Chapter 713, in Which the Librarian Responds to Questions

Some questions that have been asked today at the reference desk:

Q: Is there a number that I can call to reach the 13 or 14 state attorneys general who are suing the U.S. over the health care bill?

A: Googling "attorney generals sue health care" brought up news articles that said the Florida attorney general was the first to sue and that the suit had been joined by other states' attorneys general. I gave the patron the phone number for the Florida attorney general's office.

Q: Do you still have Love Story by Erich Segal?

A: Yes. Who would be heartless enough to get rid of it?

Q: I am writing a paper and need books and articles about school reform and African-Americans in American history.

A: A few books on school reform turned up in the catalog, and I told the student to look in their indices under African-Americans. As far the articles went, I knew we should search the databases at JerseyClicks.org*, and that we needed a more specific topic to search for. To find that, we looked in the Encyclopedia of Education in the reference collection. A brief look at the topics in the index under African Americans gave us magnet schools and other terms the student could look up.

*JerseyClicks.org won't exist anymore if the state budget passes as proposed. If you value JerseyClicks, or other services like the Library for the Blind or interlibrary loan, please let your representatives know that you don't support the 74% funding cut to state library services.

Q: Do you have a paper copy of the instructions for the NJ-1040?

A: Yes, for in-library use only. The only other alternatives are to view it online or print it for ten cents a page (and it's 69 pages long).

Let Vampires Be Evil

Could authors please stop making vampires the good guys in their novels? Yes, vampires are wealthy (because they live forever, presumably), and they're very good looking (see: Edward of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series) or at least physically powerful. They're noble royals (see: Wrath of J.R. Ward's Brotherhood of the Dagger series) or slackers who remind us of ourselves (see: Jody of Christopher Moore's campy Bloodsucking Fiends). But why did vampires have to turn into another run-of-the-mill hero from a romance novel or action flick? What was wrong with the deliciously creepy vampire of Bram Stoker's Dracula, or the evilly seductive Lord Ruthven in The Vampyre by John Polidori*? At least let them sneak up on unsuspecting humans and bite them in the dead of night from time to time.

*Footnote: Dr. Polidori's short story The Vampyre was heavily based on his patient Lord Byron's Fragment of a Novel. Fragment of a Novel was written in 1816, the year of volcanic winter. One cold summer's evening in Italy, Mary Wollstonecraft suggested that she, her future husband Percy Shelley, and Lord Byron each write a supernatural tale; Mary wrote Frankenstein. The Vampyre was later published without Polidori's permission and attributed to Lord Byron (to both of their displeasure).

My Family and Other Animals

In My Family and Other Animals, naturalist Gerald Durrell writes about his family's years between the wars on the island of Corfu. At the impulsive suggestion of her son Lawrence, 23, his mother moved her eccentric family from rainy England to a sunnier climate where Gerry, the youngest at ten, ran wild with his dog Roger, collecting bugs and animals of all sorts and bringing them back to the rented villa to create havoc, upsetting Larry in particular, the future author who comes off as rather priggish and arrogant. Sister Margo concerned only with fashion and boyfriends; brother Leslie who likes to shoot game; Spiro, a helpful Greek-American; assorted tutors for Gerry, and various islanders populate the book, all odd and quirky individuals. The book concludes with a party at their villa which is disrupted when Gerry's collection of curious and destructive magpies, a belligerant Albanian seagull, the mother's female dog in heat pursued by a pack of neighborhood dogs, and assorted other critters escape and scare the guests. Mrs. Durrell does her best to pretend nothing is amiss while the family scurries around trying to round up the animals and finally the guests have another drink or three and the party goes on successfully until late at night. All par for the course in the Durrell family.
My Family and Other Animals is a funny memoir that makes the reader want to escape in time and space to Corfu of the 1930's, live with a family like the Durrells, swim in the phosphorscent sea at night, wander thhrough the olive groves with a dog, like the young Gerry. Tourists trying to recreate that experience will find Corfu still picturesque but much built up since those times, so I plan to watch BHPL's copy of the PBS version of the book and put Gerald Durrell's other Corfu books as well as his brother Lawrence's book Bitter Lemons, which is about his stay on Cyprus, on my list of books to read.

Related websites:

Bellapais Journal

The Corfu Trilogy

Corfu Travel


Vintage Travel Posters Greece (image right)

Our Book Blog to Attend NJ Librarian Convention - sort of

The BHPL Book Blog will celebrate its 5th anniversary this May and to celebrate that momentous occasion, the Reference Department bloggers wanted to share their collective wisdom and experience about library blogging with our colleagues at the annual NJ librarian convention 2010. First we had to submit a proposal to the Poster Board Session Committee. For all you laymen (non-librarians) out there, librarians are known to be amongst the most technologically connected professional groups and we like to attend professional meetings dressed in sensible shoes and dirt-resistant outfits whilst texting, blogging, podcasting and sending singing Gorilla telegrams.

Blogging as a Team Presents Unique Challenges
Working as a team on a blog and poster board session requires compromise. Let us share our decision-making process about the title for the poster board session application, keeping in mind that once submitted to the committee, the title is carved in stone- ie: printed on the NJLA program if they choose to accept our proposal. This process almost derailed the project from the git-go. Herewith, Ellen and Anne batting around ideas about the application title.

Proposed Titles
Possible Title #1:Anne- ‘Librarians from around the country call and say, ‘My director wants me to start a library blog, but what can I possibly write about day after day?’ Ellen –‘Too long.’(Eye roll)

Possible Title #2: Anne –‘Seriously Practical Ideas for Library Bloggers.’ Ellen- ‘meh! Too short.’

Possible Title #3: Anne,(exasperated) ‘21st Century Modes of Communicating Effectively to Targeted Library Demographics using Web 2.0 Mash-ups, Social Media Applications and other Solutions too Technical to mention in a Short Title.’ Ellen (also exasperated)-‘Anne, be serious.’

Brainstorming: What do we think we know about blogging which might be helpful for other librarians to know? 1. We know there are blogs which are way more sophisticated technologically, but we stand by the pretty good quality of our original content over time; our pretty consistent methods of producing content on a pretty regular basis; and the fairly readable and often, we hope, pretty funny style of our content. So that’s what we are going to present on our poster board: how to be pretty good, pretty painlessly?
Possible Title #4: Anne- ‘Content, it’s all about the Content. Except for a few bits about the Geeky stuff like our Side Bar RSS feeds.’
Possible Title #5: Ellen- ‘Will Blog for Readers: Tips & Tales from a Library Blog.’
Anne- ‘bingo!We've got our title!’
And so you see, single author blogs can devolve into the I & Me Show, but our blog involves brainstorming, compromise and, yes, Anne admitting that Ellen’s ideas are almost always better than hers.
Having decided on a title, finished the application, amazingly, the unsuspecting NJLA PBS Committee (librarians love acronyms) accepted our application and we are now beginning to think about the actual content of what I have come to think of as, our 21st Century Blogging Triptych. Ellen has made me promise not to put too much gilding on the frame or Carolina Blue as the background and will have to generally keep me in line. Just because Duke is doing better than UNC this year, I have to defer more than usual. Meh!

By the Lake by John McGahern

In honor of St. Patrick's Day today's blog post is about Irish author John McGahern's By the Lake. This book is the perfect antidote to those formulaic books you pick up in bookstores whose blurbs read: Meet A, a publicist; B, her boyfriend, a restauranteur; C, their neighbor and a pediatrician and mother of four. . . .

By the Lake is a character study of a married couple, the Ruttledges, and their neighbors who live around the same lake in Ireland. The reader is dropped straight into the middle of things without any introductions. "The middle of things" is an overstatement, because nothing in the present happens much, beyond calvings and the occasional visitor. Mostly the characters tell stories about each other and gradually you get to know everyone in the village, and hear about all their tragedies and small victories, which sounds like a recipe for sentimentality. But this book isn't saccharine.

I loved the dialogue, for example in this passage in which Ruttledge has counted the money his rich uncle ("The Shah") is keeping with him for a few days:

"You could buy a house and land with this. You could get married. You could start a life. You could go to Africa or America," Ruttledge said as he prepared to put the box away. "It's there like strength."

"It's better than the other fella having it, anyhow," the Shah agreed uncertainly; and Ruttledge decided not to protest or joke any further.

McGahern died in 2006 and the New York Times obituary described his work this way:

Because he was an Irish writer, Mr. McGahern was inevitably compared to James Joyce. Because his stories were set in the country, he was compared to Chekhov and Hardy. His style was terse. His novels moved deliberately through their agonies of love and misgiving, always with reference to the dominating Catholic culture and the rigors of wresting existence from the fields and the peat bogs.