In case anyone cares, or maybe just for the record, I'm on a part-time sabbatical this year. I had the option of taking six months off completely or a year off part-time. PT seemed the wiser choice, productivity-wise. Plus we're in transition at Barnard--the College and the Library, so being around a couple days a week seemed like a good idea.
Sometimes when I'm not excited by the book I'm reading, I can't help but grab something I know I like from my bookshelf. This time is was Maus, Art Spiegelman's graphic biography of his parents' life and times in Poland preceding and during Hitler's reign. The book also tells of Spiegelman's relationship with his difficult father.
I don't know whether to identify this book as a memoir or autobiography. By the title, you'd think it was coming of age in college story, and it's definitely not that. Kathleen Norris writes mostly about her early, post-virgin 20s working at the Academy of American Poets under the direction of Betty Kray. Kray is definitely a subject worth reading and writing about, but I have to admit I was a little annoyed throughout the book that it didn't really deliver what I expected. I should probably get over that.
Betty intended that one of the functions of the Poets House library would be 'to gather fugitive materials such as [small-press books], magazines, chapbooks, and other ephemeral publications,' without which poets and scholars would find it "impossible to re-create the sense of a literary epoch." p.177
This week on LCSH Watch:
Mary Kosut's SUNY Purchase class
It seems Slideshare messes with my Drupal stylesheet, and since I don't have it in me right now to figure out why, I'll just give y'all the link to my slideshow instead of embedding it.
This is me immodestly promoting two events at which I'll be speaking. One of them specifically asked me to, so I'm not entirely betraying the library code of anonymous servitude. The first is the NY Art Book Fair, where Alycia Sellie, Susan Thomas, and I will be talking about zines in libraries.
I just spent 400 pages in the mind of the mother of a teenage mass murderer, and I'm here to tell you that is not the nicest place to be. Mama Eva and sociopath Kevin's story is told in the form of letters from Eva to her husband/baby daddy Franklin. (Don't you love the name Franklin, btw? Why is it so much more appealing than Frank or Francis?) The basic premise is that Kevin, born to a mother who has a hard time bonding with him, is pretty much a psycho from birth, but somehow while this is apparent to Eva, Franklin can't or won't see it, which leads to some strife in their marriage. At points that stress was so hard to take because it seemed so unjust to me that I might have put the book down if I weren't reading it at a friend's recommendation.
Rivington Street starts out in pogrom ridden Russia and follows one family to the early twentieth century Lower East Side, with its pushcarts and Yiddish socialism. It is to some extent a tale of two sisters, one a garment factory union organizer and the other an aspiring clothing designer, a boss. The other strong women characters are the daughter of a selfish and sexist rabbi, a gentile suffragist, and Hannah, the old world mother of the two sisters, Sarah and Ruby Levy. I've read it a bunch of times, and it never disappoints me. I love entering the world of my grandfather's Lower East Side and the early struggles of the women's labor and suffrage movements.
We work as hard as any man; we think as well as any man; and we want every right and privilege the men have, including the privilege of making fools of ourselves every four years as they do by voting for capitalist parties that keep the chains fastened around their necks! p.255-56
In my review of Welfare Brat I remarked how impressive it is when people can remember so many details of their childhood. Scully, unfortunately, doesn't have quite the mastery that Childers does, but she reports that her sister has no memory of their childhood whatsoever, so I guess she's not doing too badly. The quality is a little uneven; some of the short, poetic chapters (64 of them in a 219 page book) are far more compelling than others.