Month: September 2015
Haiku Break
Do you ever feel like this?
Book Review: Flight Behavior
Some authors evoke in me a longing for nurturing. As I read, I want to crawl into their laps and hear them tell me their story while rubbing the silky end of a blanket, never mind that I am a full-grown adult. Barbara Kingsolver is one of these “moms” whose works can both soothe and sharpen this craving. I steel myself from being too drawn in, but her books pry and tug until I sigh and open my heart and soul knowing they are in wise, safe hands and bound to
get a good scrubbing. Flight Behavior is about the collision of a rural woman’s life with a freak monarch butterfly migration. Themes of buried potential, metamorphosis, and disintegration along with their catalysts, make for a thought-provoking, thoroughly human reading experience.
~Librarian Robin
Maker Faire Fun
I learned all about Portland’s new library maker space and made a light-up bookmark with this handsome young man. Good times!
September 11th
On September 11, 2001, I was a newly minted librarian in my first librarian position adjusting to living back in the Mainland U.S. after a decade in Hawaii. At our branch of the Sacramento Public Library, each day a different staff member came in before everyone else, and my day was Tuesday. On my way to work on September 11th, I heard the somber newscasters reporting the morning’s horrific trauma. I had to hear the recap over and over again before I could comprehend that this was truly deliberate. It would be hours before I could wrap my brain around the magnitude of the attack. My vision felt like it was tunneling as I drove. I remember shaking as I unlocked the door and turned on the lights in the library. I don’t remember what I did next, alone there for that first hour. Did I just have the internet or was there was a radio? I do remember doing my tasks, although I was surely on a shocked sort of autopilot. I knew those towers. More than once during my internship for the New York Public Library, I stood in line at the TKTS booth at the World Trade Center to snag bargains on Broadway shows. That was in the summer of 2000, just about a year prior. The TKTS booth was in the area beneath the towers. I remember high ceilings, a lot of glass, painted steel, and a feeling of vastness. As lines go, it was not a horrible place to wait because of all the windows and sunlight. From my housing situation in Manhattan, I got to the World Trade Center via the convenient subway station under the buildings. The subway let out into a mall-like area. I remember a Gap store. These memories bounced around my head that morning at the library. “I was there,” I kept thinking to myself. Once my co-workers started to arrive, someone got a television hooked up at the circulation desk. The footage replayed over and over again all day. It was like lashes on a raw wound. I remember people saying not to let young children watch because they would think the attacks were happening over and over again. As an adult, I watched to try and understand. I couldn’t. Over the course of the day something emerged from my brokenness, like a web, that connected with others to expand and stretch around the victims, fighters, families, city, and country. It felt tangible like I should be able to see whatever this was I was a part of, this sorrowful gentle cradling of humanity.
~Librarian Robin
Poetry Flight or “Just Leave the Bottle”
All of us carry poetry in our soul. For some it flows freely into pen or song. Some spend their life painstakingly tunneling through cement with a spoon to create a channel for the merest trickle to eke through; some use dynamite. When the inner poet finds its voice, the results can be powerful, magical even.
Crush by Richard Siken is a brutal examination of the power of panic and passion, kind of like if someone’s heart was skinned alive and they lived to tell about it. Not widely available, I got it through free interlibrary loan at my public library.
Crush inspired this amateur sketch of mine:
Translated from German by Rilke’s most widely respected translator to date, The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke contains the treasured writings of a man who advised others to “feel love, and seek truth” while fully experiencing the world around them. It contains previously uncollected poems such as “You Who Never Arrived” about searching and elusiveness.
Find your joy in the magic of the mundane. Delight in the playful way Collins peppers his works with everyday objects and thoughtful musings. Collins is said to be “America’s favorite poet” and indeed he is a past U.S. Poet Laureate. Aimless Love is Collins’ latest publication. It contains recent selected works as well as fifty-one new poems.
Pent up lust and longing from a lifetime of maidenhood seep through the edges of these ladylike musings. If you read carefully, you may hear the distinct rattle of a cage door. Although restrained by the society of her time, no one can say that Ms. Dickinson did not experience love.
~Librarian Robin
Reading Goggles 