Filed under: Uncategorized
Dear Friends/Readers,
After many months of not posting, I have decided to retire my blog. The past year has been very successful for the letting go and now I must focus on the go getting.
I have finally graduated from Library school and am facing the horrible job market with as much go-get-em as I can muster. I have pretty much quit smoking, though I will occasionally succumb to temptation. I am contemplating my future and where I want to be geographically and looking forward to whatever may come. I am also reading my ass off.
I hope to come back with a more focused purpose for blogging and more time for keeping it up!
Until then,
XXXOOO
Miss LGG
Filed under: Uncategorized
I’m almost a librarian. One more week!
ONE MORE WEEK!!!!
XXXOOO
Miss LGG
Filed under: Uncategorized
Still working on monster research project.
Still being distracted by ridiculous chartings of pop songs.
Courtesy of GiggleSugar
Wanna see more song charts? Check out this Song Chart Meme Flickr set by boyshapedbox.
XXXOOO
Miss LGG
I am still on a high from the election on Tuesday night! My cynical self had been surprisingly hopeful and optimistic the week leading up to it, but as I watched the beginning of the returns, I had flashbacks to four years ago and started to get a wee bit nervous.
I was fortunate enough (thanks to my awesome boyfriend) to score a ticket to the ralley on Tuesday night! It was indescribably exciting, inspiring, emotional, beautiful and only mildly claustrophobic. You may have seen some pictures of the crowd in Grant Park. If you look closely there are some patches of trees in the way way way way back of the crowd. That’s where we were. Those trees, however, were on a tiny hill–and even though I was squinting through the leaves, and worried that the people who had climbed the trees were going to fall on me, I could actually see the stage, as opposed to someone’s back. I have to thank the awesome, tall boyfriend for sacrificing his branch-free, clear view for me to get a tiny glimpse of history.
It’s a long and sort of funny story of how we ended up way in the back of the crowd, but let’s just say it involves a VIP trolley, Spike Lee, the quick realization that we were not where we were supposed to be/way out of our league and a speedy return to the land of the regular people (aka a long ass line).
But, I digress…the whole night was incredible, and I am beyond amazed and hopeful for our future. Wow, it feels really good to say that, to think that. It feels really good to be proud of this country–I can’t remember the last time I felt that way.
Here’s to a new day!
XXXOOO,
Miss LGG
Filed under: Uncategorized
Dear readers, lovely friends:
I have slacked on my bloggings over the last couple of months. I apologize. I shall return. Over the past month and a half, I have been:
- slicing my head open on a wrought iron fence while playing softball/sporting some nice shiners for three weeks.
- obsessively watching MSNBC.
- enjoying my last two graduate classes–Internet Publishing and Research Methods, the best classes I have taken yet, and the hardest…not good for a major case of senioritis.
- obsessively panicking over the end of graduate school and having nightmares that even after completing my master’s I am still working at current place of employment.
- looking for library jobs (in order to combat bullet point two)
- reading the ridiculous and highly addictive candy of a young adult series, Twilight
- thinking about Open Access and how I can make a career out of advocating for it
- missing my very busy, super talented boyfriend who has been working on multiple shows.
Sorry you had to look at the ATM of books for so long.
XXXOOO,
Miss LGG
Filed under: Uncategorized
I was bored in class last night, and in an effort to keep myself awake I started reading all of the tribute pieces to David Foster Wallace at McSweeney’s, and then in turn started bawling. Silly, I know.
I didn’t know the guy. I’ve read some of his essays and struggled with Infinite Jest over and over and over again, but by the time I was finally done with it, I had a new favorite author and literary hero. I never knew much about the man himself, but through the loving words of his students, colleagues and friends am learning that in addition to being a genius, he was also a kind and gentle soul. I think those might be rarer than literary geniuses, which makes his untimely death that much harder.
This one, by another of my favorite authors Zadie Smith, hit me the most:
“He was my favourite. I didn’t feel he had an equal amongst living writers. We corresponded and met a few times but I stuttered and my hands shook. The books meant too much to me: I was just another howling fantod. In person, he had a great purity. I had a sense of shame in his presence, though he was meticulous about putting people at their ease. It was the exact same purity one finds in the books: If we must say something, let’s at least only say true things.1 The principle of his fiction, as I understand it. It’s what made his books so beautiful to me, and so essential. The only exception was the math one, which I was too stupid to understand. One day, soon after it was published, David phoned up, sincerely apologetic, and said: “No, look … you don’t need anything more than high school math, that’s all I really have.” He was very funny. He was an actual genius, which is as rare in literature as being kind—and he was that, too. He was my favourite, my literary hero, I loved him and I’ll always miss him.
1 And let’s say them grammatically.
—Zadie Smith
Crap, I’m crying again. So silly.
Read them all at McSweeny’s.
XXXOOO,
Miss LGG
Filed under: Uncategorized
Some of my favorite videos from the Guardian’s List of the 50 Greatest Art Videos on You Tube!
- Dinah Shore & Ella Fitzgerald Duet
- Nabakov on Lolita
- A film by Samuel Beckett, featuring Buster Keaton
Once I get used to being insanely busy with school again, I promise to blog with more substance. Until then, I will be sharing awesome interweb findings.
XXXOOO
Miss LGG
Happy sort of 444th Birthday William Shakespeare or Sir Francis Bacon or whoever you really are!
Thanks for many, many things, especially:
the words gossip, eyeball, lonely, lustrous, besmirch, amazement and radiance, your sonnets, especially #30 and #98, for “I am not a slut, but I thank the God’s that I am foul,” “brevity is the soul of wit,” and “to thine own self be true,” for Jacques, Kate, Rosalind, Malvolio, Viola and Richard III, and for As You Like It, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, Troilus and Cressida and yes, even Pericles.
XXXOOO
Miss LGG
P.S Please feel free to add your favorite Shakespearean inventions!
Filed under: Uncategorized
Woo hoo! I survived making my first website!
Using a scenario assigned for a Library Management class group project I decided to design a website around a new graduate program at the fictional Utopia University. The site would have a page for web resources, books, journals and databases.
I wanted the site to be visually pleasing and spent a great deal of time choosing colors, photos, and font style. As for the layout, I had originally story boarded a much more complicated page full of nested tables and quickly found that I was not quite skilled enough yet to make it work. So, I slowed down and came up with a plan much more fitting to my basic HTML knowledge.
If I were to do this again, I would definitely make sure to view the site in various browsers as I worked. Unfortunately, I did most of my coding and initial viewing on a tiny IBook G4 screen and only in Firefox. I was in for quite a surprise when I got to class and viewed my work on a monitor twice the size in Internet Explorer. Fortunately, I was able to make minor alterations and have it look the same on all browsers and monitors.
I must admit, that as frustrating as this project was at times, I grew to enjoy the process very much. I look forward to learning more about HTML and CSS and hope to play around with designing a site again soon!
Check out my biographical webpage which contains a link to my website!
Books?????
Oh–I am so conflicted by Amazon’s new e-book reader! It both excites and frightens me!
I love love love love love books—I collect them, I obsess over them, I can’t imagine a more perfect object than a book. The texture of the cover, the smell of the paper, the feeling of turning the pages, the weight in your hands, oh–I could go on and on about the physical perfection of the book. But books as seen in the below video, are essentially a technology—a technology that has outlasted most others, but a technology nonetheless. Does this mean that the book is bound to be surpassed by something else? A new technology that will revolutionize the way we read?
Time out for a funny video about the technology of books:
I digress, back to the Kindle. Is Amazon’s new Kindle e-book reader, finally the e-book reader that will take off? Unveiled earlier this week with a great deal of hype, there are already reports that the first launch has sold out.
So what is so amazing or possibly revolutionary about the Kindle?
- Not just for books—you can subscribe to newspapers (NYT, WSJ, etc) and blogs
- View PDF or Word documents sent to your Kindle e-mail address
- Always connected to the web—search google, access wikipedia, etc.
- $9.99 charge for new releases/$1.99 for classics
- Can also play audio books
Please read Steve Levy’s fantastic Newsweek article about the kindle and the book as technology.
This closing observation really hit me:
“The awesome technology of original books—and our love for them—will keep them vital for many years to come. But nothing is forever. Microsoft’s Bill Hill has a riff where he runs through the energy-wasting, resource-draining process of how we make books now. We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world. “Do you really believe that we’ll be doing that in 50 years?” he asks.”
Ouch. I don’t want to give up my books, but might it be the responsible thing to do?
What do you think fellow book lovers?
