Technological wow!

I searched for the quotation below in Google. Link number 1 was to Google Books. I selected the icon to Save, send or embed a section of this page. I highlighted the text, and a window popped up Share this clip. I can paste the image or the text, to notebook or blog, or embed. As I did below.

Mark Twain's Letters By Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine

I can also copy the text, as in this case:

Mark Twain's Letters By Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine

Mark Twain's Letters By Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine: "Say I am as prompt as a clock if I only know the day a thing is wanted otherwise I am a natural procrasti naturalist Tell me what day and date you want Nos and and I will tackle and revise them and they ll be"

In the Ron Powers bio it is noted as being from a letter Mark Twain sent to William Dean Howells, dated 8 December 1874.

{Notice the space between procrasti and naturalist; in the book it is a hyphen.}

Pura Belpré.

Searching for info, came across this name: Pura Belpré.

Pura Belpré (died 1982), was the first Puerto Rican librarian in New York City. She was also a writer, collector of folktales, and puppeteer. There is some dispute as to the date of her birth which has been given as February 2, 1899, December 2, 1901 and February 2, 1903.

The white tiger

Adiga, A. (2008). The white tiger: a novel. New York: Free Press.

This is not the first time a patron has asked me for this book.


Kirkus Reviews
What makes an entrepreneur in today's India? Bribes and murder, says this fiercely satirical first novel. Balram Halwai is a thriving young entrepreneur in Bangalore, India's high-tech capital. China's Premier is set to visit, and the novel's frame is a series of Balram's letters to the Premier, in which he tells his life story. Balram sees India as two countries: the Light and the Darkness. Like the huddled masses, he was born in the Darkness, in a village where his father, a rickshaw puller, died of tuberculosis. But Balram is smart, as a school inspector notices, and he is given the moniker White Tiger. Soon after, he's pulled out of school to work in a tea shop, then manages to get hired as a driver by the Stork, one of the village's powerful landlords. Balram is on his way, to Delhi in fact, where the Stork's son, Mr. Ashok, lives with his Westernized wife, Pinky Madam. Ashok is a gentleman, a decent employer, though Balram will eventually cut his throat (an early revelation). His business (coal trading) involves bribing government officials with huge sums of money, the sight of which proves irresistible to Balram and seals Ashok's fate. Adiga, who was born in India in 1974, writes forcefully about a corrupt culture; unfortunately, his commentary on all things Indian comes at the expense of narrative suspense and character development. Thus he writes persuasively about the so-called Rooster Coop, which traps family-oriented Indians into submissiveness, but fails to describe the stages by which Balram evolves from solicitous servant into cold-blooded killer. Adiga's pacing is off too, as Balram too quickly reinvents himself in Bangalore, where every cop can be bought. An undisciplined debut, but one with plenty of vitality. Agent: Cathryn Summerhouse/William Morris Copyright Kirkus 2008 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.

Library Journal Reviews

This first novel by Indian writer Adiga depicts the awakening of a low-caste Indian man to the degradation of servitude. While the early tone of the book calls to mind the heartbreaking inequities of Rohinton Mistry's A Fine Balance , a better comparison is to Frederick Douglass's narrative about how he broke out of slavery. The protagonist, Balram Halwai, is initially delighted at the opportunity to become the driver for a wealthy man. But Balram grows increasingly angry at the ways he is excluded from society and looked down upon by the rich, and he murders his employer. He reveals this murder from the start, so the mystery is not what he did but why he would kill such a kind man. The climactic murder scene is wonderfully tense, and Balram's evolution from likable village boy to cold-blooded killer is fascinating and believable. Even more surprising is how well the narrative works in the way it's written as a letter to the Chinese premier, who's set to visit Bangalore, India. Recommended for all libraries.—Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Technical Coll., Greenwood, SC
[Page 89]. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

A library patron

"I love this library; it has so many resources," a woman who came over to the Information Desk asking to use the word processing machine.

It Has Computers, Gives Advice and Is Free

Anthony Morris at the Queens Borough Public Library where he worked off his debt for past due library fines.

March 26, 2009
It Has Computers, Gives Advice and Is Free
By JOSHUA BRUSTEIN

Anthony Morris’s job search hit a snag this month when the Queens Borough Public Library notified him that he could not get a new library card until he paid about $80 in fines.

Mr. Morris, 31, had been unemployed for eight months and did not have the money. But he had amassed an armful of library books he needed to prepare for an exam that was part of the application process for a job at Con Edison, and he also needed a library card to browse online classified sites. So he asked if he could work off his debt.

After 22 hours of sorting books in the reference section at the Jamaica branch, Mr. Morris got his library card — and was asked to apply for a part-time position at the library.

“It’s just minimum wage, but it beats a blank,” said Mr. Morris, who lives nearby and previously worked at a chemical plant that manufactured leather dyes. He is waiting to hear whether he got the job.

While such direct results are certainly rare, the city’s public libraries are increasingly serving as makeshift employment centers. At the 58th Street branch of the New York Public Library in Manhattan, out-of-work professionals crowd the computers in the afternoon, a time that had previously been dominated by elderly patrons, and books on résumé writing are hard to keep on the shelves. The Science, Industry and Business Library on 34th Street drew 700 people to a career preparedness fair in January, and the Bronx Library Center recently doubled the number of computer classes it offers to the elderly because people looking to re-enter the work force had packed the existing classes to overflow levels.

“We’ve been in the job-search business for decades,” said Paul LeClerc, the president of the New York Public Library, noting that President Obama has said that a librarian helped him find his first job as a community organizer. “This is a continuation.”

The new role comes amid a broader surge in demand for libraries’ free goods and services that is typical during economic downturns. In the fourth quarter of 2008, circulation rose 16 percent compared with the previous year at the New York Public Library, which serves Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island; 9 percent at the Brooklyn Public Library; and 2 percent in Queens. All three systems also report significant increases in the number of visits.

But the libraries are facing steep cuts in the mayor’s proposed budget for next year, and have other economic woes. Brooklyn has already shut its branches on Sundays and is considering trimming hours further. This month, a hotel company backed away from its pledge to purchase the Donnell Library, a five-story building on 53rd Street, whose sale was intended to help pay for the $250 million renovation of the New York Public Library’s headquarters on Fifth Avenue.

At the Bronx Library Center, near Fordham University, Janice Moore-Smith, an education and career counselor, has over the years typically helped half a dozen people a day with their résumés. In recent months, it has often been 10. And Ms. Moore-Smith said that she had been scheduling more joint sessions for husbands and wives in which she doles out emotional support along with employment tips.

“I’m doing couples therapy,” she said.

The most common service being sought, librarians said, is computer time. At the Queens Library for Teens in Far Rockaway, more and more teenagers are showing up to sign on, saying their parents have canceled Internet service at home. And with Web sites largely having replaced newspapers as the most common job-listing venues, finding work without Internet access has become increasingly difficult.

Kerwin P. Pilgrim, division manager of the Brooklyn Public Library’s education and job information center, said that he began training 15 staff members to provide individual assistance to job seekers last summer, in anticipation that demand would rise as the economy worsened. In January, the library announced that there would be one such staff member available at all times in at least one branch within each group of four branches.

Until recently, Mr. Pilgrim said, most people who came to the library’s résumé workshops were looking for entry-level jobs. Now, the proportion of professionals in the classes has soared.

“When the banks started going down, we saw some people who had been employed for a long time and had never taken the time to write résumés or work on interviewing skills,” he said. “People got comfortable, and basically their résumés were never updated.”

Mitch Baucus has long been a regular at the Flushing branch of the Queens library, but lately it has transformed from a place of leisure to his virtual office.

When he was working as a legal researcher for a lawyer in Great Neck, Mr. Baucus regularly spent an afternoon each weekend reading newspapers and magazines at the library. Since he was laid off in early December, he has been showing up five or six days a week to scour the Internet for employment opportunities.

He spent several months searching without success, then noticed something he had overlooked.

“I realized there was a person sitting there and his job was to help people with their résumés and interviewing skills,” he said. “So I went up to him and asked him for help.”

An earlier version of this article misidentified which branch drew 700 people to a career fair in January. It was the Science, Industry and Business library on 34th Street, not the Bronx Library Center.

Tweet

A Twitter follower (imagine that, I'm being followed) has a post in his blog dated 28 February 2009, that refers to a book entitled Made to Stick.

Today's questions

Where to file tax forms 1040, and 1041 (Estate taxes)

The 8th Confession, James Patterson; not yet out.

Levittown called about a CD that only HWPL owns. Checked the shelf; not there. In transit. Levittown placed the hold, and the librarian had seen the OPAC message in transit, yet still asked me to check the shelf. Huh?

The seniora began to arrive, as usual, around 1.30, for today's film. Some come over to Information Desk to reserve books.

A Library Friend asked for The madonnas of Leningrad: a novel, by Debra Dean.

A patron wanted the New York Times

Mrs. Ochman (one of our regular callers, who often wants movie reviews from Newsday read to her) called for Brain surgeon: a doctor's inspiring encounters with mortality and miracles, by Keith Black with Arnold Mann. She said she saw him on Channel 13.


A senior asked for Safe passage: the remarkable true story of two sisters who rescued Jews from the Nazis / Ida Cook.

A senior who moves and talks really slowly asked about Sunday's movie, a special program sponsored by the National Council of Jewish Women; it will be A walk to beautiful. She asked to reserve it.

Right behind her a woman asked for tickets for Sunday's movie. "All out," I told her. "They're all gone?" she asked. "Yes," I answered. "No tickets left?" she asked. I nodded.

Tax forms: "do you have instructions books?" "Yes, one for 150, a handful for 203." "Do you think you'll have them later in the afternoon?" "I can't predict; I'm not good at forecasting." "Do you think other libraries have them?" "I have no way of knowing." Hesitating, he said thank you and hung up.

Tickets? No, to three people.

A patron asked for Jhumpa Lahiri's new book, Unaccustomed earth; it's out. Then asked for People of the book, by Geraldine Brooks (which has been very popular and in high demand, a welcome antidote to all the requests for Patterson, Roberts and Steel); it's out. Asked for The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz; it's out. Asked for Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill; here, took it. Asked for Dangerous laughter : thirteen stories, by Steven Millhauser; in, took it.

A patron asked for Before the Sabbath / Eric Hoffer.

It is now 2pm.

At 6.35 a young lady came in asking for materials on Fred Korematsu. A mother was in yesterday researching the same name for her daughter (8th grade). We have a book on WW 2 biographies, and electronic databases can provide additional materials.

A Tuesday library encounter

A patron came over to the Reference Desk looking for help with a song. It was in two books, but both were out. He didn't want a fake book. So I looked in the Patchogue Medford Library's Popular Music Song Index for it. Found it. Called PML to have it faxed. A librarian said she would. After several minutes of it not arriving I went over to the patron and told him that if he cared to leave his name, once the fax arrived we'd put it at the Circulation Desk for him. He agreed, and gave me his name. Eliot Weiss.

In a moment, I made a connection. I asked him, "Chess? Teach in Brooklyn?" Yes, he said, and said "Kings of New York." Indeed, I told him, I read the book, and really enjoyed it. I asked him about the kids in the book, if they were in touch with him, if they stayed with chess. Yes, he said, they stay in touch. Two are continuing to play it, and all the others stay in touch with the game.

I also told him about reading Jennifer Shahade's book, Chess Bitch, and of reading Marilyn Yalom's book about the Chess Queen.

Cool.

How is that spelled?

A patron asked for the movie Shine, which is out. Being about a pianist, he asked me to find another film about a piano. I entered paino instead of piano, and wound up with The Visitor (production designer, John Paino).

A Victorian Novel in Stone

The British Houses of Parliament stand beside the Thames, a symbol of London itself. Their silhouette, culminating in the great clock tower that houses Big Ben, is famous all over the world. Yet this is a building that came about by accident and whose precise authorship was for many years clouded by controversy. Its proper name is the Palace of Westminster, for it replaced the medieval palace, begun by Edward the Confessor, where from the 13th century onward Parliament habitually met. Over the years the old building was expanded, altered, filled in and divided until it had sprawled into a higgledy-piggledy mess, with several shops and a pub jammed up against the walls.

Slideshow

Books From the Great Depression

Peter Conn selects unsurpassed novels about the Depression

1. Now in November
By Josephine Winslow Johnson
Simon & Schuster, 1934
A fictional account of one family's experience on the land, Josephine Winslow Johnson's best-selling novel won the Pulitzer Prize before sinking into undeserved obscurity. The Haldmarnes leave an unnamed city for the countryside when Father loses a good job in a lumber mill and with it any hope of financial security for his wife and their three daughters. The mortgaged farm to which the family moves yields little: The novel's central section is a day-by-day reckoning of the land's collapse into baked and cracking clay during the killing drought in the Great Plains of the 1930s. "Now in November" is one of the most convincing and hair-raising depictions of the Dust Bowl in the literature of the Depression. Unfortunately, history would find room for only one Dust Bowl novel, John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath."
2. The Big Money
By John Dos Passos
Harcourt, Brace, 1936
Norman Mailer often said that John Dos Passos had written the great American novel in the three volumes of the "U.S.A." trilogy. "The Big Money" was the final volume in the series, and its success put Dos Passos on the cover of Time magazine. The novel deploys several narrative techniques in an effort to tell the whole story of America's march toward the Crash. Long conventional storylines alternate with stream-of-consciousness monologues, brief biographies of famous and infamous Americans, and "newsreels" made up of newspaper headlines, popular songs and advertising slogans. "The Big Money" opens at the end of World War I and concludes in the early years of the Depression. The final scene presents a vagrant trying to hitch a ride: The open road to American opportunity has become a dead end. Dos Passos's sustained, bitter and often funny exposé of Roaring Twenties excess is the best fictional explanation ever written of how Americans got themselves in the biggest economic mess in their history.
3. Appointment in Samarra
By John O'Hara
Harcourt, Brace, 1934
John O'Hara's first and best novel tracks the final three days in the life of a young man named Julian English. He is 30 years old, charming and good-looking, married to an attractive woman, and successful as the manager of a Cadillac franchise in a town called Gibbsville. Julian is also a dangerous drunk and a moral trifler, filled with envy and insecurity, a man with no discernible convictions. His rapid decline in the course of the novel is an emblem of moral exhaustion. "Appointment in Samarra" is set in 1930, after the Crash but before the advent of the New Deal. O'Hara always insisted on the precision of that date: His failed hero registers the sense of impending and general collapse.
4. The Good Earth
By Pearl S. Buck
John Day, 1931
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth" was also the best-selling novel in the U.S. for both 1931 and 1932. The book would shape American perceptions of China for two generations. The main characters, a poor farmer named Wang Lung and his wife, O-lan, are recognizable human beings, not mere Oriental stereotypes, who do their best to survive in a punishing world of famine, bandits, war and plague. Why did a book about an obscure rural family in a distant land sell so well in the early Depression years? To begin with, Buck was a fine storyteller, and her images of the Chinese countryside are memorably vivid. Beyond that, the novel resonated with the realities of Depression America: The portraits of suffering but resilient Chinese farmers spoke eloquently to Americans trying to make sense of their own diminished circumstances.
5. The Day of the Locust
By Nathanael West
Random House, 1939
The best novel ever written about Hollywood appeared in the last years of the Depression. A young artist, Todd Hackett, has come to the West Coast to paint the legions of bored and lonely men and women who migrate to California in pursuit of a dream they never find. The studios' celluloid fantasies mock the deprivation of the country throughout the 1930s, providing escapist entertainment in the midst of despair. The novel is punctuated with scenes of violence -- drunken brawls, bloody cockfights, sexual assault -- that unfold in the glow of Southern California's legendary warmth and sunshine. In the climactic scene, a murderous riot provoked by a movie premiere provides a "real" counterpart to Todd's painting, "The Burning of Los Angeles."
Mr. Conn's "The American 1930s: A Literary History" has just been published by Cambridge University Press.

A Traveler's Way With Words

Lafcadio Hearn: American Writings
Edited by Christopher Benfey
(Library of America, 848 pages, $40)


Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) is best known as the magisterial interpreter of Japan to the English-speaking world, a role he played after moving there in 1890, marrying a Japanese woman and then publishing a series of books in the West, such as the story collections "In Ghostly Japan" (1899) and "Kwaidan" (1904). But before his expatriation, Hearn was America's ace traveloguist. A generous compilation of his early journalistic writing throughout the New World from the Library of America reveals how powerful this forgotten genre can be.

Hearn's American masterpiece, collected in the Library of America edition, is "Two Years in the French West Indies" (1890). It includes a section called "A Midsummer Trip to the Tropics," an ecstatic but closely observed account of his voyage from New York down to the Lesser Antilles (the string of islands stretching from Antigua to Grenada). The bulk of the book, though, is a 300-page chronicle of Hearn's sojourn on Martinique, where he "fell under the influence of that singular spell which the island has always exercised upon strangers."

Hearn's descriptions of the land and sea are all the more vivid for their almost scientific precision. A vast valley in Martinique, he writes, is "watered by many torrents, and bounded south and west by double, triple, and quadruple surging of mountains, -- mountains broken, peaked and tormented-looking, and tinted (irisées, as the creoles say) with all those gemtones distance gives in a West Indian atmosphere."

An interloan

Under the heading of unusual books, this is an entry: From Ararat to suburbia; the history of the Jewish community of Buffalo. (1960). Selig Adler; Thomas Edmund Connolly. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America. College libraries, as well as Brooklyn Public, own it.

A Counterinsurgency Primer

The Accidental Guerrilla
By David Kilcullen
(Oxford, 346 pages, $27.95)

Books on Money

1. The House of Mirth
By Edith Wharton
Scribner's, 1905

Suze Orman could have saved Lily Bart. Alas, poor Lily: The heroine of Edith Wharton's "House of Mirth" was born a century too early for CNBC. In the novel, Lily's parents, failed speculators, have lost everything, save their daughter's stunning beauty. To survive as a lady of fashion, Lily needs to monetize that singularly illiquid asset. If she would make marriage her "vocation," she must "calculate and contrive, and retreat and advance" with ruthless capitalist discipline. But Lily, a gambler by nature, prefers the stock market to the marriage market. She soon discovers that men's Wall Street whispers are little more reliable than women's bridge-table gossip. "Money stands for all kinds of things," Lily tells the only suitor worthy of her hand. For this hard-won knowledge she pays a queen's ransom, a treasure measured out in dollars, in reputation, in her very life.

2. Money 332.49 G
By John Kenneth Galbraith
Houghton Mifflin, 1975

Those who "talk money and teach about it," John Kenneth Galbraith says in this history of currency in America, often cultivate the "belief that they are in privileged association with the occult -- that they have insights that are nowise available to the ordinary person . . . this is a well-established fraud." Peppering his plain-spoken account with tart opinion and ready wit, Galbraith begins in the colonial era, when shells, tobacco, and pelts served as currency, and moves apace to a modern nation where money is made out of . . . money. During the Great Depression, when money disappeared, the most effective remedies were daring, flexible, pragmatic and compassionate. Full of the grainy particulars of history and the god's-eye grandeur of economics, "Money" boasts equal parts empathy and majesty.

3. Money and Magic
By Hans Christoph Binswanger
University of Chicago, 1994

ISBN: 9780226051857

A large and startling theory spills out of this offbeat little volume: Modern money systems have deep roots in alchemy, the Renaissance science of turning base metals into gold. For evidence, Hans Christoph Binswanger, a Swiss economist, turns to literature: the second and less well-known part of Goethe's "Faust," published in 1832. Faust, the alchemist, and Mephistopheles, his diabolic helpmeet, again wager Faust's soul, this time on the creation of money, which they intend to use to save the debt-ridden emperor. The adventurers fashion notes from worthless paper and bold promises and then "materialize" their airy currency by buying land. The transmutation of paper into money and then into property stirs within Faust an ecstatic vision of limitless growth. But Binswanger argues that the ecstasy masks a lurking agony: In a world of boundless, alchemical paper, when is enough, enough?

4. Boggs 332.4 W
By Lawrence Weschler
University of Chicago, 1999

Lawrence Weschler plunges headlong into the world of the conceptual artist J.S.G. Boggs with this dizzying, dazzling portrait. Born in New Jersey in 1955, Boggs lived, at the time of Weschler's writing, in London, where the Bank of England had accused him of counterfeiting (he was acquitted). The complaint made some sense: Boggs draws paper currency so accurately that his bills might enter the marketplace undetected. But he doesn't quietly pass them off; he spends them at face value, after providing a full explanation, with any shopkeeper who will agree to play along. Many do. Weschler chased the money artist across Europe and through the looking glass of value, taking detours into history, law, economics and philosophy. Big questions arise on the nature of art and money. What makes a dollar a dollar? Reader, check your wallet.

5. A Nation of Counterfeiters 332.1097 M
By Stephen Mihm
Harvard, 2007

Between the Revolutionary era, when the Continental was America's currency, and the Civil War, which brought us the greenback, the U.S. had no national paper currency. Chartered banks and their privately issued notes proliferated. The babel of competing bills created fertile ground for counterfeits, which sprang up like mushrooms. By the 1850s, thousands of different breeds of paper passed as American money. In "A Nation of Counterfeiters," Stephen Mihm's relentless sleuthing and lively prose reanimate a world in which every dollar had to be carefully read. This rogues gallery of forgers, coin-shavers and engravers-gone-bad holds up a funhouse mirror to the entrepreneurial face of American money-making.

Ms. Kamensky, a history professor at Brandeis University, is the author of "The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America's First Banking Collapse" (Viking, 2008).

A different question

A patron remarked that every hour there is a differnt face at thr Information Desk. I told him yes, every hour or two.

"Do you volunteer here, or do you get paid?" he asked.

"We get paid," I answered.

"Not too much," he smiled as he remarked, "but you get paid."

What's that link?

Looking for the Nassau County Library Association, typed in ncla.org, and got Netherlands Consulate-General - Los Angeles, California. Oops.

Teenage dating

A patron came in this morning looking for help in getting articles on teenage dating. At first I asked if it was a college project (she did look fairly young, enough so to be in college). No, it was for a presentation to high school students. Are you a high school teacher? I asked. No, a psychologist. She's been asked to speak before high school students about recent incident: a singer, Rihanna, (hip-hop? An article describes her as R&B, reggae and pop) was beaten to a pulp by her boyfriend, Chris Brown.

The psychologist's presentation (20 minutes, she said) will discuss date violence and related topics. I showed her Galenet, and she found enough material. She emailed herself articles, and her Blackberry would blink each time one was received.

Here is an editorial in today's Daily News (I note that the singers are 21 and 19, hardly mature; add the money they are raking in, the adulation from thjeir fans, and the notoriety, and it does not make a good mix):

The beat goes on: Rihanna can teach valuable lessons to domestic-abuse victims

Talented, popular and rich, pop singers Chris Brown and Rihanna are giving America a look into the brutality and persistent dangers of domestic and dating violence. He's fast with his fists, yet she's slow to leave him.

Brown, 19, was arrested in Los Angeles for doing a horrific number on Rihanna, 21, in a fit of jealous rage. The pummeling was apparently only the latest episode in which he became physical with her. But shocking photos of her bruised, bloodied face have given way to the disturbing spectacle of reconciliation.

Experts everywhere - along with talk-show queen Oprah Winfrey, who is devoting today's program to the topic - say that most abusers are repeat offenders.

With depressing predictability, domestic violence victims convince themselves that next time will be different, that it will never happen again. But too often it does happen again. And many a woman has followed the myth to serious injury and even death.

Young as she is, Rihanna will have to work the issue out herself. Hopefully, she'll set a positive example for women in violent relationships. Pray that she does not become an object lesson in the mortal perils of taking a guy back one too many times.

I remembered!

A patron called up wanting to reserve two books: the 8th Confession, by James Patterson (already has 531 holds, and no copies are on the shelves, yet), and Shattered, by Michael Robotham (won't be published until March 17). Somehow, I cancelled placing the first hold, and I was unaware of that. I did not write down her card number, but, rather, typed it directly into Millenium. When I went to fill out a purchase card for the second book, I didn't have it.

I tried remembering it, and didn't. I tried to search patrons by email addresses (hers has the word beatles in it), but Millenium doesn't allow that. I tried combinations of six digits, and -- eureka! -- suddenly I had it.

Algiers?

A patron called up, looking for the music to the opera (as she called it) Italian Girl in Algiers. Mary took the call, and searched the OPAC. She got no results, so she asked me. I immediately recognized it as Rossini's work. Conducting an advanced search, I put Algiers in the search field, limited it to printed music, and clicked Submit. Nothing. Mmm. Perhaps we don't own it. Still, I tried switching the search value to Rossini, and clicked on the Submit button again.

Guglielmo Tell, Ciro in Babilonia, Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Otello were the first four results returned by the system ( Most relevant titles entries 1-4).

L'Italiana in Algeri : dramma giocoso in due atti / di Angelo Anelli ; a cura di Mario Parenti was the 14th link ( Highly relevant titles entries 5-23)

No wonder Algiers brought no results.

Boreslav

A youngster from the Hebrew Academy (HAFTR) came over to the Reference desk asking about Boreslav. A reference interview identified him to have been a Polish king in the 1300s. We looked in the OPAC (bibliographic instruction), and found some books on Polish history. She wanted to know about finding scholarly articles. Later, she came over to the desk and showed me a book about Jews written by Simon Dubnov. In it, there is reference made to the charter issued by King Boreslav.

March reference questions

1 March: Among the many book requests in the past (quite busy) hour and a quarter, and aside from the man who suggested Borges's Tower of Babel, there have been a few requests for newspapers, movies (Death of a Salesman, by a young lady who might be a high school senior; Titanic by the little Asian kid who often comes in looking for animated films, and today asked for Fred Clause, which is out). And the senior lady who always comes over and asks the same two questions: how'd you get so handsome (the answer she expects is "good parents"); and do you have a lucky lady in your life (if the answer is yes, her followup is how many.

4 March: A mother looking for "Observations and experiments on the gastric juice and the physiology of digestion" by William Beaumont. Her 8th grade son is doing a report. Undetermined is whether he needs the book, and when he needs what he specifically needs. I did find biographies of Dr. Beaumont in the Biography Resource Center (Galenet). Two Nassau libraries own Medical marvels: the 100 greatest advances in medicine, which contains a section or a chapter entitled "Observations and experiments on the gastric juice and the physiology of digestion" by William Beaumont. Plainview Library owns a reference copy, and Hicksville owns a circulating copy. But, again, what is the time frame? I then Googled "Observations and experiments on the gastric juice and the physiology of digestion" by William Beaumont and the fourth link is a Google books link. Clicking on that shows the title page of the book. Clicking on Find this book in a library showed that several libraries own it, including the Queens College library. Her 19-year-old son goes to Queens, so she will ask him to get the book. I searched the QC OPAC and found the location of the book. She was very appreciative for my help, and I was pleased to have helped.

3 books for one patron

A cardholder called for these three books:

The spies of Warsaw, Alan Furst.


















The believers, Zoe Heller



















Spade & Archer, Joe Gores

The cover on the Gores book has the subtitle: The prequel to Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

The Tale of the Temeraire

Picture from a story in today's Wall Street Journal. HWPL owns a book Joseph Mallord William Turner, text by John Walker, which has the painting in a color plate.












In the late summer of 1838, H.M.S. Temeraire, a once-glorious remnant of the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, was towed up the Thames to the wharf at Rotherhithe, to be broken up and sold for her fittings and oaken timbers. J.M.W. Turner's painting of the doomed ship's final passage, in which he summoned her illustrious past by rechristening her the "Fighting Temeraire," never left his possession and became part of his bequest to the nation after his death in 1851 at age 76. Enshrined in the National Gallery in London since 1856 and embodying a nostalgic nation's memory of an age when it ruled the waves, Turner's canvas remains among his best-known and best-loved works. Even today, as scholars debate the meaning of its ambiguous but deeply stirring imagery, "Fighting Temeraire" elicits a charged emotional response.

Picture gleaned from the Web.











Contrary to legend, we know that Turner did not witness the Temeraire's last journey up the Thames, and countless critics in his day and ours have enumerated the ways in which the painter plays fast and loose with the facts here. News accounts tell us, for example, that the ship had been dismasted before setting out for Rotherhithe. From a contemporary print we learn that Turner moved the smoking funnel far to the fore of his tug; and a chart of the Thames makes plain that the westward course of the voyage has the sun setting, incongruously here, in the east.

The Tale of the Temeraire

Picture from a story in today's Wall Street Journal. HWPL owns a book Joseph Mallord William Turner, text by John Walker, which has the painting in a color plate.











In the late summer of 1838, H.M.S. Temeraire, a once-glorious remnant of the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, was towed up the Thames to the wharf at Rotherhithe, to be broken up and sold for her fittings and oaken timbers. J.M.W. Turner's painting of the doomed ship's final passage, in which he summoned her illustrious past by rechristening her the "Fighting Temeraire," never left his possession and became part of his bequest to the nation after his death in 1851 at age 76. Enshrined in the National Gallery in London since 1856 and embodying a nostalgic nation's memory of an age when it ruled the waves, Turner's canvas remains among his best-known and best-loved works. Even today, as scholars debate the meaning of its ambiguous but deeply stirring imagery, "Fighting Temeraire" elicits a charged emotional response.

Picture gleaned from the Web.











Contrary to legend, we know that Turner did not witness the Temeraire's last journey up the Thames, and countless critics in his day and ours have enumerated the ways in which the painter plays fast and loose with the facts here. News accounts tell us, for example, that the ship had been dismasted before setting out for Rotherhithe. From a contemporary print we learn that Turner moved the smoking funnel far to the fore of his tug; and a chart of the Thames makes plain that the westward course of the voyage has the sun setting, incongruously here, in the east.

Conrad in twilight

A patron called looking for three books. I recognized his name and voice: he always starts the conversation by introducing himself (Hello, this is Philip Segal); he then asks whom he's speaking with. Pleasant chap. Always interesting requests.

Today he was looking for two books by John Crowe Ransom: Selected poems, published in 1948; and Chills and Fever. I found several Selected poems books, but none from 1948, so I called the patron back, and asked him what poem he was looking for. It was Conrad In Twilight. It turns out that the book of Selected Poems that HWPL owns contains that poem.

And his third request was: How we think, a restatement of the relation of reflective thinking to the educative process, by John Dewey. Boston, New York [etc.] D.C. Heath and company, 1933. In the book Dewey is listed on the tile page as Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Columbia University. [The poor unfortunate soul must've known Nicholas Murray Butler.]

HWPL owns both books; the collection never ceases amazing me.

An equal music

A patron called to reserve this book. It is only 380 pages. Another book of his, that I saw on the shelf, >A suitable boy, is 1,349 pages. Thick.



Seth, Vikram. An equal music. (1999). New York: Broadway Books.

Lincoln's Bicentennial Soundtrack

Our nation was striving in the 19th century to establish suitable venues for the performance of European music and also to prove that American composers could write music just as good as the imported kind. After all, in 1840 the director of the Paris Opéra dismissed an offer by the American composer William Henry Fry to pay all the costs of mounting his opera "Leonora" there, declaring: "In Europe, we look to America as an industrial country – excellent for railroads but not for art."

Dismissive.

America had no railroads in 1809, when Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Indeed, his birth occurred just a few weeks before Thomas Jefferson, a keen amateur violinist and music collector, handed over the presidency to his friend James Madison, whose redoubtable first lady, Dolley, presided over the first inaugural ball in the federal capital's history, and brought a taste for French music and elegance to the Executive Mansion.

And so a tradition started.

The Lincoln family left Kentucky for Indiana in 1816, shortly before a remarkable musical figure, Anthony Philip Heinrich, arrived there from Philadelphia. Heinrich installed himself in a log cabin in Bardstown, Ky., taught himself composition, and in 1820 produced a collection of songs and pieces for violin and piano loftily entitled "The Dawning of Music in Kentucky," Opus 1. A second volume followed, prompting a critic to call Heinrich "the Beethoven of America" because of the relative complexity of his music. Heinrich went on to even greater complexity, composing large-scale orchestral works with titles like "The Washingtoniad, or the Deeds of a Hero" and a "Grand National Heroic Fantasia: Scintillations of 'Yankee Doodle.'"

HWPL, of course, has: the score to his Opus 1; a CD of The ornithological combat of kings, and a couple of other CDs which include music of his (one of those, The wind demon, has a piece by William Henry Fry, who helped found the New York Philharmonic Symphony Society).

Lincoln was 17 when the U.S. celebrated the 50th jubilee of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1826. On that day, Jefferson and John Adams both died. And on that same day, in Pittsburgh, was born the first American song composer still widely remembered, Stephen Foster.

Quite a coincidence.

Lincoln apparently enjoyed Gottschalk's music, and when the 9-year-old Venezuelan piano prodigy Teresa Carreño played at the White House in 1863, she performed several Gottschalk compositions to please him. Afterward, at the president's request, she improvised a set of variations on one of Lincoln's favorite ballads, Septimus Winner's "Listen to the Mocking Bird."

Lincoln was also an opera lover. En route to Washington in 1861, he took in a performance of Verdi's "A Masked Ball" at New York's Academy of Music, and throughout the war years he attended operatic performances in Washington whenever he could.

A regular patron calls

She usually calls for telephone numbers, company addresses, 800 numbers; when the stimulus bill passed in the Senate, she called for the telephone numbers of the three Republican who voted for it (promising to raise hell with them).

Today she asked, first: does the library own Brave new world revisited (Aldous Huxley). No, I said (our copy is missing). "Can you tell me what libraries do own it?" Several, I told her. A long pause. Hello? Yes, she said; she was thinking.

Next: "Is the DVD Expelled: no intelligence allowed back yet?" No, I said to her. "It was supposed to be back last week," she asserted. It isn't back. "It was supposed to be back. Two weeks ago. It was in transit." It isn't here. "It was in transit." It actually is In Transit and has 1 hold. "How long does it take to get back? It was in transit."

"Be that as it may, it isn't here." By now two other patrons were in front of me, here at the Information Desk.

A long pause.

"Is there anything else I can help you with, ma'am? I need to help another patron."

Click.

Overstuffed Sentences

Rules of style and grammar from the New York Times.

The phrase “the fact that” is often a warning of complications to come — it suggests that the writer hasn’t found the clearest, simplest path to convey the idea.

Pare down sentences.

Separating the verb from the object by not one but two prepositional phrases made it sound as though we were translating from Latin.

in most cases, the adverb should be adjacent to the word it modifies.

‘More Than’ vs. ‘Over’

Scandal & Civility

Scandal & Civility
by Marcus Daniel
(Oxford, 386 pages, $28)

Politics and the press have not always been as tame as they are today.

To get some perspective on such views [that the Founding Era was one when Olympian political figures and impartial, public-spirited newspapers guided the nation in its times of crisis], one need go no further than "Scandal & Civility," Marcus Daniel's detailed study of the American press in the 1790s. The idea that this critical period was marked by a calm spirit of reasoned debate is a myth, as Mr. Daniel shows, and a deeply misleading one at that. The postrevolutionary age witnessed the unexpected rise of fiercely contending political parties; an increasingly bloody French Revolution that divided Americans into warring camps; a string of crises, such as the Genet affair, the Whiskey Rebellion, the XYZ affair; and the passage of the Alien and Sedition acts punishing dissent. It would not be too strong to assert that every step along the way the very survival of the nation was at risk.

Jefferson opposed the Alien and Sedition Acts as unconstitutional, stating that they stepped on states rights.

And what role did newspapers play? A profound one. As Mr. Daniel amply shows, they stoked debate with abandon as well as with a mean- spiritedness and partisan passion that make today's scuffles seem tame by comparison.

Ah, the good old days.

One of the most famous editors of the age was Philip Freneau, an ardent Republican and once "penniless young poet," and the publisher of the National Gazette, a semiweekly newspaper. What makes Freneau so interesting is that George Washington's secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, hired Freneau to work as a minor clerk at the State Department; however, his real responsibility was to galvanize, through his newspaper, Republican opposition to the administration he served. Rival journalist Richard Fenno, who was himself aligned with Washington rather than Jefferson, accused Freneau of being a "demon of slander," and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, who often felt the sting of Freneau's articles, condemned Jefferson for paying Freneau with public funds, though to no avail.

The more one knows about Jefferson the more his halo crumbles.

Sick of the constant tirades against the government, an outraged President Washington called on Jefferson to put a stop to Freneau. Remarkably, Jefferson refused, insisting the National Gazette had "saved our Constitution." But if Washington felt the pain of Freneau's attacks, it was nothing compared with what he suffered at the hands of another Republican, Benjamin Franklin Bache, who published the Aurora, a newspaper whose inimitable motto was Surgo ut Prosim ("I rise that I might serve"). A grandson of Benjamin Franklin, the worldly Bache was no run-of-the-mill journalist, which only gave more force to his criticisms. He labeled "unconstitutional" Washington's actions on behalf of the Jay Treaty – a 1794 agreement with Britain, reviled by pro-French Republicans, concerning trade, sovereignty and the looming specter of war – and called for the president's impeachment. Remember, until then Washington was seen as virtually untouchable.

Imagine calling for Washington's impeachment.

Nor did Bache stop there. At the same time that his paper praised revolutionary France's bloodthirsty dictator, Maximilian Robespierre, as the "embodiment of virtue," he derided Washington as a "Demi-God of a Turkish seraglio." Others joined the fray: One writer spoke of Washington's "childish ambition"; another said that Washington was "cowardly"; a third that he was "insipid." Bache himself blasted Washington as "guilty of the foulest designs against the liberty of the people."

Robespierre virtuous, Washington demigod of a harem.

In an age when our newspaper industry is increasingly embattled, "Scandal & Civility" serves as a timely reminder of just how vital a thriving news culture is to the well-being of our democracy. The book, it should be said, is the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation and is at times marred by the jargon one finds in graduate seminars. But it neatly presents an animated portrait of the postrevolutionary era, when opinionated, brash, irreverent newspapers were indispensable. They are no less indispensable to us today.

The Library of Babel

A patron came in soon after 12.30, when the library opened, looking for an Oliver Sacks book he had on hold, Musicophilia [MUSIC] 781.15 S. He had just returned The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales (he said his father-in-law has Parkinson's disease). I recommended Uncle Tungsten [BIOGRPHY] B Sacks. He also wanted me to find a Russian novel with the name Margarite in it; a Google search produced The Master and Margarita (Russian: Мастер и Маргарита) is a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, woven around the premise of a visit by the Devil to the fervently ... In turn, he recommended The Library of Babel, By Jorge Luis Borges.