Love Blog for March 11

Ah, Friday! Ah, links!

For ways to help victims of recent earthquakes: New Zealand Red Cross, Global Giving project for Japan

For ways to keep informed: AlertNet; BBC Breaking News; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

For something beautiful in the way of Bridges from Veronika Von Volkova

For something sketchy and refreshing in the way of known characters from Scott and Skottie

For something less expected and more carefully built from Nest of Wonders

For the joy of sharing and because it's freaking brilliant from Happle Tea

BookViewCafe because I said so

For the love of librarians and articulate presentation Librarian in Black

For Aubrey and voodoo TPD (don't ask, just go with it) from Three Panel Soul

For the love of people I haven't seen in 20 years or more - I'm off to Kansas City next month to see my friend Shaun's show! Go to his website. Go to his show. If you are in Kansas City for the show, follow the sound of the barking otter laugh and you will find me. I expect to make this sound frequently. Dude is fucking funny.

So, in case you ever wondered How to Turn a Film into a Web Series, I totally know a dude who's involved in one! No Clean Break episode 10 right here, and I'm only linking to this one because the image you see is Matthew Jones, another someone I've known since I rode the school bus, and also awesome. Offical No Clean Break website here with all the episodes. So good. (also, now I'm all nervous and curious about episode 11! GAH!)

(Geez, what is it with MPA alumni, anyway?) No one wonders why I am totally writing a character that looks exactly like him.

Oh, yeah. Um, Matthew? ....

What would Friday be without me sharing Freakangels? A Monday, that's what.

I Want FELT ALIEN ASTEROIDS

Cayenee Mocha! CAYENNE MOCHA! I was just talking about doing this at my work!!!

I heart Jagermonsters so hard. It's kind of ridiculous.

So one of the things that I truly love about Wapsi Square is that I have to let it sit for a week or so before reading to catch up again, because it's so relatively complex and told very specifically and that makes reading the archives again and again very much like reading a novella. I know that I found the comic through another comic or through an archaeology supplies website (Ninja? help?) - it wasn't something that I just 'found' through Stumble, I mean. Possibly a Whitechapel recommendation. I add weight to those, because there are rarely shitbombs on lists and I'm pretty picky, so between us, I get good stuff. Not the point, the point is that it's a fantastic story about a bunch of flawed and intelligent women and other paranormal beasties. I do miss the museum/thinky/artifacts stuff, but, as I've said, the archives are right there and reading them is the visual equivalent of a rose petal bath.

Health Care is the Issue. The ever brilliant Coilhouse magazine posted a video made by a bunch of

"Wesleyan University students, determined to speak out against extreme conservative members of the House of Representatives’ recent attack on Planned Parenthood, have presented this straightforward, sex-positive rallying cry to fellow young people across the country"

Yesterday found me in conversation with a person whose beliefs are almost diametrically opposed to my own. It was wonderful. He is a person who believes, as do I, that faith cannot be legislated, and that health care and the right to medical care ought to be legislated, not the morality. It was a beautiful conversation and yet another reminder to me why I do so love people of faith, even though I am not of them.

Fundamentalists do more to hurt their own belief systems than they can ever seem to understand.

A day with my books

A couple of weeks ago, flush with a paycheck from my part-time minimum wage job, and ignoring the valid and reasonable debts that I have, I decided to take the plunge and spend the 25USD to get become a lifetime member on LibraryThing.

I can't even tell you how pleased I am about this decision. Cuz here's the thing: I read a lot of books. A Lot of Books. Wait a minute, I need to back up a bit.

I have a library of just over 225 books in my office. It is small, and it is growing. A few years ago I decided that I would go to Portugal and so began to weed my life, including my library. I think that I ended up getting rid of about 3/5 of it, maybe more. That was before my appendix burst in August of 2007, I stayed in Lincoln, and by the spring of 2009 my library was 182 books precisely. I had room for every single book on a book shelf, standing vertically. Never let it be said that I have always been in need of new bookshelves. There has been a moment in time when it all fit.

I kept trading books in and out for about a year. In fact, I went 6 months or so without buying books (I even stopped grabbing books from the free book boxes outside of A Novel Idea (those are so damned dangerous)) at all. It was awful. But a growth experience. I am not really fond of miserable growth experiences, and suspect I will not decide to inflict them on myself in future. All that said, I don't have room for all of my books. I work in a used book shop. I get a good deal on them. And I love to read. Also, I am very curious about the look of my library - not the physical set up or the visual aspect of the spines, etc., but the subjects and the range of authors and the quality of the books. By quality I refer to something more subjective than outward monetary value.

There are titles of which I have two copies; one of them a paperback and much written in by me, and the other hardbound with a dust-jacket and relatively pristine. Some books are more comfortable in the pocket of my cargo pants, and some hold up a backpack with ease. There are some titles I love that I never have on hand because I buy cheap paperbacks of them in order to give them away because I think they ought to be read by as many people as possible. I love the size of Loeb Classical Library and Everyman Library books. I love the thin thin pages of collections of Shakespeare and Milton. I love the smell of my father's old textbooks and the trade publications of Freakangels. If a book possesses some such quality that appeals to me and will draw me to it in the future, it is likely to be something that will do well in my library. I might even read it.

Because I do have to be drawn back to my own books again and again and again. I love libraries. I use them, I revel in them, I want to spend the rest of my life working in and around and for and about them. So I tend to use university and public libraries more than I use my own. Which means that in order to be drawn back, there must be something on my shelves that cannot be replaced by someone else's.

I tend to prefer following paths that are known to me and the exercise of cataloging my books online is how I choose to become ever more familiar with these breathing bits of other people's lives and works that define such a large part of this space. I had long wanted to just get the lifetime account, but put it off and off and off until finally I could not justify having rated more than 1000 movies on Netflix, and only 168 on LibraryThing.

Next time: Thoughts on writing reviews (because you know I can talk).

The Poet thinks of community

All of this talk of libraries and how important they are to the communities in which they live has taken place without ever thinking of an underlying question: I have not yet taken the time to articulate exactly how I define community. To be honest, it seems hardly appropriate to take that responsibility on myself. The world in which I live is populated and changing. I acknowledge the clade - slightly modified for a social group whose common ancestor is more likely to be Biological Sciences or The Coffee House than a trilobite. Similarity does not necessitate contact, particularly not the continued contact over time and life changes that are, to me, indicators of the presence of community. 

Indicators, oblique and suggestive as they are, do much to define an event: the health of a pasture (leadplant); the presence of a city (population, population density, architectural diversity) or an empire (colonization, mono-language). 

Thinking about what defines community and all of the communities in my world inspired me to put together a list of similar indicators:

Geography: some defined site (web or corporeal) that is shared or is, as the horrible Library 2.0-ians have it, a destination. That destination is part of the community, and occasionally defines it by name.

Characteristic: an inside joke, shared attitude toward beanie babies, common belief system.

Artifacts: pamphlets, tattoos, you could make the argument for memories, behavioral patterns, obelisks.

Self-referential definition: membership in a community defines someone as a specific kind of person; the community's members define the present and future course of that community.

I have no personal evidence to suggest that a community must only be created or must only happen "organically" (as if organic growth is not deliberate, but I digress).  Time is a factor: time to develop relationships, time to earn/gain/pick a name, time to grow into an entity, however difficult to define. And members must share in the life of the community: events must be attended, the community must be referenced and perpetually re-defined (particularly if the definition is one that isn't supposed to change), the burden of obligations to the community must be justified.

All of the indicators that I've thought of and about require involvement and time. People have to maintain communities in order for them to continue, and if they do not continue then they remain social or political or work or neighbor groups.

I live in a town that has been around for about 150 years. There are artifacts of its earliest US history on every block, and everyone goes to church. What church is almost entirely defined by family and/or profession. I could spend days talking about everything that isn't being done to provide for a sustainable future as an independent community. I could spend just as much time talking about what is being done. There are more empty store fronts than full ones on the square, more than half of the restaurants in town are franchises, and the only grocery store is a Hy-Vee.

And yet, they all know each other. There is a fairly regular system of stratification that places you first at or not at the university, and then working or not working. They all eat at the crappy food places and at all the good food places and they all know Fred at the Hy-Vee (to be fair, there are few people who spend more than a few hours in Maryville who do not know Fred at the Hy-Vee). So, it may not be a self-sustainable community right now, but that wasn't the question, was it?

And on the much less serious side: I think a real community has its own indie self-assured love song:



And also: secret twitters at the ALA Conference. I love a good professional conference.

All communities need an underground to prove that the foundation is sitting on something.


*thanks to C and to A for the brilliant links, btw*