Friday Five: Oil and Water

This is the first of my new Friday Five series, a roundup of this week’s news.  I’m a little of a news junkie. If you are too, and you’re curious to read more about those little nuggets you hear on the radio, you should know that NU affiliates can go beyond the news breaks and get the complete information through the Northeastern University Libraries! This week almost everything on my list has to do with either water or oil, the two things we seem to need to sustain modern life. 1. It’s the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. NU’s freshman class is reading “Zeitoun” for the occasion in a “one-book one-community”-type reading program.  Naturally all our library copies are checked out! But there’s a lot of information about the book in this “webliography” about Zeitoun by Snell Reference librarian Jamie Dendy. 2. Where’s the oil? That big plume in the Gulf of Mexico is being eaten by bacteria, according to research at Massachusetts’ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Here’s the full report from the journal Science. 3. “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama” by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker is making the rounds of the pundit and political news blogs this week.  Never heard of the Koch Brothers?  Read about them online here temporarily, after which you’ll be able to find the article through one of our ejournal vendors such as Ebsco or Gale. 4. The world of stem cell research is reeling from this week’s Federal District Court preliminary injunction against the Obama Administration’s guidelines for research using embryonic stem cells. For more information about why, you can read the complete 15-page decision in Lexis-Nexis. 5. Good news for cheapskates who want to lose weight! Up front, let me say that I’m not a big water drinker.  I’ve never bought that 8 glasses of water a day thing–well, not until this week when, at the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston, research was presented updating a recent article showing that there is a link between drinking .5 liters (about a pint) of water before meals and…weight loss! I must now admit my grandmother was right with her big glass of H2O before every meal.  Much cheaper than acai berries, pills and Jenny Craig! Hope you enjoy the weekend, and have fun catching up on this week’s news!

Listen to Online Science Lectures by Experts

The Libraries have a great new resource available for students and faculty: the Henry Stewart Talks, also called The Biomedical & Life Sciences Collection. Here’s a way to browse and view or listen to lectures by experts in the sciences, including Nobel Laureates. There are over one thousand seminar talks to choose from, on topics ranging from Antibiotic Resistance and The Blood-Brain Barrier to Health Economics and Using Bioinformatics in the Exploration of Genetic Diversity. Some are overviews, while others cover recent developments. Note the wide range of lectures on Cognitive Neuroscience. While the focus is on biomedicine, the seminars also are useful for those who focus on the social and administrative science aspects of medicine and life sciences. When this was a trial resource, we received many enthusiastic comments from the NU community, which helped to make this purchase possible. Remember that your comments on trial resources are always valuable to the staff and are considered when we make our collection decisions.

Hard Cases

I have a bad case of something right now. No, make that a hard case. A hard case of crime. Because I am addicted to the Hard Case Crime books, published in cheap paperback volumes each year by the bushel. If you are someone who loves trashy literature, needs to have a certain sensational craving fulfilled from time to time, and has a nostalgia for the old, pulpy mysteries of the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, I recommend you become a Hard Case Crime addict yourself. Here at Snell, we only have one Hard Case Crime book in stock: Stephen King’s The Colorado Kid. A good practical choice, considering he’s one of the few name authors included in the series, but this is not one of the typical titles. Many of Hard Case Crime’s books are reprints of old books from the heyday of pulp fiction. Most of them are by authors only known to a cult of mystery readers; others are completely obscure names. The late Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block are both represented, as are Mickey Spillane and Max Allan Collins. If none of these names sound familiar, Donald Westlake is best known for writing the screenplay for the film The Grifters and Max Allan Collins for writing a graphic novel that was the basis for Road to Perdition. Here, they are represented with books such as The First Quarry (Collins), A Diet of Treacle (Block), and The Cutie (Westlake). Some of the novels in the series were written in recent years; some even have their first publication as Hard Case Crime books. Others have seen their first publication since the 1950s; for example, an early effort from Ed McBain called The Gutter and the Grave, originally published in 1958. The Hard Case Crime series was founded in 2004 by Charles Ardai, himself a mystery writer (he contributed a book to the series called Fifty to One). It is published in tandem with Dorchester Books. The series has been conceived with the idea of giving the book’s exterior—the cover, the design, the paper, the price tag—equal importance to the content. The adage that you can’t judge a book by its cover is utterly non-applicable. And what covers they are! Nearly every book features a scantily clad woman looking mysteriously at the reader, or at the male protagonist, who is always white, muscular, and in some sort of trouble. The colors are garish and give the cover designs a faithful look of sleazy pulp art. The paper is thin and cheap, the typeface un-ravishing, and the price is always as low as seven or eight dollars. Yet if the series sounds like one big male chauvinist fantasy, note that at least one female mystery writer—Christa Faust—is represented, with multiple books about a female sleuth. If the series also sounds like it’s prioritizing style over substance, you’re not far wrong; but that’s the point of these books. Pulp fiction is an exercise in style, mood and characteristics, and the physical look of each book follows suit. In this respect, this is a case of form following content. But correctness—political or artistic—is not the aim of these books. I have yet to read the Stephen King entry, but I hope to get around to it. It’s hard to keep up with these books at the rate they’re published. Please check out an article I wrote on this same subject for examiner.com recently, for additional information.

Papers of African American Architects Now at Northeastern

If you are like me and think the Southwest Corridor Park is one of the great hidden treasures of Boston, then you should read this article from the Globe about Donald Stull and David Lee, two great African American architects from the 1960’s whose achievements include the design of the Southwest Corridor, along with numerous other buildings in the Roxbury neighborhood. Snell Library’s Archives and Special Collections department has acquired the designs, drawings, and sketches of both men, now in their 60’s and 70’s. The Archives is in the process of applying for a grant that will allow them to hire new staff to sort through the 1,400 tubes and boxes containing Lee and Stull’s documents. Stull and Lee have connections with Northeastern dating back to 1966. Chuck Turner, who was a Northeastern administrator at that time, turned to both men to create the Southwest Corridor and re-vamp the surrounding neighborhood in order to make a better space for the mostly poor residents who lived nearby. The plan to build the park included the renovation of nine Orange Line stops that we all find so convenient today. It came as a welcome alternative to a proposed highway extension that was to be built in the same spot. Both architects empathized with the ideas behind the project because they had grown up poor, though they managed to graduate from the Harvard School of Design. In the Globe article, Stull said, “We were very much active in social change. We wanted people to have the opportunity to create their own destiny.” Today, the Southwest Corridor officially stretches from Dartmouth Street to Forest Hills, though the bulk of it runs through Roxbury. Today, Northeastern is no longer the mostly white commuter school it was in the 60’s, but a racially diverse boarding college located at the heart of the park. Most people, including most Northeastern students, probably do not realize how frequently they use the Southwest Corridor. But with this new acquisition of Stull and Lee’s archives, perhaps the beauty of this part of the city can be acknowledged once again.

The Next Generation

Like anybody who reads, I am concerned about the new generation of writers. By this I mean people my age, who are in college or have recently graduated and who plan on writing. My concerns are two-fold, but there is some hope. There is even some excitement. To speculate about what the future crop of writers will look like, we can look to the current crop, the “post-post-modernists,” the “Gen-Xers.” These are people such as Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, Dave Eggers, and Michael Chabon. I am acquainted with several of these writers only well enough to know that I dislike Michael Chabon’s writing, although I did like the film Wonder Boys, and have an on-the-fence liking of Dave Eggers, having laughed loudly at some clever things he has written while simultaneously hoping that I never meet him in person. The few short pieces I’ve read by Jonathan Lethem I thought were solid enough. But I can summarize them all as being part of the contemporary generation of literary writers that has no particular name. Just as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald were the writers of the “Lost Generation” and Norman Mailer and James Jones were post-WWII writers, the two Jonathans, Dave, and Michael are part of the…um…what do we call these days? The most obvious bad news is that none of these writers—yes, I’m making an assumption about the ones I have not read—can lay a finger on Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Mailer or Jones. The quality of literature really has declined. Eggers is inclined to writing short, sharp sentences that he tries to pass off as their own paragraph. He layers irony upon irony, while being unable to write a heartfelt ironic story in the vein of Hemingway’s Indian Camp (for example). Chabon writes these whimsical, sentimental tales that sound long-winded and forced to me. And now two more writers of the same generation have come to mind: the late David Foster Wallace and the truly obnoxious Chuck Palahniuk. Chuck Palahniuk has written the same book more than a dozen times. By that I mean he rearranges the words in each sentence, turns the level of outrageousness up or down, slaps on a narrative tone (always first-person) and calls it a book. Foster Wallace appears to be the most popular of all these guys, especially after his death. I’ve never read him either. All I can say about him is the idea of writing a 2,000 page book which is called your masterpiece to me is always suspect. My fear is that this nameless group of writers—the Gen-Xers, the post-post-modernists—will be the only writers influencing the Gen-Yers. It isn’t that I think they’re untalented (except for Palahniuk) or that they are egotistical enough to think they are a great generation of literary artists. But if it is primarily their voices and themes that carry over to the minds of my generation, then we have something to worry about. The writers of the Gen-X period tend towards genre-mash-ups and existentialist postures. They write about characters who are bored out of their minds if they aren’t whining. None of their books concern real experience. Their stories have more to do with an elite, ironic, information-age experience of reusing and discarding earlier stories and earlier writers. None of it feels real. But again, these writers are so hip, that “that’s the point.” I believe that the literature of Generation Y may rise above the previous generation, though. We have lived through some profound cultural experiences that have shaped our youth: 9/11, environmental disasters, economic downturns. We are a generation that is so over-entitled, that there is no way we will be able to get what we want when we’re older. There is no way we will be as rich as previous generations. The writers of Generation X lived through the post-hippie era, the slow collapse of the Soviet Union and Reaganomics. They were also super-entitled, and got exactly what they wanted, and became prosperous. What do you get when you live through a fairy tale with a bow-tied ending? A bunch of artists resorting to irony, self-deprecation, and re-packaging. So my simple hope is that my generation has experienced times uncertain enough, shaky enough, and almost apocalyptic enough, to churn out a few interesting stories. But I could be wrong. As it happens, the wave of writers from Generation Y has already started, because the older end of the generation is now in their early 30’s. I’ll be looking for signs of life out there. In conclusion, check out the books of Generation X that we have in Snell Library, and see if they have some merits (or faults) I may have missed. I’d like to hear some examples of very recent, Generation Y writers we have in stock as well.