In brainstorming  this week’s blog post, I began wandering around the Internet and found a fascinating article on NPR.org. The article featured a blurb about a new book called This Book Is Overdue: How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All by Marilyn Johnson. It seems so insightful that, despite having requested it through the Library, I may just go out and purchase it for my own collection.

Lately, I’ve been really pondering what it means to be a librarian (or semi-librarian in my case, as I don’t have my Masters in Library Science yet). I won’t say that I have a hard time answering this question, especially since I’ve been working at the Library and learning more about librarianship in my day-to-day duties. But there are times when I’m at a loss for words when someone asks me “Why do we need librarians when there’s Google?” (Yes, I’ve been asked that, readers.)

The question of what it means to be a librarian is one that I’m always seeking answers to and the answers I’m finding are always fascinating. Here are a few books that spring to mind when I ponder my current occupation as semi-librarian/book wrangler:

Librarian as Bookmonger/Disseminator of Information: There was a book that I read about a year ago called How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read by Pierre Bayard. I have to confess that I didn’t finish reading the book and here I am attempting to talk about it. Within the first chapter of this book, Bayard discusses a passage in a book called The Man Without Qualities (don’t ask me if I’ve read it) in which an ideal librarian is one who “never reads more of the literature in his charge than the titles and the table of contents”, lest a librarian lose perspective in his role as disseminator of knowledge. I found that quote so astonishing that I stopped reading to make note of it…and hadn’t really started back.

Librarian as Social Worker/Psychologist/um, Mall Cop: Free For All: Oddballs, Geeks and Gangstas in The Public Library is a fascinating and uproarious book about the rigors of public library work. I liked this book because I could relate in certain ways to author Don Borchert, a free-spirited wage laborer whose path into the library field was, well, non-traditional (read: a happy accident, really).

Librarian as Book Aficionado: The Library At Night is an intriguing book by author and bibliophile Alberto Manguel that features fascinating musings on his own expansive book collection and on libraries in general. Though not a librarian by trade and profession, Manguel is a man possessed of a deep appreciation of books themselves. He loves not only the wealth of knowledge and beauty within a book but also the sight, the feel and perhaps even the smell of books.  I can imagine that quite a few librarians are initially attracted to this field by their simple love of books.

Celebrated British novelist Salman Rushdie will have a multimedia exhibit of his life and works at the Emory Library’s Schatten Gallery from February 26 to September 26, 2010.  The exhibit is called “A World Mapped by Stories: The Salman Rushdie Archive,” and as part of the opening festivities tomorrow (Friday, February 26) there will be a symposium with Rushdie and other authors.  Read the full press release to find out more details.

The DeKalb County Public Library has copies of many of Rushdie’s novels, including Shame, Midnight’s Children, which won the Man Booker Prize as well as the Best of Booker Prize in 2008, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and the Sea of Stories and about a kazillion others.

I remember when I was a little boy I was so disappointed to find out that most adult books didn’t have pictures. What fun is a book without pictures? I was outraged. Today, still, I think pictures are a great way to enhance the reading experience. Luckily, I’ve found many others who agree with me. Some of them are visual artists who have been inspired by literature or literary figures. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to highlight two blogs that show off a wide range of literary inspired art.

Picture Book Report

I love this blog. It’s a project where many different visual artists have agreed to re-illustrate the classics. Each artist chooses one book to work from, and each week we get new artwork illustrating key scenes from that book. Some of the books chosen so far have been Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, A Wrinkle in Time, Geek Love, and many others. The visual styles vary greatly from artist to artist. For me, it’s really illuminating to see someone else’s conception of a well loved classic.

Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobberin’ Time!!!

Yes, it’s a silly name for a blog. I’m not sure what the story behind the name is, but it’s a fun website where different artists draw or paint portraits of their favorite literary authors or characters. There must be over a hundred artists participating, and they’ve drawn everyone from H.P. Lovecraft and Kurt Vonnegut to Willy Wonka and Ignatius J. Reilly.

As you might remember from my podcasting blog post from a few months ago, I’m a huge fan of podcasts!  Recently I’ve also become a huge fan of short stories.  I don’t know why they are not more popular.  Think about it: people have less time than ever,  they are constantly on the move, and with so much to read and do, who has time to finish a tome like this one or this other one.  What a better format than a 20 page short story that you can read at the bus stop?  Better yet, a 20 minute short story you can listen to while working out?  I think the combination of podcasts and short stories is up there in the list of genius combinations with rice and beans, Romeo and Juliet, and jeans and t-shirts.  So without further ado, here are some of my favorite free short story podcasts:

Miette’s Bedtime Story Podcast

Miette reads both classic and contemporary short stories in her soothing English accent.  This is one of my favorite podcasts, and true to its name, I’ve fallen asleep many times while listening (though sometimes the stories gives me weird dreams).  The best part about this podcast is that all the stories are handpicked by Miette herself, who has unpredictably quirky but excellent taste.

The New Yorker Fiction Podcast

Every month in this podcast they ask one short story writer to pick and read any story from The New Yorker archives that has influenced them or that they just really enjoy.  Afterwards, the writer talks about the story with fiction editor, Deborah Treisman.  It’s interesting to see what stories different writers pick.  For instance, I thought it was surprising that George Saunders chose Isaac Babel’s short story “You Must Know Everything,”  (which was one of my favorite stories in this whole series, and introduced me to a great writer).

PRI: Selected Shorts Podcast

This podcast gets professional actors to read short stories in front of  a studio audience.  Each episode follows a theme for an hour, and usually contains 3 or 4 short stories.  The performances are top-notch and really draw you in.

It’s T-minus 10 hours before this blog post is due to appear on the Library’s website and I’ll be the first to admit that I’m panicking a little bit. My muse had been M.I.A until just now as I’m hammering out this idea.

This post was originally gonna be about New Year’s Resolutions (i.e “So how are you guys doing with your resolutions? I’m doing horribly! Go to the Library. Done.”). But that idea got boring so I decided to maybe post about not having anything good to wear in my closet and to perhaps recommend one of the Library’s style books (namely How To Have Style by Isaac Mizrahi). That idea didn’t really go anywhere either but I did remember one of my favorite ideas from the Mizrahi book.  Mizrahi suggests that before buying a whole new wardrobe, one good thing to do is to get some inspiration.

Inspiration is a good thing…and that brings us closer to the point of this blog post.  Mizrahi’s idea is to create an inspiration board–a large corkboard upon which to post photos and images of things that inspire you and can perhaps inspire your  personal style. I’ve written a list of the people/images that would fill my corkboard should I ever get around to creating one: dandelions, Ugly Betty, Eric Carle illustrations and libraries.  Then I started thinking of how great it would be if I could create a virtual corkboard filled with video clips and images that I like.

From there I did a Google search and found this video about an online corkboard of sorts called Spaaze.com. Now I’m sure, considering how tech savvy DCPL patrons are, this may not be news to many people. But in case it is, take a look at this clip:

I find this pretty fascinating and I look forward to tooling around with it. It’s also nice to know how to pronounce its name (for the past few hours I couldn’t decide if it was pronounced spas or spazz).

This has been a sad month for the world of books and readers. We lost Robert Parker, mystery writer, on January 19. Howard Zinn, the people’s historian, died January 27 and yesterday came the news that  J.D. Salinger, reclusive author of The Catcher in the Rye, has died at the age of 91. According to their obituaries, Parker and Zinn were writing up to the very end. Parker was especially prolific and at least two finished books will appear after his death; but Salinger famously stopped publishing 45 years ago, although he continued to write fiction.  The author fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep his unpublished letters private. If Salinger had novels and stories locked away, will his family decide to publish them? If they do, will you read them? I’m not sure I will. It seems disrespectful to read work the author so definitely did not want me to see. When unfinished works are published after an author dies,  I always wonder if the writer was really ready for me to see his work. We readers can be greedy and we want more of the characters and stories that we love, but I feel like I’ve arrived too early at a party. My company was requested—but not just yet, please.

I vividly remember my maternal grandmother being horrified the day she caught me drinking the milk from my cereal bowl.  According to her I was obviously being raised by wolves and not her child since she hadn’t raised a hooligan.  I was five.   Please understand that this is the woman who insisted I learn how to curtsy (knowledge, much like working quadratic equations, I have never needed) and wear white gloves to church.  Even well into adult hood she was correcting my manners, scolding me for greeting her neighbors on our evening stroll with a nice “hey.”  “Hey,” she explained in no uncertain terms, was not a proper greeting in western Kentucky.  I will spare you my response but I tell you all this to explain, in some small way, my fascination with etiquette books.

I think one of the things I loved the most about the character Elle Woods, portrayed by Reese Witherspoon in the movie Legally Blonde is the fact that her manners are impeccable.  Even when she has been publicly humiliated she manages to keep her dignity AND find kind things to say to the woman who humiliated her.  By movie’s end she is much beloved, not because she can teach an entire salon full of women the “Bend and Snap” but because she never fails to be kind or stoops to the level of those around her.   She rises to every awkward and painful situation because  her manners are deeply ingrained and being able to react gracefully gives her the confidence to go on.   To paraphrase Miss Manners, also known as Judith Martin, manners are not meant to be used as blunt instruments on others but to put the other person at ease.  Of course, Judith Martin is the same woman who, as a young reporter for the Washington Post, was banned from Tricia Nixon’s wedding because she made the Nixon women “uncomfortable.”  No doubt Elle Woods would have been a more welcome guest.

If you just want some snappy reading try any of Miss Manner’s books.  Her detailed chart on weddings is a scream.  Categories include: Excruciatingly Correct, Less Formal and Over Miss Manners’ Dead Body.  If you just want to make certain you don’t bring up any little hooligans of your own, we have an app, er, book for that too.

Miss Manners’ Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior by Judith Martin

What Do you Say when–Talking to People with Confidence on any Social or Business Occasion by Florence Isaacs

Civility Solution: What to Say When People are Rude by P.M. Forni

Teen Manners: From Malls to Meal to Messaging and Beyond by Cindy Post Senning

Being a Pig is Nice by Sally Lloyd-Jones

How Do Dinosaurs Go to School? by Jane Yolen

Mind Your Manners, B.B. Wolf by Judy Sierra

Smart Girl’s Guide to Manners: Secrets to Grace, Confidence and Being Your Best by Nancy Holyoke

Please is a Good Word to Say by Barbara Joose

In this week’s post, I will discuss one of the most interesting and variable of genres, time travel fiction. For our purposes, time travel simply means either going forward or backward in time (for a more detailed explanation of time travel, go here). Time travel fiction can generally be divided into two distinct catagories, time travel fantasy vs. time travel science fiction. Generally, the categorization is made based upon the method of time travel; stories involving time travel devices and technologies are considered part of the science fiction genre, whereas stories that involve time travel through supernatural, magical, or unexplained means are considered part of the fantasy genre. Additionally, time travel science fiction is more likely to concern itself with the possible consequences of time travel, such as the Grandfather Paradox.

While time travel fiction has been around for centuries (many different cultures possess ancient myths and folktales in which the characters engage in something akin to forward time travel; examples include the Hindu account of King Kakudmi and the Japanese tale of Urashima Taro), it was in the 1800s that the genre came into its own. One of the earliest examples of time travel in fiction takes place in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (the ghosts of Christmas past and future serve as the medium by which the travel occurs, putting this into the time travel fantasy category). The latter part of the century saw the publication of the seminal time travel novel, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, in which the protagonist builds a device which carries him to the far future, and eventually back again. The book marked the first appearance of a “time machine”, a term coined by Wells, and as such can be considered the first time travel science fiction novel (this is not entirely accurate, actually The Time Machine was his second published work involving the concept of time travel, the first being a short story titled The Chronic Argonauts, however The Time Machine was more successful and is responsible for popularizing the genre). Other novels published in the 1800s involving time travel include A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (which is an excellent example of time travel fantasy, as no explanation for the time travel is ever provided, and despite the protagonist’s introduction of ideas and technology well in advance of the time period, there is no examination of the potential consequences of this) by Mark Twain, and Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy, the third largest best-seller of its time, which features a young American male who falls into a hypnotic sleep and wakes over 100 years in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »

My favorite thing about the holiday season is the beautiful seasonal songs: sacred hymns, traditional carols and even holiday pop classics. Now that Christmas time has passed most radio stations will be returning to their regular tunes. But there is one more holiday classic I look forward to hearing: the New Year’s standard “Auld Lang Syne”.

This song is widely regarded as the work of Scottish poet Robert Burns, even though several of the lyrics can also be attributed to other writers of similarly-titled works (such as “Old Long Syne”, a 1711 ballad by James Watson). Legend has it that Burns wrote a letter to a friend in which he spoke lovingly of the Scottish phrase “auld lang syne” and of an old folk song that “thrilled through [his]soul”. It is in this letter that he compiled and composed what would live on to become an enduring and well-loved holiday classic.

One of the things that fascinates me most about “Auld Lang Syne” is that, even though it has become a traditional New Year’s song throughout the world, it is still a widely misunderstood tune. There seems to be something missing in translation as holiday revelers warble the title, which roughly translates to “old long since” (and I mean that’s a rough, literal translation…or so I hear) and stumble over the lyrics.  But a simple internet search has been more than enough to uncover many wonderful things about “Auld Lang Syne” that I never knew, including full Scottish lyrics, a few nice translations of the song, and this gorgeous rendition of the song as performed by Mairi Campbell and Dave Francis.

As the song says, upon further reflection, should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, perhaps we should take the time to kindly and fondly remember them. Over a pint perhaps at the pub? That’s neither here nor there, really. But this song does blossom into a moving, loving and heartfelt ballad…and strikes me as the perfect way to usher in a new year.

We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet for auld lang syne…

Today is the anniversary of the birth for two famous Georgians.  These two men made an impact in their respective fields. I knew the first one, Ty Cobb, was from Georgia but I was surprised that Ossie Davis was from Georgia.

Ty Cobb made his impact on the baseball world.  He was born in 1886 in Narrows, Georgia. He was known as the “Georgia Peach” and was considered an outstanding offensive player of all time.  He played for Augusta in the minor South Atlantic League. He set many Major League records. Several are still intact today.  Ty Cobb  was the first man elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame which was established in Cooperstown, Ohio in 1936.

Want to learn more about Ty Cobb? Check out these books.

Ty Cobb by Charles C Alexander

Cobb: a biography by Al Stump

Ossie Davis made an impact in films. He was born in Cogdell Georgia in 1917.  He was known as one of the busiest African-American Entertainers in the 1970’s.  In his career he wrote plays and books. He was a director, playwright and producer. He co-starred in a radio program with his wife in the mid-1970’s.

Want to learn more or see some of Ossie Davis’s work? Check out the following.

Black Directors in Hollywood by Melvin Donaldson

Finding Buck McHenry

Miss Ever’s boys

With Ossie Davis and Ruby: in this life together

Just Like Martin by Ossie Davis

Want more information about these gentleman but can’t get into a library? You can use the Library’s electronic resource, Biography Resource Center. This resource along with other electronic resources can be found on our Reference Database page.