Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

The Intersection of Ingenuity and Desperation

Customs authorities in Vancouver, B. C. made a grave discovery this week when they found nearly 57 kilograms of opium inside a hollow tombstone being shipped from Iran. The find is being called the province's biggest opium seizure ever. This type of criminal activity might be considered the intersection of ingenuity and desperation or perhaps optimism and immorality. In either case, these people and objects could tell an interesting tale.

Best known for his work as an award-winning writer for young adults, Jack Gantos tells the harrowing story of being drawn into a drug smuggling scheme and his ensuing arrest in Hole in My Life. As a teen living in the Virgin Islands fearing that his life was going nowhere with no chance getting away, Gantos was approached with an offer to transport a large quantity of hashish to New York City in return for free transport and money to start a new life. Hole in My Life documents the entanglements that slowly surround him as he realizes this adventure. Using a stark and direct style that eschews moralizing, Gantos captures an image of himself as a teen hungry for internal catharsis. Desperately looking outside himself for forces of change, Gantos ultimately finds an internal motivation  that drives him from wanting to write to actually writing during his incarceration. Our author finds that nurturing the creative impulse requires a self-discipline and self-care also essential to successfully surviving the harsh realities of life in prison.

Evidence of creativity out of desperation abounds in Home-Made: Contemporary Russian Folk Artifacts. Collected here by Vladimir Arkhipov are ingenious examples of craft that put a hollow Iranian tombstone to shame. Leather cap made from an old punching bag? Check. Old Fanta cans turned into artful maracas? Check. Poet's flashlight for recording mid-slumber muse visits, built-from-scratch? Check. Home-Made is a testimony to the material expression of self-actualization that occurs when resources become bitterly scarce. Better yet, this is no simple picture book. Each example is grouped with insightful, and often entertainingly off-topic, comments from its creator. We learn that a hand fabricated motor scooter windshield was obtained by bartering medical alcohol and that the windshield's owner then attached a plastic visor himself, bending it to fit over an open fire. Our proud owner, Grigory Samorin, goes on to explain that the stickers of girls on the windshield are courtesy of his son who brought them back from Germany and that a similar trend has filled every kiosk in his town with porn.

Visceral yet hallucinatory, the images collected by Danzig Baldaev in the three volumes of the Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia are by turns inspiring and disturbing. Baldaev was the warden of "Kresty" an infamous prison in Leningrad. During his fifty-two years there (and in other reformatory settlements) he recorded hundreds of tattoos as they appeared on both men and women. Most of the tattoos here are presented as illustrations making Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopedia a flash book of sorts. Though translations are provided, only the most cursory explanation of the tattoos' meaning within the deep, complex subculture of Russian prisons is included. Still, the shocking power of these drawings speaks to a type of creative expression born out of a criminal subculture's tragic and autocatalytic need to define and enforce an articulated power structure. Plus, the drawings are cool looking.

Street Art 101

I am a wannabe artist and I love art of all kinds: dance, music, theater, and the visual arts.  I've been to the Louvre and seen da Vinci's Mona Lisa and I am lucky enough to own a couple pieces by some very talented Portlanders. But honestly, some of the stuff that has moved me most, I've seen just walking down the street.  I'm talking about what is commonly referred to as graffiti, street art and murals.  Much of it could be described as crude, youthful angst spray painted onto a wall, but some of it is thoughtful, poetic, powerful and even inspiring.  Have you seen some of the beautiful City Repair projects, or the whimsical little horses around town, or just what some extremely talented individual has done in the dead of night with some spray paint and a vision! As part of their Pictures of the Day series, the Christian Science Monitor pulled together 14 images of graffiti from around the world.  

The library has many books on graffiti and street art and murals but I want to point out one in particular, the bible of graffiti if you will, The Faith of Graffiti with photos by Mervyn Kurlansky and Jon Naar. This work was originally published in 1974 and is often referred to as the "classic text" on the birth of urban street art, focusing specifically on the emergence of graffiti on New York City subway trains.  It is an oversized book with pages and pages of amazing images, with the 2009 edition including some additional photos that Naar has taken through the years. And both editions have a mind-blowing essay on street art by Norman Mailer. Here is a taste:

...the unheard echo of graffiti, the vibration of that profound discomfort it arouses, as if the unheard music of its proclamation and/or its mess, the rapt intent seething of its foliage, is the herald of some oncoming apocalypse less and less far away. Graffiti lingers on our subway door as a memento of what it may well have been, our first art of karma, as if indeed all the lives ever lived are sounding now like bugles of gathering armies across the unseen bridge.

If, like me, it's the images you are interested in, take a look at the zine Scrawl.  In this zine, author Amy Adoyzie includes photographs of graffiti she took while in Asia.  In her introduction she says "it's a sample of art from kids in developing nations...taking back space with their own aesthetics."  You'll note that even though the languages (and the alphabets, for lack of a better term) are different, the graffiti looks reassuringly similar to right here at home.  It's well laid-out with vibrant pictures.

If your inspired to create your own street art now (though you should know that "unlawfully applying graffiti" is a Class A violation in Oregon) the library has a book for you!  Check out Graff by Scape Martinez.  Martinez is a veteran artist from San Jose, California, who goes into step-by-step detail on how to take an idea from paper to wall. Plus, it's fun for learning some of the lingo around this art form, and thankfully a glossary is included. Speaking of which, if you need some help deciphering our own local world of graffiti, Portland's Office of Neighborhood Involvement has created a guide on how to read graffiti!

The last book I want to share has nothing to do with spray paint or markers on walls, but it does, in the most wonderful way possible, capture the beauty that is street art.  Slinkachu is a street art/installation artist who takes hand-painted figures, or "little people", and photographs them in the big city (mostly London and Manchester).  This is difficult for me to describe in words, but I ask that you take a look!  The book is titled Little People in the City and it is a wonderful, whimsical collection of photographs.  As The Times so perfectly put it, "even when you know they are just hand-painted figurines, you can't help but feel that their plights convey something of our own fears about being lost and vulnerable in a big, bad city."  This is definitely my favorite book right now.

More Than Simply Sport

The 2010 Winter Olympics are approaching fast, and news stories about it are beginning to appear more frequently. Trolling for Olympics-related news recently I noted several that deal with politics, community, and the social and business impacts of the games: petrochemical companies sponsoring the games hope to get "green" points with the public, even as they continue to support environmentally destructive tar sands mining in Alberta; NBC, which has an exclusive contract to broadcast the games on US television, expects to lose money on the deal, while the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is merely expecting to break even; renters have been evicted to make way for tourists; critics complain that the B.C. government is not using available resources to estimate the economic impact of the games; and Olympic tourists may be lucky enough to encounter Captain Condom, a superhero who will be on hand to encourage people to practice safer sex. Clearly there's a lot more going on here than sport. And it's nothing new for the Olympic Games to have a huge social impact.

The most famously controversial modern Olympics is probably the Berlin Games in 1936. Adolph Hitler's government placed great importance on the Games's ability to showcase the success of Nazi ideology and fortify Germany's place in the world scene – and German officials and amateur sports promoters went to great lengths to manipulate the International Olympic Committee to arrange the games to suit their purposes.  The United States and other countries considered boycotting the Berlin Games because of Nazi policies on racial purity, but Jewish athletes who had been prohibited from competition by the Nazis were compelled to compete for their country to prove Germany was playing fair, and the U.S. backed down. Spain, which had recently elected a left-wing government, did boycott the games, and they set up their own People's Olympiad, to be held in Barcelona. Guy Walters details the fascinating history of this unusual and complex chapter in modern Olympic history in his readable but detailed book Berlin Games: How the Nazis Stole the Olympic Dream. What I found most intriguing about Berlin Games, really, was how much the controversies of 1936 have been echoed by conflict and turmoil around more recent Olympiads.

David Maraniss argues that the 1960 games in Rome were a watershed Olympics, and the evidence he presents in his book Rome 1960 are pretty convincing. The 1960 Rome games ushered in the first Olympic doping scandal, the first commercially televised Summer Games, and the first apparel sponsorship contract for an Olympic athlete. Rome in the summer of 1960 was also a hotbed of international intrigue, with rumors of defections circulating everywhere and the intensity of cold war conflict rising sharply all the time. Maraniss's history offers a personal look into these questions (and many others more directly related to the actual sporting competitions) with information gleaned from dozens of interviews with athletes, coaches, journalists, and many other people whose work made the games happen – and on the whole it is quite a compelling story.

If you're wondering how the modern games compare to their ancient predecessors, check out The Naked Olympics. Tony Perrettet takes readers through the games chronologically, beginning with athletes' pre-games training, administrative and religious preparations before the games began, and spectators' journey to Olympia, and moving on to cover each stage of the festival and its aftermath. It's a lively, entertaining history, and Perrettet's focus on details (and the book's many illustrations) allow readers to get a sense for what it might have been like to actually have been present – at the sporting events, the religious ceremonies, and of course, at the parties and the political fights.

I can't leave you without recommending my favorite fictional Olympics story: Asterix at the Olympic Games, by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo. In this episode of the long-running comics series, Asterix and his companion Obelisk travel to Greece to compete for the Gauls in the Olympic Games – with the help of the magic potion created by their village Druid, Getafix, which makes them incredibly, ridiculously strong. Naturally this leads to a doping scandal (though our heroes comport themselves most honorably), and many pages are taken up with jokes and situation comedy at the expense of the self-righteous and irritating Romans. If you find this comic suits your reading tastes, there are many other Asterix and Obelisk books for you to enjoy!

How's the Air Up There?

In recent days the completion of the world's tallest building was announced and 6'8" Brittney Griner became the second woman to dunk more than once in a single NCAA basketball game prompting the question, "How's the air up there?" In the case of the newly minted Burj Dubai (which reaches 2,717 ft in to the sky) the air at the top is a full 8 degrees cooler than at the bottom. This necessitates a complex series of airlocks through out the building to dampen the possibility of sudden shifts in air pressure causing structural damage to the superskyscraper. For Griner the question would be the sort of playful comment that is a bit of a back-handed compliment but make no mistake, her arrival in the WNBA will have serious implications. She has serious talent to go with her height. But really, how is the air up there?

Gabrielle Walker's An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere provides a variety of insights about the air around us. From Colonel Joseph Kittinger's record setting skydive from an altitude of 102,800 feet (in 1960!) to the recent scientific supposition that precipitation is seeded by unseen and omnipresent atmospheric bacteria, An Ocean of Air weaves an amazing tale from historical and scientific elements. Walker's text alternates between the fascinating stories of those who have studied the air around us and the implications of their findings. An Ocean of Air's quick pace and engaging articulation of complex scientific concepts makes for a great contrast to the ephemeral and essential nature of its subject. As the author suggests in finalizing her description of Kittinger's death defying fall to earth, "We don't just live in the air. We live because of it."

Kittinger's awe inspiring military mission was scientific in purpose but shared a passion for adventure with the subjects of Michael Abrams' Birdmen, Batmen and Skyflyers: Wingsuits and the Pioneers Who Flew Them, Fell in Them, and Perfected Them. Here Abrams reveals the history of the questionable and highly hazardous pursuit of flight using wingsuits. Many of the stories included here end poorly for the participants; broken bones and death are fairly predictable outcomes. Still, Birdmen, Batmen and Skyflyers captures a sort of lunatic mania that is inspiring. From that most famous of men to theorize about (and perhaps attempt) winged flight, Leonardo da Vinci, through the golden era of wingsuits and into today's scientific advances, which allow for accomplishments such as Felix Baumgartner's crossing of the English Channel in a wingsuit, Birdmen, Batmen and Skyflyers contains some truly batty tales!

Gasp! The Swift and Terrible Beauty of Air personalizes the gases around us and waxes philosophical on how our human experience is necessarily and inextricably immersed in the nature of air. Beginning with an infant's first breath Joe Sherman plots a course through the history of air that touches such seemingly unrelated topics as; the evolutionary source of fear in humans, the return of life to Krakatau, how and why mammals returned to the sea as whales, why you should never get between a hippo and the water, the physiology of hearing and the etymology of the Arabic word for absurd. Those topics are discussed over the course of just three pages and all within the context of  how air defines and informs our human existence. Yes, Gasp! is dense, it may even leave you breathless, but Sherman's writing is more inspirational than existential so it's well worth diving in!

Cultured Crime

Art theft is a glamorous, intellectual sort of crime – or at least it is in our collective imagination. Thieves who specialize in stealing art objects, jewelry, and the like are generally portrayed in fiction and drama as clever, humane individuals who practice theft as a skilled trade, eschewing violence and intimidation – picture Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief, Robert Redford in Hot Rock, or Nick Nolte in The Good Thief. The reality may be quite different, but crime is not a business that operates in public, so it's hard to know. Certainly I have little idea what art thieves and art theft are really like – but reading last week that more than two dozen works of art had been stolen from a private villa in the south of France – the second major art heist in less than a week – I began to wonder more about what motivates art theft, who pays for it, and how it works. And so, of course, I turned to the library.

I found a good place to start with the coffee-table book Museum of the Missing. Art journalist Simon Houpt starts with a basic premise: art objects are only worth stealing if you can command a high price for them, and that's why art theft has been on the rise since auction and sale prices began to rise dramatically in the 1950s. Houpt relates the stories of noted art thieves and those of the detectives who hunt them down, and talks about what the loss of an art object means for a museum or collector. Every single page is illustrated with reproductions of stolen art pieces and photographs of the human element: collectors, curators, gallery owners, art detectives, and thieves.

To get a little more in-depth, I turned to investigative journalist Peter Watson's rather sensational Sotheby's: The Inside Story. It's an exposé of borderline shady deals done by major museums, auction houses, and collectors – in particular, Watson makes the case that Sotheby's has systematically participated in smuggling, helping to transport antiquities and artworks across international borders in violation of the law. This is real, old-fashioned gumshoeing, and although sometimes Watson and his investigatory colleagues seem nearly as shady as the art smugglers they're tracking, it does make for a fascinating story.

The Mona Lisa is perhaps the most famous painting in the world, and at this point, one of the most challenging to steal – but it has been stolen and recovered before. When it went missing from the Louvre in 1911, Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire were among the top suspects (darn those pesky radical artists!). The public mourned the painting's loss deeply, thronging to the Louvre to visit the blank space where it had hung, and expressing their sorrow with flowers and other tributes. R. A. Scotti's The Vanished Smile examines how the Mona Lisa came to be such a meaningful symbol, and along the way, tells the story of its theft and recovery.

Looking for information on this topic, I found myself almost overwhelmed by the huge number of interesting-looking books on various aspects of art theft. As I mentioned above, there are many novels and films about art thieves and the detectives who investigate their crimes. But there are also lots more true-story books, on grave robbery, the theft of antiquities and archaeological artifacts, and the systematic looting of European art by the Nazis during World War II, among other things. Perhaps one of these books will be just what you're looking for! Of course, if not, you can always ask your friendly librarian for more suggestions.

Season of Giving

Last week the Christian Science Monitor reported that even during our current economic crisis, folks are giving to those in need. For many of us, this is what the holiday season is all about, being generous and compassionate with our fellow human beings. And even though we may not have a lot to give, anything helps.  Plus, we never know when it might be us who needs the helping hand. One particular issue this article focused on is food insecurity here in the United States. Did you know that in 2008, 49.1 million people lived in food-insecure households, including 16.7 million children? This is according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, click here for more of the USDA's information on "Food Security in the United States". But no matter what the need, I wanted to highlight this article in the hopes of inspiring a season of giving for all of 2010. Let's start the new year off right!

For information on how to make even the smallest donation count, please take a look at Wendy Smith's Give a Little. This book is chock-full of information on a variety of charities, and the ways in which they help people throughout the world.  It also includes heart-warming stories from the people on the receiving end.  Smith makes clear that even a $10 or $20 donation can really help a person in need.  And with so many worthy causes, Give a Little is valuable for the person who knows they want to give, but doesn't know where to start.  Smith does an excellent job showing how just a few dollars can cause a ripple effect that "lifts a whole family, a town, and, astonishingly, even a nation of out poverty."

A similar philanthropic how-to is Town & Country: the Guide to Intelligent Giving by Joanna L. Krotz.  Again, this book includes personal and inspiring stories of people making a difference, and also gives advice on how best to donate money or time to make the most impact, no matter what your financial status.  There is a helpful chapter on examining the things that are important to you in order to find your cause, for "the world and its communities are overflowing with need."  Krotz also offers numerous resources at the back of her book to help you create your own "giving plan".  This book is full of facts, tips and moving accounts of people's generosity.    

Lastly, and again in the hopes of inspiring, Frans De Waal, renowned author and Professor of Psychology at Emory University has written a very interesting book that argues humans and animals are "hard-wired" to express empathy.  So often we hear of the selfish acts of our fellow human beings, just look at the actions leading up to our recent economic bust.  But in The Age of Empathy, De Wall believes there is a behavioral "glue" in primate societies that includes empathy, sympathy, a sense of fair play, and trust.  De Waal refers to this as the "fellow feeling" and goes so far as to quote Adam Smith (who some refer to as the founding father of capitalism) from his own Theory of Moral Sentiments:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it.

De Waal uses insight and humor to compare human behavior to that of our animal friends and in doing so, makes us all feel a bit more human...and hopeful.

Now go forth and make the world a better place and happy 2010!

Spiking the Eggnog

I prefer my winter holidays with a bit of bite--a little spiked eggnog, if you will. And though I personally don't own a single pair of Christmas socks, a holiday scarf, or even a light-up Rudolph brooch, the sartorial choices of others are not mine to judge. The Oregonian's Grant Butler recently confessed to a conversion to the cult of the Christmas sweater after a holiday party that featured prizes for the ugliest sweater. He came in third, but his devotion to holiday kitsch lives on. Send in your own pictures or just chuckle in delight at the reader participation slide show!

As far as my mom is concerned, It's a Wonderful Life is the best holiday movie of all time. And despite my impatience with sappy Christmas miracles, I can't help but tear up at the story of George Bailey. I blame my mother. Luckily, I have a back-up holiday film tradition that won't make me grab for the hankies, but still serves up a satisfying holiday story. In La Bûche, a funeral brings together a French family of grown sisters and their long-divorced parents who may be even more unhappy at the holiday than you are. An ensemble piece that follows the family members through uncovering old secrets, flirting with new loves, and revealing infidelities (it is French, after all), this film is just bitter enough to help me get through this season of schmaltz.

Opening John Grossman's collection of cards and ephemera in Christmas Curiosities: Odd, Dark, and Forgotten Christmas feels like opening a box of holiday ornaments that has been wired with a time bomb. All your ideas about the beauty and purity of Christmas will explode when you get to the end of this book--no, it won't even take that long. Have you ever heard of Krampus? The incubus-like creature that beats and kidnaps children? How about images of lecherous Santas, or mean-looking Santas, so unlike our jolly version of the kindly red-suited man. Get your fill of naughty children, dead birds, and other Victorian-era nasties in this book that might just crush your holiday spirit.

I certainly wouldn't recommend the short story collection Holidays on Ice to everyone. Though the story "SantaLand Diaries" has become a modern holiday classic, these stories are not for the "Christmas is a magical time" believers. Holiday pragmatists only need apply. It probably reveals a lot about me, then, that one of my most cherished holiday memories involves one of these David Sedaris stories. One year, I was lonely and away from home until well after Thanksgiving when a friend called to read a Christmas story to me over the phone. He couldn't wait to share the story "Season's Greetings to Our Friends and Family!!!", a satirical look at one family's annual Christmas letter. Throughout the letter recounting the absurd challenges of the previous year, the matriarch of the family maintains her perky tone. A good dysfunctional family story is the perfect antidote to homesickness.

How far would you go for a cup of joe?

Coffeehouse culture did not sweep through my small town until long after I graduated from high school and moved to a city. When I was a teenager and needed the jolt of caffeine and the heady aroma of bohemians to get me through the day, I had to drive to the nearest city to frequent my coffeehouse of choice. I have been a devoted coffee drinker and occasional coffee-slinger ever since. Though Michael Idov laments the long lost coffeehouses of Europe in his paean to the period when quiet talk in a coffee shop could signal revolution, I still think of the coffee shop as a cultural force. Today's chain coffee shops may attaract more Mom-Groups than splinter groups, but they will always attract anyone who needs a little pick-me-up, radical or not. I almost can't imagine a week without a trip to the neighborhood coffee shop, at the very least to pick up my beans.

Coffee-Slinger was my first job out of high school after moving away from my coffeeshop-less town. This may give you a clue about how long ago that was: I had pink hair for the interview and the owner made it very clear that "natural" was expected. I dyed it brown. When the coffee culture did finally hit my hometown, it rolled through with a vengeance, and now, in addition to the four sit-down shops in town, you can drive through at least three. Apparently, our fascination with the mobile cup is not ours alone. Ray Weisgerber photographs the region's drive-through espresso stands for his book, Driven to Espresso : Drive-Through Coffee Stands in the Northwest. These beautiful black and white photos showcase the amazing variety of drive-through coffee stands, from a double-decker bus to a trailer staffed by a bikini babe. I feel a certain kinship with these places because that first coffee job I mentioned--it was at a drive-through.

Someday I will go to Paris. I most likely will spend a day at the Louvre. I will probably make a trip to Versailles. I might walk along the Left Bank and I could even go to the Eiffel Tower. But the one thing I most assuredly will do is sit in a cafe. It sounds silly to travel the world and then hang out in a coffee shop, I know, but having a little time for reflection over a cafe au lait and a brioche is just my kind of itinerary item. I have never visited a city without researching and staking out a coffee or tea house as a break from the usual tourist attractions. When I go to Paris, I will bring Christine and Dennis Graf's handy guide, Café Life Paris: A Guidebook to the Cafes and Bars of the City of Light. The first time I held this lovely little gem I became so absorbed in my fantasy of Parisian life that I forgot I was actually supposed to be working in a library at the time. If you're skipping Paris but are still headed to the continent, you could also pick up Cafe Life Venice, Florence or Rome by different authors.

I don't think too much about how my coffee is produced. To relieve my ignorance, I've got Black Gold, a film by Marc Francis and Nick Francis which focuses on Tadesse Meskela, the General Manager of the Oromia Coffee Farmers Co-operative Union, who is a tireless crusader attempting to get fair prices for Ethiopian coffee farmers. I am crazy about Ethiopian coffee and have been known to travel to more than one coffee shop in a day in pursuit of a pound of Ethiopia Mordecofe, but the famine in the 1980s has left me with a warped impression of Ethiopia as a land of unrelenting poverty. The Ethiopia of this film is green, lush, and populated with people who are working hard for a fair shake in the global economy.

Words in Politics

Morning Edition had an article this morning about how political experts differ when it comes to defining the word "terrorism." Is an act of terrorism simply any kind of politically motivated violence? A campaign to severely intimidate and harass that may or may not be violent? A violent or intimidating attack that is clearly directed by a political group? A violent act perpetrated against a noncombatant? Each expert had a different take.

In the political context, words can be weapons and language a battlefield. Stephen Poole picks apart some of the layers of meaning in political speech in his book Unspeak. Political terms and names such as "war on terror," "Friends of the Earth," "free trade," and "gay community," he argues, are carefully chosen for the extra weight they carry by implication. That is, these terms are so evocative that they create a specific story that effectively silences any opposing viewpoint. If you don't support Friends of the Earth and its activities, then you must be an enemy of the earth; "free trade" has a positive, hopefully sounding cast, so if you're against it, you must be against freedom. Poole discusses eight politically charged words and their fellows – including, you'll be glad to hear, "terrorism."

Clearly political change itself is a driving force in the development of language – and this is true in our history as well as our present. The United States was founded at a time when politics, public debate, and access to the pulpit of the press were the nearly exclusive domain of a very few privileged people – land-owning, educated, protestant white men. In Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, historian Kenneth Cmiel considers how the idealism of our young nation's grand experiment with democracy challenged this orthodox arrangement and caused a whole series of questions to arise: Is American English its own entity, meriting its own dictionaries and grammars? If so, should these include slang words and colloquial terms, or should they reflect a more refined manner of speech? Should newspapers, textbooks, and other books published here reflect colloquialisms or should they instruct Americans by their erudite example? What, indeed, is correct American English?

But how, you might ask, do words come to mean what they mean? Have you ever created one yourself? How did you do it? Sol Steinmetz and Barbara Ann Kipfer help explain how all this works in their book The Life of Language: The Fascinating Ways Words are Born, Live and Die. They look at their subject with a broad view, from word roots, to methods for shifting the meanings of words, to words we borrow from other languages, to how words can eventually pass out of use altogether.  This potentially dry subject really comes to life under Steinmetz's and Kipfer's care, and anyone with an interest in words or in language generally should find their book an engaging read.

Going Hungry

The U. S. Department of Agriculture released a study this week which reported that one in every seven American families struggled to get enough food on the table last year, and that overall, 49 million Americans suffered from "food insecurity," or the inability to be sure of adequate food to maintain healthy, active lives. These numbers don't just reflect conditions in some faraway part of the country, in fact, Oregon ranks near the top of the list of hungriest states.

Of course, hunger is by no means a new phenomenon. Nearly 10 years ago, Journalist Loretta Schwartz-Nobel took on the challenge of investigating the scope and depth of hunger in America in her book Growing Up Empty: The Hunger Epidemic in America. What I find most interesting is the way Schwartz-Nobel carefully examines a series of different groups – the middle class, the working poor, the military, new immigrants, etc. and explains how hunger affects them, and how public policies (even those originally intended to assuage hunger) have made the epidemic worsen. It's not always easy to read the heartbreaking stories Schwartz-Nobel has to tell, but overall the book provides a good overview of how very real this problem is, and how it's affecting communities across the nation.

Some people's reaction to widespread hunger is to get right out and do something about it. One way is to grow food – and for more than a hundred years Americans have built and tended community gardens specifically designed to feed the hungry and help people in poverty build new skills to help themselves. Laura J. Lawson's City Bountiful explains this fascinating history, along with the stories of other kinds of community gardens tended by schoolchildren, urban gourmets, and wartime patriots.

It's not just Americans who are going hungry. The international press is reporting that the United Nations Hunger Summit earlier this week in Rome was not productive, partly due to the fact that among wealthy nations, only Italy sent its leader to attend the summit. Meeting the needs of hungry people around the world can be quite a challenge, particularly when changing weather patterns, a volatile economic climate, and wars all complicate the issue. The Atlas of Food: Who Eats What, Where, and Why can help clarify some of this complexity. Authors Erik Millstone and Tim Lang provide a wide array of maps and charts explaining various aspects of the word food system – starting with a section on challenges, from water shortages to environmental challenges to political factors that affect people's ability to get access to food.

When the Wall Came Down

What were you doing 20 years ago?  I was in high school and I can clearly remember coming home from basketball practice and seeing people on the T.V. standing on top of this well-graffitied wall, arm-in-arm, celebrating like I'd never seen before.  I was not a young woman who paid much attention to politics.  I was all about sports and music and my friends.  But I remember the profound impact these images made on me.  Before that moment, I theoretically understood that people all over the world were living under very different circumstances than my own.  But in seeing those images, I finally, really got it.  Monday marked the twenty-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and The New York Times did an Op-Ed piece asking poets to write works inspired by the events of November 9, 1989.  Reading these poems brought up a lot of those same feelings for me and was a good reminder that the world is full of many people, living in different situations, all trying to find peace and happiness.

Though I already had leanings, this event hit me at just the right moment to turn me into a true history buff.  If like me you prefer to start at the beginning in order to get a better understanding of an event, then I recommend The Berlin Wall: A World Divided by Frederick Taylor.  Taylor will take you through the division of Germany after World War II , the flight of refugees to the West, the construction and eventual bringing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989.  He discusses the origins of the Cold War and the stark contrast in living conditions between East and West Germany.  It is a thick book, but a good one and reads at fairly fast pace.  Plus it has pictures, and who doesn't like pictures!  

For me, history really is about the people, and Anna Funder's Stasiland looks back at real people's experiences being under the organized surveillance of East Germany's secret police, the Stasi, with its army of citizen informers.  She looks at both those who had the courage to resist during the Communist regime as well as those within the Stasi.  There are heartbreaking stories of mothers unable to see their sick children on the other side of the Wall, teenagers arrested for distributing protest flyers, and (for me at least) very unlikeable members of the Stasi regime.  Funder does a really wonderful job with this book and I highly recommend it.  

You never know when you wake up in the morning what the day will bring, and there are many events that have been so dramatic as to change the course of history.  A compilation of these kinds of events can be found in Where Were You When?: 180 Unforgettable Moments in Living History by Ian Harrison.  Mainly through images and with quotes from folks who remember back to the moment, Harrison takes us on a journey starting with the outbreak of World War II through to the 2008 cyclone in Myanmar and earthquake in China.  The stories range from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix breaking all publishing records, to Armstrong and Aldrin first walking on the moon.    

And then because this post is just a bit too serious, I need to diverge a bit.  Perhaps if you listened to NPR's All Things Considered on Monday you will have heard an interview with David Hasselhoff.  Hasselhoff was huge in Germany around the time of the Wall coming down and he believes he may have had a part in its falling.  You see Hasselhoff was on his "Freedom Tour" through Germany in 1989 and his song "Looking for Freedom" topped the charts.  According to his autobiography Don't Hassel the Hoff, he had the idea of "destroying the Wall as a dramatic part of the show." So he "recreated the Wall out of painted Styrofoam blocks and...drove a Trans Am named 'Freedom' straight through it. And the crowd went wild."  Stories like this makes this book (with many color photos) a fun read.

If you were alive back in 1989, please share your memories of this momentous event.  And if you have a favorite book, movie or piece of music that reminds you of that time, please share those as well. 

A Shanty for the Salish Sea

Bellingham biologist Bert Webber is closing in on accomplishing his goal of unifying Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Strait of Georgia under the name he first coined in 1988, The Salish Sea. On October 30th the Washington State Board of Geographic Names voted 5-1 to adopt the new name and similar committees at other levels of government are expected to follow in coming weeks. Webber's interest in suggesting this new umbrella term is to acknowledge, and promote understanding of, the ecological interconnectedness of these bodies of water. That it has taken twenty years from Webber's first push to place the Salish Sea on maps for this to occur might mislead one to believe that the geographical lexicon is nearly static. In fact, we are encompassed by constant, subtle changes in geography.

Cartography itself embodies a certain paradox. Even the perfect map is by definition an abstraction and as our understanding of the world changes and increases so must our maps morph and reflect these improved, or simply different, forms of comprehension. As the companion publication to the Field Museum of Chicago's "once-in-a-lifetime exhibition" Maps: Finding Our Place in the World is an amazing compendium of maps developed by a vast cross section of our world's cultures. Edited by James Akerman, Maps explores how mapping has changed over time in many ways. From the technological perspective, Maps contains examples from the most rudimentary (but aesthetically stunning) maps of ancient mariners to modern maps of the ocean floor created using advanced sonar techniques. More impressively, Maps provides a context for understanding maps as the product of historical and cultural circumstances. The maps shared here, as a near universal form of communication, express an inspiring variety of data and desires. From maps that illustrate the spread of disease to those that show our position relative to heaven or explore Middle Earth, the images here say as much about how we want others to see the world as how the world might actually be.

Adding the Salish Sea to our maps may seem a small way to express a vague, shared appreciation of our region's waterways but a look below the surface of the ocean reveals that this other world truly deserves our attention. The Blue Planet, as adapted by Andrew Byatt, lets readers follow along with the truly stunning images from the documentary series by the same name (available on DVD in four parts: 1 2 3 4). It's fair to say that most people would not consider these works to be of tremendous scientific value. Instead, their function is to inspire and the breath taking visuals associated with this series succeed wildly in that regard. If ever one needed to find inspiration to cherish and protect the Earth's oceans from excessive human impact these works would be an entirely appropriate place begin that search.

Wish to delve a little deeper into the question of just what life below the waves is like? The World Ocean Census (as compiled by Darlene Crist) may well provide the answers you seek. However, one of this census's great strengths is that it embraces the mystery of the Ocean. Water covers 71% of the surface of our planet and a vast portion of this area remains unexplored. Even in more approachable areas there is much to be learned. Scientists say that as little as 10% of life in coral reefs has yet to be identified. Still, the life forms detailed and pictured in these pages are striking and serve as a potent reminder that the expression of our understanding about the world we live in has real consequences, even for those for those life forms that we have not yet encountered and who may inhabit the familiar waterways or our own region. These life forms may yet find a place in the feedback loop comprised of what we understand, the understanding we project and what we hope to understand.

The Webs We Weave

Last year, a spider built her web at our house in a very lucky spot: on one of the widows of our glassed in porch, affording her a smorgasboard of small insects drawn to our porch light. We watched her grow over the weeks and repair her web, a thing of beauty if ever I saw one. Textile maker Simon Peers obviously sees the beauty in spider webs, but he took it one step further. He paid local weavers to gather over a million spiders and "silk" them for what is called dragline silk, the strongest type of silk a spider makes. They make several types, did you know that? Me neither. Mr. Peers and his weavers created an 11 by 4 foot golden tapestry, now on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

This extraordinary story got me thinking about other ways we use animals in art, either as subjects or as objects themselves. Rarer, though, is the phenomenon of animals as artists. Monkey Painting is a serious look at monkeys, apes, and other non-human primates as creative beings. Thierry Lenain's volume explores attempts by researchers to connect the artistic abilities of primates to early art by humans. Monkey Painting also reproduces some of these works in full color. A delight to behold! Lest you think this is a tongue-in-cheek book, know that Mr. Lenain is a noted French writer of both art criticism and children's books.

A title that does play around a little bit is Why Paint Cats: the ethics of feline aesthetics. This is from the team that also brought us the original Why Cats Paint and later, Dancing With Cats, two titles that know how far to go in the pursuit of silliness. I'm sure some people took the phenomenon of cat painting very seriously as proof of cats' higher intelligence, but I'm not sure their intelligence can be vouched for if they were willing to sit still long enough for the creation of these startling images of cats painted as a butterfly, an American Flag, and a clown, among other things. Burton Silver and Heather Busch must be experts in the near impossible job of cat herders.

The first time I saw this book, I immediately sat down and started turning pages, despite the fact that at the time, I was supposed to be shelving books, not reading books. Outrageous colors, impossible shapes, and incredible animals fill the pages of Ernst Haeckel's Art Forms in Nature. I was sure these most of these creatures were imaginary, until I learned more about the man. He was a trained physician who changed careers when he read Darwin's Origin of Species and became an expert in comparative anatomy, specializing in invertebrates. These illustrations are now in the public domain and are available on several websites, but we also have a few versions of the book, including one that has a clip art CD-ROM so you can download the images to your computer.

What Price Fame?

Miley Cyrus has had it with Twitter. I knew it would come to this eventually – if not for Ms. Cyrus, then for some other tweeting celebrity. There is no doubt that for stars, the intensive connectedness of social media leads inexorably to a total lack of privacy.  I suppose that lack of privacy is just what some stars are aiming for, to feed their publicity machines, but I would imagine the joy found in the adulation of strangers pales eventually. So I'm not surprised that Miley eventually hit her limit (though I do admire the irony of quitting Twitter only to explain why via YouTube – see below for the video!).

Fame is a strange notion. We've always admired people for their humor, intelligence, knowledge, and for other skills and abilities – but it seems that fame based (or partly based) on celebrity itself is a relatively recent invention. In the last hundred years or so, we have created a whole new kind of notoriety with the help of the mass media, and now with social media like Twitter. To learn about the roots of this orgy of fame, I turned to Samantha Barbas's Movie Crazy. Barbas explains how the first film stars came to prominence, and discusses the movie studios' publicity machine, both of which are interesting stories. But more fascinating still is her history of fandom itself. She shows that early film fans helped shape the movie industry through fan club activities and through their letters to studios and stars. They didn't run things – studio moguls did – but they did have an influence. For example, producer David O. Selznick only agreed to cast Clark Gable in Gone With the Wind after he received hundreds of fan letters encouraging him to do so – imagine what a different flavor the film would have had if Gable's fans hadn't won out and the role had gone to one of the other top contenders, Gary Cooper and Errol Flynn!

Miley Cyrus is no has-been – she's at the top of her game, fame-wise, but many child stars slide down into the abyss of un-famousness as their youth fades. Jeff Guinn and Douglas Perry investigate the personal and professional consequences of becoming no-longer-famous in their book The Sixteenth Minute: Life in the Aftermath of Fame. Guinn and Perry discuss the fame and not-fame of entertainers like American Idol winner Kelly Clarkson, and Fame star Irene Cara, but they also consider the cycle of fame for people who are notable by circumstance, like Susan McDougal, who served time as a consequence of the Whitewater scandal, and Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have saved Howard Hughes's life and later to be his heir based on a handwritten will.

Of course, the ins and outs of fans, famous people, and the idea of fame are also discussed at length in literature and drama. One of my own favorite Hollywood classics is on this theme: director Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve. Bette Davis stars as Margo Channing, a successful but aging Broadway star. When devoted fan Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is introduced to Margo, the star takes the young fan under her wing, and gives her a job as her assistant. But Eve is interested in more than just basking in Margo's limelight – she orchestrates a series of mishaps that result in her going on stage as Margo's understudy, on a night when all of New York's theater critics are in the house. Clearly Eve's skill at manipulating people to follow her schemes has the potential to make her a star, and destroy Margo in the process. It's just a question of whether Margo's own capable strengths will keep Eve at arms length.

Is it gauche to point out, after all this, that if you're a fan of Twitter, you can follow Multnomah County Library there to your heart's content?

* Here's Miley, doing her best to explain why she needs her privacy:

A Well Regulated Militia

Last Thursday’s Tigard/Tualatin Times reported that Oregonians are more into guns than ever. Local gun club memberships are on the rise, and local and national sales of guns, holsters, and other gun-related equipment are increasing as well. The article doesn’t have a terribly empirical explanation for this set of trends, but it quotes local gun shop owners and club spokespeople attributing the rise in gun-love to the election of Barack Obama last November. They say that gun enthusiasts fear that the Democratic president will curtail American’s Second Amendment rights.

Whether or not the Second Amendment is in peril, it’s true that guns are a permanent and contentious part of American culture. Laura Browder traces the always controversial history of women and guns in her book Her Best Shot. You might think this account, which describes women hunters, sharpshooters, political activists, and other women gun owners and advocates, would be either dry and academic, or imprecise and sensational; but instead, Browder’s readable narrative emphasizes the complexities (and often the contradictions) of the roles guns have played in women’s lives, and the roles armed women have played in our society. In particular, she shows how women with guns bring out our culture's anxieties about gender roles and morality. And the book's introduction features a survey of the use of images of young women in gun advertisements, which is also fascinating.

Images of Americans and their guns are the focus of photographer Kyle Cassidy’s book Armed America: Portraits of Gun Owners in Their Homes. It is, just like it sounds, a collection of family portraits. The only twist is that these families are visibly armed, many of them heavily. But, in living rooms and kitchens, with pet dogs and cats in attendance, with babes in arms, all the folks in the pictures are just that, regular folks. Each portrait is accompanied by a caption listing the names, home state, and weapons of the family in the picture, together with a brief statement from one or more family members explaining why they own guns, and what their weapons mean to them. The reasons, the weapons, and the people are all surprising – gun ownership is often a very private matter in our culture, and Armed America helps bring this facet of American's lives out into the open.

One group of Americans who have a lot of pressure to keep their interest in guns under wraps are political progressives. But left-wing gun aficionados can always turn to the American Gun Culture Report for a little fellowship. The zine is full of critical perspectives on all issues relating to guns, progressive and conservative politics, and U.S. culture. Some highlights from the first three issues: a discussion of the portrayals of guns in Hollywood films, analysis of mainstream gun magazines, a profile of the Portland branch of the gay gun rights organization the Pink Pistols, and a regular feature highlighting unexpected gun owners.

(For those of you who, like me, have not yet committed the entire Bill of Rights to memory: the title of this post is the first phrase in the Second Amendment.  You can peruse all the amendments, and the rest of the Constitution at the National Archives' online exhibit The Charters of Freedom.)