Random Quote of the Month:

"There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth."
-- Doris Lessing


Thursday, January 22, 2015

My Life In Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead

As I discovered myself in college through the usual college experiences – love and inevitable heartbreak, near death experiences, substance abuse, faculty crushes and obsessive author fandom – I too, developed an outsize admiration for several women writers.   It was the end of the 1970’s and feminist themed literature courses were in vogue.  We read Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Nikki Giovanni, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Doris Lessing, Maya Angelou, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara and Gertrude Stein with the devotion of acolytes. Engagement in the products of these writers varied, but an attention-getter in any course was the writer with the outré personality; the outsider; the gender boundary-pusher. One could check all the boxes with George Eliot whose personal life far outshone her work for this reader. (After all, I had Silas Marner foisted on me in high school as many did, but never had I learned about the life or politics of the writer behind it.)

My Life In Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead did not so much engage me as enlist me as an admirer.  This book is the literary criticism I would have inhaled when I was in college, and now, thirty years later, I can only admire as a testament to reading, rereading and author obsession. Middlemarch is immortal literature and a life’s touchstone for Ms. Mead more than a century later, but for some of us, George Eliot’s imagined city remains a place both foreign and strange, to which we do not care to return.

Thursday, August 11, 2011

HUMBALADIGGA! SHIZNUTS! MACY'S WINDOW! SUGAR HONEY ICED TEA!

A Massachusetts Librarian writing as the "Swiss Army Librarian or, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Fear and Loathing at a Public Library Reference Desk" (http://www.swissarmylibrarian.net/) did a recent piece called "Swear Like A Librarian."  He works at a public library reference desk, and, therefore, is collecting a list of swear word stand-ins to use while serving the general public.  It is a fun piece and the comments are equally as entertaining. 

However, this being summer vacation, all the Teachers and Librarians that I know are still swearing freely, and perhaps, unnecessarily, as September looms on the horizon.  When autumn begins, we will revert to the decorous public behavior that our students "clock" every second of, and that we wish our young charges to emulate.  

Yet, there will be those occasional moments at work when I am in the Library teaching a lesson, servicing computers or cataloguing materials and one or two students are involved in some silly surreal teenage antics when they should be focused on something else, or some freak accident occurs that can only result from the alchemy of 30 teenagers in one room and I am thinking: "Can I Get A Witness?!" or "You Can't Make This Stuff Up" -- I will take a breath and think of Swiss Army Librarian's list. CHEESE AND RICE!