Monster
Trial novel meets
screenplay. Young black man, called a
monster by the law.
reviewdate:
Feb 2 2009
isn:
978-0-06-440731-1
Tagged with
Zine Yearbook 9
I am happy to have this book to point to whenever anyone asks me, "But are people still making zines?" The answer, with about 100 zines published in the last year excerpted and another 75 or so listed as honorable mentions, is an emphatic "Yes!" I loved seeing the zines, reproduced as closely as possible to how they originally appeared, but even more, I was inspired by Katie Haegele and Cindy Crabb's loving introductions. And I gotta say the Zine Libraries Index Julie Turley and I contributed is also pretty hot.
Quotations:
I love zines. Dreaming them up, physically constructing them, and bringing them to the post office all snug in their packages makes me feel whole in a way not much else does. … The medium of zines reminds me of the point of the work: the deep and sincere need to be heard, the yearning for communion. I sign most of my zines "love, Katie" as though they're letters because they feel a lot like letters. I mean, I wouldn't bother saying something if I didn't think there was someone to say it to. … The connection people make with each other through writing and reading is as human as we get, and zinesters know this, they live it. I'm writing this now and you're reading it in another now, which means we're here together in a way; wherever we are, we're both crackling with the same kind of life. --Katie Haegele, Introduction, p.1
Zines were how we learned to exist outside ourselves when the world told us to disappear. …
It was the hand touching hand as the zine was passed between you. …
It was about creating real physical connection in the face of nothingness. It was folded well loved pages falling apart and holding you together, kept safe in your pocket as you rode the train under the bay from Oakland to San Francisco, and knowing that there was someone else out there, someone you met in passing for a second who had given you this gift who had secrets like your own. And that you weren't alone. –Cindy Crabb, Introduction, p.1-2.
It's hard not to acknowledge that zines are best for their immediate, ephemeral qualities. That feeling that you've found something truly unique and special, from a seemingly unlikely source. For these reasons, putting zines in a mass—produced book is seemingly contradictory. …
Every day we are told that print is dying, but as our co-worker Chris says, "If print is dead, it's another reason to like zombies." –Joe Biel, p.6
reviewdate:
Feb 1 2009
isn:
978-1-934620-07-6
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Link digest, February 6, 2009
- 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know, via Ellyssa.
- Class Warfare Pix: The So-Called Death Tax on DailyKos. Look for CARNEGIE LIBRARIES, WPA LIBRARY PROGRAM, and PACK HORSE LIBRARIANS. (Thanks, Steven.)
- For the Birds: Feminist Collective + Distro, based in NYC, and they heart zines.
- The Hepster's Dictionary, by Cab Calloway.
I went looking for this because of a reference in Abby Bass's Pearl Tongue zine. - How to Take Your Data Back From Google’s Claws, also via Ellyssa.
- Internet Archive Zines collection
- An Interview w/ the Chicago Underground Library
- Red Roots: a South Bronx Community Art Space
Their events list is kind of hella impressive. - RR-NYC Salon Discussion on the Proposed OCLC Policy Change
Please read Emily's notes from our meeting, and Jennifer's from the Nylink meeting with OCLC, and our collective bibliography of postings and articles on the topic.
Growing Up Rich
This is essentially a poor little rich girl story, about a plump, socially awkward half an orphan, half-Jewish teenager in NYC and Boston in the late 1940s. The book surprised me, as I was expecting a more hateable heroine. In fact, one of the things that saves her, is that she is not brilliant, not beautiful, and not particularly sensitive or insightful. She is just a troubled teenager, who happens to be worth a ton of dough but is basically emotionally isolated while having to navigate the death of one parent and realizing the other will never be there for her either.
Quotations:
It was obvious that Judy would never be idle until she was downed by old age or a terrible disease. And as for rich, she didn't have it in her. No matter how much money she had invested in AT&T or Eastman Kodak, no matter how large her bank balance, she thought poor. She didn't have the flair to throw away bread crusts and socks worn at the heels. She couldn't buy a ring for herself merely because she liked the look of the gem. She could never have owned thirty pairs of shoes, the way my mother did, nor spend $45 on a cotton dress to wear in the city in August when everyone was away. Judy thought in terms of saving, not spending, which I discovered was the big difference. Almost, in fact, as big as the difference between your German Jew and your Russian Jew. My mother was a spender, and she had such fun--oh she had an absolutely lovely time spending oodles of fresh, sticky bills tucked away in their Mark Cross wallet until she was ready to snap them out. p.205-206
reviewdate:
Jan 30 2009
isn:
0-316-09188-5
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Archiving Women Report Back
Archiving Women was a one-day conference "bringing together scholars and archivists to examine feminist practices in the archive."
If I were a little more organized, I could share my notes, but unfortunately they're gone. Instead I'm going to bring up three different threads that for me characterized the event. They are preservation vs. privacy, the de-emphasis of the practitioner, and notable vs. common lives.
PS My presentation.
Queering LCSH
I catalog a lot of zines by writers who identify as queer--not gay, not HOMOSEXUAL, not LESBIAN, not BISEXUAL (though sometimes omnisexual or pansexual)--and I am at a loss for how to represent them in Library of Congressese. SEXUAL MINORITIES seems to be the best the folks at SACO have to offer, but I just have to wonder if persons of the queer persuasion are really happy with that. If the answer is no, what would you like the descriptor to be? I'm addressing this query primarily to queer folk and catalogers.
free:
Syndicate Product #14: Syndicate Consumption 2008
This is A.j. Michel's log of her year's reading (books, comics, and zines), listening, and television and movie watching. I've thought of trying to chronicle more than just my reading, but have been too daunted. A.j., who I believe is a card-carrying but non-practicing librarian, is geekarifically organized and precise, and she provides a fair use statement to justify her inclusion of the occasional zine excerpt.
I recommend this zine to anyone looking for things to read, listen to, and watch, but it's especially appropriate if you have a serious comics jones and like your science fiction okay. Since I'm seriously challenged when it comes to music, I can't be trusted to characterize her taste, but I think indie would cover it, though perhaps too broadly.
Quotations:
Much like WALL*E debating where to place the spork he collected (With forks? With spoons?*), deciding how to arrange this consumption log was fraught with struggle. Should it be arranged by type of media consumed or by date it was consumed? If by type, where do graphic novels go - books or comics? What about graphic novels that are collections of previously published comic issues? Is watching a movie on DVD the same as watching it in a movie theater? What about movies on broadcast television or cable? Are television episodes on DVD still television? --inside cover
*After some deliberation, WALL*E placed the spork between the individual containers holding the fork and spoon collections.
(You can tell it's not "chick lit" because the cover does not feature a disembodied female body part, and isn't a pink hue.) p.16-17
reviewdate:
Jan 27 2009
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Parfait, 2 and 3
If you love books and/or zines and/or fashion analysis and/or fancy binding and/or letter press and/or library search results and/or math theory and/or French films and literature and/or Red Pandas and/or original illustrations and/or cookie recipes and/or whatever other crazy things are competing to get out of book artist Emily K. Larned's head and fingers, then you will find something to go gaga over in her zine series Parfait.
I must warn you that the following review is as gushy a thing as I have ever written. If the idea of my blasé self losing control like that makes you uncomfortable, do not read on!
Quotations:
When we're not ambivalent, how staggeringly particular we can be. #2, 2005, p. 76.
At the very same booksale you also bought Madame Bovary. You love this book. It is due for a reread. But then upon close inspection later, you find that this edition was "edited" by the translator! Jesus. There's five critical essays tacked onto the end in addition to the lengthy introduction and yet the translator actually took AWAY from the original text? Oh, I'm sorry, did YOU Mr. Translator labour seven hours a day on one paragraph like our pal Gustave? You didn't? Then don't fucking EDIT his work.
You become really rather irrationally upset about this. Like it was morally wrong of these books to be donated to the library booksale so some poor soul such as yourself would buy these lousy editions, ignorant of their inauthenticity. Like, no doubt the person who originally owned these books was duped by them too, and so got rid of them by donation. When in fact you kind of feel like they should have been THROWN OUT. They're broken. They're malfunctioning books. So you're going to throw them out, right? If that is what you think their deserved fate to be? Trash? Book in trash? Um, gosh. Of course not. You'll just donate them... to the Salvation Army. What sort of horrible person would throw out a book? #3, 2007, p. 67
reviewdate:
Jan 16 2009
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Given Day, the
This book was recommended to me by a friend who got so absorbed in reading it, that she called in sick to work to finish it. Since it's 702 pages long, I might have appreciated some more concentrated reading time, as well. I liked the book, where the central plot element is the labor dispute between the Boston Police Department and the city in 1919, pretty well, but was not quite as in love with it as my friend.
Quotations:
Danny didn't know a soul who had taken the Prohibition bills seriously, even when they'd made it to the floor of the House. It seemed impossible, with all the other shifts going on in the country's fabric, that these prim, self-righteous "don't dos" had a chance. But one morning the whole country woke up to realize that not only did the idiots have a chance, they had a foothold. Gained while everyone else paid attention to what had seemed more important. p.72
"Have you ever noticed that when they need us, they talk about duty, but when we need them, they talk about budgets?" p.75
"The preliminary suspicions that the molasses tank explosion was a terrorist act have been a boon for us. Simply put, this country is sick of terror."
"But the explosion wasn't a terrorist act."
"The rage remains." Finch chuckled. "No one is more surprised than us. We thought the rush to judgment over the molasses flood had killed us. Quite the opposite. People don't want truth, they want certainty." He shrugged. "Or the illusion of it." p.491
reviewdate:
Jan 24 2009
isn:
978-0-688-16318-1
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LC, Scooby-Doo, and the breadcrumb sponge
Library of Congress Subject Headings Weekly List 51 (December 17, 2008) and Weekly List 1 (January 7, 2009)
LC welcomes to the catalog SCOOBY- DOO FILMS, sixty cross-references for BREADCRUMB SPONGE, and tweaks the standard form for dealing with bible characters.