Medieval Manuscripts Ahoy!

These are the clamshell boxes that BYU's conservator made for the Vulgate Bible "Bibila Sacra" and the Breviary - which is a book of religious devotions, prayers, things a religoius person should do and repeat.

This was  page from the Breviary - this is all written and decorated by hand.  It's absolutely stunning.  This letter is called an Historiated Letter.  

This past week I made an appointment with a curator of the BYU special collections to go see a few manuscripts that were created in the 14th and 15th centuries.  I was a little bit nervous too ask if I, a mere mortal, could view such precious items stowed away in the BYU vaults, but I realized "Wait, I am a Masters student in library science - I have some book cred!". 

Anyway, I had an assignment for my "History of Books and Libraries" class (which is blowing my mind) to look at a manuscript prior to 1500 and discuss some things regarding it's physical description, history and context, etc. 

Max can verify that I almost cried several times.  I'm out of control, I know.  It was really an amazing thing.  I'll post more about it later (because I'm slacking on my homework right now) but here is a link to the wiki I made for my assignment. 

Brooke's Manuscript Wiki

 The Mr.  let me take pictures, which was also amazing.  I looked at "Breviary, Toledo 1400", "Polychronicon (1342)", and a Vulgate Bible from the 1300's.  

I told Max afterward that I was pretty sure I wanted to go to book conservatory school.  We'll see how that goes.  

This is the breviary with it's original binding of Moroccan leather.   Amazing.  

Dead is the New Pink

I read this paragraph in a book review for a book I was looking into today on Amazon:

Dead is the new pink. The formerly living occupy a huge amount of creative space these days -- in television ("Ghost Whisperer," "Medium"), film ("Corpse Bride," "Just Like Heaven"), novels like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, even a highly regarded show of spirit photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

In literature I've even heard someone refer to this as a subgenre entitled "Dead-Narrator Tales". Woa. This concept is especially prevalent in YA lit and as I have a YA lit class this semester I've already read a few.

YA lit is notorious for stretching boundaries and defying limits, sometimes obnoxiously. I feel like sometimes the author's primary question is 'How can I create a story so niche oriented, so diverse in it's plot and characters, so 'off the charts' that teens everywhere will buy it and come to proms held in its honor?' (don't get me wrong, I loved Twilight and Stephanie Meyer's ascent to fame was much more innocent than I'm suggesting) I know! A paraplegic Vegan who secretly raises unicorns that have special powers over the stock market! Yeah, and she suffers from a sex addiction, but can't tell her Meth attic Mom!

This dead narrator thing, however, is a clever new twist. I think I kind of like it. But by this time next year I'm sure I'll be "so over it" as they tell me the teens say these days. Just when you think edgy YA lit topic have been tapped out (Drugs? too overdone Sex? too obvious) someone says, "What About Dead People?" Awesome.

Paul Auster is My Homeboy

I love Paul Auster. I do. At least I loved the New York Trilogy because it blew my mind.

I came home from volunteering at the library tonight (which is also blowing my mind with awesomeness) with a stack of books including Paul Auster's latest novel 'Man in the Dark'. Outside of the 'trilogy', Auster can be a bit...melodramatic? Is that the word? But I always pick up anything I see by him. Anyway, here is a tease from the inside jacket

"I am alone in the dark, turning the world around in my head as I struggle through another bout of insomnia, another white night in the Great American Wilderness." (Oh my, how thouroughly existential)

So begins Paul Auster's brilliant, devastating novel about the many realities we inhabit as wars flame all around us. (I love devastating, go on...)

blah, blah blah, an old man and what I'm sure are crucial plot points

...Passionate shocking, Man in the Dark, is a novel of our moment, a book that forces us to confront the blackness of night even as it celebrates the existence of ordinary joys in a world capable of the most grotesque violence. (well, I'm sold)

Seriously, that's how it happened as I was restocking the new book display tonight. It's kind of why I'm a freak, I guess, and neither my husband or my Mom can understand why I like some of the books I like.

And I'll be honest, I'll probably get to page 40 while Max finishes up his radio shift here at the radio station, and then become enamored with another 'devastating' book. Oh, I finish books, but not even a third of all of the ones I bring home from the library. I think I like mostly the idea of books, or rather the ideas in the books. I like to take them home and own the ideas for a while, think about the implications and scope of what I'm sure lies between the two covers...while not always actually reading them.

I am appreciating the luxuriant reading of a book more and more, but I'm still an ideas girl. If it sounds conflicting and thought provoking and 'devastating' - 'forcing me to confront' the complexities of the world I live in and celebrating the beauty and joy that is also there - hand it over.

I have found, however, that sometimes big ideas fall a bit short of their potential. I am currently reading "The Archivist: A Novel" which is about a librarian who watches over a sealed collection of letters that T.S. Eliot wrote to a woman named Emily. Eliot donated the letters with the instruction that they not be opened until the year 2012. A widower of 15 or so years, our protagonist is intrigued when a young, passionate graduate student tries to gain access to both the letters and his closely gaurded personal life. There is all this jazz about identity and privacy and relationships, and a pretty interesting look into the complex histories of both his wife and new interest's Jewishness. Take a librarian (awesome), some sweet special collection materials, lots of T.S. Eliot references, issues of loss and trust mixed in with a tortured self- perception rooted in The Hollocaust and the Jewish Identity and you've got a great read, right?
Great until about page 135. I haven't given up, but I'm just not entirely committed to the deceased wife's 50 or so page journal rants she wrote from an institution before she committed suicide. I"ll report back.

Did I just ramble into a corner?

Access as Warning?

ALA president, Jim Retting, had an interesting article about access in November's American Libraries Magazine. (Which you can now read online without being an ALA member - way to put your money where your mouth is ALA.) The article, Access for All, iss about the idea of access to information and how it requires a certain level of transparency in government.

Retting specifically mentioned the annual Crimea Conference, a library conference for Russian librarians, where access to information and government related information was discussed

"... [access to information] improved after the collapse of the Soviet Union but in recent years has reverted"

What? huh? Did you catch that? We've been hearing rumblings out of Russia for a while now and the relationship with our former cold war nemesis is starting to re-frost. Stories of political assassinations have led us to question their human rights stance, and, George Bush's ability to see into Putins 'good' soul through his Russian peepers not withstanding, Russia is scaring the West more than it has for some time.

Russia's political strangle hold on expression, denial of human rights, and many other nefarious doings are echoed in their attitude towards public access to information - or maybe the latter is one of the reasons they are allowed to continue with the aforementioned deeds.

In relation to oppressive countries' precedent of denying access to information Retting points out that "Most Westerners know about Tianenmen Square from the student movement but most Chinese don't know about that." That sounds bizarre to us, but that's because we live in a country with a robust press and the right to information. While I don't think that right was enumerated in the Bill of Rights, I think it should be at the forefront of any discussion of citizen empowerment and democracy. Citizens make better decisions when they have access to accurate information and governments are held more accountable when their doings are recorded, catalogued, and made available to their constituents.

When we go about determining who is in our new 'connect four' of evil, perhaps we should look not just at their nuclear arms proliferation, hostile public rhetoric, and alleged human rights abuses, but also how they deny access to information. Maybe examining trends regarding access to information, or the denial of such, could alert us of possible dangers before other, harder evidence is available.