Author: Chad
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Parks and Re-Recreation
My wife and I just finished bingeing Parks & Recreation. It was her first time seeing the show and my second, but the first since watching it live. We started with season 2 as, like The Office, it’s where it finally gets going and I didn’t want her to lose interest in the sluggish first…
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Perish Then Publish
Breaking news: A new story (that’s actually an old, unfinished manuscript) from a revered (dead or feeble) author has been unearthed and prepared for publication this year. The title is Go Set A Watchm—I mean The Story of Kullervo by J.R.R. Tolkien. What’s with all this unfinished stuff being published posthumously? There’s probably a good…
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How to Feel Small
I like things that make me feel small. Like If The Moon Were Only 1 Pixel, a “tediously accurate scale model of the solar system” that, as you scroll horizontally, reveals the vast span of our neighborhood: Or Why Time Flies, a philosophical exploration of our fungible awareness of time: Or The Scale of the Universe (my favorite), which, as…
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The Meaning of the Library
A few interesting tidbits from The Meaning of the Library: A Cultural History (ed. Alice Crawford)… In “The Renaissance Library and the Challenge of Print” by Andrew Pettegree, we learn the library was not always a hushed, solemn place: The Renaissance library was a noisy place—a place for conversation and display, rather than for study and contemplation.…
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Refer Madness: Librarians Advisory
Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk. If you’re a librarian, it’s likely you’re expected to provide readers advisory. (Or is it reader’s?) Every librarian has his or her own area of expertise and blind spots, but whether through direct knowledge or other resources, you’re supposed to be able to give patrons who ask…
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Inside Out
Here be spoilers. So just go see Inside Out. The part of Inside Out that made me teary was at the end when Riley returns home from her aborted runaway attempt and admits to her parents her true feelings, which by then had been overtaken by Sadness, Anger, and Fear mostly. Her parents don’t yell at…
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Refer Madness: Pole Stars
Refer Madness spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk. Summer is finally (almost, sorta) here. “Bees they’ll buzz / Kids’ll blow dandelion fuzz…” The AC is on at the library, but at the ref desk it’s still a bit muggy. The perfect time for this patron question: Do you have…
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Refer Madness: Let Your Free Flag Fly
Refer Madness is a new feature that spotlights strange, intriguing, or otherwise noteworthy questions I encounter at the library reference desk. The patron is a regular. He usually asks for pictures of movie stars or the address of a celebrity he can send a picture to for an autograph. (The V.I.P. Address Book makes that pretty easy.) One time we…
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Please Bother Me: On Asking Questions at the Library
“Sorry to bother you…” I’ve heard patrons say this to me or other librarians at the information desk so many times. And every time, I want to respond: “That’s what we’re here for!” Maybe we at the desk were talking to each other, or typing on the computer, or reading a trade journal, or even…
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What sends the human heart dreaming?
A poem ⁂ A girl, little with frizzy hair, asked sweetly,Did he have to put a knife in his heart?Her mother said no,and that was all. A woman, grown,hobbled on one crutch to the swing setand cast her crutch to the ground.She sat on one of the swings and started to and fro,free from it…
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Postmortem No Aware
Only recently did a cruel reality suddenly appear before me: that after I die I’ll miss out on so many books and movies and albums. Leave alone everything that will be released after I die; I dare not ponder what greatness I’ll be missing, as it can’t be helped. There are just too many good…
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Burned
When you’re parched and dehydrated and take that first drink of cool water, you can feel it slide down your sandpapered throat like a tingling balm to soothe your thirst. That’s what it felt like to listen to Anathallo’s “All the First Pages” yesterday, a relatively bad day. Fate got fidgety, wanted to spice things up, so…
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No Quarter
The bedroom was barren save some power tools, drywall sheets, and a step stool waiting for the work to begin again. I was home for Easter and my parents were renovating the basement and the basement room I’d called mine when I lived at home. The Cave I called it: in the basement and away from…
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H is for Hawk
David Fincher’s Gone Girl opens gazing upon the back of Amy’s blond head. Her husband Nick, in voice-over: “The primal questions of a marriage: What are you thinking? How are you feeling? What have we done to each other?” I thought of this while reading Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawk, when Macdonald’s gaze tried…
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Every Book Its Clean Reader
I was ready to scoff at the makers of Clean Reader, an app that blocks swear words from being seen on ebooks. Jared and Kirsten Maughan offered rationale for their app in the FAQ: The number one argument against Clean Reader is essentially that an author is an artist and they put specific words in…
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How I Got to Now: A Librarian Year
This week I celebrated my one-year anniversary of librarianship. In my application essay for library school I wrote that I’d been a frequent library user for most of my life, yet had never considered working in one until recent epiphanies changed my outlook. Perhaps I thought of it like working at a movie theater—another regular…
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The Meal
Back in 2007, the Iraq War was experiencing a “surge” courtesy of the U.S. military and I was a college student sitting at a dining hall table, wondering how I could capture the political debate of the day in metaphor through a short film script. Thus, the following piece of trenchant political satire was born.…