03.14.09
Posted in ACRL at 1:26 am by George Eberhart
Sherman Alexie signs copies of his book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian
ACRL’s Friday afternoon keynote was given by the popular Seattle poet, novelist, humorist, and filmmaker Sherman Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene Indian whom The New Yorker described as one of the top 20 writers of our country. Alexie is also an accomplished speaker and knows how to please a crowd, even one composed of academics. His opening words: “I love librarian conferences. There are thousands of hot, near-sighted women here. . . . Those oatmeal sweaters just do it for me.”
Alexie’s offbeat humor, however, is most often a mask for a serious take on race, humanity, assumptions, politics, and patriotism. In eastern Washington State where he grew up, most people are white and any Indian stands out. “But as I travel the world,” he said, “I’ve become ambiguously ethnic. People generally think I’m half of whatever they are.”
When he walks into a library, the librarians don’t know what to make of him: “They wonder, What kind of books might he like? What section should I steer him toward? Then they ask leading librarian questions to get me to reveal myself.
“‘Where are you from?’
“‘I live just down the block.’
“‘Well, how long have you lived there?’
“My standard answer: ‘12,000 years.’”
But it was the librarian on his childhood reservation that asked him, “What kind of stories do you like?” That’s always the best question, Alexie said. “My answer was, ‘Funny ones, usually about Indians.’”
Alexie noted that everyone assumes all Native Americans love nature. “Not true! For me, the outdoors is one large hallway between buildings. I’m allergic to everything that grows. Crazy Horse didn’t have to pause to take a Zyrtec while he was attacking Custer.”
After the session, someone asked whether he was working on another film, perhaps a sequel to Smoke Signals (1998). He said he had no plans for another movie, but he’s working on an idea for an HBO series about an all-Indian basketball team. “It’s only at Stage 2 of about 9,000, so don’t expect anything soon.” Other projects include turning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007) into a play produced by a Seattle theatre company: “It would be sort of High School Musical, but set in real life.” And there is a sequel to True Diary in the works that he is calling The Magic and Tragic Year of My Broken Thumb.
And here’s one thing you probably didn’t know about Seattle, courtesy of Alexie: “In Seattle, whenever there is a march — even against the Iraq War or in favor of gay marriages — eight people come dressed as sea turtles.”
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Posted in ACRL at 12:27 am by George Eberhart
The ACRL exhibit floor is usually a no-nonsense affair. Rarely do you see Elvis impersonators or talking robots, and giant fuzzy characters from kid lit are nowhere to be seen.
AL Direct Editor George Eberhart at the sit-in
However, when I heard that Alexander Street Press was holding a 1960s-style sit-in to celebrate the launch of its new online multimedia collection, I decided to join in and demonstrate that even American Libraries could engage in gonzo journalism (left). After providing the crowd with flowers for their hair, the bell-bottomed and headbanded Alexander Street presenters demoed The Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives, 1960 to 1974, a web-based collection that records the Zeitgeist of the era with narrative, documents, music, and video. It even has an option for users to contact the project advisers directly about submitting their own materials to be added to the collection. The sit-in only lasted 15 minutes, but the masses were energized and felt empowered to “Bring back the Sixties for serious scholarship.”
Another vendor that specializes in multimedia is the UK-based Adam Matthew Digital, which had a booth seven aisles away from the sit-in. One of their collections is a fascinating study of the social history of Britain from 1937 to 1965 in which academics interviewed, observed, photographed, and eavesdropped on ordinary citizens to learn their thoughts, habits, likes, and dislikes. Even their diaries (500 of them), dreams, reading preferences, cinema experiences, and the graffiti they scribbled on the walls of the pubs they frequented were of interest and recorded. The Mass Observation Online archive offers an invaluable glimpse into what life was like in England during the Depression, World War II, and the postwar era.
Nedra Peterson
Visuals can be a major help in conveying complicated concepts to restless students. As Nedra Peterson (right), director of the Woodbury University library in Burbank, California, explained during a Cyber Zed Shed presentation, “Students are visually oriented. Any tactic you can use to engage their attention is fair game. That’s why we use film clips, pop music, and commercials to explain key concepts in information literacy for our required class in library instruction.” Apparently the video and audio formats induce an emotional “affective state” in the students, which stimulates their brains and triggers recall of content later on. Peterson showed how she uses a clip from High Fidelity to introduce cataloging and collection arrangement, and a clip from The Ring to demonstrate effective research techniques (find the lighthouse) and critical thinking.
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