I think my optic nerves are strained

Due to excessive eyerolling, of course. But how can something like this be met with anything else? Not to say Andy's post is eyeroll-worthy, but the topic at hand is a further plummet into ridiculousness plaguing the shelves of school and public libraries, and more to the point, why am I being asked to take seriously a study on profanity conducted by Brigham Young University?

Are we going to pretend now that BYU has some sort of objectivity when it comes to a subject like this? Even if the academics who conducted the study aren't church members, they're still under pressure to present data and conclusions which jibe with BYU's goals and image (and which fall within the parameters of the school's position on academic freedom). Of course they're going to suggest that books (books, of all things) should be rated. Think of the children!

(Speaking of the children, here is my teenage LDS experience: reading curse words in books and hearing curse words in music, films, and from real live humans did not make me any more inclined to swear. Indeed I was nigh on terrified of profanity coming out of my mouth. Hell, I still live in fear of letting an F-bomb slip out in front of my mother. Once upon a time in high school my mom critiqued a short story I had written, and her major complaint was that a character took the Lord's name in vain. One of my good friends likes to tell the story of the first time she heard me curse--according to her I blushed like a fire hydrant. By the way, I was nineteen by this point. Surely everyone recalls the horrible things I read as a kid? They must have had a delayed effect.)

Rating children's, middle grade, and YA fiction would provide yet another excuse for parents to not be parents and yet more ways for libraries to be bullied into pulling books off shelves regardless of their buying and evaluation policies. But come on, if you're not policing your kid's reading (or listening, or viewing), no one else should be expected to do it for you. The role of librarians is to provide the most comprehensive array of media possible for patrons and to help patrons select media suitable to their tastes and needs. That is NOT the same as collating a list of all perceivable offenses for each book in the system. As Andy indicates in his post linked above, stickering books with a rating system provides a shortcut for people to be preemptively offended--if the book is OBVIOUSLY bad news, why bother to read and evaluate it? There is no such thing as a rating system that fits everyone and is completely objective, nor should there be. This whole business smacks of the continual underestimation of youth patrons and the increasing bent to fob parental and personal responsibility off on someone else, not to mention the whole distrusting-children angle. Yeah, I don't have kids, yeah, I don't want to have kids, but I was a kid once and one of my very favorite growing-up memories is the knowledge that my mother trusted me and let me use my library card as I saw fit.

And if books were rated by some outside body (a literary version of the MPAA or whatnot), guess what? That would be a barrier to purchase for both the general buying public and libraries. I'm waiting for publishers to scream about this, and hoping they do so. The bottom line for me is that there is no integrity to this study and godfuckingdammit I am annoyed that anyone should have to act like there is. I'm annoyed that this idea of rating YA books has been put into people's minds by an institutional body interested chiefly in backing up its religious overseers. I'm annoyed at the mere thought of giving more opportunities for the willfully ignorant to boil down books (or music or TV or film) to X number of curse words, context-free and inanely reductive. Let's be clear--I detest both the MPAA and the RIAA's Parental Advisory Labels, and I really do not want to see literature be subjected to these kinds of archaic, effectively meaningless systems.

Things I do in my free time

Pretty much the only independent bookstores in my area is a place called Mojo Books and Music. It is heftily hip and quite a good place all around: a great selection of books of all genres plus vinyl and CDs, and they just expanded to include a coffee and tea bar. It is one of my favorite places and I give them a reasonable amount of custom, usually in the fantasy and graphic novel areas.

It is this last that concerned me yesterday. Last week the store's owner put out a call for someone to organize their selection of graphic novels and related books in exchange for some store credit, and I volunteered. So on Tuesday afternoon I went in and spent five hours rearranging things. It was...fun. Well, duh. I don't mind shelving and organizing things, and believe me, their collection needed it. It ended up being delineated thus:

+DC and imprints (Vertigo, Wildstorm)
+Marvel
+independents with sizable collections: Dark Horse, Top Cow, Image
+other independents
+cartoons and strips
+retrospectives/history-of-comics titles
+how-tos for art and scripting
+oversized items
+memoirs and oddities

Whew! It was good exercise. Shelving is, especially unwieldy things like trade paperback collections. I also noticed a few things. First, within the collection there were about three times as many Marvel titles as DC or any of the independents; DC, Vertigo, and Wildstorm together made up about a shelf and a half, while Marvel took up four shelves. SOMEONE nearby is a Marvel fan (or was). Second, between the two major publishers there was a fractional amount of titles featuring female characters: Marvel had a few Elektra, a She-Hulk, and an Essential Spider-Woman, while DC had some Supergirl (I must've bought their last Wonder Woman trade). Both have teams including female characters (and believe me, there are TONS of X-Men and Justice League/Society trades on Mojo's shelves), but I was interested to see that very few of either publisher's lady-specific titles and teams were present.

I am choosing to be optimistic about this phenomenon and chalk it up to the fact that the people in my area who buy and read things like Heralds and Birds of Prey want to KEEP them, rather than sell or trade them to a used bookstore. To that end, I'll be using some of my store credit to nab the two trades of Gotham Central I spied among the DC offerings.

Librarian's joys

Now that my super-srs-bzns posting is over with, we here at Ye Old Blogge can see a return to the happily pointless posting of yore! With that said, I was ruminating the other day (literally; I was eating an apple and thinking at the same time) on why, exactly, I chose this profession--being that there are No Jobs--and came up with a small set of pleasing observations. Behold:

+I like research. And people tend to ask you things when you are sitting behind a reference desk or wandering around a library looking Knowledgeable. Sometimes they are not-very-interesting things ("Miss, where's the pencil sharpener?") and sometimes they are very-interesting things ("Is this book by...*checks author* Sarah Dessen any good?") and sometimes they are long-involved-but-interesting things ("I need information about America's military presence in Pakistan but I don't know how to use this database"). FUN TIMES, with no sarcasm added! I love research.

+Attendant to that, I like to feel smart. Depending on the population with which you work, your patrons may or may not be generally knowledgeable about research and library resources (and even if you work in an academic library, the students might not know shit). This provides lots of opportunities to look AND feel AND BE SMART! A woman I helped with Excel the other day was practically beside herself with how smart I was. Note: I hate Excel and am not very great with it. But I helped her with what she needed to do, and she was grateful, and I felt warm and fuzzy inside about my helpfulness and my brainmeats and the world was a bit of a better place.

+I like talking about things I like. You, as a reader of this blog, may have noted this. Most librarians love to talk about things they like, whether that is books, e-books, e-book readers, iPads and other techy things, computer coding, cataloguing, social media, or music archiving. My Thing is books, of course, and oh let me tell you how many sizes my heart grows when someone asks me about a book (it puts the Grinch's TO SHAME). The very-interesting question of Point #1 actually happened at my internship--at a high school--and I nearly exploded with YES IT IS AWESOME YES SARAH DESSEN IS AWESOME YES TELL ME IF YOU LIKE IT NEXT TIME I SEE YOU. A similar thing happened the other day with Fire by Kristin Cashore and the new Serenity graphic novel, The Shepherd's Tale. So much sqee. At my workplace, a patron asked if we had a copy of Anne of Green Gables. Since this is a tiny academic library, I had to regretfully say no...and offer to lend her my copy. Because I mean really. IT'S MOTHERFUCKING ANNE SHIRLEY PEOPLE. The answer is always yes.

+I like (re)discovering things I like. Working in a library is, of course, a primo opportunity to discover either for the first time or anew some awesome stuff. As I was doing inventory this past month at my internship, I had the distinct pleasure of going along every fiction shelf and having the internal squee upon seeing all my favorite titles in the collection. Hooray, I thought, look at all the Westerfeld! Look, three editions of Burmese Days! LOOK JO WALTON BOOKS!! I have also had the fun-times of discovering many amazing new titles and authors, including Maggie Stiefvater and Justina Chen Headley.

And that is what I have--for now. I'm sure the list will grow. It helps to remind myself, sometimes.

Among Others (here be a self-centered review)

One of my favorite living authors is Jo Walton. I fell in very predictable love with her Sulien books--they're alternate mythology for Arthurian nuts like me--and then read all her other novels. All are brilliant, just fucking brilliant. She just published her newest, Among Others, which may not be her best (it's so hard with an author like her) but is certainly the most important book I have read in a long while. I read it in a day--today in fact, I just set it down about fifteen minutes ago. I should probably put this off until I can construct a REAL review, but I just can't, like I couldn't stop reading the book.

Because, as la-ti-da as it sounds, this book was written for me. I have been waiting for it since I was Mori's age, fifteen and frightened and nervy and confused and reading everything I could get my hands on, even fluffy crap like Piers Anthony, who really is like Chaucer (just think about it). It is written for librarians, because Mori understands what libraries are and what librarians do and how important they are. She is in love with them the way I was when I read my way through the science fiction aisle from Anderson to Wolverton (we didn't have any Zelazny), the way I still am. Her librarians, Miss Carroll and Greg, are the librarians I strive to be. Eight books never would have been enough to tide me over for a week.

Mori daydreams about meeting C.S. Lewis. Haven't we all been there? Too embarrassing. He's dead! Thomas Hardy is dead (Mori would not approve of my love for Hardy, but there it is). Tamora Pierce is alive but there's a snowball's chance in hell that I'll ever meet her! And yet.

I want to talk to Mori. I want to ask her if she has read any Terry Pratchett yet, or any more of Cherryh. I want to know if she thinks Dan Simmons is a hack or amazing.

Reading Mori was like reading my own soul. It is such a selfish thing. This is a selfish review. I haven't even told you what the book is ABOUT, have I? But I can't resist; everything is there, everything. The undertone of superiority in Mori's voice when she compares her fellow female students sharing lipstick to Susan in The Last Battle, her air of sober cosmopolitanism when considering adult topics like anarchy and homosexuality. The affirmation of an author you like liking another author you like (with the modern version of this being my glee at watching Neil Gaiman Tweet to Robin McKinley). The outrage at authorial affronts: how dare Lord Foul's Bane compare itself to The Lord of the Rings? How dare Lewis intend Narnia as an allegory? For my part, how dare Redwall compare itself to Watership Down?

Mori's yearning for a karass (God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut)speaks to every person who has ever experienced the profound loneliness of, as Miss Carroll says, not having a chance to talk to people about things that matter to you. Her joy at finding that karass, at finding out that there are other people like you, really! people who read what you read and want to talk to you about it, is palpable and true. And there are. There are other people. Clearly Walton is one, clearly her childhood was on the same dramroad as mine, otherwise how would she have known just what would make me cry and say, Yes, that is how it is? It is not just about being a misfit. It's about books. What it feels like to love books and to believe that no real person could ever be as good a friend as The Once and Future King (my Lord of the Rings), to rely on them and use them and learn from them. It is a love story and a tribute to the power of books.

Film Fantasy Friday: PSA Edition

'Allo, dear readers. It's That Time of the Week again, but before we hop to, I'd like to put the word about that tomorrow, February 5th, is Save Our Libraries Day! It started in the UK, but I want to see it spreading elsewhere too. Public libraries particularly need the love and support of their patrons. So turn out tomorrow in droves, readers--Internetters--researchers--homeless folks who need to use the bathroom--parents and kids! Check out books and movies, get a library card if you don't have one, ask the reference desk for helping with your genealogy, use the system's online resources. Show your support for our greatest institution.

With that, the book for this week features a librarian. The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman is a strange little tale with few characters but atmosphere in spades--bonus, it contains lightning strikes, fairy tales, sex, and Florida. Below are the characters you really need to know:

The Ice Queen: played by Rachel Weisz, the unnamed heroine of the novel moves to Florida after her grandmother's death only to be struck by lightning...a bizarre occurrence which will shape the rest of her life.

Ned: played by Matthew Gray Gubler, Ned is the heroine's older brother, a professor at a Florida college. He is dying of cancer (yeah, it's a real cheery book).

Nora: played by Emily Blunt, Nora is Ned's chic, distant wife.

Lazarus Jones: played by Michael Pitt, Lazarus is a man who died and came back to life after being struck by lightning. His body bears this evidence--he radiates heat, can turn an ice cube to steam by holding it in his mouth, and he has a strange mark on his back.

And that's how Diana casts it. All images pulled from Google and Wikipedia. Now go show your local politicians how much you love your library!

The travails of the librarian

So, something I have noticed since setting out on my career quest is that whenever I speak to someone who doesn't know me well or someone who is a stranger--so, people who work in my college but are in different departments, friends of friends, etc.--once they find out that I am and am going to be forevermore a librarian, they will then say something along the lines of, Cool! I hear you can make a lot of money in library administration/law librarianship/as the Librarian of Congress.

Ok, not really that last, but the upshot is that when people find that they are talking to someone who is or wants to be a librarian, they immediately try to think of a way in which that career would be lucrative. I suppose this happens to teachers, postal workers, and other civil servants too, but my experience is my own. And that is that the person I'm talking to then seems to be nonplussed and/or embarrassed when I say, Well actually, I'm planning to work as a public librarian. With teenagers.

PEOPLE: YOU ARE MISSING THE POINT. I am not in this for the moola. I don't know anyone who is. People who are in librarianship for the dolla dolla bills are probably a little deluded (I mean, as far as I know, the current Librarian of Congress isn't actually a librarian. I think he is a historian, but predictably, the Wikipedia entry doesn't STATE HIS DEGREE. This is because most of America is shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED that one must have at least a master's degree to claim the title "librarian". I hate you all).

Frankly I think it is a little sad that people feel they must pander to me upon hearing of my modest career goals. It does not speak well to the common health of our society. Also, look at this bitch and tell me YOU don't want to be a librarian now:

(Babs will fuck you up with her LIS skillz)

Unrelatedly, tomorrow I am introducing a new weekly thingamajigger on this here blog. Stay tuned!

Rocktober, and the end of BBW

Happy October, dear readers! I love October. "Fall" is my favorite season, although here in Florida we really just have summer and winter--candy corn, cider, sweaters and boots, being able to walk outside without breaking into a sweat. Excellent! Halloween is great too; this year, if my hunt for a pinstriped suit of clothing fails, I'll be dressing up as Delirium of the Endless.

Speaking of my favorite comic book author, Neil Gaiman is as good a place as any to wind down Banned Books Week. His Sandman tops Huffington Post's list of the most frequently challenged graphic novels (no I am not going to link it; I don't really like the Huffington Post. If you want to read it, seek Lord Google's aid), for reasons of sexuality, violence, and blah blah blah. Most of the entries on the list have the same reasoning (including Maus, for crying out loud. For those not familiar with Art Spiegelman, Maus being challenged is akin to Huckleberry Finn or The Upstairs Room being challenged. Remember where Americans don't like thinking about the icky parts of history?)--including the very funny "not suitable for age group".

Oh, you infernal morons. This right here is proof beyond proof that the people placing challenges against books never bother to actually read them. Every one of the titles on HuffPo's list is NOT suitable for children, but GUESS WHAT? Comics =/= children's material, fuckaducks. Something having pictures and less text than the average short novel doesn't mean it's for KIDS. Watchmen IS NOT FOR KIDS. Sandman IS NOT FOR KIDS. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen IS NOT FOR KIDS. GODDAMMIT. Yeah, if you catch your 10-year-old reading Watchmen, you may have a problem--but it's YOUR problem. YOUR issue for not having read the spine label, 'cause guess what? No librarian in her right mind is going to put a Juvenile sticker on the spine of Sandman, Watchmen, Maus, or most other graphic novels.

(In what universe is this for children?)

Say it with me, folks: comic books are not always for children. In fact, comic books are not USUALLY for children. This erroneous association needs to stop. Comics aren't cartoons. Graphic novels aren't always comics. Superheroes are not typically good role models, and superheroines wear tight clothing. Blankets is about sex--what did the title make you think it was about? The Watchmen film was rated R, people. Didn't that tip anyone off? But, as ever, it's the library's fault. Librarians are supposed to be babysitters and keep every brat in the building from seeing things Mommy doesn't want them to see. Librarians are supposed to be eagle-eyed policepeople who look at every book as it's checked out to make sure it's suitable for the person checking it out. Guess what, clearly-not-reading-public? Many, soon to be most, public libraries no longer HAVE people checking the books out for you. Self-check-out with machines is the way of the future. Guess you're going to have to police your kid's books your own self now. This parenting thing is hard, isn't it?

Heaven is a sort of library

I am an assistant librarian currently. In a year (give or take a few months) I will have a Master's Degree in library and information science. Hopefully soon after that I will be working in a public library in youth services.

I love libraries. Always have. One of my earliest memories is of my hometown children's librarian singing "Wombat Stew" during a story time. I volunteered in that library throughout middle and high school and spent 80% of my waking hours throughout undergrad holed up in USF's main library. I have been in most of the locations in my county's library system--today I was in a new one, and it was awesome!--and I have some strictish ideas about how public libraries should be laid out.

1. Clearly demarcated areas. This is for the good of everyone involved. The youth deserve and need their own space; so do the children, and so do the adults. The computers ideally are NOT located in the same space as the reference materials and study tables. The circulation desk ideally greets the patrons as they come through the front door.

2. Natural light. Windows, windows, windows. High ceilings and sky lights. As little dependance on fluorescent bulbs as possible. I find this makes for a far more peaceful atmosphere (which a library needs, depending on how many children it serves).

3. Art and plants. I love a library with interesting art, especially if it is local. The location I was at this morning had a cool display of quilts made by the Brandon Piecemakers (teehee); another library in the system has a mural in the lobby made by local kids. And plants, like natural light, provide a calming sense as well as freshening the air inside (again, see children).

4. Every book its reader. Ranganathan was right, peeps--for every book there is someone who wants, and every reader should have access to books he wants to read. This is still one of the core principles of libraries. Broaden your horizons; listen to what your community wants.

5. Every patron her librarian. The staff of a library, of course, are extremely significant. The reference desk should be a hub, and patrons should feel comfortable asking questions. A patron who is there to find a great book for her niece should be able to speak with a staff member who can provide ideas; similarly, a patron who is there to conduct geneaology work should have access to a staff member who can navigate those twisty waters.

What does your ideal library contain?