Shiva in a flowing white dress

Oh I think Judge a Book by its Cover may have achieved satori with this entry. "Count the hands," ahhhh! I half expected a little fizzing sound and then for the blog to wink out of existence, having attained its pinnacle of purpose.

Head like a hole

Search for "composter" at www.homedepot.com and your search term will be corrected to "composite" and you will be offered various lumber items.



At www.lowes.com, your search will be corrected to "compost" and you will be offered bags of compost to buy.

Appalling. I only checked Home Depot because composters are back-ordered at the only "green" garden store in town, and the manufacturer of the model I want has had to double their factory run due to unprecedented demand.

Safeway has figured out that people want organic milk, Saturn has figured out that people want electric cars, but the biggest garden suppliers in the country don't sell composters.

Oh, but we use this other signal! As soon as your back is turned, in fact!

A gentleman walked up to the Information Desk the other night shortly before closing. Early middle-aged guy, probably not older than me.

"May I help you?"
"Yes. Is this signal no longer in use at the library?" he asked, laying a finger crosswise to his lips.
"I beg your pardon?"
"Is this no longer a signal that you use?" he repeats insistently, doing it again. While glaring at me.
"Oh!" I smiled merrily, as if he were just being clever, "No, we don't do that anymore."

I should have pointed out our special Quiet Area, but he was already steaming out the door. I kept smiling. You play passive-aggressive with me and I guarantee you will walk away unsatisfied. I am a librarian.
__________________________________________________

Now, here's someone who really shouldn't play...

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

That's from the New York Times. TODAY. Granted, it was in the Style section, but come on - who thinks that anymore?

Here's who thinks it, or at least she thinks that people think it: her name is Kara Jesella, co-author of How Sassy Changed My Life, and she was so blown away by meeting young librarians with cute haircuts that she entitled her article "A Hipper Crowd of Shushers." Jesus save me. (Actually, Jesus save her. Do you know how many librarians have blogs?)

In the first place, "hipper shushers"? I don't want to be a "hipper shusher," that's grotesque - not to mention the fact that it's making my spell check scream bloody murder. So does that mean that I have to get my tattoos removed? Or am I ineligible because I'm over 40?

Now, I will concede that a little revision of the librarian image is probably not a bad thing, but it's just so damn trite (not to mention shallow, naive and patronizing) to portray a batch of tattooed, vintage-clad twenty-somethings as New and Improved. If someone wrote the same article about, say, teachers, indicating that the profession is changing because some college grads with eyebrow piercings have joined it, you wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry. And, as is the case with every fresh crop of teachers, a certain percentage of every year's library school harvest will be creative and dedicated, and a certain percentage will be in it for the job security and the reasonable hours.

Oh and besides, all twenty-eight-year-olds go for drinks and are on MySpace - it's just news when librarians do it?

And furthermore, the librarian image has been cranking right along, thanks to new cutting-edge facilities, political activism, and, of course, The Society for Librarians* Who Say Motherfucker. We don't need the New York Times to tell us we're cool.


Alliance Library System's Second Life branch. Dude, we're all virtual an' shit!

I went to library school in NYC, at Pratt Institute. The majority of my classmates had jobs, and some, like me, had jobs in libraries. Some of them were straight out of undergrad, and a few, bless their hearts, would warble, "I've always wanted to be a librarian because I really love books." Most of us already knew that it's pretty much not about the books, and we knew that those Gentle Reader types would either sack up and learn to raise their voices, or they could take jobs as serials librarians.

What impresses me about librarians are the things that these youngsters are discovering as soon as they are yoked into the team at the reference desk. You take your average 40-, 50-, or 60-year-old librarian, and she can answer 95 out 100 totally random questions fired at her during a shift, including complicated legal and financial stuff. She's going to use Internet sources better than your average teenager. She believes in your privacy. She will satisfy your request for a book that can tell you whether or not you are possessed by a demon, and not bat an eye. She's the most ethical, equitable creature you'll find. She raised her kids and never lost her professional chops. She keeps her cool even when her patron is losing his shit.

And even when her patron is a shit.

Not the End of the World by Geraldine McCaughrean - review

Not the End of the World by Geraldine McCaughrean. Age 11-17. Geraldine McCaughrean is one prolific and well-rounded person. She writes adaptations of classical literature for children (Gilgamesh. Odyssey. Cyrano. etc.). She won the contest to write the sequel to Peter Pan. She writes reg'lar old adventure novels. And she wrote Not the End of the World, a "realistic" retelling of the story of Noah and his family, complete with onboard predation, physical and psychological brutality, manure, and moldy grain.

Yeah man, it's a wild premise. Our main narrator is Noah's daughter Timna, who gradually begins to question her father's version of what's going on and why; but most of the other humans and some of the animals on the ark weigh in with their points of view as well. I think it could be an important book for a kid who is learning to discern alternate perspectives, who is beginning to, you know, question the dominant paradigm.

Certainly I've never spent much time parsing the story of the Flood - I'm a big wintry atheist and think it's all horseshit. So Ms. McCaughrean's thoughtful and thoroughly imagined book took me somewhere I've never been.

I would press this book into the hands of every potentially open-minded kid I came across - if I weren't worried about the parents. You can call me a coward but I would really run it by the parents first. I would hate it if a hypothetical Devorah and Lilit weren't allowed back at the the library because some godless propagandist librarian (that's me!) suggested a book that gave their parents hives. Thumbs up, by the way.

Victory by Susan Cooper - review

Victory by Susan Cooper. Age 9-15. When I was a kid, I read Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising series at least once a year starting in 5th grade. There's a movie on the way, a movie that apparently shits all over the plot and characters, which is a damn shame, because they're wonderful. My imagination developed like a print in a darkroom because of those books.

Now, I clearly remember that it was 5th grade when I first read The Dark is Rising, because I did a book report on it for Mrs. Milloff's class. Mrs. Milloff was really large and really very short, and kind of grey and hairy to boot, plus she had a fierce New York accent. She would have easily fit in at Hogwarts. Maybe that's where she's teaching now. I liked her, and oh sure, she was unforgettable.

So it was with some surprise that I spotted Victory by Susan Cooper on the New Books shelf. I mean, 5th grade was 30 years ago I am shocked to realize. It's the same Susan Cooper, I checked. But this book is not about semi-mystical peril in the Welsh countryside, it's about Admiral Nelson. Ugh you say. Certainly Ugh I said. Naval history, god, I think only my father reads it, and I'm pretty sure he reads it so that he'll have at least one subject that he is sure to know more about than anyone within earshot.

But I read it out of loyalty to Susan Cooper, and it turned out to be a real page-turner. It's told by alternating narrators: Sam, a young crewmember on board Victory, Admiral Nelson's ship; and Molly, a lonely 21st century girl recently transplanted to Connecticut from her home in England. The descriptions are vivid and believable and the action is quick and exciting. As with many novels based on actual events, the book has to go to some manufactured lengths to inject suspense towards the end, but that is a very minor issue that most kid readers will not resent. And that cover, well, it's handsome, but a bit cryptic for my younger patrons.

Victory takes pride of place on my list of historical fiction to recommend to young readers who either like historical fiction or are required to read some for school. Thumbs up.

Airborn and Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel - review

Ages 9-15. I like adventure novels: I love a plot that gallops right along, I like clearly-drawn characters with intelligible voices, and I do like wondering how it's all going to end up. Plus I like science. So I really enjoyed Airborn, a book set in a steampunk past full of airships and ladies in big Victorian skirts. Skybreaker, the sequel, I liked just a little bit less. There's more romance and jealousy and class consciousness in the second, though the setting is more spectacular and the plot a bit less contrived.

These books have pirates and fighting, sumptuous period details and witty repartee. When they make the movie, I fully expect the kid who played Charlie in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to play our hero, Matt Cruse, the cabin boy who consistently saves the day.

I recommend these books to young people who seem to like Harry Potter more for the adventure than for the magic; who have enjoyed Anthony Horowitz's Alex Ryder series or Jeanne DuPrau's Ember books. Thumbs up. Even Bob enjoyed Airborn, and my husband, let's put it this way, generally The Economist is his leisure reading.

Black as your soul

Early May peas coming up, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

I am often loath to share pictures of my garden, especially the early spring garden, even though at that point I am absurdly excited about the little plants coming up and I want to tell total strangers on the street, "The peas germinated!"

See, it's my soil. It's my compost, to be specific. Our compost looks like a front yard in the Ozarks. Look at all that crap in there! Even before we realized that we could empty the vacuum cleaner canister into the composter, and hence began introducing rubber bands, Lego, Barbie shoes, and milk carton rings into our garden soil, we were kind of lazy about chopping up the big stuff that went into it, so we have big pieces of corncobs, the occasional half onion, and watermelon rinds in our "finished" compost. Not to mention pistachio shells and olive pits, which, you know, ARE biodegradable, but not, one might say, anytime soon.

So it's always a minor relief when things start filling in a little.

Early July pea bed being taken over by zinnias and pumpkins, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

... and by "filling in a little" I mean that not only did I not plant some of these things, I don't even know what some of them are.

It's the compost to blame again. I'm guessing the remains of the Jack O'Lantern went into the composter, and also some deadheaded zinnia blossoms, and who knows what else. At least it isn't gourds this year. The gourd year was a nightmare. I didn't pull them right off the bat because I thought they might be squash, and before I knew it they'd taken over the entire yard.

A little more orderly is the bed up near where the chickens used to be, that I loaded up with wee tomato plants in early May.

Early May tomato plants, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Early July tomato plants, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

It has also filled in well, mostly with things I expected. I'm finally going to get some tomatos this summer looks like, but maybe I should have given all this stuff a little more room.

Stimulating the mesolimbic reward pathway since 1988

I am very inventive. Someday I'll be known as Frozen Chicken Marinade Girl, and people will be all like, "You read her blog before she got famous? Wow!"

Here are some of my inventions: I invented the best breakfast of all time (leftover rice, whole milk plain yogurt, and Bedekar's mixed Indian pickle). I invented the best way to put children to sleep (sing as many verses of "I Will" as you can remember over and over again until they pass out in pure bliss). I invented the autobiographical book review. I invented orange and hot pink together, but that kind of got ruined by Isaac Mizrahi.

So - are you ready for my new invention? Oh, it's mine, I checked. Nobody invented it before I did. It's a new phrase: "do-meth-tic disturbance". Yeah? Huh? Like it? You like it. You will totally be using it the next time you have to call the cops because you're pretty sure the skinny, scabby, limp-haired girl across the street is about to get killed by her skinny, foul-mouthed, scary hyper boyfriend.

And I'm sharing it with you because I live in a nice neighborhood now, and I hardly ever have to do that anymore.

Have a cursed, wretched, blaspheming, pustulent day

You know, it has somehow got to be a violation of my civil rights for you to wish me a blessed day.

Good morning America how are you?

You know what? Açai juice? Vile.

Plus? I drank the disgusting stuff thinking all that antioxidant power would flood the cells of my body with amino acid goodness, leaving no room for the badness of too much Yuengling's lager yesterday. And? Yeah no.

Maybe it was the steady beer drinking, but it seems to me that the 4th of July was pretty darn ok this year. I have a complicated relationship with my country, and sometimes Independence Day makes me feel kind of itchy, but this year... you know? It was ok.

We always go to my parents' house. Their town, the town I grew up in, celebrates July 4th big, with a good-sized small-town parade (the Governor shows up) and a world-class fireworks display. My folks live within easy walking distance of both of these events, so the whole family comes for a picnic, and they walk up to the parade even though it's usually hot and boring and nobody stays for the whole thing, and in the evening we walk down to the fireworks at the high school.

So, this year it was not disgustingly hot, and the parade moved along at a good pace, and Big Man and Mr Four had curbside seats, and we stayed for the whole thing. The crowd, I would say, was not as blindingly patriotic as it often gets. In past years I've had complete strangers ask "Where's your red white and blue?" at that parade. I really hate that. What are you going to say? "As a liberal I feel uncomfortable demonstrating patriotism"? "I'm not a joiner"? "Makes me look like a chump"? This year I wore my anti-Patriot Act T-shirt (blue, at least), and got a receptive response when I explained what it meant.

As the parade ended, a big exciting storm descended, which disrupted the day's program pretty nicely, with everyone crowding into the kitchen or playing croquet in the rain.

Because of the rain (which took out power to some of the neighborhood, which was also kind of interesting), the fireworks were postponed, so at dusk, we took a walk around the block with the kids. I've never seen more people setting off their own fireworks in my life. What with the mist from the storm's aftermath and all the smoke from the fireworks drifting around, it was a very surreal stroll through my childhood landscape.

Not bad.