Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

All Singing, All Dancing

Andrew Lloyd Weber’s new musical Love Never Dies (sequel to Phantom of the Opera) is getting some harsh criticism from London’s theatre bloggers and from “phans” from around the world – but, although it's likely the show will see some changes before it makes it to Broadway, it's not like everyone hates it.

But it is still true that among many folks, musicals have the reputation of being shallow or even hackneyed when it comes to plot and character development, and over-the-top in the song and dance department. Like many stereotypes, this one wasn't developed out of thin air – there are lots of lightweight or schlocky musicals, with unnecessarily frilly orchestration and highly emotional lyrics. But musical theater has an adaptable structure, and it's not too hard to find musicals with intelligent, thought-provoking plots, compelling characters, wry lyrics, and socially relevant themes. Here are some of my personal favorites!

Songs tell stories, and stories can be about anything – even the struggle between workers and bosses. Marc Blitzstein's musical Cradle Will Rock chronicles Larry Foreman and his fellow workers as they struggle to form a union in a company town (Steeltown, USA) controlled by wicked businessman Mr. Mister. Cradle Will Rock was commissioned by the depression-era Federal Theater Project, one of the put-America-to-work agencies of the Works Progress Administration. The Federal Theater shut down the production before the first performance, citing budget troubles, but it was widely believed that the show was really being censored for its left-wing political slant. Tim Robbins's 1999 film Cradle Will Rock tells both stories – the story of Larry Foreman vs. Mr. Mister in the play, and the story about the play's 1937 Federal Theater production, its cast, and how it was shut down. The film is poignant, funny, and a great history lesson, telling, as it does, the heartbreaking story of how the Great Depression affected the theater community, and the equally heartbreaking story of some of the political conflicts that eventually led to the 1950s red scare.

Stephan Elliott’s Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert follows a trio of female impersonators as they road-trip across Australia to a gig at a remote casino resort. Naturally this film features a lot of fabulous costumes, dance performance, and lip synching. But it's also great drama, with complex, challenging characters (even those with quite minor roles), unexpected plot twists, and breathtaking Australian scenery. And with master performances by Terence Stamp, Hugo Weaving, and Guy Pearce (among others), what’s not to like?

I could really go on and on about this topic. But I don’t have space here to give you lots of detail about every single smart-and-sassy musical I’ve seen and enjoyed, so I’ll close with a terse list of further recommendations:

• When the Jack, the Pumpkin King, gets a chance glimpse at Christmas, he becomes obsessed with bringing this new holiday to the residents of Halloweentown. But will they be able to understand Christmas?  All is revealed in A Nightmare Before Christmas, directed by Tim Burton.

• I have a new theory that all movies in the 1960s are actually dream sequences – figuratively or literally. Dr. Seuss’s little-known live-action musical The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (directed by Roy Rowland) is literally a dream, or more properly a nightmare, about the machinations of an obsessive piano teacher.

• If you're sick of all the love songs and happy endings, you need John Cameron Mitchell's Hedwig and the Angry Inch – the loud, brash, and unapologetic story of an ambitious glam-rocker who escapes communist East Germany and comes to America seeking love, fortune, and fame.
• And, last but not least, a musical about musicals! And it’s a classic, from 1933: 42nd Street, directed by Lloyd Bacon and Busby Berkeley. What happens when the star breaks her ankle right before the opening night, and the last-minute understudy is rather woefully under-prepared?

Do you have your own suggestions of musicals sure-to-be-enjoyed-by-people-who-say-they-hate-musicals?  Send them our way!

Safety First!

Surgical teams in three quarters of Oregon hospitals have started using a simple tool to make operations safer, and it’s cut down on mistakes by 30%! This new tool is a short checklist developed by the World Health Organization (though we have our own version in Oregon), and it gives nurses, technicians, and doctors a methodical way to make sure they have all their ducks in a row. Do we all know each other by name? Check! Do we have the right patient and do we know what operation we’re performing? Check! Does this person have any allergies? Check! Have we removed all the sponges, surgical towels, needles, and instruments we used in this person’s body? Check!

Are you fascinated to learn more about how this works? I’ve got the book for you: The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande (a surgeon and professor at Harvard Medical School who also writes for The New Yorker). Gawande examines checklists in construction, investing, aviation and other fields, but he focuses on checklists in his own profession, medicine. Here’s what I found most fascinating: research has shown that surgeons are so rock star-like that it’s hard for other members of a surgical team to interrupt if they notice something’s amiss. It’s too intimidating! But, when people are polite and friendly, it makes that interruption feel collegial instead of confrontational – that is, if everyone has to say “Hi everyone, I’m Dr. So-and-so and I’m the anesthesiologist” (or whatever), they’re more likely to speak up when something’s wrong.

Safety checklists were first developed in aviation, and even those of us who have never once fantasized about being behind the controls of a jet airplane have seen this in action. Before takeoff in every commercial flight, flight attendants (whose main job is promoting safety, although they will also get you a ginger ale if you ask nicely) take their passengers through a miniature safety training. If that doesn’t do it, you can always review the information in the safety card in your seat pocket. Eric Ericson and Johan Pihl’s Design for Impact explains the history of airline safety cards, and reproduces hundreds of elegant, amusing, and instructive examples from the last fifty years of safer flying.

Everyone knows that scientists have to follow careful safety protocols – Professor Max Axiom, Super Scientist teaches kids the basics of science experiment safety measures in Lessons in Science Safety. This helpful comic from Donald B. Lemke, Thomas K. Adamson, Tod Smith and Bill Anderson gets readers ready to learn basic lab science safely with sections on preparing for the lab, working safely, handling accidents, and cleaning up. Entertaining and instructional!

Putting Things in Order

The American Psychiatric Association is working on a new revision to its massive catalog of mental disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). This time around, proposed revisions include eliminating a hard-and-fast distinction between Asperger's syndrome and autism, revising the criteria for some eating disorders, and offering a new tool for suicide risk assessment.

We humans are very interested in categorizing and classifying our world. Art and cultural historians, doctors, biologists, librarians, and many other thinkers have used classification as a tool (however flawed) to bring order where there appeared to be chaos. The news about revisions to the DSM has reminded me of several fascinating books about how we have managed (or mismanaged) this sort of tidying, and how to use classification systems to our advantage:

In Naming Nature, New York Times science journalist Carol Kaesuk Yoon outlines anthropological evidence that naming systems to describe plants and animals are universal among humans; as well as scientific research that indicates there is a special part of the brain used for naming natural objects, different from the part of the brain that we use to name inanimate or human-made objects! Yoon's narrative is readable and thought-provoking, particularly when she discusses the depth of meaning in traditional taxonomies, and argues that when we discard these traditional naming systems in favor of systems based on evolution, genomes, or chemical structures, we lose something meaningful. Folk taxonomies, she asserts, have a certain je ne sais quoi scientific taxonomies will never attain.

Take a look at the traditional names we use for plants and animals, though, and you might start to get confused. Is it a hawk, or a falcon? A moth, or a butterfly? What's the difference between corn and maize? Or mushrooms and toadstools? Answers to all these questions, and more, are to be found in This is Not a Weasel: A Close Look at Nature's Most Confusing Terms. In this helpful but entertaining reference, Philip B. Mortenson explains the history and etymology of common names of plants and animals – but even better, he looks carefully at the differences between confusingly similar organisms. Readers will leave Mortenson's tutelage with a clearer understanding of what makes a mammal a mammal, the differences between spines and thorns, and so on.  Useful knowledge indeed.

Of course, science is not the only place we employ classification systems. Per Mollerup illustrates this vividly with Marks of Excellence: The History and Taxonomy of Trademarks. The book is large, colorful, and richly illustrated, but it is more than a visual reference. Mollerup first presents an intelligent history of trademarks, their use, their ideal function, and their cultural role. Then, he lays out a detailed taxonomical structure for trademarks, with branches for different types. For example, at the roughest level, there are graphic marks, and non-graphic marks.  Among graphic marks, a further division can be made between letter marks, and picture marks.  Each element of this taxonomy is described in the text, and illustrated with specific examples of real-life trademarks. Marks of Excellence is fascinating to leaf through, but Mollerup's explanations and history are so interesting that they would be worthy of attention even if the illustrations were not so many, so varied, and so beautiful.

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!

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.

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.

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.)

Prose on Poetry

Many months ago on February 14th, Oregon had its 150th birthday. But when you're 150 years old, your birthday party lasts longer than a single day – all year, all around the state, folks have enjoyed celebrating our state's history, reflecting on its future, and bringing the word "sesquicentennial" more fully into our vocabulary. Poetry Northwest magazine and the Oregon State Library are doing their part; they've compiled a list of 150 outstanding Oregon poetry books for our enjoyment and edification. So I'll take this as an opportunity to do a little poetry celebrating too!

A few years ago I realized that not only did I rarely read poetry, I had no idea how formal English verse structure worked, and had never really tried my hand at writing poems myself. To resolve these problems, I turned to The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within, by actor, novelist, comedian, director and also poet Stephen Fry. The book is an instruction manual for poetry-writing, and it is a sincere and careful text, introducing readers to meter, rhyme, and verse forms with a series of explanatory chapters and instructive exercises, illustrated along the way with numerous examples of both excellent and execrable verse. Fry's descriptive and instructional style is logical, helpful, and clear – but at the same time, his famous wry wit is decidedly present. The book should be enjoyable to all who wish to understand poetic structures better, as well as to those who want to write and those who enjoy a bit of humor while they learn.

If you're more fascinated with the process of poetry than you are with writing it yourself, you might be interested in Abigail Friedman's story. Her book The Haiku Apprentice: Memoirs of Writing Poetry in Japan chronicles her personal journey exploring the form of haiku and discovering the world of people devoted to the haiku life, while continuing to attend to her family and her day job as an American diplomat in Tokyo. Why is the book worth reading?  Friedman's account of her exploration of a specific piece of Japanese culture is interesting, for sure; but beyond that, The Haiku Apprentice introduces readers to the beauty and precision of the Japanese language, and to the intriguing spiritual aspects of the practice of reading, writing, and enjoying haiku.

I said up above that although I don't, as a rule, enjoy reading poetry, I do like to hear it read or performed. I am not alone here – spoken word poetry has experienced a revival in the United States in the last twenty years in the form of the poetry slam. It's a very democratic sport, and the rules are simple: poets sign up to compete, they must perform original work, they can't use costumes or props, and they get three minutes. Judges are picked from the audience more or less at random, and they score each performance. That's it. If you want to see and hear how this works but don't know where the best local venue is, take a look at the film Slamnation: The Art of Spoken Word, directed by Paul Devlin. It's a profile of the 1996 New York City slam team as it makes its way to the national contest right here in the Rose City.

Fictional High School Breaks Out in Song

With news that the new television drama Glee has been picked up for FOX’s fall season, I have the oddities of high school on my mind. Glee follows a motley group of kids who are the core membership of the McKinley High School glee club, and their club director, Spanish teacher Will Schuester. There are many elements to the show’s plot, but here’s what strikes me: Glee kids are losers. Popular kids (that is, football players, cheerleaders, and the like) mock them constantly – every moment of the schoolday they’re laid open to harassment, teasing, and humiliation. Glee is lame, but if glee becomes cool (as all six kids and their director fervently hope), so will they.

But in some schools, there are no jocks, no cheerleaders, and more or less no richie-rich kids. At Edward R. Murrow, a public high school in New York City, the A-list kids are the members of the championship chess team. Sportswriter Michael Weinreb followed the team throughout the 2005-2006 school year, relating stories of chess club meetings, competitions, and cash games played in public parks; of rivalries and friendships; of talent and obsession with the game; and of the charismatic teacher who coaches the team. The Kings of New York is about the game of chess as much as it is about the Murrow team, and in the end it's a fascinating portrait of both.

The tension between popular kids and losers is at the very heart of the literature of adolescence. Nearly everyone who loves books or movies can cite a few that focus on the struggle for identity, on the horrible things kids do to each other to draw social lines, and the pressure everyone’s under. One of my personal favorites is The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton*. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, there are greasers, and there are socs – two groups widely separated by economic status, neighborhood, and general outlook on life. Violence between them is common, usually with the clean-cut socs as the initial aggressors, and it's a series of soc/greaser fights that forms the structural framework of the story. But in many ways, it's really about friendship and loyalty, and about understanding the different wisdom and strengths that different people have.

With all of its social pressure, high school is not for everyone. But how are you supposed to build a life after your teens if you don't have an education? You will find answers in the classic guide to unschooling, The Teenage Liberation Handbook. Former middle school teacher Grace Llewellyn provides guidance for kids who want to quit school but keep learning, every step of the way from investigating non-school options to talking to parents to getting into college without a high school diploma. This isn't a guide for homeschoolers, it's a guide for teens who want to set their own educational goals and reach them on their own terms. Llewellyn went on to write another book, Real Lives: Eleven Teenagers Who Don't Go to School Tell Their Own Stories, which should provide would-be unschoolers with more inspiration.

* Library-related trivia: a film version of The Outsiders was released in 1983, after Jo Ellen Misakian (a librarian at Lone Star School in Sanger, CA) wrote to Francis Ford Coppola to ask him to make it into a movie. She attached a petition signed by her eighth-grade students, who loved the book, and had hit on the idea that as a film, more people could enjoy the powerful story. And of course, the library has The Outsiders DVD as well as the book, for all of you who prefer watching to reading – or who just like to try both!

Penalty of Death

The Salem Statesman Journal reported this week that Marion County prosecutors will be seeking the death penalty in their case against Bruce and Joshua Turnridge, who are accused of aggravated murder in the deaths of two police officers in a bomb explosion at a Woodburn bank last December. Aggravated murder is the only crime for which a sentence of death is allowed in Oregon, and though the death penalty and discussion about it are relatively rare in the media here, Oregon does have a long history of executions.

And some of them have fascinating stories behind them, for example:  In 1858, Portland-area settler Danford Balch's teenaged daughter Anna eloped with a hired hand named Mortimer Stump – Balch was so angry about this that two weeks later, when he ran into Stump in a Portland bar, he followed him to the Stark Street Ferry and killed him with a shotgun blast to the head. Balch was convicted of murder and then hanged on October 17, 1859 at a public gallows set up near First and Salmon Streets while 500 people looked on. If this is the kind of grisly tale that suits your tastes, you need to check out Necktie Parties: A History of Legal Executions in Oregon 1851-1905, Diane L. Goeres-Gardner’s history of public executions in the Beaver State. In a series of short, readable chapters, Goeres-Gardner details every legal execution between 1851, when William Kendall was hanged in Salem, and 1905, when Daniel Norman Williams was hanged in The Dalles, the last man to be executed outside of the walls of the state penitentiary. (Or, if you'd rather focus on the political and legal history of executions in Oregon, take a look at A Tortured History: The Story of Capital Punishment in Oregon, by William R. Long. It's a bit more scholarly, and it focuses on the development of the institution rather than on the stories of people who were condemned to death.)

Oregon executes condemned prisoners with lethal injection, as do many other states. But lethal injection has only been widely used by government executioners in the U.S. for about 25 years – historically, prisoners have also been killed by firing squads and in gas chambers, hanged, and electrocuted. In his book Edison and the Electric Chair, Mark Essig explains that electrocution became a truly viable option when Thomas Edison, America's favorite inventor and entrepreneur, threw his weight behind the promotion of the electric chair. Interestingly, Edison was an opponent of the death penalty, but his rivalry with George Westinghouse put him under considerable financial pressure. Edison's company was providing electricity using the direct current method, which was more expensive than Westinghouse's alternating current (the system we still use today). This, Essig argues, led Edison to advocate for an electric execution chair using alternating current. Essig's history examines more than just the interpersonal and political aspects, though – he also provides thorough technical explanations of direct and alternating current, explains how the electric chair works, and describes the experiments that allowed researchers to develop the final model that was actually used for executions.

Not all executions are carried out within the framework of the formal legal system. Eliza Steelwater's The Hangman's Knot chronicles two parallel stories: the history of legal executions in the United States, and the history of lynching. Ultimately, Steelwater is looking to examine why the U.S. still employs the death penalty when most other democracies have long outlawed it. Steelwater is an opponent of the death penalty and it shows in her writing, but anyone interested in this history, regardless of their own political position, should find the book fascinating.

Lost and Found

Wired Magazine writer Evan Ratliff recently wrote a story about Matthew Allen Sheppard, a manager at an Arkansas electrical plant who charged $40,000 worth of personal items on a company credit card, faked his own death and fled to Mexico, but missed his family and was eventually caught while trying to reunite with them. How difficult is it to disappear in the digital age? Pretty challenging! Electronic traces are everywhere: ATM records are networked; any kind of email, Facebook post, text message, or other electronic communication can be monitored; and lots of regular people have their photograph and personal details all over the web so it's easy to see what they look like and what they're into. So Evan Ratliff and his editor Nick Thompson are making a game of going underground – Ratliff has disappeared, and Thompson is leading worldwide manhunt for him. Anyone can join in and compete for a prize of $5,000.  I'm sure you're rarin' to go, but if you'd like to do a little reading first about how to find missing or lost people, research how criminals manage to stay underground, or consider what you might do (or not do) if you wanted to disappear yourself, I've got some suggestions for you!

Imagine you're working on a mystery novel and you need details of how local police go about tracking a suspected pseudocide*. Cozy up with real-life gumshoe Fay Faron's Missing Persons: A Writer's Guide to Finding the Lost, the Abducted and the Escaped and you should pick up a few tips. Faron explains who is likely to go missing, who might want to find them, and common techniques private investigators like herself employ to start finding their quarry. (Writers and other folks generally interested in learning other bits and bobs about crime, criminals and investigators might want to look at the other books in the Howdunit Series, which cover everything from poisons to private investigation techniques.)

Evan Ratliff has to follow some rules for the month that he's underground – one of them is that he can't simply fade away into the wilderness. But some folks who disappear or go missing do it by getting away from cities, traveling on foot, and living close to the land. You can learn how to follow and find people in the natural world with Tracking: Signs of Man, Signs of Hope. Author David Diaz has spent the last twenty years learning advanced techniques for tracking people using the subtle signs they leave behind – foot prints, broken leaves, disturbed undergrowth, trash, blood trails, and more, and he shares his strategies in detail in this creepy but fascinating manual.

People go underground for lots of reasons. Some are trying to escape prosecution for a crime, like Matthew Allen Sheppard. Some just want to turn over an emphatically new leaf. Some folks, though, have stepped so far outside of their cultural norms that their lives are in danger because of their actions – people who turn "state's evidence" and testify against fellow criminals in exchange for immunity are sometimes given new identities, new lives, and long-term protection from the US Department of Justice in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Pete Earley's WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program is the story of how Justice Department attorney Gerald Shur created the program in the early 1960s, to help the Department win its war on organized crime. The book is filled with interesting detail about how WITSEC operates, and stories about people who have been offered protection through the program.

Criminals who've gone underground aren't all mobsters, though. Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty, starring River Phoenix is the story of a whole family on the run. Phoenix plays 17-year old Danny Pope, son of a pair of ex-sixties radicals who blew up a chemical lab that produced napalm scheduled to be used in the Vietnam War, and then were forced underground. The pressure of life in the shadows is getting to Danny, and he realizes he is going to have to make a choice: does he want to stay with his family, or try to strike out on his own without them?

* My new word of the day! The Oxford English Dictionary defines it thusly: "pseudocide, n. 1. A suicide attempt which is intended to fail, a pretended attempt at suicide. Also: the faking of one's own death. 2. A person who attempts or commits pseudocide." [Emphasis mine, of course!]

Make It Yourself

So as you know, the economy is a bit dodgy right now. Money is tight and folks want to find ways to economize. At the same time, public concern for the well-being of our natural environment is rising, and many people are looking for ways to live lighter on the land. This combination of influences is encouraging people to spend more time and effort making things they once would have bought, repairing things they would once have paid to replace, and repurposing things they would once have thrown away.

Crafts! DIY! Homekeeping skills! I'm here to tell you, there are a lot of swell books, zines, and magazines about how to make, do, maintain, repair, and repurpose things! Here are just a few that I especially like:

If your chief interests in do-it-yourself are saving money, learning how things work, and making neat stuff, sometimes it's best to cast an eye back to the past. Practical Projects for the Handy Man is a reprint of a book originally published in 1913 by the editors of Popular Mechanics Press, and with it in hand, you can learn to make furniture, toys and household objects, how to build the apparatus for magic tricks and science projects, and a dizzying array of other tips and tricks. The how-tos are interesting and helpful, but part of the charm of the book is the way it reflects the energy and, dare I say it, vim of an idealized active boy of 100 years ago.  This imaginary boy is fun loving, nimble with tools, curious about science and the natural world, and above all interested in creating things that will make life more interesting and amusing, save laborious work, and build his skills.  Being something of an optimist, I think there's a little bit of that idealized boy in all of us, and Practical Projects might help set yours to work!

But modern-day crafters and creators are all about sharing their how-to's also. The Best of Instructables collects more than 100 super awesome projects from the web community of the same name, where people around the world share how-to instructions for everything from soup to nuts. With The Best of Instructables, you can learn how to: eat a banana like a monkey, build a teeny greenhouse inside a light bulb, take the case off of your flash drive and stick the guts into a Lego brick, or make a frighteningly realistic werewolf costume, among other things.

Enough with the amusements, bring on the ideas and instructions for serious work! Formulas, Methods, Tips and Data for Home and Workshop, by Kenneth M. Swezey and Robert Scharff is a compendium of information you might need if, for example,  you wanted to determine what color a particular species of wood will turn when weathered outdoors, figure out what materials you'll need to build a brick wall of a certain size, or find a recipe for making homemade hand lotion. The sheer quantity of data, recipes, explanations, and project instructions in this 600+ page book is amazing, but it's readable, clearly organized, and incredibly down-to-earth.

If you'd like to try a few projects that are a bit more unusual, try browsing through Making Stuff and Doing Things, edited by Kyle Bravo and Jenny LeBlanc. How-tos from dozens of zines are reprinted in facsimile form, which means you'll get all the pleasure of the cute little drawings and diagrams illustrating how to do and make whatever it is. Some of my favorites explain how to make your own soymilk, unstink your socks, re-use typewriter ribbons, and do basic electrical wiring.  The book also has a nice little essay on some of the philosophical underpinnings of the DIY ethic.

If these particular books don't make your inner do-it-yourselfer jump up and down with excitement, try taking a look at the books on specific kinds of projects. Whether you want to learn about knitting, woodwork or upholstery, do a little appliance repair, plan some garden crafts, study furniture making, fix your bike, learn how to bind a book, build a fence or brush up on your jewelry-making skills, I promise you the library can help you get started.

And if you don't spot what you're looking for right away, there's always someone to help you out. If you're in the library, stop by the reference desk and we can help you find books, magazine articles or websites about your project. Or, if it's not convenient for you to visit the library immediately, a friendly librarian is only an email or a phone call away!

Seriously, if you’re ready to make stuff, the library is a great place to start.

Authenticity in Every Glass

Season three of the period 1960s drama Mad Men starts this weekend, and I'm sure you're all quite excited. There's nothing like a whole tv show full of smoking, drinking, sexism, and completely fabulous vintage clothes & interiors! The New York Times reported a few days ago that the show's prop masters work terribly hard at getting all those vintage details just perfect, including the drinks, the glasses they go in, and the liquor brands they use. Mad Men's network has an online guide to 1960s era cocktails, but since I know you're all so incredibly retro that you prefer to get your information from books, here are some suggestions:

If you want to make cocktails, learn to drink them with discernment, or just find out a bit about what can make them truly great, you could hardly find a better place to start than Dale DeGroff's The Essential Cocktail. DeGroff is a leading authority on cocktail history, and not only does he know how to mix a dreamy drink, he can show you how to do it too. He's arranged his recipes into logical categories, and he explains the features of the classic version of each famous drink, as well as providing an intelligent guide to creating variations. (And, as the Times article noted, DeGroff is not only a cocktail expert, he was himself in the advertising business in the early 70s, so he's definitely got the down low on authentic Mad Men-style boozing.)

If you require a wider knowledge of the drinking arts, you might turn to Kinglsey Amis's Everyday Drinking, a compendium of highly intelligent (though thoroughly subjective) drinking lore, advice and history originally written between 1971 and 1984. Among other things, Amis can help you figure out how to fool people into thinking you’re an expert on liquor or wine even if you know next to nothing, he provides thorough advice on all aspects of dealing with a hangover, and he outlines a recommended weight-loss diet for the heavy drinker. But humorous content aside, Amis was a great authority on wine, liquor, and beer, and had a lot to say about how to understand it and how to best enjoy it.

If you'd like to reach even further back in the past, well before the Mad Men era, I must recommend Charles H. Baker’s Jigger, Beaker, & Glass: Drinking Around the World, originally published in the 1930s. It provides an astonishing catalog of libations and detailed instructions for making each one, together with a dictionary of cocktail ingredients and a huge amount of commentary and advice. Some recipes are exotic, some familiar; some are complex, some incredibly straightforward; but all are clearly but amusingly written -- in fact, you could pick up this book without ever intending to mix a cocktail or concoct a punch, and still find it delightful.