world without end

World Without End is Ken Follett's 2007 follow-up to his 1989 The Pillars of the Earth. Its the second in his Kingsbridge series, which apparently has 3 more, making it a total of 5 in this series, so, pentology, I guess.

Pillars was good--it's actually listed in the 'good' section on the right-hand column of this blog--so I was interested to see where this one would go.  We're still in Kingsbridge, where the first story takes place, and the cathedral that formed the framework around which the first installment was built, is already in place. This book is also about the people, rather than the building, but things have changed in the years that have elapsed in Kingsbridge (or in the 18 years that elapsed between writing the first and second books!) This book is a little more soapy than I recall the first one being, and a little more sexy. Its not a bodice ripper, by any means, but I did get the feeling that Follett may have taken a little more freedom with what propriety may have allowed during the period without some shunning, if not hanging. But what do I know; my experience with what happened and what people did or could do in the 1200s is limited to the other things I've read and seen on the screen, so who's to say which notion is correct.

That said, World Without End was entertaining, if perhaps not quite as good as the original. As I said, there are now three more: after another 10 year gap, Follett produced A Column of Fire, sounds like he should have that looked at and then just three years later, and then another three more, he cracked out the remaining two. Are there more coming? Don't know, guess we'll wait and see. Based on this read, I won't be running out to get the next one, but if I stumble across it in the wild, as I did this one, I'll probably pick it up.

I read this a while ago (a few months ago?) and didn't get a chance or make a chance to write about this one at the time. I have a few more to catch up on too.

ex-libris

Ex-Libris is from 1998, so its been kicking around for a while. I borrowed this copy from my small lending library we have at my office. It pre-dates this blog so I wasn't sure if I had read it or not, but I do recall reading Ross King's Brunelleschi's Dome years ago, and it was very good--you can find it in the right-hand column in my 'great' list--so I thought I may have. But no, I don't think I did, or at least I don't remember reading it, tho the first part did seem familiar. After looking back at the blog, I did find two others Domino (which I didn't finish) and Leonardo and the Last Supper, which I did finish. In that review, I noted a few other books from Ross King that I had read, but this isn't one of them.

So if I was looking for a pattern in my reactions to Ross King's writing, I would say that I tend to like his novelized historical books, versus his historical novels. It seems like when his work is based more on a single historical work and how it came to be, he does better than straight fictional stories, even if those stories do include a fair amount of historical research and content. I would put Ex-Libris in the latter category, but that said, I liked this one better than some of the others. I may have read this one, I guessed that I did in my review of Domino (linked above) but I didn't remember then either. Forgettable is probably not a great attribute for a book, but perhaps its apt here.

If this one had a draw back, its that it has so much research and history, that it was, at times, a little hard to follow. There were so many interlacing facts, spread out over a hundred or so years, that it would take a college history class to untangle them, never mind understand them in context. So I did what I assume most readers who aren't 17th century historian would do, I ignored most of it, tried to remember the high points, and assumed that King would help fill in the blanks as we went along, which he obligingly did.

This story is about the power of knowledge, the concentrated power of libraries as fonts of learning, and the various historical powers that struggled to control, ban, censor, and contain that knowledge and keep its power for themselves. It was also a powerful reminder, for me, of why public libraries are the great democratizers, as they have taken that power from the rich and wealthy few that used to hoard it for themselves, and delivered it into the hands of the people.

If you enjoyed King's books on the duomo in Florence, and the frescoes by DaVinci and Michelangelo, you'll enjoy this one too, just not as much.

Pinnacle at White Hill

Here goes some horn tootin' (and then I'll give an update on why I haven't written anything here in a while.)

So I spent some of my spare time recently putting together a drawing <yeah, that's it right there based on a science fiction (SF) book I've been writing over the last... 20 years? The drawing is for the One Drawing Challenge put on by Architizer, which is an online journal about architecture and design.

My wife found this juried contest in a newsletter and its their second annual outing, so I took a look at what did well last year, and the rules are pretty relaxed. From the FAQ section on their website: "Your drawing(s) can take the form of a plan, section, elevation, perspective, sketch or abstract. As long as it portrays part or all of a building or group of buildings, it is eligible." Any part of a building, so a still life, in a room, would do it.

When I looked at last year's submissions though, there were a fair number of the entries that included speculative and/or abstract architecture and design, and that led me to my domed city. Over the years, I've sketched some images, and I even drew up some plans in CAD of the city, including some of the sub-levels below the city. Come on, what futuristic city ISN'T under a dome, and of course its got miles of piping and basements drilled into the earth.

There are 100 finalists in The One Drawing Challenge; that was announced earlier today. The winners--there will be two, a student winner and a non-student winner--as well as 10 honorable mentions will be named on September 28 (or the 29th, depending on where on the site you look.)*

SO where have I been for the past year? Well I've been busy with some other projects,** but what really messed up my blogging was that we cleaned up around the house last year around this time, and a handful of books I had read but hadn't written about went to the donation box at my library. I tried to remember what they were, and piece together list, while continuing to read other books until I got hopelessly lost and enough time had gone by that I didn't think I could recreate what I'd read.

In the recent past, here's what I've read, in order:

Skylark - Sheila Simonson

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015 - Adam Johnson, Editor

Robopocalypse - Daniel H. Wilson

Blue Moon - Lee Child

The Day After Tomorrow - Allan Folsum

The Secret History - Donna Tartt

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

Warlock - Winbur Smith

Outlander - Diana Gabaldon during which I learned the term 'self-insertion'

The Order - Daniel Silva

The Way of Kings (Part One) - Brandon Sanderson

This is not everything in the past year, just what I can put my hands on and reasonably reconstruct in order (based on my piling system.) I'll try and write about these soon, but I'll probably write short summaries and combine a few together at a time.

* FAQ section says 28th, the new splash page posted today announcing the finalists says 29th.

** Making Youtube videos about tool making and restoration is one of the things I've been doing. My channel is here.

sunbeam

On a Sunbeam is a graphic novel by Tillie Walden and it is both visually lush, and touching in its sensitivity to its subject matter. 

Let’s take those things one at a time. The ‘graphic’ in graphic novel comes first and its fitting I think, especially in this case. Sunbeam is science fiction story set in a universe that seems to include Earth, but the area of space where this story takes place seems very remote from Earth, and remote even from planetary physics as we understand it. Little chunks of rock, sometimes with room for only a building or two, seem to float around in space, some occupied, some not. Many of these building are in need of restoration, and that’s where Mia and the rest of the crew on their fish-looking ship come in. 

 

The palette is subdued, using just 3 or 4 colors, mostly black, normally speckled with stars or star-like speckles of who knows what. Even in daytime, if there is such a thing here, star strewn skies float overhead, are glimpsed through windows and portholes, and sometimes seem to linger between two people as they talk. Often, the starscapes are strewn with twisting, colored storms of cloud and dust. The old buildings and ruins are drafted with care and an attention to perspective that makes me think they were first modeled with a program like SketchUp. 

You can just gaze at this book, at the velvety black, other-worldliness of it. Good on you Tillie Walden. 

The fiction part of the story follows our hero Mia through various stages of her life. It’s centered on her work as a new recruit on board a ship named Sunbeam as they work on building restoration and then move on the next job. The human story is based on the relationships Mai forms with her shipmates and is punctuated by her memories of her 9th grade year in boarding school--and the relationships she formed there.

Those two story lines then progress and spin together, and we see the perspective changing in both the Mia of the present and the Mia of the past. The message is clear; we’re always growing. 

And sometimes it takes growth to know when it’s time to go back to something you may have missed along the way. 

Mia is fierce, loyal, strong, sensitive, forgiving, and both spontaneous and thoughtful. When Mia hugs someone who was keeping her from someplace she desperately wanted to be, after keeping her against her will, I almost fell over.

Read this book, and gaze at the artwork. 

ideagraph

I'm probably not the first one to come up with something like this, but I did develop this without researching other things which may be similar, so it may need to be tweaked as I begin to test it out. I've done one test so far, mapping out a series of ideas and things to see where they fit. With a little fiddling, I was able to come up with results that seemed like a proof-of-concept this isn't exactly the scientific method at work here I'll probably post a version of that test run at some point but for now I wanted to post  the chart in the hope that it may be helpful to at least a fraction of the half-dozens of people that occasionally wander past this blog.

Clicky-click to bigenate. Use at will, according to rules below please*

The IdeaGraph was born on a short walk I took at work the other day. I walked past a bus/camper parked in front of the Artisan's Asylum. This vehicle is some kind of mobile eye exam venture. I know this because I searched for what it was after seeing what I did. As I approached, looking up from a vantage point that was probably too close for maximum effect, I saw a bus painted mostly pale-peach, with a large, black graphic made of curving black lines, overlapping in a random way, forming a large tapered arc. What? I'm too close, so I looked again assuming it was something normally smaller than 8 feet long. Ah, an eyebrow. Yep, there's another one, down the other end. A little hard to see from where I was approaching. There is a spot that juts out when parked, fancy camper style, making the front end brow harder to see. I'm almost past it now, searching for what would have two big eyebrows, clearly a face graphic, no, a photo. There's the name, opto-blah,  whatever, but where are the eyes? Just eyebrows? No...

The eyes are the wheels! oh, I get it

Round, black, shiny hubcaps. yeah, sure, but...

Wait, the eyes are... dirty, sort of separated from the rest of the face by the wheel wells, the dark hollows are like the eye sockets in a skull, the eyes are detached, dangling, lumpy, dry, filthy, and wait... they're actually touching the street! In the gutter! Ground right in there, smooshed into the asphalt and the grit, flattening out the irises... bleeahck

Yeah, its kind of gross. Dumb. Not a good design. Not a good idea. The antithesis of eye health.

It probably started out as an interesting idea. That's how design works.But how do we know whether or not something that looks good on paper or a computer screen will work in reality. what if we tear off the eyelids, and scrub the eyes in the dirt. forever. yeah, lets try that Some things need to be mocked-up, prototyped, tested. But before we go to the trouble, we just need to think about things a little more before foisting them onto humanity.

IdeaGraph won't help you determine if your idea is worth realizing by plugging in some numbers, or cranking it through some algorithm, but it may help you to see where your idea lies in relation to other ideas. This is the reason I'm not including my own test mapping. Everyone has their own value system and the mapping skews toward what works for you. Disclaimer: In order to be useful for idea realization, you will need to think about the norms of the society upon which you be doing your foisting while mapping on IdeaGraph. So what does it do? It may just help to organize your thoughts.

How does it work? IdeaGraph helps organize ideas (and real things) by fitting them into an overall framework of their relative weights, and seeing how they compare to one another, with some Venn diagram aspects to it. The map has no real scale, and if you blow it up you can fit more into it. The more ideas you enter, the more helpful it becomes. Thinking about things that are real, as ideas rather than physical things is helpful when mapping. George Washington was definitely a real guy, but the idea of George Washington, or taxes, or music (regardless of whether you consider these things as worth it) will help you map.

An oval representing ALL IDEAS sits at the center of the graph. This oval shape represents every idea we have or can have, and its expanding over time. The ALL IDEAS oval is overlaid, Venn diagram-style, with a parabola representing GOOD, which grows upward, and is potentially infinite. The mirror of that, EVIL, is a parabola which extends downward, and is also potentially infinite. Think positive and negative on the y axis with Venn aspects.

GOOD and EVIL overlap in the center, creating a zone where things and ideas are both good and evil, again, Venn diagram-style, but with scale. The further ideas are located from the center, vertically, the more good or evil they are. Where they overlap, ideas are more meh, but the scale is still important.

There is also a scale from left to right. The further things are to the right on IdeaGraph, the more helpful they are, the further left, the less helpful (or more detrimental, depending on your viewpoint.) The line between MORE HELPFUL and LESS HELPFUL is not vertical. The higher ideas get on the vertical scale, the more the line (shown in red) slides to the left. The more evil things get, the more the line slides right. At the upper and lower limits, really good is always helpful, and really bad is never helpful. Even though the arrows are shown graphically, they are not overlays in the Venn diagram sense, its just a relative scale. Think positive and negative on the x axis.

Running vertically through GOOD and EVIL is a vague strip of weirdness. This band is a little murky and expands at the upper and lower limits, where it also becomes more vague. Unlike the line between more and less helpful, the weird band is an overlay of the GOOD and EVIL zones (Venn again) but its character changes; it doesn't have a fixed value. Its has some labels along the band to help you decide where things fall. For example, weird ideas on the low end of the GOOD scale are just ODD. The higher you go, the more lofty, and lower things get darker. Fee free to add your own intermediate labels to fine tune the scale.

Within ALL IDEAS is a smaller oval shape representing ACHIEVABLE IDEAS. These are the ideas that can be spun up into tangible things: buildings, books, movies, art, governments, nuclear bombs, etc. That means the oval ring of ALL IDEAS that sits outside ACHIEVABLE IDEAS contains the rest of our collective intangible ideas: greed, charity, despotism, faith, dragons, magic, Satan, etc.

Both the ALL and ACHIEVABLE ideas ovals extend left and right beyond the bounds of GOOD and EVIL. Some ideas and things are neither good nor evil, but we still need to decide if they are helpful or not. For example, I would argue that optimism exists outside the limits of good and evil, and as an intangible idea, it sits in the oval ring. Maybe it does; if so, does it fit on the left or the right?

The green circular area floating high at the center is labeled "Ideas worth considering." I put it here, on the good side of the scale, but overlapping the bad a little, spanning equally left and right, but a closer look at the red line shows that this zone is more helpful than not. This is where my value system indicates I should be looking. Yours may differ slightly. This zone has no hard limit; its more Vennish than Venn. This zone also extends outside what is achievable, with the hope that we can expand that oval.

Lastly is a red colored parabola, that makes up a very small portion of what is actually achievable. This is the "Ideas worth realizing" zone. This is where you want to be. It sits on the good side, but not too high, and extends to infinity on the right, toward helpful. The smallest bit of the parabola extends to the left, and the bottom just touches on bad, assuming that some ideas worth realizing may not always be extremely helpful, or without a darker side, but only at the very lowest scales. The red zone is also overlapped by the weirdness zone; some things worth doing may also be a little weird. This is where some art, comedy, and Shakespeare live. A blow-up of this zone, mapped with only real things may be helpful for graphing your ideas when they are close to fruition, to see if they fall in the red zone, or if they are just outside it (like scraping your eyeballs on the pavement) or way outside it (like Fat Man and Little Boy.)

Download it, print it out, fool around with it, and let me know if it works for you. And tell me where IdeaGraph and this blog post fit on IdeaGraph. I'm guessing a shorter post would probably move up and to the right, but I'm not sure if it makes it to the red zone! Based on my experience, mapping ideas can get pretty funny, pretty quickly.


* You are free to use the IdeaGraph for whatever you would like as long as you maintain the copyright information, the title, and the text referring to this blog. Also give credit to me, and link back here. If you decide to derive from the ideas and/or intellectual property manifest within IdeaGraph for profit, whether or not you've modified the graphics and text, then be a grownup and send me a fat check.**

** If you're unsure if this is the right course of action, plot it on the IdeaGraph without lying to yourself.*** And then send me the check.

*** If you are an evil person, IdeaGraph won't work for you, because everything you plot will be skewed down and left. Lying to yourself is as indivisible from evil as responsibility is indivisible from privilege.

madame rose

Madame Rose - Belgian Style Wild Ale, by Goose Island Beer Co. of Chicago, IL, is not something that I would have gone out and purchased for myself, without knowing a little more about it, so I'm sharing my thoughts on this heady brew so that you'll feel more comfortable about picking up your own bottle.

And I think perhaps you should.

This fine bottle of oak aged wild ale was a gift of the fine folks out in Erving, MA on the occasion of my office's 20th anniversary party, held last week. Thanks to Barbara and Steve who came to help us celebrate, and carried this fine bottle (along with a nice book I'm looking forward to reading, complete with some bookmarks!)

Clicky-click on the picture of the label to expanderize mon frere! Its says that this is a 2016 release, wild ale, aged in wine barrels with cherries. Crazy, right? The rear label states that this was bottled a year ago, yesterday, and has an ABV of 6.7%, along with a suggestion to enjoy in a wide mouth glass (which we are), a warning that it contains wheat (good to know) and that it can be bottle-aged for up to 5 years (fat chance.) We all enjoyed a little of this here to end out the week, and the first sip was taken in a toast to Erving, and their successful town meeting on Wednesday night. Here are my thoughts on this beer:

Rich amber, honey color with a foamy, full, cream colored head. Active carbonation, that tickles the nose, similar to a natural sparkling water. The aromas are extremely bright: citrus, caramel, and jam, with background notes of the sea. The taste is very tangy; lemony in its intensity, lemon pith, steeped fruit, and tart syrupy quality. Smooth and sparkly on the tongue, but after further tastings, the carbonation drops off. The finish is long, slightly bitter and tart, with a soft oak and smoke taste that lingers pleasantly.

Update: After 15 or 20 minutes, after the oak and smoke fades, I was left with the taste of cherries. That deep, tannin laden taste of the red-black cherry skins. It just keeps on giving.

Thanks again to the folks in Erving, and congratulations to you all!

two words for public libraries

My office recently hosted a  library visioning round table discussion on the future of libraries. The topic: Library as Place.

The Wordle (at left) grows from a simple question we asked our participants:* What are two words you think of, when you think of the future of libraries? Community, Flexibility, and Opportunity were the big winners, but all of those other words are great too! This simple question comes from a summary paper of a conference at the Library of Congress in 2014, whose participants were also looking into the future of the library. Some of the participants seemed disappointed that they didn't come up with original words, but I think the fact that a few words were repeated is terrific, and shows that within the library service industry, its pretty clear which direction we're heading. Just looks at some of the other terms that came up: Diverse, Adaptable, Transformational, Evolving. Those are good words!

The overall discussion centered on what public libraries are doing to fill the role of Third Place in the lives of their patrons and users. Whether its for more formal, structured learning and programs, or more casual, drop-in use, the idea that libraries serve in this capacity more and more is a trend that seems to be increasing, even as libraries continue to shed the outdated model of a 'warehouse for books.' It seems pretty clear to those of us who use public libraries, that their need is just as central and vital to the education of the citizenry, even as the services they offer grows and expands to meet the needs of our increasingly interconnected, digitized, and virtual society. And that's really where the magic is: libraries provide that real space, with real human connections, in a world that is increasingly moving away from these types of connections. People want--and I believe, need--these connections, and are looking to the library as one place to get them.

The most pressing need from the library's point of view, is getting that message out to the segment of the populace that still views the library as they did when they were kids. Public libraries are notoriously bad at self-promotion and marketing. Given their budget constraints, and the expertise of the folks running the place, its no wonder that marketing is not something they excel at. Its just not in their wheelhouse, and the budget isn't there to hire the professional help they need to get the message out.

So we meet, we talk, we share, and we attempt to get a ground swell rising. What is the best way to share all of the wonderful things libraries can do? Some of the suggestions from our participants included interesting ways to bring the public into their space, hopefully including some that wouldn't normally come to the library. Ideas included:

Volunteer Fair - All of the local groups that need volunteers set up tables, and potential volunteers shop around for a cause they'd like to help.
Technology Fair - Tables where you can learn about various on-line databases the library offers, along with STEAM, audio/video editing, maker, telescopes, Girls Who Code, and other things available at the library.
Indoor Green Market - At the library, even a baby animal petting zoo in a plastic lined pen!
Town Government Fair - Tables for each department, staffed by town workers who explain what they do and how you can get services.

These programs, and so many others; from programmable robot dance contests, to simple brochures at the desk titled "I Didn't Know You Had That!" are helping to chip away at the old notions many still hold about what their library is, and what it could be. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Our public libraries are what we make them, and if we don't do it, no one else will.

Then where would we be?


* My personal thanks to all of the wonderful folks who came out last week to the Lunenburg Public Library last week. We had a great discussion, and I learned a lot. And thanks to Lunenburg for hosting us!

stones of florence

I borrowed this book from my office lending library. It looks like the type of thing someone might have read before a trip to Italy, to get a sense of Florence so they would be better informed about where to go, what to do, and to better understand Florence's people. It may also have been assigned reading in a design studio or art history course. However it ended up in our lending library, I will say that Mary McCarthy does seem to have done the research and has certainly traveled to Florence many times in the preparation of this book.

The Stones of Florence is a travel book, and art history book, and a history of Florence rolled into one, but it reads more like a travel journal. McCarthy gives us a sense of what its is like to be there (in the 50s, when this was written) * and weaves in the history behind what she sees, and then ties that history to the city that remains; was built and shaped by it, right down to its people. McCarthy describes the people of Florence as different from other Italians because of their unique history. McCarthy focuses on the Renaissance period as the most formative and walks us through the various political and religious upheavals in the city (or dukedom, before the unification of Italy) and the rush of famous artists who descended on the city, and the architecture which still exudes that uniquely  Florentine attitude.

McCarthy is--surprisingly, I guess--not a big Michelangelo fan (she refers to him as monomaniacal at one point), much preferring Donatello, saying;

"Michelangelo was the last truly public sculptor, and his works, so full of travail and labor, of knotted muscles and strained, suffering forms, are like a public death agony, prolonged and terrible to watch, of the art or craft of stonecutting."

This lady's not fooling around, or pulling any punches. This was fun to read, not least because of the time perspective; I found it really interesting to look at the Renaissance and 'modern' Firenze through the lens of 1956 pop America.


[A closing note: I was on vacation for the last two weeks in July, and I read a bunch of books. Some of these reviews and thoughts may be out of order, and may be slightly vague in my memory now.]


* I read the 1963 paperback version of this books which does NOT include the illustrations of the original 1956 book. I just discovered this (doh!) If you're going to read this, it seems like it would be better with the illustrations.

shadowings

I borrowed Shadowings by Lafcadio Hearn from my office lending library yeah we have a lending library and I didn't know what to expect. Half-way through, I still didn't know what to expect. Hearn is an international type guy. He was born (according to a Wikipedia article about him) on the Greek isle of Lefkada (presumably where his middle name comes from; full name Patrick Lafcadio Hearn) to an Irish father and Greek mother. He father happened to be stationed there during the British occupation in the 1840s. Lafcadio came along in 1850. A broken home and a re-stationed father left young Lafcadio bopping around for a while, until he made his way to the US in his late teens. A few years later he found work at a newspaper, and by 1890 was sent to Japan on a story, and he never left.

Hearn stayed in Japan and continued to write, and eventually took the Japanese name: Koizumi Yakumo. He became pretty well know internationally for his writings about Japan, and Shadowings is one of those books. Shadowings seems like a collection of whatever Hearn had on his desk when print time came, and maybe all of his books are like that. This volume includes translations, and re-tellings of traditional Japanese folks tales, the history and meanings of Japanese female names, and at the end a series of ghost stories and essays about dreams. Sometimes dreams about ghosts.

These essays at the end--which are written by Hearn, as opposed to researched and documented or translated, like the first half of the book--are where the book comes into its own. The essays are like a cross between Tom Robbins, Edgar Allan Poe, and maybe a little Carl Sagan or someone like that. He's very honest with himself, his writings are almost journal entries, and he's questioning and probing all kinds of things: life, and its meaning, the after-life, a higher-power (or lack thereof), reincarnation, love, humanity, and the nature of intellect. He even tries to figure out why Gothic architecture is gloomy, and does a thought experiment on the crowd behavior. This is a busy guy!

I didn't love this book, but it was interesting to read.

leonardo, yeah, that one

Leonardo and the Last Supper is my third or fourth Ross King book, I'm not really sure. One of them: Brunelleschi's Dome, you'll see down along the right hand column under 'great.' Leonardo won't be on the 'great' list. was that too abrupt?

Its been a while since I've read one of Ross King's books, pretty much everything I read now ends up on this blog and there aren't any of his books listed on 'the books' tab, so its a few years anyway. I also read one about Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ceiling, which was also very good. This latest installment wasn't up to those standards however, and I'm not sure why, but I have some guesses. In order for my guesses to be proven out, I'd have to go back and do a little comparative analysis, but that's not going to happen; this isn't science I'm doing over here.

Here's my guesses for what I think is missing from this book, when compared to the other two I mentioned. First, historical data. King seemed to be short on it, as is everyone else, and he did an admirable job in putting together this story from what seems like not very much. He had to rely quite a bit on other biographers, and then suggested that maybe those other biographers were wrong, or at least weren't above conjecture. Second, there isn't much to the story; da Vinci took a number of years to paint the Last Supper, but that seems to be because he was always busy doing something else. There isn't a whole lot of information about how the panting/mural was done, who worked on it, or what happened day-to-day. For that matter, there isn't much information available about what da Vinci was doing during this time either. So that brings me to my third point, the book is more filler than substance. Because so little is know about what the master was actually doing and how he did it, this book is more about what was going on in Italy at the time, centering mainly on his sponsor in Milano, Ludovico Maria Sforza, or as he was known, Ludovico il Moro (Ludwig the Moor.)

The Sforza story is a very interesting story, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Leonardo's name in the title was more about selling books than a true reflection of what this story is about. "Il Moro and Leonardo's Last Supper" might have been a better title given what I read. I'm not saying you shouldn't read this book, especially if you are a fan of Leonardo da Vinci, just don't expect that King uncovered some amazing treasure trove of lost information about him.

Last complaint: there are a handful of color plates in the center of the book, but no image of da Vinci's Last Supper. No where in the book, in fact, is there an image of the entire work.

invisible cities

Italo Calvino is so much fun to read. I've read his Cosmicomics, The Baron in the Trees (Il barone rampante) and his retelling of traditional fables in Italian Folktales.

Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili)* is a series of short stories based on the imagined conversations of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. Polo has traveled the world in service of discovery and reporting his findings to Khan, the places he's been, what he has seen, and the extent and diversity in Khan's empire, most of which he has never seen. Polo described the cities he has visisted, not as places of a certain physical description, unless only in contrast to what he describes as the true nature of a particular city. The cities Polo describes are like none that appear on earth, or possibly like every city, or maybe only one city.

Calvino's insight into what makes a city is not only a sense of place. Rather it is a sense of what it is to be a city, driven in most cases by the feelings, actions, and thoughts of its inhabitants and visitors. Calvino describes cities as seen through Marco Polo's eyes as wondrous or depraved places, sad, self-involved, silly, or hopelessly lost in trying to be something they are not, or something they were, or want to be. There is a sense that what cities are is driven by how they are perceived, both from within and from without, regardless of time and place, or absolutely shackled to it. Calvino's descriptions of cities are often--and sometimes best--described by isolated incidents, little slices of time, or the shared moments of its people.

Calvino's view is at once micro- and macroscopic. His observations of dozens of make-believe cities sharpens one's knowledge of the real cities we've seen and experienced by giving us new tools with which to examine them. I find that I can learn more about the cities that I've visited just by thinking about them in new ways, and for that I'm grateful to Calvino and looking forward to my upcoming travels even more. In many ways, Invisible Cities is a lot like a travelogue of real places that we'll never see, and yet, see everyday.

Read this Book.


* I didn't see any translator credited, so I'm assuming it was done by the author himself.

da vinci's ghost

Toby Lester, you crazy mixed-up history geek, what were you thinking, taking on Leonardo in a 200 page* book?

Interesting, yes. Did I learn new things? Yes. Has my image of da Vinci changed a little after reading? Yes, yes, yes. But come on; 200 pages? I felt like the story was just getting started.

The story arc, too, was a little herky-jerky. The big idea is that Leonardo was not the first, but the last (and greatest) in a long line of folks, who put Vitruvius's concept of a perfectly proportioned man fitted into both a circle and a square, in picture form. This is a big deal because Vitruvius's work was essentially forgotten for something like 1500 years, and it was only when men started to think about proportion, in art and architecture, in a serious way again during the Renaissance, did men rediscover Vitrivius again.

Only, there weren't that many people--well, maybe that's unfair--there weren't a ton of people that preceded da Vinci's Vitruvian Man, and really only a couple cited in the book that were actually trying to create an illustration of what Vitruvius said in his Roman Era book on architecture. The others were expressing ideas of perfect proportion as a representation of God's design of both man and the universe in his own image. Basically, the two ideas have very similar results, approached from slightly different directions.

Lester's thesis is sound, no complaints there. I may have just been caught up in some hype after hearing him discuss his book on the radio. I was expecting more and I'm a little disappointed that I didn't get it.

Da Vinci's Ghost is carefully researched and amply illustrated but may have been improved with a more linear timeline. Lester's writing is easy, and his enthusiasm is palpable throughout. He also showed me da Vinci as a man who (at least in his early career) was so distracted, that he almost seems to suffer from a kind of ADHD.** It's not an image I enjoyed, and I couldn't help wondering, if Lester had given himself another hundred pages or so, if this might have resolved itself more.


* This book is more like 275 pages, but there is, like, 70 pages of backmatter. Oh, and 15 pages of preface, and a dozen pages of prologue. Aaand, like 40 pages of epilogue. Okay, I'm done.

** After writing this, I did a search for ADHD for a link, and thought: what the heck, maybe he did have it and put that in the search. Sure enough, a variety of internetty sources (albeit, wishy-washy sources) also ask this same question.

accessibility article

I wrote an article for Library Journal's Library By Design supplement: its packaged with the magazine 4 times a year, so this was the fall issue.

The process was fun: I sent in an article about providing access for all, in the public library, and how complicated it can be to that do in an historic library. I worked with an editor who asked me to do a re-write to include an example of one of our building projects, so I chose the Haston Free Public Library in North Brookfield, MA.

I won't get into the nitty-gritty here, go read the article, yo!

library for now

A little while ago I asked: "what is a library[an]" In that entry, I gave you some idea of what I, and other folks, think a public library is, and what it should be. I also talked about what a librarian is, and what that critical roll should be as the library moves forward into the future.

Well, we're bumping into that future right now.

The folks over at Street Lab--the ones who brought us the Storefront Library in Boston's Chinatown, which I wrote about in one of my first blog entries--are now working on that next step. The Uni Project grows right out of what Street Lab learned with their Storefront Library. Uni fills gaps in library service by providing the physical needs of a public library in an even more portable, flexible, and accessible format than the Storefront model.

The Storefront Library brought a temporary library service into the Chinatown community by turning a vacant commercial space into public space.

The Uni brings temporary library service right out into the existing public space we inhabit and use now.

Places like Times Square in New York City,* Chicago's Millennium Park, and others like them, are redefining what public spaces can be, and Uni fits right into that model: extending and reshaping public space to be more useful, interactive and rich.

Bringing the public library to the people is not a new idea. Wikipedia cites an example of a "perambulating library" back to 1857, in England; early bookmobile, yo. The US Lighthouse Establishment (read: US Coastguard) began its Traveling Library program in 1876, with wooden boxes of books, delivered to lighthouses for the use of the keepers and their families, who had trouble getting from their remote locations to the library. Need a more personal sized portable library? Its not exactly public, but I guess it could be. Maybe you could borrow the whole thing with your library card.

WiFi hotspots are not enough. We need libraries--in all shapes, sizes and locations--to keep us connected intelligently. The Uni Project is underway right now. Check out their video to find out more and see how you can help.

* Times Square is one of the places the Uni is scheduled to premiere this fall.**
** UPDATE: Times Square is not on the Immediate list, but elsewhere in New York. Take a look at the comment below from Sam from the Uni Project. Thanks Sam!

east longmeadow library bookmark

This bookmark was printed to commemorate the groundbreaking of the East Longmeadow Public Library in Massachusetts, on July 13, 2002. That's nine years next week! My office did the architecture, and I managed the project right through the construction. It was a great project to work on. You can see some images of the building here at the library's website. OSO Interiors did the furnishings. The library re-opened to the public in its present location on February 3, 2004.

For the year and a half that the construction was going on, the library continued to serve the public from a couple of double-wide trailers, set up on the grass next to a church parking lot in town. The New Life Baptist Church, was kind enough to donante the use of this land, its parking lot, and storage space inside the church for the protions of the libraries collections that wouldn't fit in the trailers, all for the library and its patrons.

The groundbreaking ceremony was also a chance for folks to take a last look around the old library, which began its life as a hardware store. I brought my young son to this event and he was delighted to write on the walls of the soon to be demolished building.

The quote is from Winston Churchill; "We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us", from a speech given to the House of Commons on October 28, 1943, about plans for the rebuilding of the Chamber, destroyed by an enemy bomb on May 10, 1941. I think this quote is especially fitting for public libraries and other public buildings, which help to define and support our democracy.

the digitized library

This is exactly what I was talking about!

Gwen Glazer has just written a paper about making all the information in libraries accessible on the web. I'm so excited, I could spit!

Image: National Diet Library digitization project. (They're digitizing everything yo!)

My recent blog entry--of which I spit--is titled "what is a library[an]" This blog entry was actually noted in the June 1, 2011 American Libraries Direct newsletter! That publication directed over 1,600 people to my lonely little blog, and some folks were nice enough to read a little, and even click through! Sweet! Anyhoo... what that means to me is: that in some small way, AL Direct has been nice enough to include my ideas in the conversation, for which I am grateful. So imagine my excitement when I hear that one of the biggest ideas I'm crowing about, namely: getting access to all that great stuff in our libraries, shows up in a policy paper from the ALA's information policy office!

Go ALA, I'm right there with ya, brotha! Or sista!

Okay so, the paper is like 10 pages, so I'll summarize for you. The ALA has such a thing as the Office for Information Technology Policy (OITP) which releases policy briefs on info tech. The announcement on the 2nd was for the inaugural edition of their OITP Perspectives. A new publication designed to supplement the policy briefs, and to "provide an outlet for topics that are more specialized than those covered by policy briefs." So they tapped Gwen Glazer.

Glazer is a writer, editor and social media coordinator at Cornell University Library. She put together this ten page paper for the American Library Association's OITP in Washington, D.C. The ALA announced this just days ago. Click here to read the press release which includes a link to Glazer's paper.

Here's how I break it down:

THE GIVEN
-Libraries hold a vast amount of info
-Often, these collections contain local and/or special info, available nowhere else
-This info is searchable (typically) by title, author and subject only
-This info is searchable (typically, and as stated above) only from within the library*

THE VISION
-It would be good if all of this info was accessible, and searchable
-It would be even better is all this info was accessible, and searchable, from anywhere

THE PROBLEM
-If this info is not made available on line, it will become increasingly 'invisible'**
-Special collections may be at an even higher risk of loss, due to reduced demand over general info
-In their current forms, some special collections are at risk of loss, or decay
-Some items are difficult to convert to digital forms given their age, fragility, or form
-Smaller institutions are especially disadvantaged due to lack of resources

THE PLAN
-Establish a program to digitize collections in public libraries
-Digitize all the info
-Create a single portal through which these collections can be accessed

Easy, right?

So what does all this do for us? Making our collective knowledge, history, memorabilia and records available on line and in a searchable form will put our libraries back in our own hands, allow access to materials that many don't know even exists, and may allow for some of these rare and or historical materials to be linked to other materials, projects, records and data-streams elsewhere. And you know how I love the linkage!

Image a Smithsonian type institution, with a display on hometown parades, with all kinds of old-timey documents and prints to help flesh out the exhibit, all tied into their on line exhibit, with all of the materials cataloged. We've all seen things like that, right. Now imagine another layer, that digs down to the historical collections in your own hometown--right there on the Smithsonian site.--Links to pictures, postcards, advertising, newspaper stories, speeches by the town fathers, at the parades in your own town, from your library. See, it ties these stories to us. Yeah, gimme some of that.

In fact, don't imagine, go to the Library of Congress site, and check out their digital materials collection. There's even a page on their standards for metadata and retrieval protocols. Clicky-click around on there for a few minutes and see for yourself. Go ahead, I'll wait...



Your back, great! Amazing, right?

One of my favorite short stories in a collection I just read by Orson Scott Card, is based on Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. Card's short story takes place, far in the future of mankind, 10,000 years or more. Man's spread across the galaxy is vast, and this collective of human inhabited worlds is what is know as Foundation. spoiler coming Card's story is essentially about the end of Foundation, or more accurately: the beginning of a new, Second Foundation. Built by librarians.

Let me say that again: The Second Foundation, according to Card, is a movement to [re]create a better Foundation for all mankind, by building a better, more interconnected and annotated public library; the basis for a reborn civilization. And there is a physical place where the librarians work, called a library, which is the repository of man's collective history and knowledge, and a workplace for the librarians and scholars, specifically designed to aid in the fruitful and free thought processes, upon which the Second Foundation will be built.

Maybe it is pie-in-the-sky, but I don't think it ever hurts to think big, and then act incrementally. Glazer and the ALA are talking about the first incremental step in this move toward our technologically rich future. There's enough crap on internet; wouldn't it be nice to have the internet enriched with more quality information?

* - In this case, 'within' the library means via the library's catalog system, whether or not the catalog is being searched remotely. This is whats called a 'Hidden Collection'.
** - That is, unused, or at the very least underutilized.

burnham library marker

The public library in Essex, Massachusetts is named after their local son: Thomas Oliver Hazard Perry Burnham. Who, according to the town's website, was born in Essex in 1814, and during the mid 1800's became a successful and affluent used bookseller & publisher in Boston. In his will he bequeathed $20,000.00 for the building of a town hall and library in Essex. The design, by Frank W. Weston, of Malden, Massachusetts was selected over two others in a blind competition and is representative of the Shingle Style architecture.

The building was apparently describe in the March 1894 issue of The Library Journal:

The interior is finished in antique oak, and the walls are painted in hues of brown and yellow. In the upper story is situated the town-hall proper. It has a seating capacity for 550. There is a stage and a gallery which will allow of entertainments being given there. One-half of the lower floor is devoted to the library, and will accommodate several thousand books.

I've been by the building a number of times; its got a great site looking out over the Essex River flats, and hasn't been messed up yet with any major additions or renovations, altho it is still home to both the town hall and library for this growing New England town.

making logo video etc

Okay, so that happened.

Here's how that went. I'm thinking of the third post on this logo thing, and the second post had a distinctly part-two movie-title thing going on, and this one makes the trilogy right? So being the geek that I am, I put together a little movie-advertising-type image for the post, that I was going to paste in at the beginning of the text. It was a L:3, as in Logo 3. Think Terminator 2 (T2) and Mission Impossible 3 (M:I:3). This little L:3 shows up at the end of the Coming Soon post.

My son saw me drawing this up and after explaining it, he suggested that it should be 3-dimensional. I said "Why? Its fine." and he says it'll be great, and I say, "go ahead."

So he's got my CAD drawing open, and he's drawing the thing up in SketchUp, and extruding it to make it three-dimensional, and I show him how to facet the edges, and fill it in with a metal color...you get the idea. Well, we're spinning it around to look at it, and I remember explaining the Mission Impossible example to him... and we make movies for buildings in the office all the time in SketchUp, sooo... the two of us ended up with the movie-style coming attraction, along with the explosion, in SketchUp.

We exported the movie, and then added the sound track in iMovie, and then uploaded to Blogger, which uses the YouTube format for movies, just as it uses Picasa for images.

Anyway, in other news, American Libraries Direct was nice enough to pick up my blog about the future of libraries and include it in this week's newsletter, which is sent out all around the world. Nearly 1500 people clicked on the link and took a peek at my blog in the last few days since the newsletter came out. Very exciting!

The AL Direct is a great newsletter that I use to stay up to date on the latest library buzz. If you take a look at the newsletter, there is all kinds of great stuff in there. My item is featured in the Actions & Answers section, near the bottom. Thanks to George, and the AL Direct team for including me in the discussion!

what is a library[an]

I think we can all agree on what a library was, and we may even be able to agree on what a library is. I think the trickier question is: What is a library going to be in the future?

Image: GlobalWeb snagged w/o permission from Futurist.com

This question goes beyond the bricks-and-mortar buildings, that have traditionally housed what we consider to be the modern library, to include other questions like: What forms will knowledge media take, and how will we access those media? Will some, or all of our research and learning be done remotely, or will there still be a place for a library, that is still an actual place? And as knowledge media becomes more complex, interconnected, and diverse, how will librarians provide their much needed services to help us navigate?

According to Jedi Master and Chief Librarian of the Jedi Archives, Jocasta Nu "If an item does not appear in our records, it does not exist!" Not exactly the answer Obi Wan was hoping to hear, and I'm sure librarians the world over, gnashed their teeth, and rent their garments as one, when they heard it. But another thing that scene tells us: George Lucas, for one, believes that there will be a 'place' called library in the future, where librarians work to help people navigate the vast amount of data they will eventually help to catalog, organize, and annotate. We are going to need professional help.

When I'm looking for information, my first and quickest route is now online, but in all the Google searches I've done, I have ended up with results from inside a library's collection only a few times, and that's probably because I'm occasionally searching for things like old books. I bet there are some who never get information from a library's collection returned in a Google search. That information is searchable, but only if you go to, or log into the library.

In a blog entry, three days ago, Seth Grodin posits: "the library ought to be the local nerve center for information... The next library is a place, still. A place where people come together to do co-working and coordinate and invent projects worth working on together. Aided by a librarian..." I like that. The Next Library.

And yet, just three days earlier, LA Times reporter Hector Tobar, reports that the Los Angeles Unified School District is trying to fire their school librarians, and because the librarians are under contract, the LAUSD has them in a courtroom, answering to the District's lawyers about whether or not anyone actually learns anything from them. Asking them whether they take a attendance, or pass out grades! Man, I learned to walk, talk and brush my teeth from my Mom and Dad; all without grades or attendance. I hope that isn't the benchmark, counselor.

According to the ALA, public school libraries account for nearly 82,000 of the 122,000 odd libraries in America. If these libraries don't have librarians, who is going to teach our kids how to manage the information overload? Will it be the librarians in the 17,000 public libraries in America? Seems like a tall order to do alone. Even if you are a Jedi Master.

The University of Chicago's new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library is designed as a big ol' reading room, sous cloche. But no stacks. You can get a book, you just can't get it yourself. You'll need a robotic librarian for that.*

Look at this blog entry at theory.isthereason, by Dr. Kevin Lim, who states that is his goal to be a " 'social cyborg', where the meshing of human and networking technology would allow one's presence to be augmented by the minds of many." He's gone to visit a place in Singapore called Geek Terminal. Check out the video. They got some stuff we need in our library y'all. And this was 4 years ago! How will these folks/cyborgs interface with the library?

In a short film featuring interviews with librarians at the 2011 ALIA Information Online Conference in Sydney, Australia, Infoventurer (real name: ehmmm...?) got some great answers to some of these questions. According to these librarians, the new librarian: needs to meet users where they are, connect people with information or other members of their community, act as facilitators and guides to the new media, and be what their users want them to be.

This was echoed in their descriptions of the new library (or Next Library, shhh). They see the library as still a physical space, complimented by online space, a place of connections; between people and information, and between people and community, a community gathering space, and a social, cultural and learning hub, where people can find information, or create their own information.

This last thought is an exciting one. Libraries have always been used for research to support studies and the development of new ideas, but more and more, they are becoming places where the actual creation of new information and media happens. From writing, to video production, to web pages and image editing, all with help and instruction at the library.

So what will the library of the future be? Sounds like it will be, what we want it to be. According to Herbert Samuel, "A library is thought in cold storage." In the digital age, this may be an even more fitting description, but if "Your library is your portrait", as Holbrook Jackson said, we should be careful to insure that our library doesn't become a portrait of closed-mindedness and lack of foresight.

We need to make our libraries as we want them, because no one will do it for us. And if we let them try, they may just unmake them altogether.

* - For thoughts on whether or not robotic librarians of the future will fall in love and get married, click here.

library of congress marker redux

Back in business.

If anything, the LOC maintenance shutdown allows me to show you all the reverse of this lovely bookmark. From the Library of Congress site about its history:

"The Library of Congress was established by an act of Congress in 1800 when President John Adams signed a bill providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington."

Just four years later, in August 1814, British troops set fire to the Capitol Building, burning the library. Within a month, retired President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement.

The Library of Congress, isn't just beautiful, its huge, the largest library in the world! According to their website, the library contains "33 million books and printed materials, as well as more than 113 million maps, manuscripts, photographs, films, audio and video recordings, prints and drawings, and other special collections." The stuff they have ranges from baseball cards, and comic books, to fine old manuscripts, and early American maps and documents, to sound, music and film recordings. Check out a video presentation about the LOC here.

Their website is fantastic! There is all kinds of stuff available on line. Its staggering really just browsing through it, its seems to go on forever.

Thanks again, to Natalie and Hope for picking this up for me in Washington DC.