What Are We Waiting For?

Assignment #7

Looking at Shelfari, Goodreads and Library Thing, I am struck by the human need to do something as private and internal as reading and then turn it into a social formula, where you have all this discourse about what you read. If Facebook is the model for how we are coming to interact as a species then these three seem to be paralleling that trajectory.

With that said, in terms of whether or not we adopt the Shelfari presentation and would that activate MCPLD's blog -- I think it is a good idea. The Boulder Libraries Good Reads had me initally questioning its relevance, especially with it advertising accupuncturists in the Boulder/Denver area and how can you not smile about "Boulder, CO?" Needles aside, these sites seem to integrate facebook, blogs, and reading recommendations in fun ways. I used to type up my old reading lists on a typewriter thinking that some day I was going to want to know all the books I had read in my lifetime. Here, you can do that in a way that is somehow more meaningful. My only request is that if you choose the Goodreads/Library website model, then please use a graphic designer for at least the home page so it looks inescapably compelling. Boulder's is weak. As a final thought, I would be far more interested in joining in if it were associated with my home area library. That way I can put faces to who's doing the reading -- it fosters community in my mind.

Swimming in the Information Stream

Assignment #10

If only all learning were this satisfying and productive. I simply followed Nancy and Cari's directions in utilizing EBSCO (which I have always been a little intimidated by) expecting it to be sort of dense -- aren't we drifting into the academic world, one full of confusing references, citations and ibid's? But because I'm confident in both of their teaching skills I knew I would figure it out. The only problem is, this search mechanism is pretty status quo. You aren't going to find the things I'm interested in...Right?

Incorrectomundo!!

First I search for an article in Masterfile Premier -- Ski Mountaineering in the Tien Shan -- and bingo, articles actually show up about skiing and traveling in the Tien Shan! How can this be? I practically feel like a bonafide research librarian. Okay, I'll look for something beside your usual Pablo Neurda search in Biography Resource Center to see if this really works. I search Yvon Chouinard the founder of the Patagonia clothing company, and you won't believe it, not only do I get the general Bio on Chouinard's life, I find out his father hated dentists and preferred pulling his own teeth. Well as you can imagine I am practically swooning at the informational search skills Nancy and Cari have handed to me.

I'm going to start keeping a little notebook of the bon mots I've learned. Thanks.

Stop the Debate

How many times have you heard someone say, "the movie wasn't nearly as good as the book?"
Hmmmm.......
My ongoing thought is, "of course it was not as good! They had to pack 250 plus pages of detail into an hour and fourty minutes. How could it ever be as engaging as the book?!" Give the poor movie makers a break!! With that in mind I am never let down by the movie.

"Books into Movies" was an engaging discovery. In two minutes I found "Invictus" a true story about Nelson Mandela and his joining forces with the captain of the South African Rugby team. Having lived in South Africa for six months I understand how enormous both components are to South African life. I remember driving across SA and seeing traveling gangs of rugby fans going to distant matches and getting the sense that rugby was a way of forgetting the woes that still afflict SA even with aparteid dismantled. Mandela's Robben Island prison cell is a pilgrimage site -- he is the figure that pulled off the impossible and everyone holds him out as some sort of miracle worker even though I constantly encountered people that were discouraged with the new order. It will be a bit like going back to SA and I'm stoked to find this film out in December.

The other film I found out about courtesy of Books to Movies was "Taking Woodstock" which in spite of any bad reviews I'll look for on DVD, because who wouldn't want to celebrate the vicarious experience of Woodstock? I'll put bookreporter.com into my quiver of websites I use and recommend to patrons and I'm going to read, "How Shall I tell the Dog." Check out the review for yourself.

Mutterings

Like all moments (or hours) in front of a digital screen, I start one place and end up somewhere I never expected to be. It appears to be reshaping my understanding of consciousness and concentration. Skimming through reams of information appears to me like a description of the Bardo state in the Tibetan Book of the Dead -- the mind flitting from one nano-second to the next....endlessly. I always come away feeling a bit spent and trying to gather my focus again. On the other hand the part of it I love is standing on this high divide and scanning the great distance for the pieces I didn't know existed, like discovering something kindred...or part of a soul I recognize.

It occured again when I searched Craig Lesley in Novelist and ended up with Gretel Ehrlich. You start out on some Indian Reservation in the Northwest, maybe the Yakima or Colville with troubling stories of life there, and you end up reading the Kirkus review, with the quote "greed-fed malfeasance" about melting ice and polar cold. I keep running across Ehrlich and her focus on the brittle, cold world and the piece of her that is haunted by snow -- its place in the world -- its place in the psyche. For some reason I understand that. Norman McLean may be haunted by waters, but I, like Gretel, am haunted by winter. I wasn't thinking about my relationship to all things frozen this morning, but here I am.

As you can see Novelist is about where searches end up. Did you find the right book? Did you find out that your molecules had been rearranged unexpectedly? And what does that do to my consciousness?

By the way, Novelist is going to be my savior when I get the dreaded question, "What's the third book in the series?"

A Walk with Weebly

After my experience with blogger.com I was all puffed up with confidence that going to Weebly and creating my masterpiece of a website was going to be another giant step for Ming-kind. Instead, I came away feeling a little chastened for assuming that the dad's that developed blogger were hangin' out with the dad's that got Weebly into Time Magazine for it friendliness. Blogger is really easy to set up, use, and visually it has made itself fast friends with my intuitive side. I struggled a bit with Weebly, but hope to reapproach the whole situation tomorrow with a fresh flow of Peet's. There is something of the old magazine editing table that I miss -- you know I want to get my hands on the red paper and glue or tape or paint so I can make something on the screen look like my old highschool notebook with all its endless doodles and pictures, but I can't figure out how to get there ....yet. So the website has an entertaining picture provided by Weebly which I presume can be changed at some point and I can't get "new page" off my title line. There also appears to be a graphic shallowness to the site, that I hope can be enhanced. If any of you out in webolution universe have any tips for me so I can rise out of mediocrity, I'm all ears. The URL is: http://hyperventilate.weebly.com/