TheSharonB

He said: "She has a lovely face..."

2012-02-01T00:14:00.000-08:00

Tennyson rocks my world a little bit. He's a great poet, and he likes writing about the same things I like reading about, so it all works out quite well, really. The fact that I haven't read more of his poems than I have always befuddles me - I know I will enjoy them, but I just haven't gotten around to it. I must fix that one of these days.

I have always loved his version of the Lady of Shalott. Mallory's version is just depressing (and part of the reason behind my undying hatred for Launcelot), but Tennyson's is incredibly beautiful... and depressing.

Well, they both end with the main character both a) dying and b) experiencing unrequited love that directly lead to the dying, so you can't really get away from the depressing aspect of it. But where Mallory's version of the tale is all about Launcelot being a jerk, Tennyson's is this sweet, lyrical character study in which Launcelot is an innocent bystander - the tale is more tragic and less obnoxious the way he tells it.

And then Loreena McKennitt put it to music.

By all that's bright and colourful, McKennitt's setting of the poem is one of the most gloriously beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard. It doesn't matter how often I've heard it, I still get shivers down my spine when she sings the lyric:

She left the web, she left the loom
She made three paces through the room

It's hard to explain if you've never read the poem (or heard the song), but that's the moment where a young girl's yearning to see something real for the first time in her life seals her doom. McKennitt's vocals ever so subtly draw attention to that - three paces were all that had separated the girl from her window. Three paces that she had never walked before for fear of some nebulous curse (that turned out to be true).

It's just the perfect complement - a brilliant match between an excellent poet and a fine musician. Maybe you won't quite find it as inspiring as I do, but I feel I should share it anyway:

God, in his mercy, lend her grace...

My Fair Freddy

2011-11-07T17:25:00.001-08:00

"She married Freddy, of course."

For some reason I've always remembered this line as being something George Bernard Shaw (GBS) wrote in his "sequel" to Pygmalion (the play better known in its musical incarnation as My Fair Lady). On rereading that story recently, I discovered it wasn't there. Not only wasn't it the first line, which is where I thought I remembered it being, but it wasn't in the text at all.

In the copy of Pygmalion I own (a second hand copy bought for a dollar back when I was a teenager), GBS has provided both a prologue and an epilogue for the play. In the prologue he tells of one of the professors of phonetics he knew back in the 1870s who formed a large part of the inspiration for Henry Higgins. In the epilogue he provides the "sequel" - telling us what happened to Eliza (and some of the other characters) after the events in the play had finished.

When I first read this story, as a teenager, I found it vaguely depressing. Like many people who loved the tension between Liza and Higgins, I wanted the play to be a love story. At the time, I thought the only fit sequel to the play would involve Liza eventually taming and marrying Higgins. The idea that she would settle for Freddy, of all people, just seemed like a let-down.

I think I've been at a disadvantage because I've only ever seen Freddy performed as something of a non-entity. Whenever I've watched the movie or stage production of My Fair Lady, Freddy comes across as being a bit of a sap, really. But, reading over the play again recently, I've noticed this isn't in the play at all.

Freddy can be played as a sap, or he can be played as the Prince Charming of this particular Cinderella story. The script supports either interpretation.

And there's something else the script supports: Freddy knows.

At the very beginning of the play, Freddy gets a very good look at Liza's face when they bump into each other. They look eyes with each other just as a lightening strike illuminates the scene with a clap of thunder.

Then he comes back and talks to her again before that scene is over - no doubt paying attention to this strange woman who somehow knew his name (just as his mother had before him).

When he meets her later, in Mrs Higgins' parlour, his first words to her are "I've certainly had the pleasure". Granted, he could just be a bit of a vague fool, like his mother and sister appear to be... Or he could be a henpecked man who has met someone beautiful and fascinating and has decided to play along with this interesting game she seems to be playing.

Freddy has had it rough. He was born into the upper echelons of society, but his family is broke. He was raised to be the kind of person who doesn't need to work, but he can't afford to maintain that position. His mother and sister treat him like an idiot, and he's constantly trying to follow behind them and keep up appearances as they go from one social engagement to another (well, insofar as they can afford it). He's probably expected to marry someone just like them - but even if he wanted to, would he be able to afford it? And then, suddenly, this gorgeous young woman is dragged into his world, and it's the most interesting thing he's ever encountered in his boring, henpecked existence. Is it any wonder he's happiest when he's hanging around outside her house?

At the end of the play Eliza makes it clear that Freddy isn't stupid, they've been in contact quite steadily during the past few months, and she knows he loves her. She never says anything to indicate Freddy is someone she is "putting up with", or that she doesn't and could never return his affection. In fact, depending on how you played her, it could be quite obvious that she loves him too, but is still trying to figure out what she wants from Higgins.

It turns out Pygmalion is a love story after all, but we're so distracted by the relationship between Cinderella and her Fairy Godfather that it's easy for us to miss the real love story between our courageous heroine and her slightly goofy Prince Charming.

Reading the "sequel" again in this light, it's so obviously right. That's exactly what should happen. Eliza should marry Freddy, and they should start a flower shop. They both happen to be fish-out-of-water in this bold new middle class world (as she came from the lower classes and he from the upper); they they should struggle together to make a go of it. Higgins is someone who should always be an important part of her life, but like a godfather, not like a lover.

As GBS himself points out - Galatea could never really love Pygmalion, he's too godlike.

And Freddy? Well Freddy deserves more attention. He's so subtly drawn in the play that he can be easily over looked, and given short shrift in performance, but I think it throws the play into a whole new light if you work on the assumption that he isn't an idiot, and he knows exactly who she is - and doesn't care.

You know, I think Freddy just became my favourite character.

Under Construction

2011-10-13T20:24:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I just want the drilling to stop.

That's all - not world peace, not health and riches, just a good solid hour without drilling.

I expect the students studying for their exams might agree with me.

Where to put a spoof?

2011-09-17T18:08:00.000-07:00

I was in the public library the other day when I noticed this:

Now, at the risk of sounding like a character from Sesame Street: "one of these things is not like the other..."

For those of you who might not know, Molvania is not a real country, and the guide book is not a real guide book. It's a spoof of travel books - a joke aimed squarely at the Lonely Planet type books with which it is currently sharing shelf-space.

I wondered, for a moment, if I should say something to the librarians, and then realised they probably know - there just wasn't a better place to put it.

After all, where else would you put a spoof of a particular genre? 827.994 might work for Australian "humor and satire", but is that really a better place to put it than with the genre it is satirising? Perhaps having it interfiled with the books it is mocking is more appropriate.

But, still, the library geek in me thinks they should have put the 827 in the call number somewhere. It's been too long since I've taken a good look at the DDC, so this is probably a little bit off, but perhaps this would have been a more honest classification: 914.700827994.

Maybe I'm just putting too much thought into this for a Sunday morning...

Three books, Part Two

2011-09-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

In one of my last posts, when I introduced the idea of the game "what three books would you choose for locking with a kidnap victim in a tower" (which makes much more sense if you think of the fact that the last two retellings of Rapunzel point out that she had exactly three books with her), I referenced a much more normal game (one with less kidnapping):

"If, by some miracle, you were able to plan ahead and keep three books with you on the off chance that you were shipwrecked on a deserted island, what three books would you take?"

These are my books:

1. The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll.

Lewis Carroll's poems, in particular, are something near and dear to me. I could probably spend the next few years learning them by heart and reciting them to the trees quite happily. Besides, I might finally get around to reading Sylvie and Bruno. You never know.

2. Suur illustreeritud sõnaraamat, by Jean-Claude Corbeil and Ariane Archambault.

This is an illustrated dictionary that consists of exploded diagrams with every part labelled in English, Estonian, Russian, German and French. It kind of rocks. I have to hide it in another room so I don't stay up to midnight finding out what the French word for "casement window" is. Alone on a deserted island, I can waste as much time as I like on looking up random things.

3. The Bible, by various.

The Bible is the perfect book to have with you in such a situation. On the one hand, it's the anthology to end all anthologies. It has legends, history, poetry and philosophy. There are stories about battles, romances, politics, tales of daring-do and naval gazing. I maintain there's even a play in there (hello? The Song of Solomon has a Greek chorus, for crying out loud!). Some books are miserable, some books are joyful, some are perplexing and others are a wee bit sexy. And if you are willing to argue with the thing rather than blindly accept it word-for-word, there are puzzles that will have you changing your mind over and over again.

On the other hand, it's great for existential stuff. If you want to yell at God for abandoning you on an island, the Bible can help you with that. If you want to ask Him to rescue you, the Bible can help you with that. If you want to ask Him to change the way you see the world so that being lost on a deserted island doesn't seem so bad, the Bible can help you with that. And, woven throughout the entire thing, turning up in different places and in different ways, is the overarching message: "you are not alone".

Like I said, the perfect book for such a situation.

So, those are my three books. What are yours?

Three Books, Part 1, update

2011-09-11T21:53:00.000-07:00

On second thought, The Complete Encyclopedia of Stitchery is not a good choice for locking with someone in a tower.

On the one hand, it could keep them occupied for hours on end, but on the other hand, it requires resources. You would have to keep supplying your victim with a steady stream of cloth and thread.

No, a much better book would be Mel Bay's Ukulele Chords, by Mel Bay. All you need to provide then is the ukulele and some spare strings in case one snaps.

Then you can happily leave your victim to be locked in the magic tower (which grows it's own fruit and vegetables) and only come to see them once a year.

I'm gravitating a bit towards the Rapunzel's Revenge scenario at this point.

Trashy Tabloid Attack!

2011-09-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not a big fan of trashy tabloids. I find the celebration of all things vapid and vulgar just a little reprehensible.

Generally speaking, I hate bad journalism. I had the misfortune of learning what good journalism was supposed to look like in my high school English classes. I'm not sure if they still do it today (or even if they were supposed to do it when I was in school), but in my English class we learnt all about how the whole "writing for a newspaper" thing was supposed to work.

News reports are supposed to be informative, concise, non-biased and well written. Journalists are supposed to research carefully and write clearly. Then copy editors are supposed to check facts, find mistakes and make sure the writers haven't used bad spelling or poor grammar.

And then, in an ideal world, newspapers are supposed to present their readers with news, not gossip.

That is what a newspaper should be. Something well written, well researched and meaningful. That is what I want a news paper to be.

Needless to say, I hate most newspapers. I particularly hate trashy tabloids. Every time I see a trashy tabloid I have to fight the urge to track down a "journalist" and punch them in the face.

So I have to say, I am particularly annoyed by Nine MSN's tendency to throw a tabloid at me every time I log out of Hotmail.

When you log out of Hotmail, you get taken straight to the front page of one of the trashiest, most vapid online newspapers I have the privilege of encountering in my day. The layout it terrible. The headlines are offensively trashy. The pictures are usually the kind any good newspaper would be ashamed to print.

The whole thing screams: LOOK AT ME! FOLLOW MY LINKS! READ MY TRASH! YOU WANT TO KNOW MORE!!!

But I don't want to look at it. I don't want to follow the links or read the trash. I don't want to know the bit they've shown me, let alone more.

All I want is to log out of my email account without having a tabloid newspaper thrust into my face unbidden.

If I wanted to read a tabloid newspaper, I'd find one myself. It's not like I'm sitting around thinking, "Oh, I wish someone would tell me more about what the Kardashians are up to, but I have no idea where I could go to see dozens of photos of celebrities trying to walk to the corner shops in comfy pants and no make-up..."

Dear Nine MSN, You don't need to throw trashy tabloids at people. No, really, you don't. If you feel you really must drag every single person who uses your email services towards your news page, why not have at least two news pages (one for trash, and one for "real news") and give people the choice? You might earn yourselves a bit of respect that way.

Three Books, Pt 1

2011-08-03T01:50:00.000-07:00

And so I'll read a book/ Or maybe two or three...

So, I've been fascinated by the fact that two recent retellings of the Rapunzel story (Disneys Tangled and Rapunzel's Revenge by Hale, Hale and Hale) have been very clear about the fact that Rapunzel had exactly three books in the tower.

Tangled never went into specifics about what the books were, but Hale, Hale and Hale showed us the titles of the books in their version:

Girls Who Get Saved and the Princes Who Save Them
Weave Your Own Twig Bonnet
There's Always Bird Watching

Which made me really want at least one of those books to exist. At present, not-so-much. Give it time.

Anyway, it got me thinking about that game. You know the one: you have to imagine you've been shipwrecked on a deserted island, but somehow you were prepared for such things and you managed to take three books with you; you need to say what three books you would choose and why.

Well, for something different, how about we go with the following variation: you have to imagine you want to lock someone in a tower, and you want to chose three books that will distract them from escaping. They have to be real books that you have actually looked at in your travels.

What three books do you choose, and why?

My three picks for locking with someone in a tower would be:

The Lady of Shallott - the one where the entire book is just Tennyson's poem illustrated by Genevieve Cote. A) because everyone should have some poetry in their lives, even if they happen to be locked in a tower, and b) because the heroine is locked in a tower and dies when she leaves. The hidden message is: "Don't even think about looking out of the windows, it's not worth it".

The Complete Encyclopedia of Stitchery, by Mildred Graves Ryan (originally published in 1979). Knitting, embroidery, crochet... everything really, and with detailed, illustrated step-by-step instructions. You just need to make sure there's a constant supply of material, and hopefully your victim will keep her/himself occupied.

Gravesend by Jason Fischer. The world is full of zombies. The people who aren't zombies will probably shoot you anyway, just to be sure. You don't want to go out of the tower.

Of course, this is all working on the assumption that I kidnap the victim and lock them in the tower after they have already learnt to read...

The Librarian's Dilemma

2011-07-12T03:06:00.001-07:00

One of the great things about working in a library is the fact that you get to know the collection really well.

You know to look for things in places other people might not think of - not because the books are "hidden" somewhere difficult to find, but rather because you have the freedom to think laterally.

So, for example, when I started learning German I not only went to the language section of the main collection, I also went to the curriculum collection. A number of academic libraries have a curriculum collection, although the collection may be known by a different name. These are designed to look like school libraries, so that Education students can see what kind of resources might be available to them when they go out to a school to teach.

I went to our CC to see what language resources they had, which is where I found one of my favourite "introduction to German" books Learn German (which I mentioned in my From Something to Nothing post.

I wanted my very own copy, but they appeared to be long out of print, so I ordered something that appeared to be a similar thing under a different title (Easy German) to see if it was related.

Turned out it was a later edition - and a substantially revised one at that. While the cartoon story was still there, the layout of the book had been completely overhauled and the illustrations were somewhat re-arranged as a result. The grammar points in the original had been peppered around the same page as the story, but in the new version they had been pulled out to their own pages and fleshed out a bit more. Oh, and a lot of the exercises from the original weren't there in the later version.

So, now that I knew a later version existed, the logical thing to do would be to order it for the CC... Except that the way things are at the moment, ordering a new edition would eventually lead to the old edition being "disposed of", if you know what I mean.

And, from a design perspective, they were quite different. I found the older version easier to read and more interactive, but the newer version more informative and in depth. If it were up to me, I'd definitely want to keep them both. Such things are, however, rarely up to me.

So I spent several weeks wondering if I should order the later edition of the book, knowing it would probably mean we would the older edition. This is particularly relevant to me at the moment, as I'm toying with the idea of looking at the design of introductory language texts as a Master's project.

In the end I bit the bullet and decided that, since I know own both versions (albeit, only in German - and the book does come in French and Spanish) the only people who will miss out are all of our members. And, hey, they probably wouldn't borrow out the older book anyway. Something about people, these days - they can't seem to see an old book on the shelf if there is a new book sitting right next to it...

A Garden in the Antipodes

2011-06-20T21:54:00.000-07:00

In drips and drabs I have read From a Garden in the Antipodes. A poem or two at a time. Sometimes four at once, and then nothing for weeks. Months. It has taken me over a year to read a thin volume of verse. Not because the verse was challenging or difficult – far from it. It trips along lightly and easily, dances gently through the garden, and amiably leads the reader along. I have read it as I have had time and recollection – not for want of inclination. When I have remembered the book was there, and had a moment spare, I have visited Ursula’s garden.

The poems were first written as letters to friends and family, and that is how I’ve experienced them over the year – as correspondence, of a sort, rather than a book of poetry. I have picked up the book with the frequency which I might expect to receive a letter from a friend in New Zealand. Not by design (I’m not quite that clever), but that has been the effect none-the-less.

And over the year I have come to enjoy Ursula’s garden, appreciate the progress of her fuchsias and Omi-Kin-Kan (what was that, anyway? A ficus?), and smile at the adventures and misadventures of Michael, her cat. It’s such a lovely thing to spend a little time there, listening to her tell you about her plans for the box of bulbs she just received, or talk about how hard it is to keep order in that section along the path…

In the last tree poems I have encountered the one that first drew my attention to Mary Ursula Bethell: “Fall”. When I read that poem in an anthology, I found it so amiable that I wanted to spend more time with the person who wrote it, to see what else she had to say.

And the last poem? “Dirge”? I realised after I had read it that anyone who had come to this verse first, without spending time in Ursula’s garden, would probably read it quite differently. It was very strange to read it over a second time, and think how it would seem to a complete “stranger”. This is how one would encounter it in an anthology – divorced from the other poems that illuminate its context.

It makes me wonder how much is missed in an anthology – and wonder why we never seem to republish the original collections anymore. There has been much talk lately about the way buying music song-by-song is cheating listeners out of the experience of the album as a whole – but that’s how we’ve been packaging poetry for years.

The anthology is the iTunes library (or mixed tape) of poetry. Even in anthologies of verse from the same poet, the poems are removed from their original context. Whatever vision the poet might have had when originally setting out the order of verse is lost.

I don’t think we fully appreciate how the poem we have just read influences the way we read the next one. At the end of a book of verse about gardening, one has a very clear picture to go with the imagery used in “Dirge”. Found by itself amongst poems about, say, war, or the woes of 20th Century society, the same poem would have a different resonance and evoke different images.

I have said that I first encountered “Fall” in an anthology, and that I enjoyed it and wanted to seek out the poet. I was fortunate that my library held an old copy of From a Garden in the Antipodes, and I could read it in its original setting – finding it where it fell in the pattern of poems. Where the poet set it (like a jeweller sets a stone in a broach). I am glad I encountered “Dirge” her, in its original setting, the first time I read it.

But there are so many poems that I can’t read in their original settings. While individual poems (the poets’ “best of” lists) are constantly republished in anthologies, the original books are curiosities held in a handful of libraries. I don’t have access to them. While novels are republished time and time again, it is the fate of books of poetry and short stories to be broken up and sold for spare parts.

And that’s a pity.

I have nothing against anthologies – I think they are an excellent way to meet writers and get a feel for poems or short stories from a particular place or genre. I just think we shouldn’t be neglecting the original collections: the book of poems or short stories that the author first negotiated with the publishers.

DIRGE (by Mary Ursula Bethell)

Easter. And leaves falling.
Easter. And first autumn rains.
Easter. And dusk stealing
Our bright working daylight
And cold night coming down
In which we may not work.

Easter. And morning bells
Chime in the late dark.
Soon those fluttering birds
Will seek a more genial clime
Time has come to light fires
For lack of enlivening sun.

Summer’s arrow is spent,
Stored her last tribute,
So, now, we plant our bulbs
With assured vision,
And, now, we sow our seeds
Sagely for sure quickening.

So, purging our borders
We burn all rubbish up,
That all weak and waste growth,
That all unprofitable weeds,
All canker and corrosion,
May be consumed utterly.

These universal bonfires
Have a savour of sacrifice.
See how their clean smoke,
Ruddy and white whorls,
Rises to the still heavens
In plumy spirals.

You take me – yes, I know it –
Fresh from your vernal Lent.
These ashes I will now spread
For nutriment about the roses,
Dust unto fertile dust,
And say no word more.

Check it out!

2011-06-09T18:14:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen a book on a library shelf and thought: "that looks interesting" or "I love that book, I'm glad they have a copy here"? Did you then check it out? If not, you may not see it the next time you come into the library.

If you want a library to keep a book, you need to check it out.

It's a myth that libraries keep everything. It's not even remotely physically possible (no library has that much space), and studies have proven that the more books a library has on the shelf the less likely people are to find what they want.

So, librarians regularly go through the collection to find books that aren't being used. We get rid of these books to make way for new ones - it's called "weeding". If we can, we try to find a new home for the books. If we can't, we rip off the covers and throw them in the bin (kind of like a vet putting down a dog that can't be saved).

When it comes to academic libraries, there can be a lot of rules in place about what we can and can't do with weeded books. While a public library can sell the books they've weeded, an academic library can only give them to certain people. If those people don't want the books, then we have to destroy them.

It's unpleasant, but it's a fact of life. We can't keep getting new books without getting rid of the older ones, and the best method we have for deciding what books we keep and what books we weed is:

"How often has that book been checked out in the last few years?"

Yes, we know a lot of books are read and used in the library without being checked out, but we can't track that. And, yes, we know some books are important for historical reasons and should be kept - but we don't always know those reasons. So, if a book hasn't been checked out for the last five years and is fifteen or twenty years old...

Do you know who has the power to save the books and make sure they stay on the shelves? You.

If you see a book and you think the library should keep it, you can do one very simple thing to help ensure its survival: check it out.

Heck, you don't even have to take it home. You can check it out and put it straight in the returns chute if you want to. That would be weird (you may as well take it home and enjoy it for a couple of weeks), but useful. It gives us a record for that book - it tells us it is being used and that people still want it.

So the next time you are in a library (any library) and you see a book that looks interesting, or is a personal favourite, why not check it out? It can make a real difference to the book's survival.

Hot Buttered

2011-06-05T20:19:00.000-07:00

Some days it's worth making the effort to turn up to work when you don't feel 100% with it. Some days you just end up having a pocket full of butter.

For future reference: Putting a pat of butter in your pocket is a bad idea.

Did I Mention I've Had a Paper Published?

2011-05-28T22:01:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I must have mentioned it once or twice.

Perhaps to everyone in earshot. Whether they cared the first time I mentioned it or not.

Anyway, for the record:

Bryan, S. (2011). Extensive Reading, Narrow Reading and second language learners: implications for libraries. Australian Library Journal, 60(2), 113-122.

I may have stopped doing my happy dance, but then again there are no guarantees.

Stupid Informit

2011-05-11T01:26:00.001-07:00

You know, researching with a head-ache would be easier if Informit wasn't trying to mess with me every time I attempted to save a citation to EndNote. Or, for that matter, when clicking on any button on the search page.

"Let's just change what search we're doing from one page to the next! That won't cause any difficulties. Also, when she tries to save her selected results, we'll just give her a different sent, and refuse to unmark them. That sounds useful. And, hey, why bother including details like the year and journal title in the record anyway. It's not like anyone ever looks at those..."

Stupid Informit.

From Nothing to Something

2011-05-05T01:10:00.000-07:00

The German subject I'm taking at the moment is promoted as being an introductory course for beginners who have never studied German before, but it is based around a text-book programme that is not ideal for such a course. Especially in regards to distance learners

Deutsch: Na Klar! is a programme for beginners, but not for "true" beginners. The information it covers is basic, but not introductory.

The book/programme seems to be working on two assumptions:

1. It assumes students have had some exposure to German previously

Or at least some sort of language learning. It's undeniable. If you've never done anything with German in the past, you will struggle with this book. The Introduction is supposed to ease you into the course, instead it clearly works on the assumption that you already know something about German or language learning. Not much, but more than nothing. This is particularly obvious when you look at the explanations offered for many of the concepts covered in the Introduction and first chapter. It's just not sufficient to support someone who has no experience with the language or with language learning.

Which brings me to the second assumption:

2. It assumes you have regular class time and can consult with teachers and students

Once again, you can't avoid this fact. For one thing, the explanations are pretty sparse - if you have a teacher to elaborate on them and go into more detail, then this is fine, but when you are studying on your own it's a bit of a handy cap. Also, a large number of the exercises given in the book are for classroom activities. You need to undertake an activity with one or more classmates, and then discuss the activity with the rest of the class.

Neither of these assumptions make this a good programme to use with distance students who are learning German for the first time. I have a slight advantage in that I intentionally took an evening course in Basic German last year to prepare for this Diploma. If I hadn't, I think I'd be having a very rough time of it. I know some of the other distance learners who tune in for the Monday night online class are struggling. One hour a week with someone you can't see is not sufficient to make up for the short-falls in the programme.

Now, I'm not saying it's a bad programme. It has it's good points, and isn't too difficult. The problem is that it can't stand on it's own. You need the classroom environment to support it, and you need to have had some exposure to German ahead of encountering it.

I also have the advantage of being a librarian who has just completed a Master's project on using resources to support language learners, and I've been reading all about autonomous language learning techniques. As a result, I've been making up for some of the programme's short-falls by actively using other books and resources. For a while now, I've essentially been using two textbooks (not to mention a whole pile of other things, when I can get my hands on them).

Deutsch Heute is probably a better book for distance learners, in my humble opinion, as it gives more thorough explanations of the grammar and vocabulary points. I've been using the eighth edition of this book to augment the fifth edition of Na Klar. It has, in a way, become my classroom. When I want to get more explanation of something, or see a different range of examples, I turn to this book.

I've been using the eighth edition because that's what we had in our library. I'd say it was probably the text book used at the university back in 2005. I tried to buy a copy of that edition, but could only order the ninth. I'm hoping the ninth edition is not radically different from the eighth, and hasn't decided to move more information from the book to the Internet. I'm all for hypermedia augmentation, but I don't like it when you have to use the Internet because you can't get what you need from the book.

Now, having said all of that, I don't think Deutsch Heute is a suitable programme for absolute beginners, either. Neither of these books really work on the assumption that the student is starting from nothing

I've noticed this in other "introductory" text-books as well - especially those aimed at "academic" learners. They never seem designed to take you from nothing to something.

Books aimed at children or "life-long-learners" (in other words, people who aren't studying with any serious purpose) are much better at this. In fact, the best book I've found, so far, for taking someone from nothing to something (in German) is a book called Learn German by Nicole Irving.

Now, this is a very interesting book. For one thing, it's a book that knows its theory. The use of an adventure story to carry the dialogue; the way the dialogue is used to illustrate key grammar points; the use of simple charts and tables to describe language points; the comic-book style use of pictures to help comprehension; the use of "exercises" that bear a strong resemblance to games... These ideas were all in the "top of the pops" for the design of language material in the 1990s (at least at the school level). The book was, quite obviously, written to take advantages of all of the latest and greatest ideas that had been discussed in the literature of the time. There's also a tape that goes with the book, but my library didn't have a copy of it, so I can't comment on what was on it - besides, you don't need the tape to use the book.

For another thing, it's actually three books. Sort of. Perhaps it's better to describe it as a shell. The plot of the story, the illustrations and the design and layout of the book were used for three separate books: Learn German, Learn French and Learn Spanish. No aspect of the story or illustrations is particular to a given culture, so the dialogue and grammar descriptions could be converted to any language and the book would still work. The name of the town and characters is changed to be more typically French or Spanish (or whatesver), and away you go.

This book was specifically designed to take someone from nothing to something - and something decent, at that. It isn't focused on teaching you conversational German/French/Spanish, but rather give you a foundational knowledge about the language and its grammar - something you can then build on. And all while telling a story that was reasonably fun.

I found this book to be a great help when I started this whole German schtick last year - it pushed me ahead of what I was learning in the evening course and put me in a better position for understanding the material in these so-called "introductory" German courses. It was truly introductory.

Academic language courses need to consider starting with something like that when dealing with complete beginners. They need to give that first chapter or section over to those of us who need the basics introduced and elaborated, rather than just "covered" or "touched on".

Anyone designing an introductory language programme needs to start with the concept of taking people from nothing to something before trying to build on foundations that haven't been adequately laid.

I'd recommend Nicole Irving's Learn German/French/Spanish books to anyone who is thinking of learning that language... but they're out of print. You may be able to get a second hand copy, or borrow one from a library, but Usborne (the publisher) never reprinted them. I guess they just weren't as popular as the First Thousand Words in Something-Or-Other books that have been in print for ever. More's the pity.

I've ordered something by Irving from Usborne that I hope will be a kind of later edition of this book. I'll let you know if it's any good.

I think that means I've finished

2011-05-02T16:39:00.000-07:00

So, a month or so ago I mailed away my "completion of enrollment" form.

I haven't had any acknowledgment by anyone that it was received/accepted/processed/whatever, but I have just been sent an email saying that if I fill in a graduates survey I could win a pen.

I think that means I've finished my degree.

When I follow a ridiculously long series of links to log into eStudent, it lists my course as "completed". So I think I must have finished.

Funny, I thought someone would have notified me...

Hmmm...

2011-03-19T23:22:00.000-07:00

So, I was about to click on a link to a journal article on intrinsic motivation and retention when I couldn't help but feel a bit suspicious.

The title of the article was "Teaching you to Suck Eggs", and it was written by A Trapp.

Turns out it's actually a chapter in a book called "Teaching Psychology in Higher Education" and not a trap at all.

We don't have the book, by the way, but it sounds like something we should have...

Devanny Project Diary, Entry 9

2011-03-15T22:36:00.000-07:00

Yep, definitely leaning towards focusing on Sugar Heaven. This is at least partly because I haven't managed to progress beyond the first half of The Butcher Shop and can't see myself reading any of her other novels before I have to start writing something for this project, and also partly because circling this one novel gives a nice scope.

The real question is moving away from 'what' and towards 'if'...

Oh, that's right, I have superpowers.

2011-03-10T02:23:00.000-08:00

Every now and then, I forget I'm a librarian and I don't actually have to know what I'm looking for in order to find it.

Just as I finish writing a post on how I can't find the kind of music I'm after in German, I hit on a few new approaches and track down a possible lead. Not sure if I've found what I'm looking for, yet, as I'm sans sound at present. Will find out soon enough.

Once I've workout out whether my super librarian powers have actually helped me solve the German half of this problem, I can try for the Estonian side of things.

I wonder what it must be like to be normal, and actually be able to say "Oh, well - can't find it" and give up...

Listeners' Advisory

2011-03-10T02:00:00.000-08:00

Readers' Advisory has been on my mind a lot lately. I took a short course on the subject last year, and learnt all sorts of interesting things. I haven't yet managed to convince anyone else to let me put that knowledge to good use, but I'm hoping to wear them down eventually.

The trouble with academic libraries is that we often forget we hold books that are interesting and entertaining, and that some people just want to read for the fun of it. We make it easy to find books with a purpose, but constantly neglect the users who want to discover books for the heck of it.

A Readers' Advisory service is like a travel agent for books. You go into a travel agent and say "I want to visit Europe", the travel agent should spend some time finding what elements of Europe you are most interested in (snow-capped mountains, beaches, vibrant cities, sleepy hamlets...) and make sure your itinerary doesn't have you spending most of your time in the north of Denmark when you'd much prefer to be in the south of Spain.

If you go to a Reader's Advisory service and say "I've just finished the Bourne books by Ludlum and would like to read something like that", then they should spend a few minutes finding out what it was you found particularly appealing about the books you have liked. It may be that what you loved about the Bourne books is not the specific spy/espionage genre, but rather the lone-man-against-an-unknown-foe side of things. In which case, you may enjoy many other books that are not spy thrillers.

I need a Listener's Advisory service. The online stores from which I tend to purchase music (such as Amazon.de and CDBaby.com) keep sending me recommendations based on genres. In the case of CDBaby.com, this isn't too bad as they have a slightly askew take on musical genres, so I am discovering new things through them. Amazon just keeps sending me recommendations that tick exactly the same boxes as the music I have bought in the past.

My real problem is that neither of them will give me recommendations based on what I want, and I don't know how to describe what I want in terms that will create a suitable result using their computer systems. At the moment, what I want is something like Ranarim, only not in Swedish. I want that kind of modernised-traditional-instrument-alt-folk-music thing that Ranarim does, but I want to find bands that do this sort of thing in German or Estonian.

It's a strange request, I'll grant you. I love listening to Ranarim for the sound of the music, but if I can get recordings in one of the two languages I'm currently learning, then my 'casual music listening' doubles up as my 'autonomous language learning', and I get to kill two birds with one stone.

CDBaby has never heard of Ranarim, so the system cannot offer me a "sounds like" option for the band. Even if I could, I would not be able to narrow that to the languages I'm after. You can search for country of origin, but not language, which means the odds of finding a German or Estonian language CD are really slim-to-none, let alone looking for one in a very specific sub-genre (for which I do not know the name).

Amazon.de is where I bought my current Ranarim CDs from, and is happy to recommend other folk groups from Sweden and Norway with a similar feel. Unfortunately, I want something in German, and when you go looking for German folk music you get something completely different. Wading through the popular stuff to see if what I'm after is lurking down the bottom is a challenge I haven't accepted as yet.

The sound I want is pretty easy to find in Celtic-themed groups (Ranarim actually performed at a couple of Celtic music gigs in Britain a few years back), but trying to feed the word "Celtic" into the machine just moves me further away from German language results.

Surely there's some service somewhere where I can say "I want something alt-folky and kind of Celtic, only in German or Estonian" and someone can make appropriate recommendations?

Just felt like a change

2011-03-10T01:37:00.000-08:00

Yep, changed the blog theme again. Don't think it's been that long since the last time, but the background of the previous version was making me sleepy. This one makes me smile.

This, by the way, is the reason why I don't have any tattoos. Within three months I'll be bored and wanting to get it changed...

Scabies, Scurvy and other Piratical Ailments.

2011-03-01T22:05:00.001-08:00

Did I say scabies? I meant scurvy. That whole thing about Krauts and Limeys was a piece of pointless trivia about scurvy. The only piece of pointless trivia I know about scabies is that it was common amongst pirates in the 18 Century (as were a variety of other mites, lice and similar communicable critters). But that's not really that special - they were common amongst a lot of sailors of the period, pirate or otherwise.

So, yeah, my apologies to the class of Pharmacy students to whom I told a piece of trivial information that was not only useless, but also incorrect.

Devanny Project Diary, Entry 8

2011-02-21T23:12:00.000-08:00

Somewhere in the universe, there may or may not exist a "database" of historical photos, which may or may not be connected to Jean Devanny in a way I'm not at liberty to discuss.

This database may or may not contain the following description concerning a blurry photograph of a man holding a snake:

"This venomous 7 horse power diesel engined man eating morning after the night before snake killed ten men and ate 29 dogs before Patem Alley with his usual courageous determination captured it alive after spending 9 sleepless weeks tracking the monster to its lair in the heart of the merciless hot jungle"

This description may or may not be a complete fabrication by someone who may or may not have been testing to see if anyone was ever actually going to read the data put into the database - this being pure conjecture as it seems to have taken several years for someone to read that particular entry (which may or may not exist), and the identity of whoever originally entered it (who also may or may not exist) is lost in the sands of time.

It's flippin' hilarious, though. Slightly misleading, but flippin' hilarious.

I can't help but think Jean would have approved.

Devanny Project Diary Entry 7

2011-02-06T23:29:00.001-08:00

Cyclone Yasi

So, it turns out that the cyclone I was pathetically whining about in the last post wasn't inconvenient so much as massive and devastating.

I was expecting a bit of damage. Instead, Silkwood has practically been wiped out, Tully isn't doing so well and no one is even mentioning Mourilyan. I don't know if that's a good sign or not.

Obviously, my thoughts are with the people who live in the region, but I'm also thinking about the history.

When a massive catastrophe hits a town, most people are justifiably thinking about saving lives and loved ones, but there was at least one museum in that region at some point. After Cyclone Larry, I was wondering if it would still be there. After Yasi, I'm guessing it probably isn't.

What happens to the local collections in the small community museums when the towns are taken out by flood, fire or storm? You can't think about these things when there's a major disaster looming with the promise of death and destruction, but how many of those small museums have disaster plans for their collections?

Devanny Project Diary Entry 6

2011-01-31T16:34:00.000-08:00

Storm Surge/Cyclone

Darn these inconvenient massive weather events. Here I was, thinking: "That whole Innisfail region has had a couple of years to recover from the last cyclone, it's probably a good time to go up for a bit of a field trip. I can take a look at the local museums and libraries, figure out exactly how to pronounce Mourilyan, take some pictures and footage I could use for projections..."

And then we go and get ourselves a massive cyclone that is going to cause storm surges all up the coast of northern Queensland, and probably make landfall between Cairns and Innisfail. And, of course, we all know that the areas south of the cyclone get the worst winds and rain.

I'm still hoping to get up there around Easter-ish, but I was hoping to see the place in it's non-weather-ravaged form. It's bad enough that the historic sugar mill at Mourilyan was so badly damaged during the last cyclone that it stopped functioning.

Weather! Stop making a mess of things!

Devanny Project Diary Entry 5

2011-01-30T17:22:00.000-08:00

Reflections on Sugar Heaven

What a daft way to end a book. Sure, there was a final, exultant proclamation about how much better the working men were as people now that they had organised themselves and tried to fight for their rights, but in terms of the story it was a real let down.

It's not so much that they lost the strike. I kind of new that would happen. It's the way everything took three chapters to peter into nothing.

Sugar Heaven is an oddly uneven book. It spends its time veering wildly between "reportage" and soap opera. One minute you're reading a gripping account of an altercation between the workers and the scabs at the mill, the next minute you're reading about Dulcie hating her husband's ex-wife (until she actually meets her, and then they become best friends - practically love at first sight).

And then, at the end, it goes from "we must reclaim our place on the land to make sure we are in a position to do better next time" to Dulcie being shocked at the existence of legal prostitution (and that somehow leading to her decision to have a baby) and Bill's confession to Hefty (of what, exactly?).

I have a feeling that the end was actually foreshadowed throughout the book. Hefty's taunt in the first few chapters that he had paid for as much as Dulcie had given him so far (leading to her thinking very poorly of him, but for all the wrong reasons*). The references to the fact that Bill doesn't look very well. Elsie's occasional comments that she had a right to flaunt her affair in front of Bill after what he did... Then at the end the concept of regulated prostitution is raised, with the idea put forward that "legal" prostitutes are regularly checked by a doctor, which implies that "illegal" prostitutes may have all sorts of diseases...

The final conversation between Hefty and Bill reveals nothing, but you are left wondering if Bill's great sin - the reason why he seems unwell and his wife is perfectly fine with taking a lover - is the contraction of a sexually transmitted disease from an illegal prostitute.

But, really, is that any way to end a book? Bill confesses something to Hefty that we have to guess from the context of the clues scattered throughout the novel; both men agree that all working class men in the area are intellectually better off now that they have gone through the strike and are on the verge of joining the Communist Party; the end.

It's not the lack of closure, it's the way things suddenly revert back to the soap opera, without quite letting go of the propaganda. The propaganda was easier to stomach when we were talking about the strike - not so much with the sudden prostitution and babies subplot.

*Dulcie's character arc in this novel is annoying. She has every right to object to the fact that her husband had been previously married and had visited prostitutes - especially since he neglected to tell her about this until after marrying her and taking her far away from her friends and family. However, she was also "unthinking" and stubborn, objecting to things purely because she felt they were objectionable, and not because she actually knew why they were objectionable. All that malarky about trying to insist Hefty didn't go any where near anyone or anything connected with his ex-wife, even though he was happy to think of Elsie as Bill's wife and leave it at that. Her fear of being seen in public with a man (any man) who wasn't her husband (what would people say!)... You just wanted to smack her in the head (hence, my last entry). And then, even her "growth" through the strike and the way it encouraged her to think for the first time was also kind of annoying.

I think we were supposed to follow a similar awakening to Dulcie, but her character really just exists so people can explain things to her (and, by association, us) within the context of the novel - so the book didn't spiral into report, rather than reportage. Like that character in Twister who was just there so people could tell her about tornadoes.

Devanny Project Diary - Entry 4

2011-01-26T16:33:00.000-08:00

Must punch Dulcie in head.

Devanny Project Diary Entry 3

2011-01-25T00:57:00.000-08:00

Building on the last idea:

Perhaps, instead of a "documentary" with live readings, there could be a number of "narrators" onstage.

One tells the story of Jean Devanny's life, one tells the story that is written in the novel, one tells the history of the strikes and the politics/people involved. And, of course, the reader, whose sole purpose is to read the passages of the novel which frame the discussion.

Still record interviews which can be projected, but the role of narrator that you usually get with documentaries can be split amongst people who actually move around and interact with each other on stage - making it more "live" and interesting.

Question: Can this be structured in such a way that it could be performed by one person, if necessary? Should it be? Four people on stage would be more interesting to watch, but one person would travel more easily...

Devanny Project Diary Entry 2

2011-01-23T00:52:00.000-08:00

An Idea

"Sugar! Jean Devanny, Sugar Heaven and the 1935 Can Cutter's Strikes"

Tell the story of the strikes, Devanny's interest in them and the book - dipping into "reportage", but mostly telling the story of the people who worked and lived in the area, how they inspired the novel, what Devanny hoped to do with the book and how the book has been recieved over the years.

Put together a more or less honest-to-goodness documentary with filmed interviews. On stage, those interviews would be projected onto a number of screens, and framed by a performer reading excerpts from the book.

Recording the readings, the whole thing could be cut together as a DVD...

Devanny Project Diary Entry 1

2011-01-21T00:49:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we started talking in earnest about the idea of using Museum Theatre to “open up” the Special Collections to the public. Bronwyn and I had half talked about it last year, saying “we should do it”, but not really getting much beyond that. She had dozens of projects to work on, and asked to hold off discussions until January.

I had been thinking about MT on Wednesday afternoon, and that night I was thinking about what collections we might have that would be “dramatic” enough to make a good first project. Jean Devanny’s name popped into my mind. I knew we’d had at least one visiting scholar in to see the collection in the last couple of years. Plus, Cheryl Taylor and Shirley (forgotten her last name atm) were doing some project on Devanny a couple of years back.

Mentioned it to Bronwyn, who said the Devanny collection was one of the suggestions for “first cab of the rank” for the digitisation project. We could tie the digitisation of the collection into the performance and make it some kind of “launch” for the digital collection.

Tossed a few loose ideas around concerning the extent of the project – taking it on tour to the local areas with funds from Playing Australia? Trying to tie it in with one of the local industries to get sponsorship?

Neither of us know much about Devanny beyond the name. Decided the next step was for me to "get to know her". Borrowed some books from Main and checked for biographies online. Nothing on Wikipedia. Used Ron Store’s brief biography and skimmed Ferrier’s book to put a quick and dirty entry on Wikipedia. Better than nothing, and hopefully more successful than my last attempt to add to Wikipedia (the Handball Incident).

Started reading Sugar Heaven, reading the Introduction to the 2002 edition first. So far, not bad. Interesting to encounter a mix of place names I’m very familiar with alongside ones I’ve never heard of. Are they still around, but I’ve never noticed them? Have they disappeared since 1936?

First thoughts:
• Tell the story of Devanny’s life by using her novels to highlight where she was “at” at the time.
• Communist propaganda. Her novels as propaganda, her tour through North Queensland and the Communist movement in NQ at the time.
• The 1935 strikes in particular – talk about her interest, writing this particular book, the history of the strikes and the outcomes. Maybe mixing in stories from cane cutters.
• “The Red North – Jean Devanny and Evangelical Communism in Queensland”
• “Fact in the Form of Fiction – Jean Devanny and the Art of Reportage”

Decided today that I really should be a member of IMTAL to add some weight to any proposals. Tried to join IMTAL-Europe (but had difficulty with the online forms), but discovered the Australasian version has advanced since I last looked at them. Not to the point where you can actually use their website to find out how to join, though.

The IMTAL conference is going to be in Melbourne this year, and the call for papers closes in April. We might be able to swing a little more prestige by bringing the possibility of an international conference…

Villette

2011-01-19T16:56:00.000-08:00

While preparing the book display half of a "Blog Display" concerning the writing of the Brontë sisters, I went looking for pictures from the 1970 miniseries adaptation of Villette, staring Judy Parfitt as Lucy Snowe (English audeinces may know her best as Mrs Clennam in Little Dorrit, American audiences may know her best for her role as the Queen in Ever After).

I couldn't find any I could really use. Heck, in the end I couldn't find any pictures that were directly connected to the book that were all that useful. In the end, I just went for a generic "French Village" image.

However, I did find this:

Which I found entertaining.

I read Villette at the same time I had been given Lonely Runs Both Ways (by Alison Krauss and Union Station) for Christmas, and I always found the song "If I Didn't Know Any Better" seemed to fit perfectly with the second half of the book. I had this crazy idea of having a completely bluegrass/country soundtrack for the film version of the book.

But, having watched the clip above, I have to admit that Macy Gray's "I Try" is a perfect fit for the first half of the book. So now I'm wondering if I could convince Alison Krauss to do a bluegrass cover of "I Try", or if I should just open up the music genres for my dream sound-track to my hypothetical film adaptation.

Jane Eyre is one of my all-time favourite books, but there's an extent to which I find Villette to be a better novel. The whole "Ghost of a Dead Nun Haunting the Attic" thing never works as well, for pure drama, as the "Madwoman in the Attic" and "Psychic connection via the moon" thing that Jane Eyre has going on, but I love the emotional depth of the novel.

The book is a celebration of second chances. It sets up one love story, stomps on it, then gives us another. In Jane Eyre (and Shirley), the young woman has one great love, and must go through many trials and heartbreaks before winning him in the end. She can never be happy without him - he is the only one for her! (Dramatically bring back of hand to forehead at this point). In Villette, it looks like it's setting up the exact same scenario... but then turns everything on its head.

M. Paul must have been at the school the whole time. He must have been floating around in the background while Lucy was busy swooning over Dr John. We just don't hear about him because she doesn't notice him. Too busy swooning, you see. Then, at some point, he just breaks in - seemingly out of nowhere. Then he does it again, and again, and again.

And then, suddenly, her breath catches in her throat at the thought of talking to him and she just can't fathom why. Suddenly, she's so turned around by this annoying little Frenchman that she can barely spare a thought for her glorious Dr John.

Suddenly, we don't give two hoots if Dr John goes off and marries Polly. We want to know what M. Paul wants to talk to Lucy about. We want to know why his cousin is trying so hard to keep him away. When he grabs Lucy's hand in the garden and draws her close, we pretty much forget about Dr John entirely.

And I love that element to the book - the new paradigm. In the romantic novel that is your life, you might not be Jane trying to overcome the obstacles needed to get to your Rochester. You might be Lucy who is still stuck on Dr John. Your M. Paul might be standing right behind you, waiting for you to turn around.

Luddite

2011-01-05T19:11:00.000-08:00

"I'm a bit of a Luddite," she said. She's not the first person to say it, and she won't be the last, but she's still wrong.

They're almost all wrong.

Every time I hear someone say "I'm a bit of a Luddite" I have to stop myself from replying:

"No, you're not. You're just reluctant to learn how to use technology. I'm a bit of a Luddite, you're just holding yourself back."

If, like me, you believe that the automation of jobs sucks and we shouldn't be replacing human beings with machines - no matter how efficient they might be - due to the fact that the cost to our society is too great, then you could justifiably call yourself a Luddite.

If you, like me, believe the factory system pioneered by textile companies during the Industrial Revolution was the beginning of a process that has had a detrimental effect on our species and the planet, than you can call yourself a Luddite.

If you, like me, believe that the Industrial Revolution itself was, by and large, a bad idea...

Well, you get the drift.

If, however, you just find Word 2007 too different from Word 2003 and you'd rather not have to deal with it... Well, I'm afraid that doesn't make you a Luddite, it just makes you someone who needs to think carefully about aptitude and attitude and try to work out which one is getting in your way so that you can do something about it.

Smash the knitting frames! Down with spinning jennies! Curse your capitalist industrialism! Let the working man work!

Ahem.

As you were.

Newspapers

2010-11-13T19:18:00.000-08:00

There has to be a better option for newspapers in Australia.

Either you read a News Ltd paper, which is basically a tawdry magazine masquerading as news, or you read a Fairfax Newspaper, which is usually a better standard of journalism but somewhat south-east centric.

Is it too much to ask for a) A paper that is well written and topical, b) a paper that assumes we aren't completely vapid, and c) a paper that doesn't devote more than half it's content to stories that bore the socks of anyone who isn't in Sydney or Melbourne?

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

2010-10-13T00:29:00.000-07:00

(Reblogged from http://http://aliapdliteratureblog2010.blogspot.com)

Some time ago I borrowed The sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon, gent, by Washington Irving, specifically to read "Rip van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow". These stories have been floating around the cultural psyche for some time, and I've always been aware of them - but I've never actually read them in their "original" form.

Having borrowed the book, it took me an awfully long time to get around to reading the stories. In spite of the fact that I am a fan of both short stories and essays (both of which are in the book), I simply never got around to sitting down and reading this work. I had briefly glanced at the opening paragraph for "Rip Van Winkle", but at times when I didn't have an hour to spend on reading a short story properly.

Having renewed the book several times (and, because I'm a staff member, I have longer loan periods than "normal" patrons), I decided I should return the thing and release it into its natural environment. Having decided to return it on Monday, on Saturday I actually made the effort to read the two stories that had interested me in the first place.

Washington Irving (1783-1859) has what I like to think of as a travel-writer's style of writing. The stories he tells are rather short, when you boil them down to the plots, and could easily be conveyed in a couple of paragraphs, but he takes the time to introduce you to the place and people involved in the tale. He touches on the little, quirky details that add character to a place. He tends to write around the details - giving you a raft of impressions from which to construct the picture, rather than simply telling you what you need to know.

"The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" has slipped a little in the public psyche from its original position. These days, many people just know it for the "headless horseman", and then get a bit fuzzy on the details. The story is actually a very intriguing character study of Ichabod Crane - a man who is rather fond of food, and rather easy to frighten with ghost stories.

As a self-confessed "Disney kid", I remember the 1949 film The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad, which I saw many long years ago as a small child. I think I would have been under ten years old the last time I saw it - young enough to forget all but a handful of scenes and the echo of Bing Crosby's voice singing "Ichabod Crane..."

Reading the story was an interesting experience in half-recalled images from the Disney film. It felt like I could remember aspects of Ichabod Crane's character being quite effectively captured by the Disney version - flashes of Crane patting a child on the head to impress a mother who was giving him dinner, the way he would see happy autumnal scenes converted into veritable banquets...

I remember Brom Bones being more of an out-and-out bully in the film, while in the story he was a bit more likable - and certainly more understandable. In the story, Ichabod comes across as being a little more obnoxious and, quite frankly, I think I'd probably play a few pranks on him myself, given half the chance.

There's an extent to which "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (and another story in the same book, "The Spectre Bridegroom") is more of a Scooby Doo episode than anything else. You get the feeling, as you are reading the tale, that Irving could have written a ghost story using the same basic plot, but instead he wrote a story about people who listen to ghost stories. He weasels out of the scare factor - you always feel "above" the ghost story - separated from it. Irving writes with something of a "but of course, we both know there's no such thing as ghosts" tone, and as such you never get the full depth of suspense the story could have if he just threw himself into it.

It's the way the story ends that kills its chances of working as a ghost story. Without directly telling you what happened, it makes the "truth" rather obvious, completely throwing away whatever unanswered questions might allow the tension to remain.

But then, the few other Irving stories I've read indicate he has a habit of easing people out of his tales. Perhaps this is part of the travel-writer's style as well - letting you travel comfortably in your own armchair, and leaving you sitting comfortably in the end.

Viscocity

2010-10-07T01:48:00.000-07:00

And that's what it's all about, baby!

Some desperate soul comes to the reference desk and says:

"I need to find the dynamic viscosity of seawater. I've looked everywhere in books and online, and I just can't find it."

I have no idea what the dynamic viscosity of seawater is. Heck, I can only hazard a guess at what those words might mean in that particular order. But five minutes later she's walking away with a smile on her face because I tracked down an article that gives her the information she wants.

That's the power of a librarian - we find stuff we didn't even know existed without even knowing what we're looking for.

Too Many Books

2010-10-06T00:38:00.000-07:00

Every now and then I can't shake the feeling that there are too many books in my life.

Let us, for a moment, forget the books I actually own. Let us forget that I currently do not have enough shelf-space to store the books I have. Let us forget that I deliberately chose to take a small bag with me when I went on holidays, determined to have a vacation where (for once in my life), I did not add two kilos of books to my baggage weight for the return journey. Let as forget that, due to a series of no-doubt-entirely-avoidable events, I had to buy a new bag - and had to make sure it was big enough to fit the books I bought in spite of myself.

Let us, instead, focus on the fact that I live in a library. Sorry, that should have been: "work in a library". I may spend more time at work than I do in my own house, but that's another problem.

The trouble with working in a library is that you are in a position to borrow books whenever you feel like it. A passing thought runs through your mind... you feel strangely compelled to see if the library holds a book about the thing you thought of... next thing you know you've just checked out another four books.

Do I read all of the books I check out of libraries? Heck no. I've barely even scratched the surface of the books I own.

So what do I do with these books? They fill up space in my life as I think about reading them. I think "I should return that, but I haven't read it yet" and renew them when I should just be releasing them back to the wild. I find them buried under who-knows-what other reading material on my desk and next to my chair months down the track and think "Oh, yeah, I wanted to read that", and promptly put it back on the pile so that I can "get around to it".

I know I'm not going to get around to it. I know I should just clear the decks, forget I borrowed the book in the first place and wait to see if I actually do want it enough to find it again. But...

But I borrowed it because it looked interesting, and every time I look at it, it still looks interesting.

No good can come of this.

The Author in my Head

2010-09-12T23:33:00.000-07:00

Isn't it odd, the way you get a picture in your head of what a particular author would look like... right up until you see a picture online or on a book jacket or something?

For some reason, and I have no idea why, I had this image in my head that Geoff Johns would be some guy in his late thirties, balding slightly, with large glasses and a moustache.

I think my interpretation of what comic book writers/illustrators look like must have been formed in the 80s, and it just hasn't changed since then. Mind you, if you've ever seen a recent picture of Mark Waid, it's kind of hard to think that there's been much change...

He's actually much young, better looking, hairier (on his head) and more clean shaven than the image in my head. That doesn't make him less annoying, though.

Geoff Johns would happily ret-conn the Bible, the Koran and the Tipitaka, if you let him. And Dan DiDio would encourage him.

Finish What You Started: Riddle of the Sands

2010-08-25T23:12:00.000-07:00

Some months ago, as part of my "Finish What You Started" project, I decided to finish reading The Riddle of the Sands, by Erskine Childers.

I had stalled on this book about three chapters from the end, and thought that was just a bit stupid. So I sat down one weekend and finished it.

I bought this book last year whilst on vacation in Estonia. I had just finished something exceptionally light and trashy, and thought I'd go for a "genre classic". Riddle of the Sands was one of those books I knew by title alone. Well, I knew it was a spy book - espionage of some sort - which is a genre I don't usually read. I had a fling with James Bond a couple of years ago (hasn't everybody), but after reading three or four of Fleming's books (slightly out of sequence) I stalled about two chapters into Live and Let Die and never got back to the series.

Live and Let Die would be included in the "Finish What you Started" project, but I can't find it. I lost the book when I moved house, and I just can't be bothered borrowing it from a library when I have so many books in my house I haven't finished.

Anyway, I knew Riddle was a "classic" spy book and I knew it had something to do with sand. For some reason, I had imagined that to involve deserts and the foreign legion, or something. Not so much. It's actually about a couple of guys mucking about in boats off the coast of Germany at the turn of the 20th Century. A lot of the book involves a government desk-jockey discovering the joys of yachting in amongst the sand-banks of the Frisian Islands. Oh, and we think there may be a plot to invade England, but it could just be a salvage company trying to find treasure.

I have to admit that the reason I stalled so close to the end was because the book is actually kind of boring. On the one hand, you do get a real sense of what it must be like to be on a little, ramshackle boat piloted through the sand banks by a boating savant, but on the other hand nothing much happens. We slowly gather hints, which slowly turn into ideas, which slowly suggest action which slowly unfolds. I never felt any real tension or danger in the whole thing. Plot "twists" were rather predictable. The only real surprise was that there was no surprise. For some reason I was expecting something unexpected to happen in the end.

I quite enjoyed bits of the book on-and-off, and I was impressed with the verisimility of the book - the boating scenes seemed entirely real, and the simplicity of the plot lent it believability. However, I think it says something about a book if you can stop reading it three-chapters from the end and not really feel as if you're missing out on anything.

A Tale of Two Christies

2010-06-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

In the past couple of weeks I've read two Agatha Christie books featuring Poirot: The ABC Murders and The Murder of Roger Ackeroyd.

It was an interesting comparison as I didn't have any advanced knowledge of the plot for ABC, but I knew what the 'trick' to Ackeroyd was before reading it.

I've always maintained that I don't care about spoilers - I get great pleasure out of seeing how things are done, so my enjoyment is not diminished by knowing the twists ahead of time.

This was more or less a chance to prove that theory: two books in the same series by the same author, one which was a complete surprise and the other with "spoilers".

Hard to say what my conclusions are. On the one hand, I did spend a large amount of ABC second guessing my assumptions, which was fun. I didn't pick the killer until a few pages before the reveal - I had actually formulated a completely different "clever-pants" twist, that seemed perfectly reasonable until the last couple of chapters.

On the other hand, Ackeroyd had always been on my list of things to read precisely because I knew what the twist was, and I wanted to see how Christie pulled it off. I was very impressed. Knowing what the twist was, I accurately picked the point were the "tell" occurred, but spent the rest of the book wondering if I had been misinformed. Christie did such a brilliant job with her treatment of the characters that I started second guessing my conclusions even when I knew they were correct. I kept watching to see when Poirot would figure it out, and if he would give us some indication. It really felt like he had made the wrong call regarding the killer and, when everything came together in the end, I still managed to feel somehow surprised.

So I can honestly say I did enjoy the book I read "with spoilers" more than the book I read without them, but then it was also the better book of the two. And I did enjoy the book I read "without spoilers", for completely different reasons.

As experiments go, it didn't really give me any viable data. I did get a couple of good reads out of it, though, so I guess there was no time wasted.

Oh, and you should read The Murder of Roger Ackeroyd. You can skip the other book without really losing anything from your complete reading experience, but Ackeroyd is a must.

Studies

2010-06-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

I think I can safely say that linguists make terrible scientists. Also, on the other hand, scientists make terrible linguists.

“How dare you!” I hear you cry, “Besides, you have shown your ignorance, for linguistics is a form of science!”

Whatever. You try reading a few dozen 'scientific studies' conducted on language classes and see if tell me that with a straight face. That's what I say.

For some reason, the linguists I've read can't seem to bring themselves to create a study that isn't completely riddled with holes. Blind Freddy* could see that the methodology is unsound - or, at worst, completely ridiculous - the numbers involved are not statistically significant, the data collected is barely qualitative and hardly quantitative and the controls are almost entirely uncontrolled. I've yet to read a study that doesn't qualify itself in its own conclusions by saying something like “this study doesn't really show anything conclusively, so more people should study this stuff and try to avoid the following sixteen mistakes we think we made...”

On top of that, the closer the researchers come to trying to make a proper, scientific, controlled study, the worse it is for the students involved in the darn thing.

Half the studies I read involved exposing language learners to completely made up words just so the researchers could make sure they weren't learning this vocabulary through some other means. Sure, it means you have a better understanding of the efficacy of that method of vocabulary acquisition (assuming the rest of the study isn't completely daft)... But what about the poor students who have now wasted valuable time learning words that don't exist? These words have been learnt and associated with meanings. They are now sitting in the students' synapses, ready to be pulled out and used “correctly” in term papers and job interviews.

As someone who often finds herself accidentally pulling out an Indonesian or French word when trying to remember a German or Estonian one, I can assure you that words previously learnt do stick around in the brain and reassert themselves at inopportune moments. And now these “scientists” have essentially graffitied the brains of well-intentioned language learners. It's negligent, from a language teaching perspective.

It's almost like those “scientists” who genetically modified a mouse to grow a human ear on it's back. Sure, the results are interesting, but the treatment of the subject boarders on the unethical.

Stop it. Stick with anecdotal evidence. It usually filters out the good from the bad over time.

*One day I'd like to meet Blind Freddy. He seems to be a very observant fellow, and would probably be an interesting conversation partner.

PDFs and the New Way

2010-06-17T04:38:00.000-07:00

There are days I would love to have all of my readings and “papers” in an entirely electronic format. Surely it's time to leave actual paper to purely enjoyable pursuits? I should be able to download a journal article into a reader of some sort, highlight it and annotate it just like I would with a paper copy. I should be able to copy-and-paste the quotes I want to keep into my citation manager (can we adapt one to work on eReaders, please?), attach the whole file for later use and then use the citation manager to shuffle through the journal articles in order to find the one I was looking for.

Is that too much to ask for?

I have double-ups of everything because I can't highlight PDFs and I can't copy-and-paste print. Then you get the occasional PDF where you can't highlight OR copy-and-paste the text because it's either a scanned document (little better than a snapshot of the original) or it's been locked so the copy function is disabled. What, on God's good, green earth, is the point of that? What am I going to do with your precious document that would make you think copying a sentence is something that must be disabled? I'm talking to you, ELT Journal. If I can save a copy of the PDF, I've already copied the entire text. Just thought I'd point that out. Having to physically re-type every quote I want to use for no good reason whatsoever achieves nothing except my personal annoyance.

It's bad enough when, in this day and age, you still get databases and eJournals which don't have a 'download citation' feature. Hello! It's the Twenty-First Century! Offering journal articles without downloadable citation files is like offering scones without jam. It makes you seem uncultured or miserly.

We're almost there, people. The technology already exists, but hasn't been put together yet. Come on: an eReader that can allow me to do the same things with electronic Journal articles that I can do with the paper copies, a citation manager that works on eReaders, and databases and journals that understand what people actually do with their texts and offer the right kind of files to play with. Then we can all sit down for a nice Devonshire tea with scones and jam.

Also, I want an iLiad, but someone at iRex needs to realise that I can buy two computers for the same price as one iLiad, which isn't good. Kind of hard to justify that, even if the whole eReader-meets-jotting-paper thing is a little bit brilliant.

Shorter

2010-06-11T03:26:00.000-07:00

It's 20:30 on a Friday night, and I'm at work. I'm so bored that I'm actually glad when someone asks me to print something for them. I've almost completely run out of "I could be bothered staying up", and I'm mildly convinced my arms are shorter than they were a couple of days ago.

Either that, or the computer screens have moved further away. At this point, either could be possible, for all I care.

The way it works

2010-06-02T00:16:00.001-07:00

Phase 1: We've discovered this wonderful new thing that well let you do the old things in new and exciting ways. You can abandon the current way you do things which are bogged down in a structure that doesn't allow new innovations and creativities. Your hands will no longer be tied, and you will be able to experiment until you find the Right Fit, rather than forcing everything into a Stifling Mould.

Phase 2: You can include These Things, which would make your New and Improved Thing so much more Vibrant and Interesting.

Phase 3: You should do These Things, to make your New and Improved Thing look Exciting and Individual

Phase 4: Okay, actually all of the New and Improved Things must do These Things, to make sure we are fully utilising them

Phase 5: And your New and Improved Thing should also include the same things that were on the other fellow's New and Improved Thing, or people won't be getting the same level of service.

Phase 6: Also, stop doing those things that everyone else isn't doing

Phase 7: And make sure the things you are doing are in exactly the same order as the things on everyone else's New and Improved Thing. No, this isn't a New Stifling Mould, it's a branded image.

Phase 8: Why aren't your New and Improved Things bursting with creativity and attracting admiring throngs? You must be doing it wrong. Let's try something else.

The Story of the Little Mole

2010-05-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

Like most people who have read the book, I find The Story of the Little Mole who knew it was None of his Business, by Werner Holzwarth and Wolf Erlbruch, utterly hilarious.

Yes, okay, it's a "poo book", and I know many librarians are totally over poo books, but this is a good one. A classic, you could say. And so very informative, in a scatological way. One could actually identify dung in the "wild" (if one lived on a farm in Europe) from reading this book.

Turns out the book is equally hilarious in German. I went looking for German children's books the other day to get some reading practise, and when I noticed this book was available I simply had to buy it.

Vom kleinen Maulwurf, der wissen wollte, wer ihm auf den Kopf gemacht hat is perfect for a reading activity at the "slightly past complete beginner" level. You can get the 'gist' without quite knowing all the words for an initial read through, and then you can go back over it with a dictionary to see if you guessed correctly, or pick up on the details you missed.

Details which are somehow worth knowing, even if they aren't. Who doesn't need the word Pferdapfel in their vocabulary?

Anyway, I found myself a tad confused. One of the other books I bought was a German translation of Guess How Much I Love You, by Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram (also really good for reading at a beginners German level), and it clearly mentioned on the verso that it was a translation. Vom Kleinen Maulwurf doesn't, which made me suspect it was originally written in German. I wanted to read the verso of the English version to see if I could find more information, but WE DON'T HAVE IT!

I am shocked. Absolutely and thoroughly shocked to find myself sitting in a library which does not have a copy of The Story of the Little Mole who knew it was None of his Business. Even more shocking - the other local libraries only had one copy between them, and that copy is missing. I must make sure we buy copies in multiple languages.

Anyway, I finally thought to google the original publisher of the book, and confirmed that the German version is, in fact, the original. However, at no point did any of the libraries I consulted (including the Libraries Australia public catalogue) mention that the English version was a translation. Neither did any of the bookshops I tried originally - although I did discover that there's an alternative English title: The Story of the Little Mole Who Went in Search of Whodunit - which is closer to the German title, but not as witty. No idea if it's the same translation or not, there's no mention of a translator. Or that it's a translation.

For some reason, Amazon.co.uk is trying to sell both versions of the book together. That must be disappointing to whoever wanted two different books.

Even the wikipedia entry neglected to mention that it was a German original. We'll have to fix that...

Anyway, I was a bit put out that I couldn't find this information in Trove, or in the first five libraries I clicked on. I would have thought the fact that a book was the English translation would be fairly basic information to put in a catalogue record. No doubt many of these libraries had it in the "full" record - but not in the one that was available to the general public. Every now and then I like to pretend I'm not a librarian and use the catalogue like a normal person. It's always interesting to note how much libraries like to keep their patrons in the dark.

The fifth library I tried actually included the words "English translation" in the record, but made no reference to the original version, or the translator. The sixth included the German title in the record, but didn't bother mentioning why. What is wrong with you people?

It shouldn't be this complicated to find out if an insanely popular children's book was originally written in German. Only Mr God knows why the libraries of Australia and booksellers of the greater English speaking world think such information is not worth mentioning.

Das habe ich nicht verstanden

2010-05-21T03:42:00.000-07:00

The other morning I caught the last five or so minutes of a show called "Yo Gabba Gabba" whilst eating my breakfast.

I gotta say, that show is seriously weird. I can't help thinking I would have appreciated it better if I was stoned. I spent those last five minutes (and the next ten or so minutes afterwards) saying "What?" a lot.

Then, I had a strange repeat experience later in the day - only this time I was reading Widdowson's 1979 book on applied linguistics - specifically the chapter on authenticity in texts supplied to language learners. This is one of those works which are referred to by every man and his dog, so I thought I should read it. I couldn't understand it. Bits were making sense, the rest of it may as well have been recited by people dressed as robots and hopping on one foot.

I found myself saying "What?" a lot.

What is it with applied linguistic theorists? They say something perfectly reasonable, and then "explain it" by saying something that seems barely coherent. It's as though the spend all day studying how people communicate, and then decide to see just how much they can mess with it.

Murder Must Socialise

2010-05-07T00:11:00.000-07:00

I maintain that, somewhere, out there, there exists a copy of a half-finished manuscript by Agatha Christie. In this manuscript, Miss Marple has been invited by the daughter of an old friend to a house party in a small English country town.

Very shortly after arriving, Miss Marple wanders into the library to discover a dead body lying on the floor - stabbed and strangled! She replies in a way entirely natural and expected under the given circumstances:

"Oh, crap! Not another one!"

If I was one of those "amateur detective" characters that keep stumbling across murderers and dead bodies in book after book, I'd start getting a complex. I wouldn't accept invitations to parties, after a while.

Bulletproof tights

2010-05-04T21:25:00.000-07:00

This is something worth listening to, if you have the time:

http://www.rte.ie/podcasts/2010/pc/pod-v-080410-28m14s-tts.mp3

'Tis a programme from an Irish radio station (weblike) discussing the image of librarians and the stereotypes a lot of people just can't let go.

Library stuff

2010-04-23T06:14:00.001-07:00

I love the fact that I have two academic libraries at my disposal. It's so very nice to have all those resources.

I recently discovered that Curtin's FindIt thingy has some lovely little things that JCU's FindIt thingy doesn't.

When you click on "FindIt at Curtin" in Google Scholar (you can set it to pick up Curtin in preferences whether you're a library member or not) it doesn't take you immediately to the article. It takes you to a page where you have a number of options depending on the article...

And one of those options (more often than not) is downloading the citation into EndNote. You don't even have to sign in! As long as you've got EndNote on your computer, it will just download the citation information for you. So, even if you don't have access to that article through Curtin, you can still get something useful out of them.

Very nice if you, like me, occasionally can't be bothered trying to figure out how each particular database wants to play with EndNote when you're doing your research in the first place.

My latest brilliant idea

2010-04-15T01:21:00.000-07:00

I think my university should go bilingual.

I think they should pick a language which a) has a sizable number of "home language" speakers in the region and b) is spoken by a large number of prospective intentional students (and, maybe: c) is spoken by a sizable group of the international community). They should then offer subjects and, yes, maybe even courses in that language as well as English.

I love the idea of people being able to come here to take a degree entirely in Italian or German. I love the idea of local students having the opportunity to study subjects in a language other than English. How cool would it be to be able to study German literature in German? Or Italian cinema in Italian? And all without having to move to the other side of the country or another continent?

Imagine how much our student base would swell if, in addition to the students we already get because we're the "local" university, and the students we get because we advertise well overseas, we also attracted students who wanted to study in an English speaking country but didn't think their English was up to the challenge? Or potential mature-aged students from all over the country who speak English as a shaky second language but would still love to get a degree?

It could be the best and most vibrant thing we ever did - and could probably net us all sorts of interesting funding options from the government.

Of course, they would have to stock the library with enough books in that language to make it viable. And, of course, the existing staff would be offered free language courses to cope with the new bilingual environment, while the ability to speak XXX would be a valuable skill in potential employees...

A challenge? Yes. Expensive? Well, duh. But honestly, sometimes you get good returns from putting in a bit of effort.

A Lack of Clear Guidance

2010-04-12T22:11:00.000-07:00

Or: My Kingdom For a Flowchart

I used them all the time when I was teaching - visual guides for how to set out an assignment.

They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, but my favourite ones (and the ones my students seemed to like best) were flowcharts.

They were wonderful, magic things that helped you to understand the form of an essay by literally showing you the shape of one - a box standing in for the sentence you would write here, a line guiding you through the checklist needed for a good paragraph there.

If you put your main points in the appropriate boxes, writing the assignment was like running a hot knife through butter. It was a simple matter of wrapping some sentences around those points according to the specified rules (this sentence must give a general introduction, this one must point back to your thesis, that sort of thing).

I know how useful these things are. I know how much they benefited me when I was stuck on an assignment, and how much my students appreciated them. I still direct students to them all the time.

But I can't find one for a thesis. I've been asked if I know of one, and I've looked, but no one seems to think such a thing is worth producing. Now that I'm writing my own Masters thesis, I'm really feeling the lack of such a clear, simple guide.

You want a guide for writing a thesis? Here, have a whole book on the subject, full of wonderful things you don't have time to read and not a single thing resembling the simple, clear flowchart you desire. Or, here, look at a couple of examples of other theses. Surely you can glean what you want from here? Or, wait, here are some general guidelines for things you should think about when writing a thesis - what do you mean, they don't give you any actual writing guidance in regards to form? Why would you want that?

Just draw me a picture, man! Show me what the shape of the thing is supposed to look like.

I don't have time to read half your prattle - especially when most of it is great advice, but not relevant to the particular problem I have right now.

I want to see the form. I want to have it staring in my face. I want to be able to assemble my sentences like one of those jigsaw puzzles that have the shape of the missing pieces etched into the backboard. I've got fifteen thousand words to write, and I want to make sure I know where each of them are supposed to go before I waste any more time.

Oh, and if someone out there actually has such a flowchart, what the heck are you calling it? Why isn't it turning up in any of the most logical searches? What book have you buried it in without mentioning it to anyone?

Really, people, it's quite frustrating.

My Scathingly Brilliant Idea

2010-03-26T21:40:00.000-07:00

"I've got it!" I said proudly, declaring my genius to everyone in the room. Sadly, that consisted of the cat and me. "It's perfect! Everything will work! All I have to do is convince my boss to create a job that doesn't exist and hire me for it."

As often happens in my life, I'm facing an unnecessary choice between several things that all seem like really good options. Unfortunately, they can't co-exist.

On the one hand, I really like my job. I love being a librarian. I specifically love being a liaison librarian at an academic library. I also love working with the people I'm currently working with, and although I think the institution I'm currently working for could do with a bit of work, I'm don't mind working here at all. So, staying exactly where I am and doing exactly what I'm doing seems to be a pretty good option.

Except that, I would also like to get another job at another library in one of the capital cities. When I first took this job my boss suggested it would be good for my career if I looked at staying here for a couple of years and then working at another academic library, and I thought that sounded like a pretty good plan. I still think it sounds like a pretty good plan - particularly as I like the idea of moving to Brisbane or Melbourne for a couple of years.

On top of that, I also want to go back to studies. Specifically, I want to study a language degree majoring in German. There are a couple of universities that offer part-time Diplomas in Modern Languages, which I could possibly do via distance education and would take about three years to complete. In theory, I could do those wherever I happened to be working...

BUT...

But I have seen the course I want to do, and I don't think I can do it via distance education. I don't even know if I want to do it via distance education. It's a brilliant three-year full-time Bachelor of Languages programme that offers all sorts of delicious subjects in Linguistics including such treasures as Traditional Grammar and Phonetics of Spoken Language along with literature subjects in the target language. I could do Classic Literature and Modern Theatre! As well as the actual "learning the language" subjects!

You can't do that in the part-time Diploma programmes. And while I believe you probably could undertake a course like that via distance education, it would be so much better to actually be on campus and talk to the lecturers and tutors face-to-face - as well as interacting with the other students. The evening course I'm doing at the moment has reminded me how beneficial sitting in a classroom with other human beings can be.

Only...

Only I'd have to be physically located in Canberra in order to undertake this course. Over the years I have previously wanted to live in Canberra. I almost got a job there at least twice (only each time I ended up choosing another job somewhere else). At the moment, though, it's not ticking my boxes for a place I want to live in. The thought of living in Brisbane fills my mind with interesting possibilities. Ditto for Melbourne. Sydney not so much, but I think I could make it work. Canberra, though, currently filling me with a sense of "eh". It's too much like Townsville without having the things I love about Townsville, and none of the things I've been hoping to get involved with in Brisbane.

But still, every time I think of that course, I start salivating.

Only...

Only I'd have to find a job in Canberra. And if I'm studying full time, I'd have to work part time. And getting part time work as a librarian isn't that easy in this present economic climate. And I love being a librarian.

Then it came to me - my brilliant idea. You see, where I work we used to have a position that involved providing liaison support to off-campus and micro-campus students. When the guy who held that position shifted into a new position, his job was disbanded. That is, all of the liaison librarians took on the role of supporting those students, instead of having someone who was specifically there as their first contact point.

I've often thought it would be nice if we brought that role back and expanded it, so that the off-campus/micro-campus liaison would actually create and deliver Information Literacy Training specifically designed for students whose main contact with the library was completely remote. We currently do a little bit of that, but it's not a major focus.

Now, in theory, a position could be created which involved creating and delivering online and remote IL training and information and research support. This position could be a part-time consideration operated in the afternoons (when distance students who work full time will be home and looking at their assignments) and, since the role involves helping students who aren't actually on campus, there would be no real need for the person filling this role to be on campus either.

I could, in theory, work remotely during semester time and come back to touch base during the inter-semester weeks. I could also be physically on the campus where I work during O-Week to help with the training, so I wouldn't be completely dead weight. That way I would still, sort of, be working here with these lovely people, while at the same time doing this course I want to do.

So now all I have to do is convince my bosses to create a position that they probably don't want to make and hire me for it even though it would mean they have to fill my current position with someone else - all in order to make life easier for me. What do you think my chances are?

The trouble with working in a library...

2010-03-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

I had a strange desire to see if we had any books by H. Rider Haggard in the library so that I might try reading one.

Then I remembered that I own a copy of King Solomon's Mines which I've never gotten around to reading...

Stairs

2010-03-17T00:49:00.000-07:00

"Go up those stairs," I say, pointing to the stairs to which I refer, "and go right down to that side of the building," I continue, pointing to the side of the building I'm talking about.

The stairs to which I refer are to my right. I think raising my right arm and stretching it out to the right of me as I point directly at the stairs (which can be seen from where I am sitting and, more importantly, can be seen from where the patron is sitting) is a reasonably clear indication of which flight of stairs I mean.

"Go upstairs and go down that side of the building?" the patron asks, in confirmation.

"Yes, that's right," I say, still waving my right hand towards the stairs which are on my right.

"Okay," she says, and promptly walks over to the other flight of stairs - the one to the left of me, and walks up those stairs instead.

I admit those stairs are closer to where we are currently sitting, but they are not closer to her goal. In fact, had she taken the flight of stairs I had indicated (which she should have been able to see from her position), she would have been on the same side of the building as the book she sought. It would have been a simple matter to walk down to the relevant section. By taking the stairs on my left, she doubled the distance she would have to travel and gave herself more opportunities to get confused along the way.

She is not the first person to watch me point to the stairs on my right, and then take the stairs on my left. I have seen it happen many a time, as has every single one of my colleagues.

I just don't get it. Are they so blinded by the "big" staircase that they cannot fathom the existence of another? Do they think we would send them the longer way if a shorter one existed? Do they have a problem with recognising the direction our fingers are pointing?

Is it possible they simply don't understand what we mean when we point at something? If that is so, then will they also go to the wrong part of the building to look for their books?

I fear I know the answer to that question, and it makes me wonder about the human gene pool.

Udolpho, or novel bashing

2010-02-14T20:18:00.000-08:00

So far, it's feeling a little bit like Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded. Which, as I'm sure you remember, did not fill me with joy.

I mentioned previously that Jane Austen mocks this book in Northanger Abbey, which is interesting for a couple of reasons. The one I feel like mentioning at the moment is the fact that she engages in novel bashing while, at the same time, pointing out that novelists who engage in novel bashing are hypocrites.

It's obvious Austen has little respect for anyone who would read a novel like Udolpho, yet she also makes a point of mentioning that it's a bit rich when a novelist tries to establish the intellectual superiority of their heroines by suggesting they never read novels.

There's some sort of hidden cleverness in this. Like someone who sings a parody song about how parody songs show a lack of imagination.

I love the tradition of novel bashing. It's been around as long as novels have. Apparently, so the argument went, novels encourage sentimentality, which is a grave handicap to foster in a young woman. It makes them want to do crazy things, like marry for love instead of money. It also excites their imaginations, which is just asking for trouble, really.

Really, it's this strange desire we have to trash whatever is popular and enjoyable. These days, we bash novels which are popular enough to have everyone reading them. Twilight and the Potter novels are bashed by all and sundry just because they're insanely popular. Otherwise, they would be completely ignored. I wonder of the Brontës had to deal with the same thing? I can just imagine the kind of trash talk that would have gone on about Jane and Rochester...

When I was studying 18th Century literature I used a piece from an afterplay for an exam. Can't remember the title of the thing at the moment, and the Internet isn't as helpful as it could be. I'll have to look it up when I get home. Anyway, the whole play was about a girl who read too many novels, which made her susceptible to being emotionally manipulated by a conman who was trying to woe her in order to steal... something. Can't remember if it was her father's fortune or her virtue.

Actually, what I remember most about that afterplay was the girl's father. Man, that guy was a jerk. She wouldn't marry the man he chose for her because she was in love with the conman, so he spent the whole play calling her a "wanton hussy". That happened a lot in 18th Century plays, actually. Not to mention folk songs dating back to the Middle Ages. Girls who were saving themselves for a certain someone special being called whores and hussies by their fathers, who were essentially hoping to "sell" them to the highest bidder. Talk about double standards. Or maybe that was mixed messages.

What was I talking about anyway? Oh, yeah, novel bashing. Fun stuff.

Book Days

2010-02-07T20:34:00.000-08:00

I still think librarians should have "book days" in addition to "sick days". I mean, if we don't get the opportunity to occasionally sit around all day reading books, what's the point of being lumped with that stereotype?

Jane vs Ann

2010-02-02T22:27:00.000-08:00

So, I've started reading Northanger Abbey, in which the lead character is reading "Udolpho", by Ann Radcliffe.

I'm about ten chapters in, and I can't shake the feeling that the book she's reading is more interesting than the book I'm reading. Thankfully, I work in a library, so I've just borrowed The Mysteries of Udolpho and I'll see what this Radcliffe woman is like.

My French thingy is on it's way.

2010-01-28T23:08:00.000-08:00

I want one of these:

Possible... or Probable? (press play, go away for 15 minutes then come back and watch it).

It doesn't exist yet, which is a slight problem.

It's getting closer with the iPad, but 'tis still a little way off. Give it a couple of years.

Review: The Complete Book of Roller Skating

2010-01-08T08:43:00.000-08:00

Ah, second hand book stores. I really should keep out of them – especially when I'm on vacation and will have to carry the books home with me...

On my recent vacation in New Zealand I happened to walk into a second hand book shop, where I chanced upon a book that would seem, at first glance, almost completely useless:

The Complete Book of Roller Skating “by” The Editors of Consumer Guide®, published in 1979. I don't know why I had to buy it, but I did. I don't know why I had to read it, but I did. I don't know why I had to record a passage and use my Mac applications to turn it into a Youtube clip, but I did. Maybe it was the Oh-So-70s font on the cover of the book. Maybe it was the line drawings that seem to illustrate every sporting book of the late 70s and early 80s. Maybe it was the fact that I've never been able to face inline skates and secretly yearn for the days before you had to specify you wanted “quads” when talking to the rental people at the skating rink...

Whatever the reason, I found myself the proud owner of a thirty-year-old book about roller skating – supposedly, the complete book about the subject.

I have to say this book is quite interesting, but possibly for the wrong reasons. I always worry a little when no authors are willing to put their name on something, and the writing of this book is somewhat uneven. Parts of it are instructional, other parts evangelical – and you get the distinct impression that 70% of the book is padding, pure and simple. I have a feeling that they didn't really have enough practical material for more than thirty or forty pages about roller skating, and since two chapters on roller skating and a buyers guide would make for a terribly short “complete” book, they passed the thing around the office to see if anyone could add anything of interest.

Thus you have some passages walking you through the basics of skating backwards, and others waxing lyrical (well, prosaic) about the joys of roller disco. Some parts are surprisingly well written, yet completely pointless. Other parts are just completely pointless. There's a whole chapter dedicated to a “skating into shape” programme which doesn't actually include an exercise programme. They just tell you that skating is a great form of exercise, and so are running, swimming and riding your bike. It's almost as though everyone at the Consumer Guide® office thought an exercise programme was a great idea, but no one knew what one looked like.

I have to admit, though, I did learn a lot about roller skates and roller skating that I didn't know before. I just have no idea if any of it is still “true”. After all, truth has a use-by date, and a lot of things have happened in the world of strapping-wheels-to-your-feet since 1979. Take roller disco, for example. There's a whole chapter on roller disco in the book – including the clothes you could wear to the disco in order to look really cool. The opening passage is a brilliant piece of writing (that's the bit I've recorded, if you want to hear it - it's at the bottom of this post), but I'm not sure I'll ever use the advice they provide...

This book is, well, history. A flippant piece of throw away history that I doubt even The Editors of the Consumer Guide® expected to sell more than a few copies before being pulped. An attempt to capture a fad and jump on a bandwagon while the jumping was good.

I'm keeping it, though. That buyers guide at the end was actually kind of useful.

Showcase Presents: Booster Gold

2010-01-07T04:24:00.000-08:00

One of the first colour comic books I owned was a second-hand copy of Booster Gold #18.

Now, if you've never read a Booster Gold comic before, #18 is an interesting one to have as an introduction. For one thing, it actually fills you in on the character's backstory quite nicely and gives you a hint of what it's all about...

But the hint is actually a little off. You see, #18 is full of time travelling cops, superheroes who can save the day without changing into their costume, rings that can give you the power of flight, high tech gadgets and robots, multimillionaires with alternate identities and thieves who have become better men. You learn that Booster Gold was a football player from the 25th Century who fell from grace, then stole a time machine to come back to the 20th Century where he became a superhero using his (stolen) advanced technology. You learn this courtesy of the flashbacks of the cop who has followed him into the past to hunt him down. You learn that he's rich and has geniuses working for him, creating high-tech gizmos to use in his training. You learn that he has a robotic “coach”. And you get this wonderful James Bond style story that involves a dashing man of action saving the day in his expensive suit.

What you don't get is a true taste of Booster's character. You don't get the cocky, overconfident, brash, self-centred, money grabbing, attention seeking, juvenile yet strangely charming jerk that Dan Jurgen's creation is. You don't get the superhero-promoting-aftershave or the “Superman has nothing on me!” moments that give you the truest insights into what you can expect from Booster. On the one hand, he means well and honestly wants to be the hero and save the people and the day. On the other hand, he'll never pass up an opportunity to grab publicity and make money. He's not the squeaky-clean-boy-scout that Superman is. He's not the brooding, guardian-of-the-people-weighed-down-by-responsibility Batman is. He's a jerk who needs a good slapping, but he's also charming, lovable and fun. And he's trying – he really is trying to do the superhero thing properly – so you sort of forgive him for the rest of his faults.

He embodies the whole concept of “new and fresh directions” that was the point of the Crisis. He also embodies the mid-late 80s love affair with capitalism and corporate greed. Reading over the original comics later, it's hard to imaging Booster coming from the future into any year other than 1986. If they ever make a film of this character, I hope they set it in the 80s.

These are the sort of things you learn about Booster as you read the first twenty issues of his original twenty-five issue run, published for the first time since the late 1980s as part of DC's Showcase Presents series.

The Showcase Presents books started by packaging some stories that first appeared in the old Showcase title put out by DC in the 60s and 70s and has since moved on to later comics. This series is possibly the most magnificent thing DC has ever done. By publishing these stories without colour and on cheaper paper than they use for their Archives series, they've made all of these stories affordable and accessible.

There were many of us who were hanging out for the original Booster Gold series to be reprinted, and while the colour and the glossy paper would have been nice, having the whole series in one book for just over AUD$30 is a dream come true.

Finally being able to read the whole series from start to finish is... mixed.

I mentioned before that you find out a lot of things about Booster's character in the first twenty issues. That's because the first twenty issues are good. Okay, so they repeat the origin story a little often (#18 was the fourth time we hear it told from various sources). It's still a rollicking adventure story. The series starts in the middle of everything, goes back to the beginning, comes back to the present, bounces into the future and brings us back to the 80s a few months after we left. It plays with the cliches of the genre quite nicely, letting us have a few while joyfully breaking some others. Jurgens wanted his character to be different and fun, and for the first twenty issues that's exactly what Booster Gold was. Sure, there were moments of pathos, hints of romance and the sense that eventually Booster's irresponsibility was going to come back to kick him up the cloaca, but you never doubted that there would be light at the end of every tunnel and these characters were just going to get more interesting as things went on.

The characters had real legs. Jurgens not only created a group of people you wanted to know more about to start with, he also added to them as he went on. To begin with, there was the shallow, go-get-em agent who was a single parent after his wife walked out (and may have more to him than meets the eye) and the secretary who may be a romantic interest (but for who?) and may or may not become a superhero herself. Then came Jack Soo, who gave up working for S.T.A.R. Labs because designing gadgets for a superhero was so much fun, and Michelle Carter, Micheal's twin sister from the future who saved everyone's life with a stolen school bus, and then went on to steal the Super Suit (with magnetic powers) Jack invented. You just knew there was going to be a showdown between the sister and the secretary over the super suit. You just knew the secretary was eventually going to have to choose between the superhero stud she secretly fancies and the obnoxious agent she initially can't stand...

Except, none of these things happened.

Jurgens set things in motion in the course of those first twenty issues. Things that promised us something fun was going to happen. But then, just as we were starting to really appreciate what he had planned for Michelle, he killed her off. And in such a bizarre, pointless way, too. Part of his playing with cliches, I guess – he sets up a successful rescue and then, hey, waddayaknow, the girl dies anyway. And it doesn't make any sense at all within the terms of the over arcing narrative. As the last five issues progress, it becomes a little bit obvious that Jurgens killed of Michelle because he had to damage Booster and make him miserable – and he had to do that because of forces beyond his book.

One of the things I've always hated about DC is the propensity to create stories that sweep across the entire DC Universe. Every couple of years or so, some major tragedy, catastrophe or crisis happens which is supposed to involve every character in the universe and have cross-over story lines going through every title. This has always sucked. This has always sucked for at least three reasons:

1. Every title has its own continuity – it tells its own stories and follows its own arcs. Usually, only one or two writers manage to get their arcs to flow seamlessly into this company-wide story arc. For everyone else, it's a horrible imposition that seems forced and out of place and ruins the lines of the story. Going back years later to read the stories again, these issues make very little sense and are, simply, awful.

2. You never get the whole story of the company-wide arc anyway. It's mainly carried in the major titles with a few weird tendrils thrown off into series you might not normally buy. Later on, you may get the entire run of all of the Superman comics that fit in with this story, but good luck trying to find that one issue of the Black Canary which links the story from Superman #275 to Action Comics #423. And, if you were a Black Canary fan who owned every issue from that period, chances are that one issue suffers badly from the problem I mentioned in the point above.

3. Some twit always decides this is a great opportunity to kill or otherwise completely ruin one of the minor characters in the universe for the sake of pathos. So your favourite member of the Justice League is going to go insane, destroy all who are dear to him, and then die in a last heroic effort to save the planet. Every single time DC has run a company wide cross-over, they've killed or destroyed someone I like. Someone I would pay good money to see in his or her own series, or at least used more often. They seem to think this makes them clever. It doesn't.

So come the end of 1987 and the beginning of 1988, DC runs this ridiculous Millennium cross-over thing where almost all of the heroes in the universe find someone close to them is, in fact, a Manhunter in disguise. I'm not really going to explain that one, except to say that the Manhunters are against the Guardians of the Universe and trying to stop the Chosen Ones from promoting mankind to the next stage of evolution. It was a stupid story.

Oh, and guess who the sacrificial bunny was? That's right, Booster Gold. Because of his role as the loose cannon in the Millennium story, Booster's life had to get miserable and fast. So Jurgens kills off his sister, introduces a new character (who we hardly ever see) purely for the sake of creating a distraction and turns Dirk, the agent, into the Manhunter in Booster's life. This, by the way, makes no sense. Dirk's character and motivations had been well established, and it's impossible to believe he was secretly a Manhunter. Everything seemed too fast – positively rushed – and clumsy. Motivations – ignored and trampled on. Logical plot progressions – thrown to the wind.

Jurgens spent twenty issues establishing a world that could have easily carried another twenty issues worth of stories... then spent five issues smashing it to pieces with a hammer.

I suppose at least it finished with the promise of a brighter tomorrow. In spite of his role as the sacrificial bunny, causing him to lose his family, friends and home, there was still an indication that Booster would continue to play a role in the DC Universe as one of the good guys. He managed to survive another twenty years as a minor character and guest star in other comics before the writers of another stupid cross over decided to use him as a sacrificial bunny again.

Turns out issue #18 was actually the peak of Booster's career. It showed everything the series could have been, if only Jurgens had been allowed to keep playing by his own rules.

As for the Showcase Presents anthology? Well, if you're a Booster fan, you can't go past this book. If you aren't a Booster fan, I think there's a good chance you will be one by the time you finish the first twenty issues. Then you can join me in my hatred for company-wide cross over stories.

Tintin

2009-12-07T16:05:00.000-08:00

I could cry salty tears;
Where have I been all these years ?
Little wow, tell me now :
How long has this been going on ?

There were chills up my spine,
And some thrills I can't define.
Listen, sweet, I repeat :
how long has this been going on ?

If you ever want to know what Audrey Hepburn's singing voice sounded like, don't watch My Fair Lady, because you'll be listening to Marni Nixon.

There are a number of films in which Audrey H actually sang (using her own voice, even), but one of my favourites is Funny Face, where she sings the Gershwin classic "How Long Has This Been Going On".

Her singing voice? Never going to carry off My Fair Lady. Not in a million fits. Heck, she barely managed to carry off "How Long Has This Been Going On", which was a wee bit out of her range...

Oh, yeah, this post was supposed to be about Tintin, wasn't it?

Well, much like Audrey's character belatedly discovering kissing, I have belatedly discovered Tintin.

I've always known the Tintin books were around. Some of my classmates used to read them when I was at school. They were often at houses I'd visit. Things like that. But, for some reason, I could never be bothered reading them.

No, it's more than that - I wrote them off without giving them a chance.

For some reason I cannot explain, I looked down on Tintin and Tintin readers. I assumed they would be boring and a waste of my time. This is in spite of the fact that I read most comic books voraciously and have always enjoyed things like the Asterix series. Thinking back on it now, I have no idea why I decided against giving Tintin a chance...

Well, the other day I picked up a Tintin book in Estonian (long story) and was completely taken by the art. It's quite brilliant - both simple and highly detailed at the same time. Then I borrowed a couple of Tintin books in English and I noticed that a) the plots are a lot of fun, and b) the translators have the same sense of humour as whoever translates Asterix.

I had a bit of an Audrey moment, wondering: "Where have I been all these years? How long has this been going on?"

These books are a really fun read, with really good artwork. And they've been around for years. And I could have been reading them ages ago if I hadn't been so darn stubborn for no good reason.

Never judge a book by the fact that you're a snob, I guess.

"I am Prince Caspian..."

2009-12-03T21:18:00.000-08:00

So, I watched the Disney Prince Caspian movie last night. I had intended to catch it at the cinema, but didn't get around to it in time. I rarely bother to rent DVDs these days, but the planets aligned for a DVD night when I remembered this was a movie I wanted to watch.

Now, I've read the entire Chronicles of Narnia at least twice (okay, not The Last Battle, which I barely managed to get through once - for some reason Lewis decided that he was sick of couching allegories in adventure stories and decided to see if anyone would notice if he just wrote an allegory, and the answer was: yes). Some of the books, like The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Silver Chair, I've read many times.

Prince Caspian, while never one of my favourite books in the series, is something that I have read on more than one occasion. I have easily read it as often as The Magician's Nephew and The Horse and His Boy - both of which are books I can remember quite clearly. But it turns out I can't remember Prince Caspian at all.

I sat down to watch this film, and suddenly thought: "Wait a minute, who's in this story apart from Caspian and the Pevensies? What do they do?" and at no point did it start coming back to me.

I could remember that the book is set several hundred years after Wardrobe, that the Stone Table is now under a mountain, and that, at the end of it, Peter and Susan are told they're too old to come back to Narnia. That was it. I kid you not. Even as the film was progressing I kept thinking, "I don't remember this at all!" Granted, there were probably some parts that were added to the story so I wouldn't remember them, but I spent most of the film being genuinely surprised by the plot. Even though some of the character names were familiar, I realised it was because they were characters who cross over with Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

It absolutely astounds me that I can have such a poor recollection of a book I've read multiple times. I would have thought I'd remember it at least as well as The Horse and His Boy, but nope. I wonder why? It's not like it's a particularly boring book... but then, what would I know? I can't remember the darn thing.

Don't Panic!

2009-11-25T19:38:00.000-08:00

Hmm...

I'm having some trouble tracking down an Australian television advertisement from the 1980s. I always thought you could find almost anything on line, but this is eluding me at present.

It was an ad put together by one of the cancer councils (I think) and probably belonged in the same stable as Sid the Seagull's "Slip Slop Slap" campaign (I think) and would have aired about the mid-late 1980s (I think) and involved a cartoon mole (as in the animal) telling us to keep an eye on the moles on our skin (as in, a melanocytic nevus).

From what I can recall from childhood, it went something like this:

Mole sticks his head up through the sand at the beach: "Don't panic! I'm not the sort of mole you have to worry about. But the moles on your skin? Some of them can make you sick. Real sick. So, if you catch a mole changing shape, changing colour or growing bigger - get it looked at, quick as you can. Oh, and try a little less sun".

Having difficulty finding any evidence that this campaign actually existed, though.

Hmm...

My Job Doesn't Exist

2009-11-12T02:28:00.001-08:00

I had a strange epiphany the other day (I must admit, though, that most of my epiphanies are a bit strange).

I come to the sudden, yet undeniable conclusion that my job doesn't exist. Or, at least, it shouldn't. It's not real, you see. Very little I do is real.

It's all Flashforward's fault. I was trying to explain to the characters in the TV show that they were creating self-fulfilling prophecies. They were collecting things to put on a board because in their visions of the future these things were on the board. But the problem with that is it becomes some sort of weird paradoxical cycle. The reason why the items were on the board in the future is because the items were on the board in the future. They could very well mean absolutely nothing, but they've managed to hook themselves into that existential cycle.

The characters in the TV show didn't listen to me (they never do), but I suddenly realised that I do exactly the same thing every day. You know, most people don't need the services I offer them until I tell them they do. Then, suddenly, they need something I can supply.

The world existed quite happily without iGoogle, EndNote, electronic databases, Delicious and LibGuides. No one really cared about all the wonderful tools they could have been using to do things they weren't doing.

Suddenly, an academic librarian like myself says: "but, wait, people need blogs! If they only knew how effective blogs could be, they would want them!" So, I invent a blog, tell everyone to look at it, convince them it's a Good Thing and something they not only Want, but Need... And now it's a part of my job to find things to put in blog posts.

EndNote and other bibliographic software programs are useful, but they aren't really necessary. I help people believe they need such things in order to study well. Then people need me to help them use EndNote. Or Google Docs. Or Connotea.

I'm finding the things we believe we will need in the future, then helping people need them today. And so much of my job is wrapped up in supporting things that, frankly, mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.

I feel like I'm training a unicorn to fly a spaceship - treading a strange line between fantasy and science fiction, and hoping nobody notices the fact that you don't need an interactive web-based guide to grow food for your children.

Truth be told, what we will really need in the future isn't any of these things. They'll all turn to dust before we realise it. No, the things we'll need in the future are the same things we needed in the past: the ability to cultivate food that will nourish us and build shelters that will keep us warm and dry.

These are things I can't do and can't teach anyone else to do either. But they're real. So much more real than most of what I do in my day.

Next time some librarian tries to tell you how useful the latest gadget is, tell them you're better off learning how to spin cotton into thread. It's true.

But, on the other hand, that gadget is probably really cool and quite useful, so still pay attention.

Scary Stuff

2009-11-10T18:37:00.000-08:00

We need to better educate our kids:

http://searchengineland.com/uk-report-1-in-3-kids-think-top-search-rankings-most-truthful-27428

Sadly, they only listen to music videos. Anyone know how we can convince Robbie Williams to create a music video about search engine rankings?

Magnetic Recording

2009-11-10T01:40:00.000-08:00

Favourite quote for today:

"Magnetic Recording. Although the principle of magnetic recording is over sixty years old, it is only during the past few years that the modern tape recorder has reached perfection. Recording on magnetic tape is the most accurate and versatile means of reproducing sounds today. It is used almost universally for making master recordings of music from which disks will be pressed for public sale; in another form it is used for recording television; and in still another. it is the heart of the data retrieval systems of the modern computers."

Stack, E.M. (1966) The language laboratory and modern language teaching. New York: Oxford University Press.

This book is older than our library and isn't catalogued - it's from the days before we were a university in our own right, and just a branch of the University of Queensland. I found it on our shelves and insisted the folks downstairs put a barcode in it so I could check it out. On the front, there's an imprint from an old tape spool.

Among it's many features, it includes a whole chapter on magnetic tapes - as in, the what, why and how of using tapes, channels and speeds to create magnetic recordings.

It's somehow wonderful. A snapshot of a world that briefly existed and will never return. It's completely useless for my thesis, but I can't help but like it.

Sadly, I know the minute I return it the book will probably be "decatalogued" (as far as any book which isn't on the catalogue can be decatalogued) and probably thrown out. We just don't have space for this sort of thing.

And yet, we've had it on the shelves for all these years...

Enough to give you the willies

2009-11-05T01:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, I apologise for the really bad pun in the title. You'll have to read the rest of this blog entry to work out why it's so bad, but trust me, it's horrible.

Prometheus: bringer of fire, benefactor of mankind, poor sap doomed by the gods...

The legend of Prometheus, so it goes, was that he was a Titan - which is kind of like a cousin to the gods, but not a god - who decided to take pity on poor, miserable, snivelling little mankind and give them the gift of fire. Until Prometheus came along food was always raw, night was always dark and winter was always cold.

With fire came science, art and all kinds of figurative sparks. Mankind stopped huddling in the dark trying to keep warm, and instead made vast leaps and bounds towards civilisation.

However, Zeus (king of the gods and all round jerk - I'm sorry, but that whole Leta and the Swan thing will have me forever despising the ol' Zeus) was not happy. He didn't particularly want mankind to have fire. He was quite happy to have them huddling in the dark. So he punished Prometheus for his audacity.

I half recall that, prior to the punishment, there was a bit of defiance on Prometheus' part. Something along the lines of:

Zeus: "Mankind shall never have fire if I have anything to do with it!"
Prometheus: "I'll give mankind fire if I want to! What are you going to do about it?"

It probably needs to be mentioned occasionally that annoying the gods never ends well. In fact, if there is one piece of advice I can feel confident in giving to every living being, regardless of race, creed or position in the space-time continuum, it is this: don't annoy the gods.

To punish Prometheus for having the gall to defy him, Zeus had him chained to a cliff on a remote island. Every morning a vulture would come along, rip open his guts and eat his liver. Every night the liver would grow back and the guts would heal up so it could all happen again. I believe this was not a pleasant experience, and Prometheus was doomed to suffer it for all eternity.

So, remember, kids, don't annoy the gods.

Now, where I work, we have a statue of Prometheus not far from the reference desk. He's large, he's made of brass, he has a pained expression on his face, he appears to be chained to the wall... and he's naked.

Quite obviously naked, in fact - especially in profile. He's not one of those old-fashioned, classical male nudes with their modest accoutrements*. No, he's one of the new, modern male nudes who are a little more obvious.

Now, the interesting thing about this (as Prometheus' sculptor would tell you) is that most people these days don't know how to look at a male nude. A female nude is fine - we see those all the time in "art" - but a male nude... Well, that's a naked guy standing in the room, right? That sort of thing just isn't on. Especially not in Australia.

The first few times you see our Prometheus, it's a bit of a shock. Then you get used to him. Eventually, you stop registering the big brass naked guy chained to the wall.

Well, until someone decides to "decorate" him. Tonight, I had the dubious privilege of removing a paper frog from Prometheus' appendage. Sadly, it was attached with chewing gum, so I had to spend a little bit longer trying to get rid of that, too.

Just part of a day's work, really. So far I've taught a colleague how to use blogger, consulted the special collections librarian regarding the picture collection, given a training session to a post-grad student, answered questions at the reference desk, made arrangements for the new training room, worked on my Master's project and cleaned chewing gum of a statue's willy.

And what did you do today?

*Bonus points go to whoever can correctly explain how the word "accoutrements" is being used ironically in this sentence.

Word: Curses...

2009-10-29T02:06:00.000-07:00

I would just like to say:

Darn you, Microsoft Word! Darn you to Heck!

May whoever changed your flaming bullet function so that it will not easily convert to a multilevel list after having been started as a single level list find the glue on his best pair of shoes is failing.

I do not want to re-write my list! I admit I wasn't paying attention when I first began this bullet point fiasco, but my needs are not exorbitant. All I want is to be able to change the list level based on my tab movements. All I want is to be able to highlight my current list and change the type of bullets from single level to multi-level so that such a thing may happen.

Why can this not be done? The old Word used to do it. Open Office does it with ease. Why am I doomed to manually push each new level to the point I desire without using my handy keyboard short cuts?

While I'm at it, may whoever changed the menus so that keyboard shortcuts I know and love are not longer logically related to the functions I desire find they left their favourite pen in their pocket when they did the washing.

It's not efficient, people! It's just not.

Word of the Day: Unicursal

2009-10-25T18:20:00.000-07:00

Unicursal is, apparently, a mathematical term, but we shan't hold that against it.

In addition to mathematical what-nots, 'unicursal' is also used to describe a kind of maze, which makes it cool and interesting. Some may argue that, as a mathematical term, it was already cool and interesting. Those people are sad and deluded, but useful to have around so we shan't insult them too much.

'Unicursal' is an adjective which means Having, traversing, or being on one course or path (OED), and is apparently also used as a noun without taking on a nominative form, which is just dodgy if you ask me. You shouldn't be able to say "I'm following a unicursal at the moment and won't be able to speak to you until I finish", although I'm sure it's the sort of thing people would say all the time - seeing the propensity amongst human beings to forget that adjectival words are meant to describe the noun in the sentence, not be the noun.

Basically, the word 'unicursal' describes situations where there is only one path or direction to follow. A figure in which the whole is transcribed in one route - a maze in which there are no branches to follow and no wrong turns to take.

If my interpretation of the concept is correct, one should be able to undertake a unicursal route within any "true" maze, even if it is not technically a unicursal maze. I remember reading once that a "true" maze (according to the precepts of some obscure maze designing school) is one in which you could follow the wall and it would take you through every point of the maze and back out again. This is the origin of the theory that, if you get lost in a maze or a labyrinth, you should put one hand against a wall and follow it and you will eventually get out. These are also known as "branching" mazes - to separate them from island mazes, in which the walls don't all touch.

I have been in a number of branching mazes and one or two island mazes ("false" mazes?), and I can tell you that the branching mazes feel different, somehow. The island mazes just felt strangely random - as though there was no rhyme or reason to them - while the branching mazes felt like a controlled environment. It's almost as though you can feel the design. Even when you take the short-cuts, go up the wrong path, get horribly lost and somehow manage to get right through the maze without ever finding that damn target in the heart of the thing, you still feel as though you're following something. There's more of a sense of purpose to your movements. Plus, you always have that confidence that if you just follow the wall you'll eventually get out...

'Unicursal' is also used to describe any number of shapes created by a continuous line, such as the unicursal hexagram and a number of designs popular in Celtic themed art. Apparently, the Celts had quite a thing for unicursal patterns.

I suppose one could quite happily use the word 'unicursal' to describe any metaphoric journey in which someone could only follow one path - with no chance of branching off in any direction.

See if you can use it sometime this week.

Finish What You Started - Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle and A Princess of Mars

2009-10-22T01:42:00.000-07:00

As mentioned at some point, I have actually managed to finish a few of my half-finished reads since beginning Project Finish What You Started. Just not many. Oh, and I keep forgetting to write up a review, which was part of the project, so generally speaking the project hasn't been a raving success.

In fact, not only hasn't it been a raving success, but I've also started and stalled in the middle of at least three or four other books since I decided to make a dent in the already large number of works I haven't finished. I kinda suck at this.

Anyway, I managed to knock off a couple of Edgar Rice Burroughs books along the way, so I may as well review 'em both and get it over with.

Many long years ago I had picked up a couple of Tarzan books at a library weeding sale, and promptly forgotten that they existed. Then, one holiday, I picked up one of them to see what this Tarzan business was all about.

It was Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, which is the eleventh book in the series. To be perfectly honest, the eleventh book is not the best introduction to Tarzan. I got about halfway through it, but didn't really "get" it, and then moved on to other books.

Then, a couple of years ago, I suddenly caught Tarzan fever. I can't really explain it, but I just fell for the character big time. I started collecting the movies and researching the history of the character (I think, at last count, I had at least fifteen Tarzan films from different eras - not including the first RKO serial) and decided to go back to where it all began - Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan of the Apes. One library in town stocked it, and I held onto it for much longer than I should have.

I was fascinated by the difference between the Tarzan of the novels and the Tarzan of the films, and suddenly more interested than ever in seeing where the books took the character. As there were no more Tarzan books in the library, and I couldn't locate the ones I owned, I hopped onto the Interwebs. I had already read ERB's The Lost World, and I thought I might try one of his other series while I was spending money. So, I ordered Tarzan Returns (which became one of my favourite books of all time) and A Princess of Mars - the first book in the John Carter series.

Tarzan Returns was a corker of a book, and someone would make me very happy if they would film it as a mini series (as long as they did a decent job). A Princess of Mars didn't really do it for me, though. I took it with me on a camping trip, thinking an ERB novel would be a great way to while away the time. However, It wasn't exactly gripping. I got about a third of the way into it, but then put it down and didn't bother picking it up again.

Until I decided to Finish What I Started.

Princes of Mars

I managed to pick up the story again fairly well after ignoring the book for a year:

Civil War cavalryman John Carter escapes Indians by hiding in a cave, when gets mysteriously transported through space by some kind of magical mental deportation thingy. He finds himself stark naked on Mars, where he discovers he has superpowers due to the fact that he was raised on Earth, with Earth gravity, and the lesser gravity of Mars makes him super strong and capable of leaping over tall buildings in a single bound (remember, folks, ERB thought of it first). Well, maybe not tall buildings, but he can still jump fairly high.

He encounters one of the Martian species - a race of big, green giants with four arms and hearts hardened by years of battle and senseless brutality. He accidentally manages to kill a Martian chieftain, and is given the rank and station of the fallen chief. He is then adopted by the Green Martians as a half chieftain/half pet thing while they work out if their bizarre code of honour allows them to kill him without getting into a "proper" fight first. They take him back to their "city", which turns out to be the ruins of a city built by a race which died out long ago.

While there, he encounters a Red Martian - a girl from another Martian species that is more or less human - only red. She is, of course, a princess and, of course, naked - as are they all (I can't help but wonder if ERB did the naked thing just for the sake of pulpy book covers, but I expect the excessive nudity might make filming the book difficult). The girl is the captive of the Green Martians, who treat her unkindly (because that's how they treat everyone). John rushes to her rescue, "accidentally" killing another Green chieftain as he does. By this time, he has managed to teach himself how to speak Martian (not dissimilar to Tarzan teaching himself to read), so he can communicate with the girl...

Oh, blah, blah, blah. He falls in love with her. She keeps him at arms length. There are battles between different factions of both Green and Red Martians. The would-be lovers argue over cultural differences. They get separated and despair of ever seeing each other alive. John manages to make friends with at least one Martian in every camp. There's a big battle with a warlord which involves a daring rescue of the princess. The 19th Century cavalryman manages to fly Red Martian fighter-jets without difficulty. He gets the girl and saves the day. They get married and live happily ever after...

Except the big machine that controls the weather is sabotaged, and everyone starts dying from lack of oxygen. Our hero races to the machine to save his beloved family, only to feel a strange tug on his being, as he is magically mentally teleported back to his body on Earth, which has been lying in a death-like state in a cave in Arizona for ten years. He now has new magical powers, that seem to involve not aging, and longs to find a way to teleport himself back to Mars.

It all sounds terribly exciting, doesn't it? And yet, somehow, it reads like Wells' The Time Traveller without the good bits.

Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle

Now, Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle was a different matter. There were many things in the novel I understood now, having read the first two books in the series, and the rest of it didn't need much explanation because I knew what to expect from this world.

It had been too many years since I started reading the book, so I had to go back to the beginning, but this time 'round I found it a fun book to read.

There are these two Amercian hunters on vacation in Africa - one's a middle aged jerk, and the other is a nice young man who is starting to realise his friend is a jerk. There's also a band of Arabs making their way to the hidden city of Nimmr (what is with the secret hidden cities in the middle of Africa? Wasn't Opar enough?), accompanied by their slaves who are looking for a chance to escape and get back to their tribal homes - which, conveniently enough, are located not far from the ancient hidden city of Nimmr. It's the intention of the Arabs to steal all of Nimmr's treasure and, possibly, the most beautiful woman in the world (according to the legends).

The two Americans have a falling out and go their separate ways. The jerk manages to tick off everyone in the jungle (including Tarzan), so his hired men abandon him in the middle of nowhere and he survives by accidentally stumbling onto the group of Arabs (who have also managed to tick off Tarzan). The nice young man is well supported by his hired men, but manages to get himself lost after a lion attack and a lightning storm. He survives by accidentally stumbling onto the ancient hidden city of Nimmr.

Nimmr, as it turns out, is actually one of two cities in a well defended and easily missed valley in the middle of the heart of Africa - both of which are populated by knights and ladies of the medieval variety. Apparently, during the crusades, a group of knights managed to find their way to this valley. They then got into a disagreement as to whether or not they had completed their crusade and found the Holy Thing They Were Looking For. One group said they had found it, and wanted to declare "mission accomplished" and go home. The other group wanted to keep going and refused to let those quitters go back. They set up camp at one of the only two ways out of the valley and refused to let anyone pass. To spite them, the quitters set up camp at the other exit and refused to let anyone pass at that end, either.

And so, for several centuries, generation after generation of inbred knights lived their medieval lifestyle in this hidden valley while holding two things as being absolute truths: The outside world is full of evil Saracens who must not come in, and those dudes on the other side of the valley are stupid losers who must not pass.

When James (the nice young man) stumbled into Nimmr, he had a hell of a time trying to convince them he wasn't a Saracen. Then he had a hell of a time trying to convince them the Saracens aren't surrounding them and they aren't coming. Then he had a hell of a time trying to convince them that the crusades were long over and the rest of the world has sort of moved on. In the meantime, he managed to fall in love with the princess (as you do) and get himself accepted as one of the knights (as you do). The princess was, of course, the most beautiful woman in the world...

Meanwhile, the Saracens actually were coming in the form of those nasty, sneaky, thieving Arabs. They managed to break into the other city on the other side of the valley while everyone was playing tournaments in the middle of the valley. However, the kind of the other city kidnapped the princess, which prompted James to rush to the rescue, which revealed the whole "the Saracens are coming!" thing...

Meanwhile Tarzan was busy jumping around between the various groups, rescuing people who needed rescuing, threatening people who needed threatening, and eventually bringing his own "army" (the Waziri) to chase off those nasty, sneaky, thieving Arabs.

It should probably be pointed out that this book was written in 1927, and isn't exactly politically correct by today's standards. If you aren't American or English (or maybe French), the Tarzan novels will probably not be on your list of "books that treat my racial/religious group with respect".

I can't remember how it ended. The bad guys got their comeuppance, of course, and the various estranged lovers (there were also a couple of star-crossed lovers in the Arabs' camp) found a way to be together, and Tarzan went back to roaming about the jungle looking for things to do. Does it really matter exactly how these things were accomplished?

Ugly websites are not to be trusted...

2009-10-17T23:02:00.001-07:00

Hmm...

I think I'm starting to turn into some kind of design snob.

I found a very useful article on Krashen's Input Hypothesis using Google, which took me directly to the pdf, so I had to trace the thing backwards to find out what journal it came from.

Having found its "home", I'm suddenly wracked with doubt over the validity of the article because, well, the website is ugly.

It's some sort of US/Chinese linguistic thingy that looks for all the world like it's trying to sell me a dodgy language course.

You know the kind of site I mean? Whoever designs them clearly believes in dazzling people with pointless colours and big balloony fonts, and deep down you just don't know if there's actually any substance there at all...

I'm looking at this site and thinking: "What are you trying to sell me and why should I start backing away?" rather than: "My, this looks like a place where I could find information to aid my scholarly pursuits."

And yet, it's an online journal with issue numbers and everything - supposedly even peer reviewed - and the articles (once you get out of the web page), seem pretty sound...

It's just ugly, and for some reason I instinctively mistrust it.

Nothing more to say?

2009-10-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

I swear I haven't read anything new in the last few weeks. Everyone seems to be saying the same things, only in different words.

I could happily sum up the last few articles I've read on Extensive Reading/Narrow Reading and Repeated Reading thus:

"He said this. She said that. I did a study using a statistically insignificant group of people and a dodgy methodology. I found nothing conclusive, but it looked like this and that are both possibly true".

Is this because nothing new has happened in the field? Or is it because everyone keeps citing themselves?

Matching Books to Readers?

2009-10-15T01:06:00.000-07:00

So, following yet another tangent that probably won't help me with my thesis, I borrowed a book called Matching Books to Readers, which is actually aimed at teachers of lower primary classrooms - the K-3 set.

I tell myself there's some cross over because I am looking at reading programmes and language learning and there is always the suggestion that using the books/programmes children use to learn a first language can help with learning a second language (which is half true and half bunk - children have an advantage that SLL don't have, in that they already speak the language with some skill before they try reading it)...

Anyway, the thing that struck me about the book more than anything else was its design. It's a larger page size than most of the other books I've been using. The font is bigger and "softer". There are more pictures. Oh, and the vocabulary is simpler (something not really part of the design, but hey). The other book I've used which was aimed at primary school children was very similar in its design.

This reminds me of books I used to use when I was studying Education, and I've finally noticed something: books written for teachers of different levels are designed differently.

You go and take a look at a book that's intended for a primary school teacher - not for them to use in class, but for their own education. Then look at a book aimed at a high school teacher, and one aimed at a university lecturer. There's a definite change in look, tone and complexity of language across the levels.

This is interesting, because a 48 year old teacher is a 48 year old with at least one university level degree, right? It doesn't matter what year they teach, they're still an educated adult. Why would book designers assume one 48 year old university graduate needs bigger, prettier fonts and more pictures than another 48 year old university graduate, just because the students they teach are at different ages and stages of education?

Why does John Smith, Year 2 teacher, have a bigger page with a larger text size than John Smith, university lecturer?

The Song o' Cap'n Sam

2009-10-08T00:07:00.000-07:00

I blame my boss for this one. It shall be sung upon request, but everyone has to join in on the chorus.

It's Cap'n Sam, Cap'n Sam
The Pirate Librarian
He'll tell you what you need to know
And help you if he can

Oh, come me hearties and listen to me
And I'll tell you a tale of the library
And a pirate who gave up the seven seas
To captain a reference desk.
His pirate heart was courageous and true
But he loved to answer a question or two
And so he decided the best thing to do
Was to give up the ocean
And all that commotion
And captain a reference desk.

It's Cap'n Sam, Cap'n Sam
The Pirate Librarian
He'll tell you what you need to know
And help you if he can

Back in his days as a bloodthirsty brute
He'd ask lots of questions to track down his loot
But then he decided a better pursuit
Was helping out eager young minds.
He went back to school and he got a degree -
A Masters in the Science of Libraries -
And moved to a city that's by the sea
And found some employment
That gives him enjoyment
By helping out eager young minds

It's Cap'n Sam, Cap'n Sam
The Pirate Librarian
He'll tell you what you need to know
And help you if he can

A pirate librarian's life can be hard
There's lots of bad habits you have to discard
And there are some lib'ries from which he was barred
For running the customers through.
And some of his co-workers thought he was rude
His language was salty, insulting and crude -
His jokes about wenches were awfully lewd
And his reputation
Spread throughout the nation
For running his customers through.

It's Cap'n Sam, Cap'n Sam
The Pirate Librarian
He'll tell you what you need to know
And help you if he can

Then he found work in a strange little town
Where lots of peculiar librarians are found
Magicians, snake charmers and jugglers abound
And a gorilla named Algernon.
And no body minds if he's violent and crude
Or cares if he's heavily pierced and tattooed
And now he's a happy piratical dude
And he's sharing a flat
With a shelver called Matt
And a gorilla named Algernon.

It's Cap'n Sam, Cap'n Sam
The Pirate Librarian
He'll tell you what you need to know
And help you if he can

And now if you go to that town by the sea
And happen to visit the library
Don't be surprised if a pirate you see
When you go to the reference desk.
He'll answer your queries with quiet command
And a flash of his smile and a wave of his hand
The most dashing librarian in all the land
And it gives him pleasure
To help you find treasure
When you go to the reference desk.

It's Cap'n Sam, Cap'n Sam
The Pirate Librarian
He'll tell you what you need to know
And help you if he can

It's Cap'n Sam, Cap'n Sam
The Pirate Librarian
He'll tell you what you need to know
And help you if he can

Trailers for Books?

2009-10-06T18:02:00.000-07:00

This book apparently has a "trailer":

http://www.katherineneville.com/neville-fire-trailer2.htm

Funny, I always thought these things were called "ads"...

Stephen Krashen Likes to Cite Himself

2009-10-01T21:56:00.000-07:00

Stephen Krashen likes to cite himself. That sounds vaguely distasteful, really, but I suppose one day I'll probably be citing myself too.

It doesn't help that he seems to be the most prolific writer in his field, and that pretty much everyone else who has written on his topics has written with him as a co-author.

Still, it starts to get a bit ridiculous when you're reading an article Krashen co-authored in 2004, and it keeps citing the articles he wrote in 1989, 1991, 1997 and 2002...

It gets even more ridiculous when you're reading an article that wasn't exactly written by him, but they still cite all of his previous articles – and then you realise they co-authored a couple of those articles with him...

Seriously, can someone else please write about Extensive and Narrow Reading in Second Language studies? And, I know this might be hard, but could you try to avoid citing more than one article by Krashen? The universe needs the balance.

Pamela, Or, Virtue Rewarded

2009-09-21T03:30:00.000-07:00

I can't remember which exam was focused on 18th Century Literature. I think it might have been the Associate Diploma, but it could have been Grade Seven.

Anyway, it kind of caught me napping because I'd never read an 18th Century novel, and suddenly I had to use one for a rather central part of an exam. I'd have to memorise a passage, read some of the book on sight at the whim of the examiner, and answer whatever questions the examiner might ask concerning the book.

Previously, I'd almost managed to get past the third chapter of Robinson Crusoe two or three times, but quite frankly the book refuses to be read. Have you ever tried reading Robinson Crusoe? The first few chapters are ridiculously boring. I mean, more boring than Island of the Blue Dolphin, which bored the pants off be both times I read it, but I still managed to finish the book (once when I was in High School, and once when I had to teach it for a class).

Anyway, since I didn't have the time to read several novels in order to have the luxury of choosing one, I just picked a title and random and decided to roll with it. My one criteria was that it not be Robinson Crusoe, so that left the field pretty open.

I ended up grabbing Pamela, Or Virtue Rewarded off the shelf for one reason and one reason only - I knew Richardson would give me something to talk about, and it seemed to be the only thing he had written that was less than sixty-seven volumes long. Okay, I'm exaggerating slightly, but have you seen how much space Clarissa takes up on a shelf?

Pamela, then became the first book I ever had to read for assessment purposes which I didn't finish. It wasn't from laziness - I just couldn't take it any more.

To give it it's due, the book isn't boring. It's just very, very, very annoying.

I present a synopsis, but cannot guarantee my memory of events:

We have a sixteen year old girl, Pamela, who is employed by "Mr B.", a jerk she calls "my Master" throughout the entire book. I have no idea how old Jerkboy is, but he is probably at least ten years older than she is. Maybe much more. Jerkboy comes onto her in the garden (because a servant is little more than a whore, right?), and she refuses him. At this, she worries that she might loose her job. She writes to her parents who write back to say they're more worried she might loose her virginity, and she should probably chuck the job and come home.

At this point, she nobly chooses to stay working for Jerkboy so she can send money home to the folks, even though they clearly regard her "virtue" to be more important. Jerkboy comes onto her again, and again she refuses. He takes the next logical step and abducts her.

Having shoved her into some form of conveyance against her will, he whisks her away to his house in some unidentifiable locality where no-one will know where she is in order to rescue her. The next few chapters consist of her trying to escape and him trying to either seduce her or rape her. As his methods of seduction leave a little to be desired (somewhat closer to "you, pants off, now" than anything, well, appealing), there's a very fine line between the seduction attempts and the rape attempts. She bravely wards off the seduction (yeah, like that was hard), and manages to avoid the rape by fainting - which, I guess, takes all the fun out of it for Jerkboy.

Pamela is hampered in her attempts to escape by a) the fact that she is COMPLETELY USELESS, and b) Jerkboy's housekeeper, who seems to believe it is one of her duties to help Jerkboy deflower unwilling sixteen-year-old girls.

Meanwhile, the novel progresses as she writes letters to her parents, which she despairs of ever being able to send. At one point, she thinks she finally has managed to get word out of her predicament, but it turns out that Jerkboy manages to intercept the letters and read them.

Now, all this time, Pamela is still referring to him as "my Master", when I think any female character who wasn't written by an obnoxious fifty-one-year-old bloke (who thinks he's doing womankind a favour by giving them a good example to follow) would probably be calling him something like, say, "Jerkboy".

Oh, but wait - did I mention this was a Romance?

That's right, after abducting her, keeping her prisoner, intercepting her letters to her parents and repeatedly attempting to rape her, Jerkboy decides he can't live without her and she has proven herself to be virtuous enough to be his wife, so he proposes. She at first sees this as another plot to get into her pants, then takes all of five minutes to accept. The book then changes tack to talk about how wonderful Jerkboy is and how lucky she feels to have won him - and all along she still calls him "my Master".

It was at this point that I threw the book across the room and refused to read any more. I made sure the passages I had to cover for my exam came from the two thirds of the book I had actually read, and I found a synopsis of the damn thing so I could answer questions about the rest of the story without having to actually put up with one more sentence of Richardson's dross.

Turns out that, after deciding to spend the rest of her life with her beloved Jerkboy, Pamela discovered he had a child by another woman. So, as any good, dutiful wife would, she insisted on meeting this other woman, and TAKING HER CHILD to raise as her own - after all, who better to raise her husband's child than a virtuous, married woman, as opposed to some poor, wretched slut who didn't have the good sense to faint every time he tried to climb into her bed...?

Yeah, Pamela is never going to make it into my list of favourite books. I have to say I'm more likely to read chapter five of Robinson Crusoe than ever finishing Pamela.

But, hey, the story has a great moral, right? If you put up with someone unconscionably obnoxious for long enough, you may get to put up with them for the rest of your life! Yay!?

H.G. Wells

2009-09-20T22:49:00.000-07:00

Hey!

It's the Birthday of H.G. Wells! He's one of my favourite authors!

He's also dead, so I guess there's no point in sending a card...

Cataloguing people

2009-09-10T03:58:00.000-07:00

At some point, a few years back, I read an article somewhere about a library that was playing with the concept of cataloguing people.

That is, they would put "living" resources in the catalogue, by listing people who were experts in the field or had relevant personal knowledge.

I really, really wish I could find that article now, but the only terms I can think of using are coming up with useless rubbish.

Do you know what you get when you try to look for "cataloguing experts"? You get people who are experts at cataloguing. Looking for "cataloguing people" gets you nothing but people who catalogue, and "catalogue people" gets you sentences like "after looking at a catalogue, people tend to browse the shelves..." Looking for similar phrases will provide you with similar results.

Nothing on cataloguing people, though.

Slessor

2009-09-02T23:13:00.000-07:00

Two chronometers the captain had,
One by Arnold that ran like mad,
One by Kendal in a walnut case,
Poor devoted creature with a hangdog face.

I was going to write a "spoof" of this stanza for a post comparing two cookbooks I had bought recently, when it occurred to me that the number of people who knew Kenneth Slessor's poem well enough to recognise a spoof could probably be numbered on one hand... and they probably don't read this blog.

Which suddenly made me feel very sad, and prompted me to put off the post concerning cookbooks in favour of a post concerning Kenneth Slessor. For anyone who would like to read the whole poem, you can find it here.

It's actually an excerpt from a longer poem called Five Visions of Captain Cook, but invariably these five stanzas on the chronometers end up being published in anthologies, while the rest of the poem is left out. I don't believe I have ever read the whole poem myself, only various excerpts like "Two Chronometers".

Kenneth Slessor was an Australian poet who wrote in the first half of the 20th century. Yes, believe it or not, Australia does have more than one poet on the books.

I know about him because I took Speech and Drama classes as a child (and as a teenager, and as an adult), and had to cover Australian poetry on more than one occasion. Most people, though, have probably never heard of him. Just like they've never heard of Charles Harpur, Henry Kendall or Mary Gilmore.

I'd like to point out that Mary Gilmore is quite a noteworthy poet - literally. She's on the current Australian $10 note, on the opposite side to Andrew Barton (Banjo) Patterson.

Ah, you've heard of that one, have you? Waltzing Matilda, The Man from Snowy Mountain and Clancy of the Overflow are Australian poems you may actually know about?

Hmm.

Meanwhile, how many $10 notes have you seen in the last ten years? Did it ever occur to you to ask who the chick on the other side was?

Anyway, I mentioned those poets in particular because they are, believe it or not, quite "famous", as far as Australian poets go. Pick up any book on Australian poetry and you'll find a number of poems by these writers.

Slessor's "Two Chronometers" excerpt is the first poem in the most ubiquitous book of Australian poetry in existence - This Land, an anthology selected by another famous Australian poet, Judith Wright. You can pick up Wright's anthology in any second-hand book store or charity op-shop in the country, I expect. I think I saw six copies of it at the last book fair.

Oh, come on. Of course you've heard of Judith Wright. Why, she and Bruce Dawe are considered to be among the most important poets in Australian literature, and are practically responsible for every anthology of Australian anything that you've ever read...

What? Oh, sorry. I hadn't realised you've never read an anthology of Australian poetry. No, no, it makes perfect sense. Quite frankly, if it wasn't written by 'Banjo' Paterson or Henry Lawson, there's no reason why an Australian would even dream of reading Australian poetry on purpose.

What? You've never read any of their poems either? What about Waltzing Matilda? Surely you've read that one? No? You've just sung the chorus on occasion. Okay. That makes sense, too. No one would actually think a song about a homeless bum who steals a sheep and commits suicide would make a good national anthem if they knew the lyrics.

Look, it's not like Australian poetry is particularly bad. I think quite a bit of it is really good. That Slessor poem, for example, does lovely things with rhythm and pace and is a brilliant poem to recite. I mean, if you've read any British or American poetry, you wouldn't think the Australian poetry was in any way inferior...

Oh. You don't read poetry as a general rule. Okay. No, no. Don't worry about it. That's perfectly normal behaviour for an Australian. Poetry is, after all, for wusses and toffy-nosed gits who can't get a real job. I think it's pretty normal behaviour for most people in the Western World, isn't it?

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go somewhere and cry.

"College"

2009-08-20T03:08:00.000-07:00

Hmm...

A group of students just came into the library dressed as Captain Cook, a couple of sailors and a number of "aborigines" (white kids wearing a hell of a lot of body paint).

They posed in front of our model of the Endeavour and asked me to take their photo, before trundling out of the library again.

Aparently, it's some sort of "dress up for college" dare (ah, residential colleges - what strange rituals they inflict on their residents).

Three thoughts immediately came to mind:

1) That's an impressive amount of work for a dare
2) I'm counting every single one of them as statistics (under "other")
3) They probably should get beaten up in the car park - but they probably won't.

Things Librarians Think About

2009-08-20T00:55:00.001-07:00

Okay, so the theme is "Book Safari", and "safari" comes from the Arabic word safar, which means "journey", "trip" or "tour"...

It's not specifically African. It's not specifically savannah, or semi-arid - or even specifically land-locked...

In it's purest definition, it is simply a "journey"...

So why do I have so much trouble accepting the circumnavigation of New Zealand as a safari?

What is it about the word "Safari" that makes me immediately disqualify the waters surrounding Aotearoa as a location for such a thing?

Ever Wonder...

2009-08-12T03:22:00.000-07:00

So, I've been reading Wonder Woman comics from the 60s lately.

Why, when I haven't actually finished any of the books I've started over the last three months?

I don't know. Half finished books just seem to be my thing these days. I think, one day, I'll probably have a bookmark part of the way through every book in my house (and probably a few in the library as well). Heck, I've even stalled part-way through Jane Eyre - although I'm not sure if it counts, as I've read it several times before.

At least I actually get through the trade paperbacks. I get plot, I get characterisation, I get art... and I get to the end. So, the other day I picked up Volumes 3 & 4 of the Diana Prince: Wonder Woman TPBs from my comic book shop, and they've been keeping me amused.

For those of you who might not know the history: during the 60s Wonder Woman was apparently boring the socks off all and sundry and the sales were pretty pitiful, so they decided to stop making the comics. Then someone suddenly noticed that, should they ever stop printing a Wonder Woman comic book, the rights for the character would revert back to the family of the creator. DC couldn't have this, so they quickly decided to bash out a "New Wonder Woman", so they could effectively try to ditch the old character without actually ditching the character at all.

How did they do this? Why, by getting rid of Diana's powers and entire supporting cast, and making Diana Prince - human woman, as opposed to Amazon Princess - the hero of the piece. Paradise Island was sent into some unreachable other dimension (which didn't end up being that unreachable, just harder to get to than usual), the invisible jet was gone, Steve Trevor was killed off and Diana quit the military, so she was no longer in uniform. She also lost the glasses. And gained a fashion sense. And a boutique.

Instead of her old support cast, she collected an old, blind Chinese man with the unlikely name of I-Ching, who taught her to be a martial arts expert. For the next couple of years, Diana Prince kicked but all over the globe and in a couple of different dimensions - all without superpowers and armed with nothing more than highly trained human physical prowess and a keen sense of observation. Well, she may have had one superpower they never specifically mentioned - somehow, no matter how often she was thrown to the ground in a fight scene, she never got dirt on her white go-go outfits.

By the way, more female superheroes need to wear go-go outfits. So much practical than those skin-tight jumpsuits that couldn't hold a pocket in a million years - and definitely more practical than a strapless bustier, if you know what I mean.

It was, in a way, the exact opposite of what George Perez did with the character in the 80s, where he got rid of Diana Prince and more or less made Wonder Woman the sole identity of the character.

I've decided Dennis O'Neal should never be allowed near Wonder Woman. I've never read a single story he's written for the character (in any title) that didn't suck. He really has no idea how to write a female character at all - let alone a "powerful" female character. It's like there's something in his head that says "What? Wonder Woman? I guess it has to be another dating story. Who can she pine over this time?"

Pfft!

At least Mike Sekowsky actually realised the character could do more than swoon. I quite liked his take on the whole "martial arts marvel" character. A lot of the characters in his stories had the "just a girl" mentality, but you never felt as if the writer did.

I've read my share of Wonder Woman comics from the past five decades and it's interesting to see how the writers have handled the character. Until recently, they were all male, and it's been a strange exercise in seeing how a man interprets a female character.

A lot of writers (especially during the earlier years) had no respect for her, and you could tell. They wrote about a vapid, shallow 'thing' with a heart of gold and superpowers - not really enough depth to be considered a person. What motivation did she need, apart from the fact that her man would want her more? What greater thing did she have to fear than her man's displeasure?

"Oh, Steve!"

In a sense, O'Neal actually did her a favour by killing off Steve Trevor. He really was slowing her down. In a strange way, Perez did the same thing in the 80s when he had Steve pair off with Etta Candy, so he wasn't available to be Diana's love interest (read: shackle).

You often had the feeling that many of these early, male writers had to find ways to make the character more feminine in order to "balance" the fact that she was so strong. After all, what man could possibly want a woman who could lift cars? She had to be weak, somehow, or she would be completely undesirable. So, they made her vapid and slightly pointless. Sure, she could save the day, but at the end of the day, in some way, shape or form, she still needed to be saved herself.

That's one of the things I really liked about Sekowsky's tenure as WW's writer - she never really needed rescuing. Sure, she accepted help if it was offered and expressed gratitude when someone saved her butt, but deep down you knew (and, more importantly, she knew) that she could have gotten herself out of that pickle if she had to.

I think Sekowsky must have had more female friends than a lot of the other writers. Or maybe he just actually talked to his sisters/wife/daughters and knew they were capable of thinking and acting.

All I know is that the "New Wonder Woman" improved immensely after Sekowsky took over from O'Neal, and then got darn annoying after Sekowsky left.

Oh, and the way they ended that part of WW's history? It sucked. It was even worse than the way O'Neal started it. They could have had a big meaningful story explaining why she gave up her "New Improved" life to go back to living a dichotomy in which she could never hope to be a whole person... They could have spun the story out over a couple of issues to say a decent goodbye to the friends and "family" she had collected during her new life... They could have told one last "New Wonder Woman" story... But they didn't.

Instead they just shot I-Ching in the back and gave her amnesia - effectively wiping out her whole adventure in humanity. And they introduced an important new character with no warning - one that would disappear not long after she was introduced. On top of all that, the whole thing was squeezed into one, poorly written issue. I spent the whole fourth volume thinking, "this would have been better if Mike was still writing it", and the whole last issue thinking, "Okay, someone needs a good slapping."

But, you get that.

Reading Books

2009-07-19T18:18:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I wish my job was what people think it is.

Right now, I could really do with sitting around and reading a book all day. I'm in the middle of one at home, and I just keep thinking about it.

Surely a librarian should be able to claim a "book day" instead of a "sick day" and stay home and read?

Things Librarians Try Not to Think About

2009-07-16T16:50:00.001-07:00

I received this explanation for a system malfunction in an email this morning:

Services have been restored on the HPRC NAS servers. A full filesystem, due to core dumps from DMF software, caused the High Availability software to "flap". The filesystem is common to both servers, hence the service wouldn't start succesfully on either server, leading to the "flapping". Scripts are being written to avoid
this particular problem in future.

I have a feeling I don't even want to know what it means. Sadly, I think this was meant to be the "user friendly" version.

PS, the quote is cut and paste from the email - their spelling errors, not mine.

Things Librarians Think About

2009-06-23T21:10:00.000-07:00

Okay, here's a question:

If a person was born in New Zealand, grew up there, married and had kids in the country, and then, after almost thirty years as a New Zealander, moved to Australia where they bought a house, got a job, paid Australian taxes, etc...

If, after moving to Australia they started writing books, which they published through Australian publishing firms and sold largely in Australian bookshops and news agencies...

Would that person be a New Zealand author or an Australian author? And, if you were to have a book display that showcased Australian and New Zealand authors, and you were going to set up this display by having the Australian authors in one area and the New Zealand authors in another area, where would you put the books by that author?

On a related point, if they wrote children's books, and you were going to put together a display of Australian children's books, would you include their works?

Euro-English

2009-06-15T20:15:00.001-07:00

I love it when people in Europe translate their own stuff into English.

This was on the skike home page, to answer the question "Where can I skike?" (a subsection under the question "what is to skike?"):

"In Cities not only on asphalt, also on cobblestones. Along stairs and non tightened ground stretch. Out in the open country on forrest ways - if it is allowed. Basically you can learn it allone. Just study the users manual and attached video, what comes along with every skike, carefully and follow the instructions."

"Non tightened ground stretch." You see, you just don't get descriptions like that from native English speakers. Let's not mention the spelling; it will spoil the fun.

I'm thinking of buying the red ones - purely because of the description:

"red - for all who are self confidentand who are able to harmonize eleganze and harmony!"...

Problematic People

2009-05-07T21:20:00.000-07:00

I had a "problematic" client at the desk this week. He had a problem, you see, and he had come to the desk with a particular solution in mind.

It wasn't the only solution. It wasn't the best solution. It wasn't even a particularly good solution. In fact, it was a terrible solution, due largely to the fact that it was impossible.

However, it was the solution he wanted, and the only one he was willing to accept. He made it perfectly clear that he thought poorly of us for being unable to offer him this solution, and he looked down upon all other proffered solutions with scorn and derision, declaring that they, too, were problems.

The problem, as he saw it, was the fact that we offered a book in electronic format when he would have preferred it to be in print. His solution was for us to magically create a print version for him, so that he could read it more conveniently.

I think he believed this was as simple as pressing "print" on the electronic book and having the entire thing shoot out of a printer for his reading pleasure. My attempts to explain the issues involving copyright and paper consumption fell on deaf ears. He was much more interested in expressing his disbelief that anyone would even want to look at an electronic book. My attempts to explain the benefits for distance education students left him similarly unimpressed.

I think the real problem was the fact that he didn't know how to work the thing - and he didn't want to. The fact that he would have to in order to read the book? Well, that was tantamount to a personal affront.

The really interesting thing about this client (to me) wasn't the fact that he would rather deal with a print book than learn how to use something electronic - you get that sort of thing all the time. It was the fact that he was a fairly young French guy, and I found these things made him more annoying.

His youth made me feel as if he simply wasn't trying hard enough. I felt like saying "Dude, you're what? Thirty-five? Learn a new trick." While, at the same time, his French accent, used with such grumpy tones, just made him sound petulant. By the time I had finished trying to serve him, I felt like slapping him.

I didn't slap him, of course. I tried to keep smiling and sounding like a nice professional librarian. I think it's important for people to know that their librarians might be smiling, but there's a good chance they still want to hit you over the head with a blunt object. It might encourage a firmer grip on reality.

Finish What You Started - Fatal Remedies

2009-04-02T03:15:00.000-07:00

Heh, I actually have managed to finish a few things I was partway through since commencing Operation Finish What you Started - I've just been too lazy to write the reviews I said I would.

So, anyway, here's one (brief, rambling and/or OTT though it may be):

Fatal Remedies, by Donna Leon.

I first encountered Donna Leon's Brunetti series when I was on vacation in Tasmania. I had made the unusual decision of not taking any books with me, but buying them from second hand shops and leaving them wherever I happened to finish them. The whole point of the exercise was to pick up something I wouldn't normally carry around with me - something written by an author I hadn't read before, and in a genre I don't usually choose.

The first one I happened to pick up was the second Brunetti book, Death in a Strange Country. It was a police procedural (a genre I don't usually read), by Donna Leon (whom I had never read) and it was one dollar from a thrift store (my kind of price).

I found myself quite taken with the story and the character of Commissario Guido Brunetti. I left the book in a bed-and-breakfast, as I had intended, but I found myself wanting more of the same, so I abandoned my plan to pick a work from a different genre and author, and deliberately set out to find another book from the same series. I ended up finding Aqua Alta in a second hand bookshop. It was $6.50, which was a bit more than I had intended to invest in this project, but it was a good read which got me to the end of my holidays.

When I got home, I decided to borrow another Brunetti book from the public library. I was slightly hampered by the fact that I didn't actually have time to go to the library in person, but I asked my mother to pick up something the next time she went in.

The result was Fatal Remedies. I don't know if it was because I was so swamped at work that when I went home I barely had the brain power to read magazines, or if it was because I was surrounded by so many other things to read and watch (during the holiday I also made the choice to abstain from television the entire time, and entertain myself with books and "the great outdoors"), but I found I was reading the book in fits, and quite often putting it down and forgetting to pick it up again.

As a result, the story didn't grab me quite as much as the other books. I don't know if it wasn't as gripping a story, or if I just didn't give myself the chance to be "gripped". It was interesting - and more of an exploration of Brunetti's character than the previous books - but it didn't seem quite as solid as Death in a Strange Country.

The story involved an act of vandalism on the part of Brunetti's wife, Paola - done as a political/social statement about sex-tourism. This act was potentially embarrassing for the commissario, but it got worse when the target of his wife's vandalism was found dead with a hate-note implying that the murder was also to do with the sex-tourism trade.

Of course, it would be a very boring police-procedural if things were quite so cut-and-dried. There are a few twists and turns along the way - all just barely bordering on the believable (but then, so were the other books). The end of the book wrapped up the case, but left the characters with some unresolved issues.

That's probably one of the more interesting things about Leon's books - the case itself is solved, but there are threads left unresolved. At the back of your mind, you know you will probably never hear about them again. The next book isn't likely to pick up those threads and resolve them for you. It still makes you feel as though there's something more to be read - like those formal gardens that have "rooms", where you can see the hint of something else through a passage way or past a hedge.

I haven't read another book in the series, yet. I probably will, though - just not when I have a hundred other things to do.

Public Libraries and "other" languages

2009-02-01T16:15:00.000-08:00

I went to my local public library the other day, and on a whim I went over to the "foreign languages" section to see if they had any Russian children's books that might be nice and simple for picking up some vocabulary (in case you weren't aware, I'm currently learning Russian and Estonian).

I was intrigued to note that there weren't very many books in the Russian section at all. In fact, one person could borrow the entire stock of books on the shelf and still have "room" to borrow a couple of books from the rest of the library.

Now, even if the other two branches had the same number of books on their shelves, when you consider the fact that the books were a mix of fiction, non-fiction, adult and children's books...

Well, let's just say the average Russian living in this town has very little reading material. I don't know exactly how many Russians we have (I personally know three, and they don't seem to know each other so either the Russian community here isn't very close-nit or there are enough for them to get their "fellow countrymen" fix without knowing every single Russian in town), but I'll wager there are enough of them to warrant a slightly better selection of books.

Let's put it this way: I borrowed a cook book. Just one. It was the only Russian cook book there, so no one else gets to make Russian pastries until such time as I could be bothered returning it.

And, yes, I know how the system works. The State Library has a collection of books in foreign languages, which it circulates to the local public libraries on request. All you have to do to get more Russian books is ask. However, you kind of have to know what to ask for. You can't just rock up to the library, see a book on the shelf you haven't read before and think: "Oh, yeah, I may as well try it". Is that not one of the great joys of a library?

I was thinking there needs to be a better system (that's my 'thing' these days: "we need a better system"). Perhaps, when someone signs up for a library card, they could have the option of marking their "home language" on their form. For every person who has that home language, the library ensures they have at least five "new" fiction books and five "new" non-fiction books cycle through the library branches each month. That way, theoretically, each registered library user would have a reasonably large selection to choose from.

Say, for example, there were 25 registered Russian readers in town - that would make 250 Russian books on the shelves). Would that make an untenable number of foreign language books? Yes, probably, but if you consider the fact that we have three branches in this town, and all of the books would rotate between those branches for a period of approximately three months before going back to the State Library to be sent to another town, then it seems a bit more reasonable. Also, there's no reason why they can't bring back the same books every couple of years, as long as they aren't all the same books.

And, yes, that may get a bit ludicrous when you put together all of the languages spoken by different people around town... but dammit, what are libraries for, if not to fulfil our unreasonable expectations?

Doodles and ditties

2009-01-06T19:58:00.000-08:00

The Wheels of Chance, by H. G. Wells

2009-01-01T18:30:00.000-08:00

This is a book review I wrote for a staff news letter some months back. I thought I'd pull it out and give it a bit of an airing over here.

A couple of months ago I was listening to a documentary on Radio National in which they read several passages from The Wheels of Chance, by H.G. Wells. As a teenager I had read several of Wells' science fiction novels, including The Island of Dr Moreau, which was written in the same year as The Wheels of Chance, but I had never bothered to look at his non-science fiction novels.

I was pleased to find a copy of this book was sitting on our shelves, so I checked it out… then promptly forgot to read it. I noticed it sitting on my desk the other day and decided I had better take it home – and I'm so very glad I did. Right from the opening chapter this book had me absolutely charmed. It's now one of my favourite books, and I'll be keeping an eye out for a copy of my own from now on.

The book was written in 1895 and is a contemporary novel – perhaps set a couple of years before the book was published. The story involves Mr Hoopdriver (his given name was never made clear) – a twenty-three year old draper's assistant who decides to spend his yearly two-week holiday cycling around the south of England. He has only recently bought a second hand bicycle, and he still isn't entirely sure how to ride the thing, but he has bought the clothes and accessories to be a cyclist and he is determined to enjoy himself.

Hoopdriver is something of a comical figure, and he takes more than one fall in the course of this short book, but he is also heroic in his way. On the first day of his journey he encounters another cyclist, the Young Lady in Grey, who flummoxes him by wearing "rationals" (bloomers), sending him crashing to the pavement. Throughout the book he crosses paths with this Young Lady in Grey and her ne'er-do-well companion, eventually coming to her rescue and spending a few days as her "brother" before his adventure comes to an end.

The book could be considered a social commentary, as well as a comedy, as it touches on a lot of aspects of English culture at the time. However, where other social commentaries might use a sharp, incisive humour to make their points, The Wheels of Chance treats its subjects with a loving touch, remaining gentle and charming throughout.

This is a book set in a time when safety bicycles (those with two wheels the same size, as opposed to "ordinary bicycles", which we think of as "penny farthings") were making travel possible for the common man and "untrammelled" woman. The freedom of movement they brought to women and the lower classes coincided with and contributed to the early feminist movement and the waning days of the traditional class system in England.

This book was published a year after Susan B. Anthony's famous statement celebrating the bicycle, calling the image of a young lady on a bicycle "the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood". This statement clearly influence Wells as he was writing this novel, as one of the characters is an authoress who has written a book called A Soul Untrammelled. Wells does seem to be laughing a little at the concept, but his humour is directed more at the young girl who has taken all her ideas of life from novels than the feminist literature itself.

Jesse, the Young Woman in Grey, has an idea of becoming a "Free Woman" and "Living Her Own Life", like the heroines in the popular novels. In the course of the book, she discovers that "freedom" usually costs something after all (money, for instance). Hoopdriver revels in the fact that a young man in a cycling suit could be a duke as well as a draper, and takes the opportunity to pretend to be someone else for a while. He eventually discovers that the man he actually is just might be good enough after all.

It's not a high romance, it's not a grand adventure, it's not a side-splitting comedy and it's not an incisive social commentary. And, yet, it is a romance, an adventure, a comedy and a social commentary. It is, as the subtitle says, an Idyll, and it is a very pleasant read.

From the New Journals Shelf:

2008-12-22T16:21:00.000-08:00

Canadian Music Educator/Musicien éducateur au Canada vol. 50 no.2

In the Winter 2008 copy of Canadian Music Educator I came across a very interesting article concerning gender stereotypes and musical instrument selection.

Sommer Buttu, a music teacher in Toronto who has taught in American schools in Kuwait and Israel, was intrigued by the gender stereotypes that still seem to plague instrument selection in school music programmes, so she conducted a small study on whether or not these stereotypes effect students in all-girls' schools the same way they seem to effect students in co-education schools:

"Perceptions of Female Students in a Same-sex School: Gender Stereotypes and Musical Instruments".

I have to admit I hadn't actually considered gender stereotyping in the band before. Somehow, I naïvely thought people just picked up instruments they were interested in playing, and then they either took to them or they didn't. Sommer Butto seemed to feel the same way when she started teaching music, then the parents of her students showed her the error of her ways.

She describes a scene in which the mother of one of her female students (in a co-ed school) took issue with the girl having the horn assigned to her because "it is not a girl's instrument and is not an instrument girls should play". I personally found this something of a revelation, because I've always seen women in the horn section of a band or orchestra. If I was going to give generalised gender attributes to instruments, I would assume a horn was a fairly "girly" instrument, and not unbecoming of a lady at all. Certainly not like those nasty, masculine flugabones.

Sommer describes the frustration of trying to match instruments with children who just want to play, when society (particularly through their parents) tries to give gender values to things which should, in all honesty, be gender neutral.

She then goes on to talk about her experiences teaching in an all-girls' school. The fact that every single instrument in the orchestra would have to be played by a girl, and the supportive environment fostered by the same-sex groups, created a completely different approach to instrument selection. There was a more open approach to the instruments, and the girls' parents had no problems with their selections.

In the study she conducted, Sommer found that girls in same-sex schools felt perfectly free to take up low brass and percussion instruments, and only noticed issues with gender when attending co-educational band camps and competitions.

Tellingly, she also found they felt sorry for boys. Why? Because a girl can take up an instrument that isn't considered "girly" and be considered a pioneer worthy of respect. Should a boy try to take up an instrument that wasn't considered to be "manly", though, he wouldn't be given the same kudos. Particularly male flautists. Apparently the flute is an exceptionally "girly" instrument.

Sommer gives some recommendations to pedagogical practice (which basically consist of "let the children play, but give them a lot of support") and suggests another study on boys in a same-sex schooling environment should be undertaken.

Some interesting quotes from the article:

"Research indicates that parents, peers and society all play a major role in dictating the constructed ideas of gender roles and expectations in the area of musical instruments" (p. 31)

"From a very young age, the girls see ensembles that are comprised of all females; thus the sight of a small grade seven girl transporting a tuba is neither a surprise nor an anomaly, rather a reality that is encouraged and celebrated" (p. 31)

"Many participants in this study who have broken gender stereotypes commented that prior to playing their instrument, they were unaware that women could play low brass or percussion instruments" (p. 32)

"In furthering the scope and depth of gender research in music education, it is my hope that our profession can come closer to lessening the damaging stereotypes to the point that they will no longer be a factor in the lives of our young instrumentalists" (p. 33)

Butto, S. (2008). Perceptions of Female Students in a Same-sex School: Gender Stereotypes and Musical Instruments. Canadian Music Educator. 50 (2), 30-33.

AskOxford

2008-12-14T22:39:00.000-08:00

I'm currently filching my old posts from a blog that's about to die and moving them into my current blogs, and I realised this one wouldn't really fit on any of them. So I'm putting it here:

Okay, I'll admit it. I'm including a link to this page because, as a 'dictionary freak' (as most of my friends call me), I think it's just marvelous.

I don't know how relevant it will be to your studies, but the AskOxford FAQ's page is chock-full of interesting things.

You know all those word-puzzles that people like to give you about words that rhyme with orange or end with gry? You'll find a lot of the answers here.

Operation: Finish What You Started

2008-12-08T21:34:00.000-08:00

I'm the kind of person who reads about four or five books at the same time. Yes, I know that can sound impressive (if you're the kind of person who can only commit to one book at a time), but all it really means is a) I have a poor attention span, and b) it takes me longer to finish a book.

It also means that, inevitably, I end up getting side-tracked by some of the books I'm reading and I forget to finish others. I noticed the other day that I have far too many books I started reading, then let fall by the way side.

So I've started a project. Insofar as possible, I'm not going to pick up any new books for a while. Instead, I'm going to focus my efforts on finishing the books I'm partway through. To help myself keep on track, I'll try to remember to write a review of them here. You never know, I just might stick with it.

I'm just wondering if this will extend to Robinson Crusoe. I've tried to read that book about three or four times. Never got past the first four chapters.

Hack for Hire

2008-11-09T17:32:00.000-08:00

As requested: A picture about using a library chat service.

Language Test

2008-11-04T00:12:00.000-08:00

Here's a way to find yourself wasting time:

Goethe Tests

It's a series of vocabulary tests in a large number of languages, but the vocabulary words needed for the test are written on the page, so it's sort of a big game of mix-and-match.

I started doing the "easy" Estonian tests and found myself complete disheartened by how few I was getting right the first time, so I switched over to French. It's amazing how studying English can give you an advantage with guessing French.

I'm going to have to learn French one of these days. And German. And Spanish. And maybe Italian. After, of course, I've got a decent enough handle on Estonian and Russian...

Pharmacy Poems

2008-10-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

I was looking up an online pharmacy journal this morning when I noticed a section was called POEMs.

Sadly, that was an acronym and there was no poetry to be found - but it made me wonder how successful a collection of pharmacy poems might be. At present I could only think of haikus with a pharmacy theme, but I'm sure given enough time and resource material one could write sonnets and pantoons without much trouble...

Taken orally
Prednisolone is as good
As IV in trials.

Delicious

2008-10-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

It's true, you know, you really don't see what you aren't looking for.

When Delicious changed their look, I was so busy trying to figure out how they'd rearranged everything that I didn't even notice they'd changed their name and URL.

No more that ridiculous del.icio.us rubbish that was sooo mid-Naughties. Now it's just plain old delicous.com - and better for it, in my humble opionion.

Maybe it's just the English teacher in me, but breaking up a word with dots just because you can is kind of annoying. It's the sort of thing seventeen-year-olds think is a great idea for a whole three weeks.

Good to see Yahoo! is moving on with this. Now, maybe one day they'll finally realise the exclamation point in their name is also yesterday's cool-factor (and a pointless waste of everyone's head-space - how many people actually remember to use it when they write Yahoo!'s name?).

The Longest URL I've Seen So Far

2008-09-15T23:31:00.000-07:00

The following URL is genuine, although it might be relatively temporary as it relates to pictures of a property listed in an Estonian Real Estate web site (a farm house that could definitely be described as a "fixer-upper"). I didn't know it was possible to have URLs this long (884 characters), but clearly the sky's the limit...

http://www.kv.ee/?act=object.show_in_popup&object_id=942283&search_id=0&nr=64&search_url=act%3Dsearch.simple%26company_id%3D%26broker_id%3D%26recent%3D0%26agent%3D0%26deal_type%3D3%26county%3D0%26page_size%3D25%26price_min%3D0%26price_max%3D100000.00%26keyword%3D%26price_type%3D1%26orderby%3Dch%26search%3DSearch%26building_type%3D%26building_status%3D%26floors_min%3D%26floors_max%3D%26area_total_min%3D%26area_total_max%3D%26area_ground_min%3D%26area_ground_max%3D%26start%3D3%26fuseaction%3Dsearch.simple%26search_id%3D0%26object_type%3D2%26price%3D%26price_field%3Dprice%26rooms_min%3D%26rooms_max%3D%26area_min%3D%26area_max%3D%26floor_min%3D%26floor_max%3D%26not_last%3D%26images_only%3D0%26date_created%3D%26ad_home_page%3D0%26country_id%3D1%26parish%3D0%26city%3D0%26detail_plan%3D%26structure%3D%26land_purpose%3D%26purpose%3D%26withlimit%3D0%26debug%3D%26lng%3D&popup=true

Computers

2008-09-02T16:57:00.000-07:00

People have strange ideas about computers.

Some people seem to regard them as these magic boxes that should be able to do anything and everything they want - and do it instantly. I have found this is rarely the case, but they still expect it. Oh, and they take it as a personal affront when the computer

a) doesn't do everything they want
and/or

b) takes longer than a few seconds to do it.

You would think actual experience with computers would encourage them to see the beasts differently, but they don't. Go figure.

Then there are the people who are in awe of computers, and regard them as some minor deity with an uncharitable disposition. They're almost afraid to touch them for fear of angering the gods, and they always work on the assumption that whatever doesn't work is their fault, not the computer's.

These people are quite easy to please, actually, because all you have to do is tell them that they didn't do anything wrong and they're happy. It's amazing how much joy the words "No, it's not you, the system is having problems" can bring to some people.

Then there are the tech guys. They know it is neither a magic box, nor a minor deity, but rather a tool. Sadly, however, they seem to think it's a universal tool, and if it can't be done using that tool, then it can't be done at all.

Me, I see them as like a species of some musteline-type animal. Cunning, clever on a basic level, capable of being trained - but moody, and as likely to bite you as not. Nasty little beasts, they are, happy to gull you into a false sense of security before completely wiping whatever memory device you happen to be using at the time...

I may have spent too much time with computers. I may have spent far too much time helping people with their computing problems, seeing as I'm a librarian, not tech support. I may still have a bit of the drama teacher floating around in my psyche somewhere...