January 2012
“Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some...”
– Virginia Woolf
Happy 130th birthday, V.W.!
“My battles as a writer are battles with that part of myself that thinks I’m...”
– Mary Karr
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“America’s librarians, in town for a big conference, had descended on the...”
– The Librarians of America Just About Destroyed Wild Salsa on Saturday Night
I know some people who were at this conference. (ALA Midwinter). I’d like to think they were part of this crowd.
“Did the librarians drink all your tequila?” I asked him.
He looked exhausted.
...
“I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not...”
– Margaret Atwood looks back at writing The Handmaid’s Tale.
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“There were no minutes or seconds for the ancients. Neither the postman nor the...”
– Paul Valery
I just saw the most bizarre vanity license plate: “MCDISNEY”. I can’t decide - is it an MC that raps about Disney, or a guy who wants McDonalds to merge with Disney?
“Maggie Smith’s Dowager Countess is a venerable type: part Trollope’s Mrs....”
– The Literary Pedigree of Downton Abbey (via The Millions)
The library’s fancy new automated book return system went down again, forcing me to be in at 7:30 to fix it. If this keeps up, we’ll have to go back to our old method of handling materials:
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Today at the Reference Desk
Coworker: It's a madhouse today.
Me: I think it's because Wikipedia's on strike. The public finally remembered about us.
“I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes:...”
– Martin Luther King Jr., Letter From A Birmingham Jail.
“A public reading from “The Dead” was due to take place in the tiny shop, but an...”
– Mark O’Connell, Has James Joyce Been Set Free?
“It seemed like there was some opportunity there that I might write something...”
– Daniel Handler
I just started a Google Plus page for the library. Given how little activity G+ has though, it feels like opening a branch in a ghost town.
I just found out that, as part of ALA’s Teen Tech Week, my coworker will be running a library program in which she teaches teengers how to use Tumblr. I was thinking that these might be useful topics she could cover to get these kids started:
Taking great cat photos.
Calling anything longer than 2 paragraphs a “longread”.
Complaining about people being wrong on the internet.
...
Seeking Female Founders In The Tech Startup Scene →
I was listening to this story on NPR while driving home from work yesterday. I knew that not many tech startups were founded by women, but this really shocked me:
“Accelerators are not a new idea. Among the most well-known is Y Combinator, based in Silicon Valley, which has nurtured new stars like Dropbox and Reddit. But only 4 percent of Y Combinator’s grants went to startups with a...
“I reread it now, 35 years later, and I am struck by its capacity to change like...”
– Tilda Swinton, on Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.
Hezekiah Jones ~ Drug Buddy (Lemonheads cover)
“You don’t have to like Dickens. Literature is a house with many mansions....”
– Howard Jacobson, Charles Dickens has been ruined by the BBC.
My absolute favorite thing about last night’s Iowa caucuses was the media observing that Rick Santorum, noted homophobe, was in a “tight, messy three-way” with two other men.
“Researching my novels - which range from 18th-century London to a 21st-century...”
– Emma Donoghue
“Chew your way into a new world.
Munch leaves. Molt. Rest. Molt again....”
– Amy Gerstler, Advice From a Caterpillar
December 2011
Counting Crows ~ A Long December
I’ve had a couple library patrons ask me for the first season of “Games of Thrones”. There aren’t multiple games, people. If you lose the one, well, that’s pretty much it for you.
“In poetry — as in calling ballgames — it’s voice that makes the speaker...”
– Dana Jennings, in the NY Times Book Review.
Library patron just complained that her reserve on a new, Amish-themed romance novel was taking to long to be filled. I was about to joke that I thought the Amish liked a slower, more relaxed pace to life, but she didn’t look likely to be amused.
“The city had withdrawn into itself
And left at last the country to the...”
– Robert Frost, Christmas Trees
Emmy the Great & Tim Wheeler ~ Home For the...
“When I was a senior in college, I was living with four guys, none of whom...”
– Jane Smiley, in the Los Angeles Review of Books.
“To put this as crisply as I can, the study of the classics is the study of what...”
– Mary Beard, “Do the Classics Have a Future?”, in the New York Review of Books.
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Sondre Lerche ~ Countdown (Beyonce cover)
