Daily Thoughts 11/11/2009

The prison library at the Tombs, New York City, established by Miss Linda Gilbert. (1874)

Daily Thoughts 11/11/2009

I am thinking about participating in the December 8 and 9, ALCTS Opening Doors to Hidden Collections. http://www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/alcts/confevents/upcoming/e-forum/index.cfm

Daily Thoughts 11/10/2009

British Library Gate. Colin Gregory Palmer's Photography.Creative commons Attribution, 2005.

Daily Thoughts 11/10/2009

Today was another quiet day. I renewed my membership to the American Library Association and joined the ALCTS group-- American Library Collection and Technical Services group. I alsow switched my focus from Intellectual Freedom Roundtable to Exhibits. I am hoping it will be more useful.

Right now, I am reading Working With Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman. I also been going through and doing my orders for November. I went through the purchase alerts and the patron requests to add to my list. I'll probably also order some large print biographies. The bookmobile has been requesting these.

Daily Thoughts 11/9/2009

Anselm Feuerbach, Paolo e Francesca, 1864, Schack-Galerie, Monaco

Daily Thoughts 11/9/2009

I am going to the Twitter in Libraries training at Metro New York on November 18, 2009.
http://metronylibrary.augusoft.net/index.cfm?method=ClassInfo.ClassInformation&int_class_id=285&int_category_id=1&int_sub_category_id=61&int_catalog_id=0

I walked up to my local library today and spent a bit of time on the computer.

Daily Thoughts 11/8/2009

An image from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery of a book poster. I rather liked it.

Daily Thoughts 11/8/2009

Daily Thoughts 11/7/2009

A postcard with the public domain "me worry?" face that later inspired Mad magazine's Alfred E. Neuman. From Wikimedia. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alfred_E._Neumann.jpg

I finished reading Charles Bukowski, The Continual Condition last night. It was Bukowski's usual mix of women, sex, drinking, bars, and the race track. There were some more reflective poems as well about writing poetry, school, art, and music which are a bit different than his usual works. This makes the posthumous collection of poetry a little more interesting than many of his books. He comes across as older and more introverted in this work. It reads like he is spending more time at home, using a little less cursing, and thinking about his younger and wilder days.

The poetry is a little smoother and easier to read than works like Love Is A Dog From Hell and You Get So Alone Sometimes That It Just Makes Sense. There is less of a firebrand emotional feeling. The work is mature. The book is also fairly short only 126 pages long. It draws in many of his previous poems from a variety of sources.

It was an enjoyable distraction from every day life. This book has lots of mature content and situations in it. It is not always easy to read. Bukowski is considered a counter culture figure and a wild man of the literary world. This is even more so than Allen Ginsberg or Jack Kerouac.

I was reading through http://www.lisnews.com and found this review; Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements http://www.lisnews.org/read_me_century_classic_american_book_advertisements