The Dubious Monk
chinese curses since twenty aught twobook review: absolute sandman volume 2
Last week I spent a goodly chunk of my paycheque on the second volume of The Absolute Sandman by Neil Gaiman (and artists). I did this for a few reasons. First, I don’t want Xmas presents this year (and am not buying them for anyone). These Absolute Sandman books are mainstays on the Xmas list, but now I could get it for myself. Second, for some reason it’s not available on Amazon.ca at a reasonable cost right now so I noticed it at McNally Robinson. Third, I wanted to read something in a big-ass tome, to feel like I was plumbing the depths of arcanity and such. That this volume of Sandman tales involves the lord of dreams coming into possession of hell makes it a good fit for that “reading a tome” experience.
Sandman comics are things I’ve known about through my entire comic-reading life (which isn’t actually that long). I may have only started reading comics when the original run was ending. I remember the spines of the trade paperbacks in the comic shop. I remember flipping through issues and not really being dragged in. One time at Campaign we were given a trade paperback by one of our book suppliers. I read it (it had the Midsummer Night’s Dream story in it) and I didn’t mind it, but I had other things to spend my money on like Transmetropolitan. So yes, I wasn’t a long-time fan or anything.
And then I started learning how influential it was, beyond the coolness of Neil Gaiman himself. How this was sort of a gothy bible, an artifact of the 1990s that I missed out on. But now I’m reading it. In Absolute form. While I would love to own books like Absolute Watchmen or the giant volumes of Sin CIty or Hellboy, I’ve read those stories, in many cases I on those stories already. But Sandman is this pristine land I’m walking through on these massive pages with their beautiful colouring et al.
Reading this doesn’t bring back memories of the first time reading these stories because this is my first time. I don’t know if this is forming the same kinds of memories for when I reread them in the future. Of being wrapped up in a blanket on my couch in my underheated condo, sipping tea and shooing away a cat. It’s not the same as if I’d been 17. Damned fine stories though.
book review: odd and the frost giants
Odd & The Frost Giants is a Neil Gaiman kids book about Norse mythology. It’s about a boy named Odd with an infuriating smile who helps out some gods. It’s very short, but told in that Neil Gaiman way that makes it seem like the story’s always existed and he’s just putting it down in new words. The thing I found the most interesting about it is how Thor Loki and Odin are portrayed compared with how he wrote them back in Sandman. These are (as befitting the kids story nature of the book) muppet versions of the gods. In any case, it was a cute little read.
book review: nylon road
Last week I got a copy of a graphic novel memoir about a young woman growing up in Iran. That wasn’t called Persepolis. This was Nylon Road by Parsua Bashi and that Persepolis comparison is all over this book. Persepolis is mentioned in the first line of the book’s back cover summary. In one of the later chapters Bashi has drawn herself reading Persepolis. All through my time reading it I was comparing it to Persepolis, and it definitely comes off the weaker.
Bashi tells her story of growing up in Iran and emigrating to Switzerland in the form of a series of conversations with herself from different ages. It’s a decent enough setup to compare her views now with views she had at different ages. Speaking of ages, the back cover talks about it being a young woman’s struggles but she was 40 when the book was published. The point of view throughout is much more mature than young as she tells us about how she used to think. It’s broken into small chapters that aren’t very sequential. More of a collection of ruminations. Selah.
Art-wise, there’s not a lot exciting going on. She uses a similar simple style to Satrapi’s work in Persepolis, which is fine, but doesn’t help avoid comparisons between the two.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the book. Maybe if Persepolis isn’t available and you need a memoir about a woman growing up in Iran this would be fine. It would also work very well as a secondary source in an essay about the graphic memoir form (in a “in books like Persepolis and Nylon Road…” kind of way).
i live most of my life in a possible future
The phase of the library reorganization affecting me is getting close to ending. All of the LSA3 canvass rankings have to be in by Friday at noon. Then they’ll be slotting us into the jobs according to our seniority and how we ranked the positions. We’re all tired of this whole process. Months ago a person dared to ask if they could make plans for Christmas. That person was told not to make any plans involving going anywhere because their package of hours would most likely be changed, and we’d be in our new jobs by early December. Now they’re saying we’ll be in our new jobs around the middle of February, just in time for the 2010 budget which will need us to lose more hours and we’ll do this all again next year. Well, I say we’ll do this again, but I’m not planning on being here. But still.
Winnipeg Public Library employees are being jerked around a lot, and for some reason our union doesn’t give a shit. Our union reps and management speak with one voice, telling us how much better this is than how they did it 20 years ago. I was told our only option is to elect someone else to city council because CUPE doesn’t have any political capital outside of the clean water campaign or some such thing.
And then there’s the madness of our department with Harriet and her lack of knowledge how anything in her department works. I skipped a step in a laborious task she gave me last week because it was unnecessary and would have added on an entire afternoon of work. When she found out she got me on the phone to tell me “when I ask you to do something I expect you to do it or things will be confusing” and I had to redo it. Bruce helped and it turned out that my method had produced no catastrophe. I went to tell her that that work had not needed to be done and explained why I did it the way I did and how I knew it wasn’t a problem. The explanation passed right over her head because she doesn’t know anything about how anything works in the library. And she refuses to learn. She takes pride in the fact that she doesn’t have the qualifications that would allow her to do certain tasks. Of course, her job is safe.
It’s funny how part of my reason for going to library school is spite. This whole WPL system has so much crap in it, it’s impossible to look at it and not see how things could be better. And none of us can do anything about it.
I like working in libraries but man, the Winnipeg Public Library treats its staff like shit. I cannot wait to leave. And I’m lucky I’m so low in investment in the system and that I have somewhere to go. If I was a career (non-librarian) employee of the WPL I have no idea what I would do. Hooray for still having choices in this world.
And man would it ever suck if no library school accepts me.
book review: a feast for crows
I quite enjoy George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire series. I don’t read a tonne of fantasy naymore, but this stuff is good. Brutal, political, with characters you quite enjoy every time you see them, especially since you know they could die at basically any moment. A Feast For Crows is interesting in its slightly frustrating way. It focuses on half the characters that one would think would be grabbing the spotlight from the last book. There are huge swathes of the realm that we’re used to reading about that just aren’t present. The rest of the story is promised in A Dance With Dragons, which it amusingly says in the afterword will come out next year. The book was published in 2005. There is no Dance With Dragons. Yet. I want to know what’s been happening with the rest of everyone, but I can’t.
Earlier in 2009 there was a big kerfuffle online about the delays in this next book. It led to an interesting discussion on some of the blogs I read about fan entitlement and how authors aren’t content-producing machines built to churn out what you want on a 12 month schedule. I mean, there are writers like that but that’s called television. Even though I’d love to have the next book in the series right now please, there are loads of other books I can read while I’m waiting.
working at children’s
My shift in Children’s today started off perfectly, with two 10 year olds who were looking for books on art. Because they were going to the Art Gallery and wanted to know something about art before they went. Oh, and they wanted to know about Vivaldi and the books about composers just weren’t doing it for them did we have anything about Jonahan (pronounced similarly to Callahan) Strauss and the Pizzicato Polka? He was Barock, you know. They wanted piles of information so they could show their teacher and then their teacher could teach everyone else in their class what they found out. Put that way they sound like horrible little jerks but they were funny. I had to send them on a scavenger hunt through the library for Vivaldi stuff because we didn’t have anything with more than a couple of paragraphs that they’d be able to take out, only reference material. Up at Special Services they found a DVD and a Vivaldi biography after Mary told them to go downstairs and they explained that I’d sent them up there. I don’t know how things went up at Info/Ref.
There was also a girl who came to the desk to make sure that the copy of Alice in Wonderland that she’d gotten from the shelf was “the real one. The one with all the twisted stuff in it?” She seemed maybe 15? She talked a mile a minute and I couldn’t quite tell if it was natural or chemically induced. Do the kids today take lots of speed or anything? I thought if you were 15 you’d just be smoking pot. She also asked about a Timothy Leary book “about Tibetans and Death and stuff? I guess you’re supposed to take a bunch of acid and then have someone read it to you and then freak out? A guy showed me this book on the bus once, and I said ‘I have to get that book!’” I found it in the catalogue and placed a hold on it for her. We also changed the phone number she had on file to her cell phone to avoid parental inquiries about what she’s getting from the library. I’m not sure if I’m actually supposed to do that. But I did.
And then she was still talking (she got completely sidetracked by a picture book with the title I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato – eventually she was all “It is a double negative! She’s completely going to eat a tomato!”) and said “You know what? You seem pretty cool. Like I could see chilling with you.” To which I replied, “If you hang out with old men like me, there’s something fairly wrong there.” Which ended the conversation before it got creepy. I think before it got creepy. The whole thing was odd. I’m used to the creepiness being from crazy/drunk people, not possibly-high teenagers with a thing for psychedelia.
i also looked for a new phone with an intact screen
Today I made a point of going outside even though it was my day off and I have an engrossing book to read. Usually that’d mean a day in my pajamas. But. It was like 12 degrees out and sunny. And I had to have a meeting with the property manager in the morning about people whose condo fees haven’t been paid and other things. So I walked to Polo Park and wandered McNally for a while. I made purchases I’d been putting off for a long time and walked home with a very heavy bag. Had a horrible dinner (the sauce I made was just lousy) but my breakfast had been excellent so it all evens out.
Tomorrow and Sunday I’ll be working in Children’s down at Millennium, which should be fun. They called me to come in to Special Services today but I needed this day off. Now it’ll be a string of like 12 days at work. Except for next Wednesday. I keep forgetting about that.
book review: look to windward
Knowing how Iain M. Banks’ Culture novels would be made me more comfortable with Look to Windward. This time I had no expectations it was going to veer off into a Vernor Vinge type thing and was ready for its Alastair Reynolds similarities (avec more literary heft). I was ready for the decadent Culture to just kind of go along and for the plot to be not unimportant but like a red-herring for the dilemmas going on within characters. There was a secondary character/plot that ended up being close to a pointless (beautiful) digression about megafauna but it capped off the end of the book wonderfully.
I want to be a spaceship when I grow up.
library dvds will cost $2 to take out in 2010
The other day at the library a main-floor regular came up to our desk to ask about music on cassette tapes in the library. This guy, who I will call Timmy, has a big homeless guy style beard that kind of sweeps out in front of him. It’s mostly gray but has a bit of yellow/blond staining near the corners of his mouth, but it’s well kept. He’s not dirty like so many of our patrons. He’s probably in his fifties and carries a Tim Hortons cup around with him.
Anyway, he comes up to me and asks about cassettes. I tell him our library doesn’t have them any more but some of the branches do. He wants “any kind of music, but no hip hop or that rap stuff” and kind of sits on our desk to get a better look at the screen as I search for stuff. I find some blues tapes and place them on hold for him and he wanders off to find the computer he signed up for. After he’s gone Antonine comments on how “there’s not much Tim Hortons in that cup.” She was in position next to me to smell the alcohol, you see, while I thought Timmy was just being extra friendly.
He goes to a computer and starts doing his internet stuff. And then he starts singing along. At the desk we debate calling security. There are other people near his computer who he’s bothering. I decide to go tell him to quiet down myself. Over at the computer I get him to take off one of his headphones and tell him he needs to be quiet. He apologizes and says “But it’s George Thorogood, you know?” The woman at the computer next to him kind of laughs, which is a relief. It’s much easier when people have a sense of humour around harmlessly disruptive drunks.
I go back to the desk and he shortly begins singing again. We sigh, ignore it a little while, but he continues. I call security. I chat with one of the pages about how nice it would be if this was the worst the drunks in the library got. Two security guards tell Timmy to quiet down and then hang around to keep an eye on him for a while.
Now, Timmy is always in the library and rarely makes a problem. He’s funny. And the security guards are obviously playing favourites here. He should have been kicked out just for being drunk in the library. Our more dirty homeless drunks get kicked out quickly all the time. Unless they’re sleeping in the Graphic Novels section. (Hassie: if you’re ever a homeless drunk, you can sleep in the chairs by the window in the Graphic Novels area at Millennium for unbroken hours at a time. I know you like to keep an eye on these opportunities.) Security leaves, Timmy’s quieted down and I go off to pull holds in the DVD section.
When I return to the desk Security is back and they’re taking Timmy away. He’d been getting in the face of the woman at the computer next to him, kind of falling over himself saying “I jus’ wanna make a conNECtion!” As Security took him away he wanted to know who’d complained and they wouldn’t tell him. They stopped at the desk for him to ask if I had a tape player at home so he could upload a copy of his George Thorogood to me, and when I demurred he was convinced I’d had him kicked out.
Downstairs he was making all kinds of noise we could hear from the second floor, arguing with security. Eventually our tough little second in charge of Security, Deb, is kicking him out and he says “I’ll go but before I do, can I just get a kiss?” She’s very “Get out Timmy” but he dives in for a smooch that she deflects and gets him out the door. She was telling us about this last bit later that evening, and about SMIGS who’s now banned for pissing himself and shitting on the floor (and possibly filling a 2L bottle with piss to save for later? the particulars are unclear).
Nobody’s going to want to take my job in the reorganization.
on a dark evening, something non-halloweenish
From Look to Windward by Iain M. Banks:
Some travel forever in hope and are serially disappointed. Others, slightly less self-deceiving, come to accept that the process of travelling itself offers, if not fulfillment, then relief from the feeling that they should be fulfilled.
And Banks is British, so I’m not even cheating by adding that extra “l” in travelling.
