Random interesting tangential links

You know what happens when you change jobs, your mother visits, and you're wrapped up in a two-weekend literary seminar, with a writing workshop in between? You fall behind on your essential reading, aka The Onion, that's what. I won't even mention The Daily Show ... but let's just say I found the writer's strike to be uncomfortably convenient. So I missed, until I found it today on a library blog, this hilarious story. Turns out it's part of an Onion theme -- a search for this story found a bunch of others, like this one. (And it led me to the home page of my favorite Onion columnist, Jean Teasdale, but that's a whole different thing. Sorry about the music.) Also loyal reader Matt T. sends along this blog. Being so successfully profiled on a blog is ... unsettling to say the least.

Excellent library links of the day

Today's recommended read is a blog post (take that all you blog haters) about a librarian's wedding and their excellent themed wedding invitations. I'll have to nose around the Internets some more and find the online group for old library equipment fetishists -- I love the old catalogue cabinets and check-out cards and all that stuff. One of the things I love about my new job at the FKCC Library is we stamp books the old-fashioned way. (We also scan them with a bar code reader, no worries.) But this way you know when it's due. And on the celebrity side of breaking library news, the Hollywood Reporter reports that Emilio Estevez is set to star in a movie called "The Public," which he wrote -- it's described as "a social drama set in a public library."

Today's recommended read

OK, it's not about books. But it's about reading and information and it's an interesting topic -- a book review from the Washington Post, of a book called "Against the Machine," a rant against the Internet and how Kids Today communicate. The reviewer is a former software engineer who wrote a book called "Close to the Machine" so perhaps she was destined to dislike the book. And as a blogger and avid reader of stuff on screen, I also dislike this guy's central thesis. Especially from a guy who posed as a commenter on his own blog. Fundamentally, I just don't get why this is an either/or question -- yes, the Web is full of crap (as is printed matter). But there's so much good stuff out there, so much of which was inaccessible or couldn't even have existed before.

Can you read this?

Megan Marshall -- author of the excellent biography "The Peabody Sisters" and panelist at next year's Key West Literary Seminar -- has an interesting piece on Slate today. Marshall, who knows a thing or two about deciphering migraine-inducing handwriting (the Peabody sisters would actually use stationery twice -- writing first horizontally, then turning the paper and writing across their own writing, creating the beautiful but mind-boggling pages like the one pictured here).Marshall is commenting on the uproar over Robert Frost's notebooks as annotated by scholar Robert Faggen (who incidentally is coming to The Studios of Key West later this year). She's more sympathetic than many of the scholars who have attacked Faggen. It's an interesting insight into the hard work of literary scholarship.

All for one

The apparently tireless Kris Neihouse from the Key West library has more book club news: "To keep things straight I am now referring to this Book club as the "All for One" book club in reference to the fact that participants all read the same book! So the All For One Book club will be meeting in just over a week on February 20 at 4:00 at the key West Library.

Up for discussion is A Primate's Memoir by Robert A. Sapolsky. Both the library copies are currently checked out but the book is available in hardcover and paperback on Amazon.

This is a fun interesting book--I'm about half way through and thoroughly enjoying it! Remember to come to the group whether you enjoyed the book or not, even if you did not finish the book. Those who come to the group get to decide what we read next! Come with questions and comments, and ideas! See you at the library.

Kris"