Odyssey Online

Whistle and summer is here! Whilst you are out and about in the pleasant summer time, remember SLU Libraries Interlibrary loan is still at work, available. Our forms are online, so for those working at home requests are easy.  The link here is to a quick reminder about what makes ILL’s wheels go ’round!

Maurice Sendak died Saturday.  (Links to tributes here from NCPR).  We don’t have many titles by Sendak, although we do have this overview of his career as an artist.  The wonderful Canton Free Library has, of course, his major works and it would be worth a walk to spend a little late spring time with Maurice Sendak.  There is magic in “We’ll eat you up we love you so! And Max said ‘NO!’”  The magic of monsters and the magic of simplicity I suppose–how each line in Where the Wild Things Are slips off the previous like rain, like wooden blocks tumbling.  Max is everybody either in remembering oneself or remembering one’s secret wishes.  Yup, worth a walk to the Canton Free Library…

Dr. Sarah Barber of the St. Lawrence English department holds a limited edition copy of Shakespeare’s Ovid being Arthur Golding’s translation of The Metamorphoses edited by W. H.D. Rouse and published by the De La More Press, London, 1904.  This copy is #101 of 250.  The book was purchased at Dr. Barber’s request by the Friends of the Owen D. Young and Launders Libraries (FODYLL) for use in her course on Shakespeare. Presenting the book are Mark McMurray, Curator of Special Collections, and Albert Glover, current Board chair of FODYLL.

…in The New York Review of Books Tim Parks takes up the eternal question of why a book may speak to one reader, and then doesn’t to the next. While summer reading (final exams still pending) may seem to be an eternity away, consider this a first summer reading salvo in library blogging!

…not a great deal of blogging this month about it being National Poetry Month, and with the end of the semester drawing close maybe not all that much time for recreational reading, but, soon? So with that in mind a quick overview of some of the new collections of poetry in our Browsing Collection:

• Push Open the Window: Contemporary Poetry from China Qingping Wang, editor ; Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Howard Goldblatt, translation co-editors
• Beauty is a Verb: the New Poetry of Disability Edited by Jennifer Bartlett, Sheila Black, and Michael Northen
• Everyday People by Albert Goldbarth
• Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys by D. A. Powell
• Me and Nina: Poems by Monica A. Hand
• In the Kingdom of the Sea Monkeys by Campbell McGrath
• Varamo by César Aira, translated by Chris Andrews
• The Last Usable Hour by Deborah Landau
• Midnight Lantern: New & Selected Poems by Tess Gallagher
• The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment by Anne Waldman
• Vanishing-line: Poems by Jeffrey Yang
• Touch: Poems by Henri Cole

…the actual chemistry behind the intoxicating aroma of old books is explicated in an Atlantic Magazine video. In this space we’ve chronicled writers like John Updike, and Sven Birkerts, and William Hazlitt, and Anne Fadiman on the physicality of books and what that means to the reading experience…graceful and persuasive writers all now seasoned and served with a little science…

April is the cruel month, for busy bloggers, but leave the blog and write pen on paper and you’ll find: handwriting everywhere you look! The Arts Collaborative and the SLU Libraries have just kicked off a handwritten documents end of April week, and, that’s poetry!  Reporting on this will follow, and then a summer of reading blogging!

Google matters. Google matters because a lot of people use it, Google matters because it is an important and useful research tool.  Atlantic Magazine has published a time line of Google co-creator Larry Page’s first year as the company’s CEO (succeeding Eric Schmidt).  You’ll note it was an up and down year…

…back to poetry (April is poetry month!) after this short Google update…

…a lengthy essay/contemplation on the thesaurus written by Peter Mark Roget. When was the last time you thought about a thesaurus?  Apparently the original Roget thought creating one to be a exercise in spirituality, an exercise in bringing order to the universe.  Of course while thesaurus-speak can be justifiably sneered at, good Saxon based synonyms for management speak might be a reason to keep a thesaurus on the shelves (cyber or otherwise).  Read Roget’s piece and decide…

…along the lines of the general topic of rereading…slow reading.  This piece by Maura Kelly is an argument for reading, for lengthy linear reading, for reading big novels.  Great Expectations, Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, that kind of book.  Kelly’s is a well written piece and we give a sympathetic ear to any essay that makes the case for reading. Reading.

Here’s a thought along those lines, for the interludes one might have in the afternoon, think about the big book that might make for great slow summer reading…