Here's a glimpse of the covers of issue #4 of The Borough is My Library!

Copies are available on a sliding scale $4 – $7. All profits go to Literacy for Incarcerated Teens. Get issues #1-3 online here. Issues available free of charge for zine libraries.

*If you would like to order a copy via the mail email alycia(at)brokenja(dot)ws for mailing address and further details, or to get a quote for additional shipping costs for international orders.

This year's issue again had me impressed with all the great librarians I feel lucky to know and admire.

Contents include:

• Foreword
• "What I Love about being a Zine Librarian" by Jude
• "Things I Don't Like about Being a Zine Librarian" by Jude
• "Toof & Nail" by Kiki
• "Library School Adventures" by Elvis Bakaitis
• "Telling Our Own Stories at Interference Archive" by Molly Fair

• Too many deadlines, I listened to program #479 from This American Life, which happened to be about Minnesota, which happens to be where I was born.

• Started Kaja Silverman's The Subject of Semiotics on the train, but stuck in between stations on the 5 I started to feel a bit overwhelmed.

• Baudrillard and Didion.
  From The Year of Magical Thinking:
  “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it..."

• Read a bit more of Didion over breakfast (leftover pie) because the rest of today will be a non-stop Baudrillard fest.

• Some of the New Yorker on my commute. Victor Zapana's piece about his mother made me take the magazine with me on the train.
• Trying to get away from the telly. Started Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Brilliant.
  

• A comic book summary of Baudrillard's ideas, part of this piece, and all of this one.

• Getting addicted to Sherman Alexie, plowed through half of War Dances while commuting
• I've been buying books lately. One because it was my very favorite as a child, another because I know of the author and happened to pick it up serendipitously in the local bookstore
• For class, reading excerpts from Said and Spivak and being inspired
  • Said: "The idea of the beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning..."
• Also, I've read as many books this year already as I had in all of the last few past years, and there's still a month left of 2012!
  

• Sherman Alexie, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

• "The Beautiful Daughter: How My Korean Mother Gave Me the Courage to Transition," by Andy Marra. I totally needed this today--to be reminded of the big picture and what my own reunion felt like.

The 2012 Desk Set Biblioball has been announced: it will again be held at the Bell House in Brooklyn on Saturday, December 8. Get your tickets now! This year the event will again raise funds for Literacy for Incarcerated Teens and Urban Librarians Unite’s Sandy Children’s Book Relief Fund. Among other great attractions, The Borough is My Library #4 will be debuting (!) and I'm super excited about this issue. The Desk Set organizers are still looking for volunteers to help make the magic happen, so lend a hand! Mark your calendars, buy your tickets, and I'll see you there!

• More Foucault. "The History of Sexuality," and "Discipline and Punish."

• Foucault on panopticon on the train, while simultaneously mulling over that movie I watched too.

• I just skimmed a bit of a piece in which someone talked about reading Barbara Johnson and feeling like it was incomprehensible and difficult to grasp but then returning to it later and being delighted about how clear and intelligent the work was. I don't think I had that experience exactly with the Judith Butler today, but this second time (read her in my first MALS class, re-reading in my last) I feel like somehow she's writing in a language which I've had a lot more exercise with. I can live with it a lot more easily. It's less of a puzzle. And I'm enjoying it immensely.

• The 1999 preface of Gender Trouble on the train. Really appreciating this reading, perhaps above all the rest so far this semester (so far).
• Zines at work: Black Out and Ker-Bloom! among others.