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.