September 29, 2016

The subtitle for this blog is not a joke.   I'm one whose temperament is most suited to solitary intellectual and creative pursuits, or to interesting conversation and recreation with a few close friends.

I started The Surly Librarian in 2008 as a cynic's challenge to myself: Can I turn my private grouchiness into essays for library professionals, but essays that might actually be encouraging?

Take a look at "Customer Service for curmudgeons" for one of my early attempts.
     Attitude adjustment

         (10/29/2009)

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September 29, 2016, is my last day of work with Jacksonville Public Library.

Since I admire all my library colleagues across the profession as resilient, brilliant people who "have each others' backs" despite any yanking around they have to survive, it seems like I should revisit some of this blog for their sake.

Some of these posts are dated...discouraging "news reportage" about budget cuts...but more are meant as genuine cheer leading for library folk...though, granted, out of left field (see Daikon Radishes) .

I take a couple of themes very seriously:

• First, the quality of human interactions between library professionals and their clients is far more important than collections or technology
• Second, the primary mandate of public libraries is to ensure free access to essential information, together with instruction on how to use it effectively, to those who cannot otherwise get or afford it (see Poor Richard Redux: A Manifesto).

These selected rants—and the whole blog, for that matter—are meant to get at the heart of genuine librarianship, which I believe requires authenticity, integrity and compassion.

And a sardonic sense of humor....

2013

• Our war against ourselves 7/19/2013

2012

• Resilience 11/21/2012
• Black Border 9/9/2012
• Phyllis Diller: 1917-2012 8/22/2012
• Can I Go Home Now? - Deluxe Edition 3/24/2012
• "Today, average is officially over" 1/25/2012

2011

• The wrong conversation 9/4/2011
• I have to ask.... 5/5/2011
• Market Fundamentalism 1/31/2011

2010

• Statutes & Statues 7/14/2010
• Community Integration 4/23/2010
• It's the infrastructure 2/5/2010

2009

• Attitude adjustment 10/29/2009
• Library instruction 3/24/2009
• Ask a Librarian 2/4/2009

2008

• Deeper Thoughts 11/18/2008
• Daikon Radishes 11/15/2008
• Summing up 9/14/2008
• Maurice Sendak 9/12/2008
• Digital Refugees 8/16/2008
• Digital Immigrants 8/15/2008
• Post-capitalism 7/18/2008
• Poor Richard Redux 7/8/2008
• Customer Service for curmudgeons 6/28/2008
• Neo-Luddite Web 2.0 6/25/2008http://surlylib.blogspot.com/2012/08/phyllis-diller-1917-2012.html

My latest toy: PULP-O-MIZER

 

Created with PULP-O-MIZER

Randall Munroe's xkcd: "Tech Support Cheat Sheet"

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What does XKCD stand for?

It's not actually an acronym. It's just a word with no phonetic pronunciation -- a treasured and carefully-guarded point in the space of four-character strings.

Mike Keefe: Consumer Electronics Show

"The pellet with the poison...."

One of the most hysterically funny of many such scenes from Danny Kaye's 1956 masterpiece, The Court Jester.



I figured we all needed a laugh.

Phyllis Diller: 1917-2012

When I was a little kid in Boston in the early 1960s, before I really understood the adult dimensions of her humor, Phyllis Diller was one of my favorite comedians.

This was probably because she was one of the first folks I knew to transmute curmudgeonliness into outrageous, self-deprecatory humor. My patron saint, in other words.

As the New York Times wrote yesterday, "The Laughs Were on Her, by Design."

In those late-patriarchal times, we still used the word comedienne for female comics, as though what they did was some how different. Phyllis was one of the first to break through the "laughter ceiling" bigtime. As a future ex-closeted homo, I appreciated her disruption of the gender barriers without knowing why.

Here is a 1986 interview with Phyllis by Terry Gross on NPR's Fresh Air. A saint, as I said.

As Gross says, "Onstage, she called her husband Fang. Diller told Fang jokes like her male counterparts told wife jokes."

PHYLLIS DILLER: Fang, I got to tell you something else. The other night he was reading the obituaries and he said, isn't it just amazing how people die in alphabetical order.

AUDIENCE: (LAUGHTER)

DILLER: One of the kids asked him to spell Mississippi. He said the river or the state?

AUDIENCE: (LAUGHTER)

DILLER: I asked him to lower the thermostat. He put it six inches above the floor.

AUDIENCE: (LAUGHTER)

DILLER: His father told him to ride bareback. He took off his pants.

AUDIENCE: (LAUGHTER)

DILLER: He thinks a Royal flush is the john at Buckingham Palace.

AUDIENCE: (LAUGHTER)

DILLER: I told him we had a leak in the gas pipe. He put a pan under it.

AUDIENCE: (LAUGHTER)

DILLER: And now he's become paranoid and I know exactly how it happened. He went to the mall, went up to the map and the map said you are here. He wants to know how they knew.

AUDIENCE: (LAUGHTER)

Here's an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show:

A closely guarded secret: Phyllis Diller was actually beautiful.

As Yael Cohn writes:

But in order to tell a joke like a man, she had to de-sex herself. And that’s where the self-deprecating humor came in.

“To refer to oneself in a negative way is always a good way to say hello to an audi­ence. So right away, you come out and kiss ass,” she told me.

“The reason I devel­oped things like [wearing a bag dress] was because I had such a great figure...I had ’em convinced that underneath whatever I was wearing, I was a skeleton, an ugly skeleton — and that’s what I wanted....

“All I worked for was the laughs.”

Bless her.

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A former colleague of mine responded to this post with a story from her teenage years, which she has given me permission to add here [in slightly edited form]:

In the early 60s, Phyllis Diller moved her family from Ohio to Webster Groves, a suburb of St. Louis. She had six children who were all teenagers or older at the time. I went to school with two of them. One was a year older and one, a year younger.

Everyone thought that the Dillers, Pyllis in particular, were very exotic, and we were in awe of them.

Rumors abounded that their house—in a fairly middle class part of the town—was decorated in a very outrageous manner. Rose covered wallpaper on the ceiling in the living room, white upholstered furniture with wild, flowered pillows everywhere, tons of pink everything...etc.

Remember, this was the 1960s in a small area of the Midwest, a middle/upper middle class, Republican-all-the-way kind of place. At that time, my high school was third in the country for graduating and sending kids off to colleges of high esteem, and on to big things. In other words, this was a pretty no nonsense kind of place, that prided itself on being the Rockwell picture for fulfilling the American Dream.

So…it was exciting to have someone who was outspoken and different.

One year, I think my junior year, the school administration thought it would be prestigious to ask Phyllis to perform at a school assembly for the students.

Well, Phyllis, being Phyllis, brought her "A" game, straight from Vegas. Her jokes were probably meant for a much older crowd, and she was allowed to finish but hustled off the stage as quickly as the embarrassed administration could do so.

The Dillers moved to Los Angeles a year or two later, and our claim to fame faded away as if it had never happened. I still remember, though, how exciting it was from a teenager's viewpoint, while it lasted.



Book of the month club

Okay, I can't resist sharing this one:

The blurb says:

It's a little-known fact that Elvis Presley—the most Christian icon of American pop culture—was Jewish. This book provides a behind-the-scenes account of the authors' search, from Israel to Graceland, to find the true roots of the King.

With the help of a Hasidic Jewish Elvis impersonator, Dan Hartel, who performs at senior citizens' homes under the stage name “Schmelvis,” and an eccentric Orthodox rabbi named Reuben Poupko, the authors trace Elvis's Jewish roots all the way to Israel.

Don't know yet whether or not this is a spoof, but it certainly is a stitch. To make it even better, here's a link to the documentary.

And, adding insult to injury...

...Elvis in Jerusalem: Post-Zionism and the Americanization of Israel, by Tom Segev, translated by Haim Watzman.

As the Middle East conflict enters its most violent phase, Tom Segev offers a lively, contentious polemic against cherished and rigid notions of Israel's national unity and culture









Enough, now. Lunch time is over.

Back to work.

:-)

Crack Skull Bob:Common Drawing Mistakes, No. 37

Sometimes we library folk need to borrow some comic relief from an outside source.

One of my favorite outside sources is Ruben Fletcher. His blog, Crack Skull Bob, is full of excellent sketches, and often his commentary is full of ironic humor.

Rubin has a sub-category of posts which he calls "Common Mistakes." It's a sort of advice-for-artists category with a surrealistic twist.

Here's my current favorite, with a spippet of the commentary:

You're drawing up a storm, in a crosshatching groove, and suddenly the whole thing comes down on you. It happens to experienced sketchers as well as novices....

Proper attention to drawing construction is what will prevent this tragedy from occurring. Add too much hatching to a flimsy structure, and you're just begging for trouble.

I love it.