Library Musings

I am reading Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky I am grateful to have found this book. I had gotten the impression (rightly or wrongly) from projects such as 23 Things, that the best way for me to understand Web 2.0 was to go forth and create my own blogs, wikis, etc.

Here Comes Everybody talks about the Power Curve, best known for the 80/20 application common to businesses, etc. According to the Power Curve, the first one or two blogs in an area will be significantly more successful than those from third position on down. Twenty percent of the blogs will have 80% of the readers. 80% will have only one reader. (And I sometimes think that reader is the person who is writing the blog–at least in my case.)

It doesn’t mean that keeping a blog is a bad thing, but it takes the pressure of trying to “sell” your blog to others off. I can now comfortably think of my blog as a place for my own musings and for my own reflection and remembrance on/of those musings. And I can concentrate more time on following the 20% of blogs that are successful and offer me a reading benefit.

I’ve also learned a lot about Wikipedia and why it works, as well as the concept of Wikis and why they have to have an interested audience even if it is small and temporary. (As in my YALSA class on young adult lit.)

There is also a disturbing comment about the (non-existent) future of librarianship in the book. I’ll need to consider that further. I know the idea has been discussed at length on LM-Net.

I have more of the book to read. I’ll see what else I can learn there.

Callimachus has turned me on to etymonline.com. I feel like a kid in a candy store when I go there.

When you visit be sure to scroll down and look on the far right of the screen for links to sister sites and to related sites. My favorite is the comments area: Sciolist. It goes far beyond just etymology, and in fact goes in another direction all together.

BTW, this is the website I was looking for when posting about Alphabet Juice.

What are your favorite words/language sites, books, and magazine columns?

I signed up to be an Early Reviewer at LibraryThing and will receive a free book for the first time this month (actually in 8 weeks or so, maybe less).

The pre-pub book I’ll be reviewing is When the Time Comes: Families with Aging Parents Share Their Struggles and Solutions. Based on the title, I think it is a very timely book since so many of us are currently in the position of wanting to help our elderly parents while helping them retain their pride and independence.

My short review will be on LibraryThing. I’ll post a longer review here, and link to it from LT. I hope you’ll come back to read it.

You can help me review the book if you’ll answer these questions:

1. If you’re caring for elderly parents is it your mother, your father or both?
2. Do they live independently in their own home; with you; or in a home for the elderly?
3. What struggles are you facing, and what solutions have worked for you?
4. Have you thought ahead to the time when you will be elderly and need to have care? What do you see happening to you at that time?

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.

I’m reading Alphabet Juice by Roy Blount, Jr. This is one of those delightful books that leads you to read it out of sequence by linking one entry to another, compelling you to jump from one area to another from sheer interest.

Blount looks at everything from etymologies to computer text-slang, to how the sounds of letters develop a meaning of their own–all in a dry and humorous style that keeps you reading while possibly teaching you something of value about language.

Some notes from the book on the word ain’t: “Too bad this tangy, useful verb, which was standard in the eighteenth century, has been so stigmatized since the nineteenth. Just as y’all, as a plural of you, fills a gap in English, so does ain’t as a conjunction of am not. Anyone attempting to pronounce amn’t may a attract a cowd of well-wishers admiring his or her pluck, but whatever other words the speaker surrounds it with will be lost.”

Later in the same entry, speaking of other reasons to use ain’t he gives these examples: “…where would American song lyrics be without ain’t? … ‘There is no cure for the summertime blues.’ ‘Isn’t she sweet?’ ‘Two Out of Three Isn’t Bad.’”

I was going to include his sample song lyric, “Amn’t Misbehaving’”, but how would I have indicated the apostrophe shortening the word “misbehaving” in the sentence I was quoting since I was already reducing his quotation marks to apostrophes in order to fit them into my quotation marks? I suppose that’s why we sometime indent a longer quotation? Clearly I ain’t no grammaratition.

A bit from another entry, this one on arts, the: “‘Maybe it’s true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance,” said Quentin Crisp, … but it’s also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts.’  (See common and funny looks.)” Which, of course, makes you itch to move on to one of those entries instead of going directly from the arts to the next entry, A’s, which is about the baseball team in Oakland.

Did books have this delightful tendency to provide links in their books before the World Wide Web came along? Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I have no answer. Or I ain’t go no answer.

I find myself amusing (no conceit here) in that I write roughly in Blount’s style here to help convey the essence of his book.

BTW, this entry is a great to write on a new curvy keyboard where you need to learn the exact distance to stretch your pinky to type a parentheses, an apostrophe, and a quote mark. Not to mention finding that elusive “Q”.

In addition to authoritative print dictionaries he has consulted, Blount also mentions web sites (websites?) he visited in compiling the book, and so links to the Internet as well as to his own entries.

See etymologies.com, except that I just went there and found that it’s one of those unregistered web site names that gives you a this-name-is-not-registered-you-could-buy it/search page. So, I must have the name wrong, and now I don’t know what the correct URL was for the website. Etymonline looks possible although I don’t think it’s the one he mentioned. Another reason to keep a notepad at hand while you read, or at least use paperclips or post-it notes.

And I don’t think I’ve using “parsing” quite correctly in the title of this entry, but I liked the sound of it.

I’m getting exhausted from trying to put quotation marks, apostrophes, italics and bold print in the right places here in addition to constantly worrying about my use of punctuation. For that problem, I could refer to another book on my shelf: Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences, but not right now, so I’ll close instead by recommending Blount’s book to the highest degree. And not so much Clean, Well-Lighted Sentences.

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.

I visited SLJ’s blog, Nonfiction Matters, this morning and saw an interesting post from Marc Aronson on his ideas for adapting adult nonfiction to nonfic specifically for younger readers. He has adapted a recently researched work on the truth about John Henry to create a very different version for young readers. I haven’t read the books yet, but will be. I’m interested to see what methods he used to adapt the book.

As you know if you’ve been following this blog, I feel that nonfiction for teens and tweens needs to be narrative so that it feels like they are reading a novel–something they are already comfortable with. I’ll be interested to see how Mr. Aronson responds to my comment expressing that viewpoint.

If you are also interested in reading the books, they are on Amazon: Ain’t Nothing but a Man is the version for YA’s. Steel Drivin’ Man is the original version for adults.

Thought I should post a second time today so that I will have a “muse post” to balance out the “rant post”.

I suppose we’ve always had narrative nonfiction in our libraries. Biographies, autobiographies, narrative history–they’ve been there. In fact, there was probably a larger percentage of narrative nonfiction in school libraries a few decades ago than there is now. Since the 80’s the “reference/database” nonfiction works such as Opposing Viewpoints and Current Controversies have provided a useful resource that kept us on a smooth transition into the availablity of online databases.

However, now that many of us have access to online databases, the need for those transitional books is much less. Up till this year I received preview boxes of books from Knowbuddy and some other companies, but I let them know this year that I’m no longer interested since their inventory of books for preview is made up of books like Opposing Viewpoints along with 86-page books in series that are a waste of money to pay for expensive repetitive bindings. Oops, I’m slipping into ranting again. Back to the muse state!

The new narrative nonfiction is somehow different from the narrative nonfiction found in libraries in the 1960’s though, and I’m trying to put my finger on why or how. I think one clue is in the alternate title of “creative nonfiction” to describe current offerings in narrative nonfiction. Creative nonfiction requires a plot, a theme, characters, action and the other features you would find in a good novel. So I would consider Alive by Piers Paul Read to be creative nonfiction, while House as a Mirror of Self by Clare Cooper Marcus is non-narrative fiction (maybe the term “chapter book” applies here ? )

Also, there is a another nonfiction genre I would set aside in my way of thinking as “idea nonfiction”. This would include popular science and sociology books such as the works of Oliver Sacks and works like The Tipping Point.

Obviously there are still many points where these self-created genres overlap, but they’re probably worth thinking about when trying to recommend a book to a student.

Some other vague thoughts on the subject before I close: The movie Frost / Nixon is creative nonfiction since it is based on a historical event, but rearranges some of the timeline for dramatic effect. Second thought: I collect narrative histories of disasters. Some pull you into the event dramatically ( The Circus Fire and The Winecoff Fire , to name two ), while others are less creative, but can serve as valuable references. Top of my list for that sub-genre is Darkest Hours edited by Jay Robert Nash.

See you tomorrow–this is LibraryMusings signing off for December 3rd.

If you’ve visited my blog at all, you know that I post infrequently and erratically (at best). So, I’m setting a goal that–while humble by external standards–will be large for me. I’m going to post something here EVERY DAY for the next six weeks (42 days). Today is December 2, and this is Day One.

I’m very interested these days in the newly popular genre of narrative nonfiction, also known as creative nonfiction. This past week I purchased In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction . The editor of the book is Lee Gutkind who has apparently been hailed as the “Godfather behind creative nonfiction” by Vanity Fair. I didn’t know that literary genres had godfathers, but who am I to dispute Vanity Fair ? (Not knocking Lee Gutkind here–I just thought the quote was funny.)

Anyway…where was I ? Oh, I was talking about the book. The introduction by Annie Dillard by itself is worth the price of the book, and if you roll in Lee Gutkind’s opening essay, “The Creative Nonfiction Police”, you’ve got a full meal to eat while you read, even before you’ve moved on to the writings that make up the body of the book.

After the intro and opening essay I flipped through the book and then read “Being Brians” by Brian Doyle. It is a delightful read built around an almost nonexistent foundation. I recommend it. In his advice to new writers, Brian includes the dictate to “write something everyday: letter, rant, journal, poem, prayer, whatever.” Which brings us full circle to the beginning of this blog post.

My rough plan for the next few posts is to talk some more about narrative nonfiction: what I’m adding to my library collection; what I’m reading; and so on. And I’ll talk some about other books I’ve purchased recently. And I’ll probably talk about some very random things. So wish me luck with meeting my goal!