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Title: I Thought This Was a Bear Book Written by: Tara Lazar Illustrated by: Benji Davis Published by: Aladdin (S&S), 2014 Themes/Topics: aliens, Goldilocks and Three Bears, metaphysical mash up Suitable for ages: 4-7 Opening: Once upon a time there were three bears. Synopsis: An … Continue reading →

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No idea where I got this from but it’s swell.

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Hitting this parenthetical, I knew I was in the wonderful Land of Clute:

--Ajvaz has made it clear he does not want the reader to be reminded of Magic Realism in his work, that his texts do not valorize any hero bearer of sigils out of the swamp nor any origin tale at the heart of the delta of tales untold--

Since the death of John Leonard, I've come to cherish Clute more than ever. I've always had an admiration for Clute -- for though my ability to embrace his ideas has often been tempered by my (quasi-irrational?) antipathy to taxonomy vs. his career of it, I love his rhythms and diction, and more than that, I love his willingness to follow the words into a realm more of sound than sense, something Shakespeare did now and then, and all the best poets, and John Leonard, too, who was nearly unique in offering that quality as a book reviewer.

Nearly unique. I think of Leonard and Clute as the Jazz Johns of Bookchat. I wish they'd had the chance to play a session together. Imagine what it might sound like--

The sky's falling and so's the yen. Suddenly the jaws of Story shut cleanly on him. And he realizes he's been holding his breath even on those occasions -- under a tent at Caramoor, once in a cathedral -- to which he's been invited as a designated partisan, after which he's guaranteed a standing ovation because, of course, he's followed by the Laureate, who reads from her novel-in-progress, which begins: "They shoot the white girl first."

Shouting, farting, swearing, grinding his intimates into stricken silence but also lifting them high, shitting himself so hard he blasts a hole in his own peritoneum, arguing, staggering from the ring of truths so great the world shouts God in his ear, he is a stunning creation, a histrion utterly real to the eye, a porridge of sensation who turns on a dime into icon.  Old son, you're nicked.  From sea to shining sea: long-distance loneliness ... Deer slayers, cow punchers, whaling captains and raft river rats ... Greedheads, gun nuts, and religious crazies ... Carpetbaggers, claims jumpers, con men, dead redskins, despised coolies, fugitive slaves, and No Irish Need Apply ... Land grabs, lynching bees, and Love Canals ... Lone Rangers, private eyes, serial killers, and cyberpunks. Not exactly the ideal social space for a radical Johnny Appleseed to plant his dream beans.

All in all, though, it is a structure into which a thousand tales could nestle, each nudzhing its niche, each transacting furiously. So superior are these sentences to the churlishness that passes for criticism elsewhere in our culture -- the exorcism, the vampire bite, the vanity production, the body-snatching and the sperm-sucking -- so generous and wise, that they seem to belong to an entirely different realm of discourse, where the liberal arts meet something like transubstantiation. It is the outside of the inside of the data of the dance. It is a shape for the knowing we're going to need.

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I'm not sure how long this whole mashup idea can continue, but The Independent says, "The British publisher Michael O'Mara is set to release a mash-up book combining elements of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series with Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid books, reported The Bookseller on April 27. Diary of a Wimpy Vampire: Because the Undead Have Feelings Too by Tim Collins will be published internationally on May 20."

Read more here. And check out the character's blog here. [Although you would think a vampire would know that Type O blood is not not "rare."]

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There are 2 literary mash-ups of Little Women coming on May 4th.

From HarperTeen (a division of HarperCollins) comes Little Vampire Women

From DelRay (a division of Random House) comes Little Women and Werewolves.

Who will win? The readers? Or are we the losers?

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Time magazine looks at the latest mashup, from the guy who brought you Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. He wrote that book in two months, it sold more than a million copies, and now it's being made into a movie starring Natalie Portman.

"The conceit of Abraham Lincoln is that Grahame-Smith — his very name is a mashup! — has come into possession of Lincoln's secret diaries detailing his life as a stalker of vampires. As a frontiersboy, Lincoln loses his mother to the undead and swears lifelong vengeance. A giant among men — he was 6 ft. 4 in. (1.9 m) tall — Lincoln adopts the ax, that most American of edged weapons, as the tool of his trade, hiding it inside his signature long black coat."

Read the rest of the Time article here.

And, in a rather unlikely mash up, you can listen to a radio program that featured:
- Seth Grahame-Smith, author of “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter,"
- Elizabeth Richmond-Garza, professor of English and teacher of a course called “The Uncanny,” which explores how the bizarre and unexpected feature in the art, music, literature and film of the last hundred years, and
- Doris Kearns Goodwin, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Lincoln biographer.

You can hear the show here.

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Quirk Books (those lovable scamps with the bitchy marketing team that brought you the fantabulous Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) is back, this time with Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Entertainment Weekly had a nice interview with the non-Austen member of the author team that revealed the following:

Well, our monster-to-Austen ratio is higher than in the last book, about 60-40 (that’s 60 Austen, 40 me). That’s proportionally more monsters, swordfights, and submarines.

So, less Austen, more mutant lobsters. This could awesome, or craptacular. It also loses a lot of the gimmick/hilarity/shock value of their first offering, but I'm still interested in reading it. Just not as obsessed as I was to see the first one.

h/t to fellow librarian David who passed this on to me!

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“Copy and paste” is becoming a more frequently used tool to build websites as online services continue to offer their services and content for use anywhere, not just on their own pages. As I show in presentations, these days you can build a very decent community site using either RSS or “copy and paste” (see a proof of concept I built around the La Grange Park Public Library almost two years ago).

It’s a different way of thinking for libraries, that we can actually integrate external content and services into our sites, not just link to them, but the world around us is changing and everyone else is mashing up. It’s not just the growing unstickiness and promiscuity of bits and bytes but also the disintermediation of content and the fact that people want to - and now can - get a particular piece of something, not just the whole. Again, a different concept for online library services.

So, in this type of environment, what services make good mash partners for libraries? Who do we want to play spin the bottle with?

The first time I saw MeeboMe, it seemed like an obvious candidate. Integration in library websites as a cheap (read: free), lightweight reference chat client was a no-brainer. I’ve highlighted libraries that provide links to live help in their catalogs, especially ones that are based on what our patrons use, instant messaging. Using MeeboMe for this type of services offers two advantages:

1. The user doesn’t need to have IM software installed.
2. MeeboMe offers the equivalent of web voicemail, allowing the patron to “leave a message” if the library is closed.

So I’ve been wondering if a library would add this service to its catalog, but because there is sometimes a lag in either page loading or chat window loading with the Meebo widgets, I wasn’t sure how feasible this is. Plus, I still have some privacy concerns because the chat goes through Meebo’s servers, a company that may or may not protect privacy to the level libraries do. Still, I found the idea intriguing, as apparently did others, since at least four libraries have started doing this recently.

Technically, I think the University of Calgary was the first to do this, probably because Paul Pival works there. And they didn’t integrate MeeboMe halfway or on a test page. No, they integrated it everywhere - on search results, item records, and my favorite, the “no results found” page. That last one is particularly brilliant, as it provides a lifeline at the point of need at a dead end for patrons. So I immediately added this mashup to my core set of slides.

Around the same time, McMaster University did the same thing, proving that great minds do indeed think alike. Then a month later, David King announced that the Topeka Shawnee County Public Library had also integrated a MeeboMe widget into its catalog on the “no results found” page. Thanks, David - I love that I now have a public library example to show. How is a small city library matching services with a big university one? Simply by using copy & paste.

Since pretty much anyone can copy and paste, now Baylor is doing it, too. Can you do it, as well? You bet. Just go to MeeboMe, create a widget, copy the code they give you, and paste it where you want the chat box to appear on the page. So far the results seem to be positive, but I’m hoping these folks will gossip about their mashing in a few months to let us know how it’s going.

In the meantime, I’m waiting for a library to be the first to implement Twitter for catalog or website status updates, to display the latest articles from a database (such as EBSCOHost) on their website using RSS, or to do a Google Maps mashup of local history sites that is displayed on the library’s site. Please let me know if you’ve spotted any of these in the wild.

libraries, mashups, meebome, opac 2.0

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So, to the Reader/Writer Mash-up, held conveniently on the 10th floor of Penguin towers and attended by a motley collection of educators, librarians, metaverse evangelists, poets, game designers and the odd publisher.

The point of the evening, Miranda McKearney from meeting organisers The Reading Agency, told us was to look at the changing nature of reading and writing in a digital age; "The advent of new media is changing the way we all read, and this is especially true of young people."

Then Rose, hilariously described in the programme as 'Young Person' confirmed this by saying that her and her friends all love reading, but all chose different ways to get content. For her it is olde-worlde print and paper books, but many of her friends access manga online, and presumably soon will be doing the same on their mobile phones.

I guess that what I took away from the evening (apart from Rose's brilliantly and spontaneously invented word that I've used as the title of this post) was that as publishers we often preach to the converted, those who already love books and love reading, people like you! We try very hard to sell more books to the same group of readers, rather than trying to deal with the fact that a generation is growing up who want to create content as well as consume it.

My other thought, it is time to retire the word mash-up to refer to the practice of cutting, pasting and remixing words, film, music and any other type of content imaginable. In this digital world of cut and paste, drag and drop, ctrl-c and ctrl-v, mashing up is simply stuff we make and stuff we do.

To sort of illustrate the themes of the evening here's a video which brilliantly encapsulates everything that was discussed and raises several other issues. Effectivity indeed.

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