticut River Valley, where the poem takes place - now those places are dear to me and already in the past.

I also keep coming across these phrases and songs that resonate with me on a very specific level. Sometimes it's in Sylvia Plath's journals; just before a birthday, for instance, she vows to herself to enter her second quarter-century in Boston and to live "to the hilt." (Here in Boston, I turn twenty-five soon.) Then there are the songs that have appeared on the radio and All Songs Considered, that I never heard before and made it onto my latest playlist: "Bottle Up and Explode!" by Elliott Smith, "Gray or Blue" by Jaymay, "To Be Alive and Alone" by Troubled Hubble.

The title of this post, however, comes from a line (which I think is correct; I consulted the resident expert) from a song to which I cannot stop listening: "Failsafe" by the New Pornographers. I realized I didn't really know what the word means, so (being me) I went to the OED, which describes it as a situation in which something "revert[s], in the event of failure or breakdown, to a condition involving no danger." Failure, basically, that is still failure, but causes a minimum of harm to all involved. It's an appropriate goal for me.

I don't know how to embed a sound file, and I couldn't find a video of the New Pornographers singing this song, but below is a version by the Choir Practice, which is the first version of the song I heard anyway.

I just have to say one more thing, because Clare said I should put it on the blog, and she's right. I just want to say that I am not making fun of the girl in the story; I just thought what she said was funny. Last week I was at the reference desk, and a student came in asking how to get to articles online. I asked her what databases she'd been using, and she said, "Someone told me a really good one was JSTOR." But she pronounced it "j'stor," like "je t'aime." It was, you know, the wrong emphasis on the wrong syllable. Which people like me find hilarious.

Sitting between Gutenberg and Confucius

2008-03-13T16:57:00.003-05:00

I am blogging to you live - not from anywhere terribly exciting like SXSW or anything - but from the Bates Hall Reading Room at the Boston Public Library. After lunch downtown, I made myself come here and do a Power Point (ugh) for a presentation I have to do next week. Even the Simmons library is somewhat distracting at this point. This is the quietest place I know. Somehow, in this large urban library where there is often noise and chaos within and without, in this room people are serious about their reduction of distraction. There is no talking or eating or even loud typing. Also, it's beautiful. It's one of those rooms with names of authors and artists and philosophers engraved in gold around the ceiling...the title reflects where I'm sitting. I don't have a camera with me, so an image from somewhere else will have to do...wow, looking at it while being here is so postmodern. Also, depending on where I get a job, I may not be in Boston in a couple of months, so I thought I should hit my favorite places before graduation.

Here it is:

Indexing, the art of

2008-03-10T20:19:00.005-05:00

Sorry it's been a little while. Spring break started on Friday, and I took much of the weekend to give myself a psychic rest before jumping back into work (both employment and school).

The big project I'm working on this semester (for subject analysis) is a subject index to the collected poems of Sylvia Plath. I spent the first two weeks or so doing background reading, including a book by G. Norman Knight called Indexing, The Art of. The title should give you some idea of the author's approach...this guy is serious about his indexing, and his indexing jokes. There are some pretty amazing metaphors, like, “Subheadings are the vassals of their headings and should always…have a close connexion with their lords and masters" (p. 54).

A few pages earlier, he writes, “In a ‘literary’ index…such elaborate headings add a certain attractiveness, and an index in narrative form can indeed become readable and in parts even exciting” (46). Hopefully, that's what this index will be...an amalgamation of what critic, poet, and indexer have to say about these poems.

And I forgot how good these poems are; I haven't read the whole book through since I first acquired it...I think for my fourteenth birthday, but I could be wrong. Take this stanza from the middle of "Tale of a Tub," which articulates so well the impossibility of escaping physical reality:

We take the plunge; under water our limbs
waver, faintly green, shuddering away
from the genuine color of skin; can our dreams
ever blur the intransigent lines which draw
the shape that shuts us in? absolute fact
intrudes even when the revolted eye
is closed; the tub exists behind our back:
its glittering surfaces are blank and true.

Looking back on this post, it's a little self-important and academic. Sorry about that; I'm getting all English major-y again with this project. I'm also producing poems at a much higher rate than I ever have while being in school (and not in a poetry workshop class): about concerts, the leap year, and the hallway at MIT called "the infinite corridor," among other things.

Quotations come from....
Knight, G. Norman. Indexing, The Art of. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979.

Plath, Sylvia. The Collected Poems. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.

The benefits of staying up late

2008-02-22T10:06:00.003-05:00

The other night I was flipping channels restlessly about 1:30 and thought I'd go back to Conan O'Brien. Once I got there, I literally sat up in bed because I was immediately hooked by the guy with the ukulele on the screen. I didn't even know it was a ukulele, and it took me a painfully long time to come up with the title of the song - I was humming it a while before my brain fed me the words "While My Guitar Gently Weeps." Anyway, I was really struck by the performance; I can't put my finger on why. Apparently Conan was really into it, too, though - which only proves my theory that he and I should really hang out.

His name is Jake Shimabukuro, by the way. I had never heard of him, but that doesn't mean anything. Obviously.

Those we reach but can never touch

2008-02-18T15:25:00.004-05:00

I read two poems recently that get at, if not answer, the sorts of things I've been thinking about lately, about how people relate to and love each other. I really love the first one, because it's not about a futuristic or even really a modern condition. It reminds me of Wallace Stevens' "Re-Statement of Romance," how the representations (including words) of things are never even close to what you wanted to express. And the phrase in the Rimbaud poem - "neither ardent nor timid" - really resonates with me. That's been true of me and of my life lately, and I feel like I should pick a side.

Science Fiction
by Les Murray

I can travel
faster than light
so can you
the speed of thought
the only trouble
is at destinations
our thought balloons
are coated invisible
no one there sees us
and we can't get out
to be real or present
phone and videophone
are almost worse
we don't see a journey
but stay in our space
just talking and joking
with those we reach
but can never touch
the nothing that can hurt us
how lovely and terrible
and lonely this is

Evenings
by Arthur Rimbaud
translated by Vernon Watkins

It is rest full of light, neither fever nor languor, on the bed or on the road.

It is the friend, neither ardent nor timid. The friend.

It is the loved one, the fond, neither tormenting nor tormented. The loved one.

The air and the world all unexplored. Life.

-Was it then this?

-And the dream breaks afresh.

Murray poem from The New Yorker, 28 January 2008
Rimbaud poem from LitFinder.com

From today, March is just two weeks away

2008-02-16T11:47:00.004-05:00

So I posted this to my last.fm profile, because it's music-related, but I thought I'd post it here too. Valentine's Day is over now, I've gotten over the halfway point of this consistently malaise-filled month, and I think this list is kind of funny. I don't exactly think any of these ways about love, but I have at one point or another.

The line in the post's title is not true this particular February 14, but it is in one of the songs on my (highly anticipated) Valentine's Day mix. It's subdivided into sections, because I'm pretentious. This is clearly not comprehensive, also.

Part I: There Is No Love, Only Sex
Fuck and Run - Liz Phair
The Taste of You - Erin McKeown
Sin Wagon - Dixie Chicks
I Don't Love Anyone - Belle & Sebastian
Hey Ya - Outkast
Mr. Right Now - the Nields

Part II: Maybe There's Love, But It's Probably Fucked-Up
Leather - Tori Amos
Mary Kay - Jill Sobule
Lily (My One and Only) - Smashing Pumpkins
Divorce Song - Liz Phair

Part III: I Don't Quite Get Love But I Wish I Did
Last Kisses - the Nields
As Is - Ani DiFranco
February - Dar Williams
Love, Love, Love - the Organ

Part IV: I Want Love (Just a Different Kind)
If You See the One - Rebecca Katz
As Cool as I Am - Dar Williams
Polyester Bride - Liz Phair
I Want Love - Elton John

I think I'll pass on this one

2008-02-13T16:04:00.003-05:00

So, the other day I was looking at library jobs, which I do fairly compulsively lately, and I came across a posting to be a librarian at the US Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay. It's really long, so I thought I'd post a few lines from it. Aside from a lot of standard library functions, there are these requirements:

The Librarian serves as and directs the overall library operation providing mission, education, and quality of life support to all base personnel, their families, and retirees. (Is "mission support" support for missions the personnel are sent on? Or is this more of a "mission statement" of the naval base?)

Monitors funding allocations, meets expenditure targets, and justifies unfunded requirements. (This last phrase intrigues me. I mean, I guess this is what public libraries do all the time, but I've never seen it laid so bare.)

The last line of the posting is:
Occupants of this position must maintain the privacy of official work information and data and demonstrate the highest level of ethical conduct.

Do I even need to say anything about that? I recognize that individuals and government policy are two separate things, but I'm just really curious about the librarian who would both subscribe to the ALA Bill of Rights and take this job.

That teenage feeling

2008-02-03T09:19:00.000-05:00

Last night I went with a friend to see Neko Case in concert at the Calvin Theatre in Northampton. Someone else had told me she had the most beautiful voice he'd ever heard in person, and he was not kidding around. I've never heard anything like it. We were up in the second row of the balcony, and I was pretty much pinned against the back of my seat by this gorgeous wall of sound. And her songs are so sad, and funny, and real - the kind of truth that keeps following you and won't let you forget how uncomfortably close to you it is.

Anyway, it's like waking up the day after prom or something. (I didn't go to prom, but I'm trying to make a metaphor here.) I couldn't sleep; I don't want to do homework or even apply for this amazing job I saw an ad for on Friday. I'm thinking of roaming the greater Boston area with my iPod and being emo.

The library school student at a party

2008-01-28T22:20:00.001-05:00

I've had a variation on this conversation a couple of times in the last couple of days. My friend Michelle and I are discussing laminating it on a card and handing it out at parties to preempt people. Not that we're bitter. Our working theory is that people don't ask these sorts of questions of, say, investment bankers because it's obvious why someone would want to be an investment banker (i.e., big piles of money). Librarianship, however, remains a veiled mystery to some, as you shall see.

OTHER PERSON: So, what do you do?
ME: I'm in grad school.
OP: Oh, for what?
ME: Library science.
(Pause.)
OP: You have to have a master's for that?
ME: To be a professional librarian, yeah.
OP: Huh. So what are your classes about? The Dewey Decimal System? [Melvil Dewey is invariably mentioned.]
ME: Um, not really. [I try to explain a class I'm currently taking and why I find it cool.]
OP: Well. How'd you get interested in that?
ME: That's a good question.
OP: Do you really like to read?
ME: Yeah, but that's not really why. [I try to explain access to and organization of information succinctly. This rarely works.]

Last of the pre-semester pleasure reading

2008-01-27T17:11:00.000-05:00

Last night I finally finished What is the What by Dave Eggers. If you didn't know, it's a novel based heavily on the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "lost boys of Sudan." There's really not a whole lot I can say about the book without trivializing the unforgivable things that happen to Valentino and other children. Eggers did choose an interesting and effective way to frame the novel, and the narrative is devastatingly paced - the way this boy's life must have been. Each event just punches you in the chest. It's difficult to say if I recommend the book, or if I liked it. Basically, it just made me think about the utter pointlessness of this (and many other) conflicts, the way people use each other for retaliation, for volume of destruction. It's despicable.

Switching gears entirely. A friend of mine came back into town recently and lent me The Bell Jar on CD, as read by Maggie Gyllenhaal. I was pretty excited; MG is one of my favorite actresses. I read The Bell Jar probably when I was about fifteen or sixteen, and it had a huge impact on me. Hearing it again, I realized how good it is, how well-written. There are those unmistakable Sylvia Plath metaphors, like comparing some fixture (a lamp, I think) to a "death's head." And Gyllenhaal is really great at the tone - there are times when she'll pause between words and it's perfect. She also sounds, a good deal of the time, like the recordings I've heard of Plath reading her poems - a low voice, dropping each word as if she couldn't wait to get it out of her, was a little disgusted by it. Plath, though, always sounds older, though she only lived to be thirty. Hearing Maggie Gyllenhaal is like what I imagine this young college-age Plath sounded like. It's pretty spectacular.

Thank you Arts & Letters Daily

2008-01-24T17:53:00.000-05:00

Here's a really interesting article about marriage, thanks to Arts & Letters Daily. It touches on a couple of questions I was wondering about after reading that Lillian Rubin book.

That's all.

Want to help me with my homework?

2008-01-24T16:21:00.000-05:00

So, this spring I'm taking a course in subject analysis, which is...just what it sounds like, I guess. It includes the concepts of indexing, abstracting, and determining the "subject(s)" of a work, whether that work be a book, website, painting, etc. There's a big old project due at the end of the class, and I need to decide what I'm doing it on in the next few weeks.

From the assignment description:
"Examples of projects include databases (using any database management system), subject indexes to collections of Web resources, modified or newly developed thesauri, single-item indexes, and so on."

I found two examples of what people had done in the past; one was an index to a novel, the other a thesaurus (or controlled vocabulary) in the area of typography.

Why am I talking about this? Because I can't decide what to do. I was thinking about doing some collection of poems or letters, maybe a small archival collection (though I'd want to have more access to it than M-F 9-5). It has to be not already indexed, obviously. So, if any of you wonderful people out there have resources you need subject-analyzed or indexed, just tell me, and it could be a win-win situation. I'll come up with something eventually, but it would be cool if I could actually do something useful.

That's all for this afternoon. I lied again about writing about Dave Eggers! An entry on him will be forthcoming, as will discussions of my other courses (which start next week).

Just friends

2008-01-20T15:43:00.000-05:00

So, I said quite a while ago that I would write about a recently-read book, Just Friends by Lillian B. Rubin. Rubin conducted interviews with 300 people about their friendships, following up by contacting the people participants named as "friends." (There was a recent episode of This American Life, "The Ties That Bind," that also addressed the question of what we call "friends." It was really good.) I've had the book for awhile, but I'm glad I read it now, because I've been thinking a lot about human relationships: love, marriage, friendship, sex, and romance - and how all those things intersect. The idea, for instance (pretty common in our current society) that one person should fulfill all of these roles and needs for another one - is that harmful? Is it putting too much pressure on one person and relationship? I'm not sure.

Two short passages from the book address this question:
1. "The belief, so common in our society, that the new mate will satisfy all our needs makes it easier to set friends off to the side, to diminish their importance in the immediate afterglow of marriage when such expectations are highest." (118-119) (Rubin found that later on in marriage - or after divorce - friends seem more important again. All of these findings are, of course, highly generalized.)
2. A quote from a participant: "Just like there isn't a perfect friend, there isn't a perfect husband or lover. That's why people need both, and if they don't have them, there's going to be trouble." (141)

All right, I can totally understand that. But what about these ways we define our relationships with other people? I started thinking about this when I was flipping through a Christmas present, The Girl's Guide to Everything (which I think will be most useful for the car and financial advice). The "friendship" section, however, had a little sidebar that I can't quote exactly (not having it at hand), but it was something like, don't get confused or alarmed when you make a new friend and get really excited about her, as if you're falling in love. You're not gay - it's just the flush of new friendship. Talk about labels. One participant in Rubin's study, a psychologist, said, "I suppose there's a sexual tinge to every human relationship of any depth or intensity...." (105) - and I'm more inclined to agree with that. This is probably going to sound idealistic or foolish, but I think a day is coming when in order to have a measure of peace or happiness, we're going to have to admit that some of these set-up dichotomies (male/female, straight/gay, friend/spouse) are not exactly representative of people's real lives and experiences.

Okay, congratulations on reading all those really muddled thoughts. It's a huge question, obviously, and this book is just one perspective from one discipline. I also just want to say that I don't think monogamy (or marriage) is wrong or outdated or naive. Arrangements or denials of love depend upon the people in them.

Next time, less soapboxing, more Dave Eggers and Adam Felber. I promise.

It's starting to get a little political in here.

2008-01-08T17:37:00.000-05:00

I'm going to come back in a day or two and write about the new year and everything that's meant, as well as about the book I'm reading (Just Friends by Lillian Rubin), but for now, this:

I am reproducing the below editorial by Gloria Steinem in full because I'm pretty sure the NY Times takes down their links after a few days, and I found it really interesting and wanted to share it. Ms. Steinem and I might not support the same candidate, but I think she makes a lot of excellent points, and answers the questions that spring to mind when reading ("I'm not advocating a competition for who has it toughest"). It's interesting to me that one thing that "worries" her is that young women have this sort of backlash of hoping "to deny or escape the sexual caste system." While this isn't my personal reason for not supporting Hillary Clinton, I know the feeling. It's like (some, not all) young feminists are so tired of being shot down (the "we're all equal now" counter-argument) that they can't rustle up the outrage that the situation of women - even in this country - should provoke.

Women Are Never Front-Runners

by Gloria Steinem

THE woman in question became a lawyer after some years as a community organizer, married a corporate lawyer and is the mother of two little girls, ages 9 and 6. Herself the daughter of a white American mother and a black African father — in this race-conscious country, she is considered black — she served as a state legislator for eight years, and became an inspirational voice for national unity.

Be honest: Do you think this is the biography of someone who could be elected to the United States Senate? After less than one term there, do you believe she could be a viable candidate to head the most powerful nation on earth?

If you answered no to either question, you’re not alone. Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.

That’s why the Iowa primary was following our historical pattern of making change. Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).

If the lawyer described above had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago. Indeed, neither she nor Hillary Clinton could have used Mr. Obama’s public style — or Bill Clinton’s either — without being considered too emotional by Washington pundits.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

I’m not advocating a competition for who has it toughest. The caste systems of sex and race are interdependent and can only be uprooted together. That’s why Senators Clinton and Obama have to be careful not to let a healthy debate turn into the kind of hostility that the news media love. Both will need a coalition of outsiders to win a general election. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.

I’m supporting Senator Clinton because like Senator Obama she has community organizing experience, but she also has more years in the Senate, an unprecedented eight years of on-the-job training in the White House, no masculinity to prove, the potential to tap a huge reservoir of this country’s talent by her example, and now even the courage to break the no-tears rule. I’m not opposing Mr. Obama; if he’s the nominee, I’ll volunteer. Indeed, if you look at votes during their two-year overlap in the Senate, they were the same more than 90 percent of the time. Besides, to clean up the mess left by President Bush, we may need two terms of President Clinton and two of President Obama.

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

What worries me is that some women, perhaps especially younger ones, hope to deny or escape the sexual caste system; thus Iowa women over 50 and 60, who disproportionately supported Senator Clinton, proved once again that women are the one group that grows more radical with age.

This country can no longer afford to choose our leaders from a talent pool limited by sex, race, money, powerful fathers and paper degrees. It’s time to take equal pride in breaking all the barriers. We have to be able to say: “I’m supporting her because she’ll be a great president and because she’s a woman.”

December Part Three: We Know Not the Smallest Fraction of What There is to Know

2007-12-21T19:19:00.000-05:00

I have three things to write about, and they don't exactly go together, so I'm going to write about them in three parts.

On Wednesday at lunch, I started Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. I finished it at 10:30 at night. The memoir is about the year after her husband died, and I didn't notice till I was halfway through that there were some blue letters in the otherwise black-lettered title: J O H N, her husband's name. For some reason that made me sadder than anything else.

It perhaps goes without saying that Didion's writing is almost perfect. The way she describes grief pretty much is: the way irrationality becomes your state of being, the way other people simply cannot understand. Didion doesn't offer comfort or wishful thinking; she doesn't believe in God or an afterlife. But for some reason I felt better...more informed, maybe?...about death after reading the book. I'll let it speak for itself for a couple of passages.

One of the ideas she talks about is, basically, that every death is sudden:

In each of those long illnesses the possibility of death had been in the picture....Yet having seen the picture in no way deflected, when it came, the swift empty loss of the actual event....Each of them had been in the last instant alive, and then dead. (p. 149)

She also talks about the absolute void of no longer having someone around:

I am a writer. Imagining what someone would say comes as naturally as breathing. Yet on each occasion these pleas for his presence served only to reinforce my awareness of the final silence that separated us....We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know. (p. 196)

Finally, the way she starts the ending to the book is perfect.

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

Let them become the photograph on the table.

Let them become the name on the trust accounts.

Let go of them in the water.

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.
(p. 226)

All excerpts from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. New York: Vintage Books, 2006.

December Part Two: Illicit Collection

2007-12-21T18:45:00.000-05:00

I have three things to write about, and they don't exactly go together, so I'm going to write about them in three parts.

Before the semester ended, I read this short story by Sherman Alexie called "The Search Engine." (I'm actually not quite sure why it's called this; I'll have to think about it a little more.) The second scene in the story takes place in the library, where Corliss, the protagonist, is looking for a book. I include excerpts here.

She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with the library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. an impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks. (p.5)

This is pretty much how I feel when I walk into a library or a bookstore; I want to read every book. (Well, maybe not every book.) There's an inescapable sense of despair, too, that I never will.

Later, Corliss goes to check out the book:

The librarian was a small woman wearing khaki pants and large glasses. Corliss wanted to shout at her: Honey, get yourself some contacts and a pair of leather chaps! Fight your stereotypes!
...
[Corliss asks how many books never get checked out]
"We're talking sixty percent of them. Seriously. Maybe seventy percent. And I'm being optimistic. It's probably more like eighty or ninety percent. This isn't a library, it's an orphanage."

The librarian spoke in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves. (pp. 7-8)

I really like this passage, for many (perhaps obvious) reasons. Does it matter, for instance, that most library books are never checked out? Maybe, maybe not. Also: it seems true that librarians have a hard time remembering to return library books. If I move back to Louisville, it's going to be a problem, because I still have fines on my LFPL card.

Let me also just say for the records: I don't even own khaki pants or large glasses. As for Corliss's other speculations about this librarian, I won't get into them. I won't, for example, make any unsubstantiated claims that librarians are really good in bed compared to those in other professions.

Excerpts from "The Search Engine," in Sherman Alexie's book Ten Little Indians. New York: Grove Press, 2003.

December Part One: Wait! Wait! Don't Judge Me

2007-12-21T17:51:00.000-05:00

I have three things to write about, and they don't exactly go together, so I'm going to write about them in three parts.

First of all. Last night I went to a taping of Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me (the NPR news quiz...if you didn't know). It's taped every Thursday night in Chicago, and every time I've been in town I've tried to go...this time I actually planned ahead. And I thought you might like to know some of the gory details.

1. I saw Peter Sagal while we were in line to get into the auditorium. He looks like he's lost some weight, and he had a really nice coat on.
2. The auditorium isn't that big; I guess there were about 500 people in there (that's what the house manager said).
3. Carl Kasell is not amused. He was so professional the whole time while Peter and the panelists (Roxanne Roberts, Charlie Pierce, and Adam Felber) cracked up. Once in a while, Carl would smile, and you'd know that was a good joke.
4. They taped almost an hour and forty-five minutes worth of show - it will be interesting to see what ends up in the edited one-hour-long version.
5. After the show, Peter, Carl, and the panelists all roamed around the lobby. I met Peter and Adam Felber - and got Adam's novel Schrodinger's Ball signed. Adam Felber is kind of cute in this music-geek kind of way. The not-my-job guest was Herbie Hancock, and Adam was totally rapt, and asked about this specific keyboard he'd played.

Basically, it was an NPR dork's dream, and I think I may have creeped out Peter Sagal by telling him that my roommate and I looked up pictures of NPR personalities online this summer. What more could I ask for?