May 21, 2012
May 18, 2012
this is our summer reading picture
INTO IT
bookmarking this great image for a bookmark.
1 week ago • 8 notes
April 5, 2012
March 29, 2012
yarg:
I let Rebecca take a turn on DS, and she ROCKED IT. I bow to her skillz. (Taken with instagram)
first go at “draw something.” suddenly yearning for a tablet/e-book reader.
2 months ago • 4 notes
March 16, 2012
February 26, 2012
Hello, Judy? Yeah, hate to do this to you again, but the boss is making us work late. Yeah, I know. I hope I haven’t ruined dinner or anything. Yeah, okay. Love you too. Bye.
(Source: sexpigeon)
3 months ago • 36 notes
February 17, 2012
“ I agree with you that some details are crucial, while others are peripheral. I’d rather have D’Agata change “Vegas Lights” to “Vegas Candle” than have him get his main character’s gender wrong. But is any detail so unimportant that its truth value is of absolutely no consequence? Is the “Vegas Lights” detail so peripheral that the writer may simply alter it to suit his needs (in this case, the need to make a stupid pun)? This is a narrow question, but it leads to a very broad one, namely: why do nonfiction writers bother to stick to facts? D’Agata mocks those who “[pretend] that nonfiction writers have a mystically different relationship with ‘The Truth’ than any other kind of writer.” But empirically speaking, D’Agata is the one assigning himself a special relationship. The vast majority of reporters behave more humbly: we limit ourselves to what we’ve seen and heard, whether it mangles our puns or not. In some cases, the benefits of this approach are obvious. As a person, I don’t want to be embarrassed, or sued. As a writer, I want my readers to know that I’ve worked over my words, both their form and their content; being wrong about my main character’s gender would undermine my authority. But in the more peripheral cases, the cases where no one is likely to notice or care, the attachment to The Truth is less easily explicable. Why should I cling to “Vegas Lights” simply because that’s what I wrote in my notes? I could mount a whole bunch of arguments, but ultimately, I don’t really know. I only know that when I go somewhere as a reporter, my attitude toward the things I see and hear there is damn near reverential. Later, when I turn my experiences into a piece of writing, I’m not going to write about what I wish I had seen, or about what one might think I would have seen. I’m going to do my best to write about what happened there.
The Wag | YOU’RE A FUCKING IDIOT: A Critical Discourse on John D’Agata’s “The Lifespan of a Fact”
This whole dialog is very much worth reading; this is the part that gets most directly at what has really been stuck in my craw about Lifespan of a Fact, which you can also read smart things about here and here.
(via rachael-maddux)
(via rachael-maddux)
3 months ago • 6 notes
February 16, 2012
“ Accepting oneself does not preclude an attempt to become better.
February 9, 2012
ANOTHER THING ABOUT PUBLIC LIBRARIES: being mad on the internet day
3 months ago • 18 notesthis might be obvious by now, but when people (and by that i mostly mean people who work in libraries) talk about the job of public libraries/librarians being “promoting reading” and “promoting books” as if those are the unshakable fundamentals of libraries, i get truly upset about it. yeah, libraries have books, and they always have and probably always will, but bottom line: it’s really fucking awesome that they can have more than that now. giving a shit about access to those other things isn’t a trend or anti-intellectualism. books are cool, reading books is really great, but when i interact with my patrons in hugely different ways, most of them not at all reading-related, i shouldn’t feel like i am doing something wrong or contributing to a decline in literacy because i am too concerned with “trends.”
granted, my particular job in government documents is pretty specialized and doesn’t involve a lot of pleasure reading for anyone, but a lot of people who come in with reference questions are doing scholarly research. i really like our collection and think it’s awesome and important, and if i so chose i really could have an attitude like “oh my god why are you checking out pride and prejudice when you should really be reading all these documents the government publishes because they directly affect your civil rights and liberties” but i don’t because a) i’m not an asshole and b) it’s not my job to tell someone what they should like or read, it’s my job to make sure they can get it if they want it.
you know what’s cool about my job?
January 19, 2012
