Danger Mouse

Two great bands that played at ACL have recorded cds which the super-talented Danger Mouse produced – the Broken Bells and the Black Keys. He is also part of the Broken Bells duo and has recorded with Gnarls Barkley. Since 2005, Danger Mouse, as a producer and as an artist, has been nominated for 11 Grammy Awards.

Does Danger Mouse ever sleep? In 2008 he produced Beck’s Modern Guilt. Following this year’s Broken Bells project with Shins' singer James Mercer, he had another collaborative effort, Dark Night of the Soul, where he teamed up with Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous. Guest stars included Frank Black (Pixies), James Mercer, the Flaming Lips, Julian Casablancas (Strokes), Iggy Pop, Suzanne Vega and more. The third project this year was the Black Key’s Brothers.

A few years ago Jay-Z got Danger Mouse to mash up his own Black Album with the Beatle’s White Album to create the Grey Album, which was Danger Mouse’s first hit. Then Danger Mouse was asked to produce the Gorillaz' second studio album, Demon Days.

I used to watch the very witty British cartoon series Danger Mouse back in the 1980s on Nickelodeon which was about an English mouse who works as a super hero/secret agent. Early in his career, Danger Mouse performed in a mouse outfit because he was too shy to show his face, and then took his name from the British cartoon character.

I have learned two lessons from his career – you can be shy and still reach your goals, and it helps to collaborate with other great talent.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Jonah Lehrer argues in Proust Was a Neuroscientist that Proust, along with eight other artists, made discoveries about the brain that took science decades to catch up with. In Proust's case, that memory is a process, not a repository. We don't remenber an event, we only recall the memory, so it's never quite accurate. Lehrer explains both the artistic and scientific concepts in such a way that anyone could understand. The book first examines the poet Walt Whitman, who saw the mind and body as inseparable. George Eliot, the novelist who believed human freedom arose from our ability to change, comes next. My favorite chapter was about Viginia Woolf, whose Clarissa Dalloway can't really hold a thought for more than a second, which is totally normal brain activity, a fact that made me feel better about my own scattered thoughts.

For further reading, 2010 books about neuroscience:

Anatomy of the Soul: Surprising Connections between Neuroscience and Spiritual Practices That Can Transform Your Life and Relationships
Curt Thompson

Bursts: the Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do
Albert-László Barabási

The Male Brain
Louann Brizendine

Neurodiversity: Discovering the Extraordinary Gifts of Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Brain Differences
Thomas Armstrong

The Other Brain: from Dementia to Schizophrenia, How New Discoveries about the Brain are Revolutionizing Medicine and Science
Douglas Fields

101 Theory Drive: a Neuroscientist's Quest for Memory
Terry McDermott

Pictures of the Mind: what the New Neuroscience Tells Us About Who We Are
Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald

Playing in the Unified Field: Rraising and Becoming Conscious, Creative Human Beings
Carla Hannaford

Wisdom: from Philosophy to Neuroscience
Stephen Hall

Welcome, ACL!

As someone who lives here and has for some time, the Austin City Limits Festival perhaps does not have the same allure as it does for others. I love music and I'm actually pretty envious of the people with tickets whom will be seeing some of my favorite artists this weekend, but the traffic, crowds, and influx of out-of-towners can, for me, turn that envy into impatience and mumbled curses. Nonetheless, I'm actually really excited to welcome those whom have come from high and low places to the beautiful city of Austin! Austin is so lovely, it is meant to be shared and thoroughly explored. So, if you're looking for things to do, places to see, and free internet to use, this little blog post is meant to be a big Austin Public Library welcome - and no library welcome would be complete without a rundown of the info you need to enjoy your trip:

Library Services:

• The Austin Public Library is a perfect place for out-of-towners to stop in for free internet access and book and magazine browsing at any of our 21 locations. All you need is a photo ID to use one of our computers or just bring in your laptop to hook up automatically to our wireless connection.


• Want to check out a book or two, like those Austin travel guides? Library cards are free to Texas residents that can show a photo ID and proof of current address.


• Check out our very cool used bookstore, Recycled Reads.


• Need help with anything or have questions about Austin? Ask a Librarian!

ACL Info:
ACL Website
Line-up info can be found here and you can also create your own printable schedule of the artists you want to see.

Austin City Limits, More Than Music
An article by the Austin Business Journal featuring some of the cool, non-food and non-music booths from "homegrown" companies you can expect to find at ACL.

PBS's Austin City Limits
The show that started it all. This Saturday the band Spoon will be playing on the show. Check out past artists on the show including clips from their performances and full episodes.

Getting Around:
As the ACL website encourages, respect the residents of Austin and do not park in the surrounding neighborhoods - use one of the many alternatives out there and don't worry about your car at all. For a complete list of transportation options, see the ACL website.

Austin Bike Shops
Listing of Austin area bike shops. According to the ACL website, this is the best mode of transportation to the Festival (and the healthiest)! You can even rent a bike from most of these shops, if you didn't bring yours along.

Austin Taxis and Taxi Alternatives

Capital Metro
Austin's public transit system; here's the info for the free ACL shuttles: http://www.capmetro.org/aclfest/

Capital Pedicab
You'll see them all around the downtown and Zilker park area this weekend

Transportation to and from Austin-Bergstrom Airport
All of your transportation options to and from ABI

Places to Go/Things to Do:
Austin Convention & Visitors Bureau
Info on shops, outdoor recreation, art and more

Austin, Texas
A guide to Austin from The New York Times

Best of Austin (2010)
The best of everything in Austin, from parks to pools to shopping, selected by the critics and readers of the Austin Chronicle

South Congress Avenue, Austin
This famous street is a major tourist attraction for its shops, restaurants, and atmosphere - you can read this article for free, but you must register with Texas Monthly (see the webpage for details).

Restaurants and Dining:
Austin360's Top 10 Restaurants

Austin Chronicle Restaurant Guide
Pick a type of food and the side of town you're on and you can pull up a list of all of the restaurants in the area complete with pricing info and a description.

Best Food & Drink in Austin (2010), Critics Picks
From the Austin Chronicle

Best Food & Drink in Austin (2010), Readers Picks

Where to Eat in Austin
From Texas Monthly

2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

***UPDATE*** Mario Vargas Llosa is the 2010 recipient of the Noble Prize in Literature. The Swedish Academy said they chose the Peruvian writer "for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individuals resistance, revolt, and defeat."

Below are some of the Nobel Laureate's most well-known novels.

The War of the End of the World

The Bad Girl

The Green House

The Time of the Hero

The Way to Paradise



I doubt American bookies offer odds on the Nobel Prize in literature. The British firm of Ladbrokes certainly does. I like the British approach: they bet on everything*. We here in the ole US of A primarily limit ourselves to sporting events. Who knew we could have been punting on whether Philip Roth's six decade output is more award-worthy than say Huraki Murkami's impressive but shorter career.

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded tomorrow morning at 6:00. You may watch the award announcement here.

The going assumption over the past few years has been that the Swedish Academy shuns Americans, prefers non-English writing writers, and goes gaga for the politically oppressed. With that in mind, the smart money is firmly in Ngugi wa Thiong'o's corner. Don't hand Ngugi the check just yet though. Another soft rule to keep in mind is that the Academy does not like its announcement dampened. Since Ngugi wa Thiong'o has been championed over the past few days by so many around the world, he probably won't win.

*I do not gamble, but I get a kick out of betting companies offering odds on the Nobel Prize. Onto the odds! Sometimes Texan and all-the-time legend, Cormac McCarthy enters the announcement day as the odds-on favorite. Below are the top ten in the bookies' eyes and a selection of their notable books.

Cormac McCarthy 5/2
Blood Meridian

Ngugi wa Thiong'o 7/2
Wizard of the Crow

Haruki Murakami 6/1
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Tomas Transtromer 11/1
The Half-Finished Heaven

Ko Un 12/1
The Three Way Tavern

Gerald Murnane 12/1

Adonis 13/1
The Pages of Day and Night

Les Murray 15/1
The Biplane Houses

Joyce Carol Oates 15/1
them

Juan Gelman 15/1
Los Mejores Poemas de Amor II


Who is your favorite for the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature?

Autumn

Halloween is coming around again. It was at this time of year almost 20 years ago that the electricity went out in my neighborhood, and my neighbor's kids didn't know what to do with themselves without television. It was the season for spooky stories, so to entertain them I told the scariest one I know. I got it from a book my grandmother had in her library and that I have now: Alfred Hitchcock's Stories for Late at Night. "The Fly" is in it. But the story that creeped me out more than "The Fly" was "The Whistling Room" by William Hope Hodgson.

It seems that long ago in a big lonely castle in Ireland, a jester sang a song about what a fool his king was, so the king cut out the jester's tongue. But that didn't stop the jester from whistling the song, and so the king executed him in a room in the castle--burned him in the chimney--and even as he died the jester whistled the song that angered the king.

Since then the room has sat waiting for a descendent of the king's to visit the castle, and when she came, the room became a giant bellows, whistling and hooning a ghastly ghostly version of the song, calling to the king's great-great granddaughter to come into the room...

Well, that was pretty scary when I was a kid, and it scared the neighbor's kids out of their wits, too, when I told it to them that night near Halloween when the lights went out. For a couple of weeks afterward, all I had to do was whistle at them to make them jump.

That book was a departure for Alfred Hitchcock. His movies aren't paranormal (The Birds could have been driven mad by radar or telephone wires or something entirely explainable) though they are definitely creepy. If you need to begin working on your creepy Halloween mood, the library has plenty of Hitchcock movies (below is an incomplete list):

• Sabotage
• To Catch a Thief
• The 39 Steps
• The Lodger
• The Paradine Case
• Vertigo
• Notorious
• Rebecca
• Spellbound
• Rear Window

And if you're looking for live Hitchock (and who isn't?), the Austin Playhouse will be performing The 39 Steps until October 30.

Blog post in homage to the man who designed Alfred Hitchcock's most memorable scenes, Robert Boyle, who died August 1, 2010, at 100 years.

2010 National Reading Group Month List

October is National Reading Group Month, which was founded to to promote reading groups and to just encourage reading in general. With a book club you can read a variety of books and go over questions that make you think about the plot and the characters. Reading contextualizes our life experiences and allows us to dream about the different forks in the road one can take. See the Library’s Good Reads page to find local book clubs.

To inspire you to read, here's a quotation from The English Patient - Hana is reading again, this time to herself: She entered the story knowing she would emerge from it feeling she had been immersed in the lives of others, in plots that stretched back twenty years, her body full of sentences and moments, as if awaking from sleep with a heaviness caused by unremembered dreams.

National Reading Group Month 2010 List

Blame by Michelle Huneven

The Blessings of the Animals by Katrina Kittle

Cheap Cabernet: A Friendship by Cathie Beck

Eternal on the Water by Joseph Monninger

The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow

Little Bee by Chris Cleve

The Lotus Eaters by Tatjana Soli

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deidre Madden

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender

The Queen of Palmyra by Minrose Gwin

Room by Emma Donoghue

Safe from the Sea by Peter Geye

Up from the Blue by Susan Henderson

Who Can You Trust?

The 2010 Edelman Trust Barometer--the global PR firm's annual survey covering trust and credibility, had some surprising results – results that will make you want to use your Library’s resources for business information. It was is the firm's tenth survey. It surveyed 4,875 'informed publics' in two age groups (25-34 and 35-64) in 22 countries.

The barometer showed huge declines in the public's trust in information from friends and peers. The poll also found an increase in distrust of almost all forms of mass media. Trust in information from digital media is woefully low; between 11 and 22 percent of respondents said they trust information gleaned from social networks. Traditional news media such as TV, radio and the newspaper are showing similar declines. Industry analyst or stock reports and articles in business magazines held strong as the most trusted sources of information about a company.

The U.S. results for ages 25-64 are as follows:
• Articles in business magazines is #1 with 49%
• Stock or industry analyst reports is #2 with 48%
• Conversations with company employees is #3 with 38%
• Articles in newspapers is #4 with 32%
• News coverage on the radio is #5 with 31%
• Conversations with your friends and peers is #6 with 27% (tied with “Online search engines e.g. Google news, YouTube” and “Corporate communications such as press releases, reports and emails”)

So, for accuracy and credibility, use the Library’s databases for business and company information.

Business and Investment Databases

Business Research Guides

Company Information

Investing Guide
Marketing Research

Source: Intelligent Agent

Working Girl

One of my favorite movies is Working Girl from 1988. Harrison Ford is handsome, Melanie Griffith looks fabulous (that navy velvet number with the embedded rhinestones is one of the great movie dresses of all time), and Joan Cusack has an epic line: “Sometimes I sing and dance around the house in my underwear. Doesn’t make me Madonna… never will.” The plot is a simple success story cleverly told. It’s a lot of fun.

But it’s dated, and I’m not talking about the enormous reading glasses. Working Girl glorifies rapacious corporatism. Tess McGill works in mergers and acquisitions at a company swallowing up other companies in the late 80s, the decade when, many economists posit, the government began to make laws so advantageous to business that the distribution of wealth has been shifting ever since. Working Girl never questions corporate acquisitiveness. Oh sure, the ruthless and unethical Katharine loses her man, her job, and her dignity, but once the devious schemer is purged (only one?), Trask Industries roars on while Carly Simon sings about the New Jerusalem.

Movies usually take a dimmer view: big business is manipulative (Trading Places, Network), money isn’t everything (You Can't Take it With You), a job isn't worth your soul (Office Space), it's more rewarding to raise kids (Kramer vs. Kramer). Except for The Fountainhead, Working Girl might be unique in portraying a behemoth corporation as a good thing, a more charming idea in 1988 than it is in 2010.

Still… Harrison Ford. I mean, come on.

Here are some recent books about our current economic woes:

• The Great Unraveling
• The Return of Depression Economics
• Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy
• The Big Short
• This Time Is Different
• Too Big to Fail

Rally to Restore Sanity

A very exciting announcement was made Thursday, September 16th that I'm sure many of you have heard about: Jon Stewart will be hosting a "Rally to Restore Sanity" Saturday, October 30th! Stewart calls for a return to moderation and sanity in politics amid what he believes is a level of media sensationalism that merely fuels the divide between "conservative" and "liberal" America. One of his arguments involves the pervasiveness of 24-hour news channels whom fill their many hours with dramatic, grab-the-viewer speakers, stories, and antics contributing to continued polarization of the country. Stewart believes that most of us are sane and reasonable and we should demonstrate that our numbers are greater than the extremely polarized ones frequently portrayed in and sometimes dominating the media.

So, who should go to this rally? Here are Stewart's words from last Thursday night's show:

"You may be asking yourself, right now, sitting at home, but am I the right type of person to go to this rally. The fact that you would even stop to ask yourself that question, as opposed to just, let's say, jumping up, grabbing the nearest stack of burnable holy books, strapping on a diaper and just pointing your car toward D.C. — that means I think you might just be right for it."

Stewart's new book, Earth (the Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race, was just released on Tuesday - it's "Coming Soon" in the catalog and you can place a hold on it today. While you wait, try some of our, perhaps less humorous, but interesting books on the role of the media in politics and American lives - a few of which are listed below.

And, don't forget Stewart's arch-nemesis, Stephen Colbert, is having his counter-rally on the exact same day, at the same time and place: the March to Keep Fear Alive.

BOOKS

America (the Book): A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction

Earth (the Book): A Visitor's Guide to the Human Race

I Am America (and So Can You!)

The Kingmakers: How the Media Threatens Our Security and Our Democracy

Naked Pictures of Famous People

The New Blue Media: How Michael Moore, MoveOn.org, Jon Stewart and Company Are Transforming Progressive Politics

The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls

Stephen Colbert's Tek Jansen
Colbert's very amusing graphic novel - a continuation on the story from his "unpublished novel."

DVDS

A Colbert Christmas: The Greatest Gift of All!

Trees: I like to look at them. I like to sit beneath them.

I like trees. Whether a stunning forest or a lone oak in a pasture, I'm constantly on the look out for beautiful trees. Last spring I realized that despite loving trees I'm quite inept at identifying them. I could walk through my yard and declare "that's a hackberry and those are red oaks," but I embarrassingly could not identify the other trees in my yard. That wouldn't work. I brought a few field guides home and set to work learning about American elms and scrub oaks and a tree that many call a weed but I call a chinaberry.

These two books were invaluable as I identified the trees in my yard:
A Field Guide to Texas Trees
Trees of Central Texas

Like any urban area, Austin abounds with non-native trees. This book is a great guide to all those trees we see throughout our urban landscape.
The Urban Tree Book: an Uncommon Field Guide for City and Town

Put a pretty tree in your house: Coffee table tree books
Remarkable Trees of the World
The Remarkable Baobab
The Encyclopedia of North American Trees
America's Famous and Historic Trees: from George Washington's Tulip Poplar to Elvis Presley's Pin Oak
Trees & Forests of America


The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center announced earlier this year the creation of The Mollie Steves Zachry Texas Arboretum. Scheduled to open in 2012, the Texas Arboretum will showcase the vast variety of Texas trees with native grasses and wildflowers peppering the trails.

American Male

I often find myself thinking a great deal about my father since his death. I remember him when he was at the age I am now, the kind of father figure he was to me and my sister, and his character flaws. To his credit and my occasional embarrassment, he frequently reminds me of the increasingly iconic character Don Draper of the television series Mad Men. What is odd about this is that he didn't come to the U.S. until he was 26. This has me wondering if these similarities can be attributed to culture and generation or is it something bigger, perhaps a mixture of universal characteristics tied to current societal trends? Sure enough, the library has me covered.

The Broken American Male: And How to Fix Him
Creating the Modern Man: American Magazines and Consumer Culture, 1900-1950
The Decline of Men: How the American Male is Tuning Out, Giving Up, and Flipping Off His Future
Hombres y Machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture
Manhood in America: A Cultural History
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man
US Guys: The True and Twisted Mind of the American Man

New Book by a Caltech Physicist

Leonard Mlodinow is a physicist at Caltech and the co-author with Stephen Hawking of The Grand Design which was released September 7, 2010. I recently saw a group of students from Caltech in a café, and they weren’t talking, or texting, or looking at a laptop, they were just quietly thinking. Einstein came up with his greatest breakthroughs by just sitting quietly with his thoughts.

In this major new work, Hawking and Mlodinow look to the laws of nature and physics for the answers to the ultimate questions. You can’t find the book in our catalog today, but it has been ordered. If you hear about a newly published book, and can’t find it in the catalog, ask a librarian to see if it has been ordered. You can place a hold on the title when it appears in the catalog with a call number or coming soon.

Mlodinow is also the author of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, which is an irreverent look at how randomness influences our lives, and how our successes and failures are far more dependent on chance events than we recognize. He also wrote Feynman's Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life and Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace. He also co-authored A Briefer History of Time with Stephen Hawking, which many have read, but few have understood.

In a recent interview on Shelf-Awareness, he quoted his favorite line from a book:
"We think that grass is green, that stones are hard, and that snow is cold. But physics assures us that the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in our own experience, but something very different." (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth by Bertrand Russell.) In other words, we should question our beliefs and experiences, perhaps by sitting quietly and thinking.

Fire in the sky

On June 30th, 1908 something incredible happened on Earth; specifically, in Siberia, near the Tunguska River. Some witnesses say that it was like the sky was split in two by a huge ball of fire, for others it was like we had another sun. Then they heard a huge thunder, and another, and another. We are talking about the Tunguska event, something that has kept the community of scientists busy for more than a hundred years. The first expedition to the area came after this explosion happened almost ten years later. What they found then was about 80 million trees knocked down in 800 miles square miles. At the center of this area though, the trees were standing, but they were stripped from their branches and bark. Creepy!

So, what’s the theory? Scientists say that it seems to be a meteor or comet that exploded in the air. Even though it didn’t touch the surface of Earth, the explosion had an energy blast a thousand times bigger than the Hiroshima atomic bomb. This kind of impact event (which is the name used by scientists for the collision of comets or other objects with Earth) happens approximately once every ten million years. The next asteroid that could possibly crash with Earth will pass by in the year 2880, so be sure to tell your grandkids to tell their grandkids to tell their grandkids…


For more information about this topic, here are some suggestions:

• The day the sky split apart: investigating a cosmic mystery
  
• Cauldron of hell: Tunguska
  
• Asteroids and meteorites: catastrophic collisions with Earth
  
• Collision Earth! : the threat from outer space : meteorite and comet impacts
  
• Asteroid : earth destroyer or new frontier?
  
• Cosmic collisions: our explosive universe (DVD)
  

There is also a nice article by NASA that talks about this event you might enjoy reading.

Voices in Your Head

You've been hearing Paul Frees' voice all your life. He's Boris Badenov. He's the narrator of Dudley Do-Right and Fractured Flickers. He's the voice in the old ride at Disneyland--the one that shrank you to the size of the nucleus of an atom (Monsanto's greatest technological triumph, if you ask me).

Maybe you're more familiar with Mel Blanc, who was nearly every voice of every character in every Loony Tunes cartoon: Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Foghorn Leghorn, Wile E. Coyote... check his Wikipedia page, he was all of them.

Being a voice actor has always sounded to me like a great job. If you're interested, we have some books at the library you'll want to read:

• The Audio Theater Guide: Vocal Acting, Writing, Sound Effects and Directing for a Listening Audience by Robert Mott
  
• The Art of Voice-acting: The Craft and Business of Performing for Voice-over by James R. Alburger
  
• Voice-over Voice Actor: What It's Like Behind the Mic by Yuri Lowenthal

Here's Mel Blanc's autobiography:

That's Not All Folks

The photo above is the vinyl album (does anybody remember albums?), Paul Frees and the Poster People. It's one of the great recordings of all time, imho, (Paul singing "Hey Jude" in the voice of Peter Lorre should not be missed) and it's not out on CD. If you still have a turntable you can ask for it through interlibrary loan, but there are only three in libraries worldwide. Paul's biography is easier to get, though, Welcome, Foolish Mortals (that's the first thing you hear when you enter the Haunted Mansion ride at Disney, and yep, that's Paul Frees' voice) by Ben Ohmart. It's an interesting look at a kind of crazy guy working in Hollywood in the 40s 50s and 60s.

Top 5 Graphic Novels for Book Club Discussions

If you're involved in a book club and looking for something new and interesting to read, I'm hoping the below list will be handy. It's a list of graphic novels that make for excellent group discussion, each with a different appeal. The Graphic Novels Book Club at Halcyon Coffee hosted by the Austin Public Library has actually discussed all but one of these and our meetings were lively and engaged.

Asterios Polyp by David Mazzuchelli
Asterios was published fairly recently and is one of those widely accepted, critically acclaimed (even reviewed by The New York Times Book Review) novels that would work really well for groups that already have an interest in discussing literary fiction. It is rife with metaphor and the artwork is a unique and essential part of the story.

Palestine by Joe Sacco
For those reading groups that enjoy discussing nonfiction, most of Sacco's work will be very appealing. Sacco is a comics journalist - he has spent time in Israel/Palestine and this particular work is a reflection on his experiences and the plight of the Palestinian people. Other works by him to try would be Safe Area Gonazde (about the Bosnian War) and Footnotes in Gaza.

Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
I'm guessing everyone has heard of this one by now, but I want to mention it because it is ideally suited for reading groups and just a fantastic book. There are two volumes, but there is an edition that collects both into one volume. It is about Satrapi herself growing up in pre- and post-revolution Iran whose family deals with the fear-instilling, fundamentalism of the Iranian government. The second volume focuses more on Satrapi's experiences outside of Iran as a teenager. Satrapi is a wonderfully interesting, funny, deep, and emotional character that will appeal to most.

Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis
Ellis is a powerhouse in the industry and this science fiction series is perhaps for what he is known best. Spider Jerusalem is a journalist and all around interesting character living in a dystopian future world. This is a 10-volume series, but don't let that stop you - the volumes are short and choosing to read just the first volume is usually the best way to go. You'll find that most people will come having read multiple volumes (each volume is a pretty quick read) and the trick will just be avoiding spoilers.

Watchmen by Alan Moore
This is a classic and a great introduction to graphic novels. It is a bit of a spoof on the typical superhero genre: the characters reside in a world where superheroes have played a significant role in history and have now been outlawed. The movie is good, but the book is far better because it reveals how multi-layered this novel is. It truly does what only comics can do!

Hurricanes

I didn't sleep well Tuesday night. The arm of Hurricane Hermine that soaked Central Texas woke me up several times. While nothing close to the destruction of coastal communities five years ago, the abundance of rain found me thinking about the power of hurricanes. I read Eric Larson's Isaac's Storm a couple of summers ago and was intrigued by the compelling narrative. Isaac's Storm depicts the destruction of Galveston in 1900. I had no idea that until that hurricane Galveston was second only to New York in wealth. Once I reached the library the next morning I discovered numerous works on hurricane history. The following titles discuss the scientific aspects of hurricanes as well as social and communal implications of a deluge.

Erik Larson's Isaac's Storm: a Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

Douglas Brinkley's The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast

Richard Murnane's Hurricanes and Typhoons: Past, Present, and Future

Bryan Carlile's After Ike: Aerial Views from the No-Fly Zone

David Longshore's Encyclopedia of Hurricanes, Typhoons, and Cyclones

We've been celebrating LABOR DAY since 1882.

Thanks to the United Auto Workers, when my father-in-law retired from General Motors in the late 70s, he had enough pension, benefits, and savings to do what all Detroiters dream of doing: escaping winter. He and his wife became snow birds. They'd spend summers in Michigan and winters south of Tucson near another center of union organizing (though I doubt that they knew it) Bisbee, Arizona. Southeast of their retirement condo, past Tombstone and the OK Corral, almost on the Mexican border, sits Bisbee, a settlement formed to serve the Phelps Dodge mine, the Copper Queen.

Bisbee is bizarre. When the Copper Queen played out in 1975, Bisbee became an art colony. Now it's a tourist stop of galleries and jewelers in the middle of nowhere. It's a desert town of rickety Victorian houses sitting on mineral-streaked hillsides threaded with narrow, winding streets.

It's also the site of one of the seminal events in labor history. On July 12, 1917, after repeatedly refusing the demands of striking miners, the mining companies used an army of vigilantes to round up more than 1000 men--some on strike, some just in the wrong place at the wrong time--and march them two miles to a waiting train of cattle cars. The plan was to take the men east to Columbus, New Mexico, but when that town turned the train away, the men were left stranded in the desert.

Although a federal investigation found the transport illegal and some of the hijacked men sued (no one died, but some were imprisoned for weeks), no one was ever held liable, and mining interests continued to call the tune in southern Arizona. The Bisbee Deportation of 1917 helped energize the labor movement to create the strong unions that buoyed the American middle class, including my husband's family, after World War II.

If my in-laws had read some of these books, they would have known that they spent their GM pension shuttling from one hotbed of union activity to another:

• Death In the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America
  
• Wobblies!: A Graphic History of the Industrial Workers of the World
  
• Solidarity Forever: an Oral History of the IWW
  
• Bisbee 17: A Novel
  
• Mobsters, Unions, and Feds
  
• Dark Harbor: The War for the New York Waterfront

Learn a 2nd Language

The Library will supply the resources, but you have to commit the time. Together, we can learn to speak a 2nd language.

Powerspeak Languages simulates gradual immersion into a new language through a series of stories, activities and learning exercises. For Spanish, French, Mandarin, German, or English for Spanish speakers

Tumblebook Library presents talking children's books in Spanish and French, as well as English.

Tell Me More Performance Spanish offers ten levels of instruction, from Complete Beginner to Expert, that cover all the skill areas needed to learn a language. A special feature of the program is its speech recognition technology which allows users to practice and assess their pronunciation. Tell Me More Performance Spanish is provided on a PC-compatible DVD-ROM. To get the full benefit of the program, computer speakers or headset and a microphone are needed.

Recorded Books’ Transparent Language courses consists of lessons--equivalent to one year of high school or one semester of a college course—designed to take users from beginner to intermediate-level proficiency. The software is provided on a USB drive that acts as a “key”. Users can access the program only when the drive is inserted into their PC or Mac. In addition to software for Spanish and English for Spanish speakers, the Library has Transparent Language programs for learning Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Polish, Russian, Spanish,and Portuguese.

Language Learning Research Guide includes instructions on how to search the catalog for study materials, and lists free websites for learning languages.

Novel Places

One of my favorite things to do is stroll around a new city. Whether a pretty front door or a tree with which I'm unfamiliar, these serendipitous discoveries make me smile. When visiting a new city I routinely pass by museums, choosing to continue exploring the city's fabric rather than inspect its wall-mounted art. This love of city exploration affects how I react to novels. I don't necessarily need action or believable dialogue so long as the novel expresses a strong sense of place. Granted, the total package is always appreciated, but place seems to be the driving force behind my novel reading these days.

Below are a few novels that convey a unique depiction of a specific place.

Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson (Oxford, England)

Larry McMurtry's Horseman, Pass By (rural West Texas)

Walker Percy's The Moviegoer (New Orleans)

Philip Roth's American Pastoral (New Jersey)

Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (Manhattan)

Aleksander Hemon's The Lazarus Project (Chicago and Bosnia)

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (Idaho)

Steve Yarbrough's Safe from the Neighbors (Mississippi)

Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin (rural Holland)

Swindle!

I have a pre-paid cell phone that costs me $15 a month and I'm thinking that the reason it's so cheap is that my provider sells my number to... everybody. I get more garbage phone calls on it than I have ever had on any phone. In spite of the fact that I owe no one a dime (except the library... oops!), I get three or four debt-collectors (looking for Brian or Stephen, whoever they are) threatening me every day! (Well, they would if I still picked up.)

Maybe you're not as stingy as I am and you pay your cell service to block junk calls; still, your computer isn't safe. I bet you've had e-mails from foreign dignitaries down on their luck and looking for a place to park their multi-millions. They'll pay you an enormous fee if you'll agree to babysit their fortunes just until the heat is off. All they need are your bank account and social security numbers. I've had letters from deposed princesses, heads of large corporations on the lam, dames and earls, and not a one of them can figure out how to open a checking account without my help. It's no wonder they're in trouble.

There's no better advice for dealing with scammers than this: just hang up or delete! But if you want information of greater depth, the library has books on the subject. Here are some of them:

• Madoff with the Money
• Stopping Identity Theft
• Scam-Proof Your Life
• God Wants You to Roll

And if you're bent on revenge, here are a couple of fun extra-library sites:

• 419 Eater
• Tom Mabe

Community Supported Agricultrue

I recently finished a book titled Seasons on Henry's Farm by Terra Brockman and it was lovely. Brockman lives on her brother, Henry's, farm where she and other family members work diligently to provide fresh, organically grown produce to a farmer's market and CSA in Illinois. The CSA, Community Supported Agriculture, program involves local residents purchasing a share of the farm: they make an investment up front and then receive weekly shares of the farm's harvest. By investing in the CSA, residents invest in a sustainable farm and express their commitment to local foods for the sake of our environment and our taste buds.

Reading about the difficult work Brockman and her tight-knit family do every day to keep up with the harvest and farm chores coupled with the long dawn til dusk (and sometimes much later) days gave me a new respect for local farms. The work sounds almost brutal at times, but Brockman and her family approach their chores with an enlightened sense of purpose. Her prose is elegant and graceful as she describes a full year, week-by-week, of life on the farm, while revealing a rich history of family farmers and an intense appreciation for and celebration of the natural world. Farming is truly a labor of love for Brokman and her family making it a beautiful thing to read about it.

There are a number of CSAs serving the Austin area that anyone can join - a few, in fact, are taking new members right now:

FieldFresh
A farm in Seguin. This one delivers to Austin locations as well as surrounding towns like Round Rock and Georgetown.

Green Gate Farms
Located in East Austin and currently taking new CSA members for the Fall.

Johnson's Backyard Garden
Located in East Austin, this one is currently accepting new CSA members and has a very large number of pickup locations and days/times.

Scott Arbor
Located in Seguin.

Urban Patchwork Neighborhood Farms
A community organization of small farms in Austin providing a CSA that is currently accepting members for the fall.

If you're interested in CSAs and farming, you might be interested in these books:

Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty

Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat

Growing Good Things to Eat in Texas: Profiles of Organic Farmers and Ranchers Across the State

Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen's Guide to Community Supported Agriculture

The Town That Food Saved: How One Community Found Vitality in Local Food

Was that a butterfly?

I always feel like I can't never get enough of butterflies. They just go so fast that I get this feeling that I’ve seen something beautiful but I cannot tell exactly how it looks. I can talk about its colors in general but that’s it! No details of the shape of the wings or anything else. On two different occasions I’ve been lucky enough to see the gorgeous Morpho butterfly in Costa Rica: you can only see this metallic blue flash going around, so it is hard to believe it is a butterfly. Amazing!!

Butterflies inside of a cage hanging on the wall are not appealing to me. That’s the best moment to see all their magnificent colors, but the magic is lost. The sense that this gorgeous creature is going to fly away and the urge to enjoy their beauty as fast as you can is gone. But, that’s just me, of course.

Of all the butterflies in the world perhaps the most well known are the Monarchs that migrate very long distances. Because the distance traveled is longer than their lifespan, in some cases the migration includes two or three generations of butterflies. They are indeed amazing creatures.

If you are a fan of butterflies and want to attract them to your garden you are going to need the right plants for that. Texas A&M University has information on how to do this and you can also find more information on this topic at your library:

• Texas Butterflies & Moths: An Introduction to Familiar Species
  
• One hundred butterflies
  
• Finding butterflies in Texas : a guide to the best sites
  
• Butterflies of West Texas parks and preserves
  
• A field guide to butterflies of Texas
  
• The dangerous world of butterflies: the startling subculture of criminals, collectors, and conservationists
  
• 500 butterflies : butterflies from around the world
  
• The life cycles of butterflies : from egg to maturity, a visual guide to 23 common garden butterflies
  
• Butterflies of the world
  

Stuff

Have you seen the TV shows about people who hoard stuff? Some of them buy second homes to live in after packing their first with stuff and then start filling up the second? One family moved into a tent in their front yard to escape the bugs living in the junk in the house! It's a fascinating disorder because we all can understand it. We want bigger closets and we rent storage lockers and we put off cleaning out our garages. It makes sense to save things we might need later, until saving them becomes more trouble than getting them again.

If the houses in the hoarding shows look familiar to you, here are some books at APL that might help you to understand why:

Stuff
Digging Out
Overcoming Compulsive Hoarding
Buried in Treasures

If all you need to do is tackle clutter, we can help you there, too:

Christopher Lowell's Seven Layers of Organization
Throw Out Fifty Things
Clutter Busting

And if you want to get into the organizing biz, you're lucky to live in Austin. The headquarters of the national organization is here:
National Association of Professional Organizers

(The photo is of the house of Homer and Langley Collyer, brothers who died in 1947 in their New York City brownstone under tons of trash.)

Today's "Grapes of Wrath"

Nobody would deny that times are tough. The poor economic climate is bound to have an impact on books and publishing - and, more specifically, on fiction - as it does on just about every other aspect of life. Looking at the titles below, you may be surprised at how many novelists are creating a literary record of the decade's economic woes, just as John Steinbeck did with his Grapes of Wrath.

American Rust by Phiipp Meyer
Set in a moribund Pennsylvania steel town, this bleak but skillful novel deals with what happens to us when our dreams are shattered, when all that is left is the people we really are, without comfort of daily routine or the promise of a paycheck.

American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell
These short stories are full of characters who know how to fix cars and washing machines, how to shoot and clean game, and how to cook up methamphetamine, but they have not figured out how to prosper in the twenty-first century.

The Hole We’re In by Gabrielle Zevin
Novel chronicles families battered by the recession, unemployment and debt, or minimum-wage jobs.

Dream House by Valerie Laken
A classic money pit scenario offers insights into the fragility of home, family and neighborhood.

The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter
Funny, heartrending novel is a parable of marriage and money troubles in which a well-meaning family man makes decisions that are seriously stupid but entertaining.

Model Home by Eric Puchner
Travails of a family as they literally lose everything, and finally must move into a failed real estate development in the desert.

This Is Where We Live by Janelle Brown
A novel about subprime mortgages, ruthless Hollywood economics, and the unraveling of a young marriage.

The Hitch

Christopher Hitchens had a strange June. His long-anticipated memoir, Hitch-22, hit libraries and bookstores. Within mere days of the memoir’s publication he was informed he has esophageal cancer, which subsequently reached his lymph nodes. Never one to shy away, Hitchens wrote a compelling piece, “Topic of Cancer” in September’s Vanity Fair, depicting his early struggles with chemotherapy. The piece wonderfully expresses the plurality of responding to cancer: fear, resilience, and vulnerability coexist for Hitchens as he continues treatment and sense-making.

Christopher Hitchens polarizes. His writings meld thought and disparate ideologies more eloquently and frustratingly than any writer I have read. The nimbleness of his writing and evolving beliefs reflect Bertrand Russell’s maxim: “I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.” Some might consider this assertion a sign of weakness. Hitchens’ career conveys the beauty within the assertion. His beliefs evolved as he aged. He constantly challenged his beliefs and made adjustments as he determined worthy. Whether you find Hitchens to be a buffoon or a genius, he has remained committed to mental engagement throughout his career. He is infuriating and prescient. Funny and provocative. If only we had more writers like him.

I wish Christopher Hitchens health and I look forward to his further chronicles of treatment.

Below are some of my favorite works by Christopher Hitchens.

Hitch-22

Thomas Jefferson: Author of America

Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

A Long Short War: the Postponed Liberation of Iraq

Letters to a Young Contrarian

Bix Beiderbecke

This entry is about a place as much as it is about a person. My original intent was to write about a jazz musician who was highly influential and revered amongst other top players of his generation but remained unknown to the public at large during his life time. As I was digging into this musician's back ground using the libray's catalog and print resources, it dawned on me how great it was that my local library collected, stored, and loaned out not only resources in a wide variety of formats free of change, and had services in place to assist me in getting other materials on my chosen subject such as interlibrary loan and electronic databases, but that a librarian had taken the time to single out and acquire specific choice items for my study and enjoyment. It was all so effortless because many people had already done all of the heavy lifting for me.

That being said, Bix Beiderbecke is considered by some to be the originator of cool jazz. The more I read about his style of playing, the more I am reminded of Miles Davis. Miles Davis would have been five years old at the time of Bix Beiderbecke's death in 1931. Bix, on the other hand, was only 28 when he died of chronic ill health and alcoholism. At a time when jazz musicians were setting the band stand ablaze by blasting out a flurry of notes coupled with flashy, complicated phrasing, Bix Beiderbecke was hanging back, playing fewer notes, and intoning his music with a feeling of introspection and playing it with a precision akin to that of the music of Debussy.

Non-Fiction:

Bix: Man and Legend

Bix: The Definitive Biography of a Jazz Legend: Leon "Bix" Beiderbecke (1903-1931)

Fiction:

Young Man with a Horn

Movies:

Young Man with a Horn

Bix: An Interpretation of a Legend

Ain't None of Them Play like Him Yet

Music:

Bix Beiderbecke Sound recording

Bix Beiderbecke Story Sound Recording

T. rex Sue

On August 12, 1990 Sue Hendrickson, a paleontologist, discovered the "largest, most complete, best preserved" Tyranosaurus Rex skeleton known to the world. This T. rex is 40.5 feet in length, her skeleton weighs 3,922 pounds, and she is estimated to be 67 million years old. It is extremely well-preserved and has contributed to the advancement of our knowledge about the T. rex. She is named Sue, after her discoverer, and she is on display at the Field Museum in Chicago, IL.

Her tremendous size is really just a small part of Sue's story. A court battle lasting 5 years over who owned Sue and her subsequent $8.36 million dollar sale price from Southeby's grabbed headlines years ago. Hendrickson and her colleagues found Sue's bones by chance on the outskirts of a dig they were doing for Black Hills Institute of Geological Research. However, the land on which they discovered Sue actually belonged to a Native American tribe member who later said he had not given permission to Hendrickson's team to keep the fossil they had found and claimed ownership to it. Because the property was ultimately in the trust of the United States government as it is located on a Sioux Reservation, the federal government as well as the Sioux tribe were also laying claims to Sue. The bones were housed at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology during the long, highly publicized trial until ownership of the bones was awarded to the land owner. The land owner then decided to sale the skeleton at a public auction at Sotheby's.

The Field Museum wanted to put Sue on display for all to see. With the cooperation of several private donors, including Walt Disney World Resort and McDonald's Corporation, Sue was purchased from Sotheby's for the enormous sum of over $8 million dollars. And, lucky for us, Sue is on display for the world.

Read more about how Sue may have died, why she is so well-preserved, and some of the fascinating discoveries that have been made since the fossil was found.

BOOKS

Rex Appeal: The Amazing Story of Sue, the Dinosaur that Changed Science, the Law, and My Life

Tyrannosaurus Sue: The Extraordinary Saga of the Largest, Most Fought Over T. Rex Ever Found

WEBSITES and ARTICLES

Get the Inside Scoop on Sue
The story of Sue from the Field Museum's website

Mighty T. rex Killed by Pigeon Parasite?

Paleontologists Assess T. rex Sue's Pathologies
Sue suffered from many of the same afflictions animals of today are faced with.

Sue on Facebook

Sue Pays Off For Field Museum

This Day in History: Skeleton of Tyrannosaurus Rex Discovered
From the History Channel

View the Many Sides of Sue
Photo galleries, videos and much more from the Field Musuem

To Serve Man

My sister bought me a Roomba for my birthday. The name of the company that makes it is iRobot, and Roomba is a robot, all right. It talks, it makes decisions, and it can get itself out of a tight spot (although it has trouble if it's squeezed horizontally--if there isn't enough clearance under the couch, for instance). It runs on a battery that charges on a docking station. There are two metal plates in the bottom of the Roomba that connect with two metal plates on the dock. I was holding the Roomba and aiming to place it perfectly for its first charge when it wriggled in my hands like a poodle! Like it was saying, "Oh just let me do it!". So I let it go and it lined up the connection by itself!

The Roomba is a neat robot, but it's not a heavy-duty vacuum. It couldn't handle the shed hair of my five dogs, so a couple of days after I got it I took it back to the store. I felt sorry for it as I re-packed it in its box. After all, it had tried its best to please me. When the clerk took it out of my hands, I felt like I was leaving a dog at the pound.

We may not have reached the point where we each get a jet pack, but you can have your own robot right now if you want it. To prepare yourself for a mechanical companion, read these books:

• Robotics
• Build Your Own Paper Robots
• On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears
• I, Robot
• Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong

Daniel Schorr

I was a child when Daniel Schorr cut his teeth as a seminal and uncompromising journalist. His fearlessness in covering the Watergate debacle of the Nixon presidency earned him meritorious praise from colleagues as well as the ire of certain network television executives and powerful political figures. Daniel Schorr passed away recently at the grand age of 93. His powers of perception, journalist's instincts, and intellectual prowess remained razor sharp to the very end. His voice had been a consistent part of my life since at least the late eighties and I will miss it.

Come to Think of It: Notes on the End on the Millennium

Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism

Clearing the Air