Toronto Reference Library Blog

Free Screening: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

As part of its Asian Heritage Celebrations, Toronto Reference Library will be screening the documentary Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry in the Beeton Auditorium on Tuesday May 14th at 2:00 pm.

Last year he transformed his own (rather late) version of internet meme Gangnam Style into a protest for free speech.

 

Rachel Arons in the New Yorker writes:

Ai Weiwei’s version of “Gangnam Style” is as stupid-silly as any other, and more poorly made...but it’s also an ingenious response to the attitude toward creativity put forth in the Chinese media. Ai called his video “Grass Mud Horse Style,” after a made-up creature, invented in 2009, that has become a symbol of anti-censorship in China...and, by embedding it in otherwise harmless content, it has become a way for dissenters in China to give the finger to government censors.

In support, sculptor Anish Kapoor (of Chicago's "Cloud Gate" fame) answered with his own "Gangnam for Freedom"

 

From August 17 – October 27, the Art Gallery of Ontario will be hosting a major retrospective of his work Ai Weiwei: According to What?

Recent visitors to the AGO will have seen the Snake Ceiling commemorating the over 5,000 school children killed by the 2008 earthquake--and what Weiwei calls "tofu construction"--in China's Sichuan province.

   

 The library has lots of resources on this important artist and dissident, but you might want to get prepared for the AGO exhibition with one the following:

Ai Weiwei : circle of animals by Ai, Weiwei.(with Susan Delson) Prestel, c2011.	Ai Weiwei's blog : writings, interviews, and digital rants, 2006-2009 by AiWeiwei (with  Lee Ambrozy,) MIT Press, 2011.	Ai Weiwei : So Sorry by A  Weiwei. (with Mark Siemons) Prestel 2009

 

 

 

 And remember the screening this Tuesday:

Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry

Tuesday May 14, 2013

2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

Toronto Reference Library Elizabeth Beeton Auditorium

 

Readings for the Last Night of the World

Friday December 21, 2012 (that's tomorrow) marks the end of the current “Great Cycle’ of the Long Count Mayan Calendar.  For some prognosticators, this signifies the end of the world—figuratively, and perhaps even literally.

So, how to spend that last night? 

Why not... read:)

With that in mind, here are personal recommendations from each member of the Humanities & Social Sciences Department at the Toronto Reference Library--books that have informed, nourished and in some cases, transformed our lives. Some are new, some are old--an eclectic, even eccentric, collection that mirrors the people who make up this department.

If you can’t read them all tonight, plan to take at least some of them with you into the new world to come—whatever form it may take. 

 

Egypt, not the Mayan kingdom, has been the lifelong passion and study of one of our staff.  Read the book closest to his heart--if you can: Egyptian Grammar: being an introduction to the study of hieroglyphs by Alan H. Gardiner.

  

If you can only read English, try the autobiography of Egyptologist and controversial folklorist Margaret A. Murray, My First Hundred Years.

 

 

 

 

 No matter what language you speak, see Why We Talk: the evolutionary origins of language by Jean-Louis Dessalles, which links the evolution of language to general evolutionary history. Then read about our evolutionary cousins in The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary: a true story of resilience and recovery by Andrew Westoll, and the winner of the 2012 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Whatever our future may hold, it grows out of our past, and the challenge to understand that past is a life long struggle.  Whether celebrated, notorious or blood-curdling, we've found these histories fascinating, illuminating, terrifying:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

True Compass: a memoir                                     The Dirtiest Race in History

 

 

The Third Reich trilogy

by Richard J.  Evans    

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Imperialist Canada

   by Todd Gordon

 

 

 

One of our most ardent left wingers has been in thrall since she was seventeen to libertarian darling Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. “Romance, mystery, science fiction, metaphysics, politics, economics, sex, love, ethics and philosophy in 1,168 pages” she says. 

 
 
 

It's not really surprising--the denizens of the library world are eminently broad minded and contrarian.  Maybe that's why Open Minded: Working out the Logic of the Soul is the recommendation of one of our more reflective librarians.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Librarians are also eminently practical and realistic, so please see: The Canadian guide to will and estate plannng: everything you need to know today to protect your wealth and your family tomorrow.  See also The Looneyspoons Collection--because we all have to eat, and it might as well be fun  and healthy. The practicalities of business, the inspiration of the humanities and the modern thirst for coffee all come together in Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul .

 

But for many of us, fiction--worlds created and re-created--remains the soul of reading:

 

Wuthering Heights, despite genteel covers, the great novel of overwhelming passion and all-consuming revenge.

 

 

 

 

 Magnificent Obsession by blockbuster novelist Lloyd C. Douglas--a bestseller from 1929, when inspiration, self-sacrifice and improbably happy endings were still in vogue. You can read it online in 2012 through Project Gutenberg of Australia.

(See also the guilty pleasure of the 1954 Douglas Sirk film.)

 

Seminal Canadian works by Gabrielle Roy and L.M. Montgomery, Bonheur D'Occasion  (aka The Tin Flute) and Anne of Green Gables.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For worlds past, present, future and the intertwining of them all, see Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See also the new movie version by the Wachowski siblings.

 

And lastly, as a signpost to a new world, the shining words of one of our great poets:

Gwendolyn MacEwen, from Afterworlds:

 

 Sunlight at Sherbourne and Bloor

 Late afternoon my bike takes me across the city.  I wonder how we

fashion our lives, these brilliant disorders, these fine, inspired errors when

--look--the future is utterly implicit in the present,the present is the logical outcome

 

Of all points in the past, and that building going up across the

street has been going up forever. Everything we do now contains the

seeds of its own unfolding.  The bridge eases over the deep ravine.

 

Something tells me:

You will never do anything more vital, more profound, more perfect or more

Necessary than what you are doing right now.

 

Today has been Friday, that was its name--Friday--and the

Sunlight at Sherbourne and Bloor completes the city.

 

         

 

 

 

Dig Into Literature

While you are waiting to start digging your garden - distract yourself with one of these fine works of literature.

Tulip Fever by Deborah Moggach	The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys
Amsterdam in the 1630s went nuts over tulips - who knew a flower could cause such a frenzy!	An experimental potato farm in World War II England brings a young woman and a Canadian soldier stationed nearby together.

 

The Garden of Reading: an Anthology of 20th Century Short Fiction About Gardens and Gardeners by Michele B. Slung, editor	Monday or Tuesday and other  short stories by Virginia Woolf (eBook format)
Short stories about gardening from Garrison Keillor, Colette, J.G. Ballard, Eudora Welty and others.	This collection includes "Kew Gardens" set in the eponymous botanic garden in London.

 These titles are available in the Languages & Literature Department at the Toronto Reference Library. Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf is available as a downloadable eBook.

TED Talks For Enquiring Minds

 

 

The TedTalks video site emanates from TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading". TED started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together inspiring thinkers from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. This incredible site now hosts over 900 recordings of speakers talking on topics from quantum physics to human psychology.

"If you are looking for something that will expand your mind, open your heart, and possibly rekindle your faith in humankind, a good place to start is listening to the fabulously inspiring presentations made by the best and brightest among us." -- David Sunfellow, nhne.org

Here are a few that I think are worth viewing, along with their descriptions:

 

"Kevin Slavin argues that we're living in a world designed for -- and increasingly controlled by -- algorithms. In this riveting talk from TEDGlobal, he shows how these complex computer programs determine: espionage tactics, stock prices, movie scripts, and architecture. And he warns that we are writing code we can't understand, with implications we can't control".

***

 

"David Gallo shows jaw-dropping footage of amazing sea creatures, including a color-shifting cuttlefish, a perfectly camouflaged octopus, and a Times Square's worth of neon light displays from fish who live in the blackest depths of the ocean".

***  

 

"Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz's estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied".

***

There are many, many more recordings to enjoy where those came from at http://www.ted.com/.

Tip: To access recordings by topic, I would recommend using the Talks Tags page.

EasyBib: The Free Automatic Bibliography and Citation Maker

EasyBib is a free website that can help you prepare a bibliography in your choice of formats: APA, Chicago/Turabian, and MLA styles.

As outlined in the instructions, preparing a bibliography is a basic three step process:
1.) Search for your source 2.) Build your bibliography 3.) Print or export it!

The first half of the following 3 minute tutorial explains how to use EasyBib to create a bibliography; the second half of the tutorial explains some of its other useful features:

 

Well that's the idea anyway. But it may take a little time for you to become familiar with the site and to figure out how it actually works. For example, when starting the search for your source, EasyBib defaults to something called "Autocite" to try and locate your reference. What they don't tell you in the video is that sometimes Autocite doesn't work and can not locate what you are looking for, or even worse, makes some preposterous suggestions. If this happens, you are then invited to complete a "Manual Entry" where you are advised, "just fill out what you know" and "we'll format it correctly".

When Autocite does work successfully, however, the information that EasyBib finds for your reference is simply dropped in a form that allows for editing and annotation. The final step is to click on "Create Citation". The citation has now been added to your bibliography. I have had success in creating references for material across a variety of formats using EasyBib.

One quick example - when I input the part of TPL's website that relates to our Mission - I just 'cut and copied' the URL - it created this citation for me:

"Mission, Vision & Values : About the Library : Toronto Public Library." Home : Toronto Public Library. Web. 01 Dec. 2010. <http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/about-the-library/mission-vision-values/>.

Try playing around with EasyBib to see if it works for you. I wish this website had been around when I was a student. In summary . . . the strength of EasyBib is not that it is easy to use, but rather that it is capable of handling the complexity and richness of resource types that are found in conducting research today.

Pretty Cool!

 

Is Canadian Literature Criticism Dead?

An early excerpt from Beauty and Sadness by Andre Alexis (who kicks off our Canadian authors reading series the Eh List at Toronto Reference Library) caused a firestorm of controversy when it was first published in The Walrus.

Here’s a brief sample from The Long Decline:

These days, Canadian literary reviewers are so woefully incompetent, it makes you wonder if there’s something in our culture that poisons critics in their cradles. I was once told, by a short, pompous man with thick, dark-rimmed glasses (a self-styled “critic”), that criticism is “the rich loam out of which literature blooms.” If that were the case, Canadian literature would have withered, died, and blown away long ago.

Reactions were to say the least, spirited.  The Walrus Blog provides a handy list of links to the debate entitled The Long Tail of “The Long Decline”

But Beauty and Sadness is also a very sophisticated, very literary work.

 The second half is made up of personal essays and reminiscences of a writer pondering the end of two romantic relationships, the success of his first novel Childhood and the middling response to his second, Asylum. An extended version of The Long Decline entitled Water concludes the book and in its longer format suddenly becomes the thoughts of writer in mid-career with nagging doubts about what he hopes to achieve both personally and artistically.

The first half of the collection, a set of dazzlingly crafted short stories, should dispel any doubts on the artistic side. The stories are written in the styles of the writers who have most influenced Alexis including Guy de Maupassant, Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust. These stylish imitations are the literary equivalent of Nouvelle cuisine, a Chanel dress or a Fabergé egg. Even the title of the collection comes from novelist Yasunari Kawabata

But take a second look and the stories--a man attacked by his own household furniture, ghosts coach a blind writer in a homegrown Southern Ontario Tower of Babel--become reflections of the same fears and longings that show up in the personal essays. How much of this work comes from Alexis' own life and how much comes from this thing called literary tradition? And what does it mean if Canada is losing it? 

Come join us for great stories and rousing debate here:

 

The eh List Author Series: Andre Alexis - Beauty and Sadness

Thu, Mar 10 | 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

Toronto Reference Library

 

The eh List Author Series: Andre Alexis - Beauty and Sadness

Tue, Mar 15 | 7:00 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.

Runnymede