I am not sure what day it is! I started my new job, and I don't have enough hours in the day.
I spend my days programming children's programs, and then giving those programs, making posters, talking to schools, giving library tour ........ There isn't much time for anything else. When I get my act together, I may set up a a blog about all the programs I give, but at the moment -- it is not going to happen!
Watch this space!
It's a great time of year for Tasha Tudor. Heck, any time of year is good for Tasha Tudor. I just love all her work, and there is a lot of it.
She lives off the land in a house with no electricity. She lives with mice, and wildlife. You can actually go and visit her in her house -- for a fee. A friend of mine has always been a fan of Tasha's. for her birthday, she went to see her, and she got to have a cup of tea with her. My friend enjoyed it, but was shocked by the decayed state of the house. Tasha lives in what seems to us like poverty, and yet it costs a fortune to go and visit her. When a mouse ran across the floor in font of them while they were having tea, my friend politely declined a home made cookie!
I just LOVE her timeless art though. This little book, pumpkins moonshine Is just perfect for the halloween season.
Go visit Tasha at her web site.......Tasha and family
I started my new job today. It has been a long day.
Well, I have been quite overwhelmed at all the crongrats I have recieved from everyone.
Such a busy week, I haven't started my new job yet, but we had a staff development day at my future branch. A day of presentations, and lectures -- well, they felt like lectures! Had my Jim, and Nick's lunch in the children's room with my old friends Tigger, and winnie. Elmo was there as well. I got to peek into my bew office, and there was my new computer -- it had just been delivered -- just for me whhooopp! My desk is surrounded by puppets, books, craft supplies, and more books. I was like a kid in a candy store.
I have always prepared, and paid for my own story times, but now I have it all, right at my fingertips.
So, Monday is the magic day.
I STILL haven't finished cutting for Stone!!!
Well, I am still getting through 'Cutting for Stone' and the name, Sister Mary Jospeph Praise is well and truly stuck in my head now. If anyone has read the book they will know why! It is a really long winded book, and has many, many details in it. It is worth reading for the action bits though.
SO, I got my dream job. Yes, I am now the children's programmer for the Bluffton Branch library.
I am so exited.. back into Never Never land for me. Back with Olivia, Winnie, and Toot and Puddle!!
So now you will see more kids entertainment in my blog.
For all their august reputation, the Swedish poet's fellow winners have a notably chequered history
In becoming the 108th winner of the Nobel prize for literature, Tomas Tranströmer joins a curious club in which giants such as WB Yeats, Rabindranath Tagore, TS Eliot and Jean-Paul Sartre are outnumbered by obscure figures (often Scandinavian realist novelists or poets from Mediterranean or Latin countries) you've never heard of. Several should not be in at all, according to the contemporary interpretation of the prize's rules as excluding anyone except imaginative writers; the roll of honour includes the philosophers Henri Bergson, Rudolf Christoph Eucken and Bertrand Russell, the Roman historian Theodor Mommsen and Winston Churchill, whose chronicle of the second world war (put together by young researchers) secured his entry as a historian. Erik Axel Karlfeldt, a Swedish poet, was not only dead when awarded the 1931 prize but until his death had been permanent secretary of the awarding body, the Swedish Academy. Two more little-known Swedes who were then academy members, Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson, were scandalously jointly honoured in 1974.
Politically, the laureates range from Knut Hamsun, who eulogised Hitler, to Pablo Neruda, who composed an ode to Stalin, and Mikhail Sholokhov, who had been a Supreme Soviet member under him; left-of-centre views perhaps predominate (Jorge Luis Borges's support for rightwing regimes is said to have put paid to his chances), but conservatives such as Eliot, François Mauriac and VS Naipaul have received the nod too. Creatively, authors at the avant-garde end of modernism or writing experimental novels, plays or poetry after 1945 are scarce – Eliot, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, Claude Simon and José Saramago are the most obvious adventurers. Conversely, Proust, Joyce and other difficult authors have been shunned.
Of the 107 laureates since 1901, only 12 have been women, and a longstanding European bias is evident when countries are ranked Olympics-style by wins: first France, then the US, UK, Germany, Sweden, Italy and Spain, followed by Russia/Soviet Union, Ireland and Poland all on level pegging. Naguib Mahfouz is so far the Arab world's sole winner and is one of Africa's four; Asia has had three, divided between India and Japan; Latin America and the Caribbean seven. As well as the strength of its own tradition, France owes its record to the number of exiles who choose to live there, and overall the proportion of laureates resident in non-native countries is striking, with recent winners such as Saramago, Gao Xingjian, Naipaul, JM Coetzee, Doris Lessing, Herta Müller and Mario Vargas Llosa continuing the pattern.
Regarding Nobel literature laureates as role models would be a mistake. Half the American winners alone – Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, John Steinbeck – were alcoholics. Hemingway killed himself; Kawabata Yasunari probably did too, and the aforementioned Harry Martinson tried ineffectually to end his life with scissors during the outcry over his questionable shared victory. Maurice Maeterlinck was exposed as a plagiarist, Günter Grass as having fought with the Waffen-SS. André Gide's long-running relationship with Marc Allégret began when the latter was 15. Sartre has been portrayed as benefiting from, in effect, the procuring of distressed young women by his partner, Simone de Beauvoir.
One future laureate (Vargas Llosa) punched another (Gabriel García Márquez) in public, probably over a woman; it's also possible that one (Russell) slept with the wife of another (Eliot). Russell's leading rival for the title of most priapic laureate, Elias Canetti – who, it should be noted, became British and so contributes to the UK tally – wrote callously in a memoir about his former lover, Iris Murdoch, who had depicted him as the sinister enchanter figure in her novels.
When Beckett won in 1969, his wife called the prize "a catastrophe", referring to the pressures of unsought fame and the demands on his attention. Others have grimly recognised it as pointing to imminent creative death, and perhaps imminent literal death: the average number of years laureates survive after victory is markedly low, and post-prize masterpieces would probably form a very short list.
This was all taken from he Telegraph, a very serious newspaper in England. Seems like it is more of a curse to win this prize.......
I finished 'A visit from the goon squad'. It was OK, but more of a teen coming of age, and very modern writing. I have been disappointed with the last few Pulitzer prize winners. Not sure what the judges are looking at.
Now this is a true epic, sweeping , shocking tale. It has all the right ingredients for a classic. I am quarter way through this juicy novel, and really enjoying it so far.
The story is a riveting saga of twin brothers, Marion and Shiva Stone, born of a tragic union between a beautiful Indian nun and a brash British surgeon at a mission hospital in Addis Ababa. Orphaned by their mother's death in childbirth and their father's disappearance, and bound together by a preternatural connection and a shared fascination with medicine, the twins come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution.But it's love, not politics -- their passion for the same woman -- that will tear them apart and force Marion to flee his homeland and make his way to America, finding refuge in his work at an underfunded, overcrowded New York City hospital. When the past catches up to him, wreaking havoc and destruction, Marion has to entrust his life to the two men he has trusted least in the world: the surgeon father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
Librarian, Book lover, and professional book sniffer.
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