Library Musings

I just read an additional entry in Alphabet Juice that was so delightful I had to post about it here.

The entry is the one on hoo hoos. (Don’t know the meaning of hoo hoos? That’s one of many good reasons to buy the book!)

Anyway…

I read the entry from start to finish, finding it amusing. I liked the last bit about a New York cabdriver who (quote) …after nearly running over an elderly lady, said in a reassuring tone, “Nah, you don’t wanna hit a pedestrian. ‘Cause you have to fill out a form. …” (end quote)

That’s pretty funny. The best reason not to run over a pedestrian is to avoid filling out a form. Smile.

Then I decided to re-read the entry to see what all I might have missed.

This time when I arrived at the target section, I read the conclusion of the entry more closely , and found it to say, “Cause you have to fill out a form. And if you don’t dot all your t’s and cross your i’s . . .”

That’s worth a giggle since it ties back in to dyslexia, which is really the subject of the entire hoo hoos entry.

But say it out loud. It comes out: If you don’t dot all your t’s and cross your eyes . . .

That made me laugh out loud.

Several colleagues told me as we left for Christmas Break that I should be sure to do “something fun” while school was out. I think they meant for me to travel or go skiing or some such thing. But I’m having a happy holiday my way: with books.

I’ve had packages coming in from Amazon every couple of days, not to mention the books I’ve bought locally, so I have a lot of unread books on hand.

So far today, I started reading Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney. I’ve never read it before, and had no idea how it would affect me. I’m sitting in a well-lit house, Christmas tree lights on, cats happily wandering around, sunny day outside, Christmas carols playing—and I’m scared to death. I had to put it down and switch to other books just to calm myself down. I’ll get back to it for sure. Maybe knowing I’m going to be scared will help next time. I’ve not seen the movie either. Do any of you think the movie is worth renting if I’ve read the book?

Anyway, I switched to Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. I enjoy his books and also learn something from them, but I can’t read one in a sitting, mostly because they are in comic book format, and I read more textually than visually. His books are going to be a great addition to my library though. I think the students who love manga will be very excited to see these.

So, I put Scott’s book down and switched to Damp Squid by Jeremy Butterfeld. It’s all about how language changes, how dictionaries are compiled, how new words are born, etc. I’m enjoying it.

Other books that came in today’s mail: Furry Fantastic; The Culture of Calamity; Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences; and Indexed.

Books on order: The God Machine; Earthshaking Science; Alphabet Juice; Three by Finney; Why the Long Face? and Shattered City: The Halifax Explosion and the Road to Recovery

I hope some of these books will appeal to you like they have to me. Most of all, I hope you have a wonderful holiday!

I’m reading some of the essays from American Disasters, edited by Steven Biel. A most interesting one is “Chicago on the Brink: Media Trauma and the 1977 L-Train Crash” by Andrew Hazucha.

If you are not a Chicagoan, you are probably not aware of this disaster when a rear-end collision of one elevated train with another resulted in 4 passenger cars falling from the tracks with a loss of 11 lives and 180 injuries. (In addition to the essay I am reading, there is a good summary of the event online.)

Parts of Hazucha’s essay seem to me to show a small scale reflection of the collapse of the World Trade Center 25 years later.

Hazucha says, “The…disaster had forced upon the people…one abiding truth: [as] an event that came before the city could prepare for it, this particular [incident] required interpretive strategies that offered not only consolation but preparedness for future calamities.”

Later in the article, he echoes the events of September 11, 2001 in an even more haunting way: “…members of the…media were so proximate to the disaster that they saw it unfold…as history in the making, rather than a finished event. Rendered largely in first-person, present-tense narrative, much of the coverage conveyed an urgency and immediacy not normally found in most stories…”

Having watched Dan Rather on September 11 and seeing him unable to accept that Tower Two had actually collapsed, the similarity to the L-Train coverage becomes very hauntingly clear to me.

If you have further interest in my readings on disasters, visit me at librarything. My name there is furdog, and I belong to a group called Disaster Buffs.