28 Friday Mar 2008
Posted in Uncategorized
Stephen D. Levitt, author of the wildly popular book on weird statistics, Freakonomics, has just reviewed Philip Pullman’s fantasy novel The Golden Compass on his blog over at the New York Times. Did he like it? Not so much. As Hanna wrote when she sent me the link, “okay, this has to be the fastest and most complete pan of a book I have read in a long time.” Check it out and have yourself a giggle.
11 Tuesday Mar 2008
Posted in our family
On Saturday, Hanna and I went shopping at McIntyre & Moore’s, this spiffy used bookstore in Davis Square, near Tufts University. Their fiction section and children’s book section are paltry, but they have extensive nonfiction titles of all sorts. The impetus for the shopping trip (besides needing a Saturday outing) was the fact that they’re moving and having a 40%-off sale of their entire stock! Hanna walked away with a whole stack of books on Irish history and I picked up a book on the history of sex education in the United States that just became the 900th volume in my librarything catalog. I’m not sure what that says about me, other than that I’ve more or less managed to make up for all that weeding I did back when I initially cataloged my library in 2006.
06 Thursday Mar 2008
Posted in linkspam
Through a complex series of mental associations having to do with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, library student jokes about cross-referencing and the Super Tuesday election hoopla, I suddenly felt the urge to share my favorite political quotation of all time from Sara Vowell’s essay “The Nerd Voice,” written in the wake of the 2000 election (Gore v. Bush, in case anyone has forgotten):
I wish it were different. I wish we privileged knowledge in politicians, that the ones who know things didn’t have to hide it behind brown pants, and that the know-not-enoughs were laughed all the way to the Maine border on their first New Hampshire meet and greet. I wish that in order to secure his [or her!] party’s nomination, a presidential candidate would be required to point at the sky and name all the stars; have the periodic table of the elements memorized; rattle off the kings and queens of Spain; define the significance of the Gatling gun; joke around in Latin; interpret the symbolism in seventeenth-century Dutch painting; explain photosynthesis to a six-year-old; recite Emily Dickinson; bake a perfect popover; build a short wave radio out of a coconut; and know all the words to Hoagy Carmichael’s ‘Two Sleepy People,’ Johnny Cash’s ‘Five Feet High and Rising,’ and ‘You Got the Silver’ by the Rolling Stones. After all, the United States is the greatest country on the earth dealing with the most complicated problems in the history of the world—poverty, pollution, justice, Jerusalem. What we need is a president who is at least twelve kinds of nerd, a nerd messiah to come along every four years, acquire the secret service code name Poindexter, install a Revenge of the Nerds screen saver on the Oval Office computer and one by one decrypt our woes.
[The Partly Cloudy Patriot, 116-117]
That is all.
26 Tuesday Feb 2008
Posted in linkspam
30 Wednesday Jan 2008
Posted in linkspam
Classes start in earnest this week, so I can tell the next few days I’m going to be scrambling around getting used to the new schedule and so on. More to come on what I’m actually taking. I also have a backlog of more “serious” posts I want to write, including a couple of book reviews. I’ll try to get to them, slowly but surely, over the next few weeks. But meanwhile, in honor of returning to library school, here’s a bit of satire:
And here I thought my bibliomania was, well, kinda normal. Shows you what freakish circles I travel in!
16 Wednesday Jan 2008
Posted in book reviews
Tags
Finally getting around to posting this . . .
Although I’m not a big fan of the ubiquitous New Years Resolution (though the tradition has just scored points for giving me the opportunity to use one of my favorite words, “ubiquitous”), I always enjoy year-end round-ups that let you look back on reflect on all the awesome (and heinous) things that have happened in the past twelve months.
Being me, naturally, these reflections usually have a lot to do with reading. So, in the spirit of the season, here is my top ten list of favorite fiction and non-fiction reads of 2007. Many of which, you will notice, have already made appearances on the FFLA in the past few months. If I’ve posted about the titles previously, I tried not to be overly-long-winded here.
Eligible for the top ten was any book I read for the first time January 1 through December 31, 2007–that is, they did not have to be new releases, just new to me. I was going to do top tens of each, but I didn’t have quite enough to split it (blame the dearth on grad school). So I shaved a few titles of and made it just ten.
And it’s “favorite” rather than “best” intentionally: I really think taste in literature is so extremely subjective, that it would be hubris on my part to assign “best” to anything here. Let’s just say, they rocked my world, and it’s just possible they’d rock yours too!
The following are arranged alphabetically by author.
Favorite Reads of 2007:
Fiction
Inkheart, Cornelia Funke. A middle-grade novel about a girl and her father who discover they have a special, and dangerous, talent for words. Special note: I encourage you to check the book out before the film version hits the screen (though I’m excited about that, too).Nonfiction:
Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption, by Laura Miller. I’m geeky enough to have devoured this geeky tome on the culture and economic dynamics of the 20th century book business. (Just so you know I read stuff unrelated to feminism . . .)22 Saturday Dec 2007
Posted in book reviews
This weekend, I’m heading home to Holland, Michigan (yep, it still feels like “home”) for Christmas . . . by train. It’s twenty hours from Boston to South Bend, Indiana, by Amtrak, and in order to pass the time I’m taking–what else?–a big stack of books. Here’s what’s in the Nina Totin’ Bag.
Spending: A Utopian Divertimento, by Mary Gordon. I’ve actually already started this novel, which is about a woman artist and her self-appointed muse, about art and work, relationships and sex, money and ethics, feminism, and a whole lot more.
Dragonhaven, by Robin McKinley. I’ve been saving this one for a couple of months. It’s always a treat when one of your favorite authors comes out with something new.It is entirely possible that between now and Saturday, noon, when the train pulls out of South Station, I will have added a volume or two to the collection. I have this 25% Barnes & Noble coupon burning a hole in my pocket and I think the Prudential Center has a copy of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, which I’ve been meaning to read since July, and which I know I will need to own since it will be read with pencil in hand to make notes in the margins. And Mom tells me I simply must read Lauren Child’s Clarice Bean Spells Trouble . . .
Then again, I have to fit those Christmas presents in somewhere too.
12 Wednesday Dec 2007
Posted in think pieces
. . . Not if you see it on the big screen, at least according to Hanna Rosin’s review, “How Hollywood Saved God” in The Atlantic Monthly.
While I am very much looking forward to seeing the movie adaptation of The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, on the big screen this weekend (my first movie in the theater since . . . um . . . well, before I came to Boston, I swear on both volumes of my Shorter OED) it’s been interesting to hear some of the debate about the film, the books, and their treatment of religious issues. While I’m not sure I would go so far as to label it a “controversy,” as it was billed on this morning’s “On Point” discussion on NPR, it does seem to have stirred up a little, shall we say, dust in Catholic and Evangelical circles.
In the books on the other hand . . .
“On Point” actually had some extremely thoughtful guests (Ms. Rosin among them) who were discussing the theological themes in both His Dark Materials, the book trilogy, and the movie-makers decisions to elide most of the deeper re-workings of Biblical and spiritual themes. Professor of Religion Stephen Prothero won my heart with his passionate defense of literature as a way for young people to explore the Big Questions and engage in meaning-making for themselves, as well as his delight in Lyra, the series’ protagonist, as a feminist heroine:
My daughters get dressed up as Hermione for Halloween and for the Harry Potter parties, and you know Hermione is a wonderful character but she’s sort of carrying the water for Harry Potter, who gets to be the hero . . . and I love that about the books [that Lyra gets to be the heroine]. I think it’s wonderful to tell girls to question authority, to make a little trouble, to be suspicious when people talk in God’s name as if God is speaking to them through an earphone.
Even more radical, of course, is Pullman’s project of writing an “alternative Genesis” with Lyra as a new Eve whose initiation into sexual awareness is the catalyst for redemption. The narrative is an explicit “response to the church,” Rosin points out, drawing on her interviews with Pullman himself, “this idea of patriarchy and misogyny and the idea that she should be Eve, and she should re-write the story of Eve.”
“And I would argue,” Prothero follows up, “that what we have there is something quite like feminist theology . . . that we shouldn’t be thinking about God as this old man with a beard in the sky . . . why do we have to have the woman be the villain here? Why can’t she be the hero?” Amen.
Plus, I hear that seeing the daemons on screen is worth the price of a ticket. So see you at the theater!
As an aside: My one reservation about the books, incidentally, is the way they are being marketed–much like the Harry Potter books–to a pre-teen audience when they are actually much more dense and in some ways more frightening, than Rowling’s series.
Also, Tom Stoppard wrote one of the early screenplays–wouldn’t you love to have seen that version??!
16 Friday Nov 2007
Posted in library life
Tonight, I am headed to the Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair to admire, well, antiquarian books, manuscripts, and prints, in an atmosphere of bibliomaniacal excitement. A group of us are headed down after work, and my friend Hanna is meeting us there. If I buy anything I’ll report back with pictures! I doubt anything will be in my price-range (<$25) though. Oh, well, it's fun to window shop!
I also thought I’d share this link from the MHS website. It’s our monthly object of the month, which a number of archives have started doing as a way to increase the visibility of their holdings online, and give people a taste of what sort of resources archives have to offer. MIT also has a fun collection on their site.
In the MHS collection, I particularly like the entry showcasing eleven-year-old Sara Putman’s dairy, with an account of her 1862 visit to the aquarial gardens, which was an early Boston aquarium.
Everyone have a good weekend!
12 Friday Oct 2007
Posted in life writing
Well, I just finished my third job for the day–this morning I worked at Barnes & Noble from 7-11am; then I had my first shift at the Massachusetts Historical Society from 1-4:45pm; then I finished up a batch of carrier additions for Lean Logistics after supper. Hopefully this will be the only day I put in that many shifts! I will be finishing up next week at Barnes & Noble, and start my regular schedule at the MHS on October 22nd. Everyone has been wonderful, and I am so excited to start in earnest (but grateful I will not be doing double-duty until then)!
I thought I would take a moment, before finishing the final draft of my Evaluation of Information Services evaluation proposal, to sit down and write a little bulletin about what I have been doing this week in library school (I am still on the fence about the whole am-I-an-archivist/am-I-a-librarian divide; I’m glad my new job title is “Library Assistant.”).
I knew I had arrived in library science school when I went out to Blick art supplies and purchased a dozen soft lead pencils and a pencil case this week. I need to take notes at my internship, and other various places where pens are highly discouraged, and I was always finding myself without the proper tools. I am very pleased, and may soon (my archivist-historian friends assure me) find myself preferring pencils above all other writing implements. I have not taken the next step, which would be to start taking “notes” using a laptop and digital camera.
I also know I am in grad school because I have become extremely forgetful. Since being offered the MHS job last week I have locked myself out of my room once, left my wallet at work, forgotten my T-pass for the subway, and (the crowning achievement) left my mobile phone in a cab on my way home from Barnes & Noble Sunday night . . . in my defense, it was 2am following music inventory, but still . . . the cab driver was kind enough to return it unscathed the following day on his rounds through the neighborhood.
This week in classes:
In other news, the course offerings for Spring 2008 were hot off the press yesterday, at least in the History department. I find myself torn between “9/11 Narratives,” taught by an Islamic World historian with a frightening amount of energy, and “Lives of Faith: Early American Religious Biography & Autobiography.” In library science, I will most likely be taking Oral History and Cataloging.
. . . and then I stopped by the public library on my lunch hour today to return a few books, and somehow left with a few more: Pushed: The Painful Truth about Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care; Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks; and The Secret History of the Pink Carnation (I’m reading the series in reverse order). If I find any time to actually read any of these titles, you’ll hear about it here . . .
the feminist librarian 