Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone by Seamus Heaney

Heaney won many awards for his recent translation of Beowulf. His latest work translates the ancient Greek play Antigone by Sophocles. There is a tradition in Ireland of translating Greek drama, and Heaney honors the tradition with this plain spoken work. Here is an example of very readable verse. Haemon, the son of Creon, the king, advises his father

Nobody can be sure they’re always right.
The ones who are fullest of themselves that way
Are the emptiest vessels. There’s no shame
In taking good advice.

Of course, Creon does not take the advice and the tragedy unfolds. While the story seems simple and reading the play takes only an hour or two, it is thought provoking. It makes you think of current affairs.

Clusty, the Clustering Search Engine

How do search engine developers think up names? I guess there is some logic to the name of this new search engine. After you enter a search statement and click the “cluster” button, a results page appears with links to “clusters by topic” in the left column. On the right side of the page is a more traditional results list. Clusty is not the first search engine to offer results grouped by narrowing topics, but it does do it in an easy to use way. Click on a topic to get a more focused set of results. I also found that I could customize Clusty, telling the service which kinds of searches I would like to perform. I added searching blogs to my tab choices and dropped shopping and gossip. I tried searching several topics in blogs and the service works, but especially good search terms have to be used to get a good results list, as the bloggers are not using controlled vocabulary. In other words, be specific. The tab for searching gossip news is a service that I have not seen before. I will probably use other search engines more, but I may use this service for the blog searching and the clustering.

I found interesting results searching for my blog by name. The results list included a link for the blog as a whole and one more for a specific posting. I found two links to Aaron Schmidt's Walking Paper blog, which mentioned this blog, and one entry for LISFeeds which includes the blog in its list of library feeds. A Google search brought back a similar result, only there was one link to Aaron's blog and two to LISFeeds. The Google search could also be expanded to include omitted results. Either way, blog was found.

Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest by David Roberts

In 1680, the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico rose up against the Spanish military and the Catholic Church, killing many colonists and chasing the governor out of the territory. Before the rebellion the Spanish had enslaved the Indians, making them work as servants of the colonists and the Franciscan priests. Many of the Indians died of starvation, disease, and hard labor. How the supposedly meek and unorganized native peoples reclaimed their land and how the rebellion shaped the history of the region are the central topics of this book. The author also tells the story of his quest for the native tales. He tells how much of the oral tradition is still being kept secret by the Hopis, Navahos, and other tribes. Anyone wanting to understand the history of the Southwestern states should read this interesting book.

Bonnie and Rick in a garden in upstate New York

New York Trip Photos by Glenn 027
Originally uploaded by ricklibrarian.

This photo was taken by Glenn in summer 2003. Nancy was also on the trip. Librarians stick together off duty, too.

Who Let the Dogs In? by Molly Ivins

For nearly two weeks I have been listening to the 10-disc audiobook of Who Let the Dogs In? by Molly Ivins, read by Anna Fields. The book is a selective collection of Ivins’ columns from newspapers over the course of her career. It is rather large body of work. I listened while driving to work and home and while running errands and while doings household chores. I also listened in the wee hours when I was awake in a counterproductive attempt to induce sleep. What was I thinking? Ivins writes to wake people up!

Ivins writes about politics, which means she often writes about fraud, corruption, hypocrisy, and fuzzy thinking. She has a talent for noticing falsehoods and disinformation and has roasted nearly every important politician in Austin and Washington since the 1980s. No one who utters spin is safe, and she especially targets anyone she judges to be “just plain mean.” Her opponents might claim that she is mean and negative. Many readers disagree because she is unfailingly humorous and often recommends truth, honesty, and compassion in government. In the final section of the book, she profiles some of her heroes. My favorites were her tributes to Barbara Jordan, Morris Udall, and Jacobo Timerman. I also enjoyed hearing her stories about LBJ, Bob Bullock, and Ann Richards.

Anna Fields is a great reader. She really portrays Ivins well and nails every colorful phrase, while maintaining a wayward charm. She delivers both Ivins’ wit and outrage. If there are awards for audiobook reading, she should receive one.

Local Wonders: Seasons in the Bohemian Alps by Ted Kooser

My question as I started reading was “Why did I buy this book?” I had a vague memory of a glowing review in one of the review journals that I read. As the author described life in rural Nebraska, its people, the wildlife, the weather, and the topography, I sensed that I was forgetting something. He mentioned having a shed where he would read and write. He seemed to meet a lot of people. He remembered moments from his childhood and youth and thought about his parents and his uncle and his grandparents. I kept reading each diary-like entry, enjoying the stories and thoughts. Finally, when he mentioned meeting a Russian poet, it dawned on me. Kooser is the Poet Laureate of the United States. It is no wonder that he writes so well.

The obvious thing to do after reading Kooser's memoir is to read his poetry, and I suggest the collection Delights and Shadows. You will recognize some of his stories from Local Wonders turned into poems. “At the Cancer Clinic” and “Turkey Vultures” are two pieces related to his fight with cancer. Other poems describe a motorcyclist at a stoplight, a student with an overlarge backpack, and pastels in a wooden box that had once belonged to Mary Cassatt. Family and memories are also important in the poems. Even reluctant poetry readers may enjoy this book.

Muriel Spark Archive at the National Library of Scotland

In late 2003, the Thomas Ford Memorial Library, my library, was awarded a LSTA grant by the Illinois State Library to buy books to support the summer reading for the sophomore honor’s English class at Lyons Township High School. We received $3000 to buy novels by 40 plus authors on an approved list, including Graham Greene, John Steinbeck, E. M. Forster, Anne Tyler, and P. G. Wodehouse. We were able to purchase many of the titles in hardcover and paperback, and we set aside about a third of the grant to get titles in audiobooks on compact disc. My colleague Aaron Schmidt went to the honor’s classes to promote the collection, summer came, the students read, and the library retained a nice collection that filled many gaps that had appeared in the collection over the years.

Like many readers using our library, I noticed the audiobooks. Several dozen novels by great authors really improved the collection. Commuters and other listeners snapped them up. Among the titles I checked out during the spring and summer and listened to while I gardened and drove to work and washed the dishes were three by Muriel Spark. I had seen her name for years but had never read any of her books. I listened to The Bachelors and was very entertained. The story was so British and just when I thought I knew what was happening, the author twisted the story and something new was revealed. When I finished, I went back to the trough for more. Memento Mori was even better, and I enjoyed listening to Loitering with Intent immensely. I was able to get a lot of gardening work done while listening. I also read paperback editions of Girls of Slender Means and A Far Cry from Kensington.

Last week I saw that Muriel Spark is on a list of nominees for a new Booker Lifetime Award. I did not know that she was still living. The books I had read had mostly been written in the 1950s and 1960s and looked back to the period after World War II. At least I thought they had. Loitering with Intent was published in 1981. In 2004, Spark’s 22nd novel The Finishing School was published.

I wanted to know more about the author. I found she wrote an autobiography Curriculum Vitae, which I am checking out to read soon. Also I found the National Library of Scotland has a really nice website focusing on her career and its archive of her papers. Go to http://www.nls.uk/murielspark/ to find a profile of the author with selected photos. Along the bottom of each page of the profile are thumbnail links to selected links from the archives; book covers and handwritten notes are among the offerings.

Look at the website and then check out one of books. Maybe you’ll get hooked, too.

Here and Nowhere Else: Late Seasons of a Farm and Its Family by Jane Brox

I discovered this older book when I read an author interview on the website Bookslut. In the interview, Brox described the writing of her three accounts of life on a New England farm not far from urban Boston. Here and Nowhere Else is the first of the books and introduces her family and their challenge to adapt their farm business to the modern economy. She writes very forthrightly about her brother’s dissatisfaction as a hand for their father and her own return to operate the farm store. She combines poetic descriptions of the land with accounts of the family dysfunctions. Readers who enjoy this book should then continue with her other books Five Thousand Days Like This One and Clearing Land. Readers should then turn to Wendell Berry's novel Hannah Coulter.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come: A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires Old (Books) by Joshua Kurlantzick

I am still behind in my newspaper reading and just found another article of interest to bloggers and blog readers in the Thursday, February 17, 2005 issue of the Chicago Tribune, section 5, page 12. The Tribune is itself behind. When I checked the selective Newspaper Source from EBSCO to see if the article had been included, I learned that the same article had run in the December 15, 2004 issue of the New York Times, page E1. Newspaper Source provides only a citation and short abstract for the half page article, so you will have to go another source to get the text. It is included in NewsBank’s Chicago Tribune database.

The article tells how a few lucky blog writers have used the popularity of their blogs to convince book publishers to accept books that they have written, in some cases based on the blogs and in other cases on totally different subjects. Some publishers have even approached bloggers with book ideas. Most of these books deal with the war in Iraq or politics or other hot topics, but memoirs and novels have also been contracted. Some six figure advances have been offered.

I suspect there are many bloggers who would appreciate a lucrative book deal. I also suspect that the bloggers who have gotten deals write good sentences and paragraphs, do not confuse readers with little known acronyms, define new terms, and proof their entries before publishing to their blogs. Knowledge that blogging could lead to riches might lead to better writing for blogs. We can all dream.

Library Dust by Michael McGrorty

Library Dust is a blog from Michael McGrorty, a new librarian, who has also been a U.S. Navy enlistee, a labor investigator, a private investigator, a probation officer, a novelist, and a poet. Writing is obviously very important to him. Many of his entries on Library Dust are fully developed essays that could easily fit in a magazine or newspaper. His December 28 entry about the fate of the library in Salinas, California is eloquent. He write to us as if we are friends. I enjoyed reading about his pickup truck in his review of the book High and Mighty by Keith Bradsher. You do not have to be a librarian to understand Library Dust. We should all take writing lessons from Michael McGrorty.

Senegal's Entrepreneurs Can't Just Look Out for No. 1 by Laurie Goering

I am often a day or two behind in my newspaper reading. This morning while on the exercise bike, I came across this article by Laurie Goering on page 10 of the Thursday, February 17 issue of the Chicago Tribune, near west edition.        I’m not making a link because the paper will tie you up with passwords and will want to extract some cash from you, unless you already have an online account. I recommend getting the article from the paper in your local library if you are in the Chicago area or finding it through the NewsBank or Proquest databases for the Chicago Tribune. It is not one of the selected articles added by EBSCO to its Newspaper Source as yet. Eleven other articles from that day’s paper have been added, three of which are international stories. There are thirty-three stories from the Wednesday edition, so it may still be added.

Laurie Goering often writes interesting articles from foreign locations. I think she has been in Africa for several years now. She was in South America when I first noticed her articles. I have not noticed a calendar pattern to her reports. They seem occasional. They rarely make front page. I always read them when I find them.

This report describes the efforts of many people in Senegal to better their lives through hard work. Mouhamadou Moustapha Anne is shown sewing couch cushions with an old Singer sewing machine. He sells his couches from the median of a road in Dakar, and his earning support his extended family and distant relatives. Another photo shows salon owner Nabou Diagne washing a woman’s hair. She aspires to a good life through business success. Like many Senegalese business people they share with those in need. Sharing is strategy for change. Another group of businessmen pooled their funds to start their own bank when they found the big banks would never give them loans.

The article includes statements from successful exporters and government officials, telling why it is so hard to get ahead in Senegal. Various industries and living conditions are described. As a librarian, I appreciate the map and table profiling the country that accompany this nearly full page article.

Next time someone tells you that third world people are poor because they are lazy and will not work, wave this article at them!

Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver

I was a little late noticing Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver. I had ordered the book when it was first reviewed, but I did not read it until after I saw the author on a CPAN-2 book discussion. I was impressed by her wit and rhetoric. The very next week, my minister quoted her in a sermon. I moved the book to the top of my reading list.

Kingsolver lives outside Tucson, Arizona, gardening, raising her daughters, and writing novels and essays. While she is most known for her novels, this is a collection of her published essays, many in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack and subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. My favorite is a four-page piece about forgiveness titled “Going to Japan.” It is followed in the book by “Life is Precious, or It’s Not,” which discusses the mixed messages our children get about justified and unjustified use of weapons to kill. Throughout the book Kingsolver questions how our daily lives contribute to the world crisis and how to live an ethical life. The decisions you make every day are important. This book was written in 2002 but is still timely. Every public library should have this book.

Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family by Ronne Hartfield

I enjoy reading memoirs. I am not alone, as the autobiographical titles that I add to my library's collection are fairly popular with readers. One of the best new additions to our collection is Another Way Home by Ronne Hartfield.

Shepherd, known as “Day” or “Dearest,” was born in Louisiana in 1899. Her father was a white plantation owner and her mother was one of the daughters of a family that had been in service on the plantation for generations. Mathematically, she was seven eights white, if you define someone by ancestors, but she adhered to the conventions of the time and identified herself as “colored.” With her fair skin, she moved between cultures easily and often took jobs that were reserved for whites in New Orleans and later in Chicago where she arrived in 1918. Eventually she settled into the African-American community of the South Side of Chicago, married, and raised a family. As a mother, she told her children all the family stories. Now the author, her daughter, has woven these stories into her own memories of growing up on the South Side and stories about race relations in the city. What I liked was how well the family’s life was described. You learn about the father’s jobs, the children’s schools and friends, and the mother’s caring for the family. You learn about mending clothes and when to bring out the good china. It is an intimate portrait, which emphasizes the similarities between races more than differences. I recommend this book to readers who enjoy biographies.

Hannah Coulter: A Novel by Wendell Berry

I am starting my blog with a review of one of the best books that I have read in a long time. This is saying something, as I do read a lot. Being a person who grew up in a rural setting but moved to a suburb, I find this book about rural lives is very thought provoking.

Wendell Berry is a poet, novelist, and essayist, who has often written about rural America, the environment, and moral values. He included all of these elements in Hannah Coulter, which is a first person narrative about a good woman who has led a good life on farms in Kentucky, just south of the Ohio River. During the Depression of the 1930s and the during the Second World War, the community thrives because the farmers and their families naturally form a fellowship and work for each other as needed. Uncle Burley, one of the secondary characters, is known to have worked on every farm in the area without ever being paid a dime. After the war, the cohesion begins to unravel. As the century ends her children and grandchildren have scattered to cities near and far. A question that Hannah asks is whether her children's lives are better than her own.

This would be a good book for discussion groups. I have recommended it to numerous friends.