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Libraries: The Dream of Civilization

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Add this to the Quote of Note file:

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz:

To destroy a library is to destroy the dream of civilization. To destroy the NY Public Library is to destroy our sixth and best borough; that beautiful corner of New York City where all are welcome and all are equals, and where many of us were first brought to the light.  The Library is the borough I love best and the one we need to fight hardest to preserve —for in its many branches and countless shelves lie our best hope for a better world.  It really is that simple: Save the Library, save New York. Save the Library, save the future.  Write Mayor de Blasio and remind him of his promises and of our covenant with our libraries and with our future.

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Cell Phone Etiquette

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Namely, it should be turned off from the time you enter the library to the time you leave it.

That is all.

no-cell-phone-sign
Or I’ll kill you.

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Creating Canon: When Book Lists Attack

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We had a bit of an outpouring of literary geekery the other night when I found this comment on a friend’s Facebook feed:

Ok most of list I agree with however not being a fan of C.S. Lewis I can say I didn’t get beyond The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I can even agree with The Da Vinci Code being on here, and don’t anyone get all crazy calling me a heretic, The Da Vinci Code was decent fiction regardless of the topic especially when read with Angels and Demons. But check out the very last book #100 I am sorry but there is no way that book can even be considered decently written.

Book #100 is Fifty Shades of Gray.

Learning that tidbit compelled me to look at the list in its entirety, which you can see here. I won’t re-post it here because it’s long and kind of tedious, and frankly unnecessary.

The list is titled “From Zero to Well-read in 100 Books.” I applaud the ideal and the effort that went into it. There’s a lot of extremely high-quality stuff (Twain, Conan Doyle, Chaucer, Orwell, Huxley, Plath, Voltaire, Poe, Dickens, Dickinson, Flaubert) in it. I have some question over the results, specifically the selection process.

The post, written by “Jeff,” is an attempt to define the term “well-read”:

“Well-read” […] has a number of connotations: a familiarity with the monuments of Western literature, an at least passing interest in the high-points of world literature, a willingness to experience a breadth of genres, a special interest in the work of one’s immediate culture, a desire to share in the same reading experiences of many other readers, and an emphasis on the writing of the current day.

The following 100 books (of fiction, poetry, and drama) is an attempt to satisfy those competing requirements. After going through several iterations of the list, one thing surprised me: there are not as many “classic” books that I associate with the moniker well-read, and many more current books than I would have thought. Conversely, to be conversant in the literature of the day turned out to be quite a bit more important than I would have thought.

That’s fine. But to my eyes the list is a jumbled compilation of established canonical literature, non-canon literature, and popular writing. That’s actually what our exchange was about: trying to figure out what the blogger was thinking when he created the list.

I can see C.S. Lewis, because even if Narnia is not your thing, The Screwtape Letters is canon. But Screwtape is not on the list while Narnia is.  The whole list is like that. A few quick examples that got our attention include:

Edith Wharton: Age of Innocence is there but House of Mirth is not.

Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights is there but Jane Eyre is not.

And why Cloud Atlas? I get that it’s an incredibly well structured book but not exactly taught in college lit courses.

Jeff also split up the Bible into The Gospels and The Pentateuch and then assigned them different slots on the list. (#43 and #77 respectively). Yes, it’s alphabetically ordered, but I have yet to find a literary bible study course where the professor makes that distinction. If it’s a study course taught at a religious institution it might make more sense, but it’s still confusing.

More bits: Inferno, but not Purgatorio or Paradiso? The Divine Comedy is a three-book set. It’s not like Dante just sat on the field of ice when he got to the Ninth Circle of Hell. Without redemption and bliss being attainable facets of spiritual life, there can be no value in punishment. Granted, Inferno is the volume most people have heard of, but . . .

Dracula made the list but Frankenstein did not. Neither did Stevenson’s Jekyll & Hyde or anything by Oscar Wilde or H.G Wells.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved made the list but The Bluest Eye did not.

The Illiad and The Odyssey made the list but The Aeneid did not. Yes, I know the Greeks remain more popular than the Romans, but you needed a familiarity with both to consider yourself well-read when I was an undergrad.

Ulysses by Joyce is there but Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not, which I think is a mistake. Finnegan’s Wake isn’t there either, but to be honest, I’m okay with that.

No William Faulkner. That’s just wrong. No Truman Capote, either. Yes, Capote is an acquired taste, but In Cold Blood is totally canon.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is there (if mistitled), but nothing by Alice Walker is. Has Jeff never read The Color Purple? Spielberg made a surprisingly good film about it and everything.

One of our thread’s contributors figured out early in the exchange that it seemed as if Jeff fostered a desire to be thought well-read by people he imagined to be educated, but didn’t actually know what knowledge that sort of education called for or what the American canon contained. So he put down canonical authors that he remembered hearing about, and maybe read some of their work. And he put down books that he and his social circle liked:

Ayn Ran: Atlas Shrugged. No.

Douglas Adams: The Hitckhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Works for me.

Doris Lessing: The Golden Notebook: Not my favorite, but not a bad choice.

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale. Excellent choice.

And of course, E.L. James: Fifty Shades of Gray. I would rather read Atlas Shrugged. Yes, I am serious. At least the sex scenes in that book are interesting.

So, Jeff, if you’re reading this, please pop a reply and defend #100 or any other of your choices. I’d really be interested in hearing how you came up with this list.

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A Shameless Plug

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As I’ve mentioned here before, I’m trying to get back into the game of fiction writing. Along the way, I’ve met plenty of awesome people who got involved in the game after I left, or never left and went on to do amazing things. Charles Barouch is one of the latter. We worked together years ago when we both wrote game review columns for Gateways magazine, which has long since disappeared into the mists of time.

Charles now had his own small press, HDWP Books, and is currently producing an intriguing short fiction series called “Theme-Thologies.” The idea is simple: create a theme for a book then find the best stories possible to fill the space.

I’m not in any of the books currently on the shelf but I am working to get a piece into one of the future anthologies. I do believe in the project and the staff and writers involved, however, so I’ll be putting some cash down for these titles. You may consider doing the same. If nothing else, let’s share this far and wide and get some exposure for these guys.

 Charles’s post as it appeared on his G+ account earlier today reads as follows:
I need $6
You are all nice people. I’m sure if I asked you for $6, just because I needed it — or even wanted it — a lot of you would reach into your pocket. I’m not asking for me. Well, not exactly for me…
Here’s my problem: I need to jumpstart the sales on Theme-Thology. These are really good books but we aren’t visible enough. Can you spare $6 to help 18 authors and artists?A Promise: From now until April 21st, if you buy the first two Theme-Thologies (total: $5.98) and post a review of either of them (on Amazon, B&N, or Kobo, or GoodReads), I will send you the first eBook from our new science fiction series: Interrogative: Tiago and the Masterless. Just post a link to the review at http://www.hdwpbooks.com/books/thankyou and the book is yours.A Prize: Additionally, from now until April 21st, if you buy any of the first three Theme-Thologies ($2.99 each), I will enter you into a drawing to win one of the following eBooks: one of five different Mike Reeves-McMillan books (City of Masks, Hope and the Patient Man, Hope and the Clever Man, Realmgolds, Gu), A Noble’s Quest by Ryan Toxopeus, Adjacent Fields by Charles Barouch, or The Tower’s Alchemist by Alesha Escobar.
Just buy the Theme-Thology of your choice and post at http://www.hdwpbooks.com/books/thankyou.● Already bought them? Post a review (on Amazon, B&N, or Kobo, or GoodReads) and I will send you the first eBook of our new science fiction series: Interrogative: Tiago and the Masterless and put you in the drawing. Just post a link to the review at http://www.hdwpbooks.com/books/thankyou.● Received the Adjacent Fields signed, limited edition print book at Spectrum 2013? Post a review (on Amazon, B&N, or Kobo, or GoodReads) and I will send you the first eBook of our new science fiction series: Interrogative: Tiago and the Masterless and put you in the drawing. Just post a link to the review at http://www.hdwpbooks.com/books/thankyou.

Full Details Here: http://www.hdwpbooks.com/books/thankyou

Buy if you can, click on one of the share buttons below if you can’t.

 

Entrepreneursim in Libraries

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This looks extremely interesting, from the ERIL-L listserv:

To all Librarians, Entrepreneurs, and
Innovators:

We seek pioneers, adventurers and inventors to tell
their stories.  The libraries of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro
and Wake Forest University are organizing a conference entitled,
"Inspiration, Innovation, and Celebration: an Entrepreneurial Conference for
Librarians".  We strive to provide a forum for you to share your path to
change.

Conference
dates: June 3rd and 4th, 2009 in the Elliott University Center on the campus of
the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

The mission for this conference is threefold:
1)
To share and celebrate entrepreneurial accomplishments in libraries
2) To
inspire each other to innovate in our libraries
3) To create a community of
interested librarians who will perpetuate the discussion beyond the
conference

Entrepreneurial activity may have taken place in areas such
as: instruction, services, processes, facilities or resources, but this list is
not exhaustive.  We’re interested in hearing about your process and the
successful presentation could include the following:

·  Identification of an
unmet need or development of an innovative approach that extends the scope of
service 

·  A non-traditional
approach to fulfilling our mission as libraries

·  A description of how a
solution was designed and implemented including any obstacles that were
encountered (financial, structural, human…)

·  A discussion of lessons
learned or what you would do differently next time and the project’s current
status   

·  A description of the keys
to success 

·  A tone that inspires us
all to become more entrepreneurial in our libraries, however small the
project


Format:

·  Sessions should be one
hour in length to include 45 minute presentation with 15 minutes for
Q&A. 

·  We will accept panel
discussions


Timing:

·  If interested, submit a
letter of intent – a one paragraph description of your presentation –
immediately.  Those who submit a letter of intent by September 1st will receive
priority consideration.  

·  Please submit your final
proposal by 5:00 pm on Monday 1 November 2008; it should include a detailed
outline of the presentation with a textual description of the entrepreneurial
project. 

·  Photos, drawings or other
multi-media aids are welcome; display space will be available at the conference.
 

·  Invitations to present
will be delivered by mid-December

·  Send your submission
to:

Rosann Bazirjian
Dean of University
Libraries
The University of North Carolina – Greensboro
P.O. Box
26170
Greensboro, NC  27402-6170
E-mail:
Rosann_Bazirjian@uncg.edu
Phone: (336) 334-3418
Fax:  (336)
334-5399

Conference Steering Committee:  Rosann Bazirjian,
Wanda Brown, Michael Crumpton, Mary Krautter, Mary Beth Lock, Barry Miller, Mary
Scanlon

 

Peak Oil & Libraries 3.0: Collapse-Proofing Ourselves

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I recently bought (pre-ordered) a copy of Reinventing Collapse : The Soviet Example and American Prospects by Dmitry Orlov.  Orlov is a Peak Oiler and his writing on the subject is easily distinguishable from his contemporaries because he spent a lot of time in the Soviet Union during its collapse from Socialist Superpower to Just Another Asian Country With Nukes and a Funny Alphabet.  In other words, he’s seen the mighty fall and it wasn’t pretty. His work can be seen at his Club Orlov blog and if you have time, I’d suggest giving it a good look.

[Read more…] about Peak Oil & Libraries 3.0: Collapse-Proofing Ourselves

Peak Oil & Libraries 2.0

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First, a great big thank you to Tom and Phil of EscapingNYC for pointing out that Library Journal has finally published an article about peak oil and what libraries should be thinking about in terms of dealing with it. (If you guys ever do manage to escape, please leave a forwarding address.)

It’s a good article overall, but I’ve got a few relatively tiny problems with it. The author has clearly read a fair amount of James Howard’s Kunstler’s work, which is great, he’s a terrific source for this subject. But then she writes:

If grand-scale fuel conservation and creation of alternative
liquid fuels had begun two decades ago, the results of the decline
would have gone largely unfelt. The demand for oil would have been
lower and the rate of decline in production slower.

Possible, but I think unlikely, if only because alternative-liquid fuels (biodiesel, ethanol and liquefied coal to name three)  are a scam and were just as big a scam then,  just less heavily subsidized scams than they are today.  Note that the term "scam" here means "requires greater energy input per unit of production than is contained within that unit of production."  Ethanol is a particularly cruel joke in this regard, as it’s made from corn, which can be, I dunno, eaten by hungry people. (Do you think it coincidental that food riots erupt in 37 countries just as our supply of ethanol explodes? I don’t.)

I think what we could very easily have done twenty years ago was refurbish, modernize and expand our rail and water-based transportation infrastructure. We also could have built better, more fuel-efficient cars and trucks, re-thought how electricity was generated and delivered, and not built more 3,000 sq. ft. houses than we could afford to buy.  Oh, and we could have not exported nearly all of our manufacturing jobs to the Far East. All of these points have been made by Kunstler in the recent past.

Oh, well. Pet peeve over. It is an excellent article, and you should read  it.

Stuff has happened since I first starting posting on this subject.  I’m told by friends who have relatives in the oil business that had you suggested even a decade ago, with oil at $12 per barrel that we’d see such a remarkably steep price curve, due to stagnant supply and climbing international demand more than anything else, you’d have been laughed out of the room. (For the record, some did, and they were.) And I don’t think that Peak Oil means the end of the world as we’ve known it, or even the end of libraries. But I do think it means that our current model of converting absolutely everything to digital media will be more expensive to maintain and more difficult to implement, if only because if the increased risk of losing access to those collections due to–of all things–lack of electricity.

Electricity is easy: take a pair of magnets, wrap them with copper wire and spin them around each other, and you get an electric current. Simple. What’s a good deal less simple is how to provide a particular type of electrical current–in the case of the U.S., 120 volts at 60Hz frequency–in quantities sufficient to power 150 million+ homes and their attendant gadgets, gizmos, and appliances in a consistent manner.

"Consistent" in this case means, "always cheap and always on," neither of which will be a given 10 years from now. (Heck, it’s not always a given now.) In 10 years, the word may come to mean "10 consecutive  hours a day, Monday through Friday." 20 years from now the concept of a reliable civilian power grid could well be ancient history.  So imagining how to revitalize our electricity-based ILS’s and OPACs using the assumption that we’ll always have all the PCs in the library  at our disposal may not be the best use of our time.  Granted, such things will help our patrons  in the short term (if 10 years is a short term to you), but the real question is one that the author touched on in her article: you’re maintaining a public library, and resources are short;  your computers are old, and getting older. They break more often and each time, it takes longer for someone to actually fix it.  Worse, the parts needed to maintain it are becoming more difficult to find at any price.  People will naturally move away from exclusive reliance on the PCs and  go back to the stacks where the "real" books are. Also the supply of brand new books will shrink as deliveries become less predictable (and the mass market paperback publishing industry goes belly up, one publisher at a time) such that donations become primary sources for our collection.

We may want to think about how we’ll track our stacks materials and update our card catalogs under those conditions.

Known Veterans of the Frater Family

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I hate memorial Day. Specifically, I hate the jingoism, the militaristic bullshit and the monumental levels of hype one hears pretty much on every television, radio, and in every newspaper and magazine, and on God knows how many internet sites, for these 24 hours. Statism is bad when it’s tolerable, it’s disgusting when it’s prostituted for mere political gain.

That said, I was born here, and at least 2 branches of my immediate family risked literally everything to come here in the early part of the 20th century, and for all it’s warts, it’s home. It’s a home that numerous individuals lived and died to defend and protect, and for their service, I am grateful.

My only real experience with the U. S. armed forces has been financial: I sold a couple of hard drives to the Navy and the Marines way back when I was in the computer parts business. The navy ship in question, whose quartermaster ordered the equipment was the U.S.S. Enterprise, which, being the science fiction nerd I am and will always be, pretty much made my whole year. But asthmatics with crappy vision are generally exempt from military service, so a civilian I remain, despite high scores of marksmanship at the local rifle range.

Members of my family, however, have served, for a wide variety of reasons, and I’m going to honor them and their memories by putting their names and service information here. You’ll notice that  there’s more information on some than others, but in every case I listed as much as I could find.

Many thanks to my grand-uncle, Fred Frater, for maintaining these family records.  (Fred’s half-brother, Hal Frater, was my grandfather; Hal passed away this past February 3, only 30 days sort of his 99th brthday. Hal’s wartime service was  spent working for the War Dept. illustrating equipment manuals for the Army and Navy.)

KNOWN VETERANS OF THE FRATER FAMILY   

Captain Garret Winegar, 12TH Mass. Regiment, Revolutionary War; enlisted, Continental Army, America, N.U. (see Revolutionary Rolls, Mass. Archives, Chapter 45, page 406)

John N. Francisco, Civil War, Union Forces, 1st Lt. Co. K, 22nd Infantry, Iowa Volunteers. Wounded, Port Gibson, Miss. (Battle of Vicksburg), (Grandparent of Jannibell O. S. Frater)

Edward W. Knapp, Civil War, Pvt., Co. E, 9th Regiment, Iowa Infantry Volunteers, (Grandparent of Janibell)

Walter A. “Skip” Smith, WWII, Seabee Pacific

Janibell O. Smith Frater, Army Nurse, WWII, served 1943-46 (wife of Fred)

Fred Stanley Frater, 82nd Airbone, WWII (Husband of Janibell)

Albert R. “Al” Frater, USMC, Vietnam, 1965-66

Arthur Frater, Major, U.S. Army, 9 years service

Jules Frater, served  in Europe

Ronald Wherely, U.S.M.C

Tom Wilbean, U.S. Navy

Stan Smith, Served in Vietnam

Dick Memmary, U.S. Navy

Julian Frankel, U.S. Army, served in Korea

Happy Memorial Day!

The Sky Is Falling . . . But Not Today

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If you read my last post–which I think of as "yesterday’s" but is really more like "two days ago’s"–you know that some very smart, observant, and well-spoken individuals think that the Era of American Participatory Democracy is either on the ropes or gone for good, depending on your reading of their arguments.  That, if true, would suck.  At the very least we’d have to deal with the fact that we’ve sold out our collective ability to make stuff, do stuff, and solve real problems in real time for cheap toys and doodads, which break if you play too roughly with them.

But as if that were not enough, now comes this. There is a decent chance (estimated at 10%, which is significant but not something to really lose sleep over on a nightly basis) that something big enough to punch a hole in our planet will hit us some time this century. That’s not really news to people who have any interest in astronomy or geology–it’s a big planet, and the solar system is crowded, and pieces of space junk are always hitting us or coming close to hitting us. Less often and to lesser effect now than, say, 1 billion years ago, when the solar system was  getting the last kinks worked out and mountains routinely punched holes big enough swallow Ontario in the planets and their moons. Until now this has not been that big a problem.  Mostly because, well, we’ve only been here a short time, nearly all of which (until just recently) has been spent dealing with more immediate concerns like hunting, gathering, and growing food and sheltering ourselves from the elements.

Think of it this way. We at some point all do the same thing, which is sit on our beds, and watch as the sunbeams stream in through the window, illuminating every speck of dust in the air before splashing down on to the bedspread and floor.  I’m still fascinated by that.  It’s possible to stare at this display of the sheer thickness of the air just in our bedrooms–air  filled with tiny particles shed by anything and everything around us, including dust, pollen, bits of skin, hair (both from us and our pets), plaster and insulation from the ceiling–for hours. Now, these things are all tiny compared to our heads, or even our eyes, yet the space around us is filled with them, but since they don’t bother us, we don’t even think about them. Then one day, some speck of God knows what hits your eyeball at exactly the right speed and angle and you feel a shooting pain in your eye, so you blink, then you stagger, maybe you fall down, and the only thing on your mind is how the hell did that happen?

Well, it happened because your luck ran out. It’s the odds. Ten billion billion trillion specks of dust whizz past you or smack into a part of you that’s not sensitive enough to notice, but eventually, your luck runs out, then owie!!

The solar system isn’t that different. The biggest difference is that the Earth is an eyeball that’s roughly 8,000 miles wide, and the last real owie that hit is was about 65 million years ago. The result was a massive underwater crater near the Yucatan Peninsula and a change in  environment that led to the extinction of the dinosaurs.  It’s estimated that the rock which caused that was something like a mile wide which is pretty tiny compared to a lot of the stuff that’s out there now. But out there these falling rocks remain, just waiting for that ever so elusive gravity nudge that sends it on a course towards another major owie.

The thing we have going for us is that fact that we are here.  We actually have the tools and knowledge we’d need to see something like a mile-wide rock from space while it’s still far enough away to do something about it.  We aren’t doing much at the moment, which is disappointing because movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon aside,  it really is just a matter of time and  the chance of any given event happening is 100% if your time horizon is long enough.  Clearly the editors of The Atlantic though it was worth a cover story.

Anyway, read the article. Enjoy!

Our Democracy That Was

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It’s an interesting exercise in evaluating the current state of politics in the U.S. to take a good, long look at Bill Moyers’ new book, Moyers on Democracy (excerpted by Truthout.org, here) and compare it to Chalmers Johnson’s review of Sheldon S. Wolin’s new book, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, (discussed here on Alternet.org).

The two authors take parallel courses through their research and observations, but they both imagine subtle differences to the similar conclusion: the American ideal of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" is just about over.  Moyers believes that time is running out to save our souls and the ticks are getting closer together, while Wolin has (to Johnson’s reading) chronicled the end of Our Way of Life.  If so, it would be a sad day indeed, since it’s one thing to realize that the Greedheads have won but it’s quite another to realize that you’ve been helping them win all along. 

Anyway, read the articles and if you’re feeling especially flush, buy the books.  Enjoy!

Mark the Date, 6/13/08

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Faced with an absolute abundance of stuff to write about (work, articles, the recent Nylink and NYTSL events just to name a few) I am choosing to alert the general public that June 13, 2008 will once again be "Blog As If It’s The End Of The World As We Know It" day.

Details are here.

I go now to prepare and try to structure a week of posts.