• I didn't think that Survivor was anything to be ashamed of at all. In fact, I really enjoyed the questioning of the Missionaries a lot.
• My suitcase has a hole patched with pink duct tape, and I haven't started packing yet. I'm off to Immersion for a week, and I'm feeling a bit anxious!
  

• More Survivor, which I am enjoying.
• Immersion documents!
  

• Firebrands, which reminds me of Library Heroes in many ways.
• Doonesbury compliations, since they were left out on the kitchen table.
  

• These past few days have been devoted to hacking everything from culture to typewriters to toenails.

• Katelyn Angell, "Boom or Bust: The Need for Senior Services Librarians." from Progressive Librarian #32
• "The Career Risks of Scrutinizing the Physical Side of Books"
  

• Today I went over to the dark side, instead of getting a million things done on my to-do, and to-read lists: IRC.

• Finished Mind of My Mind on the train home, and yes, I will admit I took the long way to read some more. 500 pages in and it feels like nothing!

• Finished Wild Seed, and moved directly on to Mind of My Mind, since the trilogy is conveniently bound together. Good waiting-at-the-airport reading.

• Wild Seed
• Re-read parts of "Don't Leave your Friends Behind: Anarcha-Feminism & Supporting Mothers and Children" zine, which I came across a copy of in a box of donated materials at work.
• "Notes on Anarchism" zine by Noam Chomsky, in which he quotes Rudolph Rocker:
  

• The U.S. Social Forum program
• Finished A Gate at the Stairs on the road trip home
• Started a bit of Octavia Butler's Seed to Harvest compilation
• Added many good things to the reading list!
  

• A Gate at the Stairs, on my first-ever significant train ride. Great reading, great sights.

• U.S. Social Forum program (!!)
• Collection development marathon...
• From NYPL's Twitter feed: "One sure window into a person's soul is his reading list."- Mary B. W. Tabor
  

• Today my reading was centered on Information Literacy in preparation for Immersion. I'm starring the ones that I found particularly useful/interesting:
  • *Ken Bain, "How Do They Conduct Class?" from What the Best College Teachers Do.
  • Alma R. Clayton-Pedersen with Nancy O'Neill, "Curricula Designed to Meet 21st-Century Expectations" from Educating the Net Generation.
  • *Parker Palmer, "The Heart of a Teacher: Identity and Integrity in Teaching" from The Courage to Teach.
    

• More of A Gate at the Stairs, even though there are many other non-fiction books that I should be reading.

• Many, many emails.

• All of a Jeffrey Brown compilation while on a plane at JFK, not even off the ground.
• Life story of a German woman who Isabella knew and who wrote of her life on a really old computer and printed out the tale for her friends and family after her death.

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

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

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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?!).

• Who said social networking wasn't good for something? I just joined #TeamAchieve through Twitter, and now I, along with a few other inspiring pals, am committed to writing 700 words a day six days a week. In addition to a reading log, this sidebar might begin to include my progress on this endeavor.
• More of Beloved. Excited for Summery, fiction train reading.

• I feel like I just performed a marathon of reading and writing in order to complete this 13-pager for my American Studies class. Now my reading will be semi-free again for almost three months, no longer beholden to a syllabus.* I will admit that I enjoyed my class enough to be a little disappointed about that.

• My subscription to Radical Teacher hasn't run out yet! I got a bill two days ago, but #87 yesterday. This morning I started right in with "Teaching Freire and CUNY Open Admissions," by Kristen Gallagher.
• Last night, again unable to get to sleep, I read a few more pages of Beloved, which still feels like cheating on the non-fiction and classwork (even though it relates to it and was mentioned over and over).
  

• Not so much reading, but listened to Ira Shor talk with a room full of librarians about teaching. Absolutely amazing. There was a very nice communal feel to our discussion afterward as well. Very nice afternoon of contemplation about teaching in libraries.
• Followed by a night of utterly incomprehensible Herzog. This and that.

• The Republic in Print

• Pickup Truck Stoled
• "Introduction: The Theme of Our Contemplation" from Pamphlets of Protest: An Anthology of Early African American Protest Literature, 1790-1860
• Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
• Russell L. Martin III, "North American Transatlantic Book Culture to 1800" from A Companion to the History of the Book

• shortandqueer #12, "Menstruation, not punctuation (periods.)"
• The Republic in Print

• After our presentation at the Conference on Intellectual Property, we listened to the keynote by James Boyle...

• The Republic in Print

• "Pamphleteering in America" by Howard Zinn, from Artists in Times of War
• Let's prepare to celebrate:

• Ties that Bind

• ebooks, ebooks, ebooks and preparation!

• ebrary, and more Tiya Miles. Still really enjoying this last text of my American Studies class.

• One of the things a decently long commute has taught me is what kinds of books I can or want to read on the train. Anything that causes me to want to take notes is impossible. Anything that I would want to append is borderline. Ties that Bind is a great read in that I can just read it; it's fascinating, it reads like a narrative and yet it's historically appropriate (many "we have no way of knowing"-s) and I am blowing through it, which somehow also inspires me to keep reading more + more + more.

• Started Ties that Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom by Tiya Miles, which I am really enjoying! It's nice to read narratives after a lot of theory.

• Migrant Imaginaries
• I got reference questions that I could relate to today! Art history, television, media, film, art ed. Hooray!

• Cracked open Alicia Schmidt Camacho's Migrant Imaginaries: Latino Cultural Politics in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (for class)

• Somewhat impossible reference questions today, and more weeding. Things like software program books for software I've never heard of...

• Happy Birthday Brokenjaws'er!
• Taught the undergrad version of my American Studies class about the library today. Enjoyed hearing about their research topics; everything from the Beach Boys to the Lower East Side.
• Finished The Black Atlantic, discussed it and other imagined communities in class

• Black Atlantic: finished up all but the Richard Wright chapter (which I still hope to squeeze in!) on the train.

• More Black Atlantic, almost done!
• First two chapters of Imagined Communities by Benedict Arnold
• Browsed what I want to read in the History of the Book in America series and wished they were all part of my own library...

• ebook work day, complete with three simultaneous monitors--and that was just for me.

• more Black Atlantic

• ebooks, ebooks, ebooks.

• Finished skimming The Case for Books and Started Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Conciousness, for class.

• Phew! Marathon of Denning all day!
• At some point this week, I also read "The Culture of the Thirties" by Warren Susman.
  

• Denning is getting good
• Just discovered that crucial, helpful, and everything I was trying to get at book for my final
• Weeded old and very very dusty communications textbooks--I shook and blew and inhaled that dust off...
  

• My morning mta commute has happily been replaced by a bike ride, and the weather could not be better for it. I adore the crispness of spring with all its promises of everything summery to come. That said, I'm diving into Denning's Cultural Front for class today, but not between Flatbush and Utica.

• Kindle reading; The Case for Books is enjoyable.

• George Lipsitz, "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: Racialized Social Democracy and the 'White Problem' in American Studies"
• Barak Obama, "A More Perfect Union"
• Lisa Lowe, "Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences"
• Philip Deloria, "Patriotic Indians and the Identities of Revolution"
  

• Knitting patterns (finally bought some DPNs I "needed" from Knitpicks)
• Browsed through my stacks of suggested titles for my final paper
  

• We pawed through the business/econ section of the Reference stacks today, finding an assortment of titles that would make Awful Library Books proud.
• I got five paragraphs or so in on the homework.
  

• Judith Butler, "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire" from Gender Trouble
• Judith Halberstam, "Mackdaddy, Superfly, Rapper: Gender, Race, and Masculinity in the Drag King Scene"
• Elsa Barkley Brown, "What Has Happened Here?: The Politics of Difference in Women's History and Feminist Politics."
  

• Helped a bunch of Queens Public librarians read some zines
• Got my issue of On Wisconsin in the mail, and got a little nostalgic. Interview with Lorrie Moore.
• Still working on the Teddie Roosevelt and manliness essay for homework this week. Didn't get much reading done on the 3 hour commute to Flatbush--a bit to tired in the AM to read about imperialism and conquest.
  

• Sometimes when it's real. slow. at. the. desk. it seems like the day didn't even happen at all. And I couldn't find where that woman's class was! Or satisfy the CPE student! Long Sunday.
• Read some more On Writing Well, but couldn't make it through kind of watching the Oscars.
  I liked this paragraph on revising well enough a few days ago that I folded over a tiny corner on page 87:

• More biking and celebrating than reading today.

• On Writing Well
• More of Counterpoise
• Call numbers for books for MALS class; American print culture and the construction of publics...
  

• Constance Penley, "Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics and Technology"--highly recommended article about women and Star Trek slash fanzines
• Robin D.G. Kelley, "'We Are Not What We Seem': The Politics and Pleasures of Community"
• Kelley, "The Riddle of the Zoot Suit"--also really great; talks about Malcolm X's writing about his time as a zoot suiter and how his later perspectives clouded his recollection of the cultural significance of his hipsterism.
  

• The Pscychology of Moving
• Inside a Divided Upper East Side Public School
  

• Raymond Williams, Base and Superstructure in Marxist Theory
• Zitkala-Sa, School Days of an Indian Girl
• Finished Trachtenberg; recommended--his vision of American culture is a bit bleak, but true to life (largely powered by capitalism, for worse rather than better).
  

• More Trachtenberg, with a particularly enjoyable part about the myth of Thomas Edison as inventor and made man (as opposed to entrepreneur with an economic eye and workshop of collaborators)
• Booking a Flight the Frugal Way
  

• The last bits of the latest Bitch with breakfast
• More Trachtenberg, which I am finding hard to concentrate upon whilst on the train
  

• Most of today's reading was on the interwebs in preparation for this event, for which we librarians created a wiki.

• More Bitch, my reappointment CV.

• Somehow I am teaching three Television/Radio/Communications classes tomorrow. I would have liked to read a few results for searches in Ebsco databases, but they would not load from home. Thinking lately (with help from J.) that technical glitches and tutorials should not be what we teach.

• Reading and writing to-do lists (academic, shopping, deadlines and teaching) and proposals (talks, papers, grants) seems to take up the 90% of my sitting-down-getting-things-done time.

• Homework: The West in American mythology, the Frontier as it Americanizes all of us (via Nash Smith of the UW, interestingly), Buffalo Bill and the blur of the real (history vs. narrative and show) and Kaplan getting all imperial (thank you for that last little bit about Africa and Vietnam and the Philippines and the lack of awareness of the meaning of those helicopters dashing away while filming Apocalypse Now!).

• Broken Pencil-got a sub!

• I have been very poor about reading on the train lately. Somehow if it's not fiction or a codex, I can't get myself into it on the platform or on the train. Or maybe it's just the normal procrastination that accompanies homework.
• I printed out a good many things about the kindle today, and noticed a bunch of free ebooks online.
  

• Kept reading our proposed abstract for the Conference on Intellectual Property over and over (and our readers helped immensely), until I had all the PDFs in order and sent it off. I like confirmation emails on proposals; they seem to come easily and have an excited person at the other end of the computer tubes.

• Communications research textbooks for weeding (lots changed since 1996! Things like calling email "internet electronic mail")

• We went to 'Snice and I read my homework. I need to remember to keep a dictionary handy, as I have slowly become someone who does not skim over words, but insists upon looking everything up. I bothered Matt a lot because he has a dictionary on his computer, with or without the wireless.

• A lot of 2010 so far has been about organizination and getting hardware on the up and up in my free time, and today I finally got GnuCash to work properly (without futzing up the back end myself), and re-installed Open Office. Contemplating going totally linux. Reeling in numbers and installation pop-ups. Is this reading? Caught up on blogs amidst all of this-especially glad that Library Praxis is back up!

• Zine from Kelsey, "Getting the Guts Out" (really nice!)
• Ira Shor's Critical Teaching and Everyday Life has been rattling all my dreamy illusions about education, and feels so close to home and pertinent that I suspect someone is looking over my shoulder when I read it (especially on the train).
  

• Bits of Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, and supplemental materials from the BC New Faculty Retreat.

• More Wao, which made me laugh out loud more than once and read nerdy parts (400 hit points!) to Matt.

• The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

• Critical Teaching and Everyday Life by Ira Shor. Introduction was pretty amazing; about CUNY and the struggles of the open admissions.
• The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
  

• More writing than reading today, and business librarianship homework.

• Beret Knitting Pattern; finished, but waaaaay too big!

• A Passage for Dissent: The Best of Sipapu, 1970-1988
• Play it As it Lays by Joan Didion
  

• A Passage for Dissent: The Best of Sipapu, 1970-1988
• spreadsheets of info about earnings, spendings, retirement, debt.
  

• "What about George?" from the New York Times
• Patti Smith's New York Love Affair: An Excerpt From Her Memoir "Just Kids"
• Online business class reading; lotsa company info websites
  

• Jerianne's Literature Review and Zine Cataloging Needs Assessment
• "Synergy, Social Responsibility, and the Sixties: Pivotal Points in the Evolution of American Outreach Library Service" by Toni Samek, in Libraries to the People
• Some of the new (Winter 2009) issue of Radical Teacher
• Skimmed Revelling in New York zine, recommended!
  

• Finished In Dubious Battle on the morning commute (perfect timing as we pulled into my station)
• Skimmed Alternative Library Literature: 1998-99 (27 page index!) and 82/83, 88/89
• Studs Terkel's Working: A Graphic Adaptation
  

• A few chapters of In Dubious Battle
• Skimmed library-related zines, a few issues of Progressive Librarian, Alternative Library Literature, Sipapu, Booklegger's Guide to the Passionate Perils of Publishing and Alternative Materials in Libraries
• Content on my GSLIS continuing education business research course via Moodle
  

Yesterday the only thing I read was Peter Reinhart's Artisan Breads Every Day, a present from my secret santa, in an effort to teach myself to make a good sandwich loaf.

Just finished reading Victoria Law's Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles Of Incarcerated Women and wanted to recommend it. Vikki's book is an inspiring read, a great work of activism, and a eye-opening archive of the life of women in prison.