Award-winning Poet, David Shumate, will visit Main on April 29

David Shumate, Award-winning author of High Water Mark, is the guest speaker for ACPL’s 3rd Annual Poetry Awards Ceremony on April 29th at 7 pm.  The ceremony will be held in Meeting Room C at the Main Library.  Mr. Shumate will discuss the power of poetry and share readings with the audience; attendees will also have the opportunity to hear readings from this year’s winning entries.  Refreshments will be served.

Hope to see you there!

Becky, Interdepartmental Librarian

 

Earth Day 2008

Happy Earth Day! Wondering how to celebrate? Here are a few suggestions:

• Watch An Inconvenient Truth
• Read a book about sustainable living
• Read a book to your baby about environmental responsibility
• Buy a few compact fluorescent bulbs and use them
• Walk to the store, post office, or park
• Visit your local park
• Learn more about your city’s recycling collection requirements
• Donate items that you no longer need to a local charity or offer them up on The Freecycle Network
• Start a compost pile
• Have a picnic
• Put a stop to unwanted junk mail
• Learn more about the local water supply
• Email a green living question to your friendly librarian
• Say “Hello” to your neighbor
• Make a pledge to celebrate every day as Earth Day

If you can do nothing else, be sure to take a moment to look outside at this beautiful Spring day! Have a wonderful Earth Day Allen County!

An Earth Dwelling Librarian

Earthquake!

There is a form at the USGS Earthquake Hazards Program where you can fill in your experience of this morning’s earthquake. This helps the USGS map out how far away the effects of the earthquake were felt. Take a look!

http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/eqinthenews/2008/us2008qza6/

Go to the bottom of the page and click the Did You Feel It? link.

For an interesting report on how far-reaching the effects were felt (24,267 reports from 1,790 different zip codes at the time of this writing), see the statistics page.

Melissa, IT Librarian

Staff Picks Display on LibraryThing.com

The Staff Picks display, which General Reference Librarian Sara has been creating for over a year, is now available digitally via LibraryThing.com! Sara has collected the titles of over 650 books that are staff favorites, and has been displaying them in the Great Hall of the main library. Patrons love to know what librarians are reading, so these books go fast!

Our Staff Picks library on LibraryThing.com can be viewed in either cover view or list view. Each book is tagged with the name of the staff who recommended it; links to the ACPL catalog, member reviews and recommendations are also included. We encourage patrons to explore our staff picks on LibraryThing.com, and if you find a book you like, add it to your own LibraryThing.com library.

If you’re a member, why not add ACPL as a friend?

Melissa, IT Librarian

The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry

In honor of National Poetry Month, here is a badly written senryu review of The Willoughbys by Lois Lowry:

A hilarious

book, not The Giver at all.

Read and laugh – a lot.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you – a terrible poem, but a fantastic book. This is the best children’s book that I have read this year. To see what others think about The Willoughbys (and not everyone agrees with me) check out the ACPL Mock Newbery blog post about it by clicking here.

Heather of Children’s Services

Curtis Crisler to Visit Main Library

Curtis Crisler, author of Tough Boy Sonatas will be at Main Library to celebrate National Poetry Month with us on Wednesday, April 16th at 9:30 AM. (There are still some seats remaining if you would like to come. Please call 421-1255 to sign up. )

Mr. Crisler kindly agreed to answer some questions posed by our Teen Advisory Board for the benefit of those of you who may be unable to attend.

Question: Do you ever get poet’s block?
Answer: I think I’m a believer that there is no such thing as writers/poet’s block. When writing, sometimes a writer writes good stuff, but most of times he/she writes bad stuff. The good work you keep, and the bad work you put to the side or discard (as a suggestion, you should only put it to the side, one can always go back to the bad work and make it better). But since we write a lot of bad stuff, it seems longer before the good stuff comes along, at least for me. But when the good stuff comes, it can come in droves, so in contrast the bad writing tends to be labeled as blocked because it isn’t good. But the more you write, the more you understand the ebb and flow of the process. Take the good when it comes, and just ride it out.

Just can’t get away.

By the time this gets posted, I will be sitting on the beach in Florida. I’m supposed to be on vacation — and hopefully I won’t be thinking about work — but I thought the rest of the world would be aching to know what a librarian does on her vacation, so I’m predicting that I will either be knitting or doing a crossword puzzle.

I’ve always wanted to write crossword puzzles. I find satisfaction in doing crossword puzzles — making everything fit nice and neatly in all those squares. I can only assume that I’d find a similar satisfaction in writing them, although I’ve never really tried. As I understand it, there are really two tasks in writing puzzles: making all of the words fit neatly into the little squares, and then writing clues to go with them. I think that’s probably the more clever part, depending on how hard you want the puzzle to be.

The idea of puzzle writing brings to mind the sonnet. Writing sonnets is sort of similar: making words fit neatly, not into little squares, but into lines of syllables with particular rhyming patterns. Perhaps if a crossword puzzle is a little overwhelming, you might like to try a sonnet. You’ll find instructions all over the web, including at eHow.com and the Dummies website. If you end up with one you’re proud of, Prairie Home Companion (the public radio show with Garrison Keillor) is having a love sonnet contest: enter by Friday, April 11 at midnight.

Mary Tyler Moore

I was in Minneapolis last week (fabulous city, by the way) and got to pose for a tourist photograph with the Mary Tyler Moore statue downtown. I showed the photo to a friend who said she had never seen the Mary Tyler Moore Show because she doesn’t have cable. Never fear, Angela! We have lots of DVDs here at the library!

Mary Tyler Moore by okobojierik

~Sara

General Reference Librarian

Blue about blue

If you’re tired of feeling guilty, or contrary, about global warming, Maude Barlow has an under-reported crisis for you: Humanity is running out of clean water, and people already are fighting to the death for it.

Barlow leads Canada’s largest public advocacy group, and her new book advocates that the public wake up to the reality that hundreds of millions of people already have no good water source and that the rest of us, even rich Americans, are using up our supplies faster than nature can replenish them. (See the shrinking Colorado River, Rio Grande River and Great Lakes.) The book, Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water, provides plenty of scary details and nightmare scenarios. (A million people in a Kenyan slum share 600 padlocked pit latrines.) Barlow also makes a cogent plea for the United Nations to establish water as a human right.

The biggest villains by Barlow’s account are for-profit water companies whose control of scarce water resources has aroused public outcries in poor countries around the world. Next in Barlow’s pantheon of evil are rich-country governments that pressure poor countries to hire the private companies, and poor-country governments that acquiesce.

Barlow insists on public control of water, but obviously a lot of public systems have failed to protect their water supplies. Barlow’s answer is for the small number of water systems that she admires to go out and teach failing systems how to do the job. Meanwhile, she trashes the desalination industry as a mass polluter. She also jabs again and again at companies that sell bottled water in rich countries where the tap water is already healthy, maybe even healthier, to drink.

Blue Covenant is a polemic, but it’s an eye-opening one for those of us who’ve never thought much about running out of water, despite the fact so many people already are desperate. It even makes links between water depletion and the climate changes (e.g. Australia) that we call global warming. Maybe that connection to a problem the public has already begun to recognize will help Americans think about what our free market policies are doing to water supplies in poor countries, and how our green lawns, washed cars, irrigated farms and water-hungry industries are using up our own H2O.

Evan

Sarah Connor Chronicles

So I’ve been watching this show on www.hulu.com, which, because of various other factors that I won’t go into, is the only way I can watch it (without waiting for the DVD). I was a big fan of Terminator and Terminator 2, and I think the TV show has started to hit its stride just at the end of its first season. It seems likely that there will be a season 2, but I don’t think there’s been an official announcement yet.

I do have a small issue with the season finale (officially episode 9, “What He Beheld”), which I will try to keep spoiler-free. I thought this episode was the best so far, except that it may be crossing a line of good taste by putting a little girl – about 5 years old – in the middle of a scene with horrific violence and stress. I mean, it was effective, and affecting, but at the very least it’s pushing the envelope. Was it necessary to the plot? Probably not possible to know at this point, but if it is, couldn’t the plot point have been accomplished some other way? I think movies can do this kind of thing. I’m not so sure about television. Then again, I have a five-year-old, so I’m not exactly objective. What do you think?

Here’s a link to the Wikipedia article on the Terminator franchise, in case you’re confused about what happens when, who plays who in which movie, and how the books and graphic novels fit it. You can also look up what we have in the ACPL catalog.

Ian, science fiction watching librarian