TwentySevenLetters / B

Best Americans

According to this article in Publishers Weekly, Houghton Mifflin is going to expand their already-extensive Best American series to include comics. They already include some sequential art pieces in the Best American Non-Required Reading, but they’re now making an entire anthology of comics.

The Best American Comics series will be edited by Anne Moore, with Harvery Pekar as the inaugural guest editor. It’s due out in October, along with the rest of the Best American books. Granted, every October rolls around and I say I’m going to wait a few months, and maybe someone will buy the Best American Short Stories and Best American Non-Required Reading books for me, but every year I cave and at last get the BASS on my own. This past year I was determined to be strong and not spend my hard-earned $14, but then I saw it was guest-edited by Michael Chabon (swoooooon--as a writer, anyway), and, well, there went my fourteen bucks.

A long, long time ago (at least four or five years now), I interviewed at Houghton Mifflin. One of the perks they mentioned was that employees get (or got, at the time) a significant discount on any HM titles, and they can purchase the books a little in advance. Seeing as I have all of the BASS collections since 1996 (plus a couple of stragglers prior to ’96) and all of the BANRR collections, I was very excited at this. I didn’t get the job. But now I have a friend who just started there, and I’m hoping I can exploit her good nature. (Though I’m not sure she’d be allowed to do that.)

The Rebbe of Oz

After work Saturday, a friend came down from Boston. We went to dinner and then to a high-school play. The high school in question is the local Hebrew Day School, and the play was a Hasidic version of The Wizard of Oz.

(For the gentiles in the audience, myself included, a rebbe is the spiritual leader of a Hasidic community, not necessarily the rabbi. I looked it up.)

Anyway. I knew about this play because one of my favorite patrons was in it and was also in charge of costumes. On her brief forays into the library (returning books and checking out new stacks for her siblings, mostly), she’d mentioned the show, and I told her to tell me when they had dates. About 2 weeks ago she brought a flyer, and asked me NOT to post it. “We want people to come… but only family, mostly. We don’t want a bunch of strangers watching us make fools of ourselves! But you can come, if you want…”

Being Orthodox, the show was only open to women and girls, and Alexander had other plans for the night anyway, so I emailed a friend and asked if she’d be interested. She was, so we went off to see the Rebbe (the Wonderful Rebbe of Oz).

We arrived at the school about 20 minutes before it was due to start, and we were just about the first people there. The girl who invited me was running around with last-minute craziness, but stopped to say hello, and seemed very glad that I came. Other families started filing in, some of whom I recognized. The principal of the school (a very friendly woman; she comes into the library two or three times a week) did a bit of a double-take when she saw me, and asked, “hey, how did you get roped into coming?” A few other regular patrons also recognized me—some right off, but some with “where do I know you from? You’re out of context!” (The first of the “out of context” people also asked me how I got roped into coming, in those exact words.) I’m guessing I get some big points with the Jewish community now.

As for the play itself: it was obviously a low-budget performance, with no elaborate costumes and a lot of recycled sets. The kids worked really hard on the play, and it showed—they were animated and peppy, and they all seemed to be enjoying themselves. In particular, the girls playing the Cowardly Lion and the Wicked Witch were excellent—the lion was a clown with a very expressive face, and the witch had an amazing cackle.

And because this was a Jewish version, there were no Munchkins. Instead, Dorothy’s house landed among the Menschkins.

Feeling cranky today

Preschool Storytime (4-5 years old), 10:30 AM, Wednesdays.

This is what our calendar says. This is what the library newsletter says. The flyers, the recording on the phone, the librarians (when asked)—this is what they say.

Today’s storytime had 8 children, the oldest of whom was almost 3. At the zero hour (i.e., 10:33, when I gave up on waiting for older kids to arrive), I swapped out two long-ish titles for two much shorter ones, since my audience was even younger than usual.

My reading of The Wee Little Woman was punctuated by the almost-three-year-old digging out her toy cell phone, “dialing” (it beeps when you press buttons), and talking on it. Mom didn’t bat an eye. I kept going and just talked over her, but… geez. Cell-phone rudeness starts early.

I finish up the storytime and I’m back at the desk just in time to overhear two mothers talking disapprovingly: “Those books are still too long, and he [gesturing to her 18? 20?-month-old child] just doesn’t have the attention span. They need to choose more appropriate books.” Then they left before the actual Toddler Time, where the books are shorter and are chosen with 2- and 3-year-olds in mind.

Behold the summer reading program!

Spring started yesterday, and in preparation, we’ve fleshed out almost the entire summer reading program!

I’m pretty sure I’ve already whined about how much I hate themes, and how I had no ideas what to do as a science-y thing, since animal science would require animals. But! We might have solved that problem, and in a way that will require very little effort!

The tentative plan right now is to do one art project a week and one passive program: a trivia/scavenger hunt/quiz-like thing. Every Monday, we’ll put out a new sheet of questions. Each kid who turns in a sheet (one per child per week!) gets a small prize of some sort, which should encourage them to actually do it. I hope. Each week will have three questions, at least one of which would require kids to look up the answers. Questions like “is a ladybug a kind of spider, beetle, or ant?” and “what kind of whale is the biggest?” will be the norm, but there will also be things like “without looking it up first, draw what you think an armadillo looks like.” (Question 2: look it up and draw it for real.) We’re hoping we can make a small gallery of “armadillo” pictures.

We might still try to find the contact information for the woman who brings her turtles to schools and libraries for education programs, but we’re not making any promises yet. Our craft projects are pretty well planned out, including one day at the end of the summer as a Day-Long Use-It-Up Arts-and-Crafts Extravaganza. In actuality it will probably only be a half-day (4 hours, maybe?), during which we’ll bring out all the odds and ends we have left from other crafts. Seven pipe cleaners, a handful of beads, dark blue, brown, and black construction paper, a lump of multi-colored clay, whatever’s left. We’ll just put it all out and the kids can make whatever they want with whatever’s at hand. We use up leftover materials, they go home happy, everybody wins. (Well, except the eighth kid who wants a pipe cleaner.)

The teen program is still up in the air, but I’m leaning toward a multi-session make-your-own-storyboard/comic program (which, if the comics folks win out, I might use to launch an actual teen comics discussion group, which someone asked me about last night), and maybe a Monster Costume workshop or something. I’ll figure it out, but really, I don’t expect it to get a whole lot of traffic either way. So far, I’ve had only one person express interest in attending, and she’s 26 and has a full-time job and grown-up responsibilities. This is already a better response rate than last year, and I think I’m more likely to see her than anyone else.

I’m putting more of my energy on the kids’ program than the teen program, mostly because that’s where the effort will be appreciated—but also I’m hoping the sunshine-and-lollipops-ness of the younger program will counteract the doom-and-gloom of the unattended teen program.

Talk to me!

This morning, I got an email saying that someone had commented on one of my posts. Which is interesting, because when I tried to turn on the commenting option, Blogger did something goofy and told me it couldn't do it, and insert this code in this place in your template, and it seemed that code was already there. Strange. And now they won't give me the code again to try placing it in there a second time, so I can never ever try it again, or something.

But apparently, commenting is available! If you click on the time stamp under a post, you have the option to leave a comment, and see any other comments posted. If you don't click on the time stamp, you'll never know comments exist. I tried to turn them on and it didn't work, except that it did, in a weird way.

Curiouser and curiouser. Eventually I'll get myself moved off Blogger and onto WordPress, where this sort of thing should be easy. Until then, comment if you want, email me if you want, or just plain ignore the whole response opportunity. (And if anybody knows how to make comments visible from the main page and wants to share this information, please feel free to do so. I think the easy way will just be to dump Blogger and move to something more powerful.)

YAM: Event 1 of 2

This afternoon was our first of two Youth Art Month activities. Because we’re kind of bad at planning things, it was only at the beginning of this week that I decided exactly what the program would be. (And yes, I’m allowing myself to take full credit here, because while my coworker and I are both bad about planning things, I went out and bought materials and built prototypes and things.)

I picked bead creatures. In preparation for Youth Art Month, I bought stuff like pipe cleaners (some in stripy animal prints!) and wooden beads (plain and painted). Yesterday we got our second box of art supplies, which included some lacing cord, and we had a bag of plastic beads on hand. So, we could make multiple things: three-dimensional bead bug-like things, flat animals, bracelets/necklaces, or just abstract pipe-cleaner structures.

The photos here are of my prototypes, and what I put together during the program. We had six kids and three adults show up, so it wasn’t a huge, standing-room-only success, but it was something we’re likely to do again. The kids had fun, cleanup was easy, and everyone went home happy. So, yay.

And because this is just the way things are, we’re already sort of thinking about the Summer Reading Program, the theme of which is Paws, Claws, Scales, and Tales. Can’t begin to express how much themes irritate me, because we’re supposed to make all of our programs center on the theme, rather than just doing whatever we feel like. The teen theme this year is Creature Feature, so I need to start thinking about that—though I’m reluctant to plan anything, since last year’s program was such a train wreck. It’s not even spring yet, and I already resent the summer reading program.

But at least my Youth Art Month stuff is cute.

I finally found “the ugly”

In one of my last batches of reviews, I had a good and a bad… and now there’s an “ugly” to round out the set.

Suzanne Weyn, The Bar Code Tattoo. I’m willing to bet that at least half of you out there have already guessed the basic premise: we’re in the future, and it’s a future in which everyone has to be bar-coded, and something is going horrifically wrong with the tattoos. Our main character joins up with a resistance group, then the tattoos become mandatory and they all have to run away for a variety of reasons. There are questions raised regarding the ethics of human cloning, and what about some of the clones who are now turning 17, but are being denied barcodes simply because they’re clones? And having your whole medical history tattooed on your arm, so that only the more “desirable” people will be able to get jobs, insurance, housing?

Sound cliché? It is! But it gets a little more interesting than that. The future that we’re living in is the year 2025. Yes, about 20 years from now. Which means we have about three years to perfect human cloning to the point that said clones will still be alive and healthy to even have issues 20 years from now. Also, this bar-code tattoo was supposedly introduced in 2016, only ten years away.

But the real problems with this book aren’t just the unlikelihood of any of this coming to pass on the schedule the author proposes. After all, 1984 didn’t turn out to be anything special. (However, this book was written in 2004, with a 12-year buffer to the introduction of the tattoo.) No, the real problems have nothing to do with the story. The writing in this book is just awful. Every detail is spelled out, not just in the text itself but in the dialogue. At one point, two friends are talking, and one laments that she never thought the bar code would really impact her life much. Her friend replies, “that’s because we’ve all gotten used to being tracked through the Internet. It really started in the 1970s when credit cards were first linked to computers. By the 1990s somebody knew every move you made with that card.” Much of the dialogue is like this, this lecturing tone even in conversations between friends.

It hardly seems worth snarking on the futuristic painkiller you’ll find at the drugstore: Adlevenol. Apparently the big three got tired of competing and joined up to make a SuperDrug. Or something.

But what really pissed me off in this book—what really cemented that this book is just too stupid to live—is that there’s a recurrent musical theme. The main character’s mother sings snippets of a song from “the early days of the century,” and the lyrics become something of a rallying cry. The song? Nelly Furtado’s “I’m like a bird.” With the lyrics “I’m like a bird/ I’ll only fly away. I don’t know where my soul is/ I don’t know where my home is.” Grammy-nominated or not, nobody is going to care about this Nelly Furtado song in 20 years. I mean, Nelly fucking Furtado?? I really don’t care how many radio DJs said this song was timeless or a classic or any of that. Fact is, I doubt if anyone’s going to give a flying crap who Nelly Furtado even is in 10 years, much less 20. (Does anyone care even now?) Some songs and artists are classics. If the author had chosen something from The Beatles, maybe. I’d even give her credit for, say, U2 or Billy Joel. But even a couple of years down the line, nobody is going to remember a flash-in-the-pan pop singer who released one album. “I’m like a bird” is not going to withstand the test of time.

And I hope to god that this book doesn’t, either.

And Tango Makes Three

From the AP Wires, via Salon.com:

Parents Complain About Book's Undertones

March 04,2006 | SAVANNAH, Mo. -- A children's book about two male penguins that raise a baby penguin has been moved to the nonfiction section of two public library branches after parents complained it had homosexual undertones.

The book, written by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, was moved from the children's section at two Rolling Hills' Consolidated Library's branches in Savannah and St. Joseph in northwest Missouri.

Two parents had expressed concerns about the book last month.

Barbara Read, the Rolling Hills' director, said experts report that adoptions aren't unusual in the penguin world. However, moving the book to the nonfiction section would decrease the chance that it would "blindside" readers, she said.

(Incidentally, the title of the book is And Tango Makes Three.)

I have no words. What is wrong with people? Homosexual undertones? "Blindside"?

I’m doubly happy now that it’s on order already for my branch, and we’ll probably keep it with the picture books. Nobody will find it in the non-fiction section. The ones who do find it there will put it back on the shelf (in the wrong spot, most likely), because they’ll be looking for facts, not feel-good love stories from nature.

Still more reviews!

Believe it or not, I have read some grown-up books recently—they just take me a little longer.

Chuck Klosterman, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs : A Low-Culture Manifesto. This book is a series of essays about pop culture, from the breakfast cereals referenced in the title to The Sims. I admit that I couldn’t make much of the sections on sports (and in fact I glazed over to the point that I don’t even remember what sports he talked about. Basketball, I think. Maybe some football, too. But I do remember his reference to the Rice Krispies mascots as “Rastafarian elves.”

Klosterman has no real agenda; the essays aren’t tied together to prove some Great Point About Society. But his writing is very funny, and a lot of his points valid. Not all of them—he’s never going to get me to agree that Pamela Anderson is as important to our generation as Marilyn Monroe was to hers—but several of them. It doesn’t take very long to read it, and if you’re interested in pop culture and creative non-fiction, get it from your local library. Or, if you know me, ask to borrow it.

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad is Good For You : How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. This guy actually does have an agenda, but it’s one of which I approve, so it’s okay. The basic premise of the book should be pretty obvious from the title, but to expand on it, he’s arguing that many elements of pop culture have become more complex over time, and require more thought to understand them on their many levels. He starts by analyzing computer games and the way they’ve changed: from Pac-Man (objective: eat the dots, avoid the ghosts) to games like Zelda (objective, in just one section: fill the bottle to water the bomb-flower to blow up the rock to make a bridge to cross a river), games have been requiring more problem-solving skills and creative thinking to advance through increasingly-complicated plot lines. Johnson also talks about the changes in television shows (contrasting the number of characters and relationships involved in one episode of Dallas as compared to the number in 24), and how the DVD market now is proof of the multiple layers of plot and dialogue, necessary to support multiple viewings. I can buy this argument for The Simpsons, which does continue to make me laugh on multiple viewings, but everything is on DVD now, and I don’t really think that Saved By the Bell has the same depth as The West Wing.

He also argues that movies are requiring more mental energy now, too, and movies that would have been art-house-only releases in the ‘60s and ‘70s are blockbuster hits today. I’m not convinced on this point, as I think he and I are defining “blockbuster” differently. (He specifically lists movies like Memento, Being John Malkovich, and Run Lola Run as evidence that the public is ready for smart movies that bend time and space in a variety of ways. According to IMDB, Run Lola Run grossed $7.2 million; Being John Malkovich grossed $22.8 million, and Memento led the pack with $25.5 million. By comparison, Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith grossed $380.2 million.)

So, his book is interesting, but not as convincing as he may have expected. Unfortunately, I think it’s one of those books where, if you already believe the premise, it’s not worth reading the book, and if you don’t believe the premise, you’re not going to be convinced. It might convince some people who are on the fence or who have very little opinion at all. I guess it’s hard to impress someone who already believes your thesis, but I found his evidence to be a little underwhelming and his explanations to be a little rambling (like me!). I’m glad I got it from the library, instead of spending money on it.

Happy Birthday to me!

Today is the first anniversary of Library Ninja. While we’re on the topic of milestones, this is also the 100th post. Why, yes, it IS the reason I’m posting a couple of times today, as separate entries. I'm a nerd.

Youth Art Month

March is Youth Art Month. This means that all the libraries in Providence are scheduling Children’s events and programs to do arts, crafts, and other creative things. One branch has a bookbinder coming in to teach kids how to make their own books with blank paper and decorative covers. Another branch has an honest-to-goodness artist coming in to run workshops. Several branches will be displaying all the art produced by kids throughout March on a Gallery Night at the end of the month.

What’s our branch doing? Well, in our usual slacker fashion, we’re not being very ambitious, but leaving it up to the kids to be so. We’ve picked up a variety of materials—pipe cleaners, wooden beads, Magic Nuudles—and while we might make a couple of prototype projects that the kids can base their projects on or ignore or whatever, it’s pretty much going to be one of our standard art programs. (“Standard art program” in this case means “throw an assortment of supplies on the table, see what the majority makes out of it, and retroactively name the program after it.”)

In other crafty news, though, we were recently told we had $150 to squander spend on craft supplies for after-school programs. After much perusal of supplier websites (Classroom Direct and Discount School Supply), we placed 2 orders, totaling $150.01. Luckily, the PPL budget was willing to kick in the penny over budget. The first box, about a third of the supplies, came today, and we’re actually sort of excited about it. New markers, to replace the old dried-up ones! (We’ve already thrown those away, and just tried to avoid needing markers for a couple of weeks.) A bunch of kitchen sponges for sponge-painting! Googly eyes in assorted colors! (Colors, people! Does it get cooler?) And my favorite, only to be whipped out at the height of the summer boredom, when the library can’t possibly do anything exciting: multi-color scratchboard paper. Awwww yeah. This was just the COOLEST thing in elementary school, so I’m hoping it’ll be a big hit with the kids this summer. Or whenever we finally bust into the package.

Correction: It was the second-coolest thing. First-coolest had to be CrayPas, the oil pastel crayon things. They were fabulous. And 5 student packs came out of our Youth Art Month budget. I am unreasonably excited at the prospect of using these, even though I can’t draw worth a damn.

Is this thing on?

I just finished what may very well be the worst pre-school story time I’ve done. I cut it short at only four books, instead of the usual five, because it was fairly clear that the kids (and some parents) were just waiting for me to shut up so they could go home and have lunch.

Seven kids showed up. Again, this was the pre-school story time, aimed at 4- and 5-year-olds. Of the seven children, one just turned 5, and another is 3. The other five kids were 2 and under. I read a couple of new books that just came in this week—Spike in Trouble, about a dog being blamed for all kinds of mischief he hasn’t committed, and Something Might Happen!, about a lemur who’s afraid to do anything (like eat cereal) because of the potential that something bad could happen (like the crunching startling him, causing him to jump and hit his head on a lamp)—and a couple of old favorites (I Want To Be a Cowgirl and an adaptation of The Little Red Hen, this time with weird photo-realistic illustrations of the animals, including the pig, duck, and cat playing poker). Bright, funny pictures, mostly funny stories, the usual goofy songs (made goofier, even! If you’re happy and you know it, quack like a duck!), and a roomful of blank stares. They’re not even chatting amongst themselves.

That was the strangest part. Seven kids, babies and toddlers, silent. The two oldest boys—the 5-year-old and 3-year-old—are always silent, so I don’t worry too much about them, but this week neither of them even took any of the books when I was done, which is a little more unusual. The others? No idea what was going on with them. Zombie-children? Epidemic indifference?

Of course, I finish up with some relief on both sides and return to the desk. On the other side of the room, our AmeriCorps worker is doing a storytime for a group of 30 or so pre-schoolers from the local YMCA, who just happened to drop in. To be fair, the AmeriCorps program at the library is combined with Ready To Learn Providence, and those workers are supposed to be doing storytimes out in the community. And 30 children coming in late to a storytime—even a bad one, like today’s—would be a big disruption, so I can understand making them a separate event. But... sheesh. This sucked.

And! A patron is now leaving the Toddler Storytime (for 2- and 3-year-olds), who said that her daughter is 4 (and rather precocious, we’ve observed), but prefers the Toddler Time. So I’m just hugely unpopular today.