Branches and Rain

Night Librarian

2009-11-12T20:52:00.005-05:00

6:13

Where to get library card? Where is the Tallahassee Anxiety Support Group meeting? Open Henderson Room. Story of her life.

Books on résumés.

PC for Sheila.

Top off printers w paper.

PC for James.

Anxiety Woman again. Looking for book about healing with crystals. Can read "over a thousand words a minute".

Sheriff's Deputy wonders whether I think there are more homeless these days. Says complaints about public urination are legion these days. I remind him that the homeless shelter used to be Tommy's, a rock and roll bar, where I once got so drunk, (drinking Benedictine, oh, you foolish boy), that I vomited.

He reminisces about dorm life and partying at FSU in the '70's. The drinking age was 18 then, and bars lined the strip on Tennessee Street. Our time there as undergraduates overlapped, though he is five years younger than me, he being cloistered with the football players. I would never have met him, who I would have disdained as a "jock". Yes, we agree, students these days are spoiled rotten, with their off-campus apartments and their cars and their broadband Internet connections.

Back in our day, an undergraduate got a dorm room with a bunk, a desk, and a randomly assigned roommate. You couldn't have a car until you were a junior, and you bought a big electric fan for relief in hot weather. My roommate Bill, destined to be a high school coach, was an accomplished cocksman.

James can't start his session. While I am helping him, another user kicks a power strip and the whole table of six PC's goes down. Find right strip, power on, sort everyone out.

Books on food delivery and personal concierge businesses. Do we have jobs open? Show County web page. How to apply for Library Assistant position? Show online application. He hesitantly begins the process. Full-grown man a newborn babe in cyberspace.

7:17

Phone: Mr. L. wants to know if D. has mailed his info yet. Don't know, please call back tomorrow.

Amanda wants books on Rome we're holding.

Check Henderson Room. Anxiety Support Group meeting in progress

Karen's card's been set lost. Give her guest pass.

Report fluorescent ceiling panel outage in Henderson Room to T.B.

Full-Grown Man has taken off jacket and is pecking away at application. Good man.

Can I check her card for fines? Yes, but all disputes must be with Circulation. She's good, card is clear.

7:39

Typical day-after-a-holiday today. Like a Monday. Was doing virtual reference chat in AskaLibrarian from 3 to 4, which was itself pretty busy, when the workroom bell rang so long and, well, alarmingly, that I decided I'd better go out. Brave ML was alone on the burning deck, a knot of patrons standing at the desk, both phones off the hook on hold. I entered the fray, and we soon had all fires put out. I had the desk with D. at 4:00 and the fur continued to fly.

Run to Chaos Keep by Jack Chalker. Find on shelving cart.

Can print in color? No.

Work on unfinished non-fic send-item list I found at desk.

Phone: Song for Night by Christopher Abani. Is checked out, place hold? Doesn't have card. Get card to reserve library books.

Help Full-Grown Man w app.

Help her find children's dictionary in catalog.

Finish send-items. Take down to Circulation.

Phone: Will wants Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem. Place hold. Lethem one of the new literary heavyweights. Just don't have time for him, or Chabon, which is no judgment on them.

Help Full-Grown Man.

8:30 announcement.

Count & bag change.

Full-Grown Man finishes and submits app. Yay!

Clean up & straighten, shut down catalog PC's.

8:50 Five people left on Internet up here.

Time to head for the barn.

The Blooming of the High Line

2009-11-07T23:52:00.004-05:00

I've been following the transformation of the High Line, an elevated freight railway in NYC, into a public park, for several years. The guesthouse where we stay in the West Village is close to its southern terminus. I posted a photograph of a section of it in a Facebook album last year. The High Line features in the setting for Reggie Nadelson's 2005 Police Detective Artie Cohen crime novel, Red Hook.

The Manchester Guardian has an excellent article on the opening of the park, with a detailed account of the plantings by Dutch horticulturalist Piet Oudolf, and a comparison with similar projects elsewhere. I am impressed. Current horticultural thinking is all about "what wants to grow there".

Forty per cent of the species Oudolf put on the High Line were already there, dropped by birds and blown by the winds on to the railbed during its derelict years. Sustainable may be an overused adjective, but Oudolf embraces the notion, in that what was put there by nature was, by definition, sustained.

It reminds me of the agrarian writings of Masanobu Fukuoka, and reflects my own attitude about the ecology of urban yards.

Reader Advisory for Mrs. P.

2009-11-07T00:25:00.001-05:00

Doris sounded pleased that I had answered her call. She wondered whether we had anything on reserve for her. No, all her reserve requests were still outstanding. She is home-bound, and she places requests for titles on the NYT Bestsellers list, which her driver collects for her.

Would she like me to choose some books for her? Yes, she enjoyed what I picked for her last time, two or three would be nice. She has an educated voice, like a career woman of my mother's generation.

The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard.
The Wooden Leg of Inspector Anders by Marshall Browne.
Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown by Paul Theroux

Night Librarian

2009-11-05T20:51:00.003-05:00

7:10 The Society for Creative Anachronism has defied the odds by showing up to use the Henderson Room, a small conference room on this floor. It is almost always booked on Thursday nights, but it's been months since anyone actually showed up to use it. Members of the SCA can easily be identified at a glance, if you are expecting them. They always seem to be enjoying themselves.

It's the first week of no daylight saving time. It was almost too dark to read on my Park Avenue bench by the time my supper hour was over.

I found Incline Our Hearts in the basement trash bin where the book donation volunteers discard materials they deem unsellable. This is where librarians find their reading matter, while entering or leaving the building by the staff entrance. I'm only joking, but it's funny to see everyone peek into the bin, a large canvas hamper on casters, as we file out at night. It's like the fishing game at a school fair.

I once found an old and worn hardback copy of Waugh's Men at Arms. It had been withdrawn from the U. of Penn. library sometime after 1955, with only 5 date due stamps.

Its cover blurb compares Wilson's Incline Our Hearts to Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, being the first of five novels that comprise The Lampitt Chronicles. It's a nostalgic and very funny coming-of-age story. If you've been to a boys' school, you will especially enjoy it.

8:06 The SCA leaves down the stairs. Check the room. It's locked, with the lights turned off.

Internet workstations still almost all occupied, but very quiet.

8:30 First closing announcement.

Count & bag change drawer. Police Internet area for discarded reservation slips, golf pencils, broken pens, gum wrappers. Realign tables and chairs in reading area. Turn off catalog PCs by reference collection and in stacks.

Franklin Flats: a vanished Bohemia

2009-11-03T00:54:00.023-05:00

I took these pictures a couple of weeks ago, when we finally had a clear, cool day.

Franklin Flats: a vanished Bohemia

I've had it in mind for a long time to photograph these old apartment buildings on or near Franklin Boulevard and Park Avenue. Back in the '70's, an interesting mix of students, artists, potheads, journalists at WFSU and the Florida Flambeau, new-agers, holistic therapy enthusiasts, radicals and a lot of, um, feminists lived here on the east side of town, on the other side of downtown Tallahassee from FSU. My wife and I lived at 519 East Park Avenue when we were married in 1980. Rents were cheap, and no one had A/C, but they were well-built, and close to downtown and to FSU.

In my captions, I mention people leaving, couples splitting up. By the late '70's it was becoming obvious even to us diehards that "The Sixties", the Counterculture, the Revolution, had gone to seed. The election of Reagan and the murder of John Lennon at the end of 1980 were double-tap pistol shots from Reality. We weren't young anymore, all of us 30-ish, give or take a few. We moved on to the rest of our lives.

More on Webster and Old Dictionaries

2009-11-02T12:41:00.002-05:00

Either old dictionaries are humming in the ether or the NYT is reading my blog, (only joking). Three weeks after my post on the 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language, the October 18th NYT Magazine printed a piece by Ammon Shea as its On Language column, Old Dictionaries: The Uses and Abuses of Outdated Lexicons. Shea has some interesting things to relate about Webster's Second loyalists, and about the Foundation for American Christian Education, FACE, which promotes the use of the 1828 edition. Possibly my patron had been to their web site.

Blogging Reference

2009-10-31T23:09:00.004-04:00

This time yesterday I didn't expect to be here. Having already worked a Saturday this month, I neglected to look at my schedule. Then S. said, as she was leaving, "See you tomorrow!". Aargh...

Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble. (Job 14:1)

So, FSU homecoming game today at noon, which may make for a quiet day at the library, or not.

10:00 Open.

PC for Sebastian.

Update Tallahassee-Leon Co, Statistical Digest in binder to 2009 ed.

Show pharmacy student health db.

GayUSA Travel. He is sure we have a book w this title, but all I find is GayUSA: Where the Babes Go, which is, alas, for women. Suggest gaytravel.about.com .

PC for Reginald, who has an armload of CD's.

PC for Laverne.

Woman at self-checkout station says card has expired. Take it down to circulation.

Can print from laptop? E-mail to self and get library PC.

She has a book on reserve. Send to circulation.

Today's paper.

Wake up printer.

PC for James.

Freestone wants to see if his letter got in the Democrat. No.

Do we have the new People Weekly? Find in back, put in jacket, give to her.

Pull other jackets from reading area to put new issues in.

R. brings me a sandwich.

Utopia by Thomas More, take name and hold.

Black Elk Speaks. Take to shelf.

Books on the death of a parent and grieving.

He's double-booked for PC, give another.

Books on recidivism. No, show db's, esp. Opposing Viewpoints.

Janel says card is "in the car". PC for Janel.

12:10 Going to lunch.

It's rained, so the gazebo is full of hwg's, (homeless white guys), whose benches are wet. Cherry Pepsi, ham panini and Golding's Fire Down Below on the 1st floor landing.

12:45 Back. L. is here, yay!

Book about a woman recovering from a stroke. Barbara somebody? I try and try, but come up empty.

Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson. Our copy lost.

PC for Mike.

PC for Tony.

1:35 S. back from lunch. Magazine reading area full of men pretending not to be sleeping.

Local history section? L. takes her.

Very quiet.

Woman gives me a funny little fingers-only wave as she passes.

Stapler.

She'll come back. Was trying to find a book she saw in large print. About a detective and a girl with a serial killer after her. She had hid it somewhere this summer, thinking she would come back for it. She guesses she'll just have to look at every single large print book to find it again.

Self-checkout says take her card to desk. Means circulation desk downstairs, sorry. Yes, she can leave her poster here. She's back. Had thought self-checkout was a PC reservation station. Goes to 15 min. stand-up PC.

Couple looking for girl who comes here to use Internet.

Phone: Renewal request for ILL. The Spiritual Science of Kriya Yoga, by Goswami Kriyananda.

Books about drums, and for his brother, about rap music.

Help with Yahoo Mail.

Phone: E. at Georgia Belle Apts. needs map to her dentist's office. Will print out and mail,

FAMU grad student wants particular table from 1980 census for Valdosta, GA. Census.gov only goes back to 1990 online, he says, and FAMU library has mislaid their printed vols for 1980. We don't have. Give map to Strozier Library at FSU.

Take map to mail room.

Have other version of Tanakh for checkout? One I gave her not same as ed. in ref coll. No, is only one for checkout.

USA Today.

Where is Henderson Room? (Theta Xi Theta mtg.)

NetLibrary questions, accounting books. Put Accounting for Dummies on hold.

PC for Maltoria.

Map of Tallahassee.

Camping & wilderness survival books. Take to shelf.

Today's paper.

Man's PC session timed out because he was only using his laptop. Woman w new reservation kindly lets him have it to sign back in. Why's he need 2 machines?

3:34

Returns paper.

PC for Dre.

PC for Tamon.

Very quiet again. S. expresses relief. Sky is dark w rain clouds.

N. Fl. Fair info.

Help w copier.

Give man book we're holding, Separation of Power by Vince Flynn.

USA Today? It's out.

PC for Anthony.

PC for Crystal.

4:00 Cigarette on between-floors landing. Rain drops. Elton John comes faintly over the trees, "Hold me closer tiny dancer..."

Boy teen asks for S.

PC for L-y-d-i-a, (she spells it out to me). Do people have trouble spelling Lydia? Yes.

Lydia oh Lydia, that encyclopidia,
Oh Lydia the Queen of Tattoo.
On her back is the Battle of Waterloo.
Beside it the wreck of the Hesperus, too.
And proudly above waves the Red, White, and Blue,
You can learn a lot from Lydia.

She's having trouble using our PC's for school because her class web site needs IE 7. Maybe the PC's in Media have newer IE?

S. can't find rebound copy of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France for boy teen. Odd, is vol. of Harvard Classics, but at 823, not with the set at 808. I can't find it either.

The Internet is about all that's going on. No walk-ups or calls. Put away some newspapers.

4:45 15 min. announcement.

The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online

2009-10-31T00:52:00.003-04:00

I read a story in Library Journal that cited an online news article, Facebook 'sparked white flight from MySpace' . It seemed overly sensational to me, and it earned the usual snarky back-and-forth comments one sees on news sites, but it made me curious enough to look for the research it claimed backed it up, a lecture by sociologist Danah Boyd to the Personal Democracy Forum in New York this past June, The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online .

Ms. Boyd observes that social relations reproduce themselves online, a fact that is obvious when stated, but which we don't usually think about.

In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere. Unfortunately, it's also bringing with it next generation divides. The public sphere was never accessible to everyone. There's a reason that the scholar Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere was historically the domain of educated, wealthy, white, straight men. The digital public sphere may make certain aspects of public life more accessible to some, but this is not a given. And if the ways in which we construct the digital public sphere reinforce the divisions that we've been trying to break down, we've got a problem.

Not everyone has the skills or understanding to engage with the public sphere in a meaningful manner. If you think that civics education is in bad shape in this country, take a look at media literacy. Digital publics combine the worst of both of these. Most of you in this room learned to use Twitter and Facebook through your friends. Collectively, you set the norms for what is appropriate among your network. If you aren't part of these networks, these technologies may feel very foreign. I recommend each and every one of you to login to MySpace and try to make sense of it today. It will feel foreign to you because it's not your community, it's not your friends. Now imagine how people who aren't like you feel when they walk into Facebook or Twitter.

She is talking about an issue that has been a concern of "netizens" for a long time. Andy Oram worried about it back in 1999, when the original "social networking" site, Usenet , was already ancient, in his Dickens pastiche, The Ghosts of Internet Time .

“The Internet is gone,” said my companion, stooped and hoary.

“How could that be—what could replace its bounty?”

“The international financial institutions have a proprietary satellite-based network, imposing and impenetrable. The entertainment companies put out 6500 programs a week, all strictly metered by kilobyte and filtered to isolate controversial content. The electric companies—which always controlled the ultimate pipe, and therefore ended up controlling the medium—run the network that activates devices in the home. Everything the vendors want is built into powerful circuits costing a thousandth of a penny, making software and the culture that accompanied it obsolete. So there are many separate networks, each specialized and tightly controlled.”

“But what about democracy? What about a public space? Is there no forum for the average citizen?”

The old Ghost’s wrinkled face cracked in a sputtering, hollow laugh. “Forum? You want a forum? I’ll give you a million of ’em. Every time Consolidated Services, Inc. or Skanditek puts up a new item on their media outlets, they leave a space for viewers to post reactions. And they post, and post, and post. Nobody can track the debates…”

More recently, Doc Searls and others have criticized Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social networking sites for being "social siloes", (proprietary user interfaces), that are walled off from public access. This is why I post anything serious that I have to say to this web log, rather than Facebook. Anyone can find it here. If I think my FB friends would be interested, I post a link to my FB page.

Nevertheless, I understand people's need, whatever their social standing, to have an online space in which they feel safe to express themselves to others of like mind. Usenet forums, when unmoderated, could be pretty intimidating. Trolls commonly baited new posters for fun. I used to contribute to a flight sim forum for the WWI game, Red Baron, and it saddened me when someone would open his question with, "Please don't flame me".

At the library, as you might guess, we librarians are Facebook users, while our public-access users are MySpace folks. I will never forget the summer of 2006, when MySpace splashed here among the black teens. MySpace now gets our attention mainly when someone's MySpace page crashes their browser.

St. Teresa of Avila

2009-10-25T00:55:00.001-04:00

We've been watching this Spanish television miniseries, (with English subtitles), on the new EWTN program, EWTN Gallery, Saturday nights at 8 p.m. Eastern. They've been showing two one-hour episodes each week. We've seen six, and it looks like we'll see the last two next Saturday. What a great production, beautifully filmed, with a spectacular performance by Concha Velasco as the Spanish saint and Doctor of the Church. American television would never make anything like this. What an inspirational example of holiness and renunciation St. Teresa is. She was not afraid of any earthly power that tried to block her reform of religious life in Spain in the 16th century. It's too late to see on EWTN from the beginning, but you can buy it on DVD from EWTN or Amazon, and it will give you weeks of pleasure if you watch one episode at a time.

1893 World's Columbian Exposition

2009-10-23T00:49:00.002-04:00

Researching "There's a Place in France" unexpectedly brought me to the tune's origins in the "Streets of Cairo" exhibit at the Columbian Exposition. The Columbian Exposition was recently brought to life in Erik Larson's popular history, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America. The library of the Field Museum in Chicago has uploaded an archive of images from the Exposition, including lovely color plates from The World's Fair in Water Colors, by Charles S. Graham.

My great-grandfather on my mother's side, Karl Pundt, was a brick mason, and helped to build this first ever Ferris Wheel. He came over from Germany to Chicago in the 1880's. My mother recalled that he would take her around Chicago, showing her structures he had built.

There's a Place in France...

2009-10-22T01:11:00.001-04:00

...where the ladies wear no pants.

He seemed strangely hesitant as he told me that his PC was "frozen". "Show me", I said. The "Start" menu worked, but the Internet Explorer browser had clearly crashed. He had visited "nudeblackwomen.com". See below under "Web Mules" where I discuss the search behavior of computer illiterates.

No nudity was on view, only a woman in a bustier. We use WebSense to block pornography, and it works very well. "If you look for this kind of thing", I admonished, "you are going to get some garbage", meaning malware and viruses.

Waking up Windows, 1985-2009 | Technology | guardian.co.uk

2009-10-21T01:33:00.001-04:00

Windows start-up screens then and now.

I love this sort of thing. Like a lot of people, I didn't come to personal computing until the advent of the Web. I had used dumb terminals at Bookstop in the '80's, and at the library later on. But I have no fond, nerdy memories of DOS games and Commodore 64's. In 1996, when I enrolled in FSU's MLS program, I was able to use a Windows 3.1 Intel 386 PC at the library to write my papers. This was due entirely to the generosity of my supervisor, Sarah Johnson. At the time, only department heads had PC's It had an early version of the Netscape browser, (What's New, What's Cool!).

I do remember the Start Me Up Windows 95 launch commercial on television. MS put a lot of rock star oomph into Win95. The Rolling Stones did the commercial and Brian Eno composed the startup sound .

It wasn't until I played around with Linux in Library School that I discovered the roots of the Windows graphical interface. Take a historical GUI tour at Nathan's Toasty Technology page. The appeal of Linux for non-command-line types like me was that you could configure your own desktop, something that neither Windows nor Apple let you do. But the end of my exploring was a grateful return to Windows 98, which was for me consistent in look and feel, and reliable.

I am not an early adopter. I only gave up Win98 a couple of years ago, when browsers for it began to be badly dated. I ordered a new PC with XP rather than Vista, XP being a well-tested and mature OS, with a still massive installed base. There is no compelling reason for businesses and agencies to go for a new OS at this point, unlike the great Y2K scare. I actually only got XP on my work PC this year. I had Win2K before that.

Crumb's 'Genesis,' A Sexy Breasts-And-Knuckles Affair : NPR

2009-10-19T23:21:00.001-04:00

This story is much better listened to than read. Reserved my copy at the local Borders today. Be sure to check out the excerpt.

Sketching His Way Through Genesis - NYTimes.com

2009-10-19T02:22:00.001-04:00

Robert Crumb does the Book of Genesis. I don't generally follow the graphic novel scene, but this is huge. It's something that I might have expected from Art Spiegelman. Genesis needs a man of great suffering to illustrate it, ideally Jewish. I think that Crumb can do it.

Blogging Reference

2009-10-17T23:27:00.004-04:00

No FSU game today. Library's annual Title Wave book sale has them lined up down at the garage.

After a week of grey skies and rain, autumn has put summer to flight, and it's glorious outside.

Retrieved from the trash bin in the basement, three by Merton. Disputed Questions, The Waters of Siloe and The Silent Life. They didn't think these would sell? Well, maybe not. Disputed Questions has what looks like a good essay on Pasternak. Where would Merton have ended up if he had not died when he did? Has the world forgotten him? Surely the noisiest monk who ever was.

10:00 Time to open the doors.

Howling child downstairs.

Phone: Mr. L. wants number for National Builders in Wichita.

Do we have November ish of Gourmet? Not yet. She mourns passing of Gourmet. Has collection dating back to '40's. November will be last one.

Mom with daughters. Hasn't been to the library "since sixth grade". How to look up books w/o card catalog? Show online catalog. Daughter already knows what to do.

Help her print out e-mailed pic of great grandson. Send it to our color printer in back. She knitted his little wool cap and scarf.

M. is going to weed new fiction while it's quiet.

10:25 12 PC's in use.

Two girls: How much are copies?

M. debates how many Scarpetta to keep. All copies are rental.

Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, take to shelf.

PC for Tammy, w/ babe & hubby. Didn't know her card from a branch was good here.

Material requests db appears to be down. Send call to MIS.

Older white couple asks where book sale is.

Where is PC 63?

Two, heh, "coeds": where is book sale?

The Lions' Pride: A Pictorial and Anecdotal History of Leon High School by Linda Teague, take to Florida coll.

Inventor's Digest, books on inventions. How many items can she check out?

PC for Derrick, who is wearing a black hoodie with gold fleurs de lis.

Dad w/ kids: where is book sale?

Mom w/ little girl: where is book sale?

Print out USPTO info for "invention woman".

PC for Patrick.

PC for Trey.

A Colonial Dame XVII Century arrives to photograph me, and I her, with our Colonial Heritage display. The Dames persuaded Mayor Marks to issue a handsome proclamation declaring October "Colonial Heritage Month".

Mom: how to cite Gale doc? Can use word processor?

11:31 The Saturday morning seniors have come and gone with their weekly stacks of fiction.

Phone: The Pact: Three Young Men Make a Promise and Fulfill a Dream by Sampson Davis. Hold for Jared.

Phone: where can she send a fax?

Where is recycling bin? Where to check out?

Woman unhappy with noise level in Internet area. Amazed that library doesn't ban cell-phone use. Urge her to fill out "concerns" form, which she does.

Man can't remember name of medical suspense author. Check Genreflecting. It's Michael Palmer.

Man listening to music video on PC w/ ear-buds sounds like he has bees in his head.

11:55 PC's are full.

12:00 Lunch. Gyro sandwich and Gabriel Cohen's pretty good crime novel, The Graving Dock, on Park Ave. bench. It's overcast again, but cold, at least. Street lined with cars of book sale browsers.

12:35 Her reservation has expired. PC for Cornisha.

Guitar music, take to shelf.

FSU student: how to get card? Give library brochure.

Make round. Find sex book in 900's quiet area. Reshelve at 306.7. All's well.

Straighten new books.

Do we have any books about this library? No, just the vertical file and the article on the web site. He used to study at this library in the '50's, in the original building, The Columns, and has fond memories.

Where is book sale?

Today's paper & USA Today.

1:28 Quiet.

Belly Dancing Basics by Laura Cooper, take to shelf.

M. back from lunch.

Looking at album of black and white photographs of Governors Island in NYC taken in 1982.

Weeding new non-fiction.

Get more baskets from 1st floor for new book area.

Pulling red dots off "old" new books at ref kiosk.

People waiting at desk: Today's paper? It's in use. Today's paper? Sorry, it's out.

Volunteer L. wants help with corporate info. Show Lexis-Nexis Corporate Affiliations, International Directory of Company Histories.

PC for Carol.

PC for Casey.

Her keyboard quit. Restart PC.

PC for Roscoe.

Help man photocopy DL & SS card.

3:00 L. leaves. What a lifesaver she is.

The Black Hole War : my battle with Stephen Hawking to make the world safe for quantum mechanics by Leonard Susskind, take to shelf.

The Case of the Missing Servant : from the files of Vish Puri, India's "most private investigator" by Tarquin Hall. Our copy out. Request one from branch? She'll wait.

Queen of Dragons by Shana Abé, fetch from check-in room.

Suite 606 by J.D. Robb, Mary Blayney, Ruth Ryan Langan, Mary Kay McComas, in regular print? Main copy out. She'll take the large print, then.

Take "old" new non-fic down to check-in room sorting carts. Staff elevator opens upon B. and two Friends of the Library women, laughing and tired from the book sale. Have we been busy? B. has a camera. Sort books onto carts. V. asks if we've been "swamped".

Phone: Do we have "fat belly cookbooks"? Does he mean "flat belly"? No, fat belly cookbooks. There are lots of them, says he. Nothing in catalog. Nothing obvious at Amazon. Is all right, he says, he'll try the State Library. Huh???

Pencil

Can she get PC in Gates Lab? Does she have card? No. Guest pass is for PC 60. She declines.

PC for Philip.

Help woman print food stamp info.

Where is music up here? Recorded music in Media on 1st floor. Only music books up here.

Mom & sons need history of refrigerator. Not much on shelf. Find bibliography & print it out, explain how to request ILL materials.

PC for Lance.

PC for Daniel.

PC.

Help woman print e-mail.

Help man with drop-down list.

Man wonders why his session is short. He accepted a short session. Explain we are closing at 5:00.

Refill heavy duty stapler.

4:29

PC for Tammy.

Phone: Is Joan. What day of week was 11/17/84? Wednesday. Was day she returned to States from Canal Zone.

Install Office 2007 compatibility pack so woman can edit docx on her flash drive.

15 min. announcement.

Another Monday

2009-10-13T02:07:00.009-04:00

(I dream that I am in a kind of ice cave, up to my chest in sea water. I am on the coast of Tierra Del Fuego. Behind me the cave opens onto darkness, and the thundering, freezing, southern ocean. On a little shelf of ice I am counting change. The coins keep getting mixed together. I am afraid that I will be swept away into the deep before I can sort them out.)

I make myself wake up. Coffee and a smoke, make my morning offering to the Most Holy Trinity.

The Vespa won't crank. Battery's weak after days away in Tampa to see U2. I manage to kick-start it, and shove off under a low, grey sky that augurs rain.

Feeling more than usually desolate, I say a Hail Holy Queen over the sound of the engine. "To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears." It helps.

Why so down? Must be The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty, Sebastian Barry's spellbinding novel of a man who finds himself, "lacking all conviction", as Yeats would say, on the wrong side of the Irish troubles. It comes to me that I've been in a dark, Irish space, with U2 and their Bloody Sundays as well. Weird.

No matter, onward. I must open up on my own. D. is on leave. Newspapers, change drawer, empty pencil sharpener, refill staplers, printers, open restrooms, start 50+ PC's.

T. is hunkered down at a virus-stricken PC at the reference desk, trying to root out the virus. She finds a coupon executable, likely dating from the Oprah/KFC fiasco earlier this year, but it is not the virus, "Antivirus Pro", contracted when I visited the Miss Black Florida USA site last Wednesday, trying to find the name of a Miss Black Florida back in the '90's for a caller. She finally gives up. She must rebuild the PC, and she takes the box with her, leaving the LCD and a tangle of cables.

The second floor landing presents a tableau of motionless unfortunates, waiting for the library to open. They sit or stand suspended in the humid outdoors, as condensation rolls down the great glass windows. Their relief is tangible when I open the doors and they press into the cool, dry library.

M. is here now, and I am glad for the company. After the initial flurry of assigning PC's to non-cardholders, it is quiet for a Monday. She was off last week, and she has a stack of paperwork to sort out. It is my turn to fill the non-fiction send-item list, one of several lists that we print out daily of items that have been requested the day before. Shelvers used to do these before the hiring freeze of '07', (goodness, has it been that long?), but I actually enjoy it. I pull the easy ones, checking back often at the desk, and trundle them down to Circulation just before my lunch at noon.

We had expected 70 or so Leon High students to come in to work on their history fair projects between 11 and 12, but as I step out to the landing for a smoke, I see them finishing their lunches in the gazebo down in the park and trooping our way. If I eat at my desk, I will surely be called out by the workroom bell and lose my lunch hour. I make myself scarce, taking my sandwich up to the staff lounge instead.

Back at 1:00. Lo and behold, I have an hour off the desk. Check the Answer Squad mailbox for reference questions. Can she check out books with a fine on her card? Forward to Circulation. She mistakenly included her own children's book with returns to our Northeast Branch. Forward to NEB staff and tell her so.

I try to ferret out remaining send-item reserves. The Dracula Scrapbook, Peter Haining, ed. hasn't moved in years, as well as From Julia Child's Kitchen. They will be marked missing. A couple of titles on anatomical drawing in the 643's are just plain not there. Now I must try to imagine where some bleary-eyed shelver might have mis-shelved the remaining titles. The Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Sourcebook I find at 613.8521 rather than its correct location of 616.8521. Clear the Bridge! : the war patrols of the U.S.S. Tang I find at 940.5421 rather than 940.9451. Architectural Presentation Techniques has 720.28 on its spine label, rather than 720, as the title record has it.

Back out to the desk at 2:00, and soon it's after-school time. Gaggles of cheery black teens drift in, happy to be out of school for the day. I see a couple leaning together at a table, and not long after, Anthony, our 2nd floor security guard, asks me to call DS, the supervisor of the day. She tells me that they are lying on the carpet at the back of non-fiction, and asks me to keep an eye on them.

Mr. L., the church furnishings salesman calls, wanting the number of London Church Furniture in Kentucky. Where are they in Kentucky? They are in London, Kentucky, and he laughs. Another man calls. He used to look up business addresses with a database we had. Sorry, I tell him, we can't afford ReferenceUSA anymore, but try Switchboard.com, a free site run by the same company.

I walk back to the end of non-fiction. There is a hidden nook by the fire-escape door that invites indiscretion, and sure enough, they are kissing there, though they are standing up. Tut-tut, they must cut it out, I tell them. No Kissing Allowed. She protests that she told him they must not behave so. He is abashed, and says nothing. They clear out. Oh dear, puppy love.

Another hour off the desk. I am fading, and I occupy myself with donations.

Back out to the desk at 4:00. C. is here. His favorite station is at the PC with the virus, so he manfully sits himself down at the Internet guest reservation PC instead. I decide to cull the new non-fiction books, which are getting tight. We keep new non-fiction on the new shelves for six months. I find many titles needing their red dots removed, and to be shifted to the regular non-fiction shelves.

A cute young guy with a mane of braided locks wants whatever we have on medical marijuana and on Mendocino. Wouldn't you know, all our books on medical marijuana are lost or missing. Fortunately, I can show him our Opposing Viewpoints database, which has many articles on the subject. I could tell him a lot about Mendocino, but I don't. He and his girlfriend drill down into Opposing Viewpoints.

MD, our Youth Services coordinator, shows up at 5:00 to help out. I continue culling and shelving the new non-fiction while keeping an eye on her.

And then it's 6:00 pm. I made it.

A Good One

2009-10-07T01:05:00.001-04:00

There is nothing more satisfying to me than a genuine reference question: a question with an obscure, but findable, and even interesting, answer.

LM at our Northeast Branch, a veteran of many years in the Reference Department at the main library, called to ask if I knew whether there was a grammatical term for brand names that have "gone generic", like Xerox, Saran Wrap, Scotch Tape, and so on.

I thought, "L., you're asking me? I'm not worthy!" When I started in reference, she could find answers more quickly in our print reference collection than I could find them online. But the branches don't have extensive reference collections.

I was dazed with my fall allergy attack when she called last week. To my shame, I didn't get around to searching until today.

They are called genericized trademarks or proprietary eponyms. According to Randall E. Krause, to whose Database of American Proprietary Eponyms I originally linked, which link is now dead, they are not nouns, but are in fact rare, proper adjectives.

Netbook grant, Shelter maxed out

2009-10-03T01:10:00.000-04:00

A couple of stories from the Tallahassee Democrat that merit the attention of local readers.

Leon County libraries receive grant for laptops.

The Shelter houses record number.

A Nottinghamian, and On Being a Web Mule

2009-09-30T22:30:00.008-04:00

A Nottinghamian

A man approached me on the floor, and asked me if the library had anything by Stan Barstow. He was a stout, older man, in his sixties, perhaps, with a weathered face, a hooked nose like John Lennon, and a "Notts" football team patch on his sweater. He had heard that Barstow's writing was similar to that of Alan Sillitoe, though he guessed no one read Sillitoe anymore. I said that I, for one, had enjoyed Sillitoe very much.

We had only Barstow's Just You Wait and See, in large print. He wanted, if I recall, A Kind of Loving, Barstow's first novel in what would become his Vic Brown Trilogy. I took an ILL request for it, and then showed him John Harvey's DI Charlie Resnick novels, set, like many of Sillitoe's novels, in Nottingham. I handed him the first one, Lonely Hearts.

Barstow wrote mostly about West Yorkshire, rather than Nottingham, but he was associated with Sillitoe and John Braine as a leader of the Realism movement of the early sixties in Britain. Like Sillitoe's gritty Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Barstow's A Kind of Loving was made into a film, starring Alan Bates. I must see if I can get it.

On Being a Web Mule

I don't know what else to call it, so I have made up a name for it. I am talking about people who, unwilling to learn to use a computer, and having neither an e-mail address nor a credit card, want to use librarians to do business for them online, especially by telephone. Dealing with these people is about the most uncomfortable and frustrating experience that I encounter in my work.

I had a couple of them on Tuesday, each one taking about twenty minutes, during which my co-worker had to handle all other desk traffic by herself.

One woman was trying to enroll in a test preparation course for the Certified Nursing Assistant exam. She hoped that I could supply her with a list of nearby providers with toll-free numbers. She wanted me to try web addresses that she made up, a common strategy with the computer illiterate: what they're looking for, with ".com" on the end, cnatesting.com, cnaclasses.com. We descended into a hell of clueless forums and crap search engines. I could feel her anguish over the phone, as I failed to retrieve the imaginary list. She sounded so desperate. I tried to imagine what she must be doing for a living, if she aspired to be a CNA.

I tried it my own way, going to the Florida Department of Health, which administers the test. But the FDOH, other than strongly recommending that candidates take such a course before attempting the exam, offered no help in selecting a test prep provider. I finally said that I had to close the call, that other people were waiting for assistance. She said that she would call back in five minutes.

I continued to look, hoping to have something ready if she called back. The more I looked, the more depressing it got. It seemed to me that CNA test prep might be something of a scam, as I have come to regard the test prep industry in general. The courses were not offered by vocational schools or community colleges, but by "schools" in strip-mall storefronts. One poster to a forum, having taken such a course, wondered why, if there was such a demand for CNA's, she could not find a job. I was unable to find any training in Tallahassee, but I found a place in Jacksonville, and printed out the information to leave at the desk. The woman never did call back.

Another woman called, excited about an episode of Mystery Diagnosis, a Discovery Network program that she had watched that morning. The episode had been about Lyme disease, from which she suffered, and she wanted to purchase it on DVD for her Lyme disease support group. My initial search got nowhere, and we had to drill down through the DISH Network site to find the local TV schedule and determine the correct title of the episode she had seen, The Stabbing Sensation. The Discovery site directed customers to iTunes. I explained that she would have to download and install iTunes to purchase the episode, not realizing that she didn't even have a computer.

After lunch I got a message that she had called back. I returned her call. She confessed that she did not have a computer, and that she had spoken to the leader of her support group, who had not been able to order the episode on DVD. I explained that it was only available as a video download, and was not available on DVD. She asked me to send the details to her group leader, which I did, after I found that it was more easily available from Amazon as on-demand video. But it was still not burnable to a CD, being one of those confounded DRM-protected Windows Media videos. It could, however, be loaded into a compatible portable video device.

It takes my breath away when I realize how fast recorded sound and video delivery is changing. DVD's seem to be going the way of CD's. How will this affect library media collections, which have been the public library "growth sector" for the last twenty years? Will they wither away? I expect that CD's and DVD's will survive as "boutique" formats, for works that do not have enough of an audience to merit distribution by the media giants.

An American Dictionary of the English Language

2009-09-28T23:40:00.003-04:00

A man wanted to see where we kept our dictionaries. I showed him the 423's in the reference collection. Did we have Webster's original dictionary? I pointed to Merriam Webster's Third Unabridged, the current edition. No, he protested, he wanted Noah Webster's original dictionary, the 1828 edition. We didn't have that one. Why not? He thought it was as significant a cultural treasure as the King James Bible.

Why, indeed? I didn't have a good answer. I love dictionaries, and I prize my massive Webster's New International Dictionary: Second Edition, Unabridged, which I found in an antique shop for thirty dollars. It is still considered the authority by hardcore librarians, including many words left out as archaic by the third edition, and advising the reader whether a word is "proper English" or slang, a distinction that has fallen out of favor, to say the least. I admired his sentiment, and I was ashamed that we did not have Noah Webster's 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language. I took an interlibrary loan request from him.

When I was in military school, at the Sanford Naval Academy, we had a teacher who impressed upon us the preeminence of the Merriam Webster dictionary. We must accept no other. He required us all to submit drawings of the Merriam Webster logo. It was Noah Webster who endeavored to save English from the English. Because of him, we write color instead of colour, and theater instead of theatre.

There is a sort of "back-to-intellectual-basics" trend in publishing now. Simon Winchester has written about the origins of the Oxford English Dictionary, and others have written about Roget's Thesaurus, Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and The Harvard Classics. I suppose a similar impulse is moving me to want to read Gibbon. (No, I'm not going to spoon-feed you the links. Look them up!)

Visions of Gerard

2009-09-23T23:05:00.009-04:00

I've just reread Visions of Gerard, the only novel by Jack Kerouac that I have ever read. I read it the first time only because it happened to be on a bookshelf in a bedroom in Burlington, Vermont, on a cold, wet day in early spring, 1973.

It's about the short life of Kerouac's saintly older brother, who died of heart disease at the age of nine. It is set in Lowell, Massachusetts, a New England mill town, among the French Canadian population, working class and Catholic.

Not so different from 1973 Burlington. A friend from high school had invited me to go with him there, to "God's Country", from which his parents had retired to Winter Park. They were also Catholic. His father was of French Canadian descent, had been a hair dresser in Burlington. His mother was of Polish descent.

We stayed with the family of his childhood friend. I had never seen a place like Burlington before: an old New England town with stone buildings, a town square, a World War I memorial and an ancient cemetery. I was a child of rootless sunbelt subdivisions, bedroom communities.

We crossed the river, where the silent red brick textile mills sat forlorn by the falls, into the town of Winooski to visit family on his mother's, Polish side. His cousin was an authentic greaser, like the Fonz, with pomaded hair, leather jacket, and motorcycle. I had never seen a real greaser, and I haven't seen one since. An endangered species, to check off one's life list.

Our host family was also of French Canadian descent, and very Catholic. So Catholic, in fact, that they didn't even have to go to church. A priest and friend of the family said a homely Mass around the dining room table. I watched them, a wild boy from the pagan future that was Modern America. I wanted to warm myself at that fire.

It was March: chill, sodden, and misty from the thaw. I don't remember why I was alone in that upstairs bedroom for an afternoon. And my eye fell upon Visions of Gerard. It was so easy, then and there in that old house, to picture this tale of 1920's Lowell, Massachusetts; this sweet, sad memory of tragedy visited upon a family bound together by love, faith, and community.

Maybe it was God's Country. When I returned to the Southland, I carried with me a little black and silver crucifix.

Hippie Lessons

2009-09-21T00:09:00.018-04:00

It must have been in my junior year of high school, 1969-70, that I bought this book. Budding bookman that I was, I spent my Saturdays riding my bicycle to the Colonial Plaza and the new Winter Park Mall to hit the bookstores and news stands.

There is a lot of curiosity now about life before the "revolution", as evidenced by TV shows like Mad Men and the film, Revolutionary Road. In 1969, in Orlando, Florida, hippies and anti-war demonstrators were only seen in the media: on television, in newspapers, and in the news weeklys like Time and Newsweek. Many larger cities had underground newspapers, like Atlanta's Great Speckled Bird, or the Berkeley Barb, to which several of the articles in this collection are attributed. In Orlando, we had to make do with two national publications, Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone, for sympathetic coverage of this "new underground".

AM radio did not play most of the music we wanted to hear, as bands like the Jefferson Airplane, the Cream, Steppenwolf, Hendrix's Experience, broke from the short AM format and explored controversial material. The appearance of non-commercial FM stations provided a lifeline for alternative rock fans. In Orlando we had FM 107.

Looking at it now, I think Kornbluth's anthology has stood the test of time. It is a fine snapshot of the Counterculture at the end of the sixties, before Theodore Roszak so named it. It is worth noting that it is almost entirely the work of men. Liza Williams rails against freeloading "hippiebums", but there is not a whiff of feminism.

Jesse Kornbluth is still around, having gone on to a successful career as a print journalist.

Forty years after, I confess I am conflicted about it all. At the time, it seemed pretty clear cut. Either you wanted to keep the nigger down and nuke Hanoi, or you didn't. But in retrospect, I have felt like I was dragged into an argument among my elders. Beats and Squares. I am a Catholic now, but that would not have saved me at the time, as religious orders and seminaries hemorrhaged in the confused aftermath of Vatican II.

It is a part of who I am. The other day, my wife said to me, "I'm into fruit!". And I replied, "Well, don't get all yinned out". And yes, (as she comments), hearing ourselves, we laughed.

Brave New World

2009-09-18T00:40:00.007-04:00

I promise not to make a habit of this. Others have devoted themselves to posting vintage paperback covers, Pop Sensation, for example.

This is one of my favorite covers, by Charles Binger. I have a framed blow-up of it on the wall here in my office at home, done for a "classics" display at the library. Binger has used the "keyhole" technique popular in paperback covers of the '40's. I had cherished this cover as a find, but I see that it is all over the 'Net, even roundly mocked at BoingBoing.

I don't care, I like it. It says, "stop the world, I want to get off!" We see a new Adam and Eve, sans fig leaves, escaping, not cast out from, the "soulless Eden". Will they be missed?

I don't suppose the word dystopia had yet been coined. It is a potent and ancient image. Escape or exile? From Ur of the Chaldees, The Old World, the Concrete Jungle, Suburbia, Cyberspace?

And return, to what? To a naked, undistracted, painful, ethical, courageous existence in the sight of an inscrutable God.

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.

The Bible and the Liturgy

2009-09-15T23:37:00.009-04:00

I've actually been reading The Bible and the Liturgy, by biblical theologian Jean Danielou, S.J., for several months, and finished it tonight. It has been my reading for my weekly hour at Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament on Tuesday nights.

Readers of the works of Scott Hahn, a biblical scholar and a convert to the Catholic Church who has brought many into the fullness of the faith, may not know that this work is something of a touchstone for him, being about typologies of the Tanakh, (which Christians call the Old Testament), and how they are woven into the accounts of the New Testament and the major feast-days of the Church, particularly Easter and Pentecost. Hahn has amplified Danielou's insights to produce a number of books on subjects like the Book of Revelation and the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Before this I had worked my way through Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth, another brilliant work of biblical theology. I have found over the years that this is my preferred method of Bible study: not to work my way doggedly through a book of the Bible, but rather to read a scholarly work about the Bible with references all through the Bible, keeping my Bible close at hand.

Red Alert

2009-09-13T00:16:00.005-04:00

1958. "SAC ATTACK! Every minute of every hour of every day, there are American bombers in the air, loaded with H-bombs, ready to fly into action at the mere spark of the right radio signal. These are the planes and men of the Strategic Air Command."