Robert Sawyer Lecture on SF

I found this lecture on Robert Sawyer's website. It's an excellent analysis of what makes good and bad science fiction. I highly recommend giving it a listen.

Music at the library

This Saturday we will be having a musician playing in the auditorium at the Morrison Library at 2 pm. Lenny's been playing music around Charlotte for over thirty years and he'll bring a wide range of acoustic Americana and blues songs to entertain us for about an hour. It should be fun for the whole family.

...our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts

According to Nicholas Carr Nietzsche said that. The article I linked to is in the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly and in it Carr ponders what it means for our minds now that we rely so much on the Internet for our research. Diane Rehm recently did a show on a very similar topic.

What struck me early in my reading of the article is Carr's admission that he has a hard time getting into deep reading mode. I noticed that in myself but I hadn't thought to ask around of my readin' friends if they were having the same problem. As a TV raised child of the 70's it took me a while to become a good reader. I don't want to the internet to ruin me as a reader.

Author Interviews

The Atlantic Monthly has published an index to their author interviews here. There's some pretty good stuff there.

Summer film series

Wow, I haven't posted here in a couple of weeks. I've probably lost the two people that checked this every now and then. My buddy, Sam Shapiro, who is the manager of the Popular Library at the Main Library loves to put together film series. I work mostly evenings so I miss almost everything he does. Finally he has a series on Sunday afternoons this summer that I hope attend a few times. He's going to show westerns. Not only that, he is going to show two of my favorite John Wayne westerns, Rio Bravo and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. You can view the whole lineup here.

How not to get taken

There is a nice entry on the official Google blog on how not to get scammed over the internet. You can read it here.

I've noticed I tend to get a lot of phishing emails disguised as communication from eBay. A good rule of thumb for eBay users is to log into eBay and see if there is a message in your inbox on the eBay website. If not, then the email is fake.

New Robert Heinlein

It's not often you can say that a new book by a dead science fiction writer contains quality material that has never been printed before. There is a collection of scripts he wrote in the 1950's that is being released by Subterranean Press. It's called Project Moonbase and Others. Pretty neat, I think. The collection is a little pricey but I own pretty much everything he's ever released, admittedly much of it in paperback, so I may have to consider purchasing this.

If you are interested there is a script available for free at the Subterranean site. You can view it here.

The Joys of Reading

Pulitzer prize winner, and now Nebula award winner, Michael Chabon has an essay in the Los Angeles Times about how cool reading is. You can read it here.

Scary Clouds over Southpark

Scary Clouds over Southpark
Originally uploaded by zzazazz

During my dinner break yesterday I saw these clouds over Southpark. I couldn't resist taking a shot.

Short fiction

I love science fiction short stories. Some of the best SF I have read has been in the short story form. Right now I am reading a collection called Wastelands. So far I am really enjoying it. My only criticisms of it are that there aren't enough older stories and and that first one by Stephen King was just silly. Other than that it's been a fun read so far.

Today I did find a list put together by Jonathan Strahan of all the science fiction short story collections he could find that are coming out in 2008. You can view it here. There sure are a lot.

Brad Bird on Ollie Johnston

One of the classic Disney animators, Ollie Johnston, passed away recently. A personal favorite of mine, Brad Bird, wrote a nice piece on Mr. Johnston for an animation blog. You can read it here.

People don't use Google?

From the smart people at Metafilter I found a chart displaying which search engines are used the most. You can view the chart here. I use Google exclusively, which do you use?

Need more book blogs to read?

The always helpful Metafilter site today has an entry that links to a lot, and I mean a lot, of good book related blogs. You can view them here. Be sure to scroll down to the comments. There are some good suggestions there also. Metafilter is the brightest online community out there.

I think I'll write a fake memoir

I see on the New York Times book blog that another memoir may be fake. I was thinking not that long before these fake memoirs were exposed that there were an awful lot of memoirs out there. "Can there really be that many interesting people in the world?" I thought. I think you should have to be at least 60 before you are allowed to write a memoir. I will tell you one thing, you are going to have to be at least 60 before I read your memoir.

The Main Library

Did you happen to read the article on the early stages of the possible renovation of the Main Library? I like what I am hearing from Mr. Brown, the library director. I think looking at the Main Library as a possible Imaginon for adults would be a great idea. I know that teens meet up at Imaginon and spend a day there using the facility. Friends that don't live in the same neighborhood have a fun place to rendezvous. A place that their parents know is safe.

I would like to see a Main Library that is a facility that adults will go to just for the heck of it. A place in downtown where they don't have to worry about parking or dodging transients. Right now the Main Library isn't a gathering place. Those that work downtown use it for picking up items they have placed on hold or browsing the CD or DVD collection. When I go down to do research I see a bunch of homeless people hanging out and that's it. Most other people seem to come in and get what they want and leave. Balancing the needs of transient citizens and year round residents has always been a challenge for libraries in big cities. Books have been written on that topic, I think.

I've always thought that partnering with a coffee shop would be a great idea for the downtown library. Initially I thought they were going to put in a coffee shop and then I saw that a cart had been stuck near the entrance on the first floor. I'd like to see a working coffee shop with its own entrance and periodical collection at the corner of Sixth and Tryon. It could be a gathering place full of good coffee, magazines, out-of-town newspapers and wireless internet. Something like a Border's Books and Music. Since it has its own entrance it could make its own hours and you could even have entertainment in there at night. A little stage could be stuck in the corner and you could have music, readings or even stand up comedy.

I'd also like to see a gaming room that was open the same hours as the library. Right now they have gaming events and every machine is used. A room devoted to gaming would be unique and a huge hit.

I remember traveling to Winston-Salem with a friend a few years ago to see a band play at a club. Being library people we decided we should go to the local main library. We did and we left pretty quickly. It was an old building full of homeless guys. It wasn't a bad library, I'd use it if I lived there. They had plenty of material and computers but it was just not a place that was conducive to killing a few hours of time. What did we do? We went to Border's. I would like to see the Mecklenburg Main Library become a place where someone like me would go the library to see what it was like and then stay for a few hours because it offered me a reasons to hang out.

A Whodunnit

Last week I finished probably the fifth mystery I have ever read in my life. Maybe sixth if you count those robot SF mysteries that Isaac Asimov wrote. I remember the one I read was about a murder that took place on a planet where the human society that developed there loathed contact with other humans. If they didn't see each other in person how could someone be murdered? I guess that would be a...mystery.

The novel I finished last week was The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie. It was the second Agatha Christie book I have read. Seeing as how it's a mystery I cant' say too much about it but I will say that I first decided to read the book because of the introduction written by Connie Willis for her new book of short fiction. Willis names this books specifically as one of her favorites and goes on to say that she learned almost everything she knows about plotting a novel from "Dame Agatha." Unfortunately the introduction also gives away the identity of the murderer. I read it anyway. I had never read mystery that I had known who was going to be the murderer before going in.

I will say this for Agatha Christie, each of her books that I have read I have torn through. I guess in any good mystery you get to the point where sleep and hygiene become less important than getting to the end and discovering who is the murderer. I don't see myself ever becoming an avid reader of mysteries but an Agatha Christie mystery every year or so might be a nice break from routine.

Human Smoke

I just finished reading the most amazing book last night. It's called Human Smoke and it's by Nicholson Baker. The book is a series of paragraph to page-long vignettes about the lead up to and first couple years of World War II. Each tiny chapter covers a news story or diary entry and, at some point in the entry, the date will be given. It's written in a journalistic style with very little editorializing by the author. It is obvious, though, that the author's sympathies are with those who opposed the war rather than with those that worked to broaden the conflict.

I have seen at least one other review remark on the similarity between the beginnings of World War II and the current conflict in Iraq. I don't mean that there is any comparison between Hitler and Saddam although both of them were brutal mass murderers. The similarity that stands out in this book is when you compare the desire for war of Churchill and Roosevelt and George W. Bush and friends. In both instances the Western powers spoke of their desire for peace while rushing headlong into war. The similarity in the rhetoric will cause you to doubt your own existence.

What had always been impressed upon me was the inevitability of the Second World War. Hitler was bad and if it hadn't had been for Churchill and Roosevelt and the mighty sacrifices of the 'greatest generation' then we would all be speaking German right now. What Baker shows is the folly of that belief. There were plenty of opportunities to stop the war from spreading in 1940 and 1941. What is intriguing is that it may have been possible to avoid the ultimate horrors of the Holocaust if the goal of the allies was truly humanitarian and not on an aggressive war footing. Imagine that, lives saved by avoiding war.

The reviewer, Mark Kurlansky, sums it up better than I can: "It may be one of the most important books you will ever read. It could help the world to understand that there is no Just War, there is just war -- and that wars are not caused by isolationists and peaceniks but by the promoters of warfare."

Legal Forms

Surprisingly, one of the hardest questions to answer at the reference desk is whether or not we carry legal forms. We do have a few books on our reference shelves that can be photocopied but usually we just don't seem to have exactly what someone desires. There is a nice set downtown that people were always happy with when I worked in telephone reference but a legal form is something most library users don't consider a big enough project for a trip downtown. It is a very useful set of books. They are designed to be legal in North Carolina.

This last Saturday a gentleman came in and needed a Power of Attorney form. I showed him what we had on our reference shelves and he wasn't happy with it. He suggest I check online. I searched a site had saved on my Delicious bookmark page but it was a pay site and the forms were priced at over $25. We decided to search some more. I then searched the bookmarks of other Delicious users and found this form. He looked it over and thought it was perfect and I printed it out for him. I then bookmarked the site myself. If you ever need to do your own search you can do that here.

I never can know when I mention a website like Delicous if everyone knows what I mean. Delicious calls itself a "social bookmarking site." Essentially you use the site to bookmark other websites. You can then share what you find with others and use what others have bookmarked for your own purposes. That is what I did this weekend. I used what others had bookmarked to help me with the question. I searched for "legal forms" on Delicious and went to the site that the most users had bookmarked. After I did that I had the question answered and the form printed out two minutes later. It's the power of the hive mind.

My favorite use of the internet hive mind concept is a section of the site Metafilter (a collection of nerdy people that link to cool and interesting and educational and funny webites) called Ask Metafilter. It's simple, once a week each member of the Metafilter community can submit a question to the hive mind. There are some smart people on Metafilter and you get good answers from the community. I tried it for the first time a week ago and got these answers.

100 greatest last lines

I don't recall seeing one of these lists before. I've seen the 100 greatest novel lists. I've seen the 100 greatest American novel list. I've seen the list of the best opening lines. Now the American Book Review has released a list of the 100 best last lines from novels.

Arthur C. Clarke

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke has died. I've been reading his stuff for a long time. I haven't devoured his books over the years like I have Robert Heinlein's but I consider his short stories to be a treasure.