Thursday, February 26, 2009

Book Review - The Man Who Invented Christmas

Les Standiford – The Man Who Invented Christmas: how Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” rescued his career and revived our holiday spirits

Though the holiday has passed, anyone who loves Charles Dickens in any season will enjoy this slim, but hearty, book about how the world’s most famous Christmas story came to be. Standiford, who says he intended “this volume to be a fireside pleasure of the Fezziwigian type, and not a formal work of scholarship,” gives us the social and personal forces that brought Dickens to write and publish A Christmas Carol. Chief among that impetus was Dickens’s speech to an audience at a kind of public library in 1843.

At the request of his sister who lived in that city, Charles Dickens came up from London to speak to an audience at the financially imperiled Manchester Athenaeum, which had a “library of 6,000 volumes, classes for the study of languages, elocution, and music, exercise facilities; and regular programs of lectures and debate” supported only by the donations of those who had pooled their resources to better themselves and their society. “‘A season of depression almost without parallel ensued,” he told his audience, “and large numbers of young men … suddenly found their occupation gone and themselves reduced to very straitened and penurious circumstances.’”

He ended his speech with soaring words. “The more a man learns, Dickens said, ‘the better, gentler, kinder man he must become. When he knows how much great minds have suffered for the truth in every age and time … he will become more tolerant of other men’s belief in all matters‘” and long after institutions such as this one are gone “the noble harvest in the seed sown in them will shine out brightly in the wisdom, the mercy, and the forbearance of [others]” To add to my delight Standiford goes on the describe how Andrew Carnegie later took these ideals to America to fund the building of over 3,000 public libraries so that others could follow suit.

And so, as he walked the streets that night" the author tells us, "a new story began to form.” Dickens returned to London and, as a friend’s letter stated, “’a strange mastery it seized him.’ He wept over it, laughed and then wept again, as bits and pieces swam up before him, including the vision of two children named Ignorance and Want …Tiny Tim and Bob Cratchit and Scrooge and Marley and all the rest, stamp themselves on Dickens’s imagination and that of the world forever.”


The book goes on to discuss the writing, publishing, distribution, piracy, theatrical exploitations and variants of the most familiar Christmas tale ever told and how Dickens's story reinvigorated Christmas celebration. Within two months of the book’s release, there were three unlicensed stage productions of A Christmas Carol in London in February of 1844, and eventually Dickens, who also acted in later productions, and performed public readings until his death at the age of 58, also had to deal with frequent American piracy of his works which international copyright law gradually made better for him.
A Christmas Carol resurrected his then waning career and his work become the enduring theme of Victorian age Christmas that persists to this day. While other books such as the many biographies of Dickens led by Peter Ackroyd or Norrie Epstein's The Friendly Dickens and Michael Patrick Hearn's Annotated Christmas Carol necessarily go into much more detail, Standiford’s “Fezziwigian” armchair tale delights and informs those who love the drama and motivations of literature and the persons who create it.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Take Part in the Kick Off Event for Glendale's History Drive at the Glendale Central Library, March 14th!

(click here for more information on this photo)

Be a part of Glendale’s history at the Kick Off of the Glendale History Drive. Help us add chapters to Glendale’s past by sharing or donating your photos and documents.

The
Glendale Public Library is interested in collecting and/or scanning items to add to its collection of:

  • photos and documents relating to Glendale’s cultural and civic events,
  • images of landmark family celebrations in Glendale, and
  • photos and documents pertaining to buildings, houses and places of interest in Glendale.
Selected items will be scanned at the Kick Off event or at a later date. Walk ins are welcome, but appointments are encouraged.

The Glendale History Drive will continue by appointment through the end of June.


The Glendale History Drive is in partnership with The Glendale Historical Society and the Historical Society of Crescenta Valley. For more information or to make an appointment call (818) 548-3752, go to the Glendale History Drive website, or download a copy of the History Drive flyer.

Participants will receive a 2009 Historic Glendale calendar courtesy of Glendale Printing Center.


Tuesday, February 24, 2009

This Week in Reading February 22 - 28

Literary Names of Note This Week

Nobel Prize in Literature: John Steinbeck (1962)




Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Biographers: Michel de Montaigne, Samuel Pepys

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers: Elizabeth George, John Sandford, Tim Powers

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers: Willhelm Grimm, August Derleth, Theodore Sturgeon

Historical Fiction Writers: Bernard Cornwell

Graphic Novelists / Cartoonists / Illustrators: Edward Gorey, Milton Caniff

Children’s / Teen Authors: Lemony Snicket

Events to read about: Fascists, Nazis, Communists, Republicans, witches, clones, six shooters, Grand Canyon and Guantanamo Bay, along with the Supreme Court twice, a president, an artist, an architect and two very important printers, Gutenberg, who brought printed books to the Western world, and typographer Daniel Berkeley Updike.

This Week’s Questions:I quote others only the better to express myself.”And because I found I had nothing else to write about, I presented myself as a subject.” Was this said by a blogger or one of this week’s authors?

Who are the three authors born this week who gave the following advice to would-be authors?

Write freely and rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.”

Keep going. Writing is finally play and there is no reason you should get paid for playing. If you’re a real writer, you’ll write no matter what.”

"It comes down to what I call "suit up and show up." ... A lot of writing is simply showing up and doing the work day after day."

Answer to Last Week’s Question: One of the writers above said “Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one single person – a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.”

Along the same lines, Toni Morrison, who is also the author of last week's quotes, said this: “Whenever I feel uneasy about my writing, I think: What would be the response of the people in the book if they read the book? That’s my way for staying on track. Those are the people for whom I write.”

Monday, February 23, 2009

Live Green, Live Like Ed

Come hear Ed Begley, Jr. provide a wide array of practical options for anyone who wants to make their life a little-or a lot-greener. From recycling more materials than you ever thought possible to composting without raising a stink to buying an electric car, Living Like Ed will help you live green.

This is a free lecture sponsored by the Friends of the Glendale Public Library.

Ed Begley, Jr.'s book, Living Like Ed is a comprehensive yet accessible guide to becoming more environmentally savvy. Ed Begley, Jr., has been considered an environmental leader in the Hollywood community for many years. He has served as chairman of the Environmental Media Association, and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. He still serves on those boards, as well as the Thoreau Institute, the Earth Communications Office, Tree People and Friends of the Earth.

His recent movie and television appearances include Pineapple Express, Boston Legal, Veronica Mars, CSI: Miami and Gary Unmarried on CBS. He just finished his 48th movie, a biography of artist Georgia O'Keefe, with Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons.

Ed Begley, Jr.
Thursday, February 26, 7 pm
Glendale Public Library Auditorium
222 East Harvard Street, Glendale
(818) 548-2042

Wednesday, February 18, 2009

This Week in Reading February 15 - 21

Literary Names of Note This Week

Nobel Prize in Literature: Toni Morrison (1993)



Thinkers, Spiritualists, Scientists, Historians: Jeremy Bentham, Alfred North Whitehead, John Rawls, Eckhart Tolle, Van Wyck Brooks,

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists, Biographers: Erma Bombeck.

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers: Sax Rohmer, Ruth Rendell, Margaret Truman, Len Deighton, Gregory McDonald.

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers: Andre Norton, Laurell K. Hamilton, Iain Banks.

Graphic Novelists / Cartoonists / Illustrators: Warren Ellis, Gahan Wilson, Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening.
Literary Obituaries: Sudanese novelist Tayeb Salih.

Events to read about: Both Corpenicus and Gallileo were born this week; the first magazine in America and later the New Yorker started up in the same week the Post Office was begun to deliver them; the US denied some Japanese Americans the right to citizenship during WWII and a president visited China to re-open it to the West; and we went from a computer the size of a room to You Tube appearing on handhelds.

This Week’s Question: One of this week’s authors said some of the best things ever about the process of writing for people who want to read. Who said the following?

"The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time."

"I wrote my first [x] because I wanted to read it."

"I never wanted to grow up to be a writer. I just wanted to grow up to be an adult."

Answer to Last Week’s Question: We showed you a site with pictures of beautiful libraries from around the world, called Curious Expeditions. We asked you which of these exquisite libraries have you visited. Some of our librarians in the course of their studies and travels have been to several reading rooms shown, including UC, Berkeley, the New York Public Library, our nearby neighbor, the Huntington Library (which has many rare first editions to see,) the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library at Oxford, Trinity College in Dublin (where you can see the Book of Kells on display.) The list is probably endless because some of us like also to visit other public libraries from small towns to big cities when we’re on vacation. It’s great to have themes for your vacations over your life, from all the libraries you can see to all the theaters you can see or all the ball parks or roller coasters you can visit. We have the books to show you where everything is.

Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Book Review - A Great Idea at the Time

The idea of being a person who had read the "greatest books" of the Western world is, in its best sense, the very sort of aspiration that promised wisdom and understanding (and led some of us to become librarians,) but, in its worst sense, was also the very sort of snobbish pretension that kept people from reading great liteature they might otherwise have enjoyed. A few people, mostly older, in some libraries nationwide still meet regularly to read and discuss the newly adapted list of books offered by the Great Books program, but as this book’s title implies, what was once exciting is now more than passé, mostly because they went about it the wrong way.

A Great Idea at the Time: the rise, fall, and curious afterlife of the Great Books by Alex Beam is a delight to read and it makes no pretense of being fair to the well-intentioned but far too misguided idealists who, by 1952, gathered “443 works by seventy-four white male authors, purporting to encompass all of Western knowledge from Homer to Freud.” The people behind it were two University of Chicago admiinistrators, the charming ivory towered Robert Hutchins and philosopher Mortimer Adler, who, the author suggests, got in the way more than helped . (Beam calls them “two fascinating people, one of whom you’d like to be, and one of whom you would not.”) From their days as student and professor they felt that it was necessary for civically engaged persons to have a shared background of what was later called cultural literacy.

The idea was that people would read one of the great books each week, and in classes at liberal arts colleges, or in local meeting rooms filled with tradesmen, housewives, and people of business and the professions, they would be led by a Socratic professorial type who would engage them in lively discussions of that book in order to bring out the meanings applicable to that day’s issues, events, and problems. It sounded then and now like a wonderful idea. But when published first in 1952 by the Encyclopedia Britannica company in conjunction with the university, Beam says, “The Great Books of the Western World were in fact icons of unreadability – 32,000 pages of tiny, double-column, eye-straining type.” And many of the books chosen were centuries old tracts of surpassed scientific specificity and philosophic meandering such that one could do little with them but fall asleep over them. Many of the Western canon’s great literary writers were there, of course, but not all, and no women, nor people of color until much, much later.

Still they meant well but when these sets were sold to status seekers by flashy salesman, who hadn’t read them either, millions of Americans kept unopened copies as tasteful room decoration. During the hype Adler created a kind of index to find any of 102 idea themes throughout the eighty-some volumes of the Great Books, by listing which page in which volume that idea was discussed or exemplified. He called it the Synopticon, a word he made up, meaning 'a way of looking at things from several angles' and it was used later by him in a reworking of the Encyclopedia Britannica. (It was not that useful on paper, but little did Adler know that he was inventing something like tagging long before the Internet where such mullitple angle searching would become useful at last.) According to Beam, however, he left quite a few important ideas out.

The whole fad was an actual movement however, as the
Great Books Foundation reminds us still, and many offshoots have come from it. Back when it was big in the nineteen fifties and sixties many people got into it. When I was younger I took the novels and dramas from the list, ignoring the science works completely, and combined with recommendations I took from Clifton Fadiman’s Lifetime Reading Plan and lists of books taught in literature courses, made my own list of classic reads. I became a librarian because I had spent so much time in libraries tracking down those books and plays. Britannica re-launched the Great Books series in the early 1990s, but after Adler had already shown himself to be unwilling to adjust to the multicultural awareness the country now enjoys, it was pretty much a financial disaster.

There are more wonderful, active reading groups around the nation now then ever before, however, and people are reading what they want to read rather than what some august body of fuddy-duddies feel they should be reading. There are several very active regular reading groups here at the Glendale Public Library who choose their own books and the library has kits of books and topic questions for groups who would like a hand in selecting titles. This library, along with many others, participates in statewide and national reading events like One Book, One Glendale and other programs. (Look for a Summer adult reading program this year, not just for children anymore.) It can still be a great idea to get together to read and discuss what we read. Let's just do it in a more interest-sustainable way. A Great Idea at the Time was a fun read.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

This Week in Reading February 8 - 14

We're winding down one of the two times of year that seem to produce the most prolific authors. There are some extremely popular frequently releasing novelists, relentless essayists, a mystery writer who published more than anyone, and fantasy and teen writers who have filled whole shelves by themselves. Also, some very important people to our culture, who also wrote a bit, were born this week.

Literary Names of Note This Week


Literary Obituaries: Playwright Robert Anderson, (1917 - 2009), Tea and Sympathy, I Never Sang for my Father; playwright Hugh Leonard, (1926 - 2009), Da.

Nobel Prize in Literature: Boris Pasternak (1958)

Novelists and Story Writers: Kate Chopin, Sidney Sheldon, Alice Walker, John Grisham


Thinkers, Scientists, Historians, Biographers: Robert Burton, Charles Darwin, Martin Buber, David Friedman.

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists: Charles Lamb, John Ruskin, Frank Harris, George Meredith.

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers: Georges Simenon, Janwillem van de Wetering.

Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers: Jules Verne.

Children’s / Teen Authors: Jane Yolen, Judy Blume.

Events to read about: Both Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin were born on February 12, 1809 and are receiving bicentennial celebrations this week. Inventors Thomas Edison and Ray Kurrzweil were born a day apart, just over a century apart. Plus, there’s the Beatles, Bill Clinton, and a few literary dates to note, as well.

This Week’s Question: The writers above, and, of course, the writers from every week of the year, have filled many of the world's most beautiful libraries with their books which take us on many curious expeditions. In fact, we’ve just been sent a link to a wonderful website called, strangely enough, Curious Expeditions, which has an amazing set of photographs of some of the most beautiful libraries in the world to please those who love libraries. How many of these exquisite libraries have you visited? Which ones would you like to visit?

Answer to Last Week’s Question: According to Wikipedia, besides theme parks, museums, and festivals, (some in winter and some in summer,) in England, there are four major Dickens festivals in the United States. San Francisco has the annual Great Dickens Christmas Fair (which often includes a performer from the festival in Kent, England.); Port Jefferson, New York has a Dickens Festival in the Village; Galveston, Texas has Dickens on the Strand; and Riverside, California has the Riverside Dickens Festival which was held last weekend. We don’t know anyone who’s been to any of them but a search of the Internet reveals many smaller and more temporary ones as well.

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Ed Begley, Jr. Lecture 2/26 at 7pm

Living Like Ed provides a wide array of practical options for anyone who wants to make his life a little-or a lot-greener. Ed Begley, Jr.'s book is a comprehensive yet accessible guide to becoming more environmentally savvy. From recycling more materials than you ever thought possible to composting without raising a stink to buying an electric car, Living Like Ed will help you live green.

Ed Begley, Jr., has been considered an environmental leader in the Hollywood community for many years. He has served as chairman of the Environmental Media Association, and the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy. He still serves on those boards, as well as the Thoreau Institute, the Earth Communications Office, Tree People and Friends of the Earth.

His recent movie and television appearances include Pineapple Express, Boston Legal, Veronica Mars, CSI: Miami and Gary Unmarried on CBS. He just finished his 48th movie, a biography of artist Georgia O'Keefe, with Joan Allen and Jeremy Irons.

This free lecture is sponsored by the Friends of the Glendale Public Library.

Thursday, February 26, 7 pm
Glendale Public Library Auditorium
222 East Harvard Street, Glendale
(818) 548-2042

Thursday, February 5, 2009

This Week in Reading February 1 - 7

This week, like the last one, is one of the strongest of the year, filled with writers of strong influence upon their societies, their readers, and on upon other writers.

Literary Names of Note This Week

Nobel Prize in Literature: Sinclair Lewis (1930)

Novelists and story writers: Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Lao She, Ayn Rand, Muriel Spark, James Dickey, W.S. Burroughs, MacKinlay Kantor, James Michener, Robert Coover, Judith Viorst, Gay Talese, Paul Auster.

Poets and Playwrights: Sidney Lanier, Langston Hughes, Christopher Marlowe, Hugo von Hoffmannstahl, Jacques Prevert.

Thinkers, Historians, Biographers: Sir Thomas More, Simone Weil.

Humorists, Essayists, Editors, Journalists: S. J. Perelman, William Rose Benet, Eric Partridge.

Mystery / Crime / Suspense Writers: Andrew M. Greeley.


Fantasy / Science Fiction Writers: Yevgeny Zamyatin

Children’s / Teen Authors: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Meg Cabot

Events to read about: Births of painter Norman Rockwell, film director John Ford, composer Felix Mendelssohn, and the OED and the USO.

This Week’s Question: Many of us have been to Shakespeare Festivals, even Shaw festivals, and some theatres hold a brief Marlowe festival of plays or a festival of Rand or Michener movies now and then. And Joyce gets Bloomsday in June. But are there any festivals for novelists? In addition to a fairly new Dickens World theme park in England, there are at least four yearly Dickens Festivals. One of them is nearby, this weekend. Where are they? And why don’t you attend one and tell us about it?

Answer to Last Week’s Question: When a person is known only by a single name rather than a full name that person is said to have a mononym. We often call Dickens, Joyce, Perelman, and Mendelssohn by their last names, but that is in convenience; they were not solely mononymous. Moliere, Stendhal, and Colette, however, were.

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