Quirky Roadtrips for Armchair Travelers

Here are a few of my favorite nonfiction travel books with a focus on the humorous and/or meditative by some great writers.

Travels With Charley:  In Search of America - John Steinbeck
The classic of this genre, which debuted in 1962, Steinbeck and Charley, Steinbecks's standard poodle, lead the way.

Blue Highways:  A Journey Into America - William Least Heat-Moon
Another classic published in 1982, chronicles the author's atmospheric travels down two-lane, back roads in an old van.

Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches From the Unfinished Civil War - Tony Horwitz
Horwitz explores the physical and cultural landscape of the Civil War with lots of weirdly funny sidetrips, which include the consumption of raw bacon and an interlude with a master Scarlett O'Hara impersonator.  Horwitz, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is also the author several other literary travelogues including Blue Latitudes:  Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before.

Notes From a Small Island - Bill Bryson
Bryson, a master raconteur, recounts his humorously poignant, final tour of Britain, mostly by foot and by rail, just prior to returning Stateside after living in England for a number of years.  Bryson is a prolific writer with great comic wit whose booklist includes the wonderful A Walk in the Woods:  Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Candy Freak:  A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America - Steve Almond
A slightly edgy, humorous memoir-travelogue of the author's quest for elusive sweeties.
Click to visit Steve Almond's website.

Assassination Vacation - Sarah Vowell
Vowell, an NPR This American Life contributor's, comic/noir take on pilgrimages to the sites of presidental assassinations.

Keep on Tech Trekkin': Yammer On

In the year since I participated in Tech Trek, Web 2.0 technologies have exploded.  Barack Obama's amazing electorial success was due in part to the use of a MySpace-clone website, which helped build an extremely dynamic ground campaign.  This landmark use of technology in American politics underscores the way that web applications have become customizable conduits between individuals and/or organizations that allow for rapid communication and response. 

The latest app that I'm playing with is Yammer.  Yammer is basically a microblogging service (like Twitter) with a business app.  I heard about Yammer on NPR's tech segment, signed up, and coaxed a couple of co-workers into signing up, who coaxed some other coworkers into signing up.  It is fun and easy to use (IMHO) and useful, according to the NPR segment, because it cuts down on email by letting people in the business or organization that uses it know what other folks within the org are doing in real time (like Twitter does with friends). 

You sign onto Yammer with your work email and it connects everyone whose work emails have the same ending.  Unlike Facebook and other public social-networking web apps, only your co-workers can see your Yammer posts.  This cuts down on exposure to distracting, non-work related posts and keeps everyone focused on company business while staying connected.  Very cool.

Santa's Little Helpers

Happy St. Nicholas Day (December 6th)!

Here he is in la belle France avec Pere Fouettard, a mad butcher/priest dude who will get you if you are naughty.  (Click link to see the French website where I found this cool picture.)

In Switzerland, St. Nick hangs with Schmutzli, a sooty, nasty dude who will carry you off in his sack if you don't watch out. (Click link to see Flickr with this great pic).

The devilish Krampus is part of Austrian (and other eastern European nations') winter holiday traditions that have merged with St. Nicholas Day and Christmas.  Krampus, which means "claw", is another bogeyman to make sure that the kiddies don't get out of line. Click here for more about Krampus.

In the Netherlands, Santa, known as Sinter Klaas, is accompanied by Schwartz Piet, an African helper in Renaissance style clothes.  Schwartz Piet is more of a friendly helper than a threat to kids.  (Click here for more on Sinter Klaas).

Have these kids been naughty?  Only Krampus knows.

Have a cool Yule!

Big Sticks: Pink Saris and The White Tiger

Serendipitously, a day or so after finishing Aravind Adiga's wonderful, Man Booker Prize-winning novel about a down-trodden young man's path to becoming a successful entrepreneur through dubious means in contemporary India , The White Tiger, I heard a fascinating story on NPR about a group of vigilante Indian women called "The Pink Saris".

The Pink (Gulabi) Gang or Pink Saris, are led by Sampat Pal Devi  and wear, what else, bright pink saris, and carry a leki stick, the weapon of choice for Indian police.  The Gulabi Gang goes around and attacks dishonest and bad folks who avoid punishment by the Indian criminal justice system through the payment of bribes and influence.  The average target of  Pink Sari attention is a male who has victimized someone poorer and less powerful, often a woman.  

I find this interesting because the term "thug" originally comes from India, derived from the term "thugee", which is a kind of organized crime, Kali-worshipping cult, who were feared bandits and thieves. The idea of this women-only group, who wear such distinctivly feminine clothing, banding together, getting thuggish for justice like a band of Wild West vigilantes, and openly taking on an unresponsive, male-dominated justice system is pretty interesting stuff.

The White Tiger has a similar theme of the weak against the strong, but Balram, the protagonist, takes on the system in a covert, murderous way rather than through direct action like the Gulabi Gang. Balram, a  Dickensian anti-hero, is a young man working in the Indian capital of New Delhi as the personal driver of Ashok, the soft, Westernized son of the family that has Balram's rural village and entire family locked in a merciless, feudal grip. Balram, the white tiger, seeks to survive the corrupt, injust world he has been locked into from birth by striking out at his employer. 

Balram is a true, old school Indian Thug, which comes from the Sanscrit word for "conceal", "sthag".  Balram hides his true feelings beneath a submissive exterior, bowing and scraping and obediently performing all the menial tasks set for him by Mr. Ashok and his family, who Balram calls animals, no matter how horrible or degrading.  Balram's spiritual link to the Thuggees is underscored by the presence of a Kali magnet on the dashboard of the car that Balram drives for Mr. Ashok.

Picture from http://www.shivani.com.au/Media/picture-galleries/Trip-to-India.aspx?imagepath=%2FMedia%2Fpicture-galleries%2FTrip-to-India%2FIndia-and-Diwali-07-080 .  Accessed 12/8/08

Arviga's novel combines an amoral protagonist a' la Camus with elements of Poe ("The Casque of Amontillado" first comes to mind) and a touch of Shakespearean tragedy (I seem to recall a reference to bloody hand-washing).  The upstairs/downstairs contrasts of Indian life in the rural "Darkness" versus the "bright lights, big city" of Delhi are sharp and startling.  T

his novel smoothly transitions from the first world, high-rise apartment where Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam, Ashok's overly-sexy, spoiled American wife, reside in air-conditioned comfort to the third world, bug-infested, squalor where Balram and his fellow drivers spend their nights without missing a beat.  This clear and shocking dichotomy is as strong a call for social justice as anything Charles Dickens ever wrote or any picture Jacob Riis ever took.  The novel's gruesomeness and the author's use the first-person frame tale of a series of letters to a Chinese bureaucrat, among other things, also echo the building, Gothic horror of Poe's, "The Tell-Tale Heart".

Ms. Sampat Pal Devi's autobiography has been published in France.

DIY Book Bag

Cool idea from Boing Boing:  a book purse made from Reader's Digest Condensed Books.  Nice to find a use for them other than decorating chain restaurants and bars.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/10/25/howto-make-a-puse-ou.html

Reader's Digest Condensed Books are fairly useless to most readers mainly because the idea of "condensing" literature is somewhat unsavory and anathemic to real readers (think Cliff notes).  If you look at reading as a pleasure to be savored, why would you want to snip away at tasty bits and pieces of a good book just so you could plow through it more quickly to the "main idea".  Condensing periodical articles is cool.  I totally dig Utne Reader and Reader's Digest, but forget condensing novels.  If it is worth reading, it is worth reading in its entirety, IMHO.

Freedom to Savor the Salacious and Sample the Staid

I went to see my cousin's CofC class production of the play, Quills.  The play is about the Marquis de Sade and is quite provocative.  It was made into a movie starring Geoffrey Rush.  It brought to mind discussions I had in library school with fellow students about censorship and "thought crimes".  Banned Books Week starts tomorrow, too, so the subject of intellectual freedom is at the forefront of my mind.

Personally, I don't think that knowing and thinking about things is the same as doing them.  Thought crimes don't exist in my world.  Even thoughts/concepts that may be unpleasant to me are fodder for books, articles, and discussion.  I believe people should be free to think and write about anything they like as long as they are not planning or inciting crimes.  Not everyone agrees with this and I do find hateful pundits to be extremely unpleasant but I think that holding the ideal of intellectual freedom above all my personal inhibitions and preferences is essential for my practice as a public librarian. 

To paraphrase Ranganathan, "Every book its reader and every reader its book."  Yes, indeed!

Picture from http://media-2.web.britannica.com/eb-media/23/115523-004-FA619CA3.jpg .  Accessed 12/8/08.

My Life Post-Harry: What I Am Waiting For

I am not exactly "waiting" for The Tales of Beedle the Bard in the way I waited for Deathly Hallows, but I will buy it and I will read it, mostly for background info.  My capability for anticipatory zeal is not piqued in the slightest by any of the HP movies.  They have not been all that great with the exception of the Cuaron effort.

Here's what I am waiting for.

*David Mitchell's new book about Dutch traders in Japan in the 18th or 19th century on the island of Dejima (or Deshima).

*A new book in Holly Black's Modern Tales of Faerie series or any YA book or any book by Holly Black.

*Wendy McClure's promised tome about disturbing children's books.

*The movie version of Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

*Another season of Flight of the Conchords.

*Finding a copy of Sarah Kider's Mermaid Song to purchase on CD or by audio download.

The waiting is not the hardest part.  The real problem is that a good "wait" is hard to find.

Random Reading: Bookmarks and Books

While reading a great article in the Charleston City Paper (I really have to give props to their Web 2.0 skillz) I found a new bookmarking site, Mister Wong.  It appears to be a multi lingual version of Del.icio.us, which I find really interesting.  I like messing around with languages, words, idioms, etc, and I don't mind subtitles.

During the process of importing some Del.icio.us bookmarks into Mr. Wong, I found a new Library 2.0 site, Open Library, which wants to create a web page for every book, according to their site info.  Looks like an interesting site to keep an eye on and play around with.

I must say that Del.icio.us' new look is much more graphically appealing.  The import/export process was also really easy.  This was the first time, I tried that, too.   I went ahead and imported all my random Del.icio.us bookmarks into one account, as well.  Now to trim the tags.

Meme Streak: The Day After Caturday

I have memes on the brain. 

While reading a William Gibson novel, Pattern Recognition, a virtual, semiotic funfest, I wanted to refresh my understanding of the word "meme".   Discovering that my bed-worthy Webster's Collegiate, circa 1977, was too outdated to help and my newish Websters 3rd too heavy for horizontal use, I decided take the contextually-appropriate Google/Wikipedia route.  This led to more info grazing and I found this online Time article about 4chan, an "off the chain" website, where users share assorted visual tidbits and other stuff. 

According to Time, 4chan is a meme hothouse which started out as an anime/manga fan site modeled after a Japanese site called 2chan.  At some point, 4chan had a Saturday thing called "Caturday", where users posted funny pictures of cats.   This in turn spawned the LOLcat phenom.  Interesting stuff.

Lately I have been really interested in the whole viral info transmission concept.  It figures in several good nonfiction books I have been reading; The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell and The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson.  The internet is a great place to see it in action because it happens so quickly and so visibly. 

It is also interesting to me that 4chan is a mostly unrestricted website that allows for a high degree of anonymity.  I think that theoretically, at least, information evolution/transmission probably occurs more rapidly in this kind of open environment (the watched pot and all that).  I found the anime/manga connection interesting too.  Otaku figure heavily in Pattern Recognition as well.  Just another drop in the meme pool.


Internet People by Dan Meth




Weezer's Take

A Little Tab'll Do Ya!

I am really lovin' the tabs so now I am converting the library blogs that I work on to tabbed versions using the CSS stylesheets from http://www.btemplates.com/ . I can see possiblities for major improvements in navigation and access to info using these templates. Click the links below to see what tabs can do. Please note that these are still under construction.

http://standrewslibrary.blogspot.com/

http://standrewslibrarychildren.blogspot.com/

Picture from T.J. Wagner's Tab Gallery. Available at http://home.epix.net/~tjwagner/myfulltabbottle.jpg. Accessed 7/14/08.

Clonification and My Year of Blogging Dangerously: Faux Wordpress Templates

Exploring the options of Wordpress has pushed me to expand my knowledge of Blogger. I have decided to stick with Blogger as my primary blogging platform for this blog. My horizon has definitely been expanded by interacting with Wordpress. I really liked using Chris Pearson's Cutline Template (Wordpress.org) on my own site but find the Wordpress.com version too constraining to use as my only blogging option primarily, as I mentioned before, because of the banning of Javascript.
I googled to see what other people were saying about the topic of Wordpress versus Blogger and found a great blog, Smithereens, with a pretty clear discussion of the limitations of Wordpress.com. I also found out that just like MySpace, Blogger has inspired folks to create CSS layouts/templates so that users can customize their blogs.
I have always used the templates that come with Blogger and have never tried actually loading my own. Apparently interest in Wordpress clone templates for Blogger is a hot and happening thing. I have tried three templates so far and I found....tah dah!!... a Cutline clone template. The tabs are web addresses not pages like the Wordpress versions and the instructions in the code are written in Spanish, but that is okay. I am plowing ahead.
I paid for a year of web hosting for my birthday last year and created a blog using Wordpress (the dot org CMS - content management system - just learned that term yesterday ; ) ) This really pushed me to learn more about the mechanics of independant blogging, which was a good thing, I think. It was very technical; not infrequently over my head. Everytime I see "MySQL", I think "my squall" and "perfect storm".
In the end, I have learned that the biggest thing about using a free blog host versus DIY blogging is that free hosting saves a lot of time and brain power. Like Lyle Lovett said in the song, "one wrong move will turn your world upside down" when you are hosting your own blog. Fixing mess-ups was frustrating and took time away from the actual process of writing something. Using these custom Blogger templates is allowing me to get under the hood and tinker around without having to do too much. It is kind of like putting on some rims versus rebuilding the engine.

Samurai Night Fever: Two Guys and a Girl

I have totally gotten into the Samurai Champloo anime series. I am now on Disc 5. Two guys, Jin, a ronin, and Mugen, a thief, are traveling with a fifteen year old girl, Fuu, who is searching for the "samurai who smells of sunflowers".   This is a great anime series for adults.  Highly recommended!!

Negatory, Good Buddy: Things Wordpress Won't Do and Some That It Does Better

Exploring Wordpress.com and comparing it to the wonders of Blogger has been added to my way lengthy list of current geekoid interests. I have been using Blogger for about 3 years and the full version of Wordpress on a paid host for 9 months. I just started messing with Wordpress.com and am learning the limitations of the free version as well as how it differs from Blogger.

I really like the fact that Blogger is pretty user-friendly and free-and-easy with the Javascript widgets. Wordpress.com is also user-friendly and has some awesome features like built-in stats but sadly it is not welcoming of widgets from other sources and Javascript widgets are strictly verboten (click here for more on that and again here for a bit more). This means that some of my all-time favorite, most visually interesting, widgets don't work on Wordpress.com's blogging platform with free hosting.

In the immortal words of Jeri Blank, "Sad."

A Few of My Favorite
Widgets Which Won't Work in Wordpress.com
(Sorry, I could not resist the urge to alliterate. It's an English Major thing.)

*Library Thing Book Covers
*Twitter Badge
*Del.icio.us Tag Clouds
*Photobucket Slide
*Project Playlist Player

Methinks Wordpress may be too serious for some of my intended audience (families with young children and teens who are more likely to respond to an eye-catching visual like a slide of movie posters than a lot of words describing the actual movie).

Wordpress.org, the platform, will let you do anything you want because you are paying to host it yourself. If you crash, get hacked, whatever, it's on you. The dotcom free hosting site is another deal entirely; a very safe, secure place to engage in serious blogging.

I do love the tabs, on Wordpress.com, though. I can see some real use for that - more static info, like library location and hours, program and event schedules, on the tabbed pages and reviews on the front page (where the blog is) sorted by categories and tags.

The categories and tags feature of Wordpress appear to offer an especially efficient way to organize and sort posts. I plan to continue to work with Wordpress to increase my proficiency with these and other features. The Trek continues.....

Happy Trails!

Wordpress

My blogs are in motion. I have combined all of my "professional" blogging for the last two years into one big ball of bloggishness. I am playing with Wordpress and checking it out. It has a nice import feature that I used to add the stuff from this blog

Posting My Secret

I am addicted to PostSecret. My daughter turned me on to it a few years ago and I have it on my My Yahoo page (my home page) and I check it each week for the new secrets. I have "read" all the books, too. It is one of the most moving art works/projects I have ever experienced.

PostSecret now has a some extra content; audio secrets, YouTube videos, a Facebook group,etc.

Trawlin' the Net For News: The Dredge Report

While looking for info on a recent political scandal in my home county (not Charleston), I discovered a wealth of SC political blogs and a social networking site devoted to user-driven newsleads. Here are some tasty samples.

FITSNews - "Conservatism with an edge" blog of Governor Sandford's former spokesperson, Will Folks/

The Palmetto Scoop - A conservative blog run by several folks including a moose. (Click here for more info.)

South Carolina Hotline blog - the SC Hotline sites are apparently by Jeffrey Sewell

South Caroina Hotline website - Really, nice directory of SC news sites and blogs.

SC Yellow Dog Democrats - Blog of SC Democratic party members (click for their "about" info)

Click here for SCIWay's directory of SC Political blogs.

More political blogs and pundits - click here.

Click here for SCIway's directory of blogs about life in South Carolina.

For news with a social networking edge on the local, national, or world level, check out NowPublic.com.

Anime for Adults

I have been really getting into the anime thing thanks to Ms. Amanda, whose business-like exterior hides mad anime/manga skillz, and Ms. Tama from JOH, Crazed Babe of Anime and Teen Anime Club sponsor at Johns Island Regional Library.

I prefer to watch in Japanese with English subtitles. I have picked up a little Japanese doing this.
I find it fasinating how much English has infiltrated Japanese. Here are a selection of some of the best stuff I have seen so far.

Anime From Akira to Howl's Moving Castle: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation by Susan J. Napier is an excellent reference work for more info on anime. (Click title for catalog info on book.)

Click here for anime related items from the CCPL collection.

Movies

Akira - The classic anime movie. Extremely powerful futuristic fantasy with shades of Blade Runner, Mad Max, and Brave New World.

Steamboy - made by the same director as Akira with some similar characters. Anime Wild Wild West meets Victorian England/Jules Verne with a dash of Greek tragedy.

Whisper of the Heart - Sweet Studio Ghibli teen romance/feel-good movie. Wonderful portrayal of family life in urban, mid 20th century Japan mixed with fantasy.

Paprika - Futuristic fantasy thriller. Awake, she's a prim and proper therapist but, when she's snoozing, she transforms into Paprika, a spicy, secret psychological superheroine battling monsters from the id.

Tokyo Godfathers - A Japanese Christmas story featuring a stolen infant, a tough, runaway teen girl, and an odd homeless couple composed of a hopeless alcoholic with a secret, sad past and his best friend, a transgendered, cross-dresser, who dreams of being a mother.

Series

Cowboy Bebop - (Bladerunner + Star Wars) X cool tunes = Cowboy Bebop. This is a great series.

Samurai Champloo - Even greater series by the creator of Cowboy Bebop. Hiphop cool in samurai-era Japan with great tongue in cheek humor and wonderful characters on a quest. Visually, this is the best of all the anime movies or shows that I have seen. Incredible stuff.

Witch Hunter Robin

- Beautiful, atmospheric future fantasy with witches. Has an X-files vibe plus Gothic Lolita cool clothes.

Book TV and Booknotes on C-SPAN

I don't have full-strength cable at home, just a diluted el cheapo version that costs about $10.00 a month. I get good reception of the basic local channels, which I want, plus some junky shopping channels, that I block out. I read alot and watch videos so I really don't need more TV channels to tempt me.

Yesterday, while pulling an all-nighter with my successfully post-operative parental unit at the hospital, I encountered Book TV, a C-Span 2 channel that broadcasts nonfiction book authors giving talks about their works. Thought it was pretty interesting stuff, well, interesting to me, anyway. Tom Wolfe was talking about trophy wives and corporate culture at Enron and Silicon Valley and so forth. Apparently there is a related show called "Booknotes" that has been on C-SPAN since 1989. Who knew?

Booknotes offers hundreds of streaming video interviews of authors. Click for link to Erik Larsen's 2003 interview about The Devil in the White City.

I plan to take a closer look at Booknotes and the online version of Book TV. I am going to check out Book TV again, too, the next time I have "real" cable access.

Monkey Shines

Monkey was truely awesome: incredible acrobatics, sets, music, everything. Sun Wu-kung inspires and amazes. Xie xie! Namaste.

Workplace Marginalia: Stuff I Learned From Helping Patrons

• Laki or Lakagigar , a fissure type of volcano located in Iceland, erupted in the 18th century and caused world climate change.
• The Drinking Gourd is the Big Dipper.
• Flying Foxes are a type of fruit bat and many of them live in Australia.

Picture from http://www.naisections.org/AAE/drinkingourd.jpg. Accessed 12/8/08.

Reading By Example: We Both Read Series

I really love the We Both Read series of beginning reader books. These books come in several reading levels and when opened, the left-hand page is for the adult reader and the right-hand page is for the beginning reader, which makes reading a shared experience. These books are incredibly popular and more titles are being added to the CCPL collection all the time.

Click here to see the We Both Read series!

Pictures Speak: Wordless Books

Wordless books let the pictures tell the story. Older readers and visual learners will pick up more "cues" from the beautiful artwork in these stories.

Un Brella by Scott E. Franson

The Red Book by Barbara Lehman (Caldecott Honor)

Author/Illustrator David Wiesner has created many beautiful award-winning wordless books

Flotsam (Caldecott Winner)

Tuesday

Sector 7

Free Fall (Caldecott Honor)

For more wordless books from the CCPL collection, click here to search for the subject heading, "stories without words - juvenile".

Pictured is Yellow Balloon by Charlotte Dematons

Ambiguities: Gender Flexing

I have been reading the wonderful, Borges-influenced, Japanese writer, Haruki Murakami's, novels lately and have found it very interesting how he handles GLBT issues. I wonder if this is partly the influence of one of Japan's greatest twentieth century writers, Yukio Mishima, a bisexual, whose work I haven't read yet BTW, or something attributable to Japanese culture in general. All of the Murakami novels, I have read so far contain characters who are GLBT in part or whole.

I have discovered similar, generous treatment of gender ambiguity in Japanese manga and anime, which even have a special genre called "yaoi", "boys love", whose target audience is tween/teen girls, "shojo". Even the muy macho Naruto inadvertantly kisses the equally macho Sasuke in what I interpreted as a humorous reference to yaoi style anime/manga. Yaoi is like a much, much, tamer version of slash fan fiction (longer paper on slash)but with a similar esthetic. (Slash is another fascinating literary subject IMHO.)

The Fruits Basket manga and anime series contains several sexually ambiguous characters, particularly the cross-dressing characters, Ayame, an adult who is the "Snake" of the Zodiac and who takes narcissistic pride in his attractiveness to both sexes, and the younger, more innocent Momiji, the "Rabbit", who risks getting bullied because he prefers to wear a girl's uniform to school. I also felt like there was also a subtle yaoi undercurrent between the two main male characters, Yuki and Kyo, which was expressed in the story's plotline as constant fighting and bickering.

In Western literature, depictions of ambiguous sexual orientation, by which I mean characters or themes having any sort of GLBT overtones, have traditionally been very controversial and potentially career-dampening for the writer (think Radclyffe Hall). Leading a GLBT lifestyle with any sort of openness was even more risky (think Oscar Wilde). Lately I have found more GLBT characters, who are out, literarily speaking, in the books that I read. I have been really pleased by the treatment of these characters by the authors as multi-faceted people and not just sterotypes.

Here is my short list.

Ironman by Chris Crutcher (2000 Winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award)

The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips
Prague by Arthur Phillips (his website)

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst (winner of the 2004 Man Booker Prize - click for Guardian interview)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon (winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize)

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon

Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (He did not win the Nobel Prize in 2007.)

Momiji picture from a fansite, Aucifer. Available at http://fruitsbasket.aucifer.com/character_profile.php?ID=8. Accessed on 5/16/08.

Witch One Do I Choose?

So many witch books so little time! Most of these books are series books and like all YA series, can be found in the YA paperback section at all CCPL branches. YA paperbacks are not linked to the catalog so you can't look online and see what is there. You have to go directly to the shelves and uncover the magic yourself!

You Are So Cursed by Naomi Nash - You don't need real magic if you can use your mad sleight-of-hand skills to fool all the kids that bug you at school.

Sweep by Cate Tiernan- What meeting the hot new guy at school led you to suspect that everything you thought you knew about yourself and your family was totally not as it seems?

Witch Child by Celia Rees - Historical fiction set in 17th century England and America from the author of Pirates!

Circle of Three by Isobel Bird

Daughters of the Moon by Lynne Ewing

Rhymes With Witches - Lauren Myracle

Monkey Business: The Last Remaining Ancestor of Salazar Slytherin

Hippity, hoppity, Spoleto is on it's way! For the first time since 1989, when I saw the awesome Laurie Anderson, I am actually going to one of the big events; Monkey's Journey to the West. This brings full circle a serendipitous series of personal literary/artistic/spiritual events that began with, what else, Harry Potter.

It all started when I was re-reading the Harry Potter series last spring in anticipation of the release of Book 7, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I noticed two odd references (in Book 2 and in Book 6) to the Slytherin family members looking "monkeyish" and "simian". This really intrigued me and I started investigating for monkey myths and discovered the story of the Monkey King, Sun Wu Kong, who tried to conquer death.

Further investigations of the Monkey King led to the story of the 16th century Chinese novel, Monkey: Journey to the West. This book, written by Wu Ch'eng-En combines the story of the mythical Monkey King with the story of the real Buddhist monk, Xuan Zang (also known as Tripitaka). Xuan Zang is famous for making a secret, forbidden fifteen-year journey to India and back in the 7th century in search of more Buddhist sutras to answer his spiritual questions. He is also famous for his travel diary, which provided China with valuable real information about the world beyond its borders.

Xuan Zang hailed from from Chang An in Shaanxi province, which is home to the famous Qin dynasty army of terracotta warriors and the start of the Silk Road. The Wild Goose Pagoda, which still stands in what is now the modern city of Xian, is home to Xuan Zang's library; the Buddhist texts he brought back from his quest.

Xuan Zang passed through an area that has fascinated me since I read Dr. Elizabeth Wayland Barber's Mummies of Urumchi and became intrigued by the Beauty of Loulan and the other mysterious, European Silk Road travelers, who were buried by the salty wayside in what has become one of the fiercest desert regions in the world, the Taklamakan.

One of my personal literary goals is to read the entire four volume epic, Monkey: Journey to the West. I have done some research and selected the Anthony C. Yu version as my translation of choice. It is a complete and faithful translation according to the reviews.

But there is more...

My random ramblings prompted, Ms. K8 to recommend the wonderful YA graphic novel, American Born Chinese by Gene Yang, which also draws upon the Sun Wu Kong story.

As part of Tech Trek, I got back into messing about with MySpace and made friends with The Gorillaz and discovered a related MySpace page for the production of Journey to the West that members of their group were involved in creating in the UK. I wished so much too see it....

To the present...

I noticed the eye-catching, beautiful cover of Where, a new free entertainment info magazine, that Ms. Vickie had requistioned for our branch, and discovered that the Monkey is coming to Charleston. So now we are full circle and I get to see the monkey at last.... but.... I still want to see where he lives, so....the journey continues!

www.flickr.com More photos or video tagged with biggoosepagoda on Flickr

Big Goose Pagoda in Xian: Now That's a Book House!

Some More Choice Monkey King Resources

Monkey King Lesson Plan

Power Point Slide with Links

Picture from the opera, Journey to the West, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/content/image_galleries/280607_monkey_gallery.shtml?10. Accessed on 4/30/08.

Should Wikipedia Be Labeled "Warning: Use of This Product May Be Damaging To Your Crediblity"?

A couple of disturbing things came to my attention in the last week regarding the alarming trend/misperception that Wikipedia is a reliable source of credible factual information. Wikipedia does contain facts, but those facts are tainted with opinion, hearsay, and just plain jokiness in some entries.

The first thing that I learned was that an acquaintance's doctor's office had given him/her a printout of medical information from Wikipedia to use as a guide. (Sacre' bleu!) Even if the doctor wrote the Wikipedia him or herself, unless that doctor reverifies the info in the article every time it is printed and issued to the patient, the possibility exists that the Wikipedia entry might have been tampered with and contain useless or even hazardous information at the time it was printed.

I discovered the second thing the day before yesterday when I was googling and I went to an About.com entry and discovered that the About.com post was using Wikipedia for its information source. Somebody better warn the teachers.

Apparently About.com relies on "guides", experts in a field, to gather information from the web on their area of expertise and post it on About.com for random internet users to access. About.com is now owned by the New York Times. You think they would know better; journalistic integrity and all that.

The latest thing I came across is the news that Google is creating somthing called knols (apparently a "knol" is a unit of knowledge comparable to the "util of satisfaction" from the utility theory of economist, Thorstein Veblen , the guy who invented the term "conspicuous consumption") Google wants to use the knols concept to move into the Wikipedia -About.com field of intenet user-generated information; experts contribute their knols or something like that. I just hope it is not just another pile of Wikipedia-style truthiness.

All this just goes to show that alot of people simply believe anything that comes off the internet if it is packaged nicely. I plan to keep on pushing the electronic databases and googling with the +edu to try to get better info for my patrons.

Here are my multi-disciplinary "explanations" for what is wrong with using Wikipedia for a reference source.

In mathematic terms -

Wikipedia =Facts + Nonfacts

Facts + Nonfacts = Nonfacts

Therefore Wikipedia = Nonfacts

In literary allegorical terms -

Using a quote from Shakespeare's Macbeth to make an allegorical reference to the above mathematic explanation of what is wrong with Wikipedia:

"No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas in incarnadine, making the green one red."

Symbolic Meaning: The blood on the hand of Macbeth symbolizes the taint of nonfact, which makes the green sea of fact one big red nonfact. (I'll let you figure out where the commas can go in that statement.) (English Major Joke Alert)

In historical/social science terms -

The fierce tribe of nonfacts with their superior weapons of confusion are always able to overcome and conquer the delicate, social order of the tribe of facts. Nonfacts efficiently subjugate and absorb the fact tribe members so that the nonfact tribe becomes even stronger. Even though the former fact tribe members sometimes appear unchanged, close examination reveals that facts act as nonfacts as long as they merged.

In philosophical terms -

Unless you are an expert, you can not know with certainty that the info in a Wikipedia entry is factual.

If you are expert enough to know the info you find on Wikipedia is factual, then you don't need to use Wikipedia to get info on the area of your expertise.

Therefore people who use Wikipedia are not expert enough to know they are getting bad info.

In conclusion people who want to get facts about a subject that they are not experts about should use a credible source (like an encyclopedia or electronic database) rather than Wikipedia.

Philosophy is not my strong point so my logic may be flawed. Perhaps I should consult Wikipedia...

Macbeth is contemplating washing his hands in the photo from the Creation Theatre Company's 2006 production of MacBeth in Headington Hill Park, in Oxford, UK. Available at

http://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/images/theatre/macbeth-creation-blood.jpg . Accessed 4/22/08.

Tea Greenish: Upping My Game

I worked at Charleston County Recycling's Earthday Festival this past weekend. It was an awesome event; bigger and better and greener than last year. Personally, I have been trying to get greener, too, by trying to generate less non-biodegradable waste, especially plastic (even #1 and #2) and styrofoam as I go about my day-to-day life.

On the homefront, this means going back to using powdered detergent and dishwashing powder (these come in cardboard containers), avoiding purchasing and ordering foods that are served in styrofoam containers or completely avoiding restaurants that use styrofoam containers as well as generally eating out less. I have started looking for juices sold in glass bottles (Earthfare's 64 oz apple juice bottle is the bomb!) and refill them with homemade tea instead of buying soft drinks. I like the Pom teas because they come in a reusable glass. I am now using Pom glasses to carry water instead of plastic bottles. My husband has graciously acquiesed to my wishes to pass on plastic and is now getting groceries in paper bags (which actually hold more!).

I was interested to see the Slow Food folks at the Earth Day Fest. I want to get more into the Slow Foods thing myself; making time to prepare good food from fresh ingredients (I use a lot of canned vegies and beans at present). Slowing down my cooking to a snail's pace is looking like a prime candidate for the top of my green resolutions for next year. I am sure I will get no complaints from my family on that one!


Here's my recipe for ice tea made with bulk loose tea. I get mine at Earthfare, which has opened a "tea room" with all kinds of cool bulk teas (many are Fair Trade) as well as all kinds of boxed teas. (Earthfare graciously donated some bags for the St. Andrews' Green Skillz Prize Drawing, by the way.)

*I use a 64 oz (8 cup) Pyrex microwave-able mixing bowl with a handle and spout for this. (see picture above)
*I spoon in 6 heaping measuring teaspoons of loose tea (I use black tea like Assam, Darjeeling or Earl Grey) into the bowl. (Green or herbal tea my require a different quantity or brewing method).
*I fill the bowl with 6 cups of water and swirl the tea around washing the tea that is stuck on the sides of the bowl down into the water. I have found that it works better to put the tea in first but it will still work the other way around no problem, I just have to stir the tea a little more to disperse it.
*I nuke the Pyrex bowl of tea and water for 10 minutes on high (I have a wimpy microwave so a more powerful microwave may need less time).
*I let the tea sit in the microwave and steep for at least an hour or two (sometimes much longer if I forget about it!)
*I slowly strain the cooled tea into my 64 oz bottle using a funnel with a cup sized tea strainer (this is a stainless one, mine is plastic) sitting in it.
*I top off the bottle with water and put it in the fridge to cool.
*The used tea leaves go into the compost pile.

If I wanted to make it sweet, I would probably add sugar at the point when I added the tea leaves at the beginning because the sugar should dissolve into the tea when the mix is heated in the microwave. Some of my co-workers make sun tea which is even more Earth-friendly. I will have to experiment with that... maybe next year!

(picture of Taian Teahouse, one of the oldest in Japan - click to go to webpage)

Here is a link to a Japanese-American tea classic, The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura from Project Gutenberg.

South Carolina Tea Links

Tea in South Carolina from South Carolina Magazine

Tea in South Carolina from SCIWay

Andre Michaux Biography (planted the first tea in America in the Charleston area)

Middleton Place (site of first tea planting in America)

Pinehurst Tea Plantation (Tea Farm) in Summerville, SC

Charleston Tea Gardens (now owned by Bigelow, this tea farm produces American Classic Tea)

Book Connection: Ish by Peter Reynolds

Nice, upbeat kids book about being in transition. Very wabi-sabi.

Connecting to Literature: The "Aha" of Passover

Books have been a major influence on my thinking and some have changed my life. I was taught in library school that connecting to books and literature was the highest goal of reading. The use of books in counseling to foster mental wellness is called "bibliotherapy" and reading books and listening to stories have led to radical social change (think Gutenberg and Voltaire).

Today's topic was Passover at my church. I missed most of the service because I was teaching a Sunday school class. However, the bit that I did get to hear was about the connection between the Passover story in the Bible, which ends in the liberation and exodus of the Israelites, and the hopeful possibility it contains, that one day, all enslaved people will win release. The spiritual that we sang, Wade in the Water, reminded me of something that I think about as I go about Charleston looking at all of the beautiful old "pyramids" built by African hands; how the literary connection they made between those Biblical stories and their own situation of slavery became an impetus to push for freedom. Moses and the Egyptians was more than just a tale, it was an inspiration and a plan.

Books, and the stories and ideas they contain, are powerful things. Stories speak to us in the language of the unconscious. New ideas are like a strong wind to push us forward, sometimes to unexpected places. Literacy and freedom go hand-in-hand.

NoveList Is Now Linked to the Catalog!

Note (4/20/08) - Sadly I haven't been able to get the PURL to work in a blog post. The good news is that you can go directly from the book entry in NoveList to the item in the library catalog. I am going to play with this some more.

When you look up a book in NoveList it now has a feature that will check the CCPL catalog for the book and take you to it so you can request it. To find this link, scroll down the page and look for the heading, "Database and Persistent Link" (The persisent link (PURL) allows you to link the NoveList entry on a book to a blog or web page which is also a great feature.) There is a pink book icon labeled "Check the Library Catalog" which, if clicked, will trigger a search of the CCPL catalog for the book described in the article. Sweet!



Here is the purl for Shoeless Joe and Me by Dan Gutman. Check it out!



http://web.ebscohost.com/novelist/detail?vid=3&hid=116&sid=6537be48-8535-4bca-b06e-9bf459412079%40sessionmgr106



To log into NoveList outside the library click here for instructions. To see why I like NoveList, click here.

Bigtime Thumbs Down: Harry Potter V

Japanese cover of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I did not like the move version of The Order of the Phoenix. Maybe it was the fact that the waltzy John Williams' theme used in the earlier films was not that present. (I do like waltzes.) Maybe it was the fact that the broom flight from Little Whinging to Grimmauld Place was so low to the ground and obviously exposed to random Muggle and Death Eater eyes (I was surprised JK Rowling let this one "fly"). Maybe it was the fact that this big scene had all the hallmarks of a cheesy advert for ye old London town (I was surprised that Harry and his guard did not swoop through "The Eye" or make a pitstop on the hands of Big Ben). The fact that it was accompanied by the most BORING music possible made it completely intolerable.

There was just no spark in this movie. The DA practice scenes were as tired and dull as Rocky's workout. In contrast to the overzealous faithfulness of the first two movies, this movie varied too much from the book in several key plot areas to be forgivable. (Blasting your way into the Room of Requirement! As if.)

The script also seemed really limp and hollow. The snappy wit of JK Rowling's dialogue from the book just wasn't there. The sappiness of the final moments of the film were almost unbearable. I felt so sorry for Daniel Radcliffe for having to utter such drecky lines. I held my tongue when I saw this movie last summer in the theater but I must let it out after a second attempt to watch it on DVD. HP and the OTP (the movie) is a monumental stinker.

Maybe the next three films will be better. Frankly, I am not that hopeful. I personally think that Alfonso Cuaron's masterful version of Book 3, The Prisoner of Azkaban, is going to remain the best movie of the lot. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix proves the point that it is always better to read the book.

I like actually like this version better than Warner Brothers'. At least it is amusing. This Harry Potter parody is from the activist group, Walmart Watch.