Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:40 PM

Until tonight, Ian had never actually seen the film of The Wizard of Oz. He'd read and loved the book, but somehow escaped being exposed to the Judy Garland version.

So, I finally rectified that, and we watched it on DVD. Here was his reaction.

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:24 AM

From the Library Journal Academic Newswire:

PEW REPORT: MOST SEARCH ENGINE USERS CAN'T DISTINGUISH PAID RESULTS Before librarians and those in academe get too comfortable leaving so many digital solutions to companies like Google, consider this: only one in six Internet search engine users can tell the difference between unbiased results and paid search advertisements. According to a new study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org), only 38 percent of web users even know of the distinction between the two, and just 47 percent say they can always tell which results are from paying advertisers.

Pew researchers say they are surprised at the results, as 92 percent of web searchers say they are confident about their searching abilities. The study also showed that many searchers are relatively unsophisticated in their use of search engines. Just 44 percent use a single search engine, with 47 percent using it no more than once or twice a week. Despite their difficulty in discerning unpaid results, nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought the presentation of paid results wasn't made clear. On other hand, a core of 32 percent use search tools more seriously. Pew data shows that these users tend to male, young, better educated, with higher income and longer online experience. They also are more likely to be able to differentiate between paid and unpaid results.

Pew has made the full report available here.

In other words, I'm a bit tired this morning. Gee, who would've expected a story called Tome of Entrapment, about a book that literally sucks people in, would be so engrossing... [Actually, I did get to bed at a relatively decent hour last night, but I really did get caught up in the story, which was also longer than I expected...]

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:35 PM

A few items I've seen around that I wanted to share:

1. The latest Christian Science Monitor includes "The ways we occupy ourselves nowadays," an essay on changing job titles.
2. Earlier this week, Mark Kleiman posited an interesting scenario for alternate history (which Andrew of Universal Acid explores further):

   Hume in his History of England, records that Columbus, having been rebuffed at the courts of Spain and Portugal, sent his brother Bartholomew to England to ask Henry VII for support. Henry liked the idea, and sent Bartholomew back with a message inviting Columbus to come to England. But Bartholomew's ship was taken by pirates, and Christopher stayed in Spain until Isabella finally came through.
   
   How would the world have been different if Columbus had sailed for England rather than Spain? Perhaps Central and South America would be rich and democratic. Or perhaps the silver of Peru and Mexico would have corrupted England instead of Spain.

3. Finally, a truly scary New Yorker essay (first seen on the Shifted Librarian) called "1992 House," which begins as follows:

   The assignment for Mrs. Stanfill's eighth-grade social-studies class was to pick a year in U.S. history and live for a week as if it were that year, without any of the conveniences available in today's modern society. I chose 1992

   Never realized how primitive conditions were...

Posted by Lis Riba at 9:15 PM

Earlier today, La Reine Noire asked:

Time for a game!
How many copies of Christopher Marlowe can one girl possibly own?

She shared the contents of her library, so I decided to list my collection as well. This is what I came up with:

• Works:
  • Paperback copy of the Complete Plays: bought used, which has since lost its front cover
  • Dover Thrift Edition of the Complete Poems
  • Shakespeare's Edward III, bought on remainder because I know the authorship is disputed.
  [Of course, now ask me which of these I've actually read, and it's much more embarrassing...]
  • I have the CD When Love Speaks with Annie Lennox's rendition of "Live with me and be my love"
  • I also have a poor quality rip from the audio track of McKellan's Richard III for the Big Band cover of the poem
• Nonfiction:
  • Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning (1st edition; I understand he's changed his conclusions in the newer version)
  • David Riggs' World of Christopher Marlowe
  All the other bios I've read have been borrowed from libraries.
• Modern fiction with Marlowe as a character:
  • "Winter's Tale" by Connie Willis
  • The Armor of light by Melissa Scott & Lisa A. Barnett (2 copies)
  • The Scholars of night by John M. Ford
  • Sandman The Doll's house by Neil Gaiman

And off the top of my head, that's it. I have access to a few other titles electronically, but most of my reading comes from borrowed books (libraries, for the most part).

That seems remarkably small given the amount of reading I've done. [I mean, I've read twenty of the 44 works on my Modern fiction list, but own only four!?]

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:05 PM

A friend recently asked:

I have a question for those on my flist who have MLS degrees - how hard was it to get them? I'm considering going that route after getting my BA, as I'm becoming aware that I would be one of those teachers with great enthusiasm for his subject but no ability to impart it to most people, and as I have strengths in research and organization, I'm wondering if I should pursue an MLS myself. . . .

I thought about it and wrote a response, and I think my advice is useful enough that I'm going to share it here:

I had little problem getting into school: besides college transcripts, I needed to take the GRE standardized exam and get some recommmendation letters. For the most part, I took classes part-time while working full-time, which generally worked ok. I would not recommend taking more than one class at a time if you're going to go that route.

Aside from one professor, the classes themselves were no more difficult than what I recall from my undergraduate Bachelor's degree. That one professor has a reputation for extremely heavy workloads. It's to the point that if I meet any other Simmons grad, I can say "Not knowing any better, I took her for my first class" and get a wince. When I add that I took her summer session, when things were taught double-time, they cringe in sympathy. But I digress.

Usually, you can check out course evaluations or talk with other students to find out more about the classes at whichever school you attend. [For example, it's common knowledge that you don't take Intro to Cataloging together with Intro to Reference, as they're both high-workload classes; either is manageable alone or (depending on your schedule) paired with other classes, but together they're a bit much.]

One other thing about the workload. Professors often operated on the assumption that students have access to a library for their homework. A majority of students worked in libraries, and could use those resources. If you don't have access to a good library near your home, you should plan to have to use the school library. And assignments often require reference materials that can't be checked out, so expect that you will need to be spend time in a library, and schedule accordingly.

Whether you should pursue an MLS? One of the deciding factors for me was just reading through the course catalog to see whether the classes actually sounded interesting. As I like to joke, I truthfully went looking for 36 credits and found 36 classes that I wanted to take.

One of my professors observed that MLS degrees attract two kinds of students: the social types and extroverts who want to interact with the public (reference, instruction, storytelling) and the more-introverted techies (cataloging and computers). A typical library job will most likely require both (catalogers asked to help on the reference desk), but she said she could really see the differences.

I will also echo what your other friends have told you. Library jobs are scarce and, particularly in the case of public libraries and the schools, don't pay terribly well. There's frequent PR about an upcoming librarian shortage -- (1) the average age of librarians is older than most professionals (many people enter the field late in life or as a second career), so (2) soon they will all retire leaving a ton of openings just begging to be filled by shiny new graduates. The first half of that does appear to be true, but not the second. Due to budget cuts on all levels, librarians who leave aren't being replaced, and libraries are strapped so tight that they're cutting back hours or closing branches or laying people off.

On the other hand, if you're not specifically looking to work in a library, an MLS can be a boon in other fields. Library science includes studies of databases and indexing and taxonomies and other useful skills in high-tech fields.
Research and organization -- definitely! There are times when I think of a library degree less as its own discipline, than as training in skillsets that will work in any other discipline. I can find things faster and more efficiently, whether I'm looking up something related to literature or law or medicine or business.

In conclusion, I'd say go for it if it's a subject you think you'd be interested in. Don't do it solely as a career path. Do it for the learning and classes you'll take, not for any expected benefits from having the degree. Does that make sense?

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:15 PM

I just discovered that I'm not the only company employee who blogs under hir real name. The other blogger is somebody I know from an earlier life (or, at least, an earlier company) and has been with this company for an even shorter tenure than I, but suffice it to say I'm no longer the sole token blogger in the place.

Posted by Lis Riba at 8:32 PM

At Arisia, I heard someone talking about the Shakespeare canon, and started wondering what would be considered Shakespeare fanon...

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:50 PM

As I've mentioned earlier, one of the unsung benefits of this job is the access to reading materials. I want to share the benefits of my discoveries with you.

So welcome to a new occasional feature of this blog, something I'm currently calling: Seeing the cites^*.

I'm not going to share the full-text articles on this blog, but hopefully this will give you enough information to (a) decide whether you want to read them, and (b) find them through your local libraries.

"Hermione Granger's Solution"

One of my greatest frustrations with the first Harry Potter novel occurs near the conclusion, where Harry and Hermione are confronted with a logic puzzle. They're trapped in a room with seven bottles: one allows the drinker to move into the next room, one will let the drinker retreat to the previous room, two are harmless, three are poisons, and the only clue is a riddle.

I find this so incredibly frustrating, because J.K. Rowling doesn't provide enough detail for readers to actually solve the problem! It wouldn't take much to make this a playfair mystery -- just a description of the bottles and their positions, for example.

That's why I was delighted to find:

"Hermione Granger's Solution" by Roger Howe
Mathematics Teacher, Volume 95 Number 2 (February 2002), page 86

In the four-page article, Mr. Howe backsolves the problem. Given the clues provided, how are the bottles arranged, and what does each contain?

Rowling hasn't provided enough information to derive a unique solution, but Howe demonstrates how logic can narrow down the 5040 possible configurations to a far more manageable two.

Pretty cool.

^* I'm not entirely happy with that name for this series; if you've got an idea for something better, please share your suggestions in the comments.

[Note: On February 11, I decided to rename this series "Seldom seen cites"]

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:20 AM

I took drivers ed when I lived in Florida, and for some reason they didn't teach me much about handling winter conditions. Everything I learned about driving in snow I picked up on the streets of Boston and through the The Boston Driver's Handbook, a title most bookstores shelve in the humor section.

At any rate, I've been doing this for well over a decade now and have a pretty decent grip on what I'm doing. [Such as: when in doubt about the conditions, let Ian drive. <grin>]

But today I saw something unusual, and I was hoping one of you might be able to explain.

It's snowing, and expected to snow for much of the day. When I pulled into the parking lot, I noticed at least a half-dozen cars with their windshield wipers pulled out so they were sticking straight up (like antennae), rather than lying against the windshield as they normally do.

Why?

• What are the advantages of this?
• Does it make it easier to clean the windshield later?
• Are there any risks, like the wipers getting stuck like that?
• Was this just a prank to see whether they could induce succeptible coworkers into copycat behavior? [If so, they succeeded; I couldn't see any reason not to, so cleaned the ice off the blades and stuck my antennae wipers straight up, too.]

Anyway, just curious.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:30 AM

I know that Google has made it possible to search OCLC Worldcat (to find copies of books in the nearest libraries). However, I'm not sure what keywords to add to my search to push those results to the top, nor do I have the time right now to go digging.

Can some clever librarian (or other Google-acolyte) share the secret with me?

Thanks!

Added later: Lis Carey found the answer for me. And here's the article in Searcher magazine with more details.

Thank you!

Posted by Lis Riba at 11:20 PM

[Because, I couldn't write about the con until I did the responsible thing and finished blogging about work. :) Well, it made sense in my head, at least.]

Goodnight, everybody!

Posted by Lis Riba at 10:30 PM

For a while now, I've been meaning to post about how things are going at my new job. So I'll just take this moment to ramble on about some of the things I've been intending to mention for the last several weeks (seriously! I've jotted them down in my notebook, but just haven't had the time to blog).

What else...

I seem to have become the resident expert on blogs within the company. So much for keeping a low profile <grin> This probably means refining and reposting my personal blog policy for everyone's protection. And to any of you coworkers reading this, Hello!!! Introduce yourself in the comments. Or maybe you can help me with the following:

I've also had an idea for an April Fool's prank along the lines of those I used to pull at Lotus. I think it would be a great gag, but I'm still familiarizing myself with the corporate culture, and I'm not sure how well it would go over. I think I'm going to have to recruit an accomplice who has been with the company longer to advise me on those aspects...

And, well, that's about all I feel like writing about work for now. Hopefully, those of you who have been with me through my gruelling job hunt can now feel happy that I've landed someplace good. And those in the Boston area looking for work, we do have an employee referral program. :) [To you-know-who-you-are who emailed me a few weeks ago, I checked but so far haven't seen anything that quite matches your skillset.]

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:45 PM

A strong element in The World of Christopher Marlowe was the Catch-22 that existed in Elizabethan England for the well-educated lower classes.

Marlowe was too smart to be satisfied in the trades (besides academia raising hopes, he was also probably too old for apprenticeships after earning his degree), yet not well-connected or high-born enough to land a secure court position. He was stuck square in the middle, unable to find his place (or an income), and Riggs points to textual evidence that makes Marlowe sound bitter and resentful about that.

Anyway, I was thinking about that Saturday morning on the drive into Arisia, while we listened to Standing room only on the radio -- Broadway showtunes. Julie Andrews My Fair Lady got me thinking:

Could the Pygmalian story work transplanted to Shakespearean England?

Social ties among the upper classes were so tight (and interrelated), would an unknown actually be able to plausibly gain admittance to the court? I think it might be easier to set such a tale early in James' reign, when the court was in a bit more flux and strange Scots were coming down to London.

Just something for me to ponder and play with...

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:45 PM

Ian found and forwarded to me the following Screen cleaning utility.

A most excellent tool. I wish somebody would make a screensaver out of it for regular maintenance.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:40 PM

So, part of the reason I've been away from the computer is because I've been absorbed with reading.

Finished The World of Christopher Marlowe. I can somewhat understand the criticisms I've heard that Marlowe is treated a bit like an enigma as Riggs focuses on the world around him. But having already read other Marlowe biographies, suffice it to say I liked it and learned many new things. I even may update my Marlowe in modern fiction list to make this the recommended biography.

I've occasionally commented that I'm well positioned to write fantasy fiction about Marlowe, given that I've not only read enough other books about him, but I've done a fair bit of reading into Elizabethan attitudes towards sexuality and towards faerie. But I've never actually had a story to tell.

Well, Riggs has given me one story seed that I'm going to nurture in the back of my mind to see whether anything germinates. To quote:

Lucan was off limits for Elizabethan translators. When Barnabe Googe undertook a translation of Lucan at the outset of the reign, Calliope, the Muse of Heroic Poetry, appeared in a dream and told him to abandon Lucan in favour of Christian astrologer Palingenius, 'whose pen did tread the crabbed ways / Of virtuous life'. In the Preface to his Tragical Tales (c. 1575), George Turberville recounted a similar experience. Turberville no sooner began to translate Lucan than the Muse of Tragedy came to him in a dream. Melpomene was more direct than her sister Calliope had been with Googe. She not only warned Turberville to 'Let lofty Lucan's verse alone'; she further admonished him to 'Remember how fond Phaeton fared / That undertook to guide Apollo's charge.' This poem was not for him

I'm not sure how common this timing is, but Riggs assigns Lucan to late in Marlowe's life.

Just three weeks after Marlowe's death, George Peele eulogized "Marley, the muses' darling" -- but what if he weren't? Which other Englishmen translated Lucan, and what were their fates? I've seen fictions where Marlowe contends with demons (The Armor of light) and where he deals with faerie (Strange devices of the sun and moon and Sarah Hoyt's series), but what of his relations with the muses and fates and other creatures from the Greco-Roman mythology that he wrote about?

Something to ponder.

[On a related note, I've found another title for my Marlowe in modern fiction list through Christopher Marlowe: a literary life. I realize this is only cool to me, but I was excited by the discovery, since the rate of additions has slowed precipitously.]

After that, I started reading one of the galleys I got at ALA Midwinter: A Perfect red : empire, espionage, and the quest for the color of desire. The last several years has seen a rise in what one bookstore has categorized as "mundane histories" -- stories behind everyday objects. And I have to say that I find these fascinating. As one may guess from the title, this is the history of red dyes.

Trying to describe Red (to be released in May) the first word that comes to mind is "colorful" -- and that's not intended as a pun. The story ranges all over, from Italian dyers to the Spanish conquistadors to the British Royal Society and East India Company, through piracy and espionage and fashion, with fun trivia details on the origins of now-common words and phrases.

But take a look at this excerpt about the future Emperor Charles V to see what I mean by colorful:

Thanks to these illustrious ancestors, young Charles claimed nearly half of Europe as his birthright. Yet if family was the making of Charles, it was also the source of great sorrow. Many had considered his parents' match felicitious -- his Flemish father, Philip the Fair, was said to be the handsomest man in Europe, and his mother, Juana of Castile, was destined to inherit the crown of Spain -- but the marriage was a disastrous one. Unfaithful to his wife, Philip had attempted to rule over her kingdom with a heavy hand, only to die of a sudden fever when Charles was just six. Some claimed that Juana had poisoned her philandering husband -- an unlikely story, though it was true that Philip, when alive, had driven his wife half-mad with jealousy.

After Philip's death, Juana descended even farther into madness and melancholia, a victim of the mental illnesses that plagued Iberia's inbred royal houses. Refusing to bury her husband's body, she accompanied it instead on a macabre funeral tour of Spain, during which she insisted on opening the casket again and again. The people of Spain began calling her Juana la loca -- Juana the Mad. Soon afterward, she was confined for life in a castle in Tordesillas.

With his father dead and his mother locked away, Charles was raised by his paternal aunt, Margaret of Austria [...]

As Charles grew up under Margaret's care, it became clear that he had inherited his father's athletic grace but not his good looks. Even when he was a child, Charles's lower jaw jutted out to an abnormal degree, and by the time he reached manhood his jaw was so massive that he found it a strain to keep his mouth closed. Instead he often let it hang open, prompting a common laborer to say to him in 1518, "Lord, shut your mouth, the flies of this country are naughty." Charles would later do his best to disguise the fault with a beard and mustache, but the "Habsburg jaw" would dog his descendants for generations.

I mean, they never taught history like that when I was in school.

And the third major book I finished this week was Aaron Lansky's Outwitting history : the amazing adventures of a man who rescued a million Yiddish books

Oy, I called the other book colorful? Funny, entertaining, educational... I couldn't resist reading frequent excerpts to Ian, which invariably cracked him up. Heck, our downstairs tenant came by during a break in the snowshoveling, and I cracked him up, and he's not even Jewish!

I'm trying to think of an appropriate and brief excerpt to share:

I had figured book collection meant picking up boxes, carrying them out to the truck, and fartig, you're done and it's time to move on to the next stop. Instead, Mr. Temmelman insisted I join him at the kitchen table, where, for what seemed like hours, we sipped tea, sucked on sugar cubes, and talked. When it came time to part with his books, his eyes welled with tears as he began handing them to me, one volume at a time.

"This book," he recalled, pulling a handsome volume of Zishe Landau's Lider (Poems) from a cardboard box, "this book I bought in 1937. It had just come out, it was a very important book, my wife and I we went without lunch for a week we should be able to afford it. And this book," he said, holding aloft a yellowed copy of Ven Yash iz geforn (When Yash Set Forth), Jacob Glatstein's powerful account of his travels in interwar Europe, "have you read this book?"

"Well, no, actually I haven't," I conceded.

"In that case, I want you should sit down right now and read this book."

It was a long afternoon. Every book he handed me had its story.

And several chapters later, he explains lessons learned:

The visit to Mr. Temmelman was my first and last trip alone. After that, I tried whenever possible to travel in a team of three: two to do the shlepping and the third to be the Designated Eater. The latter was the really hard job: While the others carried boxes, you had to sit with the host at the kitchen table, listening to stories, sipping endless glasses of tea, and valiantly working your way through a week's worth of dishes cooked "special," just for you...

I'd give this my highest recommendation, and think all of you would enjoy it -- and keep in mind, that's in a week when I read an acclaimed Marlowe biography! So, nu? what are you waiting for?

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:30 PM

Sorry things have been so quiet here lately. I feel bad because there've been a lot of things I've been meaning to write, but I've been too busy to jot them down. But not only haven't I been been in a mood to blog, but I haven't been doing much reading of blogs either. I think I've got to trim my LJ Friend List (or create a reading filter), because I just can't keep up.

Took a personal snow day home from work today. Officially, the company was open for business, but we weren't able to dig our car out from the snow until midday today. So, I took an unpaid day off.

For those unfamiliar with our house, we own a three-family with a parking area large enough for four or five cars in the back. The catch is, our plot has a bit of a slope. The front door opens onto the first floor. The entrance at the back, at the bottom of the driveway, is to the basement. So not only do we have a lot of ground to (un)cover, but it's a steep angle.

However, Ian succeeded in digging us out, so I'll be back at work tomorrow.