• Cecil and Jordan in New York Stories by Gabrielle Bell
• Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman by Murakami.

• Kiki Smith exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. I liked the installs in the period rooms best. Creeptastic.

• Techie House prep.

• "Grand Narratives and the Information Cycle in the Library Instruction Classroom." by Sara Franks from Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods

• Bike commuting season has begun... so commuting reading is out the window. And nice hairstyles.

• Today was another day of absorption, but not through text. I attended (and presented at) Brooklyn College's Faculty Day, and was happy to participate in everything from a presentation on game theory to a Bob Dylan sing-along.

• Today was housekeeping, bike-riding and a nice RR event. I finished a grant application that I'd been working on for some time. Felt good to drop it in the mail.

So,
so you think you can tell
Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.

• First 30 pages of Alternative Materials in Libraries on my morning commute. This book is so good that it makes me want to tear my hair out.

• I got a free copy of Dreams from my Father; which is funny because I shared and then gave away my first copy, so it's like it came back to me. I read the preface and the intro on my way from BC today.

• Finished Logicomix. I knew Bertrand Russell as an anti-war activist, so his work as a logician is totally new to me (but not entirely--thanks to J--barber paradox!).

• I finally started Critical Library Instruction today! I read the intro, Elisabeth Pankl and Jason Coleman's piece and most of Jonathan Cope's chapter on my commute, and ate it up with a spoon. I feel like all of the spaces that Ira Shor's lecture opened up in my brain for critical teaching is being filled with these much-needed library perspectives. Special kudos to Jonathan, who really brings theory, history and thought to library instruction, yet very accessibly.

• Finished Beloved this morning before anything else.
• Listened to Howard Zinn on Democracy Now! this morning, on the subject of "good wars." It was nice after just criticizing the unification of America in my paper on the Revolution and pamphleteering, to hear another attack on early America. "What is dubious about the Revolutionary war?"
• Returning to Radical Teacher #87, I found this paragraph striking from Rick Wolff's piece, "Teaching Capitalism's Crisis:"
  

• Do you ever read fiction as fast as you can, wherever you can, to keep up with it, the story, as if it were really happening, in real time? That's how I've been reading Beloved, between meetings and speaking obligations, and an election for a new chair (me?!).

• I'm considering this day one of #TeamAchieve. Game on.
• Beloved on the train. It seems wrong that I keep thinking about Her Fearful Symmetry when I'm reading this book somehow, since the themes and the characters are so different, but it keeps happening. What other books have ghosts as main characters?
• More Beloved at the laundromat. Had a major laundry-driven crabbiness. But reading this perfectly crafted work made it a little more bearable.