FINALLY

Thank you Fondren library, for another year of providing shelter to poor college students in need of a home away from home.

A Podcast on High School Libraries

We all have some idea of what a college library is like. So to better understand the somewhat sad state of our educational system, I sat down with a high school student to talk about the taboo subject of libraries.

My YouTribute to the only rock band in Fondren's Music Catalog

This is my way of saluting Radiohead and all their greatness. (Oh, and did I mention that they're the only rock band in Fondren's great music collection?)

Yet another reason from why Radiohead may be the best band in the world

The other day I was picking through the neglected online CD catalog at Fondren for some good music when I came across music by a little British band you might have heard of called Radiohead. From what I can tell, Radiohead’s albums are the only rock ‘n roll albums (if you can call them that) in Fondren’s catalog (a subject search did not show any CD results). Fondren has every album of theirs (including their not-so-extraordinary debut Pablo Honey).

To be honest, Radiohead makes really great study music. Studies have shown that music with lyrics isn’t as conducive to studying as music without lyrics (e.g. classical and jazz music). But Radiohead gives the best of both worlds, combining a classical and jazz influence into foot-tapping, head-bobbing rockers with ambient, ethereal, electronic, instrumentals.

And I will confess, I’ve never been a huge fan of Thom’s lyrics. Having been a fan for years, I’m rather ashamed to admit that though I can recognize all of Radiohead’s music by ear, I don’t even know the titles of half of their songs. The names are just too weird. But that’s okay. Radiohead has always been a band first, a group of punk lyricists second.

If you disagree with me and think that Thom Yorke and his motley crue are a bunch of weirdos—well, all I gotta say to you is that one of the best music schools in the nation believes that Radiohead is the only rock’n roll band good enough to grace its music shelves.

The top 10 films at Fondren

There are plenty of great DVDs at Fondren. Here are my top ten:

1-Coppola's APOCALYPSE NOW --I first saw the Redux version; it seemed so fresh though it was 30 years old, and it still such a relevant film.

2-Herzog's AGUIRRE, WRATH OF GOD ---it inspired the above film. Herzog is my favorite director still working

3- Miyazaki's SPIRITED AWAY-- his films can't help but make me relive the joy of childhood.

4- Ford's THE SEARCHERS-- probably the film that turned me from a Western-hater to a Western-lover.

5- Welle's CITIZEN KANE-- it really amazes me that Welles was only 26 when he made this terribly mature film.

6- Forman's ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST -- this is probably among the funniest films I have seen. It convinced me that a film didn't have to be recent to be humorous.

7- Chaplin's THE GOLD RUSH-- the first Chaplin film I ever saw (I was 6 years old). Even then, I knew it was great.

8- Ray's PATHER PANCHALI -- Satyajit Ray is one of film's few Renaissance men.

9- Kaufman's SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK --somewhat critically maligned, but it takes a couple viewings to truly "get."

10- Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI --the only 3-hour film I have managed to watch in one sitting, without a single yawn.

You can’t always get what you want

The most annoying thing for me is coming to the library sometimes just to pick up that one CD, DVD, or book, only to find that someone has already checked it out in the 10 minutes it took you to walk over to Fondren from your dorm room.

Lesson learned: don’t be afraid to reserve materials in the future. It doesn’t cost anything, and it takes just a minute of your time at most (that is, unless, you have absolutely no idea how to navigate Fondren’s catalog, which is neither the smartest nor the most user-friendly library catalog I have used. For more on this see my previous post).

And just FYI, for those who’ve never actually checked out anything from Fondren, be sure to keep in mind that you need to open an account with the library in order to be able to reserve and renew stuff online.

And when you do get an account, don’t forget to renew stuff on time. What really bugs me about the Fondren reminder system is that it only reminds you to renew an item two days before it is due, rather than the day it is due.

And because, like many on the Rice campus, I am a do-it-at-the-last minute person, this has resulted in me having to make several late-night trips to the library to return an item because I forgot to renew it the day it was due.

Well, at least I enjoy midnight runs. 

5 minutes could save you 50 dollars or more on textbooks

Let me tell you the story of a now-enlightened college student, whom I shall call “Joseph.” The first semester of Joseph’s freshman year at Rice, he naively decided to take a 400-level course (which shall remain unnamed), which required the purchase of approximately 100 dollars worth of “required” textbooks. But just before he emptied my wallet at the bookstore, he happened to remember something his professor had said about “course reserves” at Fondren.

He soon found out that these mysterious course reserves were a set of items which one can only check out for a certain period of time because they have been “reserved” by a professor for the use of students in that particular class. All he had to do was go to the circulation desk with the call number of his item (book, CD, DVD, or whatever), and one of the librarians would retrieve your item(s) for you.

And so, Joseph used the course reserves to check out his required textbook once a week to do the required readings, and his wallet lived happily ever.

The same thing happened to Joseph this past fall semester in an English class. While Joseph watched as the rest of the noobs in his class wasted precious moolah on the “required” textbooks, Joseph simply went to Fondren the day before class to do the reading for class the next day.

Okay, that’s enough of that. In case you didn’t realize, the “Joseph” in that story was me. So I have first-hand experience (not third-person experience as the story might suggest) benefitting from Fondren’s course reserves.

Besides having to physically go to Fondren, the only catch is that you usually can’t leave Fondren with the item. Also, you have to go up to the circulation desk every 2 hours to renew the item if you need it for a longer period of time than that (however, you may be able to convince the librarians to extend your check-out period, if, for example, the item is a 3-hour movie).

So do yourself a favor and check out the Fondren course reserves site here.

Note that you can search by instructor, course number (e.g. PHIL 342, CHEM 212, etc.), or course name (e.g. Physical Chemistry for Biosciences, Organic Chemistry, etc.).

The course reserves don’t have the textbooks for every Rice University course, but it’s definitely worth looking at, especially during the first week of classes, so you can determine your budget for that semester. All I’m asking in return is that you send me a mere 10% of what you save on textbooks from now on.

I accept cash or check.

What?! DVDs at Fondren?

So every time I tell someone that Fondren has DVDs, I get a puzzled look. DVDs? He or she will say. That’s cool. I never knew that. The only person I know who actually checks out DVDs from Fondren is my roommate. And that’s only because I actually told him about Fondren’s DVD collection at the beginning of the school year.

By this measure, I suppose I’m just an extreme outlier when it comes to checking out DVDs from Fondren. If you don’t like waiting in lines, you can now self-checkout most DVDs now (unless they have booklets or extra materials associated with them).

Back in the old days (i.e. last year), you had to go to the circulation desk with an index card which had the call number of the movie you wanted written on it. Half the time, the librarians or student librarians would return empty-handed, either because they couldn’t read my handwriting (repeating second grade penmanship might do me some good at this point in my life) or because they still hadn’t figured out the Dewey decimal system.

If you’re a devoted fan of arthouse, you will be rather surprised by the breadth of Fondren’s selection. If you’re a fan of campy, trashy films, you’ll be happy to a find a few of those there as well. If you don’t, I’ll basically have the whole DVD collection to myself. Which is cool. 

That’s a win for me, a lose for you. But if I have competition for the DVDs, I’ll watch them quicker, and stop procrastinating on my schoolwork. Now that’s a win for everybody.

So bottom line: I encourage everyone to check out Fondren’s collection. I do realize by saying this, I am hampering my ability to pick up any DVD I want without having to reserve it before hand. But you should keep in mind that your tuition helps to support Fondren, and you shouldn’t let go to waste. After all, I can’t be the only one patronizing that section of the library. 

Interlibrary Loans—a great way to get (almost) anything you want

 Check this out.

So one of Fondren’s well-kept secret services is the Interlibrary Loan. In a nutshell, by requesting an interlibrary loan, a patron can request an item not owned by Fondren library. The librarians subsequently must request the item from another library that has the item (hence the name).

It’s a great way for the ultimate cheapo to get anything he wants without paying for it (you can even request  DVDs and CDs)?

One catch is that you need to pick up your item within about 7 days of Fondren’s receiving the requested item.

How do I know this? Well, simply put, Fondren banned me from using the interlibrary loan service after I failed to pick up the Andrey Rublev DVD I had requested within 7 days. However, in my defense, I would like to say that Fondren only managed to retrieve the DVD in time for winter break, so I really didn’t feel like driving all the way down to Fondren just to pick up a DVD.

This service is not exclusive to Fondren all three of my library branches (Harris County, Brazoria County, and Houston Public library branches) offer this service.

Sadly, Borders is going bankrupt

 I was quite saddened to hear the news a few days ago that one of my favorite places in the world—Borders—is filing for bankruptcy.

And by the way, in case you got any Borders gift cards for Christmas (like me), you should try to use them as soon as possible. Companies filing for bankruptcy will occasionally refuse gift cards as payments for items.

Surprisingly, though, they are still offering coupons for in-store and online purchases. I guess coupons are just staples of the thriving and the failing business.

The Microsoft Surface—the most overhyped technology since the iPad

Near the beginning of fall semester 2010, I decided to make the trek to Fondren just to check out this new gadget called the “Microsoft Surface.” The new arrival to Fondren was the subject of a front-page Thresher article, so I had a feeling that it may be worth a look. I decided to make a trip with a a couple  curious , tech-nerdy friends.

When we made the trip up the elevator (this was the first time that either of my friends had even been above the first floor of Fondren), we came to the familiar, musty stacks of obscure fiction and poetry. At the end of the stacks was a room of its own (a room with a view, I might add) dedicated to the Microsoft Surface.

Proof that I was really there. Photo Credit: Sonny Nguyen

Luckily for us, we were apparently the only ones on campus who actually cared enough to check out this enormous technological novelty.  (We did eventually meet a scrubby freshman from Hanszen, who almost had us believe a ridiculous story about the origin of his initialized, two-letter name, but that’s a whole other story…)

And no more than a novelty the surface proved to be. The most difficult task we faced that day was trying to figure out what the Surface was actually good for-for comparison, we actually had a biochemistry exam that evening.

We found ourselves wondering, “What purpose does the Microsoft Surface serve in a library setting? “

None, the Microsoft Surface replied, again and again. No matter what buttons we pressed or what screens windows we virtually slid to one another, we could find no utilitarian purpose for this giant tablet.

No Internet, no Microsoft Word, no calculator.  The Surface did feature a somewhat amusing four-player version of Ping as well as a Cloth simulator (all touch-stimulated), but is it really necessary to shell out thousands of dollars just to amuse a few lonely people for a few minutes?

Bottom line: the Surface is essentially a virtual coffee table that does a few “neat” things (and it’s not even a good coffee table—what kind of coffee table runs on electricity?)  

Of course, if you believe that I’m just a tech-noob (which I’m not) or a Microsoft-hater (which I’m certainly not) the best thing for you to do is to actually go to Fondren and see the Surface for yourself—or spend thousands of dollars of your own so that you can continue write that list which Americans have been writing for ages: “One thousand ways to utterly waste your money.”

See these CDs (Ya hear what I did there?)

Every now and then, when I check out the Fondren library catalog, I find some interesting box set no one has ever bothered to check out before. Here are a few of the best, which together, provide a great snapshot of some of the greatest music the 20^th century produced:

·         Works of Stravinsky

o   If you asked the average classical music critic which composer defined 20^th century classical music, he would likely drop the name of Igor Stravinsky. This 22-CD set covers a lot of (including the revolutionary Rite of Spring and the Firebird Suite). It also contains some rather obscure works, such as Stravinsky’s lesser-known forays into the world of sacred music and jazz. Overall, it is certainly worth a listen, whether or not you are a classical music aficionado. After all, you have nothing to lose except a minute at the Fondren checkout counter.

·         Complete Glenn Gould Jacket Collection

o   You really can’t beat this collection of Glenn Gould’s—it simply has everything, and in the original jacket too! A must-have for those who are OCD about having a musician’s entire catalogue (I proudly confess that I am among this crowd). In such a case, you’re better of just buying the $300 box set off of Amazon and listening to the 80 CDs at your own leisure.

·         The Complete Ella Fitzgerald Song Books

o   Seemingly a world away from the Fondren music library that is composed of predominantly classical music. But Ella sings through the works of Tin Pally geniuses like Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin with such skill that she elevates their popular music to the level of art achieved by the greatest of classical music.

I Still haven't Found what I'm looking for

Knowing-or at least thinking you know—how to use a library catalog is one of the most important traits of the successful library patron. Knowing what you want to check out is the first step; actually finding what you’re looking for is the next, and possibly the hardest, step. But obviously, the more you know (cue NBC “The More you Know” music), the easier it will be to find your item.

And so, here are my evaluations of the different strategies for finding items in Fondren:

·         Search by title

o   It’s best if you know the exact title of the item you're seeking so that you can search by title and quickly end your fling with the Fondren Catalog. From my experience, searching by General Keyword or Subject usually returns results that are quite irrelevant.

·         Search by author’s last name

o   This is the next best thing. If you feel like putting in the first name—because the last name is not unique enough, for instance—then always put it after the last name. Otherwise, the great Fondren catalog will assume that the first name is the last name and vice versa.

·         Search by Subject

o   This is usually an inefficient method of finding what you’re looking for, unless you’re content in finding a list of items that may or may not relate to what you’re looking for. Who knows? You may actually get lucky with this method.

·         Search for “Words anywhere”

o   Again, this method of searching is just far too general and hardly ever works, unless you’re searching for something extremely specific (e.g. The Rise and fall of the Monarch butterfly in the Himalayan Mountains). I don’t really recommend it since you’re likely to be much better served by the “Title” search.

·         Search by series or periodical

o   This only really applies to certain items (i.e. volumes of an encyclopedia or journal series), so it’s not quite a great general method of searching.

·         Ask a librarian

o   This is usually the searcher’s last resort, but just keep in mind that the Fondren librarians don’t bite. 

Dr. Collins (or How I learned to Stop Hating and Love Poetry)

But there is hope for you to still discover the literary world. For the student who was scared away from poetry by horrible English teachers, I recommend a healthy diet of Billy Collins. 

Who is Billy Collins, you ask? He’s the poet who turned me from a poetry-hater into a poet. In my senior year of high school, I picked up a copy of his book, Nine Horses, which changed my literary life around. 

His poems are extremely lucid and work on two levels: if you’re a literary snob, there are plenty of allusions in there for you to ponder over. If you’re a poetry simpleton who can barely pronounce Shakespeare, you’ll still be able to sift through these poems without consulting Google to decipher a literary reference.

Fondren has most of Billy Collins’ slim volumes. They’re not too long, and they’re not too dense. Check them out, and maybe you’ll fall in love with literature all over again.

Full disclosure and shameless advertisement: I have a poem coming out in R2, the Rice University literary magazine, this spring. Check it out if you dare. 

Why people hate poetry

During my middle school and elementary school years, poetry had always been something of an enigmatic subject for me. The poet, in my mind, was a dead, gray-haired, bearded British or American guy who had nothing better to do than sit around all day BSing around like a philosopher—except they were even worse than philosophers since they were too lazy to even write essays. Instead, they wrote these baffling miniature items called “poems,” which no one—including themselves—could understand.

English class had always been about finding “meaning” and answering that eternal question posed by English teachers everywhere: “What is the author trying to say?” But I used to always wonder, “Is the author ever really trying to say anything?” (Of course, I kept thoughts like these in my head, for I knew that they would certainly not help me to pass 7^th grade English).

The tradition of meaning-searching continued and worsened in high school. Except now we had to write, rather, BS essays on this BS poetry with the new 50-dollar words we had used to describe it. So instead of just analyzing the rhyme scheme, or the alliteration, or the assonance, or the anaphora, or the polysyndeton, we had to write about why the author was using said devices (to those who know what polysyndeton is: you see what I did there?)

Essentially, high school English makes students want to forsake the world of literature if they haven’t already done so in middle school. English teachers and curricula force students into reading works that do not appeal to the average teenage male or female. For instance, it’s understandable that a 15-year-old may fail to see any ado about Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. Some things take maturity to appreciate. I used to hate Shakespeare as a kid, but now that.

To a certain extent, students who forsake the pursuit of discovering literature can’t really be blamed. The poor teaching of literature really leaves a bad taste in the mouth. It’s kind of like how some kids avoid eating cheese their entire lives just because their mothers packed them a spoiled ham and cheese sandwich for lunch one time in the second grade; you know they’re missing out on something fantastic, but can you blame them for their decision?

What IS Librariphilia?

At my high school, the library was really just an enormous, quiet computer playhouse, where students would battle each other in one of a wide array of first-person shooter games.  Books would remain untouched.

When I came to Rice University, I thought the library situation would be different. But I still frequently find that I am the only one to check out many worthwhile books, DVDs, and CDs.  When I walk through Fondren’s stacks, most people are hunched over dimly lit desks, poring over textbooks—not eagerly shuffling through the copious shelves of materials nearby.

With the advent of the Internet and new hi-technologies, there seems to be an increasingly enormous vacuum in society which needs to be filled by “Librariphiles,” that segment of the population which enjoys using physical—rather than digital--resources; there is just something irreplaceable about the fresh,-out-of-the plastic scent of the 2011 edition of The Best American Poetry.

Since most libraries are not run for profit, they don’t have to advertise. But if someone were to make a list of interesting items found at a certain library, people would be less likely to shell out dough at Barnes and Noble when they can acquire the same materials free of charge at their local library.

Ideally, I hope my blog reaches out to those who remain unaware of the library’s treasures, but I would also like to appeal to lovers of art, literature, comics, music, and film everywhere.