Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Daily Thoughts 9/20/2011

Edmund Blair Leighton, Sweet Solitude, 1919


Daily Thoughts 9/20/2011

This morning I bought some refreshments for the Biography Book Club which is happening at 4:00 p.m. today.  We are reading about Abraham Lincoln.  There were some fliers handed out at the Friends of the Mount Vernon Public Library meeting last night.

I checked the displays, udpated the Twitter and Facebook accounts. I spent some time going through the gift books.  I also spent some more time on Lynda.com watching videos on InDesign.

I also am working on an order list for test books.  I spent some time reading through the Chief Leader which is the civil service newspaper for New York city.  They list jobs in the five boroughs of Manhattan as well as the MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority.)  They also report on open positions as well.

This afternoon from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. we had our first Biography Book Club.  We talked about different biographies on Abraham Lincoln.  For the next Biography Book Club, each person will read a different biography of a famous person from New York.

This evening, the Mount Vernon Public Library had an Intermediate Computer Class from 6:00 to 7:00 p.m.

The book, A Pleasure to Burn Fahrenheit 451 Stories by Ray Bradbury came in for me to read.  I read some of it on the train home.  There are some interesting themes in the short stories.  For example, a theme in the writing is how modernity rejects horror authors like H:P. Lovecraft, Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, and   Edgar Allen Poe as superstitious.

Another theme in the book A Pleasure to Burn Fahrenheit 451 Stories is the censorship of reading aimed at creating a mass culture.  It is interesting that Ray Bradbury also criticizes the preference of driving over walking and watching television over reading as part of mass culture..

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