Blah and more blah

I'm reading Michael Dibden's Vendetta and so far I am a little under awed. My parents really like his books so I thought I'd give him a try. This is an early Aurelio Zen book and it feels like he's more interested in showing off his knowledge of Italy than writing a story. It's good, no doubt, I just wish there was more happening and less description. The cover blurb promises me that the ending will shock the unshockable reader but I remain doubtful. I'll try more of his books later because supposedly there's more about Zen and his life in them. I don't know if it's a cultural thing or what but the way my bosses write emails really ticks me off. They're so formal, like what you'd write to someone you barely know rather than to a coworker. They also come off as very patronizing/critical. It's the language they use. Maybe I'm too sensitive, I don't know. Also their lack of understanding of the Internet depresses and baffles me. I wrote a Wikipedia page back in November as part of our marketing campaign. This was discussed in committee for over a month; I read the text out loud to get feedback and then I posted it, trying very carefully to keep it neutral in tone. I put a few pictures up as well. Another member of the marketing committee sent an all staff email out informing everyone it was up. I heard nothing about it. About a week ago we all got an email about new rules concerning the dissemination of information and pictures on the web and how they have to be approved by the director first. Fine, I understand that's fairly normal. Yesterday I get a formally worded email about how it is so nice that I want to help with things's but the info has to be reviewed first and my Wikipedia page was jumping the gun. "Your well-intentioned move" my ass. That rule didn't exist when it was written. There was no objection for over a month. Then he wants me to take the Wikipedia page down. I told him I would try but didn't expect much luck. I know the formal writing I'd partially his training from elsewhere and might be to have something on record for obscure reasons but it doesn't do any good by the fact that I feel like I'm criticized more often than anything else. Hell, I'd take no praise over getting some fucking supplies and resources. Finally the second shipment of books is coming in. In short, don't criticize your employees for breaking rules before they have been written. I, at least, am not psychic.

Snuff by Chuck Palahniuk or stop trying to be shocking you're not 12

Like my yellow nail polish?

So each chapter of Snuff is from a different character’s POV and there are four characters: Numbers 72, 137, 600, and Sheila and it’s a good thing each chapter is labeled whose POV it currently is so you can go back and see who’s thinking because otherwise I couldn’t tell the difference. Well, that’s not entirely true as a couple of them had verbal(mental?) ticks. Number 600 called everybody “dude”; kid dude, pizza delivery dude, dude 137, television dude, dude 72, player dude, dude with the roses, ugly dago dude, ugly wop dude, teddy-bear dude, dude, dudes, dude, and if you think that was annoying to read imagine several pages of it. Sheila relates obscure tidbits of information and afterwards thinks, “True Fact” about twice a page. If she’s not dishing out depressing (sometimes inaccurate) historical factoids her boss Cassie Wright is. Or number 137 is. And they all have their own sad and pathetic life story to tell with a side helping of daddy issues. And in the cases of number 72 and Sheila, mommy issues.

                So what is this steaming pile about? An aging porn star by the name of Cassie Wright wants to end her career with a bang by setting the all-time gang bang record of 600 men. (The internet claims that another woman already set the record at over 900 before this book came out but shh! Palahniuk has a gimmick to sell. I mean tell. No, I mean sell.) Sheila, her assistant, is in charge of managing the “pud-pullers”. (She has many more euphemisms for masturbation to insult all men, regardless of occupation or status among the living, but I’ll spare you. Take it as read that they could be confusing and distracting, and became obnoxious after the first three pages.) The three men are part of the casting call. 137 lost his acting career when it surfaced he had bottomed in a gay gang bang porno and hopes his performance will convince people he’s really straight so he can be on TV again. (God alone knows how he thinks participating in another gang bang, even if it is heterosexual, will get him back on a mainstream show.) 600, another aging porn star, worked with Cassie for many years and is also hoping to revive his career. (Although he portrays things like he’s doing this as a favor to give the production star appeal.) 72 was told by his adoptive parents that Cassie was his biological mother and he’s here to “save” her. So they all stand around reminiscing and interacting while they wait for their turn on the sheets, giving Palahniuk enough time to create a lot of stupid porn titles. (The movie they’re currently creating will be titled World Whore Three. Creative, right?)

                It comes out that Cassie really did have a baby she gave up for adoption around twenty years ago. Feeling guilty and like her life is a waste, she’s actually planned this porno as a (not very) covert suicide. She expects to be fucked to death and wants the proceeds of her life insurance policies and the income from the movie to go to this abandoned child. Sheila muses how smart this all is because the way they’ll cut the movie together the insurance investigators won’t be able to tell which guy is fucking a live body and which is fucking a corpse. That way they’ll be able to deny knowing at what point during the shoot she died. (This would be a great plan if insurance companies were a) not stingy as hell and b) composed of morons. Never mind the fact that it’s completely illegal to profit from a crime and the way these four were yakking on CNN would have the news the day after the thing was released. And forget internet sales. You’d have to set up a ton of proxy sellers to avoid attracting attention and anyway who would handle the transactions? Paypal? Credit card companies? Great idea if you have many different accounts to funnel the money through and a way to report it legitimately. And you better have a way to pay off, generously, all the dozens of crew working the set so they don’t narc on you when the cash starts rolling in. And if this all goes to the unknown child how are they going to set this up to make a profit off the snuff video of their mom if it is deemed illegal? Through their lawyer? That’s assuming you get the raw footage back after the police have confiscated it for evidence during the investigation into Wright’s death by sex act. But I digress. This point just really annoys me it’s so stupid.)

                I also want to talk about the imagery in this book. It’s gross. He describes the room these 600 naked, bronzed, sloppy men are waiting around in, one hand down their shorts and the other in the chip bowl. How the one restroom is covered in human waste and the floor of the waiting room is sticky with bronzer. Everything is sweaty, oozing, soaked, and covered in junk food crumbs and saliva. There’s no real purpose to this other than as an attempt to be shocking. I’m sure part of this approach was to show the seediness of the sex industry but I’m sure that could have been accomplished to better effect through the degradation of the characters and how the industry has befouled each of their lives. They have all hit rock bottom due to pornography in one way or another. A good writer could easily do something with that rather than slop down the melodramatic horseshit Palahniuk gave us instead. (137 participated in the gay porno as an attempt to prove that he really is gay and not just confused like his daddy said. His daddy says getting “diddled” as a child made him that way. “Oh yeah, son, I’m sure it happened. I did it, after all.”)None of this tawdry, overwrought imagery will stay with me, either. You want something disturbing that will pop into your mind at random moments read Yasmina Khadra’s In the Name of God, a description of the rise of religious fanaticism in a village in Algeria, or the indifference with which the main character of Fudoki by Kij Johnson kills women and children during a night-time raid, or even the end of David Markson’s Vanishing Point which culminates in a spiraling description of death and loss or anything by Arnaldur Indridason. The description in this book can best be summed up with the word “cheap.”

                Of course this entire book is an attempt to be shocking, from the gang bang aspect to the talk of blow-up dolls and dildos to 600 pondering about having sex with a dying, comatose woman. The premise of this book is based on the gang bang record set by Annabel Chong back in 1995 of 70 men and 251 sex acts in one 10 hour shoot. This, coupled with the fact that a woman can die from sex, fascinated Palahniuk enough to set an entire story around it. The characters are so contrived, and in the case of 600 disgusting, that most of the book is an eye-rolling annoyance. The prose is horrible. I don’t care if it’s supposed to “sound like how people talk”, I hate dialect writing. It was irritating in Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and it’s still irritating 150+ years later. The ending is stupid. I mean, really stupid. There’s a “twist” but it’s not much of one and the whole mess dissolves into a confused scene with cyanide, defibrillators, and unresolved plot threads. If you’re running up to a particular climax, don’t suddenly make a left turn down a side alley to stand giggling while your audience tries to figure out where the hell you went.

Faculty meeting tonight! Wooo!

I am so excited! A 2 1/2 hour faculty meeting at 6:00pm so we can prove to the accreditation committee that we have faculty meetings! I bet this will be just as awesome as the 2 1/2 hour staff meeting we had last Thursday, though unfortunately I had to leave at the two hour mark to go close the library. :( I'm sure no students actually needed anything in the hours I wasn't there. At least this meeting will be after I technically finish work so I'll be all free! They damn well better feed us.

Seriously, last week's staff meeting consisted of people talking about the progress their departments have made toward accreditation. Most of us had very little to say; Our director of education wasn't there and our director was in a meeting. Once the director joined us one of our newest members, the registrar, decided to hijack the meeting to complain about all the things she doesn't understand and how she hasn't been able to get the director of education to sit down with her to explain them. She held us hostage for close to an hour whining about little things most of us had no interest in and which none of us could solve.

Then our director declared that all the shared files (registration forms, time sheets, leave requests, etc.) on out intranet were out of date because they had the old logo on them and they should be deleted right now and turned to the computer to do so amid panicked shouts that we needed to copy them onto our hard drives first. "They're pdf files so that means word copies are on people's computers somewhere. We just need to find them." Yeah but couldn't we wait to find them before deleting things? "I'll print copies out." Some of the files were created by people who no longer work here. "Oh, they didn't really create anything, I'm sure there's a copy on someone's computer." Oy vey ist mir.

I haven't been able to get a second book order. I email and email but the director keeps saying she'll get to it later and my subtle "is there anyone else you would like me to send this to?" has been met with silence. (As happens with most of my emails.) I've managed to bring the matter to the attention of a few other people; here's hoping that works. (They knew I needed books but they thought the director was taking care of it.

I've also somehow been put in charge of fire safety. We needed a fire inspection of the building and the director asked me to set one up. Okay, fine, so I try to go through the proper channels, leaving a message at the correct number so we could have an appointment scheduled for the fire marshal to come out. That wasn't fast enough for her. "There's a fire station across the road. Why don't you go ask there?" I pointed out that they didn't have fire marshals there but that wasn't a good enough excuse and off I tromped through the drizzle (closing the library) and on the knock on the fire house door. The guy there was nice and, amazingly, got things set up. I got a phone call the next day and the next Tuesday I led the fire marshal around the school.

One of the things we needed was a fire evacuation plan. And wouldn't you know it but that got assigned to me as well. (In addition to creating floor plans of our buildings.) Since she wants to "check these things off [her] list" that means I get an end of the day deadline. Something several people would do over a couple of months she assigns to the librarian to do in three hours. Which, as my dad pointed out, is kind of funny.

Epic Stapler!

Oh, yes, have I mentioned that I'm proctoring exams now?

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic

Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic, A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words, is a lyrical description of the events surrounding the so-called "Khazar Polemic" and conversion of the Khazar people. Written as an encyclopedia containing cross-referenced entries between three different sections (Christian, Muslim, Jewish), it relates the efforts of various scholars to pin down exactly what happened at the Khazar court when the Khagan invited representatives from the three religions to hold a discussion to convince him of which path to follow.

The Khazars were a real people and the Khagan really was their leader but apart from a few names from history (like Saints Cyril and Methodius and Al-Muqaddasi) this is a completely fictional account. This is reality as dreamed by many people from different eras, stitched together and retold a dozen times.

The story starts, for lack of a better way of putting things, with the Khagan's dream in which an angel told him that God is pleased with his intentions but not his deeds. Accordingly, he arranges the polemic mentioned earlier to gain an interpretation. Whoever is most convincing, wins the Khazar people to their religion. The process is helped or hindered by the princess Ateh, leader of a sect of dream-hunters, men who stalk other people's dreams for clues to pieces of the soul/body of the original Adam, from which they will compile the ultimate book. Peeking through the narrative are forces which conspire to stop this book ever being written.

The exact facts of the polemic and conversion have been lost in time and the encyclopedia details as well the efforts of various people to discover them. Unsurprisingly, each faith's source says that their own side won the argument and the Khazar people ceased to exist when they were absorbed into the larger Christian/Muslim/Jewish community. Reading about the Khazar practices, where faiths and peoples other than their own get more prominence in civic life, one gets the feeling that rather than converting to one single religion, assimilation into their own immigrant communities happened instead of the other way around.

Each entry tells a little more of the story and they don't have to be read in order. You can read from cover to cover or skip around. Whichever method you choose you'll get the whole story in a coherent manner but you'll have different perspectives on the scenes you read depending on the order you gain facts. I would really suggest reading the bit about Dorothea and the trial minutes last though.

This is a lovely, poetic history featuring a humunculus, devils, men who walk through dreams, hungry ghosts, impossible feats, and adventurous people. I really enjoyed this book. It is exactly the sort of dream-like, imaginary tale I enjoy, with real moments of horror, excitement, and love. Each entry is self-contained but reading each entry will give you perspective on others. Some of it is thought-provoking, especially on the nature of thought. He illustrates this with a metaphor of two men (author and reader) holding ropes with a puma (text, thoughts, ideas) caught between them. They can't eat the puma...

The book contains many wonderful vignettes and poetic proverbs; the translator did a great job. This book is like a cross between a fairy tale and a myth, dreamed by a storyteller, retold the next morning.

More to follow

Okay, okay. Okay. I'm going to be getting back to writing this. I mean it. I have stuff written out and everything. I really want to keep up with writing because I enjoy going back to see what I thought about a book. I do just want to say about that nitwit Sullivan who raised all the brouhaha over being told to apologize about her tweet to Brownback that there is a difference between being censored and being told to say sorry for that constitutionally protected free speech. Hopefully her parents will wake up long enough to teach her not to be a fucktard. I mean, come on, little girl, you can insult someone all you want but you got to expect them to take offense.
In other news, Iran apparently dislikes everyone in existence and using pepper spray to get good shopping deals is called aggressive shopping in California.

White Noise by Delillo part 2

In a nutshell I found White Noise to be a self-conscious satire with interesting observations but no deeper understanding. And an obsession with supermarkets.

            Jack teaches Hitler studies in a small college town on the edge of Iron City. He’s married to his fourth wife, Babette, and they live with their four children from various marriages. Babette reads tabloid papers to an old blind man and teaches classes in sitting, standing, and walking at the community center. 15 year old Heinrich is skeptical of everything (including whether it is currently raining or not) and is the sort of person who will constantly refresh Google news for the updated death toll in the latest disaster. 12 year old Denise is a miniature adult worried about the medication her mother may or may not be taking. 9 year old Steffie is Denise-lite. Lastly, young Wilder, who I could have sworn was 2 from the way he acts but online sources says is 6, never speaks and, to be quite blunt, comes across as retarded. The story is told from the 1^st person POV of Jack who, other than being kind of nebbish, has no personality. Ready to read 326 pages about these people?

            Jack goes about his daily existence until a tanker carrying the dangerous Nyodene D crashes near their town releasing a toxic cloud of chemicals. An evacuation is called for but during the escape Jack is forced to stop for gas, exposing himself for two minutes. (This was a point of difficulty for me because the way the event is described they’re outside the radius of the cloud.) He’s told that this exposure could prove to be a fatal problem at some point in the next thirty years. Then life goes back to normal.

            The rest of the book is more of the first part of the book, except there’s more anxiety about death. (This was in the pre-cloud part too. Jack and Babette like to argue about who would rather die first. The foreshadowing is less shadowing and more penciling in.) Jack discovers Babette has been keeping a secret from him and she manages to belittle his place in her life while loading her confession with an incredible amount of bathos. In the end Jack tries, in his ineffectual and bumbling way, to reassert control over his life, Wilder nearly gets himself flattened by rush hour traffic, and the whole thing fades off into the produce section.

Throughout, brand names are thrown around like invocations, dating the text even more. While looking at clouds at sunset we suddenly get the line, “Clorets, Velamints, Freedent.” Thank goodness for Wikipedia, purveyor of random information. While sleeping, one of Jack’s daughters breathes the words, “Toyota Celica.” I’ve never heard of that particular model but I’m sure their commercials were awesome. Random lines from the ever present TV and radio litter the text until they’re actually coming out of the mouth of a passerby, culminating in a torrent of nonsensical information from a drug-fried character at the end. Rather than being intrusive I liked how these lines remind the reader of the constant barrage of information and advertising that floods our lives. The naming of products out of context was less subtle and kind of silly.

            On the whole, this was a well written book. Events progressed nicely, plots points were wrapped up, and the descriptive passages were very good. His imagery of the toxic event, with the ever expanding cloud lit by helicopters and the refugees trudging along under the falling snow, was very evocative. The prose was generally readable and with only a few stutters flowed well.

            One final complaint: the dialogue was horrible. With few exceptions all characters had the same unrealistic speech patterns. Even a German accented woman eventually started monologing the same way as everyone else. It was like Don Delillo’s voice was coming out of multiple mouths, eventually giving me the creepy sensation that there were no individual characters at all but rather some sort of hive mind parroting the author’s internal thoughts. Like a master puppeteer having conversations with himself through proxies.

            This was a decent enough book but I don’t think it aged well and I couldn’t connect with it. Maybe if I had been more aware during the ‘80’s it would have more resonance with me. I’ll have to read Delillo’s more recent work to see how he’s changed.

*Clorets is apparently a type of gum now mainly available in stores in South America, the Middle East, and S.E. Asia. You can, of course, buy it on Amazon.

Velamints appear to be a mint. Surprisingly, they do not have a Wikipedia page. They do have their own Facebook page which informs all that they’re back.

Now I thought Freedent might be a dental adhesive but it is, in fact, a type of gum. It’s advertised as not sticking to dental appliances.

White Noise by Delillo part 1

I've read a number of books since I last posted but I'm going to focus on White Noise since it's been highly touted. This review is going to be too long. My thoughts about why I don't like the feel of the novel take up a good chunk of it so I'm going to split this in two. First post is on my personal thoughts about why Delillo's kind of a supercilious windbag and the second post will focus more on the book itself.

The blurb on the back of the cover of White Noise describes an everyman and his family jolted out of their complacent, consumerist existence by a man-made “airborne toxic event” which forces them to reevaluate their values and view of life. I started the book anticipating the journey of an average American family forced to abandon their comfortable way of life to flee a disaster of modern society’s own making. As they moved through a growing landscape of logos and brand names, stripped of the trappings of a sheltered civilization they would eventually confront the human frailties that consumer culture hides them from. Their familial ties would be strengthened by the ordeal and they would ultimately gain a deeper understanding of themselves and human nature. Yeah, that didn’t happen. Obviously I’ve never read Don Delillo before. So let’s deal with the story I got instead.

            I must make it clear that I am not a believer in the view of consumerism espoused by the book; that modern man hides behind shopping and the acquisition of things to deny the inevitability of death or that it makes people shallow and stupid. This is partly because I don’t believe that people have fundamentally changed in the last hundred years. For ages people who can afford it have been buying the latest fashion, carriages, furniture, food and drink, pets, servants, etc to boost their ego, flaunt their wealth, and compete with others. It’s just that now more people can afford to join this game what with higher purchasing power and cheaper products. I really don’t think it’s terrible to allow the less than wealthy the pleasure of options and nicer things. Brand names and marketing have obviously become more prolific but this really only seems to be a horrible thing is you believe the pursuit of money and goods is evil. Or, if you’re like Don Delillo and never learned the art of selective attention. Seriously, I contend that most of us had a disillusioning experience with marketing at some point during our childhood and came out of the experience a little wiser and more discerning. Advertising isn’t an all-consuming parasite leeching away at out vitality and intelligence but just a part of the landscape. Amusing, annoying, unavoidable, yes, but without real impact on who we are or how we live. This is apparently not what Delillo thought in 1984 when he wrote White Noise.

            I don’t know how to explain this novel other than to say that it’s very eighties and, to be honest, kind of mean. I admit I can get frustrated at how stupid people can be but, at heart, I find most people interesting and unique. Each person contains a secret world of experience, thoughts, feelings, fears, anxieties, crimes, loves, and hopes and they exist at the center of a web of connections leading outward in an ever-expanding tangle. Each person is a story and each story, if told well, has the capacity to be interesting. The people in White Noise are denied that delicate characterization that would have breathed life into the story and are, instead, caricatures, almost automatons. I know that was probably the point, to show the hollowing of self caused by rampant consumerism but in divesting them of individuality they become difficult for the reader to connect with. Plus, they’re boring.

And Hurricane Irene is done with us; Murder on the Leviathan by Boris Akunin

Well, that's over. I pray that the hurricane isn't as dire on the rest of it's path as has been predicted. There will be a lot of damage and flooding but hopefully nothing monstrous. We were on the edge of it here with winds of 60+ mph and you try sleeping in the top corner room of the house during that. From 12:30 to 3:00 it sounded like an invading force roaring down the street. It had shadow trees blowing across two of my walls, disappearing momentarily when the power went out, coming back to dance around my room again. For 2 1/2 hours I listened to tree branches bounce off our roof and slam into the front and back yards. Just when I might be falling asleep there would be a reverberating bang from across the street. Then a huge gust of wind would smash into the windows by my head causing them to rattle and creak. Seriously, I've never liked sleeping through wind storms. You know the kind of surreal thing? Through it all the cicadas never stopped chirring.

This was similar to Isabel only the majority of that happened during the day. That time I watched a movie and did my Spanish homework. A 10 foot dead limb fell off a tree in the backyard and skewered the deck. It sounded remarkably like a javelin. We had to get a neighbor to help us break it up. We live up a hill so we have an incredibly remote chance of flooding but the neighborhood further north was underwater. People were out of their homes for months.

There are six or seven large branches that have come down this time but nothing a little effort and a handsaw won't take care of. Our cars are plastered with wet leaves but there's no damage. Except the inside door handle that broke on my car yesterday but that has nothing to do with anything except old age.

I read Boris Akunin's Murder on the Leviathan. It was all right; a very quick read. It was something of a homage to Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie so the format was a little stale but it was interesting. Each chapter was from the point of view of different characters. An entire household is coldly murdered in Paris and the evidence leads the leading inspector to suspect a group of first-class travelers on the ship Leviathan. As such, he gathers them all together in one of the salons so he can keep an eye on them throughout the cruise East. The group consists of a bunch of stereotypes. You have the pompous British Indologist, the eccentric Englishman, the honorable inscrutable Japanese, the boring doctor and his dull wife, etc. Erast Fandorin, the protagonist of this series, never has a chapter from his perspective. He is only seen from outside and while this can be a good tactic it doesn't quite work here. The other characters have their little national quirks and they show their bigotry towards members of other countries and consequently come off as being rather snobbish/spiteful but Fandorin is basically perfect except for his slight stutter. This is annoying and worst of all, boring. The Japanese is the only other character who manages to not seem incredibly petty but I noticed that Akunin is a translator of Japanese so I assume he has more respect for that nationality. Of course, the Japanese man praises the Russian Fandorin for being above the rest of the cast and being able to better appreciate Eastern sensibilities and having the ability to think more clearly. Ew. Fandorin was much more interesting in the first book where his sterling qualities were set against his naivete and enthusiasm. I'll read other books in this series but I really hope he goes back to first person and sticks to countries he knows.

Now I'm almost finished reading A Case of Two Cities by Qiu Xiaolong. I like this author and the other books in the series about chief inspector Chen but this book is basically about a land deal corruption case, and even with a couple of murders and a scene change to the U.S. thrown in, that's very difficult to make interesting. However, it has it's moments and it has been a good book to read during a storm. The one thing I find really funny is that when the Chinese Writer's delegation goes on their tour across America they only eat Chinese.

First Earthquake!

Well, that was exciting. By which I mean kind of scary. Tornado warnings? Uncommon but not unknown. Hurricanes? A little more used to that. Blizzards? I can deal with those as long as the power isn't out too long. Heat waves are old hat. But earthquakes? No I don't think so.

I didn't even know what it was at first. I thought a truck had crashed into a building or something had exploded because that is far more likely, but it went on too long. I moved to a doorway because I remembered hearing that was what you're supposed to do. Plaster was falling off the ceiling and everything was shaking like the building was about to take off. Nothing fell over at work but when I got back home several things had fallen off my shelves. My dad said the dog had been startled but nothing was damaged.

The students all rushed out afterwards to call their families. I had to coax one woman out from under the study table. Like me, the majority of them are from areas that don't get earthquakes. Fortunately the Pharmacology exam was over and there weren't anymore classes. The school closed about quarter to five. We're back open today though, which the Anatomy and Physiology students are probably a little disappointed about. Their exam is at 10:00.

The thing that makes this so much more freaky to us here than, say, in California is the rarity of the occurrence. We don't have earthquakes. Some blowhards in the paper are saying, "People are stupid. Earthquakes are normal here and everyone should know how to deal with them." Sure, minor quakes that feel like a truck passing by, where people sleep through them happen here. I've never felt one. But they happen. This was on a different scale. This hasn't really happened in living memory. If you have no experience with something so unnerving and your teachers and elders don't either and so haven't taught you about it, you have no set way of dealing with it. There are many people who come to this area who can't properly deal with humidity. We try to help them because not being able to can be dangerous to their health. What would be useful is advice without the attendant snobbery.

Exciting things happen so rarely. Which is another part of why everyone is all abuzz about this. I sort of want it to happen again as long as nothing gets damaged.

And done; Video tutorial attempts

I've finished The White Lioness. Everything I predicted came true, only the assignation almost wasn't thwarted because of an obnoxious combination of bad luck and incompetence. Seriously, if Wallander was as good at his job as he's supposed to be, half the things that went wrong could have been prevented. Starting with keeping the rest of his colleagues in the loop and following up on important reports to make sure they were received and understood. For all my bitching about it I will read another book by Henning Mankell. I mean, obviously he's a good writer, capable of putting together a plot and creating half-decent characters, it's just that this particular book suffered from age. Or something. These events would have been much more exciting to think about at the time they were written, when Apartheid was being dismantled and the black majority had a chance to have real participation in their country's governance. Twenty years later and the book's ending message of hope is more melancholy considering the AIDS epidemic, the failure of the economy to take off and the rising rate of crime. For a look back at what was this book has it's place, even if the man who wrote it was Swedish and not South African.

I'm attempting to create my first video tutorial at work. I don't have a microphone yet or a quiet place to record so captions are going to have to do for this first one. This is just a test to see if I can use the software.

This is a test or most of the 500 pages is padding

I don't think I can spoil The White Lioness considering the author does a pretty good job of doing it himself so I'm not going to worry about it.

Mr. ex-KGB agent and the evil South African racists have this weird fetish for talking about how ruthless and cold they are. It's grown to cartoon villain level proportions. Seriously, even without the eeevil plotting and reminders of how much they love stomping on others and murdering innocents I would buy them as not particularly nice. For crying out loud, they're attempting to assassinate a man who represents the hope of their country so they can plunge it into civil war in order to justify further repressing the black majority. You could show them happily playing with a puppy and the possibility of bloody unrest would still be lurking in the reader's mind. There's no need to show them kicking the puppy as well.

Anyway, Wallander is something of an example of informed ability. The author and the bad guy keeps saying how clever and talented he is but I just don't see it. Yes, he does a bit of solid investigating but most of his discoveries are through sheer luck and plot contrivance. Mr. ex-KGB agent wonders how Wallander could ever have discovered and followed him again and I'm like, you just blew up his fucking apartment and abducted a man from it at gunpoint, he didn't have to look very far. Wallander continues to act in a disordered manner by not bothering to tell anybody what's been happening because apparently only he can bring things to a satisfactory conclusion. Or so he keeps insisting. Because none of the others understand what's going on. Of course they don't! You haven't told them jack! If you told them who they were supposed to be looking out for maybe your daughter wouldn't have been kidnapped! Telling someone to tell someone to watch your father's house is a lot more effective when the people on watch know what they're doing there.

The section that I just read ends with one of the detectives asking, "How will it all end?" Well, my guess is the daughter doesn't die, Nelson Mandela doesn't get assassinated, and Wallander's amazing ability to stumble into the right scene will save the day.

The White Lioness by Henning Mankell; I need a new computer

I read the first Kurt Wallander book Faceless Killers a while ago and I rather liked it. The juxtaposition between his competent professional and pathetic private life made for a different read. It was a fairly straightforward police procedural and it wasn't a page too long. So I was a little put out to see that the third book in the series is the size of a Jo Nesbo thriller.

So far I don't dislike The White Lioness. The writing and the individual scenes are entertaining but the book as a whole just doesn't do it for me. My biggest problem is that Mankell spoils his own book for you. Going in you know right away, from the book cover and the first chapters, that there is a plot to kill Nelson Mandela (this was written not long after he was released from prison) and that the final planning stages are taking place in Sweden. A real estate agent is killed because she took a wrong turn and ends up near the house the Russian and South African involved in the plot were hiding out. The murder is completely senseless because she hadn't actually seen anything but it serves to show what a ruthless idiot (more on that later) the Russian is and to get Wallander involved.

So, practically from the start we know who killed her and why. We know what the bad guys are up to and what their motivations are. We also know Nelson Mandela isn't going to get killed which lets the air out of the over-arcing plot. Mankell spoils things in the middle of the book too. He writes a scene where he lets you know the aftermath of a plot point and then goes back to tell you how it came about. I already know what the result is going to be so there's no real suspense.

The bad guys are basically pure evil. Racist bastards with no human feeling who kill in cold blood. There is no attempt at showing them as real people. I think Apartheid was terrible as well but the people involved were still human. I got tired of the one-note evil bad guy when I was 12. Unless you're going to go the whole hog and show him as a James Bond style villain with a fluffy cat and a laser gun, don't bother. The only one who's different is the South African hitman who became a murderous asshole because Aparthied made him do it. Sorry! Not a good enough excuse for becoming a contract killer. Most people who faced the same discrimination didn't, after all. But Victor is obviously someone we're supposed to somewhat sympathize with and I just have difficulty buying it.

The Russian ex-KGB agent (because there had to be one) is presented as cold and professional, murdering a woman for no reason other than she asked him for directions. This is what brings the police into the story. If he had pointed out the right road to her and sent her on her way everything would have been fine. Killing someone is a great way to bring attention in your direction. Blowing up your house leaving the police to find a Russian radio transmitter and a South African gun? An even better way of bringing attention to yourself. Committing a bank robbery and shooting a cop with the same gun you used to murder someone else? Congratulations! You've hit the trifecta of stupid! What will you do for an encore? Excellent choice, sir. Raid a bar patronized by Africans and then leave the tear gas canisters you used in the apartment the cops have traced you to. And for your prize, I predict you will be killed before the end of the book. How this man ever survived as a KGB agent is anyone's guess.

I'm only half-way through the book. The stupid hurts a bit but despite all these points (including the sentimental thread through the story about how Sweden is changing and crime is getting worse which is linked (possibly unintentionally) to an influx of foreigners) it isn't bad. It's a mess but taking it in small chunks and reading other things in between makes it all right. It just isn't much of a thriller or a police procedural.

Chinese Letter by Svetislav Basara; textbook rant

I finished Chinese Letter by Svetislav Basara. Wha-huh. I'm not sure there's an actual plot and nothing really happens. Definitely not for everyone. Guy rambles on and on about existence and fearing death but wanting to kill himself. He has been ordered (probably by imaginary people) to write a statement of about 100 pages and he writes down whatever occurs to him. There's conversations with his mother, his sister's marital woes, the neighbor girl's shenanigans, his visits to his pathologist friend, and lots of introspection. The main character is obviously insane and this is the reason for his crisis. His very existence causes him pain but he cannot bring himself to end it. It's a little funny, a little obnoxious, and a little unnerving. I didn't not like the book. That's really all I can say for it.

Now for a small rant on textbooks. Textbook publishers are parasitic asshats who make a living feeding on the earnings of a captive audience. They are part of what's making it so hard for anyone not supported by well-off parents to get a higher education. They deserve to be pressed with their own product. Preferably an introductory medical-surgical nursing book; those things are huge.

I have 4 editions of Karch's introductory pharmacology text and I decided to look through the first chapter to see if the older editions would still be useful for the students and I made a (not so) shocking discovery. They are all the same. Oh, they changed the font and re-designed the diagrams and charts but the information is practically word-for-word. A few paragraphs were given a couple extra words or a new sentence but not in such a way as to add content. I then looked through Jarvis' physical examination pocket companion for 1997 and 2008. Again, identical. All of the paragraphs were identical except for maybe a few words every couple of chapters. Nothing that added content. If the nursing diagnoses (listed in a little box at the end of each chapter) hadn't changed in the intervening years there would be no need for a new book at all.

New editions every year or two also means that students can't easily go out and buy a used copy of the text assigned which is what I did as an undergraduate. (Of course I studied art history. Less new information really.) If the class the year before used edition 8 and this year they are assigned edition 9 there goes your opportunity to buy something cheaper.

Now, I understand the need for new texts, especially in fields where information is regularly updated, but the changes being made do not justify the amount by which they raise prices. These texts cost $100 - $150. How are poorer students supposed to afford this? When a student comes in looking for a book to study from I just give them an older (by maybe a year or two) edition with a warning. They don't care; many of them are working with families to care for and they're just glad to have something to help them in their studies. I don't care because I know all the relevant information they need to pass their class is there.

I'm going to do a comparison of some of the other texts. I have some that date back to the '80s. (No, they are not on the shelf for the students.) I'll look at them next to the newer editions, from the past 5 years, to see what's changed.

Too much documentation

I get to work yesterday and find out that my boss sent me about 20 emails over the weekend. Each one was on some point that she wanted me to fix in my section of the accreditation self-study narrative the school is pulling together. Since I am the whole library department I am in charge of all library related queries. That's reasonable. Many of the points she wanted clarified were reasonable as well. But 20 emails, each 2 sentences long is not reasonable.

Many of the questions, too, were frustrating. The self-study asked what classification system the library uses and I answered Library of Congress. So in one of the emails she asks me what that is and why I picked it. What is it? If the accreditation committee doesn't know then they certainly shouldn't be doing this particular job. And why shouldn't I use LoC? Most academic institutions do.

In the section about library improvement I wrote that we will get subscriptions to nursing journals. She asks why haven't we, send her the information. Why? Because the emails I send about pricing information to the Director of Education fall into a black hole, that's why! I send emails out and get no response. I have no idea what they want or how much money they are willing to spend.

She wants to know why I put the late fee at 25 cents a day. Then she sends me three emails with cut and pasted library policies from other universities along with several links. She says I should research ways to get students to turn in books on time so they don't take class texts out and keep them the whole semester. If she'd bothered to ask or even looked at the catalog I've set up she'd know that they can't take textbooks currently in use by a class out of the library. Because I'm not an idiot. The overdue fine is supposed to be the incentive to return the book. If they keep the book out too long they have to pay for the cost of the book. What more can you do? I have a loan policy. I don't need someone else's. She knows I have one! She asked me to email it to her last week! I write her weekly reports!

She's trying to do my job for me. She hired a trained professional so all this would be taken care of. I understand that the accreditation process if stressful and time-consuming but she needs to let me do what I was hired for. Revising the report and answering her further emails took up half of yesterday, time I was going to spend cataloging the rest of the books I got last week and creating a second sheet of call numbers. Instead I found she bought me more books to catalog but I didn't have time to get to them all. The accreditation committee will understand why I'm using LoC. They will be less impressed if the library is not organized. I haven't even had time yet to catalog the journals that keep getting donated or the videos that are already there.

Oh, it feels good to rant. I really do understand that this is very important to her but I feel as though she has no idea what I'm doing.

Carn by Patrick McCabe; Thank all that is Holy for air-conditioning

Poor Norway! God watch over and comfort them. I just don't understand the mentality that allows people to feel as though they are justified in killing innocent, unsuspecting people. It's like a giant toddler-ish temper tantrum. "I'm upset so I'm going to hurt you." And what does it truly accomplish? Nothing good for anyone, not even the people who did it. It's just cruel lashing out.

The poor students and faculty where I work! Many of them seem to be from areas that don't get this sort of humidity. At least that's what they tell me. I'm basically stuck indoors for most of the day until 6:00 so I feel no need to complain. The air outside is smothering though; this is the only part I hate about summer. I love catching fireflies and the sound of cicadas and the green tunnel of the parkway near the river but the humidity...the humidity that fogs up my glasses as soon as I step outside and sucks the breath out of me when I get in my overheated car, that is something I could do without.

Work has mainly consisted of helping students with APA format and finding references and helping with computers and the copier/printer. Oh, and putting call numbers on books and cataloging. A lot of that. I got two orders of books in this week. I'm trying to build a slightly more diverse collection than just textbooks. The director said the acid-base, fluids, electrolytes book I asked for was too complicated for the students. I had thought that the reviews made it sounds like a good bet but even so that is why I sent the list to her and the Director of Education asking them for approval! They're the nurse and doctor! Anyway, I'll tell her to send it back and choose one of the alternatives on that subject from the list of possibilities I compiled. I also need to find good English and computer texts.

I finished City of Tiny Lights. Eh. Conspiracy theories aren't really my thing. Nor the cynical reasoning behind the "twist" at the ending of the book. Tommy was active and interesting for the first half of the book and then got pretty ineffectual and downright stupid for the second. Of course he had been hit in the head. The book was all right. I'd read another of his.

Now I'm reading Carn by Patrick McCabe and why haven't I ever heard of this author before? This book is so poetic. I bought two of his books at the library sale for fifty cents. The story is set in the small town of Carn in Ireland during the 1960s. A returning native has used the business know-how he acquired in New York to turn the place prosperous. The story is partly about the changing place as it opens up to the world and the new era of Elvis, "longhairs", bikers, and cinema. The priest who used to terrify villagers is no longer in charge and commerce reigns. The main characters are a young woman who dreams of leaving Carn for London for rockers and mod styles, a woman who escaped the stifling clutch of the nun at the orphanage at 16 and has come back home from London now that she can no longer find work, and a young man who is just discovering that the world holds more than his one small town can contain. It's beautifully written.

I am also reading Chinese Letter by Svetislav Basara. It's a short novel where the protagonist, who is also ostensibly the author, comes across as incredibly emo and also quite insane. The "I wish I didn't exist" mantra would be eye-rollingly annoying if it wasn't balanced out by his paranoia.

City of Tiny Lights by Patrick Neate; Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic

A Ugandan-Indian Englishman private eye investigating a case for a hooker. It's a decent enough book. Tommy Akhtar does nothing but drink, smoke, and ruminate about his past and the way of post-colonial Britain and in between that he looks into the case he was hired to solve. Then he gets involved in a case he wasn't hired to solve. That sort of thing happens a lot in these sort of books, along with the obligatory run-in with stereotypical obnoxious and stupid authority, and I have to wonder how these PIs finance their escapades. The plot is almost buried in reminiscences about Tommy's life and "how the world works" tangents and the British slang and cricket references leave me in the dark more often than not but it's not bad over all. There's more of a problem with the staccato nature of the prose and the "serious" tacked on to every fifth sentence. Also, for a book with a message running through it about how even "Paki's" (as he puts it) can be real people and something other than their stereotype and which makes fun of those people who judge others based on ethnicity/nationality, the fat-necked/overly tanned/macho "Yank" with bad fashion sense and an inability to "get" English humor comes over as hilarious. And kind of jarring actually.

Tommy has sent some dumb "thug-lite" kid with a chip on his shoulder to go undercover in an organization that brainwashes just that sort of idiot. I'm sure this will end well. Tommy is an interesting character but after he solves the case he was initially paid for he really does very little.

It's a good read, but I wonder how many of my recommendations would still be nice if I was buying books rather than getting them at the library.

This next book I did buy but cheap. Amazon Marketplace is my go-to for all books not in the library. That's where I got Hidden Camera by Zoran Zivkovic. A Czech author, this book is about a middle-aged undertaker who finds himself being led a merry chase in what he believes is a hidden camera show. He gets an invitation to a film, only when he arrives there is only one other person in the audience, a woman who's face stays hidden, and the film shows him eating his lunch. In the dark after the show ends he receives another invitation, this time to a bookstore. He decides to outwit his unseen antagonists by not being freaked out or making a fool of himself for their show. He fails if only because he's trying too hard and he's so caught up with being well-mannered that he's too rigid to easily adapt to new situations. The unnamed protagonist ends up moving from one strange situation to the next in the hopes of getting the better of the plot's organizers and of seeing the face of the mysterious woman. The ending was odd. I think I need to consider it a bit more because the whole thing seems to have something to do with life before birth/after death and nothing is ever explained. There's no dialogue either, basically. Only a short conversation with an obstetrician and a few lines exchanged with the extras in the "show".

I miss Spring; Troll by Sinisalo

The heat! 99 and humid. That's all I've got to say about that.

All staff have to work on this self-study narrative from the accreditation board so I spent yesterday writing the library part. Today I'll enhance it and turn it in. They ask awkward and weirdly worded questions. What information technology do we have? How broad do you want that? What is your definition of it, accreditation board? How many titles of the collection are business related, how many are on general education, and how many are other? Do you want an exact figure? Do you think I have them marked that way? That I've divided them up by that classification? What evidence is there that the resources are up-to-date and course related? You mean other than the library catalog? What "evidence" do you want? What are the procedures for students checking books in and out? Accreditation board, you don't actually know what librarians do, do you? Or do you mean you want to know what my loan policies are? Bah. I'll answer but it's very hard not to be sarcastic.

We had an HR training session yesterday with our new HR person. Who is actually the director of admissions so she's going to have a busy time. We had to go over the student catalog and come up with questions that might be good for a FAQ page on the website. Then we got a crossword puzzle based on the catalog as homework. I finished it pretty quickly.

Today I'll work on the narrative and put call numbers on books. Good times.

I read a book called Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo. Hah. Well, it was interesting. This photographer finds a hurt troll cub and takes it in to nurse it back to health. There are four other characters that he interacts with because of his need to help the troll. Each character's thoughts are told from their point of view so you might have a paragraph or a page with their name at the top telling their side of a scene. These alternating POV scenes are intercut with book excerpts and news clippings about trolls. The main character, nicknamed Angel, grows more and more infatuated with the little beast until his actions totally center around it. Angel is a beautiful young man who a lot of people want and he uses that and gets used in return. He didn't have much personality though. The ending was kind of abrupt. I was left with an unfinished feeling, like it cut off right when the next part of the story should have started. However, the read as a whole was whimsical and different and rather enjoyable. I'm not quite sure what the Filipina mail order bride was doing in the story. She could easily have been cut out.

And I'm back; First Drop by Zoe Sharp

Well, that was remiss of me. I should have written sooner.

Work has been interesting. The students and faculty are checking out books and asking for help with research so I guess things are headed in the right direction. I've created an access database to keep better records of the resources and Populi has upgraded their ILS feature which has made my life a little easier. I can delete resources and change cover pictures now! Very exciting stuff. My boss would be harder to deal with if we worked in the same building but fortunately we don't. She's a driven woman and I believe she's a nice enough person but her idea of management is to criticize every time she sees you. I think it's her way of letting you know she's watching. This would be very depressing if I wasn't getting a lot of positive feedback from everyone else.

My project of "put call numbers on book spines" is going nicely. The only thing I'm really having a little difficulty with is getting more support from the faculty. There are a few full-time staff that are really including me in the academics but without an order from above the rest of them have no incentive to incorporate what I can offer into their lesson plans. I've sent out emails and posted on the Populi news feed but I don't think a lot of people are paying attention. I'll work on it.

Now on to First Drop. Much like the movie Shutter Island seemed to last six hours, First Drop seemed to last about five years. This was not a good book. Now I don't say this because it was badly written or plotted. I say this because Sharp's characters are some of the most obnoxious, flat, and self-absorbed I've ever read. Charlie Fox has her first job as a bodyguard watching out for a fifteen year old Floridian boy named Trey. She got the job from her boyfriend/boss , Sean, the only character who isn't completely unlikable but this may be because he has no personality and is hardly in the book at all. Anyway, Charlie has come over from England for her first American job. The author obviously did some research or took a vacation in Florida or something so that aspect wasn't too terrible. The dialogue though wasn't particularly good and that was rather distracting. All the teenagers sounded like fake Californian valley girls and Ms. Sharp doesn't seem to realize that certain grammatical rules apply even to speech filled with "like" and "totally". The retired CIA agent Walt and his nephew were constantly calling Charlie "missy" and "little lady" which was just inappropriate under the circumstances and just in general most of the dialogue was filled with colloquial American English that would be right in certain cases but that she didn't know how to use properly. There were a few things that were obviously British in-jokes, like having a character named "Randy" and having the teenagers not understand sarcasm (or as she called it, "irony". Here's an interesting post on the difference between the way the two countries look at this topic http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2009/05/sarcasm-and-irony.html) Teenagers are generally the masters of this form of communication. The other thing that stuck out was the plot point wherein Charlie and Trey are on the beach and oh no! they are in trouble because the police are checking everybody's IDs (due to a murder committed nearly 200 miles away) and once the police get to them they'll be finished! They've got to get away! And I'm like, wait, what gives the police the right to randomly demand all beach-goers to present their IDs? Oh, and apparently Ms. Fox and Trey rode the 240 miles from Fort Lauderdale to Daytona on a motorcycle. And not on I-95 which would make sense but on a state road which would lengthen their journey to about 6 hours. They must've needed an alarm clock and smelling salts just to wake their backsides up enough to not fall flat on their faces as soon as they dismounted.

As for Charlie herself. She was utterly unprofessional: She expected the adolescent she was supposed to protect to do her job for her. He's her charge and she should expect nothing from him. She's utterly without the ability to empathize or put herself in another's shoes: When Trey gets upset and storms off during a conversation where it becomes clear that his father may have hired people to kill him she huffs and thinks to herself that she doesn't have time to deal with "a stroppy teenager". She's incompetent: When things started getting dangerous, instead of dragging a fifteen year old around with her while she tries to clear her name she should have driven to another state, dropped him off at a police station and then made her way to the British embassy. Trey would have been protected, fewer people would have died, and things would generally have been less of a mess. She's completely self-absorbed: When Trey, who has understandable trust issues, questions her commitment to protecting him after she uses him as a human meat shield, she gets angry that he would question her ability to do her job.

Charlie Fox is basically a horrible human being. When she gets upset at Trey's inability to deal with all the mayhem she tells him that people died because of him and that she herself killed a man for his sake. That is not cool. She argues the semantics of sex with him and angrily blurts out her gang-rape in the hopes that further traumatizing him might make him think twice before participating in one himself (I have no idea why she thought he might to begin with.) Her feelings are the only ones she allows to be valid. She's always in the right. She's a bad ass fighter who gains fanboys and can pass for a teenager. She's basically a really weird self-insert character.

Anyway, the majority of the characters were horrible people, the main character being the worst. I also have to remark on the female characters. There are only three other females in the book among the multitude of guys. One is a matronly female who makes pancakes. She's of no consequence. The other is a teenager who acts as support to Charlie; buying her supplies, smoothing the mood, and doing a little fangirling. The other is a hard nosed cowardly bitch who acts (badly) as a red herring and is summarily shot. Charlie is not allowed competition.

Okay, I just need to get that off my chest. I don't know why I bothered finishing the book. It was teeth grinding-ly bad. It was so bad I don't think I could make a semi-humorous post about it though I might like to try.

I'm re-charging with other books. I read Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, an alternative interpretation of the series. I don't quite like the way he portrayed Watson but for a Sherlock Holmes vs. Jack the Ripper book (something that's been done to death by now) it's quite good.

The Terra-Cotta Dog by Camilleri; Poison Study by Snyder

Still no tape, still a wonky printer situation. The students only seem to be able to print from one computer so I'm reserving it for that purpose.I checked out four books yesterday; two to a faculty member and two to a student. Now to see if I eventually get them back. I could've printed them out a receipt if I had a frickin' printer.

Still doing catalog entry. I want to put the journal and magazine collection on it but the Populi catalog isn't very good for that. It insists on having a bar code for every item and I'm not putting bar codes on the journals. They're not available for check out. Same with some of the other media. Partially I just don't want to hear my boss complain about how long they take to get here when I need to order more bar codes. Brodart orders take forever. They don't make it clear that when you order something that they give the jobs to outside vendors who then take months to get things done. And I can't even call to complain because I don't know who they are. I've been waiting for my outside book return for a month and a half.

CamStudio was a bust. It wouldn't start on my machine and I didn't feel like babying it. So I downloaded Microsoft Expressions 4 which, so far, is working fine. I'm not quite ready to record as I don't have a place to do audio yet. I have a headset here at home I could use but I'd have to record the video there, watch it here and do voice over, and then put the both together there due to where the software is and the fact that I can't be assured quiet there. I'll figure it out. In the meantime I've started a school library blog to give tutorials on research and such using images from the problem step recorder. www.ghntslibrary.blogspot.com.

Also, I am the person in the building to go to with tech problems now that admin is across the street.

I'm reading The Terra-Cotta Dog by Andrea Camilleri. I enjoyed the last book of his and this one is just as interesting, maybe even more. Inspector Montalbano is intelligent and something of a ass at times but he's an interesting ass with redeeming qualities. In this book he has to contend with a fishy grocery store robbery and the secret imparted to him by a dying big crime figure. It's an easy read and again there are cultural notes at the back.

I'm reading Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder. This is a fantasy book about a young woman who gets a stay of execution if she'll agree to be the Commander's food taster. The writing is pretty decent and it reads easily even if the author has the annoying habit of ending chapters when something dramatic has happened or been said and then just picks up in the exact same place in the next chapter, often with the next line of dialogue in the conversation. This book might turn out to be a romance disguised as a fantasy but well-enough done to hold. The world she's created of a kingdom taken over by what's basically a military dictatorship is interestingly different from over books with the same feel. The Commander isn't arbitrarily tyrannical, he's a ruler. It's not a place I'd want to live but it's not stupidly harsh. You can understand his reasoning behind his laws even if you think they're too much. It's easy to imagine resistance naturally coming about as people grow tired of the strict laws rather than like other conquered fantasy worlds where an underground resistance movement headed by one savior defies cackling despots who kick puppies and molest children. Anyway, it has been a good read so far.

I haven't given up on First Drop though I sincerely want to drop kick it into the river.

I think the Title is the hardest part really

Me and my Grandpa.

I can now close the stacks part of the library while keeping the computer lab open so I can more easily go to lunch when I want. It's wonderful to have more control over my schedule again.

I've been doing catalog entry. I've done about 100+ books at his point and there are at least 300 to go. And then, once I get tape I can label them all! Yippee! I've been using the Populi library system that's connected to their college management software program since that's what the school already uses. Adding resources to the catalog is pretty simple. It lets you enter something by ISBN number and it pulls information from Amazon. This gives you a more or less full description of the contents for your resource page along with the authors and publisher. You have to enter all other data by hand. The resource page when created is not particularly streamlined but there are a lot of different field options. Except a series field for some reason. And you can't delete a resource or change it's status between available and unavailable. Apparently they're working on changing that. Sometimes it just refuses to enter things correctly at all and you just have to work around it.

You can, of course, assign multiple subjects of your own wording to each item and to be honest I only sometimes use LCSH or MeSH. I don't have thousands of books and I don't want there to be fifty different subject headings with only one item linked to them. These things are to help users find similar items or to let them browse for a useful topic. The wording needs to be something they'll think to look up. There's no way I'm putting the APA manual under the heading "Psychological Literature". Who's going to look for help with citations under that? Also, there's no reason to limit myself to three subjects when four will be better. I want things to be interconnected in such a way that when students browse the catalog they find things they hadn't thought to look at but find useful. I'll have to conduct a survey after they've been using it for awhile to make sure it works.

Yesterday I created an APA citation help sheet for the students and I've helped a couple that were sent by their teacher for instruction. I'm looking into how to make video tutorials for using online databases and to help teach reading comprehension and evaluative skills. I have no budget so I downloaded Windows Live Movie Maker and I'm thinking about getting CamStudio. I've also come to the realization that since the library is one of the only open doors on the hall I'm going to have to be ready to help not just students but anyone else who wanders in looking for information of whatever nature.

I'm almost done with Red Lights. It's just one long night for Steve the protagonist. He gets progressively drunker as he and his wife make the trip up to Maine to pick up the kids until eventually he decides his wife needs a lesson in understanding him when she objects to his stopping at bars along the way. He takes the keys with him into the bar to prevent her from driving off without him, which she threatened to do, and comes back out to find her gone. More drinking, one escaped convict, and lots of embarrassing drunken rambling about being men later and Steve wakes up in the car with a flat tire, missing luggage and wallet, a bad hangover, and no idea where his wife is. When he reaches a phone it turns out she never made it to where she was going. So he has to find her.

The narrative kind of feels like the passing of the highway under tires and also, unsurprisingly, like a drunken night out. It's a monotonous, nighttime journey, where roadside places are indistinct and very human emotions of hurt, annoyance, and confrontation come to the surface as the road wears on with nothing to do but watch traffic. Things start out very clear and get more and more blurry and less cohesive as Steve loses it, until he wakes up painfully alert with a squirrel watching him through the windshield. And then comes the shame, because he made a fool of himself, and the anxiety at being far from home with his wallet gone, and then the panic because he can't find his wife.

It's Friday!

The picture is my grandma and my mother.

I have the bar codes I need to put on the books so now I can enter them all into the catalog with the number of copies along with all their information. What I still can't do is put call numbers on them because 1) I can't print (although I may have fixed that, we'll see) and 2) I have no tape, still. I have put in a purchase request for Scotch book repair tape again and now hopefully I'll have it by next week. Oh please, oh please, oh please. Then everything will be ready for checking out. You know, once the students have ID cards. But that's not my problem!

Also, I'm coming to the conclusion (actually, I came to it weeks ago) that we may be able to afford only one online journal with full onsite access. AJN seems like a good bet but it's $500+ just for one user. Having an EBSCO product would have been great but all of their databases are over $8000. However, the nurse reference center they have is very similar in content on a number of points to Medscape's free content. Obviously the EBSCO version is much better but for a small institution Medscape seems like a pretty good alternative. Geez, education really is for the well-off. It's too bad there are no alternative pricing arrangements for small places.

I've also put in my first book request to the Director and the Director of General Education. The books I chose were mainly on subjects that faculty members told me students had trouble grasping. I included a few books to help with faculty development as well. The faculty I've talked to really like the idea of having professional development resources so I can use that if questions are raised about why we should buy them.

A student opened up to the copy/printer yesterday, grabbed a sheaf of paper, stuffed it into her bag and walked out. I didn't see it happen but a student who had been in the study room where the machine is told me. She and another student were just as flabbergasted and angry as myself. Paper isn't exactly expensive and there's a Staples right across the street. I'm going to have to keep a very small amount of paper in the machine and let people come to me if they need more. For every ten good students you get one bad one, you know? They're just stealing from their classmates.

I have finished Treasure Island. Pirates, treasure, mutiny, fights, ships; they all make for a great adventure. It's an action-driven story, not much for dialogue or character development. The atmosphere often takes center-stage.

I am now reading First Drop by Zoe Sharp. This is the first book in a British series to be printed in the U.S. about a new bodyguard named Charlie Fox (a woman) who comes to America to take her first job protecting the son of a computer programmer in, apparently, Florida. I'm only in about 60 pages and I already hate Ms. Fox to bits. She is massively unprepared for both her new job and a new country, she is incredibly unprofessional, and she is very petty and self-centered. I may abandon it, I may just save it to read by the computer.

I've also started Red Lights by Georges Simenon which will, of course, be better. His stories have not failed me yet. This one is not a Maigret mystery though. It takes place in '50s New England. A couple is driving up to Maine to retrieve their children from summer camp. So far they've fallen into their usual summer routine which has been marred only by the husband sneaking a double rye when he pulled over to use the restroom. Now there's a bit of tension between them and we'll see where that goes.

Yay, weekend! The drive to and from Cleveland (or the environs around Cleveland anyway) and everything in between was exhausting. I hate open casket funerals. I think they're demeaning. The makeup is never right, the flesh sags, the hands are stiff. I can understand people wanting to say goodbye but it just seems so degrading. Well. It was wonderful to see my family and next year one of my cousins is getting married so that will be a happy reason to have to go to Cleveland.

Edit: I can't print from my computer, but I can print from the student computers on my log-in. The tech guy said something about 32 and 64 bit and how something has to be changed which just sounds far too complicated. Oh, and Charlie Fox is one of the most uncompassionate, unsympathetic, self-centered, unprofessional little half-wits to masquerade as a bodyguard ever. The only time I've felt such annoyance and disgust for a character was when I was reading the first two Dexter books. (The show, however, is awesome.) Henry Miller doesn't count because he's amusing and the writing's much better.

I have to go to Cleveland again

My grandmother just died.

I hate having to ask for time off from my new job after only being there a month but this is important. I'll just have to see how things go.

A few preliminary pictures

Most everything's dried out now. I'm going to try and record what's there maybe over the weekend but I took a few pictures now just for the heck of it.

The girl with the bob is probably my grandmother and the teenager with the curls is most likely my great-grandmother.

Apparently the autism awareness symbol is a puzzle piece. Consider me informed.

Here's my great-grandmother.

I have a new computer at work; I am thrilled. I spent most of today (re)familiarizing myself with various databases and search engines and writing tutorials about how to use them. I need to write search strategies and reading comprehension sheets as well. I was glad of the air-conditioning today. The other building is having problems with the A/C and the heat outside was like a second skin. I got in my car at lunch time and the dashboard thermometer read 107. I need to remember to put my driving gloves back in the car so I can steer better and more easily handle the car key now that it's summer.

My parents drove to our poor flooded and stripped house over the weekend to save as many wet things as possible. My grandmother's year books and fairy tale books are gone but I was expecting that. So they brought me back a plastic bin of soaked things. While you don't want to store old paper in plastic (the fumes given off by old paper products would hasten their deterioration), it kept the moisture in long enough to allow me to separate a lot of pages. It's much harder if not impossible to peel apart dry paper. A number of photos are gone, stuck together with their own chemicals, but other photos remain along with a number of newspapers and correspondence.

There are a few papers dealing with the Hindenburg disaster. My grandparents were just parking the car to go watch it land when they saw it explode. One paper deals with conspiracy plots about sabotage. I think Bolsheviks were involved, I haven't gotten a chance to look closely.

There are a couple announcing the death of President McKinley. I'm drying one of those out now.

There are a lot of invitations to my great-grandfather to go to various events. He was chief clerk to the secretary of state of New Jersey during the 20's, 30's and 40's. Now the title is assistant secretary. There are a number of photographs of him working in his office. They must have had an official photographer. He always looks like he's been surprised at work but they had to have set those shots up.

There must be an entire ream of paper dedicated to my great-grandmother's high school graduation, including her last report card (she was an excellent speller and did quite well in rhetoric) and a poem she composed on a typewriter to commemorate the event.

There are several booklets on weird subjects. "The Germany of Asia" written around 1917 about Japan. "The Hole in the Hauptmann Case" about the man convicted in the Lindbergh baby case. I'm still drying that out but I think Bolsheviks are involved in that also. There's one on the German-Bolshevik connection written around WWI as well. There's Masonic Temple stuff but that's not surprising as my great-grandfather was a Mason.

Once everything is dried out I'll start taking photos.

I'm reading Treasure Island because I wanted an adventure book and I remember enjoying it as a kid.