The Deer In The Wood

We finished reading Little House In the Big Woods to Abby last night. Cathy and I have been taking turns over the last month reading a chapter or two each night to her before bedtime. We were riveted by tales of spooky panthers chasing grandpa through the darkest woods; of the explosive moment where Laura slaps her sister Mary because Mary insists her hair is prettier; and the delicious scene where Pa returns home from an outing to collect honey, pretending he hasn't had much success, only to surprise Ma with buckets and buckets of the stuff!

I had forgotten, in the 25 or so years since I first read it, the wide-eyed cinematic splendor of the books final chapter, The Deer in the Wood. You might remember? Pa lays a deer-lick trap in the forest and spends a crisp autumn night camped out in a tree with his gun. He's going to bring his family fresh venison and whatnot, whatever unfortunate critter comes sniffing and licking about long enough so as Pa can put in a good shot.

But Pa goes and completely forgets the reason he's there: to bring his family fresh meat! We know from previous chapters that Pa doesn't waste any time when it comes to providing his family with their fill of meat. He's a fierce customer, a frontiersman providing for his family, and a damn good shot.

But Pa is instead overcome by waves of fellow-feeling for nature and its noble creatures. He can't bring himself to shoot a single one of the animals that falls prey to his mighty deer-lick. He ends up having this wonderfully becalmed transcendentalist moment as cozy as the accompanying Garth Williams illustration. It's a lovely piece of writing.

Though what really makes the final chapter sing isn't Pa and his inner-Emerson at all. It's Wilder herself, describing the moment she first awoke to the present, announcing "now is now. It can never be a long time ago." Its a firework of a line, the surprise of Laura awakening to the sweet, irreplaceable now of things. Like Pa, she's overcome by the moment, of the pause before the past is past and the future beckons. I need to check this book out!

I think she's a little bit crazy

Of all the things I've read with Abby, nothing has quite matched the fun we've had reading Shel Silverstein together. We fell hard for Where the Sidewalk Ends earlier this year, in the spring. It was Cathy's old copy. We liked it so much that one morning this past June we made our way into one of our favorite bookstores and picked up a copy of A Light in the Attic. We needed more of the stuff. Both were favorites of mine as a kid. The Giving Tree, too. Part of the childhood literary cannon.

One of our early favorites was The Sitter from A Light In the Attic. You remember it. Crazy Mrs. McTwitter, the babysitter who thinks "a baby-sitter's "supposed / To sit upon the baby."

As a kid, I think what I found most appealing was how nutty and invitingly subversive Silverstein's poems and illustrations were. That still holds up today. Both Abby and I love Mrs. McTwitter's super-fried perm, her dotty stare and those little baby legs so winkingly splayed beneath her well-rounded bottom.

Safe As Houses

I've wanted to read this book for about 10 years now. I finally bought a copy and cracked it in late August. I've found it to be the perfect tonic for getting over the fact that we've had one of the coldest October starts in 133 years. Even better, it's a great read about a subject I've had a big crush on for a long, long time. The suburbs and me go way, way back. The one I grew up in, Bay Village, is a woodsy little coastal suburb in Northeastern Ohio that shares its northern border with Lake Erie. It's proximity to the Lake is undeniably its best attribute, though it's not without an interior magic of its own. A nice little chunk of the Cleveland Metroparks hugs the coast toward the center of Bay where it's home to one the largest public beaches on the West Side of Cleveland. Once, in the 80s, however, Better Homes and Garden's successfully shamed many of us teenagers by rating Bay Village one of the nation's safest suburbs.

Manny Farber On Howard Hawks' Red River

Very excited to see Library of America has just published a new anthology of Manny Farber's film criticism. Not only because I've cultivated, as book collector and reader, something of a fetish for many of Library of America's finely crafted hardcover titles. (Though it should be noted that their Farber anthology is not part of the regular Library of America series and come with "its own unique format and binding.") But because Farber's writing on film is so striking in its originality and finely stylized acuteness. His film writings ignore things like plot summations in favor of these brilliant, finally crafted declarative bursts. Sometimes it's a dazzling paragraph like this one about Howard Hawks' "ingeniously lyrical" Western from 1948, Red River:

Red River as a comment on frontier courage, loyalty and leadership, is romantic, simple-minded mush, but an ingeniously lyrical film nonetheless. The story is of the first trip from Texas to the Abilene stockyards is a feat of pragmatic engineering, working with weather, space, and physiognomy. The theme is how much misery and brutality can issue from a stubbornly obsessed bully (John Wayne, who barks his way through the film instead of moving), while carving an empire in the wilderness. Of the one-trait characters, Wayne is a sluggish mass being insensitive and cruel-minded on the front of the screen; Joanne Dru is a chattering joke, even more static than Wayne, but there is a small army of actors (Clift, John Ireland) keyed in lyrically with trees cows, and ground.

Guralnick, Elvis and YouTube

I've been thinking a lot about Peter Guralnick's amazing Elvis Presley biography since finishing it last week. One of Guralnick's gifts as a biographer is his ability to completely disappear behind the narrative. The storytelling throughout the two volumes of his Elvis biography are guided by the words of Elvis, his family, friends, girlfriends, gurus, doctors and the objects and documents that surrounded them. You get to know and appreciate the accomplishments and shortcomings of an Elvis blissfully free of all the pop-culture detritus (not entirely unjustified) that's cluttered so many assessments of Presley.

Presley's unmaking came in the form of an intense four-year slide into polypharmacy and its attending dependence on a near grotesque amount of medications readily administered by celebrity smitten doctors. The pathologists who examined the lab results from Elvis's autopsy found, according to Guralnick, "the detection of fourteen drugs in Elvis' system, ten in significant quantity. Codeine appeared at ten times the therapeutic level, methaqualone (Quaalude) in an arguably toxic amount, three other drugs appeared to be on the borderline of toxicity taken in and of themselves." You could have gotten high just licking Elvis the dude was so pumped full of drugs.

I find it fascinating that Elvis' cultural ascendancy coincided with (and was propelled along by) the spread of home televisions into the living rooms of large swaths of the U.S. That's where so many people first saw him. It used to be that catching a glimpse of any of this footage after it first aired meant you were either a media scholar happily burrowing through an archive or simply lucky enough to catch a repeat of the original.

Now, of course, a pretty sizable chunk of Elvis video culled from TV guest appearances, specials and movie clips is being posted on YouTube, Google Video and other video hosting sites. A huge spectrum of televised popular culture is available online, legally or not. I'm smitten with the idea about the potential this has to democratize media access with Youtube and other file hosting sites acting as informal (and unstable) archives. Sometimes a copyright holder will go after these videos and hosting sites like YouTube will dutifully remove the video at the copyright holder's request often ignoring the fair use considerations of the poster. I have no idea how aggressive Lisa Marie and the Estate of Elvis Presley are about challenging copyright infringement and fair use but there's a lot of Elvis clips out there.

In any case, in '68 Elvis made Christmas special for NBC. The producers were committed to getting Elvis back to his roots. He hadn't performed live in years and his recording output over that same time had largely consisted of schlocky soundtrack albums. They brought in Scotty Moore, the guitarist who played on Elvis's seminal Sun recordings from 54-55 among others to capture a kind of informal jam for the program. Here's a great, smoking clip from the '68 special on NBC of Elvis performing a spirited version of That's Alright Mama.

Elvis Is In Your Nutty Butty

I've been reading the second volume of Peter Guralnick's terrific Elvis Presley biography, Careless Love: The Unmaking of Elvis Presley before going to bed the last few nights. And here's where I'm at: when Elvis was 29 he met this hairstylist named Larry Geller. Geller introduced him to books like The Impersonal Life, Autobiography of A Yogi, The Initiation for the World and Beyond the Himalayas. Elvis devoured them and asked for more. He'd study them, underlining passages that really resonated with him and then he and Geller would spend evenings in, Guralnick writes, "extended bouts of philosophical discussion." Eventually this spiritual nourishment, a diet that included everything from the autobiographies of gurus to books on cosmology, numerology and metaphysics, leads to this beautiful passage on page 200:

He felt a new serenity in his life. To the guys it seemed more like madness, and they felt increasingly alienated, resentful, bewildered, and angry all at once. Elvis appeared to be leaving them with his almost daily visions, his tales of going off in a spaceship, his delusions of being able to turn the sprinkler system of the Bel Air Country Club golf course behind the house on and off with his thoughts, his conviction that he could cure them of everything from the common cold to more serious aches and pains by his healing powers. To Marty he announced that a bird's song had turned into the voice of Christ, and under other circumstances they might have been tempted to commit him to a doctor's care, but reason told them that he would come out of this obsession, too, just as he had come out of all of his other momentary impulses and infatuations.

I'd love to believe Elvis really could control the sprinkler system.

Freedom From Fear

I began David M. Kennedy's Pulitzer Prize winning book Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 the other night. In a queasy parallel with our own economic woes, it begins on the cusp of the stock market crash of 1929, an event that ushered in the Great Depression and all its consequent hardships. This massive economic disruption, Kennedy points out, also came to symbolize the end of an era of massive and prolonged industrial expansion.

The old adage, "may you live in interesting times," seems particularly apt in describing the tectonic social and economic shifts that occurred during the first one third of the twentieth century. Kennedy describes a study commissioned by the Hoover Administration, Recent Social Trends, that sought to detail the many aspects of American life at this time. This included, according to Kennedy:

the Great War, mass immigration, race riots, rapid urbanization, the rise of giant industrial combines like U.S. Steel, Ford, and General Motors, new technologies like electrical power, automobiles, radios, and motion pictures, novel social experiments like Prohibition, daring campaigns for birth control, a new frankness about sex, woman's suffrage, the advent of mass-market advertising and consumer financing. "These," the researchers declared, "are but a few of the many happenings which have marked one of the most eventful periods of our history."

Astounding, to say the least.

Post Apocalyptic Road-Trip

The structural ingenuity of Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Road, draws its power from the classical elements of earth, wind, air and fire. A father and son travelling through bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape in search of warmth, of something better, are repeatedly beset by nature at its cruelest and most unforgiving. They huddle under a plastic tarp to hide from the rain and snow, build fires to ward off the cold, cover their faces with sheets to strain the ash from the air and long for an earth rendered whole again.

The Road is fiercely bleak and relentlessly unforgiving. There's not an ounce of sentimentality. The grief enshrouding it is nearly unbearable. But what ultimately sustains the reader, I think, what keeps us going and makes it worth our while, is the relationship between the father and son that lies at the center of the book. It's in this relationship that McCarthy weaves a powerful accumulation of riffs, motifs and themes that he controls with breathtaking precision. At the root of this father-son relationship is the universal love of a parent for his child and of a child's love for his parent. It's one of the oldest stories we know, and McCarthy's prose and themes have been justly called biblical in both their severity and tenderness. And there's no doubt of the severity found in The Road. Humanity, what's left of it, has seemingly resorted to anarchy and cannibalism, the sky is impenetrably gray, the landscape fire scorched and hope, whenever it threatens to flicker, is promptly extinguished. McCarthy's genius, however, is to subject this elemental severity to the love between the father and son and our own hope, as readers, that such love would continue to exist undiminished in such a bleak place. There's a fierce undercurrent of tenderness in The Road, a light in all its darkness that the darkness can't quite comprehend. A heartrending tenderness that, despite itself, rises up out of the darkness. It's not triumphant, this love, it's not a balm or eventually victorious in banishing the novel's unrelenting darkness. It just is because it knows no other way.

One telling exchange towards the novels end, as the father and son stumble through the darkness in search of their shelter, offers a telling glimpse of this unbending compassion:

I can't see.
I know. We'll just have to take it one step at a time.
Okay.
Don't let go.
Okay.
No matter what.
No matter what.

At the risk of hyperbole, The Road is a masterpiece, a work of fiction both devastating in its effect, powerful in its momentum and deeply satisfying in its conclusion. That, my friends, is why we read!

Words We Say, Or Words We Don't Say

It's been my experience in reading the novels of Ian McEwan, the popular English writer, that he starts strong and ends weak. It may very well be that the beginnings of his novels, Atonement, Enduring Love and the Man Booker Prize winning Amsterdam among them, are invested with such finely chiseled prose and a seemingly effortless command of narrative that sustaining them through to a satisfying conclusion is nearly impossible. Or maybe he just loses the thread, runs out of steam.

But at the risk of giving my inner-critic enough rope to hang itself, I've found McEwan's endings to be too tidy. There's a nagging tendency by the author to abruptly tie up loose ends and provide odd, jarring summaries of the action that's proceeded. Such contrivances deflate and call attention to the narrative at a time when the reader's immersion and suspension of belief should be cresting.

But I keep coming back to McEwan's books because, endings aside, they're compulsively readable and often breathtakingly beautiful. Terrible things erupt out of the most quotidian of events- a child kidnapped from a grocery store, a fender bender that goes terribly awry--and McEwan's wrings the anxiety, tension and grief from these situations with a masters sense of ambiance and control.

His latest, On Chesil Beach, may be his best and most successful yet. And, yes, something terrible does arise out of a quotidian event. A young couple, on the night of their wedding, sexually repressed despite themselves, awkwardly makes their way to the conjugal bed with disastrous results. In fact, this short book, more a novella, has no other subject then the disaster their sexual coupling, its impending failure and its heartrending consequences. And it's here that McEwan's penchant for tidy conclusive summaries is handled brilliantly. For it's in the consequences that arise from the couples failure to sexually consummate their marriage that McEwan shows us how words, those we say and, more devastatingly, those we don't, can heal or tear asunder.

Kusturica Doesn't Do Storytelling

I am against the notion that cinema is storytelling and a film director is a storyteller. Storytelling is for a talk show, not for the cinema. It's one of the aspects of cinema, but cinema is a much more complex picture of the world than storytelling. It's like saying James Joyce is a storyteller, which would be completely stupid. Of course, there are storytellers. But if you read Shakespeare or Chekhov, you cannot say they are just storytellers. They had a story that they turned into a drama. But drama is not the same as story.

-Emir Kusturica, from the book My First Movie: Take Two

Home Movie Love

My Dad shot some really great Super-8 home movies from roughly the late 60's through the early 80's. A couple hours of them were transferred (poorly, my Dad and I both think) to video for the occasion of his 60th birthday celebration 6 years back. The whole family got a huge kick out of seeing them, though getting a better quality transfer of this footage, especially while the actual 8 mm film reels are still in decent shape, is something I keep meaning to do.

But poor quality or no, I'm looking forward to toying around with some of this home movie footage sometime in the next month or two, putting together some short video essays exploring Breitenbach family folklore. Like a lot of folks, I'm fascinated by the Super-8 medium, the rich family history found in the scenes they depict (to say nothing of how these "scenes" can take on their own accumulative power over time and come to shape a family's own sense of history and shared experience, in a word, folklore) and the almost impressionistic quality of its grainy picture. Hell, I'm fascinated by how the grainy, color saturated moving images inherent of so many 8 mm home movie footage has been used in any number of Hollywood films over the years (sometimes gracefully, sometimes like a hammer) as a kind of shorthand for childhood nostalgia, authenticity and depicting the nuclear family at play.

Howard Jenkins gave a Patricia R. Zimmerman's Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film a shout-out in his own boundlessly enthusiastic Convergence Culture. I recently picked it and plan on cracking it later tonight. I can't think of a better way to ring in the Memorial Day Weekend.

Zimmerman's book, according to the declarative blurb on its back cover, "the first historical study of amateur film." Sounds good.

Update: And dadburnit if I didn't just come across that Zimmerman was co-editor of another book that I have perhaps completely unjustified high hopes for: Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, a collection of essays exploring some of the more fascinating aspects of amateur film. I suppose it runs the risk of that dry, flaky prose some wings of the academy seem perennially onset with--though I almost find that with any collection of these kind of academic essay collections, you usually have the good luck of finding at one or two voices strong enough to follow further.

Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2007

I suppose a good deal of the success of any one of these yearly "Best Music/Sports/Political/Food/Business Writing anthologies, and there are many, is due in good part to whoever happens to be editing it that particular year. So, after neglecting it the past several years, I was pretty happy to pick up Da Capo's Best Music Writing 2007 on the strength of seeing Robert Christgau in the guest editor chair. I've always enjoyed reading Christgau's music criticism, especially his expansive, championing coverage of Afropop. And as a nice bonus, Christgau "as the only full-time rock critic, experienced music editor, or that matter professional journalist ever to assemble one these books," as he's right to point out in his introduction, had "something to prove and only one way to prove it." He wanted the anthology to include representatives of the best music writing of the year. And having read at least three of this anthologies predecessors, it's definitely been the most consistently enjoyable.

Halfway through, two pieces have really stuck out- Jonothan Letham's astounding summation of James Brown and his gift of funk, Being James Brown, and Erik Davis's Always Coming Home: Joanna Newsom, a beautiful account of the making of Newsom's sophomore album, Ys. I'm about midway through Elisabeth's Vincentelli's affectionate, personal essay on the long running chessefest Eurovision Song Contest, Bulgarian Idol, which has inevitably leads me, out of garish curiosity, to YouTube.

Close To The Edit II

Over the last few weeks I've been editing some home video with iMovie. It's a powerful little tool (at least as handy as a good Swiss army knife) and I can't imagine there's a better introduction to basic film/video editing out there. It's consistently intuitive and comes packed with more then enough decent editing tools to give anybody the editing bug. I know I've got it.

Reading the Walter Murch book has been the perfect antidote to my tinkering with the purely technical aspects of iMovie. Murch, as I've said before (but it's worth repeating), is an utterly compelling advocate of film-editing. His answers almost always offer perfectly revealing anecdotes, a scene he edited in Godfather II or Apocalypse Now (where Martin Sheens hypnotically intimate voice-over narration--written by the amazing Michael Herr, whose Dispatches is one of the best, most vivid historical accounts of Vietnam I've had the luck to read--is a good part of the allure the film has for me) and how he came to respectively shape them in the editing room and the affects he hoped they'd have on the films -on Coppola and Puzo's and Milius, Coppola and Herr's-respective narratives.

Editing allows for this near endless opportunities for massaging whatever materials you're working with. The ability to sequence, add musical cues, titles, photographs, voice overs, sound design, animations, among other editing effects--can all be used in service to whatever narrative, whatever story, you're trying to tell.

The goal, then, is to make that narrative a compelling one. I'm still working on that one.

Close To The Edit

I've been happily reading Michael Ondaatje's The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. It's a series of nicely freewheeling conversations Ondaatje, an author of some repute (good or bad, I don't know), had with the respected film editor/sound designer and all around polymath, Walter Murch. Ondaateje, who wrote The English Patient, became friends with Murch during the making of the film adaptation of that book. Murch was the film's editor and played an active role in helping to shape its overall sound design.

The book is winningly casual and Murch is completely game, wise and answering Ondaatje's questions with those elegant, perfectly formed paragraphs that I find myself both jealous of and thrilling to. The gift of highly articulate, maddeningly interesting gab.

In one of their conversations, Murch explains the decision behind not playing any music during the infamous restaurant scene of The Godfather where Pacino's Michael Corleone murders the police Captain and Sollozzo.

In the hands of another filmmaker, there would be tension music percolating under the surface. But Francis wanted to save everything for those big chords after Michael's dropped the gun....It's a classic example for me of the correct use of music, which is as a collector and channeler of previously created emotion, rather than the device that creates the emotion.

To which I found myself nodding my head in vigorous affirmation. I can't tell you how many films I've seen that have made my teeth ache with an overload of musical frosting. These scores have all the bombast of an advertising jingle, their mission being to make the viewer feel something the narrative hasn't already managed to accomplish on its own. This is either because Michael Bay is directing or simply because the film should never have been rendered into existence in the first place.

My favorite films have musical cues that do just that--they collect and channel previously created emotion and they remind me of the breathtaking power of music and occasion. There's this great, magical music moment in one my favorite films from last year, Pen-Ek Ratanaruang's Ploy, where a hotel maid who's just had some very naughty relations with the hotel's bartender lays back on the bed she's just made, turns directly to the camera (the first and only time a character addresses the viewer) and lip-synche's a wonderfully languorous, post-coital Thai pop song. It's completely unexpected and yet a perfect, even giddy encapsulation of what's just come before it. The music acts as an exclamation mark. It's funny, touching, sexy and devastatingly charming.

How Libraries Learn

I.

While the Library 2.0 collective frequently reminds us that it's concerned about more than just technology, the bulk of its evangelizing has been focused on just that. One often hears this sentiment echoing through the literature the movement has spawned, this conviction, tentative though it may be, that there's more to it than just technology.

I don't discount this sentiment. Library 2.0 really is about more than the technology. I often wish, however, that more attention was paid to some of these other, non-technological factors. Reading the literature, it becomes clear that while other areas within libraries, especially public libraries, are ripe for 2.0 treatment, extended meditations are rarely encountered.

That being said, this is not such a meditation. It's me rambling. About place mostly.

If Library 2.0, at its root, is about transformation, then we need to be careful to not let the allure of technology, powerful as it is, stop us from fully exploring and taking advantage of some of the other tools at our disposal. This is especially vital when one recognizes just how much the thrust of Library 2.0's technological vision disrupts or recasts the roles of these other tools. In order to work effectively, the technology components needs to work seamlessly with a number of other, sometimes resistant, factors.

Earlier this summer, John Blyberg wrestled, far more eloquently, with some of these issues, admitting that the prerequisite to Library 2.0 was the internet. He wrote:

So now I’m asserting that there would be no Library 2.0 without the internet. More specifically, that the internet was a prerequisite for what we now agree to call Library 2.0. Like an awkward adolescent, however, L2 will inevitably experiment with independence from its high-tech bloodline.

I like that. Technology is the primary agent for change--it's the engine under Library 2.0's hood. It's leading the way, generating the most excitement and causing the most tangible change in libraries. The LBI Shanachie Tour from earlier this autumn provides a telling snapshot of how technology is both reinvigorating and redefining a handful of libraries here in the U.S. (I'm especially fond of the hushed campground introduction on episode five. And I want a t-shirt!) But what other potentials is it churning in its wake that demand our attention?

II.

The rapid, whiplash technological changes over the last decade have rocked more than just the library world. Media conglomerates, for example, are desperately treading water as they attempt to regain their footing and lost revenues. Whether it's the film/music industry fretting over its precipitous losses while wagging angry fingers (and lawsuits) at file sharers, or newspapers like the New York Times (and soon, the Wall Street Journal?) abandoning access fees in favor of making their online content freely available, there's a very real and sometimes clumsy, even ruinous series of changes underway, prompted, prodded and pushed (sometimes kicking and screaming) by this technological paradigm shift.

And these technological shifts are causing organizations, for-profit and non-profit alike, to reevaluate more mundane elements like their missions, policies, organizational structures, management styles, marketing strategies, programming and how they use their physical space. What, they're asking themselves, needs to be changed, tweaked or discarded? What needs to be expanded, reigned-in or sent packing?

It's the physical space/place element that I've been thinking about lately. How can the interest in "library as a place" play a more active role in the Library 2.0 movement? Are we already seeing it? Libraries like Seattle Public Library. Not long after it opened a New Yorker article breathlessly described as "the most important new library to be built in a generation", one conveying "a sense of the possibility, even the urgency, of public space in the center of a city." Heady stuff, and a powerful demonstration of the potential for libraries to be something other than sturdy institutional buildings storing slowly yellowing books.

Or maybe we're seeing it in libraries like Maricopa when they challenge rigid notions of classification, and so pulling themselves up from the trenches of Dewey in favor of more user-friendly findability. Or perhaps new attention to the potential of library as place is happening in those libraries actively evaluating and redesigning their interiors to make way for more collaborative uses. Places where teenagers (or, my goodness, adults!) can let out an occasional excited holler without fear of an accompanying shush. Places where patrons can not just consume information but create it.

So what's stopping other libraries? In his wonderful book, How Buildings Learn, Stewart Brand writes that institutional buildings, like many of the old libraries still being used, "were designed specifically to prevent change for the institution inside and to convey timeless reliability to everyone outside. When forced to change anyway, as they always are, they do so with expensive reluctance and all possible delay. Institutional buildings are mortified by change." Which is to say that their form doesn't cope well with the evolution of its function. Or, as Brand goes on to suggest, "First we shape our buildings, then they shape us, then we shape them again--ad infinitum."

So then, how do libraries, especially some of the more bombastic, seemingly impenetrable specimens out there, gracefully respond to changes in user needs being driven by technological advances? Especially when patrons expect and crave both the serendipitous joy of discovery that comes with idiosyncrasy (wandering/browsing=findability) and the oasis-like calm that comes with continuity? What are the costs involved? What trials must be overcome? While some changes to such places can be relatively simple (better signage, a new furniture layout, interactive displays) others (new wiring and plumbing--allowing for more natural light) can be costly and protracted procedures.

Stewart Brand writes (and he could be describing the urban sprawl of Chicago's Harold Washington Library):

Institutions aspire to be eternal, and they let that ambition lead them to the wrong physical strategy. Instead of opting for long-term flexibility, they go for monumentality, seeking to embody their power in physical grandeur. Post offices, colleges, and state capitols bellie and hinder their high-flux information function with stone walls, useless columns, and wasteful domes. The building tries to stand for the function instead of serving it.

Right on.

What are some of the more simple, cost-effective ways a seemingly static library can change/evolve to better serve its users?

And not just better serve them, but excite and transform their very expectations of the library experience.

Library Place and The Life of the Mind

I spent some time this afternoon reading and enjoying the essays included in the book The Library as Place. I've been haphazardly curious about this notion of "place," for some time now. My wife, Cathy, took a fascinating class when she was a Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning graduate student at U.C. Berkeley called Sacred Landscapes. In their first class they drew maps of their favorite childhood places. For many, this was the route they took to buy candy. Places of sugary enchantment. The class came with a hefty reader, some of the articles of which I've returned to again and again. Randy Hester's Subconscious Landscapes of the Heart, Peter Smirniotopoulos's The Meaning of Place and Yi-Fu Tuan's Topophilia and Environment. I'm especially interested in those places we value the most, for reasons we rarely ever think to articulate. They effect us emotionally, we react viscerally to them, these unconscious attachments to certain places.

One of the quirkier essays/papers included in Library as Place explores "the meaning of library space in the life of the mind." The essay, Stimulating Space, Serendipitous Space: Library as Place in the Life of the Scholar, written by Karen Antell and Debra Engel, reminded me of this unconscious emotional connection we have to place. They write that scholars deeply value "the physical library, often for intangible but nonetheless crucial reasons such as 'conduciveness to scholarship.'" Concerning this nebulous "conduciveness" the authors write:

This theme is where our results got interesting. "Conduciveness to scholarship" was different from other themes because it revealed how scholars used library space independently of library resources.

So, it's not because the library offers a myriad of information resources, the books, the databases, the eager reference desk librarian--it's something else that brings scholars to the library to do their work. Something that, according to the scholars the authors interviewed, helped them to channel their minds and allowed for them to have a "dialogue" with their resources. Something conducive.

And not just for the old timers. The young scholars, too. You might think they'd conduct their research wherever they could get a decent WiFi connection. That sitting at home in their pajamas, accessing online databases and texting their peers would be more conducive. Not so.

"Contrary to all expectations," the authors write, "we found that younger scholars, by both age and scholarly age, were far more likely than older scholars to comment on the physical library's conduciveness to scholarship."

The library put them in an "academic attitude," helped to "increase their attention," it was, in fact, highly conducive, a live wire sparking the intellect. What power! The library has the ability, it would seem, to physiologically orient the mind of innumerable scholars over time so as to work optimally when in its embrace.

Well, alright!

Suburban Trees

Wednesdays, between my Internet Publishing and Library 2.0 classes , I have a 6 hour stretch, at least two of which I spend walking from campus to the local Whole Foods for lunch, roughly 2 miles away. I take to the back streets, attempting to walk a different route each time. I have a big soft spot for old suburbs like River Forest--the majestic canopy of old trees, the oftentimes exceptional architectural variety of the homes, the high octane manicure of their lawns, the lazy solitude of their weekday afternoons.

The trees may still be about a week out from offering their best displays of color, but some, like the one above, are in peak bloom.

I couldn't do justice to this tree. It was was monster, branches sprawling this way and that, leaves still obstinately green. What kind of tree? An oak? I don't know my trees!

I realize that my notions of suburbs are both idealized and nostalgic, willfully discarding the rapacious consumption they've encouraged and the entitlement they so often exhibit. Of course, the suburbs are an easy target for the disdain of those of us who gladly left them for a more urban experience. And it's a complex, fascinating dichotomy-- urban vs. suburban--and one not easily unpacked.

I've long been meaning to read Kenneth Jackson's history of the American suburb, Crabgrass Frontier, which tantalizingly offers chapters on suburban idealization (Home, Sweet Home: The House and the Yard) and suburban development between the two wars, which, based off my own experiences, yielded many of the suburbs like River Forest that I find so appealing. Perfectly fine, at least, for a leisurely afternoon stroll between classes.