Salem's Lot

Although I have been in Logan Airport since 6:30am, I'll be entertained by one of the best books ever to read on Halloween - Salem's Lot. Boo!

Ready to Wear?

I love this quotation:

"Trendiness can be measured by what one chooses to wear. Style is determined by what one chooses to ignore."

From "A Trend Without a Leg to Stand On" - The Washington Post 10/27/2006

Beantown

All expenses-paid business trips with the opportunity for sight-seeing rock. I am in Boston this week in order to help train our new clients at the Boston Public Library. I have already had some great food and a very happy visit to the Museum of Fine Arts this evening. In a little over an hour I saw stuff by Gilbert Stuart, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, Diane Arbus, Robert Rauschenburg, Andy Warhol, Whistler, and John Singer Sargent.

My favorite though was by an artist I haven't heard of before - William Rimmer. His painting, Flight and Pursuit, was very eerie. Click on the title link if you want some more information and an image. In any case, I loved going to the museum at eight at night. It was pretty much us and the local art students.

Under the Banner of Heaven & The Information

I am currently reading Under the Banner of Heaven by Jon Krakauer. He also wrote Into Thin Air and Into the Wild. Under the Banner of Heaven is about Mormonism, and more specifically, Mormon fundamenalists that practice polygamy. It was written a couple of years ago, but talks a lot about the group under Warren Jeffs (who just got busted for his huge polygamy group) as well as the guy who abducted Elizabth Smart. Krakauer also goes into the history of Mormonism, starting with Joseph Smith's visitation byt the angel Moroni. It is a VERY interesting book, and hard to put down. My mom said a lot of the way they treat women reminded her of the characters in The Handmaid's Tale, which is an awesome book. One of the women mentioned in Krakauer's book was married to a guy who became fundamentalist, and it got so that she wasn't allowed to handle money, dirve a car, or speak to people outside of their family unless he was there. Her husband even spanked her when she did something "wrong."

Coming up on the list will be No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy for the CSI Book Club, as well as Wicked and Storm Front (Dresden Files series) for The Arcanum.

I also got a lovely surprise present from my very dear friend Jenny. An Amazon box was waiting on my doorstep yesterday, and when I opened it it was the new Beck album, The Information. She has the best taste in music, and has introduced me to so many incredible things. I love her dearly.

Peaches & Bats

I am lucky to have a job that lets me learn interesting but hardly useless information. While researching ancient Chinese art the other day I saw a picture of a gorgeous piece of porcelain decorated with peaches and bats. Sort of an odd combination, but one that I definitely take delight in, being that I like mysterious things. Anyway, I read about the history of the "fruit bats" and it turns out the mystery was solved as follows:

"Peaches are symbols of longevity, and the chinese character for bat, "fu", sounds like the character for "blessings" when pronounced. Therefore, bats + peaches = "May you possess both blessings and longevity." - From AsianArt.org - http://www.asianart.org/hiddenmeanings.htm

Pretty cool.

October Post

I was just thinking how long it had been since I had posted, when I was inspired today by a friend who was kind enough to share her wonderful blog with me! It's been a happy and fairly busy 3 or so weeks, which is always good. I visited a dear friend of mine and her family 2 weeks ago. She was looking beautiful. We had not seen each other since last December, so it was a blessing to have that weekend with her. I also had a lazy time last weekend ordering miniature wallpaper for my dollhouse, shopping with my sister (been doing way too much of that lately, but I won't have a 28 year old body forever, so I may as well enjoy it!), going to the Furniture Factory on a full moonlit night to see Backyard Trash, taking a fall afternoon hike on the mountain, and cooking dinner with my sibs. I also have a ton of e-mail to catch up on - so if any of you are reading this that are owed a reply, you are hanging over me like a spectre, so don't worry :-)

I have also been reading a lot, big surprise. It helps to keep me sane. I finished The Sunne in Splendour a couple of weeks ago. Now I have been jumping around my stack of library books, plus some stuff I just picked up at Barnes & Noble. ;-) Here's a recap if anyone is interested:

The Introvert Advantage - I don't normally troll the self-help aisle, but I became fascinated with the idea of the introverted personality and all that entails a couple of years ago when I found out I was one. Now it is so nice to read authoritative information on it and say "whew, I'm not a misanthrope after all, and it's ok to like to be alone."

Bitchfest - 10 years of the best of Bitch magazine articles - really good stuff!

Good Women - Three novellas by an English author, really fantastic. I loved "Garden Guerillas" the best.

Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, 19th annual collection - This is an absolute integral part of my book collection. I have been collecting these every year for over ten years now. Enough said.

AA Gill is Away - Read this now. You really can, it's on the web. This guy is incredible. http://www.travelintelligence.net/php/writers/writ.php?id=22 It is a series of travel articles, mostly done from 1999-2001 - not what you think though. I can't do it justice in words, just read them. He could write about a burlap sack and you would be enlightened. Hands down favorite essay is "Mad in Japan." Second is "Hunforgiven."

Rumspringa - Rent the documentary The Devil's Playground if you can't get the book right away. The author did them as companions to each other. The Amish have a coming-of-age ritual called Rumspringa (literally means "running around"). At about age 16, if the kids choose to so, they can go absolutely wild. Drugs, sex, drinking, you name it. The idea is that you expose yourself to this, you can make a more informed decision to be baptized into the church. Some take a few years. Some never want to go back and join the "English" world. The catch is that you are cut off from the community forever. I haven't finished it yet, but it's fascinating.

Also picked up but not yet read - may have to come back to:

Music Lust (along the same vein as Book Lust) - Interesting enough to read through, although great as a reference.

Rejuvenile: Kickball, Cartoons, Cupcakes, and the Reinvention of the American Grownup

What to Eat - Marion Nestle is really cool.

A Dash of Daring: Carmel Snow and Her Life in Fashion, Art, and Letters

Whew. Enough to keep me busy, but of course I have my eye on more. I am dying to read two short story collections by Margaret Atwood that I just discovered:

The Tent

Moral Disorder and Other Stories.

Amazon wishlists are awesome. I can keep up with what I want to read there, and just see if the library has them. I also want to read:

Pay the Piper: A Rock n' Roll Fairy Tale by Jane Yolen
The Unruly Life of Woody Allen
The Last of Her Kind
Edgar Allen Poe & the Jukebox
Suite Francaise
My Latest Grievance

I Like September

If you're looking for a great vacation spot and are within a day's drive of the Gulf Coast, get some friends, bring your blender and your favorite books, and rent a house at beautiful, secluded Ft. Morgan off the coast of Alabama. I spent a wonderful four and a half days there with family and friends, and am ready to start planning next year's trip!

Each evening I would take a nature walk down the beach and observed some awesome wildlife. Stingrays (no, I didn't kill any!), jellyfish, TONS of fish, crabs, you name it. Board games were played, seafood was eaten, margaritas were imbibed. No one got too drunk, keelhauled, shark-mauled or otherwise injured, except for a nasty sunburn on my part. That's the price you pay when you stick a gal of Anglo-Irish descent much closer to the equator when her genetic code hasn't evolved to catch up.

Now I am back among the land of the nerds, enjoying beautiful fall weather, and a great stash of library books. Sweet!

Book of the Week - and Woe Betide All Slumlords!

Finished Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be, and I am now reading The Sunne in Splendour by Sharon Penman. I've managed to get a lot of my English history from her books so far - why is it you're always more interested in learning when you're no longer in school?

Anyway, The Sunne in Splendour is about The War of the Roses, and follows the battles and intrigues of the Houses of York and Lancaster. So far it's focused on the rise of the Yorkist Edward IV and his reign, and then (it is a VERY long book) goes into the succession of his younger brother, Richard III. I've been trying not to read too much background, because I don't want to spoil the ending! This also shows how woefully inadequate my knowledge is of some of the most pivotal events in English history. Oh well.

I am also on a crusade to get my neighbors pit bulls removed from the renters next door. It is infuriating. When we first moved in they had four dogs chained in the back yard of the house. Yes, chained 24/7. Not kept as pets. Definitely breeding them, and, I am 99% sure, fighting them. The dogs got loose on several occasions, threatening me, my husband, and others in the neighborhood. After animal control and the police were called several times, I think the landlord forced them to keep the dogs elsewhere. So, we had relative peace all last year, but now the dogs have returned. I am also fairly certain that my neighbor is selling pirated DVDs, and have it on some authority that he may be dealing drugs as well. Arrgg!! I've called the landlord twice now, and have gotten no response. What is wrong with people? This guy is a slumlord, the house looks like hell to boot. Today I am going to call animal control, on the grounds that it is a matter of time before the dogs get loose again, and there is not a sufficient fence to keep them in. I gave the slumlord ample time to call me back - too bad for him.

Why Wait?

As I was driving home this afternoon, I happened to listen to Waiting on the World to Change by John Mayer. It's a lovely sounding song - Mayer has a lot of talent and great pipes - but I don't agree with his lyrics. It is interesting in this era of an unpopular war to listen to this generation of protest songs. Click on the link above for the full set of lyrics to the song.

Basically Mayer's message is that our generation is misunderstood and people think we don't stand for anything. "Now we see everything that's going wrong/ with the world and those who lead it/ we just feel like we don't have the means/ to rise above and beat it." Wow, what an amazing attitude - that will get you places.

Now, if you're reading this you may think I am taking a song way too seriously, but it's a serious topic and raises some questions. First, we live in the richest country in the world. We can vote, we can say what we like without the gestapo whisking us away in the middle of the night - we pretty much have every means at our disposal to make change happen. If you're bothered about what's going on, use your head, use your voice, use your youth and energy. If you're over 25, start a grassroots campaign and run for office. We live in a NOW society, but change can take a while. It took time to get where we are, and it will take time to change direction.

The second thing in Mayer's lyrics that bothered me was "and when you trust your television/ what you get is what you got/ cause when they own the information, oh/ they can bend it all they want." Ok - this is incredible. If you're getting all of your news from television you may need some more help than one woman can provide. Never in the history of the world have we had such amazing access to all sorts of media - not only newspaper and radio, but a cornucopia of web content. With the web, nobody owns the information. Download an RSS reader and subscribe to newsfeeds! Make your own information in a free blog or web site. Rank the importance of a news story at Digg.com. I am a librarian and therefore I try to get my news from a variety of sources, and I can guarantee you I am not seeing only pro-war content out there. Salon and the New York Times are huge and freely accessible on the web if you want perspectives that you feel you aren't getting from the Fox News network.

Finally, the third line I want to take to task is: "It's not that we don't care/ we just know that the fight ain't fair/ so we keep on waiting/ waiting for the world to change." A fair fight? I'm sorry, but the fight began when we were suckerpunched by suicidal monsters in airplanes. That wasn't fair.

Even if there was no link between Al Qaeda and Iraq, we took down an absolute despot. This is a guy who would have his countrymen arrested, strip them naked, hang them by their hands with their arms backward, and have them beaten or electrocuted to death. In any case, I am sure Saddam Hussein would not have refused the opportunity to have a go at the Great Satan with Osama bin Laden. I find it interesting that those who say conservatives see things only in black and white tend to have some of their own monchromatic viewpoints.

So John, I have to say I give it a 5 for the music and a 0 for the lyrics. I'm just not buying it. Being passive and being a pacifist don't mean the same thing. Remember, my young minstrel - a man of thought AND action gets more chicks.

Book On Deck

Next up on the reading list: Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be: A Rock & Roll Fairy Tale

I am excited about this one. I have gotten on a biography/authobiography kick lately, and this one looks very cool. It's a memoir by a woman named Jen Trynin. Apparently she was on the verge of making it big around 1994 - she was on the cover Billboard and in Rolling Stone and had Aimee Mann as her friend/mentor, and things just sort of bottomed out and it didn't happen. Anyway, the book came out this year. I haven't read it yet so I can't recommend it, but it looks very promising! Here is her site: http://www.jentrynin.com/enter.shtml

Almost finished with Savage Beauty. If you don't read any other poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay, read "Renascence." http://www.bartleby.com/131/1.html

Yes, I am Just Going to Be Cryptic Today

A Series of Tubes

I had heard about this on the news, and looked it up and found a hilarious recap on BoingBoing:

Sunday, July 2, 2006
Sen. Stevens' hilariously awful explanation of the Internet
Senator Ted Stevens, a neutricidal maniac who wants to allow the phone companies to charge Google and others for delivering their packets to you, gave this incredible description of his understanding of how the internet works. This man is so far away from having a coherent picture of the Internet's functionality, it's like hearing a caveman expound on the future of silver-birds-from-sky and why we need to keep them from flying so high they anger the gods.

"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially...

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material."

But, It Goes to Eleven

I am so excited. I just found out that there will be a new Christopher Guest movie next year! If you have not experienced the joy of a Christopher Guest movie, sequester yourself for a weekend with "This is Spinal Tap", "Best in Show", "Waiting for Guffman", and "A Mighty Wind".

All of his movies are absolutely hilarious mockumentaries, and Spinal Tap is probably the most well known. The sentence-long description of the new one, called "For Your Consideration" is already cracking me up: "Three actors learn their respective performances in the film "Home for Purim," a drama set in the mid-1940s American South, are generating award-season buzz."

What I love about these movies is that it has introduced to me the genius of actors I have usually seen in more "character actor" parts over the years. Eugene Levy (the dad in American Pie), Fred Willard, Jennifer Coolidge (the hairdresser in Legally Blonde). So the first time you watch one them, you're going "that's the guy in...!"

Christopher Guest is amazing because of the range of roles he can play, and really become a different person in each one. I think my favorite is Corky St. Clair in Waiting for Guffman. In this, he is an actor who moves to Blaine, Missouri from NYC to direct community theater and is always seen buying clothes for his wife "Bonnie" who is mysteriously never around.

One Man's Trash

Real estate terminology, Alabama style:

Curb appeal - Any detritus from your house remodeling or any piece of junk whatsoever that you throw out on the curb for the trash guys and 30 minutes later, it's gone.

I'm not kidding, people will take anything.

Last year we ripped a bunch of nasty astroturf off of our front porch and put it on the curb, - this stuff was moldy and had to have been there at least 15 years - anyway, I was talking to my neighbor a couple of days later and she told me her son was looking out the window one day and saw the guy from the across the street come over while we were at work and cart it off.

When we had contractors working this fall to reside and reroof our house, they told us all kinds of people were stopping by to pick up old aluminum siding, moldy awnings, you name it.

The reason I bring up this topic today is because we ripped up a lot of carpet from inside the house today - mulberry colored old lady carpet - and put it outside. Today is Saturday, and the trash pickup is Monday. Wonder how long it will make it. I predict there will be one happy grandma somewhere tomorrow.

Book of the Month

Currently reading Savage Beauty - a biography of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford. I am excited because I think it will be pretty juicy. I love really good biographies, especially about people who wrote great poetry and had lots of love affairs.

You may have read this poem before, called "First Fig"

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light!

On Modern American Poetry, the critic JoEllen Green Kaiser says of this poem:

"Her most famous poem, after all, does not mourn absent love but rejoices in love’s impermanence."

What Would a Megalomanic Read?

Kim Jong-il's favorite book club:

http://www.dearreader.com/

I just can't help myself sometimes.

The Man Who Wanted Sounds

I've decided that I need to write down some of the strange but true experiences that fate kindly bestowed upon me over the past few years, before I start to forget them. Most of them came from, you guessed it, when I was working at the public library. The first tale is set in the summer of 2002, when I was working in the library before library school that fall, to see if it was something I wanted to keep doing. har dee har har.

This particular day I was working in the audiovisual department:

Patron - a black man in his thirties

Me - clueless

Me: Can I help you?

Patron: I'm looking for some sounds.

Me: Well sir, we have all kinds of CDs with sound effects. Train sounds, scary sounds...

Patron: No, no I want sex sounds, like with a woman.

Me: Uhhh....

Me: Umm, we don't have anything like that here....maybe you could try an adult store?

Patron: Well I know that! (turns around and walks off)

Stay tuned for our next story, "The Strong Woman of Queens."

Rocking-horse droppings?

Funniest thing I read today:

"Illegal aliens didn't invade in one day. However, if our nation devoted every available federal, state and local resource to their removal, in 90 days, they would be as rare as rocking-horse droppings."

- From a letter to the editor in the Huntsville Times.

Neigh!!

Annie Gets Introduced to Physics

I was watching NOVA's Elegant Universe on PBS tonight, and the discussion was about uncertainty at the sub-atomic level and quantum mechanics. What I understood was that Einstein was of the idea that there were rules that explained the behavior of the universe in the somewhat rational and expected manner, but then this new wave of scientists said, hang on, these subatomic particles (protons, neutrons, and electrons) will actually behave in very bizarre manners that we can only predict. One example they gave was that you could walk into a wall, and of course, not go through it, but there is that CHANCE that you might be able to phase through it at some point. Of course, the probability is practically infinite, but it's there. I found all of this fascinating, even if I don't understand the science behind it, and it made me think of a social quantum theory.

People broken down singularly are bizarre and eccentric creatures, ranging from our little peccadilloes to major perversions and stuff that gets one into the Darwin Awards and News of the Weird. Yet, as a whole, we somehow manage in most parts of the world to come together as functioning societies. I suppose your black holes would be places like Darfur or East Timor, and your dark matter would be uncontacted tribes in the Amazon.

"O.K., that means our whole solar system could be, like... one tiny atom in the fingernail of some other giant being...
This is too much! That means...
-one tiny atom in my fingernail could be--
-Could be one little...tiny universe....Could I buy some pot from you?"

Mud Spelled Backwards is Dum

Yes, you would be spelling it as "dum" too if the simple minds of the Simplifed Spelling Society and American Literacy Council managed to push their agenda through public schools. This CNN article caught my eye today. Interestingly enough, Andrew Carnegie, he of the philanthropic Carnegie libraries and Melvil Dewey, the Father of Librarianship, were both past proponents of simplified spelling. The basic gist of "simplified spelling" is that you spell a word phoenetically, rather than in all of its rich etymological glory. I can see it now. Take the word "pen." You've got some Alabama kid that's going to spell it as "pin" because of course that's how you pronounce it down here, but some other kid in Virginia is going to say "pehn." Or some other person in Michigan who spells roof as "ruf." Total chaos!!! Kind of reminds me of those parents who won't toilet train their kids because they're afraid of giving them a complex about going to the bathroom. I guess they won't be able to figure out the restroom signage either when they finally learn.

Well, I guess that's enough ranting for one night. I'm going to the liberry.