Friday, December 27, 2002

Friday Notes 2.  An on-line resource for NEILSA Librarians DEADLINES & DATES: I'll try to list all the upcoming dates of importance here, you will have to mine for the details.  NEILSA CLOSED Jan. 1,2003  AND we hope the "holiday" has been good to you also. February TBA - BYCA  (Before Your Computer Arrives), someone from your library MUST attend the BYCA workshop. Late spring/early summer workshops. March 24, 25, and 26 Upcoming Grant Application Deadlines Nominate an Outstanding Museum or Library for National Service Award These awards are the nation's highest honor for the extraordinary public service provided by museums and libraries. The deadline is February 15, 2003. See: http://www.imls.gov/whatsnew/current/112102.htm Learning Opportunities Grants applications: January 15, 2003. For more information about this grant program please see: http://www.imls.gov/grants/museum/mus_gen.asp National Leadership Grants for Libraries: February 1, 2003. http://www.imls.gov/grants/library/lib_nlgl.asp National Award for Library Service: February 15, 2003. http://www.imls.gov/grants/library/lib_nals.htm National Award for Museum Service: February 15, 2003. http://www.imls.gov/grants/museum/mus_nams.asp. National Leadership Grants for Museums: March 1, 2003. http://www.imls.gov/grants/museum/mus_nlgm.asp National Leadership Grants for Library/Museum Collaborations: April 1, 2003. http://www.imls.gov/grants/l-m/l-m_lead.asp All IMLS grant and award program deadlines can be viewed at: http://www.imls.gov/grants/dedln/index.htm       County Meetings Scheduled: If your county meeting is not on the schedule please contact NEILSA •    Allamakee County Meeting •    Black Hawk County Meeting - When called - seldom •    Bremer County Meeting - April 8, 2002 @ 7:30 in Readlyn •    Buchanan County Meeting •    Butler County Meeting •    Chickasaw County Meeting •    Clayton County Meeting •    Delaware County Meeting - May 13, 2002 @ 7:00  Edgewood P L •    Dubuque County does not have a County Association •    Fayette County Meeting -  April 10th at 1000 @  Fayette Library •    Grundy County Meeting - All meetings start at 9:00 am - 2003 schedule         1/27 @ Conrad, 4/28 @ Dike, 6/28 @ Grundy Center, 10/27 @ Reinbeck •    Howard County Meeting •    Winneshiek County Meeting CE: Special Workshops: One & two hour workshops at Fall & Spring county meetings, item specific workshops.     OTHER CE: You must register with the listed provider.  Check: http://www.silo.lib.ia.us/for_ia_libraries/continuing_ed/index.html         Self-Directed Learning Opportunities: http://www.silo.lib.ia.us/Certification/alternate.htm ANNOUNCEMENTS:     County Meetings Scheduled: If your county meeting is not on the schedule please contact NEILSA Allamakee County Meeting Black Hawk County Meeting - When called - seldom Bremer County Meeting - April 8, 2002 @ 7:30 in Readlyn Buchanan County Meeting Butler County Meeting - April 1, 2002 7:00 Shell Rock PL Chickasaw County Meeting Clayton County Meeting Delaware County Meeting - May 13, 2002 @ 7:00 in Edgewood P L Dubuque County does not have a County Association Fayette County Meeting - April 10th at 1000 @  Fayette Library Grundy County Meeting Howard County Meeting - April 7, 2003 @ 7:00 Elma PL Winneshiek County Meeting YOU WROTE: snippets from your e-mails: The Elgin Public Library now has a national traveling exhibit, "The Great Experiment: George Washington and the American Republic" We will have the exhibit until January 23. The exhibit was organized by the Huntington Library, San Marino, California in association with the American Library Association, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Elgin Library is the only Iowa site for the exhibit on this tour. We had an opening reception on the evening of December 5 with Dr. Clair Keller from the Humanities Iowa Speakers Bureau. He dresses in costume, George Washington as military officer, president, and farmer. He dressed in the military uniform for his appearance here and held a "news conference". We had about 50 people in attendance. The next morning he went to the local high school and grade school for appearances. He is very good and was well received. You can get a speaker from Humanities for $50, honorarium and mileage are covered. Because of the exhibit being here, the town promotion group is celebrating Christmas with "An American Christmas" theme and is giving away turkeys, cherry pies, and for the children "Valley Forge blankets" (navy throws) If you are in the area before January 23, stop in to see the exhibit. Bev Strong FEEDBACK:     Survey Question: No new question. When you respond please send replies to Ken at davenport@neilsa.org or use the "comments" link at the bottom of the blog     REPLIES - Next week CHANGES: Updates – Addresses & such - None this week   CONSORTIA NEWS & E-Rate: Supreme Court sets schedule for CIPA appeal: ALA arguments to begin March 5 Arguments on the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) will be held Wednesday, March 5, 2003, according to a schedule released December 18, by the U.S. Supreme Court. In May, the American Library Association (ALA) received a unanimous lower court ruling that CIPA is unconstitutional. The opinion was written by Chief Judge Edward R. Becker of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals and joined by U.S. District Court Judges John P. Fullam and Harvey Bartle III. The three-judge panel held that CIPA is unconstitutional because the mandated use of filtering technology on all computers will result in blocked access to substantial amounts of constitutionally protected speech. The Court found that filters both overblock (block access to protected speech) and underblock (allow access to illegal or unconstitutional speech). To learn more about the ALA and the lawsuit against CIPA, please visit ALA Web site at http://www.ala.org/cipa or call 312-280-4223. To donate to the ALA legal defense fund online, go to: http://www.ala.org/cipa     END PLATE: Long Announcements, Supporting Documents, & other "stuff" Interesting poll results revealed last week by George  Barna. Barna is a California-based pollster who specializes in religious beliefs -- the Barna Group is the Gallup Poll of the Christian world. They just did a survey at the request of the American Family Association, and the results are quite telling: the poll asked Americans who don't consider themselves Christian to express their "impression" of 11 groups of people: positive, negative, or in-between? Evangelical Christians rated 10th -- just above prostitutes, and  significantly below Republicans, Democrats, lesbians and Movie and TV performers. Even lawyers came in at #7! (Ministers, though, should take comfort: you came in at #2 -- but it was a distant #2 behind military officers, who came in first by far).  Survey details and press release: http://www.barna.org/cgi-bin/PagePressRelease.asp?PressReleaseID=127 Monmouth County Library may bar young patrons unless accompanied by adults -------------------- December 19, 2002, 3:16 AM EST MANALAPAN, N.J. -- Monmouth County Library officials may soon prohibit children ages 9 and under from entering any of its 11 branches unless they are under the direct supervision of an adult. The policy, now under consideration by the Library Commission and the county Board of Freeholders, would be similar to those already in place at other libraries throughout the state. It would also require that an adult accompany children between the ages of 10 and 13, but the adult would only have to remain in the same building. Ken Sheinbaum, the library system's executive director, said the crackdown came about because children were being left alone in the branches while their parents work or run errands. In many instances, librarians have been forced to stay after closing because parents did not arrive in time to pick up their children. "We don't want to make parents unhappy, and we certainly don't want to call police," Sheinbaum told the Asbury Park Press of Neptune for Thursday's editions. "But on the other hand, we don't want kids left in an unsafe situation outside a closed building." The library commission has scheduled a Jan. 14 public hearing on the proposed policy, but it was not known when a final decision would be made. Copyright (c) 2002, The Associated Press -------------------- This article originally appeared at: http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-nj--librarycrackdown1219dec19,0,5904218.story Visit Newsday online at http://www.newsday.com Graphic Novels Speak Louder Than Words December 22, 2002 By NICK HORNBY [Editors NOTE: Long but worth it IF you are considering attracting a new clientele - teens] However often you tell yourself that the comic book is a legitimate art form, with its own language and style, its Chaucers and Shakespeares (although there are some high-culture snobs who would argue that even Stan Lee at his best fails to approach the heights that ''King Lear'' attains), its critics, its ability to get us to see the world in a new way, you may still feel an urge to explain yourself if you are caught reading one in public. (This is especially true if you find yourself reading a page that contains a misspelling. Comic-book artists seem to have a little trouble in that department.) This defensiveness is more likely to come upon you if you have reached a certain age; in the course of preparing for this review, I was tempted more than once to explain to taxi drivers and fellow bus passengers that I was being paid -- paid by The New York Times Book Review, no less -- to read these works, and that there were all sorts of proper books by proper writers waiting for me on my bedside table at home.         The truth, of course, is that many of these proper books will remain unread, or half-read anyway, whereas these comic books were devoured, quickly and with great pleasure: comic books are never dull, in the excruciating way that prose fiction can be, and it's as hard to imagine half-reading most graphic novels (Chris Ware's brilliant, dense, long and occasionally obscure ''Jimmy Corrigan'' is an exception) as it is to imagine half-reading a sonnet. Indeed, one of the problems with a book like Eric Drooker's startlingly beautiful ''Blood Song'' is that it is hard to know how to savor it. ''Blood Song'' -- subtitled ''A Silent Ballad'' -- contains not a word of prose, no description or dialogue of any kind, and most of its pages hold only one or two frames. Yet ''Blood Song'' has a strong and compelling narrative that works like a fancy water chute at a theme park: one has no sooner sat down to read Page 1 than one finds oneself, perhaps 20 minutes later, propelled straight through and out the other side, having barely absorbed the whole experience. Prose can be turgid and indigestible, as we all know, but ''Blood Song'' -- a mythopoeic account of a young woman's flight from a ruined Eden to the corrupt and terrifying urban world -- helps one to understand that writing's density can be purposeful: if one had read a book with the same theme, one would have days -- weeks, months -- to contemplate its complexities and nuances. I ended up feeling that I'd shortchanged Drooker's impassioned tale. You can try stopping to stare at the pictures, but their strength is their simplicity, so there really isn't an awful lot to grapple with; maybe we need lessons in how to read books like this. The more exposure to graphic novels one has, the more one realizes that the relative youth of the medium, at least in its current adult form, presents its artists with problems of appropriateness that the more established arts don't have. Whereas most established writers know what constitutes a novel, and filmmakers understand what will sustain a film, even the best comic-book artists sometimes seem unsure of their material and their intended audience. Jason Little's ''Shutterbug Follies,'' for example, is essentially a sweet-natured adventure yarn, the sort of thing in which a dangerously curious young heroine gets in over her head and finds herself pursuing and being pursued by bad men with beards. (That's old-school bad men with beards, by the way, rather than the post-9/11 variety.) Those familiar with Herge's Tintin will recognize Little's Bee -- she even has the same red hair -- and Little is clearly an admirer of Herge's strong, crisp, bright graphic art. The temperament and style of ''Shutterbug Follies'' suggested that it might make a perfect -- and, let's face it, free -- Christmas present for my 12-year-old niece, but I'm not sure how her parents would feel about the references to masturbation or the mutilated and naked bodies. (Bee works in a photo lab, where she sees lots of things unsuitable for a young niece, and many of them are reproduced in the book.) The resulting tone is curious, like a Nancy Drew mystery adapted by Brian De Palma, and one suspects that Little may have alienated both of these potential audiences. He's a great illustrator, and he tells a convoluted story with economy and flair; he will, I'm sure, find his range eventually. Adrian Tomine's ''Summer Blonde'' (which is beautifully published by the very smart Canadian company Drawn and Quarterly) aims for the readers of Daniel Clowes's ''Ghost World,'' and will almost certainly hit them, too. Tomine's characters, like Clowes's, can be as sour and as sarcastic as real people, and consequently, reading a comic book suddenly becomes as rewarding as reading good contemporary fiction. ''Summer Blonde'' consists of four novellas, three of them populated by marginalized, lonely and sexually inept Gen Xers (the fourth features marginalized, lonely and sexually confused high school kids). Regrettably, it would appear that sometime during the next few years -- they are not quite miserable or alienated enough yet -- Tomine's characters might find themselves on the same party circuit as some of Todd Solondz's folks. Though these stories are cheerless, they are never less than smart; Tomine cites both the alternative comic ''Love and Rockets'' and Raymond Carver as inspirations (and each story ends with an elliptical resonance), which suggests he knows that comic books are like all art forms: just because you have the talent doesn't mean you have anything to say. Tomine has both talent and a writer's eye for the truth. Kim Deitch's ''Boulevard of Broken Dreams'' is an ambitious, surreal and occasionally baffling attempt to narrate the history of animation in the last century -- a companion piece to Michael Chabon's novel ''The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,'' which fictionalized the golden age of the comic book, and Elizabeth McCracken's equally wonderful ''Niagara Falls All Over Again,'' which trailed after a couple of vaudeville comedians as they crossed over to movies and then to television. Deitch is of a different generation from Tomine and Little; his drawings are comparable to R. Crumb's in their feverish, angry energy (Deitch almost certainly wakes up in the morning exhausted and with his head full of delirious images), and come as something of a shock after the clean lines of his younger colleagues. But his experience and sophistication allow him to do things that the youngsters are not yet capable of: ''The Boulevard of Broken Dreams'' is full of metaphor and imagery that shift meaning, flashbacks and flash-forwards and a bagful of tricks that give the book heft. What is particularly impressive is the way that Deitch juggles the personal -- his artist hero is plagued by a cartoon demon that simultaneously inspires and destroys him -- and the cultural dimensions of his narrative: his book is just as much about the neutering and Disneyfication of animation as it is about the self-destructiveness of genius. Almost as impressive, not least because of the freshness of the subject matter and milieu, is Baru's ''Road to America,'' which is set during the Algerian struggle for independence from France in the late 1950's. Baru's protagonist is a talented young boxer who becomes an unwitting political symbol for both sides. The colonial oppressors want him to demonstrate that their patronage can work, and his native countrymen and their resistance movement want him to demonstrate his loyalty to the cause by giving them hefty chunks of his purses. This is an exemplary graphic novel, informative and gripping, and Baru's muted colors and mournful caricatures are a welcome break from the American style. I shall give this to my 10-year-old nephew, thus discharging my avuncular pedagogical duties, and he will never open it. ''Nobody feels the need to provide deep critical insight to something written by hand,'' Lynda Barry writes at the end of her book ''One Hundred Demons.'' ''Mostly they keep it as short as a want ad. The worst I get is, 'Too many words. Not funny. Don't get the joke.' I can live with that.'' I am not sure that I am able to provide deep critical insight, but Barry deserves more than perfunctory attention, because ''One Hundred Demons'' is a terrific book (not, please note, ''comic book'' -- no qualification is necessary): brutally honest, thoughtful and soulful. Barry's work is clearly heavily autobiographical -- she refers to it as ''autobifictionalography,'' although one gets the impression that the ''fictional'' part of that neologism refers to form rather than content. The 17 vignettes here are shaped like stories, but they have the unmistakable whiff of self-revelation and self-analysis about them. Barry is, underneath the wonky handwriting and the quirky, naive drawings, a great memoirist, and ''One Hundred Demons'' could happily sit on a shelf between Tobias Wolff's ''This Boy's Life'' and Dave Eggers's first book -- unless, of course, you arrange books alphabetically, in which case Barry belongs between Julian Barnes and Donald Barthelme, and that makes a kind of sense too. Like Wolff and Eggers, she finds a tone that accommodates self-criticism and self-irony without tipping over into self-loathing (although her self-portraits can be pretty fierce, and are invariably very pimply), but what she is particularly good at is resonance. These stories all contain little grenades of meaning that tend to explode just after you've read the last line. One can deduce that Barry had a tough childhood, but she prefers to concentrate on the details that connect rather than those that may exclude -- it's an innate talent, and one that separates the artists from the self-pitying bores. In ''One Hundred Demons,'' Barry chooses a disparate range of evils, annoyances and little disasters -- head lice, dancing, the 2000 election, dogs -- and finds a personal narrative that never quite goes where you might anticipate. ''Magic,'' for example, refers to the Lovin' Spoonful hit ''Do You Believe in Magic?'' and deals with a friendship that ground to a halt when the author started junior high; in 9 pages and 18 frames Barry touches on her parents' separation, guilt, betrayal and the potency of cheap music. The words of the last frame, which uses a real photo of Barry and Ev, the lost friend in question, have all the rhythm and regret of a great Springsteen song. In ''Lost and Found,'' Barry pokes fun at herself for being ignorant of ''story structure'' and ''arc'' and ''plot points,'' but I think she's being disingenuous: she knows. In the end, asking whether graphic novels are a waste of time is exactly the same as asking whether all novels are a waste of time: the answer is that it rather depends on who's writing them. Barry seems to me almost single-handedly to justify the form; she's one of America's very best contemporary writers. If I give anyone a copy of ''One Hundred Demons'' for Christmas, it'll be one I pay for, because I'm keeping this one. Nick Hornby's books include the novels ''High Fidelity'' and ''About a Boy.'' His latest, ''Songbook,'' is a collection of essays about music. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/books/review/22HORNBYT.html?ex=1041664743&;ei=1&en=ecfc0a4cac1a8fea The fine print stuff   blogs - Friday Notes 2 AT -  http://radio.weblogs.com/0108327/ NOTICE – DISCLAIMER - pick one, any one will do. MY disclaimer:Basically my opinions are my own, shared by no one else (sometimes), and are not the opinions of my agency, my board, my co-workers, my parents, siblings, relatives, my dogs or most any other know life form.  Except, of course, those very bright concerned, sensitive, perceptive &, in general, well educated, widely read and cultured individuals who wish to share this peculiar road to ruin, as well as a couple of down & out drugged out beatniks from the good old days. OK?  The "Prime Directive" applies.Edited by:Ken Davenport - NEILSA Consultantdavenport@neilsa.org COPYLEFT NOTICE 2002: THE INFORMATION IN THIS PUBLICATION IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt© COPYRIGHTPlease note: material found on the web should be assumed to be under copyright and is presented here for purposes of education and research only.NOTE: If credited [via ???] or [from so & so] it is their material and not covered by my "Copyleft" notice.  Ken SOURCE: {Consultant} D:CorelwpdocsFridayNotes1227.wpd  August 2, 2002 BOILER PLATE FOOTNOTES:1. WARNING: I will be able to give you about a 5 working day warning on deadlines (by e-mail, less otherwise) I have 10 days to reply, if I miss the deadline, well I won't miss, if you miss  ... I'll send it in late but ... 12:10:05 PM    comment []

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