habitually probing generalist

Tuesday of this week, February 7th, was the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth, his bicentenary. Various events were held worldwide and we did a little bit here in Sioux City at the Bishop Mueller Library at Briar Cliff University. Late in January, thanks to having most of our Dickens’ texts around me due to [...]

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My friend Jess talked me into participating in JaPoWriMo, or January Poetry Writing Month. At least that is how I am parsing it out. The idea is simply to write one poem a day. She insisted they could be a short as haiku and that there was no requirement for them to be any good. [...]

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Transformations. Anne Sexton; Houghton Mifflin 1971 WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder Brutal. Unflinching. Caustic. Anne Sexton let loose on fairy tales. This is another book in my Two-Thirds Book Challenge. There isn’t a lot to say here unless one is a fan of Sexton. We read a few of these along with many other Sexton poems (and those [...]

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English after the fall: from literature to textuality Robert Scholes; University of Iowa Press 2011 WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder Disclaimer: I received an uncorrected proof copy of this book as part of the Library Thing Early Reviewer Program. I read this book from 23 Nov – 13 Dec 2011 and the bottom line is that I enjoyed [...]

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Cribbed from Angel at The Itinerant Librarian. 1 The book I am currently reading. Like Angel, I usually have more than one book going. I am currently reading the following: The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore; Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces; Hermann Melville’s Billy Budd and other stories; and about a half [...]

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Registration time is soon upon us at BCU. This time it will be for J-Term (January 3-20) and Spring semester. I am open to any feedback you might have but here is what I am considering for both. Descriptions, where provided, are from my discussion with the profs—trying to take notes while also being courteous [...]

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Structures for organizing knowledge: exploring taxonomies, ontologies, and other schemas June Abbas; Neal-Schuman Publishers 2010 WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder [Full disclosure: I personally know and greatly respect the author of this text. I have met and talked with her at 5 conferences from 2006 to 2009 (4 ASIST Annuals and the 1st NASKO). I have seen her [...]

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Thought I’d post a little update regarding my plans for fall. First, a quick update on where I am currently. Update My hours at the BCU library were bumped up to 6 (from 5) hours/week so I could take on a weeding project of my own. I had already cataloged the backlog and current acquisitions [...]

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As I wrote a couple of posts back, I took a digital photography class (MCOM216) at Briar Cliff this summer. This short post is simply to provide links to my portfolio+ now that I have the pictures in Flickr. We used Photoshop to make an HTML portfolio as part of our graded exercises but it [...]

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  I read this aloud to Sara (and myself) from 22 May – 8 June. I quite enjoyed this book despite being familiar with some of the author’s argument due to reading his blog Text Patterns at The New Atlantis.  I recommend his blog. Jacobs is the author of several books: The Pleasures of Reading [...]

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