Wednesday, March 24, 2010

New books!

What a dirty trick. I was hoping it'd stay cold and rainy so nobody has any post-break spring fever. So much for that.

At least the colorful pages of Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes is keeping me distracted. I mentioned it in a blog post a few months back and have finally finished reading it. It's a fascinating book!

It's actually a collection of essays about the suburb as a form of American community and the many ways in which it influences -- and is influenced by -- the "typical" American lifestyle and habits. There's one terrific essay, for instance, about malls and how they came to be, how they're designed and built, and their roles in suburban life. Other essays look at various types of suburbs, how suburbs have influenced American art and been influenced by American architecture (ever seen a Cape Cod-style home in the New Mexico desert? It's very odd), and how the suburbs are changing in response to shifting American habits and preferences.

One especially engrossing essay discussed "big-box reuse." For instance -- and I assume it's happened to your hometown; it definitely happened to mine -- Wal-Mart suddenly started building brand-new SuperCenters about a decade ago, and in the process abandoned most of its older, smaller stores. Similar things have occurred with other companies, like K-Mart, Target, and restaurant chains. What happens to those empty shells after they've been replaced by their larger and shinier descendants? Most of them are torn down, of course, to make way for other businesses, but in America's small towns, it's not uncommon for those empty spaces to remain standing for years on end, simply because those towns are too small to attract the interest of a company wealthy enough to buy the property and dismantle the building. Instead, many towns have opted to raise money in order to convert those buildings for other uses. Some old Wal-Marts have become museums, farmers' markets, or -- as in the case of one in my own hometown -- a small-business incubator where local businesses can rent booths that they can use as offices or to sell their goods to curious shoppers. It's a weird mix of flea market, office building, and county fair, but is tremendously popular.

Yes, I admit it. I come from a suburb. So do most of you, so nyehhhh. Anyway, I highly recommend it for art freaks and community planners alike, as well as anyone who's curious about how certain aspects of our society are examined and analyzed through various lenses.

Since this post has appeared on a Wednesday, I'm sure you know what it means: Wednesday Half-Post! I'm off to Massachusetts tomorrow for the last Academic Bowl regional competition, and things should normalize (for the most part) from here on out.

I said a few weeks back that I'd do a New Book Cart Day so you all are up to date on the new books (fiction and art-related, anyway -- we'll hear from the other librarians about their subject areas in a few weeks) that have been coming in. We've got an exciting crop this year; 2009 and 2010 are proving to be fantastic years in publishing!

Without further ado, the greatest hits:

Horns by Joe Hill
The author of last year's terrific The Heart-Shaped Box is back with Horns, a weird little story about a guy who wakes up one day and discovers that he has grown ... yes, wait for it ... horns. Why? Who knows? But there's more to the story: this guy is kind of busy being blamed for the grisly murder of his childhood sweetheart (which he didn't do), and the horns give him a mysterious power that forces people to tell their secrets. The Heart-Shaped Box made a splash last year for its sheer creepiness; it seems Joe's in fine form for his sophomore novel.

Subway Art by Martha Cooper
This is a big book. It's also quite lovely; showcasing some of NYC's best train-car graffiti, Subway Art is quite an education in how spray paint can be used so incredibly deftly that you're left wondering whether that stuff actually came out of a can. You also learn a little more about the history of graffiti on subway cars, and how creative vandals in other countries -- Germany, for example, which has long been known for its exemplary graffiti -- have adopted techniques and models first pioneered in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. You come away completely fascinated and with a new appreciation for the paint encrusting most of the walls facing the northbound Red Line on the Metro.

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown.
Little needs to be said about this one, I suppose. Better hurry and check it out before anyone realizes that we've got it here -- once word gets out, it's all over.

Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins (not quite available yet)
Along with its sequel, Catching Fire, this book follows in the footsteps of such luminaries as Running Man and Death Race 2000. Set in a postapocalyptic future, the entity that has supplanted the United States and controls several territories demands tribute in the form of two children from each territory who must participate in a televised fight to the death. Sort of a combination of American Gladiators and Survivor with a bunch of UFC thrown in, this practice brings up a lot of questions about reality television and what its logical end might actually be.

Heresy by S.J. Parris
I guess this could be referred to as a period piece: in 16th-Century England, Queen Elizabeth I has been excommunicated by the Pope for refusing to allow the Church of England to rejoin the Catholic Church. As a result, her spymaster, Francis Walsingham, has informers planted all over the country, keeping their ears to the ground for any possible threats to the Queen. This novel centers around one of those informers, a disliked leader of Oxford, and his participation in a historic debate (which actually happened) with a guy who has a heretical idea: the cosmos has no center, and all the stars we see are actually suns seen from a great distance, with planets of their own. In other words, he was born about four centuries too early. However, the debate isn't the only thing going on; a serial killer is on the loose, and the mystery only deepens the further in you get. It's a nice mix of historical accuracy and fiction; a few characters never existed, and neither did the murders, but everything else actually occurred.

First Contact, Or, It's Later than You Think by Evan Mandery
A ... frankly bizarre book, to put it mildly. The plot reminds me of Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace: The aliens have landed, and they look like Orthodox Jews who have a taste for Woody Allen. A clueless Republican president (ahem) plans a kosher state dinner, but a huge misunderstanding leads to a bunch of American nuclear weapons taking off for the aliens' homeworld. Of course, it's up to the protagonist, an attaché to the president, and his new alien pal to save both worlds from irrevocable war. In a really funny way, of course.

Map of the Invisible World by Tash Aw
Indonesia in the 1960s was, much like the United States, undergoing major upheaval. This is the story of a young man whose father is arrested by Communist soldiers and imprisoned; the young man must travel to Jakarta and find out what happened to his father. Along the way, he shanghais a female American professor who knew his father as a child, and they develop an inexplicable bond as they wander through the streets of a nation in the process of tearing itself apart.

The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson by Jerome Charyn
A writer known for his interesting takes on life in various periods of American history, Charyn takes on Emily Dickinson. A complex task by any measure, he pulls it off in exactly her voice as she works through her relationship with her father (who admired her for her intellectual companionship, but condescended to her gender), her family, and her dog. It's extraordinarily well-written; the voice in the novel is very nearly consanguineous with the voice in Dickinson's poems. She was a fascinating woman with a rich inner life and unbridled creativity, and this novel allows you to imagine something much closer to what the inside of her head may have been like. Thumbs up!

Okay, that's it for this week. Until next week!

Friday, March 19, 2010

Getting Started on Deaf Research: Part 4

This is highly non-academic weather. Students skip classes, professors cancel them, and librarians wish they were outside. It's such a significant change from the last three or four months of ice, clouds, and generic freezing misery that I keep looking around and wondering where I landed.

These last few weeks of clouds have been good for my reading list, though. I managed to eke out one last book: Silent Dances by A.C. Crispin and Kathleen O'Malley. Pure sci-fi, total mental vacation. It's nice!

This book is notable because one of the authors is deaf, and so is the protagonist. It's part of the StarBridge series of novels, set in a future where humanity has, for the first time, discovered that there is life out there -- and most of it belongs to an interstellar group of species (called the CLS, interestingly enough). As part of the process of applying for membership, Earth helps establish a multispecies school for young people who want to work for the CLS, called StarBridge Academy.

Silent Dances is the second book in the series. Tesa is a student at StarBridge Academy; she's a deaf American Indian who relies on ASL and a highly-advanced portable computer/translator that's capable of distinguishing between multiple speakers at once and accurately transcribing all the dialogue that's going on. She graduated from Gallaudet (!) before starting at StarBridge, and is about to get started on her last major project, sort of a practicum, before officially graduating. However, she gets sidetracked by the news that a new world has been found, populated chiefly by hundreds of species of giant avians. One species in particular, resembling cranes, appears to be intelligent -- but have such powerful voices that they can kill a human being from hundreds of yards away. They rely on their voices only for what they call "primitive" uses -- for mating or for warnings -- and use a form of sign language in all other cases.

Of course, hearing people are at a marked disadvantage here, what with tending to explode and die, so they send Tesa in so she can learn to communicate with them and evaluate their intelligence. This is complicated by the sudden news that a black-market ring of privateers has been capturing the intelligent cranes and selling their skins in an especially sketchy part of the galaxy, as well as the discovery that the cranes are actually at war with another species on their own planet -- which turns out to also be intelligent.

It's your typical sci-fi action-adventure in space, colored by the fact that everyone signs in one way or another. There's also a sort of minor -- but significant to deaf readers -- plotline about the development of a new surgical technique that can restore Tesa's hearing. She's ambivalent about it at first, in spite of her parents' encouragement, but in the end decides against it. There are also instances that ring very true with me, as a deaf person -- like when Tesa's hearing love interest suddenly turns away from her when someone interrupts as she's signing to him. He does it totally unconsciously, and then realizes a few minutes later that he completely cut her off mid-sentence without thinking anything of it, and turns back to see that she's livid. Another example of something that I can relate to, of course, are the few instances when she completely forgets herself and yells a profanity at the top of her lungs for one reason or another.

There's also the fact that she's an American Indian, which lends itself to a unique relationship with the intelligent avians, especially when it's discovered that many aspects of their cultures and relationships with their environments are similar in many ways.

It's really an interesting book -- thought-provoking and a nice read in general. I especially liked the way O'Malley inserted her own prediction about Gallaudet and the form it takes after another two centuries of growth and development. It's especially interesting when taking the Sixth Street Project into consideration ... but I'll just leave it at that.

Today, we'll finish up the rest of the Deaf Research Help series with a quick run-through of whatever's left. We've done the pathfinders, FAQs, and the Guide to Deaf Biographies. Really, those are the three big things that usually manage to answer most questions.

After those three, you'll see a link to our Index to Deaf Periodicals. Another product of Tom Harrington, it's a good, basic way to find out about anything that was published on a given topic or by a specific person in the following deaf-related periodicals during specific years:
    1. American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb (v.1-38, 1847-1893)
    2. Deaf American (v.26-39, 1973-1989)
    3. Deaf American Monographs (v.40-48, 1990-1998)
    4. Deaf Life (v.1-11, 1987-1998, 2002)
    5. DeafNation (v.1-3, 1995-1998)
    6. Silent Worker (v.1-14, 1948-1962)
One extremely important thing to bear in mind is that this is an index. There's no full-text here. It's just intended to help you figure out out the following:
  • What articles has this person written?
  • What articles have been written about this topic, individual, organization, or family?
  • What was published during this year?
Keeping in mind, of course, that the index includes only what was published in the periodicals listed above, and only during the years listed. It can come in handy, though, if you're trying to remember the name of that article you read in DeafNation about how the ADA might have caused interpreter shortages sometime in the 1990s, for example, or if you're curious about myths about sign language.

Once you've got the basic information on where, when, and who published the article you're looking for, you can then find the full text of the article here at the Library. The earliest years of American Annals have been digitized, as well as the Silent Worker, and are available online for Consortium members, while the rest may also be available electronically, on print, or on microfilm here at the Library. It's pretty nice!

Following the Index to Deaf Periodicals on the Deaf Research Help page, you'll find links to other Gallaudet-created resources, including the Gallaudet Video Catalog and the Clerc Center's Info to Go for parents and educators of deaf children, and then a link to a list of outside resources such as the Described and Captioned Media Program.

Down at the bottom of the Deaf Research Help page is mostly information for our librarian brethren and sistern. Tips on communicating with deaf library patrons, which is intended for hearing librarians who have little experience in working with deaf patrons, and Deaf Subject Headings, which is pretty technical and not for the layman. It's a collection of deaf-related terms, designed to help librarians in other institutions catalog deaf-related materials.

And that's it for Deaf Research Help. I hope this ... well, helped!

Question of the Week
Why do you stay open during Spring Break?
I have asked myself that very question! Just kidding ... or am I?

Truthfully, I get the feeling that students think the campus completely shuts down during the break while they're gone, which doesn't actually happen. It's business as usual, except there are no classes and we have reduced hours to go with the reduced number of students. We really do continue working -- there's always plenty to do, with or without a line at the Service Desk!

We're also open during the breaks between each semester. The only exception is part of the break between the Fall and Spring semesters, when the campus shuts down entirely between Christmas and New Year's Day, but the rest of the time, we're wide open!

Friday, March 12, 2010

Postponement

This week's post has been postponed to next week due to a case of the creeping crud.

*snif*

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

on reading

Another half-week, another half-post ...

I'm heading to Florida tomorrow to work at the Academic Bowl's Southeast regional competition. It should be a fun outing -- it's my home state, after all, and it's hosted at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind, a school I've visited many times. Of course, the town we're going to, St. Augustine, is, by some estimations, anywhere from four to six hours from my actual hometown, so no triumphal return for this good ol' boy. It's okay -- I'll be busy.

In any case, I'm on a little Italo Calvino kick after finishing If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (final verdict: great read but likely to require several attempts first), so I'm deep into Why Read the Classics?, which is a collection of his literary essays. He discusses works ranging from Pliny the Elder's Natural History (we have two volumes; the rest are held by other Consortium schools) to Cyrano de Bergerac's hilarious The Other World, or the States and Empires of the Moon (the linked record goes to our own copy of a combined edition of this book and its sequel, Voyages to the States of the Sun) to Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Calvino turns out to be a pretty entertaining, thoughtful, and extraordinarily well-read critic; he reviews some works I haven't read or even heard of -- and makes me want to read them, too. He's got a little slant towards Italian literature, which is understandable, given that he's Italian himself. It's also a terrifically well-written book, generated by an author who knows what he's doing and fully understands what he's looking at.

In general, though, I have so far gotten the impression that the essays contained in this book are more useful for figuring out why Calvino reads the classics than why you should read the classics. He makes use of a fairly high-level literary vocabulary that would probably leave most people a little lost, so it's not much of a book to read if you aren't already a strong reader -- in which case, you probably don't actually need the book. This seems to be a fault on the part of the publisher or editor, though, not Calvino; those essays were collected posthumously from various introductions, prefaces, and articles he wrote over the course of thirty years. None of them were written with the express purpose of convincing Joe Six-Pack that he should read some Voltaire between NASCAR races.

Still, it's got me asking myself why I read. It's been a topic of some debate over the past few years, especially when the subject of my age comes up (hint: I was young enough to really appreciate Power Rangers when the very first episode aired); the prevailing opinion seems to be that not very many people under the age of 30 read at all (see The Age of American Unreason and The Dumbest Generation), and that I'm somehow an aberration because I actually like to read. Our Library director suggested months ago that I do at least one post about why I like to read so much, so I guess I'll grab the opportunity to do so right now.

So.

The reason why I read -- and read so much, at that -- is fairly simple: I developed the habit early and reinforced it often. I read at the dinner table, in the car, on the school bus, waiting for the dentist, and before I went to bed at night. I exhausted my preferred genre at the local public library -- science fiction -- sometime in high school and moved on to other subjects and have ended up reading anything that grabs my eye.

I mean anything. One of my favorite professors in graduate school -- she taught cataloging and classification, the stuff that determines what call number ends up on a book's spine and what you see in ALADIN Discovery -- said the same motto at least once in every class session for all three semesters that I had her: Never apologize for your choice of reading material. This rather neatly encapsulates my approach to books.

As a reader, I read whatever I can get my hands on. As a librarian, I don't judge people for the choices they make in what they check out. The same is true for the other librarians working here at the Gallaudet University Library and pretty much any other librarian you'll ever meet. If you want to read Mein Kampf, go ahead and check it out. It's a little meandering -- Adolf wasn't the most coherent thinker at the best of times -- but an interesting read.

As far as the classics are concerned, I do think everyone should read at least a few. Not because you should so everyone thinks you're smart, but so you can see how little human nature has changed over thousands of years. It also expands your horizons a little bit on a couple of levels: first, you'll encounter words and ways of saying things that haven't been around for a long time, so you'll gain the benefit of finding out how different the world can be, depending on how it's said or written -- and maybe even learn how to apply this practically in your approach to the world, your job, and your relationships with others. Second, it really does let you look at the world through different eyes in different places and different times. It's the benefit of experience; 19th-Century Britain looks very different from the way it is today, and you can find out how by reading Dickens. The same goes for Greece through Aristotle, China through Sun Tzu, and, yes, the United States through Washington Irving or Mark Twain.

Ovid's Metamorphoses lets you see the Greek myths in their plainest forms, whether through the eyes of the goddess Athena competing with Arachne on the loom or Pyramus as he whispers to Thisbe through a hole in the wall. Cyrano's States and Empires of the Moon -- or Voltaire's Candide, for that matter -- shows you that the French of the 18th Century were funny. Pliny's Natural History lets you see a magical Greece where unlikely creatures coexist with the animals we know well today.

Above all, reading the classics will let you see that a lot of the problems we struggle with today have been around for a very long time. That we're still around today speaks volumes about us as a species, most of which is good.

That seems to cover things pretty well. Next week's post will appear on Thursday, as I'm again out of town next Friday -- busy guy, I am -- and we'll talk a little more about our Deaf Research Help page.