Good Morning, A New Years Eve Manifesto

Zane Grey in Australia. Zane Grey wrote westerns. It is such an idiosyncratic picture.

Good Morning

Right now, I am reading The Merchant of Dennis The Menace The Autobiography of Hank Ketcham. Hank Ketcham new he was going to be a cartoonist from time he was six years old. He was an incredibly focused man. I can see parallels between the life of Hank Ketcham and Charles Schulz. Both were very clean, middle american white anglo saxon protestants. The book is profusely illustrated with black and white photographs and cartoons.

Today is a half day at work.

I picked up a copy of the dvd Capote about Truman Capote. I heard that it was a very goood film. I liked In Cold Blood and was wondering what the life of the writer Truman Capote was like. I could not finish the movie because the dvd was scratched. This happens sometimes. I'll have to return it and request another one. The first part of the movie was very interesting. It makes me interested enough to maybe read some of hist other works.

I am trying out a Tumblr account. http://bookcalendar.tumblr.com/ . It looks like an interesting sharing network for a variety of different things from links to videos to picures.

Baker & Taylor is laying off 60 people from their retail division which is bad sign. It means that less people will be buying books from bookstores. If less people buy books from stores they are likely to use the library more. However, because less money is being spent there will be less tax money for libraries. It is a kind of vicious circle. The coming year will be about increasing efficiency without increasing costs. This means a lot more will be expected of people.

http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6625720.html

This poem is after the style of the Beat poets, it is a kind of lyrical nonsense poem in an attempt at a jazz kind of rhyme. I am thinking of Bob Kaufman the beat poet who wrote the Abomunist Manifesto when I am writing this.

A New Years Manifesto

I manifest a festive festival

This festival of manifestos

New years festival on all days

To remind your mind to enjoy

Manifests positive manifestations

Affirm your new years affirmations

Resolve to resolve your resolutions

And remember to remember joy

Happy New Years!

Truman Capote A Christmas Story

Truman Capote, 1959

One of the friends of the library is a storyteller. She did a trial run for a program of reading stories for adults. She read the short story, A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote. It has a ghostly quality to it which I found quite applealing. She read for about an hour. She mostly reads to elders, often in the nursing home setting. http://www.geocities.com/cyber_explorer99/capotechristmas.html

This morning, I spent a bit of time with a colleague designing a brochure on services available at our library. It will take up quite a bit of time to do it right.

I also spent some time going through Baker and Taylor's Paperclips which is a catalog of mass market paperbacks available through the distributor. It is going to be rolled into Forecast in the future which is the monthly list of forthcoming titles from Baker and Taylor.
http://www.btol.com/pub_details.cfm?id=30

The reorder list of titles which were damaged is done as well. Today was a productive, but very predictable day again. I did not get any chance to do any weeding today.

On the way home, I read some more of The Taint and Other Novellas by Brian Lumley. It is a collection of Lovecraftian stories. I don't want to spoil it by commenting on the stories until I have finished reading all of them. There is the constant reminder of "cosmic horror", or that we are mere tiny things in the immense darkness of the universe. H.P. Lovecraft considered himself to be primarily a poet. The Fungi From Yuggoth is his long work. It is a long, strange, and frightening poem.
http://www.yankeeclassic.com/miskatonic/library/stacks/literature/lovecraft/poetry/fungi.htm

Lovecraft was supposed to have gotten his idea for Cthulhu from Alfred Lord Tennyson's poem, The Kraken:

The Kraken

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
-- Alfred, Lord Tennyson