Brian

A cute, heart-warming antidote to articles about Harry Potter protests:

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg writes about borrowing the video of Bergman\’s The Seventh Seal from the library, at the insistance of his 7-year-old son. As a follow-up, the Jewish lad asks dad to read him the Book of Revelation.

Some time ago, a discussion somewhere got me thinking that sommelier and librarian are similar jobs in many ways. (Maybe I heard someone actually say that. I don\’t recall.) This interview with a young sommelier (free registration may be required) in the Chicago Tribune got me thinking that again.

"Q. How does one prepare to be a sommelier?

A. Lots of reading. You have to read every book and magazine you can get your hands on. …"

2600.com reports that convicted cracker Kevin Mitnick\’s book, The Art of Deception, is missing a chapter. Between the time review copies were sent out and the book\’s release, Wiley and Sons removed Mitnick\’s background chapter, in which "he expressed a good deal of anger at the people who helped to capture him and who profited from his story." 2600 says that Wiley had received a letter from the lawyer for one of those people, which the publisher maintains was not the reason for the excision.

Bruce Jensen, Jessamyn West, Chris Dodge, Katia Roberto and Sandy Berman are all featured in \”Liberating information: radical librarians shelve the status quo,\” in the November/December 2002 issue of Punk Planet. The article itself isn\’t on the PP website, unfortunately. It\’s followed in the magazine by a full-page solicitation for readers to donate PP subscriptions to their local libraries. The issue also has, among a bunch of other interesting stuff, a piece about punk porn and an interview with political scientist Michael Parenti.

BTW, I highly recommend the book of Punk Planet interviews, We Owe You Nothing, for library collections.

The cash-strapped Massachusetts Horticultural Society has sold its collection of rare books and journals to the Chicago Botanic Garden. This story in the Chicago Tribune (free registration may be required) was front-page news in the hard copy delivered to my curb this morning. The Botanic Garden (which isn\’t actually in Chicago) now needs a place to put the stuff, which includes a Latin \”History of Plants\” published in 1483. There\’s a fact sheet about the sale on the Chicago Botanic Garden\’s website.

Chicago Tribune columnist Eric Zorn writes about his late discovery that it\’s okay to stop reading a novel you find you don\’t like. He invites readers to e-mail him about disappointing books they started.

Wired reports that Shohdy Naguib Surur lost the appeal of his conviction for posting one of his father\’s poems on the Internet. He had been convicted on morals charges and sentenced to one year in prison.

"Shohdy\’s father, the revered Egyptian poet Naguib Surur, who died in 1978, wrote the satirical poem after Egypt was defeated in the 1967 war against Israel. He condemned the Egyptian government and politics, using explicit sexual imagery and colloquial street Arabic. The poem was never published in Egypt but has been disseminated there through underground cassette tapes of Naguib Surur\’s readings."

Shohdy Surur is avoiding incarceration by living in Russia. An earlier Wired story about the case is here.

While slumming around the Weekly World News site, I ran across a link to Googlefight. The idea is you pit keywords against each other in a battle of Google searches. Looks like a way to help stay awake during a slow ref desk shift, but I got an error telling me it had \”Too much fights!\” when I tried it out. Of course, one could always just run separate searches directly on Google, but where\’s the fun in that?

Speaking of fun with Google, \”pubic library\” results in about 1170 hits. Did you mean: \”public library\”? it asks me.

Instead of going with a mainstream publisher, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius author Dave Eggers is self-publishing his first novel through his McSweeney\’s imprint. You Shall Know Our Velocity is available from mcsweeneys.net and will also be sold by indy bookstores. The Chicago Tribune has an article (free registration required), which also mentions that Eggers will be doing appearances with They Might Be Giants, reading from his book between TMBG songs.

Tuesday\’s installment of Natural Selection, a daily single-panel comic, does a library joke. In case you can\’t tell the setting is a library from the big \”Public Library\” and \”Book Checkout and Return\” signs, you can take a cue from the librarian\’s hair. Or maybe she\’s not a librarian; can\’t tell whether she has a degree. 😉
Anyway, here it is.