Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library is a dreary, well-worn, four-story
central library two blocks west of Verizon Center in Washington D.C. It was designed by celebrated 20th-century
modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and was outdated the day it opened
according to Richard Reyes- Gavilan executive director of the District of Columbia
library system. If all goes according to
plan, the library’s collections and staff will move out at the end of 2016 or
early next year so construction can begin.
MLK is slated to reopen in 2019 as a future-minded reimagination of a
21st-century public library. Along with
the usual collections and offices, the 460,000-square-foot space will include a
rooftop garden atop a new fifth floor, two large performance areas, spaces for
start-ups and students, a cafe and an interactive children’s reading room. A “maker space” filled with 3-D printers and laser cutters, dubbed the Fab Lab,
has already opened. The price tag for
the project is $198 million. But
Reyes-Gavilan’s ambitions go beyond bricks and mortar. He wants to put the D.C. Public Library at the
forefront of American libraries, to be a model for the nation by embracing a
“hacker” culture that treats library patrons not as passive consumers of
information, but as creators. His mantra is “libraries are not their
buildings,” but “engines of human capital.”
Reyes-Gavilan was born in Queens, N.Y., the youngest of three sons of
Cuban immigrants. His mother, Nora,
stayed at home to raise her boys, while his father, Rodolfo, worked a series of
odd jobs, including stints at a matchbox factory and manual labor at Creedmor
Psychiatric Center in Queens Village, Queens.
During the summer months, his father would bring him along to the mental
hospital. To amuse himself, the then-8-years-old
Reyes-Gavilan joined in the games of imaginary baseball that patients played
without balls, mitts or bats. “You’d
swing and they’d tell you to run,” he remembers. “I didn’t care, I was hitting a home run
every time. At that age, everything you
do was pretend, so it was completely and utterly normal.” On Saturday mornings, his father would drop
him off at the main branch of the Queens Library. “It wasn’t so much the books that attracted
me as it was the place,” he says. “It
was about going to a place that was free that you could get lost in.” In his early 20s, he made a living selling
books by helping his then-girlfriend’s father, Hank Salerno, a school principal
on Long Island, with his side gig as a rare-book dealer. They combed sales at churches, libraries and
estates, sometimes finding unexpected treasures, such as Thomas Pynchon’s high
school yearbook. Reyes-Gavilan and
Jennifer Salerno also bought and resold trade paperbacks of counterculture
literature at a sidewalk stand on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. Many years later, at Hank Salerno’s suggestion,
he got his library-science degree and found work at public library branches in
the Bronx. He learned “my calling was being in bigger buildings with more
variety of activities going on. Reyes-Gavilan
eventually rose to chief librarian of the Brooklyn Public Library, earning
accolades for initiatives such as establishing career centers in libraries. Then in 2013, DCPL’s Board of Library Trustees
chose Reyes-Gavilan to replace
Ginnie Cooper, another former chief librarian in Brooklyn, as executive director. Nevin Martell
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/meet-the-man-who-is-turning-dcs-library-system-into-a-national-model/2016/03/30/5d06eda0-db50-11e5-891a-4ed04f4213e8_story.html
When a
small child, Flannery O'Connor kept
a pet chicken and trained it to walk backwards.
It was the subject of a 1931 film short titled "Unique Chicken Goes
in Reverse." Later she said it was
"the high point" in her life, adding "Everything since has been
anticlimax." Her favorite subject
was birds, and a gift of crayons or drawing paper was more of a treat than
being offered candy. Her father taught
her how to bind books, and at one of her manuscripts, "My
Relitives", typed for her so she
could distribute it in style. She loved
to turn things upside down and backward.
One of her cartoons has one fish tell another, "You can go jump out
of the lake." Hoping to improve her
chances of publication, she dropped her first name, Mary, and became Flannery
O'Connor. Source: Flannery O'Connor: the Cartoons, edited by Kelly Gerald. Thank you, Muse reader!
Flannery O'Connor turned her initials, MFOC, into a
logo that became her signature. She made
the signature to look like a chicken, with the M as a beak, the F as tail
feathers, the O as a head, and the C as a curve for the body. See the initials as a bird at http://tumblr.austinkleon.com/post/7394928170
‘The Habit of Art’: Flannery O’Connor,
illustrator by Katharine Eastland o
young writers seeking advice, she wrote, “You have got to learn to paint with
words,” and argued that any discipline, be it mathematics or theology—but
especially drawing—would help them to see and, ultimately, to judge. For judgment, which is critical to fiction,
begins and ends in sight: “Everything
has its testing point in the eye,” she wrote, “and the eye is an organ that
eventually involves the whole personality, and as much of the world as can be
got into it.” A phrase O’Connor used in
her book of essays and speeches, Mystery
and Manners, published posthumously in 1969, is “the habit of art,” which
she culled from the book she “cut her aesthetic teeth” on, Art and Scholasticism by Jacques Maritain. By Maritain’s phrase (which is not truly his,
as its roots extend to Cicero’s writing on rhetoric) she does not mean artistic
activity—though that, too, has its place—but the quality or disposition of mind
that yields such activity: Writing
is something in which the whole personality takes part—the conscious as well as
the unconscious mind. Art is the habit
of the artist and habits have to be rooted deep in the personality.
Have you ever thought to yourself, "Justin Bieber's songs
could make for a good soap opera?" Well, James Corden did, and he created a soap opera with Salma Hayek, Gary Oldman and Ray Romano using only the lyrics from the Biebs'
song repertoire. Titled The Bold and the Lyrical, the
soap opera, debuted April 5, 2016 on The Late Late Show.
The idea was simple enough—to create a logo and slogan that
cast the long-struggling state of Rhode
Island in a fresh, more
optimistic light to help attract tourists and businesses. A world-renowned designer was hired. Market research was conducted. A $5 million marketing campaign was set. What could go wrong? Everything, it turns out.
Supreme Court Appointment Process: President’s Selection of a Nominee by Barry J. McMillion, Analyst on the Federal
Judiciary April 1, 2016 Congressional Research Service 7-5700
www.crs.gov R44235 Read 23-page report
at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R44235.pdf
April 6, 2016 It
hasn’t been a good week for America’s octogenarian literary icons. Hard on the heels of legendary journalist Gay
Talese’s much-critiqued failure http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/02/gay-talese-twitter-female-writers
to name a single inspirational female writer, 80-year-old writer Calvin
Trillin is facing accusations of racism (at worst) and tone-deafness (at best)
over his poem about Chinese food in the latest
issue of the New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/04/have-they-run-out-of-provinces-yet-by-calvin-trillin
In an email to the
Guardian on April 6, 2016, Trillin suggested that his poem was being
misinterpreted and that it “was simply a way of making fun of food-obsessed
bourgeoisie”--and further defended the piece by saying that it was a device
that he’d used before. Have They Run Out
of Provinces Yet? takes as its subject the multitude of Chinese cuisines.
Julia
Carrie Wong http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/06/calvin-trillin-new-yorker-chinese-food-poem
April 7, 2016 The news this week that Lena Dunham will launch a new imprint at Random House comes as a
growing number of Hollywood voices are using their platforms to champion books. Emma Watson launched her
feminist book club three months ago, soliciting ideas on Twitter before
settling on its name: “Our Shared Shelf.” The group now has more than 123,000
members. In an introduction on the
club’s Goodreads page, she said she decided to start the club after reading
books and essays about gender equality as part of her work with UN Women. Next year, Lena Dunham and “Girls” executive
producer Jenni Konner will launch a publishing imprint at Random House called
Lenny, named after the newsletter they started last July. Next week, Gywneth Paltrow launches her new
Grand Central Publishing imprint, goop press, inspired by her lifestyle
website, goop. The inaugural title is a cookbook by Ms. Paltrow called “It’s
All Easy.” Jennifer Maloney http://www.wsj.com/articles/celebrities-who-love-books-1460054691
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1453
April 8, 2016 On this date in 1904, Longacre Square in Midtown Manhattan was renamed Times Square after The New York Times. On this date
in 1983, Natalia,
Greek singer, was born.
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