IN LIBRUM: Ramblings of a Library Student

Cocktails. And Dewey.

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:23:04 GMT

Since I have followers on my flist who are enamored of cocktails, and followers on my list interested in libraries, I thought I'd go ahead and link y'all to the latest post on my library science blog, in which I show off the hand-typed catalog cards I made for a series of cocktails for my upcoming graduation party:

Cataloging Cocktails

Now, it should be noted I was slightly more interested in finding appropriate matches for all ten classes of the Dewey Decimal System than I was the best possible cocktail list, so a couple of those are dubious as libations go. Still; I intend to make it through all ten Friday night if I can. And if I can't I'll have the tenth, the Bloody Mary (classified under History, Geography and Biography), as breakfast on Saturday.

Mastery

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 07:24:39 GMT

So I know I haven't been around here for quite awhile. Three things:

1) I do, in fact, still live.
2) I have completed all requirements for my Master's program in Library and Information Science. I will officially graduate next month.
3) The giant honking piece of work I had to complete this semester to graduate - my "e-Portfolio" - is publicly available on my library science blog, The Pinakes (direct link to the e-Portfolio: http://thepinakes.com/eportfolio). Feel free to take a look! Let me know if you hate it, or love it...

Ancient Gamers?

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:54:12 GMT

I take a temporary step back from my livejournal hiatus to post this link, which is just of awesomeness:

http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=4205385

If I only had a few grand to spare, I'd have the greatest gaming geek accessory ever. Especially since I've always had the theory that older dice were luckier. How lucky is this thing?

And I love that the link states that "Modern scholarship has not yet established the game for which these dice were used.". Oh yeah, we geeks know.

Great GoT Casting News

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:26:36 GMT

GRRM himself has confirmed not only the long-swirling Sean Bean-as-Eddard Stark rumor, but also added that Mark Addy has been cast as King Robert. I've seen Addy in a couple movies -- A Knight's Tale and The Full Monty, and in both he was something of a lovable, comic softy. I think he can easily channel Robert's charisma but the fierceness required would be something different from him. But I always pictured in my mind's eye a younger Brian Blessed as Robert, and Addy shares quite a few physical traits. I'm very curious what he'll bring to the role.

As for Bean, he was my choice for Ned long before HBO ever even picked up the option. I can't possibly express how much I approve of his casting. I guess I hope it doesn't break the bank, but hey, he only gets his salary for one season anyways. Ned was the role they could afford a bigger paycheck for.

GRRM also named the actors playing Viserys, Jon Snow and Joffrey, but I don't know any of them. Regardless, news like this just makes this pilot seem so much more real.

Woohoo!

EDIT: Actually, I've seen the Joffrey in something -- he was the "Little Boy" in Batman Begins, I assume the one Batman encountered a couple times and saved. That doesn't tell us much about how well suited he might be for Joffrey, though. But frankly, I'm not sure that's the hardest part. Joffrey requires no empathy, unlike some of the other villains.

The actor for Jon Snow, Kit Harington, has mainly done stagework in London. Google Image Search shows that he has the right look for the part.

Hooray for Xray

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 16:42:35 GMT

Just checking to say huzzah and hooray for our good Madame X for surviving the removal of her alien infestation. What was once a bizarre and scary situation can now merely be fodder for the greatest, grossest story for Martha to tell amongst friends over a finely tuned cocktail. Cheers to you Xray, and to Mr. X as well! May your recovery be swift.

Essay on my most favoritist band

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:28:59 GMT

Over on yonder facebook, Doug/misunderstruck rather innocently asked me "so, in your biased opinion, what do you think of the new sunset rubdown?"

For those uninitiated, Sunset Rubdown is the "side project" of songwriter Spencer Krug of Wolf Parade fame. My fandom/fanboy response to everything Krug does is well known to Doug. I've been a fan of Wolf Parade since their first album, Apologies to the Queen Mary, and it's developed into an ever-deepening obsession with each release from Sunset Rubdown ever since. I've seen both bands live multiple times. SR's new album is "Dragonslayer", which follows on the heels of "Shut Up I am Dreaming" and "Random Spirit Lover" (as well as various EPs). RSL is probably my favorite record by anyone ever.

So in a reflection of my obsession, I replied to Doug's simple query with a full length essay. I figured I might as well reuse the thoughts, so here is my full response, slightly further tweaked for readability:

You’re right – I’m way past being able to write an impartial review of anything Krug does. But hey, I’m not a paid reviewer and I don’t have to be objective. I like it, of course, although it does not have the epic heft of Random Spirit Lover, and will probably never touch nerves in me the way *that* record does.

RSL was an epic hero in full fight, against the demons of confusion, lust and loss. It rises up and down sonically, and turns into a full-on cacophony in songs like “Up on your leopard” and “Trumpet! Trumpet!”. Dragonslayer is that same central character now aging and losing his grip, and “passing the baton from the old mare* to the faun” (Silver Moons). He is like Beowulf, not the mass of muscle and sinew that defeats Grendel but rather the old man who goes knowingly to his death against the dragon.

*Gender can be interestingly flexible in his songwriting.

I’ve been thinking about why I’ve become such a fanboy and why Krug’s music speaks to me so directly. Much like my taste in fiction, I like that he’s creating a new, somewhat mystical world for his characters to occupy. It’s not strict, like the worldbuilding of fantasy fiction -- the walls of his world are loose and bend their shape for each different song and circumstance. He gazes over mountains, oceans and rivers without giving them names. Then again, in the older song “Us Ones in Between” he’s driving from Arkansas to Illinois, and in "Nightgale/December Song", on Dragonslayer, he moves to Nashville. His mythology is all allegory, dream and metaphor, and can snap from his hazy world back to the modern world at any time. It’s an interesting and potent mix that keeps his efforts from becoming cheesy or overtly fantastical.

His songs frequently reference each other (and not just the direct sequels and reworking – the references are many and scattered, and reward the frequent, obsessive listening of which I’m guilty.)

He uses Greek myth as a touching point (Icarus especially, who is referenced literally in “Idiot Heart” and indirectly occupies RSL’s “Winged/Wicked Things”) but he’s not loyal to any one mythos: “Leopard” seems to take on elements from “The Epic of Gilgamesh”, particularly the strange, sexualized taming of the wild man Enkidu.

Back to Dragonslayer: it’s a more intimate record. “Silver Moons”, the opening track, lays out the blue print for the album: he’s aging, moving on, and questioning whether his lover ever truly loved him. “Idiot Heart”, though, is the energetic pulse, the still living beating heart rejecting the passage of time. It would have fit well on RSL, but it’s important here because it shifts the sad mood of Silver Moons into a more frenetic drive.

It also lets us move our idiot body around (and live? Hell yeah. Emily and I were a sweaty pile of dance, which you must understand is unusual for a stick like me).

"No, I was never much of a dancer, but I know enough to know you've got to move your idiot body around, and that you can't settle down until the idiot in your blood settles down. So move around..."

I’m less convinced by tracks three and four and probably why the album doesn’t catch me as strongly as RSL. Both “Apollo” and “Black Swan” were very strong live a couple weeks ago but they don’t stay with me emotionally the same way as his older material. Good songs but … it’s hard to identify what’s missing.

Paper Lace is Krug “covering” a song he wrote for a different band, Swan Lake. This version has more heft (but misses Dan Bejar’s backing vocals). But it picks back up some of the momentum lost by Apollo and Black Swan.

The real core of the album comes in the final three songs, though, and the combination of You Go on Ahead and Nightingale is the closest Krug has come to back-to-back majesty since Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts and I’ll Believe in Anything from Wolf Parade's Apologies to the Queen Mary. It begins a little chincy: Spencer is overly fond of really cheap keyboards (in concert, keyboardist and backing vocalist Camilla Wyn-Ingr says he found the one she uses thrown out on the street) and the song starts with plastic sounding plinking that belies where the song is going. It’s a sequel, of sorts, to Trumpet! Trumpet! from RSL and by the end it generates the most ferocious climax on the whole album:

“And if there are two eyes in my head,
there are four seasons in a year,
and reflections on the water
of a burning yellow sphere.
And the days add up to weeks,
add up to months,
and add up, and add up… to years.”

“And if reflections on the water
sometimes look like burning tears,
we can watch them changing shape
without pushing off the pier.”

Then Nightingale/December Song hits straight on the heals of You Go on Ahead. It starts with a rumbling drum build (a highly unusual sound for SR) and adds an organ-esque grind. It's all a little Arcade Fire, but it works, in part because of the brilliant lyrics:

“So let me hammer this point home:
I see us all as lonely fires
that have burned alive as long as we remember.
But like all fireworks and all sunsets,
we all burn in different ways:
You are a fast explosion, and I am the embers.”

Nightingale references multiple Krug songs of the past. The notion of fire connecting lives is a recurring motif from the early song “They Took a Vote and Said No” to Swan Lakes’ “All Fires”.

The last song, Dragon’s Lair, is the biggest and most cryptic mystery (and longest, around 10 minutes) but it’s the one that gives me the biggest Beowulf vibe. It’s the protagonist from Silver Moons finally making his final declaration (demand?) to his lover. I think it falls short of “Kissing the Beehive”, the similar epic the closed Wolf Parade’s “At Mount Zoomer”, but definitely takes on the same role for the record as a whole.

Sunset Rubdown is very powerful and intense live (not at all meandering like some of their records) and if they are in town, *go*. It reveals whole new levels to their music.

I might as well embed a video of SR to give an auditory and visual taste -- here is Nightingale/December Song. The video is very dark, pretty much too dark to watch, but the sound is better than all the other versions on YouTube.

Ash, RIP

Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:40:44 GMT

I just lost my cat tonight. Not Monkey, the calico fiend who lives with us; Ash, the sweet, elderly cat who has lived with my parents since I was a teenager. She was mine, originally. I picked her out from a litter born into the house of a catlady my mom knew. We adopted Ash and her "step-brother" Puck the same day. They were born in different litters (to cats belonging to the same catlady), but Puck's mother rejected him because of his funny gate and Ash's mother adopted him. Then we adopted Ash and Puck together.

Ash was scarred by a couple events in her life. First was my going away to college. She and I had bonded very closely and she could never understand why I left. I think she felt abandoned. It permanently altered her personality -- she went from outgoing and excitable to shy and reserved. She was still very, very sweet though, and loved attention. She would just never pursue it -- you had to go find her. The second event that scarred her was my parent's house fire in 2000. She was upstairs, where the fire started when it happened. She was shellshocked for a couple years after that. It was only Puck dying a year ago that got her to emerge from her shell again. Without him providing companionship, she started to roam my parent's house again, for the first time in years going downstairs voluntarily, pursuing attention and affection. It was sweet.

She was always, always sweet. Quick to purr. Even in her darkest days after the fire, she loved nothing more than a head and belly scratch. She was so sweet and harmless we let our two-year-old daughter pet her freely. Ash loved Mather, and Mather loved Ash. Now the sweet old gray cat is dead, and I will always miss her.

RIP, Ashurabanipal.

Music Meme Answers

Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:57:38 GMT

Here are the answers from my Music Meme post:

1. Bad Religion
2. Ennio Morricone
3. Soul Coughing
4. Handsome Furs (misunderstruck)
5. Julie Doiron
6. Tegan & Sara (misunderstruck)
7. U2 (The Corbie)
8. Giacomo Puccini
9. Rancid (misunderstruck)
10. The National (misunderstruck)
11. R.E.M. (misunderstruck)
12. Oingo Boingo
13. Vampire Weekend
14. Interpol
15. Okkervil River (misunderstruck)
16. Squirrel Nut Zippers (misunderstruck)
17. Peter Gabriel (misunderstruck)
18. The Velvet Underground (The Corbie)
19. The Doors (Xray the Enforcer)
20. Ween

Theft, Pt. 2

Mon, 01 Jun 2009 07:28:47 GMT

The fuller story of my iPhone theft, copy and pasted from an explanation I posted on my facebook page:

~~~

I was eating at Cancun and put it down to take a bite. A girl snatched it from in front of me and ran out the door. Her boyfriend/co-conspirator tried to trip me as I chased her. I eventually ran her down two blocks away in the Tenderloin but no cops were around and she swore up and down that she tossed it while running. I couldn't bring myself to -do- anything, threaten or grab her. I just couldn't bring myself to grab or hit a girl (which is why the girlfriend, not the boyfriend stole it in the first place -- their scam relies on that, I'm sure).

I offered her cash for the phone back, but she still swore she didn't have it. I was worried about the boyfriend coming up from behind me (knife? gun? who the fuck knows?), so at that point I let her walk away. I'm kicking myself now for letting her go, but I froze up in the moment. In retrospect I could have shouted for cops (not that I saw any). I dunno.

I'm pissed, I'm feeling pretty violated, and I'm mad that I didn't *do* something.

~~~

Of course I've gotten all sorts of replies on fb, most of which to the effect of saying I did the right thing and not to beat myself up over it. Which I think is true, but makes me feel no less shitty for the whole situation. I'm very accustomed to people *not* fucking with me, since I'm 6'5", 230 lbs, and I'm pretty casual even in neighborhoods like the Tenderloin. I've eaten a thousand burritos at Tacqueria Cancun (a seedy hole in the wall that makes awesome burritos) and it just didn't occur to me that anyone would be so blatant as to just try and grab something from right in front of me like that. I'm usually far more worried about my bike locked outside than anything within arm's reach of me.

A timely reminder, I guess, that assholes -- total, complete assholes -- exist. That girl looked me in the eyes twice: right as she snatched it, and when we faced off after I ran her down. She didn't care. She didn't give a shit.

It'll cost me $300 to replace. What are they going to get for it? Not much. Are they willing to pay AT&T for a contract themselves? I doubt it. Can they sell a clearly used, scratched iPhone on Craigslist? Yeah, but not for much. I'm a little concerned about identity theft, but aside from my name and my email contacts, they can't access all that much from it.

When she's browsing through it (it's been shut off from connectivity, but old photos and emails are still there), I hope she feels a little shitty staring at 300 pictures of an adorable toddler that she just stole from me.

Theft

Sat, 30 May 2009 15:02:55 GMT

My iPhone was stolen last night by a pair of snatch-and-run thieves. I cannot begin to express how angry I am.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK GOD DAMN FUCKITY FUCK FUCK ASSHOLES GOD DAMN ASSHOLES FUCK DAMN IT.

Sigh. That didn't make me feel any better.

The Music Meme

Fri, 29 May 2009 18:13:54 GMT

Rather than a real update on my universe, as I promised XRay a couple weeks ago, I'll delay again by posting the current meme going around -- pics of twenty shuffled bands off my iPod. It's your job to guess their identities. Shouldn't be too hard for anyone with a sense of my musical taste. I can't compete with Martha's obscure death metal bands.

(Okay, mini update: thesis drags on slowly -- I might drop it in the Fall if I don't make good Summer progress. Will graduate in Dec 09 no matter what. Starting a library/archiving internship at the California Academy of Sciences next week. Super excited about that. Kid still cute but developing longer and louder tantrums as she ages. Oh joy).

Now on to the bands:

1.

2.

3.

4. Handsome Furs - misunderstruck

5.

6. Tegan & Sara - misunderstruck

7. U2 - The Corbie

8.

9. Rancid - misunderstruck

10. The National - misunderstruck

11. R.E.M. - misunderstruck

12.

13.

14.

15. Okkervil River - misunderstruck

16. Squirrel Nut Zippers - misunderstruck

17. Peter Gabriel - misunderstruck

18. The Velvet Underground - The Corbie

19. The Doors - xraytheenforcer

20.

To the X's and all other New Yawkers

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:18:19 GMT

May I present to you, Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage:

It's opening in New York, having completed a sold-out run in Berkeley last year. It is the brilliant. It is funny, it is savage, it is intellectual, it is stupid, it is silly, it is smart. And catchy. Go see this show. It's right up your bailiwick. It will make you wet (literally, if you sit in front).

Full disclosure: the writer/lead, the director, the composer, Grendel and Grendel's Mother are all friends of friends. But I'd recommend the show even if I hated them all. And I do kinda hate one of them, but I won't tell you which. I also have a crush on one of them, but I won't tell you which either, aside from saying it might be the same one.

The New York Times profiled writer/lead Jason Craig in this article. Read it. Then go buy your tickets. Then enjoy the carnage. Grendel, in particular, is fucking excellent.

My favorite song from the show:

Music Monday - Orcish Metal Style

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 08:48:08 GMT

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 22:52:09 GMT

It's been a long time since I've posted, and an awful lot has gone on in the meantime. In short:

1) We've finished moving. Our condo sold in October (we accepted an offer a week before the mortgage collapse -- whew). We now live in a nice, 2-bedroom rental house in San Francisco's western fogbelt, the Sunset District.

2) I'm writing a thesis. Last week I went to Washington, D.C. to kick off the serious research at the Library of Congress. Spending a week at the Library of Congress is the pilgrimage to Mecca for a Library and Information Science student. It went really well, though the east coast is COLD. And this was DC, not New York or Boston. I'm taking one final class this spring, and otherwise will graduate once this paper is done -- probably in August.

3) Christmas with a two-year-old? Both fun and very, very challenging.

I'll try and fill in the interesting details in time.

Hope

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 04:11:53 GMT

For Xray

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 04:09:03 GMT

I took this picture at the recently opened California Academy of Sciences. Where, incidentally, I've applied for a job in the research library *fingers crossed*.

Book Meme

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 00:12:42 GMT

Stolen gleefully from Werthead:

Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don't dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Wert didn't know if you're supposed to announce the name of the book or not, so I'll leave it out. I had to go off of page 57 because page 56 was the same text in a different language.

"With his death upon him, he had dived deep into his marsh-den, drowned out his life and his heathen soul: hell claimed him there."

Any guesses? Shouldn't be too hard for this crowd to figure out.

Adventures in Moving, Pt. 3

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 18:40:56 GMT

We accepted an offer on our ~~NOPA~~ Haight-Ashbury Flat yesterday. It's under our asking price, but after three months and no offers we were willing to take it. It's still substantially up from what we paid five years ago, not too shabby during the current "Mortgage Crisis".

If the sale makes it through escrow, we'll be looking for a new home to rent later this month. The adventure continues.

Poetry Tuesday, Viking Style

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 21:00:41 GMT

I've had an interest in Íslendingasögur (Icelandic Family Sagas) since reading the Njal's Saga in an undergraduate medieval history class. Last semester I had to choose an esoteric topic on which to prepare a "pathfinder", so I chose Íslendingasögur. A pathfinder is essentially a study guide, or list of references, for a researcher to use relating to a given library. My pathfinder was designed for San Francisco's Main Public Library, and can be viewed here.

When creating the Pathfinder, I checked out a number of books on the subject, including Gwyn Jones's translation of Egil's Saga, which features a misanthropic, shapeshifting skald as the protagonist. Egil Skallagrimson loves to spout off poetic verses. Here is an example of his wordsmithy, as he encourages his companion to lead a viking raid on a town called Lund:

Raise glaive and let sword glitter,
My warrior, wolftooth-stainer:
We've doughty deeds to do now
This summer, dalesnake-season.
Let every lad to Lund then,
Briskly no less than bravely,
Let's sing there long ere sunset
The soursweet song of spears.

It's a funky little bit of verse, but I love the phrase "soursweet song of spears". And I'm guessing "wolftooth-stainer" relates to blood on a blade. Ah, vikings.

Music Monday

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:50:04 GMT

I wasn't going to post any music today, but there was talk of the movie Velvet Goldmine and "Make Me Smile" in Scriva's comments, so I had go find a version...so here is Steve Harley, a glam-era Brit, and his near-perfect kiss off to his former band, "Make Me Smile" - a song that can be taken so many different ways. Delicious.

Rock, roll, and opera

Mon, 09 Jun 2008 21:08:16 GMT

A week ago I saw two R.E.M. concerts at Berkeley's Greek Theater, followed by seeing Wagner's Das Rheingold on Friday night at San Francisco Opera. Here are my thoughts on each. Click below if you're interested.

The R.E.M. shows were fantastic. First, the opening acts were both marquee themselves: The National and Modest Mouse. I've commented already on The National's drummer, but I want to mention a few more aspects of their live shows. Their album music, particularly on Boxer, their most recent album, is morose and downbeat and I wasn't sure how well it would translate live, especially in outdoor daylight. I was quite impressed, and its a tribute to their cohesion as a band. Including the two horn players (who I'm not sure are considered "regular" members of the band), they brought eight people onto the stage. They used this mass of bodies to good effect. Each song slowly, steadily built into a strangely controlled chaos by the end. The lead singer has a wonderful baritone voice, perfectly controlled so you can make out every word and nuance of his complicated lyrics. The violinist (and sometime keyboardist/backup singer) nearly stole the show with his enthusiasm and fire. I would love to see this band in a smaller venue with their own fans.

The National's setlists on the two nights were essentially the same, but for a band with only two full length albums, that's not really a surprise. It was more surprising that the same was true for Modest Mouse and their thousand album catalog. The first night, Isaac Brock seemed especially pissed, and he never said a word of patter between songs (at one point Johnny Marr said "thanks"; that was the limit of conversation coming from the stage). However, Brock's rage made for good music, as he spat out his lyrics with the appropriate venom given the nature of his music. When he seemed to be in a brighter mood the next night, and even joked with the audience a little bit, the music didn't seem as good. Unlike the National, who seemed to really enjoy playing off each other, MM was almost completely static, the only fun being had by the two drummers who enjoyed throwing no-longer-needed maracas and drumsticks at their roadie.

R.E.M. was in great form both nights. Michael Stipe was in a deliciously campy mood, joking, chatting, and laughing with the crowd and his bandmates -- at one point admitting that even he had no idea what some of his early lyrics were (and revealing that for the first few albums they were never written down). The first night in particular leaned on the heavier rock songs from their catalog, regardless of era (What's the Frequency, Kenneth?, Orange Crush, and so on) meant to blend well with Accelerate, their uptempo current album.

They also curried favor with diehards like me by pulling out all sorts of old and obscure songs. The first night, at least one song was performed from every single R.E.M. album bar Life's Rich Pageant. Night two opened with two songs from Life's Rich Pageant in the first three. Obscurities over the two nights included Wolves, Lower and Carnival of Sorts (one of my absolute favorites) from original EP Chronic Town, We Walk and Laughing from Murmur, and Little America from Reckoning. They also did better known older songs such as South Central Rain, Driver 8, Fall on Me...I was quite happy. One of the best songs over the two nights, though, was a more recent one, Imitation of Life. It was the lead single on their barely noticed album Reveal, and I always thought it was quite underrated and stood with any of their bigger hits. Live it was a pleasure, especially since they added a nice back and forth vocal harmony between Stipe and the honey-voiced Mike Mills that was reminiscent of Fall on Me.

Another highlight was the performance of Drive. Back on their mid-nineties Monster Tour, they would do a hard rock version of Drive that I never liked. Last week, they did the album version of Drive, and seeing it live helped me realize how beautiful and disturbing that song was. They also did an acoustic sing-along of the organ dirge Let Me In, which worked quite nicely. I saw the members of The National out in the crowd enjoying that one.

It was also interesting checking out the age demographic of the show. I'm a day shy of my 31st birthday, and that placed me about halfway between the mostly yuppie old-timers, the surprising amount of twenty something hipsters, and the tweenagers who came along with their yuppie parents. I don't know that I've seen a wider spread of ages at any rock concert I've been to.

On to Das Rheingold. SF Opera is staging, in concert with the Washington Opera, the "American Ring", using various iconic elements of American history in their production design. Wotan is an industrial tycoon, the Giants are overall clad workmen, and Alberich the Nibelung is a gold miner with a placer pan. As a concept, that's fine, but my main objection is they only carried out half their vision. Using visual projections and some of the costumes they succeeded in implying their ideas, but the set designer was obviously out of the meeting. We had a metal grid floor out of some sci-fi Ring Cycle, and unwieldy setpieces that aside from the Giant's flying I-Beam had little to do with their "concept". In the end, instead of some great projection of an iconic twenties skyscraper for Valhalla, we just got a piddly little bridge. Quite disappointing. I enjoyed the music of course, especially the wonderful Alberich and Loge (who was the perfect malevolent solicitor), but I believe if you have a production concept, you better see it through, and if you can't, put them all back in chainmail costumes and boulder strewn sets. Don't go halfway.

For the rest of the summer, we'll be seeing a few more shows: Wolf Parade in both San Francisco and New York, the first day of the Outside Lands festival (Radiohead), and the second night of the Treasure Island festival (the Raconteurs and Vampire Weekend). Sometime in the next week we'll also be going to see avant-trash auteurs Banana, Bag and Bodice stage their original Beowulf rock opera. Given the excellence of all their past productions, this might be what I'm most excited about.

The Strange First San Francisco Public Library

Tue, 06 May 2008 17:33:29 GMT

I'm currently enrolled in a "History of Books and Libraries" class. Of the now six courses I've taken en route to my Masters in Library and Information Science, it has been far and away my favorite, not surprisingly since I was a History Major undergrad. Over the course of the semester, I've gotten the chance to research the ancient White Book of Rhydderch, a medieval manuscript containing the oldest known copy of the Mabinogi, a Welsh cycle of myths and legends; a 1530 printed book on "The Heavenly Spheres" by French astronomer Oronce Fine (that one I actually got to hold in my hands!); and I've just completed a major research project on the history of the San Francisco Public Library.

The Library was first envisioned by Andrew S. Hallidie, a surly and sober Scotsman who came to California as a teenager to find gold, failed, but made a fortune building wire rope. He thought of ingenious uses for his cable, including suspension bridges and his most famous invention, the cable cars. Hallidie hoped that a library free to the public would draw the young men of the City away from the "low dens" where they imbibed far too much and frequented prostitutes. He saw libraries as a way to civilize, sober up, and educate the masses so they could contribute more to society.

He recruited various allies -- mostly populist politicians, labor organizers, and the City's intellectuals to campaign for a "Free Library" (the City already had a number of subscription libraries, which were common in that time period, usually part of a men's club or trade organization). A couple years later the "San Francisco Free Public Library opened".

It wasn't quite the significant institution you'll find today, or even what you'd have found in 1920. It didn't have its own building -- the Board of Supervisors, loath to fund a library, refused to let it use any civic property -- so it was built into a converted theater after they ripped up the stage. The job was so overwhelming that the first librarian quit almost immediately. After another librarian fled, they hired Frederick Beecher Perkins, a tall, gaunt bearded Bostonian with an attitude. He hated most fiction -- thought it was immoral and unbecoming of readers -- and would argue with patrons trying to check any out. He insisted all the Pages wear slippers over their shoes so he would not hear them clatter on the stairs and ladders. He didn't allow any patrons to browse the shelves themselves, fearing that the rabble would damage the books too much. Eventually, he was fired for beating a nine-year-old boy on the library floor.

He was replaced by John Vance Cheney, a sweet and soft spoken poet who had never worked in a library -- he was a clerk at the Post Office when he was hired. He turned out to be a much better fit for the library and oversaw quite a bit of growth and a move into a wing of City Hall.

A few factoids about the early SFFPL:
-Overdue fines were 5 cents per day. This compares to only 10 cents a day now, over 125 years later...not much inflation.
-The library was open from 9 am to 9 pm every day but Sunday, when it was open 1 pm to 9 pm. Overall, the library was open for longer hours in 1880 than it is now.
-Women were allowed in to browse at all open hours. This was not true of every Public Library in 1880.
-Most of the politician who backed the library founding were part of the virulent Chinese Exclusion movement. As such, despite foreign language collections in German, French, Spanish, Swedish and Latin, the library only contained one book in a Chinese language -- even though there was a substantial SF Chinese population, and Chinatown was around the corner from the original library.
-To get into the library, you were given an entry ticket. You handed this ticket over when looking at a book, and you could not leave the library if you did not return the book and get your ticket back. This is how they prevented theft.

In honor of poetry Tuesday, a poem by John Vance Cheney, Librarian of San Francisco from 1887-1895:

THE HAPPIEST HEART

WHO drives the horses of the sun
Shall lord it but a day ;
Better the lowly deed were done,
And kept the humble way.
The rust will find the sword of fame,
The dust will hide the crown ;
Ay, none shall nail so high his name
Time will not tear it down.
The happiest heart that ever beat
Was in some quiet breast
That found the common daylight sweet,
And left to Heaven the rest.

The Library: Repository, or Something More?

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 17:58:50 GMT

The journalist and author writer Norman Cousins once said "The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas -- a place where history comes to life."

I used this quote as the lead-in to a paper I wrote recently on the supposed phenomena referred to as "Library 2.0", a conceptual model for library-public interaction that incorporates facets of the user-content generating "Web 2.0" (of which LiveJournal is a noteworthy example). Judging from the answers to my first post -- how people use the library -- there was very little in the way of "birthing ideas" so much as research and reading. And this was drawing from a self-selected group of literate and actively online users.

I'll go more into the details of Library 2.0 in future posts, but for now, do potential patrons want a more interactive experience from their libraries? Would you be interested in libraries with reference blogs, online (and interactive) recommended reading groups, or do other facets of the web already cover those needs for you?

Don't Expect Too Much

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 23:43:17 GMT

I plan on posting some of my incoherent thoughts on library issues (from the largely uneducated perspective of an industry newbie) plus bits and pieces about theater and literature. I'll do everything I can not to build an audience. In that vein, I can't promise I'll post frequently, but I'll try.

First question to my non-existent collection of readers: what the hell do you use a library for? Anything more than checking out books?