Priceless Books

Originally uploaded by Librarienne.

I stopped into the little used bookstore here in Urbana - Priceless Books - for the first time in two years. Oh, what a sanctuary a good used bookstore can be. As you can see, books are stacked here and there and on the floor (much like UIUC’s Main Stacks). There is a very magical serendipity to browsing a cluttered used bookstore that one doesn’t find in a library or even in the big-box bookstores. It was heavenly. I walked out with the book I came for - Nabokov’s Ada - plus two others.

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… to one of my all-time favorite bands: Pink Martini.  This song, especially, makes me feel happy whenever I listen to it and I just found a clip of it from the Letterman Show, so I have to share:

lyrics to Leonard Cohen’s “Bird on a Wire” … wordled by yours truly

(Okay, I’m mentioning Google a lot lately because I’m using it at work to build a community space type thing and I’m also making a map for all the participants in a big program for this Fall. )

I am so naive.  I have just assumed that any county’s basic information … you know, cities? major roads? … could be found in Google Maps.  Now, I knew GMaps has limited information about certain areas because I thought I lived in one of them.  Now I know better.

One of my current projects is to make a map for the place where I work of all the libraries where librarians have participated in our programs.  Easy enough, yes?  We have the library addresses, look them up online, save the markers to “My Maps” and … voila… we’ll have a searchable, zoomable map in no time.

Oh ho ho.

I started alphabetically by country - Argentina.  Buenos Aires, to be exact.  So I type “Buenos Aires, Argentina” in Google Maps and what do I find?  An empty grey blob where a metropolitan area of 13 million people should be, one of the top 20 metro areas by population.  (This is in Map view, mind you.)  I zoom out … the entire country of Argentina is an empty grey blob.
40 million people?
Nothing?

Bolivia and Peru don’t have any roads marked either, but at least they have a few cities.  Argentina - along with Paraguay, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana - has nada.  Zilch. I think the emptiness of these countries is particularly shocking because of the way Brazil is so nicely filled in with highways, roads, and towns.  Zoom in on Rio de Janeiro and you see all sorts of detail.  Add to that weirdness — Google has a domain for Argentina at www.google.com.ar … but in the Argentinian equivalent of “More services” (click on “Más” at the top of the screen) Maps is noticebly absent.

So (in Google Maps) I zoomed out to see the whole world then went in closer region by region and found that, according to Google, there is absolutely nothing of interest in the following countries:

Argentina
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Bhutan

Dominican Republic
Equatorial Guinea
French Guiana
Georgia
Greenland
Guyana
Iceland
Israel
Lesotho
Mauritania
North Korea
Paraguay
South Korea
Suriname
Western Sahara

It’s bad enough they’re using something like a Mercator projection, which shows Greenland almost equivalent to Africa in land mass when Africa is 14 times larger.  But why would these countries be absolutely blank? According to Wikipedia, there are about 220 countries.  Some of Google’s missing countries are ranked in the top 50 countries by population:  South Korea (#25), North Korea (#47)  and, as I said, Argentina (#30).

I’m discouraged, disheartened, and disappointed by the reports of Google’s absence at ALA Anaheim.  Anaheim??  I mean… c’mon!  On top of that, there was the one-year anniversary of the last post on Google’s Librarian Blog.  What a rotten, passive-aggressive way to break up with someone, Google.  What, no phone call?  No text message?  Not even a Gmail chat to ask how we’re doing?

How can I continue to be your renegade evangelist to librarians if you don’t make an effort?  That would be like Obama’s reps making all his speeches for him.

But then… you don’t have to make speeches.  You’re the only one running for the office of World’s Supreme Internet Presence.

(…seemingly random transition…)

This past weekend I went to the little art theatre in town and saw The Fall.  Oh, I could gush and gush about this movie.  If you love beautiful images, images so rich and lovely they seduce you as they go by, then you should see this movie while it’s still on the big screen.  Storyline… eh.  Characters… eh.  Beautiful?  As Molly Bloom says in Ulysses: “like mad yes I said YES”.

The little girl in the movie is a charmer.  I usually get very bored very quickly with little kid gimmicks in movies, but this kid was amazing.  And when she gets scared, she says “Googly googly googly, go away!”

I have since learned that “googly” is a cricket term, but my first thought was… well, you don’t need me to tell you, do you?  The word sounds vaguely like a certain internet giant, doesn’t it? But it seems so ironic to me that this different-by-one-letter word would be used to fend off something big and scary when it sounds so much like something big (and becoming scary) in our own world.  And will I continue to use Google services and show others how to use them?  I’d like to say “no” but whenever I start to do that, some little voice in my head says something about resistance and futility… .

Socializing in Google Reader vs. Bloglines

Over a year ago I started using Google Reader as my aggregator and I added a little widget to my blog’s sidebar for my “Shared Items” — posts from my RSS subscriptions that I found interesting, amusing, or just plain weird.  In Google Reader it’s very easy to just click “Share” (or hit Shift + S) and - voila - the post you’re reading is in your Shared Items.

And I like to share, by golly.

But part of sharing is the exchange, the two-way street, the trading off… I’m not getting enough of that.

Let’s start with Bloglines - the original aggregator for many people in my little circles.  In Bloglines, it is fairly easy to share, albeit indirectly.  You subscribe to a feed, you click on “Subscribers” and then you get a handy-dandy list of the public subscribers.  You see a name you recognize and you click on it to find other feeds that like-minded friend is reading.   You subscribe to the ones you like and all that wholesome blog love is passed along.

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In Google Reader, you have to already be connected with people on Google Talk (Gmail’s chat) in order for their Shared Items to show up in your feeds. Otherwise, you have to get the URL of their Shared Items from their blog (which is how I peak over the shoulder of Robert Scoble, the techie tasmanian devil) or from them directly.

Of course, it helps if they’re using Google Reader and marking items to be shared in the first place.  I can see from my “Friends” tab in Reader’s Settings that several people I know are using Google Reader, but none of them have any Shared Items.  From what I’ve seen, you can’t just search for like-minded folks on Google Reader and see what kind of feeds those people are reading. If there is a way, please … um… share.  Thanks!

On the other hand, when people are willing to share, there are many wonderful ways to do this in Reader.  For example, I have all my feeds sorted into folders (ie. art, food, library, tech) but when I come across a specific post that I want to file away for a specific purpose, I edit the tags (ie. brainstorm, comment, products, tips).  So if I want to share the stuff I’m reading with people in certain contexts, I can make a whole folder of several feeds public - like “libraries” - or I can make a tag of specific posts public - like “tips“… Actually, in Reader folders and tags are technically the same thing but you can see from the image to the left that Google will display them differently in the sidebar, depending on how you’re using them.

So if you’re using Google Reader and you’re Sharing stuff (or you’re going to start now  :-)  ) please send me a line or send me your feed’s address.  I’d love to peak over your shoulder, too.  C’mon. I’m a librarian. What people read fascinates me.

In summary, here’s a gloss of sharing options in Google Reader and Bloglines, to the extent that I’ve figured them out.  If you can think of more details to add, I’m happy to hear them.

Not long ago I discovered a blog of historical photos called Shorpy, named after a young boy who worked in a coal mine.   Many of the photographs are black-and-white, many from the 1920s — my favorite decade of all decades.  Today’s photo is very apropos, considering I went to my first dance class last night.  None of the dancers in this photo look all that thrilled, granted, but who knows how long they’ve been at this dance marathon.  My favorite part?  The outfit of the guy on the far left.  I would love to dress like that.

I was looking for a good dose of humor this morning, so I turned right away to Piled Higher and Deeper.  I found two comics that really express everything I could want to say about…

1. Life

and 2. Politics

Occasionally I like to glance over the stats for this little blog and see which pages people find the most often. I try to just ignore that the post with the car crash pictures is far and away the most popular, week after week. I’m not even going to link back to it right now.

But in the top three of popular pages is one of my tags. Yes, a tag. The weird tag, specifically. So I looked over the page to see what was there … a lot of literary-ish stuff mostly, talking about Bukowski and Tom Waits and even a little Ray Bradbury.

But the post that caught my eye - today of all days - was a post about Father’s Day from two years ago when my dad wasn’t speaking to me. I am happy to report that, not only did my dad and I have a good long conversation on the phone today, but we even agreed about something! Namely, that the oil companies roadblock any feasible alternative energy initiatives, but anyway… it’s a good feeling to look back and know that progress has been made. Very important progress. Love you, Dad.

[ Click on the photo to see a slideshow of pics from class.]

For our final project in Letterpress Printing, we’re each creating a small broadside which will all be put together into a folio.  My broadside is a short Stephen Crane poem in a beautiful blue ink.  I’ll be hand-lettering the colophon with an old calligraphy pen, (for better or worse).

In the Flickr photos I mention another Pablo Neruda translation, which I printed for one of the first projects in class.  Here it is:

Verb (originally Verbo)   by Pablo Neruda (tr. Sara Quinn Thompson)

I’m going to rumple this word,
I’m going to twist it,
yes,
it is much too smooth
it’s as if a great dog or great river
with tongue or water passed over it
for many years.

I want that in the word
there can be seen the roughness
the metallic salt
the toothless strength
of the land,
the blood
of those who have spoken and those who have not.

I want to see the thirst
inside those syllables
I want to touch the fire
in that sound:
I want to feel the darkness
of the cry. I want
words as rough
as virgin stones.

This summer I indulged myself with a special class.  I even get credit for it.  The class is Letterpress Printing and, sure enough, we set type by hand and print it.

Today, however, was a field trip of sorts.  We visited the Rare Book & Manuscript Library here at UIUC, where we were treated to a special showing of fine typographic and illustrative examples. We saw a fragment of a Gutenberg Bible as well as several pieces from history’s great printers: Aldus Manutius, Nicolas Jenson, the controversial William Morris, and the incredible Hermann Zapf.

The theme (for me) was the deliberate care given to details.  Pick up a book, any book.  Go on, I dare you.  What kind of aesthetics went into this volume you’re holding?  There’s the typeface, of course, but look at all the stuff around and between the text… yes, the space.  The room for your eyes to breathe. In a book of poetry this can be especially beautiful.  Imagine the page in front of you is a reverse image — a black background with a white foreground.  Try to trick your eyes so that the blank spaces stand out to you. … Now bring the text back to the foreground.

Is that not beautiful?

For once, I’m satisfied with a silly online test score:

Your Score: the Wit

(57% dark, 23% spontaneous, 21% vulgar)

your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK - You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you’re probably an intellectual, but don’t take that to mean pretentious. You realize ‘dumb’ can be witty–after all isn’t that the Simpsons’ philosophy?–but rudeness for its own sake, ‘gross-out’ humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat.

I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer.

Your sense of humor takes the most thought to appreciate, but it’s also the best, in my opinion.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

The 3-Variable Funny Test!

I’ve been working (slowly…) on a couple papers for classes, one of which led me on a brief and surprising goose chase through my bookshelf. Along with the article I was originally looking for, I also found a collection of poems I translated for a poetry class back in the dark ages of 2003. Reading back over them today, I was surprised that these were the poems I had chosen, and I wonder what exactly they meant to me then, compared to what they mean to me now:

and this one, from one of my favorite poets:

from the Writer’s Almanac of May 17th:

SF stood for Sigmund Freud, or serious folly,
for science fiction in San Francisco, or fear
in the south of France. The system failed.
The siblings fought. So far, such fury,
as if a funereal sequence of sharps and flats
set free a flamboyant signature, sinful, fanatic,
the fire sermon of a secular fundamentalist,
a singular fellow’s Symphonie Fantastique.

Students forget the state’s favorite son’s face.
Sorry, friends, for the screws of fate.
Stage fright seduces the faithful for the subway fare
as slobs fake sobs, suckers flee, salesmen fade.
Sad the fops. Sudden the flip side of fame.
So find the segue. Finish the speculative frame.

“SF” by David Lehman from When a Woman Loves a Man © Scribner, 2005.

I’ve never seen anything like this posted on campus before, but there it was - on the bulletin board of the Undergrad Library tunnel.  Do you think it’s a joke?  I thought so at first, but now I wonder if maybe it’s serious.  I feel sorry for the kid, so I’m spreading the word.  If you have a penchant for massages and grapes, here’s your chance.  Me, I’m just not that into grapes.  But I wish him the very best of luck.

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