Daily Thoughts 3/27/2009

Love Among The Chickens, P.G. Wodehouse. I just liked the title and cover design. It is quite appealing.

Daily Thoughts 3/27/2009

I am working on the Automatically Yours, a program with Baker and Taylor which allows a library to place standing orders by author for fiction. I have the selection list of authors ready. Hopefully, I will be able to have the process done next week. http://www.btol.com/promo_details.cfm?id=32 I am also going to ask Baker & Taylor if they have a standing order program for award winning titles , Hugo, Nebula, Edgar Award, Pulitzer Prize, Mann Booker Prize, RITA Award (romance) , Bram Stoker Award (horror), Fiction American Library Association Notable Books, Pen Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and a few others.

I placed a small order of fiction books to fill in gaps for books which we missed ordering for popular authors as well. A short list of thirty seven books.

I am going to another meeting for Earth Day this afternoon in the mayors office. We have a few things ready. There is a small display put together for books on Earth Day. The local high school special education department is doing a display with us on alternative energy, we plan on doing a cleanup day for around the library and a planting for the side of the library.

I am about half way through reading The Everything Managing People Book by Gary McClain, Ph.D. and Deborah S. Romaine. This is a very plain written, easy to understand book. There are no citations of major companies, just examples of every day things which may happen in day to day management of a company. This book does not promise to turn you into a gung ho super manager.

I watched a little bit of Slam Nation The Sport of Spoken Word filmed by Paul Devlin. This is a documentary about the poets in a national poetry slam in the United States. I rather liked it because it interviewed Bob Holman who is a major figure in contemporary performance poetry and Marc Smith from Chicago who created the concept of the poetry slam. There were some very interesting things that I learned. A lot of performance poetry is about how you use your lips and face to create stage presence and sound for an audience. Taylor Mali in the film was really excellent at doing this. Another poet who I really enjoyed was Saul Williams who is also an actor. He tells you that stage presence is really important in performing.

This is a fairly sexually charged film with some strong language. Both Beau Sia, an asian poet and Jessica Care More, an African American poet express a lot of sexually charged themes in their poems. Beau Sia also showed the pictures he likes to draw which are quite good. Jessica Care Moore won 5 Apollo Amateur Nights with her poetry. The movie so far is very interesting to watch. It is not what I expected. The group poetry pieces that are shown are very different.