Odyssey Online

Vampire Friends of the Libraries explained.

In honor of the time of year, and in honor of Dacre Stoker’s recent visit, an overview of our collection of vampire fiction:

• Blood Thirst : 100 Years of Vampire Fiction Edited and with an introduction by Leonard Wolf
• Dracula : the Un-dead by Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt
• Fledgling : A Novel by Octavia E. Butler
• The Historian : A Novel by Elizabeth Kostova
• The New Annotated Dracula by Bram Stoker, edited with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger, introduction by Neil Gaiman
• Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko, translated by Andrew Bromfield
• The Radleys : A Novel by Matt Haig
• The Vampire Armand by Anne Rice
• The Vampire Stories of Nancy Kilpatrick by Nancy Kilpatrick

Of course, to really know vampires one should be acquainted with the work of Lord Byron, although, that can be further work for this blog…

Remember, remember the 5th of November. The gunpowder, treason, and plot. I know of no reason why the gunpowder treason should ever be forgot from a famous film of a slightly sinister nature…and while you remember that remember that Dacre Stoker will be signing books at the Brewer Bookstore today at 4:30, and lecturing tonight in the Winston Room at 8:00.  Great frightening fun, see you there!

…with summer reading season in full swing, here is a reminder about the SLU Libraries Browsing Collection. Located just in front of our Special Collections area in ODY, the Browsing Collection is made of up of both nonfiction and fiction, and is assembled with the serious reader in mind.  A sampling of current titles in the Browsing Collection includes (picked to emphasize variety):

• Journal to the End of Islam by Michael Muhammad Knight
• History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
• Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown by Christopher Harvie
• Bicycle Diaries by David Byrne
• Past Due: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy by Peter S. Goodman
• War at the Wall Street Journal: The Inside Struggle to Control an American Business Empire by Sarah Ellison
• Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis
• Portrait and Dream: New and Selected Poems by Bill Berkson
• Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan
• White Egrets by Derek Walcott
• The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifites by Helen Weaver
• Ripe: The Search for the Perfect Tomato by Arthur Allen
• A Reader on Reading by Alberto Manguel

The Browsing Collection is available to anyone with borrowing privileges, and, again, these titles which are all on display are suggested to hopefully suggest the breadth of what is available.  Check ’em out!

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece over the weekend, on a signed Abraham Lincoln document here in the SLU Libraries Archives, and it’s new “place” in a national digital collection of Lincoln’s papers…they are literally looking to scan anything he signed or touched!  Our Curator of Special Collections Mark McMurry has some interesting commentary on this document, and the ultimate “place” of the document now that it has a digital doppelganger…

On January 14th I’ll be part of a panel with Michelle Gillie (of ODY!) and Amy Hauber (of Fine Arts!) discussing the Creative Commons. My notes for the presentation are here.

So if you’re interested in documents related to either the founding of the Creative Commons, or documents foreshadowing the necessity of the Creative Commons, take a look!

…in the reference area of ODY there are eight new beautiful white-as-bone art deco iMacs.  Brand new, ready for any Apple-leaning researcher who happens by and are first in line. These are networked machines sporting all the things you’d expect with a Mac, plus Photoshop and both Firefox and Safari.

And after a morning on the Mac, why not read about the company from which these beauties sprung.  We have a number of books in the collection on Apple, and on the implications of the technologies they’ve produced and so successfully marketed:

• The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, Coolness by Seven Levy
• The Second Coming of Steve Jobs by Alan Deutschman
• iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It by Steve Wozniak and Gina Smith
• West of Eden: the End of Innocence at Apple Computer by Frank Rose
• iPod Therefore I am: Thinking Inside the White Box by Dylan Jones

POETRY READING

“Have You Seen A. Lincoln? Searching for Old Abe in the National Archives”
Presented by Dr. David Gerleman, Assistant Editor, Papers of Abraham Lincoln

Thursday, November 5
4:30 p.m.
Josephine Young room, ODY Library

Sponsored by the History Department, ODY Library, and the SLU Sophomore Initiative

Hope to see you there!

…with Bill Fox’s inauguration at hand and the air of celebration much about the autumnal scenes here at St. Lawrence, I thought it would be in the spirit of things to point to books written by our faculty that are home here in the St. Lawrence University Library Collections.  These folks are great teachers, they’re fine writers.  This is not a comprehensive list, but, rather, a sampling for an inauguration weekend:

• Rabbit (un)Redeemed: the Drama of Belief in John Updike’s Fiction by Peter Bailey
• The Springfield Story: A Satire by Roy Caldwell
• El Interticio de la Colonia: Ruptura y Medicion en la Narrativa Antisclavista Cubana by Ilia Casanova-Marengo
• Los Corridos en la Memoria del Migranta by Martha Chew Sanchez
• Dream Season: A Professor Joins America’s Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team by Bob Cowser Jr.
• The Good Society: An Introduction to Comparative Politics by Alan Draper and Ansil Ramsey
• Shaping the Upper Canadian Fronteir: Environment, Society, and Culture in the Trent Valley by Neil Forkey
• Microfoundations and Macroeconomics: the Austrian Perspective by Steve Horiwitz
• Queer Family Values: Debunking the Myths of the Nuclear Family by Val Lehr
• African Studies and the Undergraduate Curriculum edited by Patricia Alden and David Lloyd
• The Sky is Not the Ceiling: An Astronomer’s Faith by Aileen O’Donoghue
• Freedom’s Promise: Ex Slave Families and Citizenship in the Age of Emancipation by Elizabeth Regosin
• Memory from a Broader Perspective by Alan Searleman and Douglas Herrmann
• Scraping by in the Big Eighties by Natalia Singer
• Economics as Moral Science: the Political Economy of Adam Smith by Jeffrey Young