The World of Paper
Wings, by Mona Waterhouse
This post really belongs over on the Arts blog, but my most recent Reader´s Connection post was about the availability of ebooks at the library´s Downloadables site; and I’d like to bounce back with a paperphiliac post about “The World of Paper,” an exhibit that will be on display at Central Library until January 10th.
On the Arts blog, courtesy of photographer Jeffrey A. Kisling, we have pictures of one part of the exhibit: artist Kyoko Ibe’s Flight, a glorious work that’s currently on view in Central’s Atrium.
But “The World of Paper” is all over Central Library, from the floor portholes in the Learning Curve (2nd Floor) to the Nina Mason Pulliam Special Collections Room (6th Floor), with more than 350 individual objects: art and artifacts from the Dard Hunter Collection as well as historic photographs and other material from the Robert C. Williams Paper Museum at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia.
If you’re feeling brave, you can click on the arrow below and start a fifty-second video. The cameraman was not, unfortunately, Jeffrey Kisling, and you may experience sea-sickness while viewing. The solution to this problem is to come to Central and see the exhibit in person. We obviously haven’t captured it here.
The video begins with sheets of Fiji tapa cloth, a forerunner to paper, on exhibit in the Yellow Room near the St. Clair Street entrance. After that you get glimpses from around the building (I don’t have details on how the paper with real butterflies was done), and you end up in the Learning Curve, looking at a cool paper shirt and some psychedelic watermarks.
Please join us at Central Library before January 10th and take this amazing tour. You’ll actually see some books here and there.
What´s New with Downloadables? (Ebooks and Social Networking Features)
On our homepage´s lower left, there used to be a link that said Downloadable Audiobooks. You may have noticed that we´ve e-transmogrified it.
Now it just says Downloadables. We had to make the change because ebooks have become available at that site, in addition to the audiobooks. These ebooks can be read on Sony Readers. They can’t be read on a Kindle. If you happen to know whether they can be read on one of the new Barnes & Noble Nooks, please leave us a comment to that effect.
Go to the Downloadables site for instructions. You’ll have to download the Adobe Digital Editions software.
Features have been expanded to accomodate ebooks. Back in May, for example, I did a posting about your new ability to change your checkout period. Now, if you go to My eAccount, log in, and select Lending Periods from the menu, you’ll see that a lending period field for ebooks has been added.
Again, you’ll need to go to the Downloadables page to read all the instructions.
So what was I saying about social networking features?
I haven’t completely recovered from our library’s Month of Mysteries, so I’m going to select Mystery & Thriller from the eBook Fiction menu. (The networking features are available for both the audiobooks and the ebooks.)
I’ll choose the Dick Francis title, 10 lb Penalty, from the list. When I’ve opened the record (by clicking on the title or the cover art) I’m given the choice to go to Facebook or Twitter, or to send an email. I’m going to select Email a friend . . .
. . . and write my email and send it.
And my friend receives an email, complete with a link that will take him or her to the title I’ve chosen.
Facebook and Twitter users will be able to use those sites to spread the word about books they’ve enjoyed.
Check out our enhanced Downloadables site. I hope you find something that you’d like to share with someone.
Indy UFO Abductions!
I´m sorry that Intruders: The Incredible Visitations at Copley Woods doesn´t have any cover art that I can display here. There was cover art in our catalog, yesterday, but then some gray humanoid beings with big liquidy black eyes came into our Information Technology area and . . . well, I can´t remember what happened for the next hour or so; and now the cover art is gone.
I shouldn’t make a joke out of this. Intruders (c1987) describes a suburban Indianapolis family whose members have been abducted repeatedly over the years. “Copley Woods” is a name that author Budd Hopkins made up to protect the family’s privacy. Hopkins is a serious, seemingly reliable guy, and the founder and head of Intruders Foundation, a nonprofit research and support organization. I’m not smiling or feeling cynical as I read his book. I just hope he’s a con man, because I don’t want this stuff to be true.
Although everything that he relates is disturbing, thus far the most disturbing thing in the book is the underlining. I’m disturbed because I’m a librarian, of course–Folks, you’re not supposed to underline in library books, not even in pencil–but I’m more disturbed by the passages that this poor woman chose to highlight. (Yes, I’ve made a broad-daylight gender assumption.) One has to assume that she experienced recognition while reading these frightening passages.
Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions (c1981) was Hopkins’s first book. After reading it, “Kathie Davis,” a woman living in “Copley Woods,” Indiana, sent the author a letter that led to the writing of his second book, Intruders.
While on patrol, a couple of New York police officers saw some strange happenings. They went to a bookstore, looked at a copy of Intruders, and decided that Hopkins was the man to contact. Their letter to him kicks off Witnessed: the True Story of the Brooklyn Bridge UFO Abductions (c1996)
In Sight Unseen: Science, UFO Invisibility and Transgenic Beings (c2003) Hopkins and co-author (and wife) Carol Rainey investigate “impossibilities” such as space ships that become invisible and aliens that conduct interspecies breeding with humans. We believe that by looking at some theoretical twists and turns as well as several bizarre discoveries in modern science, particularly in the field of physics, we can show how UFOs and their occupants may actually obey, not defy, the laws of physics and the natural sciences. We will demonstrate, once and for all, how phenomena eventually thought to be impossible might actually be occuring now, presently, in our lifetime.
UFOs were on my mind initially because nuclear physicist and Roswell Incident investigator Stanton Friedman will visit Central Library next Thursday, November 5th at 7:00 p.m., to discuss UFOs. The library doesn’t own Friedman’s earlier title Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience, about alien abduction, but we do have two of his books, including his most recent title Flying Saucers and Science: A Scientist Investigates the Mysteries of UFOs: Interstellar Traffic, Crashes and Government Cover-Ups.
In an interview on extrasolar-solar planets.com, Friedman said UFO debunkers follow 4 basic rules: A. What the public doesn’t know, I won’t tell them. B. Don’t bother me with the facts, my mind is made up. C. If one can’t attack the data, attack the people, it is easier. And D. Do one’s research by proclamation. Investigation is too much trouble and most people won’t know the difference . . . I am convinced that some Earthlings have been abducted by some aliens. Each case must be taken on its own merits. I don’t much care about beliefs based on top of the head bias, prejudice and ignorance. Let’s deal with evidence and data.
Questions in Closing These can be skipped, if you like. The blogger is just relieving his queasiness after reading about this stuff.
1. If there are really this many aliens among us, why don’t they make themselves useful? Why don’t they stop researching human reproduction and go wipe out Al Qaeda? With their ability to put people into missed-time trances, and their other icky talents, I think they could do it.
2. Is “Copley Woods” really New Palestine? Greenwood? Some little subdivision I’ve never heard of?
3. Has Budd Hopkins been on Oprah? If not, why not? Does Oprah fear that her transgenic identity will be revealed?
Watch the skies. In fact, if Hopkins is telling the truth, you should keep an eye on your garage.
Book Discussions at the Library November 2009
Three October book discussions are still coming our way, beginning tonight at Southport.
Tuesday Night at the Blue Moon, a novel by Debbie Fuller Thomas, will be discussed at the Southport Library on Monday, October 26th at 7:00 p.m.
An unusual plotline and top-notch prose mark this talented novelist’s debut. When divorcée Marty Winslow’s adolescent daughter Ginger dies from Niemann-Pick, a debilitating hereditary disease, Marty discovers Ginger was not her biological daughter, but was switched at birth. Orphan Andie Lockhart is living with her beloved but ailing grandparents when the court gives temporary custody to Marty, her birth mother. Andie finds herself in a chaotic, financially strapped family that runs the Blue Moon drive-in movie theater. Thomas competently displays the heterogeneities of grief, from older sister Deja’s teen Goth rebellion to Marty’s endless baking, and the difficulty of revising what one has always assumed to be true. The mistake’s tragic cost to both families is shown throughout, but Thomas proffers redemption, albeit in tough, realistic doses. — Publishers Weekly
Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose will be discussed at the Pike Library on Tuesday, October 27th at 6:30 p.m.
Wallace Stegner’s uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery–personal, historical, and geographical–that endures as Wallace Stegner’s masterwork: an illumination of yesterday’s reality that speaks to today’s. — Publisher’s note
The Franklin Road Library will host a discussion of Listening is an Act of Love: A Celebration of American Life from the StoryCorps Project on Thursday, October 29th at 6:30 p.m.
[Editor Dave] Isay has devoted almost two decades of his life to various documentary studies, firmly believing that the soul of the nation is found in the stories of its everyday people, a belief that any reader of this oral history collection will come to support. The interviews in this book are excerpted from the more than 10,000 collected by StoryCorps, a singularly ambitious oral history project founded by Isay and colleagues in 2003. Since its humble beginnings in a rented recording studio in Manhattan’s Chinatown, StoryCorps has interviewed people from all walks of life, in all 50 states . . . In this gathering from their massive undertaking, we read the tales of survivors, trailblazers, bounty hunters, teachers, doctors, and bus drivers, to name a few. Some of their stories are excruciatingly tragic, revolving around events burned into our collective memory. Others are so sweetly personal that one might feel voyeuristic reading them. — Library Journal
And now on to November:
There will be three opportunities in November to discuss Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations . . . One School at at Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin.
Wayne Library Monday, November 2nd at 7:00 p.m.
East 38th Street Library Monday, November 9th at 6:00 p.m.
Pike Library Tuesday, November 24th at 6:30 p.m.
Greg Mortenson and coauthor David Oliver Relin recount Mortenson’s crossroad and what he did about it. After a near fatal attempt to climb Himalayan peak K2, Mortenson was nursed and sheltered by villagers in a remote area of Pakistan. Following his recovery, he promised to return and build the village its first school. That project has now grown to include more than 50 schools across Pakistan and Afghanistan, with a particular focus to bring educational opportunities to young girls. — Library Journal
Getting Mother’s Body by Suzan-Lori Parks will be discussed in the Goodrich-Houk Meeting Room at Central Library on Tuesday, November 3rd at 6:00 p.m.
The Beedes are a hard-luck family living in a small Texas town in the 1960s, operating a gas station on a month-to-month contract with a stingy white man. Billy, 16 years old, is pregnant by a coffin salesman, whom she later discovers is married. She gets it in her head to go to LaJunta, Arizona, where her mother, Willa Mae, is buried with jewelry expensive enough to get Billy out of trouble. Willa Mae was a wild woman and a hustler who cheated most folks, including her daughter and her lover, Dill Smiles, a mannish woman who prefers to live as a male. Billy’s uncle Teddy, a former minister who has lost his calling, and her aunt June, who lost a leg as a young woman, accompany Billy on her journey. Hot on their trail is Dill, whose truck Billy has “borrowed” for the trip. Pulitzer-winning playwright Parks offers a collection of exuberantly loony characters, longing for better lives and a means of realizing their meager dreams. Told from the perspective of each of the different characters, including the dead Willa Mae, this is a thoroughly riveting novel of love, family, and redemption. — Booklist
Terri Blackstock’s novel Last Light will be discussed at the Warren Library on Thursday, November 5th at 10:30 a.m.
The first book in Blackstock’’s Restoration series literally begins with a bang: airplanes fall out of the sky in the opening paragraphs, at which point the novel’’s protagonists and readers become swept up in a stunning set of circumstances, the import of which slowly sink in as the novel briskly moves forward. Unlike the deluge of dramatic depictions of the end times, in which Christians disappear and the world reacts, this story focuses on a natural phenomenon–albeit one that most of the characters believe is a message from God–that profoundly alters human society. Blackstock’’s main characters, the affluent Bannings, who live in suburban Birmingham, Alabama, initially react to this disaster by putting themselves first, for fear that any other strategy would endanger their lives. Soon, however, challenged by the Sermon on the Mount, they begin reaching out generously to neighbors. — Publishers Weekly
E. Lynn Harris’s novel Invisible Life will be discussed at the Flanner House Library on Monday, November 9th at 6:30 p.m.
Harris [who died in July 2009] burst onto the literary scene in 1994 with “Invisible Life,” the story of Raymond Tyler, a young black man fighting to make sense of his love for his girlfriend and his attraction to his friend Kelvin . . . Black Americans–have been given a rare opportunity with this book to broaden their understanding of lifestyles like or unlike their own. Mr. Harris has stimulated a dialogue within the African-American community, desperately needed for so long, about the complicated issues of sexuality. — Southern Voice
Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly will be discussed at the Fountain Square Library on Thursday, November 12th at 1:30 p.m.
Bauby wrote this memoir with the blink of an eye. After a stroke, in his 45th year, Bauby is first in a coma and then in a condition called locked-in syndrome, a paralysis that makes him feel as if his body is imprisoned in a diving bell. Within this bell, however, is movement: his “mind takes flight like a butterfly.” Transformed from editor in chief of French Elle to the likes, as he points out, of Dumas’ Noirtier de Villefort, he experiences each sensation in the present and in memory with great intensity, the smell of French fries, his daughter Celeste singing “Poor Little Rich Girl,” the recollections of shaving his father or of soaking in the tub, a Scotch and a good book in hand. He remembers, imagines, and dreams. He learns about his true nature and about others, who respond to his paralysis with anger, fear, or compassion. Bauby is eventually taught an alphabet which allows him to put into words this interior life by blinking his left eye, and this memoir–published in French as Scaphandre et le papillon two days before his death–testifies to the richness of human consciousness despite the body’s oppressive entrapment in the diving bell. — Choice
Lisa See’s novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan will be discussed at the Lawrence Library on Tuesday, November 17th at 10:15 a.m.
In nineteenth-century China, in a remote Hunan county, a girl named Lily, at the tender age of seven, is paired with a laotong, “old same,” in an emotional match that will last a lifetime. The laotong, Snow Flower, introduces herself by sending Lily a silk fan on which she’s painted a poem in nu shu, a unique language that Chinese women created in order to communicate in secret, away from the influence of men. As the years pass, Lily and Snow Flower send messages on fans, compose stories on handkerchiefs, reaching out of isolation to share their hopes, dreams, and accomplishments. Together, they endure the agony of foot-binding, and reflect upon their arranged marriages, shared loneliness, and the joys and tragedies of motherhood. The two find solace, developing a bond that keeps their spirits alive. — Publisher’s note
Twenty Wishes by Debbie Macomber will be discussed at the Southport Library on Monday, November 30th at 7:00 p.m.
Macomber returns to Seattle’s fictional Blossom Street . . . for a hopeful tale of four widows who meet at 38-year-old Anne Marie Roche’s bookstore. Separated from her husband after he refused to have a baby with her, Anne Marie felt certain they would reconcile–until he suddenly died. Lillie Higgins lost her husband in the same plane crash that claimed the husband of their daughter, Barbie Foster. Elise Beaumont entered widowhood after cancer claimed her husband. Together, the four make life-fulfillment wish lists. With Elise’s prodding, Anne Marie decides to fulfill one of her wishes–do good for someone else–and becomes a “lunch buddy” to an at-risk third grader. Anne Marie, meanwhile, must deal with the reappearance of her adult stepdaughter, Melissa, who always held her in disdain. Elise mainly serves as a catalyst for Anne Marie’s journey, but there is plenty of focus on Lillian and Barbie, who find purpose in unexpected and difficult relationships. — Publisher’s Weekly
Reading in Indianapolis November 2009
Our November cover article highlights the One Book One City program, which this year features Some Buried Caesar, a Nero Wolfe mystery by Indiana native son Rex Stout.
There’s also an Information Desk article about the expanded services being offered by Tutor.com, the online tutoring service available on the library’s website.
Click on the image at the left to open an e-copy of the newsletter. Paper copies of Reading in Indianapolis can be picked up at any library location, and at the locations listed at the bottom of page 10.
