Spent most of this week's creativity juices making the annual Christmas card scene. In involves robots, felt, and glitter. Here's a felt heart from the scraps.

Plus ca Change

While home sick recently, I read an article in the VHS's journal about outcries against modern art Virginians made at mid-century. Ross Valentine, art critic for the Times-Dispatch, led much of the complaining -- yet he did note that "the furor sparked an interest in art, but it also 'has given some of us something to talk about besides atom bombs, hidden treason, deficit embezzlement and other historical obscenities in an age that has, I am afraid, become hardened to obscenities.' "

Aiello, Thomas, "The Champion and the Corpse: Art and Identity in Richmond, 1950." (Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, vol. 117 : 1)

Bad Teen Librarian

When, in a nyquil-induced haze, I heard the announcement of the National Book Award on the radio this morning, I thought the "young people's" book was The Mockingbirds (by Daisy Whitney), which I remembered from blurbs as being about mean girls -- it turns out it's also about surviving date rape. I fretted people would confuse it with Mockingjay, the last of the Hunger Games series. It turns out, the winner is Mockingbird, by Kathryn Erskine, about an eleven-year-old with Asperger's.

I gotta pay more attention.

Northside History

Cool blog about tourist homes on Chamberlayne! I don't think of this area as "in town" at all, but one card (part way down on this post) describes the house as "four minutes from the business section" and touts the fresh air and whatnot of being out of town.

365 may be more creativity than I can handle, but one a week won't stress me out. How 'bout ... hearts! Spotted this leaf at Dutch Gap on a Veteran's Day outing.

Place Holder

I'm not sure why I am not using delicious to save this blurb on interfiling YA genres. I'm just sticking it here, okay? I do plan to take out separate genre shelves -- I mean it.

Reading

Earlier, a mom of two girls in the uniform of their private (Christian) school got my help deciding if Patterson's Angel Experiment would be appropriate for the younger girl. I began with the usual: Well, YA includes books for kids in grades 6 to 12, so it covers a lot of ground. Then we moved to: Let's see what some reviews say. Turns out most said grade 7, and I also read buzz words like suspense, thriller, action, and even "graphic laboratory scenes" just to be sure I wasn't leading the mom astray. She said, Oh, that's fine as long as it's not . . . you know. Which I guess means sex?

Now, I've got VOYA (June 2010) in front of me, and there's a nice interview with Blake Nelson (whose books I now want to read!). After some discussion of including a sex scene, the interviewer asks "Do you find it sad that our culture is so much more accepting of violence than it is of making love?" To which Nelson replies, "Yeah it's weird, . . . [P]arents let kids play computer games all day where you just shoot Middle Eastern people in the head all day, but then freak out if the same kid reads a book where someone has sex."

Not exactly the situation I'd just had, but similar enough to note it, I think.

The juxtaposition of a particular committee meeting and my reading of an article in WIRED* about the first hackers has me thinking about the idea that information wants to be free. As a librarian, I believe that . . . to an extent. I also believe in intellectual property, and that it's not fair to copy big hunks of someone else's work and present it as your own. I do believe that mechanisms must be in place to allow the free sharing of stuff you don't want to own, or don't have room (real shelf space or data storage space) to own. Just like you might like reading each new Daniel Steel or James Patterson print book and not want to keep it forever, mightn't you want your access to an ebook copy be transient?

Somewhere else I read something along the lines of "you know you have a pair of sunglasses that cost $150, quit complaining about buying a special ebook reader for that much." Which really annoys me: I don't live as near to the poverty line as so many library users I see daily, and I yet would never dream of spending that kind of money on shades. I can be a tech-savvy[ish] reader of yours, and still think $150 is a lot of money.

I digress. Free information. Free information is great, it's democratic. It's a value the early tech heads espoused, and various companies seem to be taking it away, whether in the form of net neutrality or DRM and other schemes that make customarily legitimate sharing -- like sharing a work via a library -- really hard to do. It's looking like the new ebooks my library will get will be kind of limited. If we buy the rights to two copies of the newest Grisham, only two patrons will be able to "have" it at once. Our downloadable audio does not have that constraint. What's the point of "having" a digital version of something if only one person can have it at a time?

Maybe it will work out better than I think.

*"Geek Power: How Hacker Culture Conquered the World," by Steven Levy, May 2010

At the New Library

At the big library, people often have to wait -- fairly politely and patiently, I will say -- for a public computer to be free. Many like to sit at one work table in particular, sometimes grabbing a book or magazine to look at while they wait. Folks seldom return these items, so I have made wandering over there an excuse to get up, and clean up.

Today's find on that table: Name that Cat: Over 1000 Inventive and Colorful Names. It seems tongue-in-cheek serious, with entries like

"Grapes. M/F. This kitten's dispositions is on the sour side, and he's the first to complain."

and

"Scraps. M/F/ Scraps likes to mix it up with the poodle next door."

and even "Mister Softee. M. For the cat who's a real pushover."


The section on entertainers (and fictional characters) is useful, if dated. May I interest you in Clark Kent, Elvis, Figaro, Fonzi or Ellwood (from the Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey, not from The Blues Brothers)?

Literary: Blanche, Dinah, Fagin, Poirot, Walden. (Not Mink [Snopes], though.)

Picking Sides

Perhaps the best way to see if I am Team Zombie or Team Unicorn is to assess each story. (Note to anyone wanting to rush out and get the book for a young person: there's a good bit of swearing and some mature themes: it's not the next thing to get your fan of Goosebumps books.) (Note to self: can I stack up colons like that?)


Zombies vs. Unicorns, Justine Larbalestier and Holly Black, editors (2010)


"Highest Justice," Garth Nix - middle-weight fairy tale (unicorns: +2)

"Love Will Tear Us Apart," Alaya Dawn Jackson - pretty good love story; why do I feel like I don't get the ending? (zombies: +2)

"Purity Test," Naomi Novik - after various bit of suspense and bloodshed, ends with the line "okay - you know what, just shut up and give me some more chocolate milk." (unicorns: +4)

"Bougainvillea," by Carrie Ryan - elaborate, sad, bloody (zombies: +1)

"A Thousand Flowers," Margo Lanagan - medieval, sad, upper-tier fairy tale (unicorns: +3)

"Children of the Revolution," by Maureen Johnson - hauntingly awesome; captures the college-aged woman's voice perfectly (zombies: +5)

"The Care and Feeding of Your Baby Killer Unicorn," Diana Peterfreund - freakin' awesome killer unicorn story, layered in with the a teen's struggle to know what her faith calls upon her to do (unicorns: +5)

"Inoculata," Scott Westerfeld - he's such a masterful describer of post-apocalyptic worlds and he captures/creates the language of young people so nicely that I'll give this one high marks even though bits are a lot like Ryan's The Forest of Hands and Teeth (zombies: +4)

"Princess Prettypants," Meg Cabot - this hysterical story is the only thing by Cabot I have really liked! I may have to give her books another chance. (unicorns: +5)

"Cold Hands," Cassandra Clare - heavy-duty fairy tale-with-implied-lesson. Damn. (zombies: +4)

"The Third Virgin," Kathleen Duey - poignant; wished it had more depth (unicorns: +3)

"Prom Night," Libba Bray - while I love her off-the-wall humor: an ugly prom dress is an "unholy union of Hot Topic and mother-of-the-bride," another bleak zombie story is another bleak zombie story. Or were those fireworks a symbol of hope? (zombies: +3)

Looks like Team Unicorn for me! It strikes me that there's more room for variation in world-building for unicorns than for zombies, but great writing can take the day.















See also: Tor's interview with the cover artist, Josh Cochran.