Daily Thoughts 6/5/2009

A statue of James Joyce in Dublin, Ireland.

Daily Thoughts 6/5/2009

I am going to the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art festival tomorrow. Hopefully, I will get to see one of the panels, AH, HUMBUG! Arnold Roth and Al Jaffee in conversation with Gary Groth from 3:00-3:50 p.m.

I dropped off my my library books at my library. I drove up there. It is raining outside. Then I drove down to Barnes and Noble at the mall. I took a look at In The Stormy Red Sky by David Drake. The hardcover is $25.00 at the bookstore. The cover art is very nice. I could go to the Strand Bookstore and buy it there if they have it for $12.50 if there are any extra reviewers copies. The author is popular enough that there often are not any, or I could buy it as an E-ARC from Baen for $15.00, or if I am a little bit more patient, I could wait for it and order it from my library. I have never bought an E-Arc from Baen.

I watched Steamboy this afternoon on dvd. It is by the director of Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo. The story is interesting. It is about a conflict between Britain and a mad inventor who makes various clockwork steam mechanisms.

The main character is Ray Steam, a young inventor whose father has invented a new form of energy in the form of a high pressure steam ball. The story is quite fanciful. There are armored steam powered knights, railroads, steam cars, dirigibles with giant claws, a steam powered floating fortress, and other mad inventions. There are plenty of fantastic explosions and London nearly gets destroyed. There is a back story of science going out of control. You might call this film steampunk.

It definitely has the feeling of Victorian science fiction. The settings are interesting, Russian Alaska, the english countryside, and London during the 1860s. There is lots of fighting and action. The anime has a lot of detail to it. The characters unlike most anime are not big eyed people from a non-descript setting, they look European.

The main problem with Steamboy was that the characters were rather shallow and predictable even for anime. The villains look like the set piece villains you might see in an old film. The characters seemed to be a background piece for the the inventions and the battles. The dialog was very predictable, but it fit well with the action sequences. Not everyone will like this.

The anime took ten years to make. The drawings are very detailed. The mechanics of the world work quite well. I would say this film is as good as Akira the directors other film which is considered a classic in anime. I could drift right into the action without thinking too hard. If you like cartoons or anime this film is worth watching. It is pure escapist fluff. If you like manga, Akira is considered to be an excellent manga comic.

New York Anime Festival

New York Anime Festival

Alright, I have to go to my convention. I usually do a few things first. First, I bring a large shoulder bag, some pens, and a pad of paper to take notes. The shoulder bag will be empty except for som very light reading which is my obsession.

I like to look at the floor plan before I go as well as the list of author talks or presentations.
I am going to visit Booth 201 Bandai Entertainment, Booth 241 Anime insider, Booth 308 Diamond Book Distributors, Funimation Entertainment 504, Random House Del Rey Pantheon Booth 314.

I hope to go to the panel on Anime Journalism Room 1A24 1:45-2:30 P.M.
And I also hope I get to see Hideyuki Kikuchi the author of Vampire Hunter D 5:30-6:30 P.M in Room 1A24

Anime Next is running a Manga Library so I'll probably go there as well. Room 1 B 01.

I like to have an idea of where I am going before I go to conferences and be prepared. I usually do something different from what I originally planned, but that is alright.

When I got there it was completely different from what I expected. There were people all over in costume, cosplay. They were dressed up as different anime characters, everything from the Transformers to Naruto, to Fruits Basket. It was kind of fun to see the girls and guys in some very funky and sometimes revealing costumes. There were a lot of brightly colored maid costumes, not just in black, but also pink. People were wearing rabbit ears, fox ears, and cat ears. Some people were dressed up as cats. I bought a ten dollar cat ear hat. I think I might wear it on halloween. The young adult librarian wants to do a cosplay party as part of the anime club at the library. She bought a disposable camera to take pictures of the costumes.

There were tons of toys as well. All sorts of different stuffed plush toys which came from different anime shows. There were booths with an incredible variety of costuming material and prop fantasy weapons. Eight foot long wooden swords, ninja outfits, kimonos, cat costumes, doll costumes, superhero outfits, corsets, funny hats, buttons, masks, and all kinds of oddities. There was even a magazine devoted to this Otaku magazine. A lot of it was cute, harmless, and fun. However, the lolita material is a little bit disturbing. We are very careful at our library about lolita material and teenagers. http://www.otakuusamagazine.com/ME2/Default.asp

I skipped the animenewsnetwork panel and went to hear a panel on independent j rock, Japanese Rock. There were two bands who were talking Karaterice and Echostream. In the program guide there were eleven musical guests.

The variety of different types of things associated with anime was incredible. There was a Naruto videogame, anime card games, there was even a lightsaber dueling club. The convention was a kind of fun house for adults and late teens. Anime is stretching into many aspects of popular entertainment.

The show floor had a lot of very risque material. People were selling x-rated material, hentai and yaoi. I was quite surprised at the amount of this kind of material. I thought it was a little over the top. Some of it was quite salacious. The material ran the gamut from childrens material to very adult material. We can buy R rated material and some unrated material, but for the most part we don't buy x rated. Selling x rated material can drive away some of the buyers who are looking for more conventional material for children and adults.

There were not a huge amount of publishers there. I did not see Viz or Tokyopop at the convention. Bandai and Funimation were at the convention. Del Rey Manga was there as well. There was very little free material.

There was an interesting attitude prevalent at the convention that they were there to make money at the convention, not later. Everything was focused on the immediate sale. This was less prevalent at New York Comic Con. At New York Comic Con there seemed to be more of an understanding that some of the professionals might be ordering large amounts with long term accounts.

I did pick up several free magazines with information on the bestselling animation and manga; anime insider, and ICv2 were two of them. I also picked up a free copy of Previews from Diamond Comic Distributors, which is a magazine which lists all the forthcoming comics and items for the next month which are going to be sold in comic book shops.

I bought three Vampire Hunter D novels from Darkhorse Press for myself. I really enjoy Hideyuki Kikuchi's work. He was one of the featured guests at the conference. Unfortunately, I could not get them autographed. The tickets for the autographing table had run out by 10:30 a.m. for his book signing.

A criticism which I have for a lot of the people at the conference is that very few people had paper catalogs. Being able to read about a book or video in a full page spread is quite helpful. Catalogs are tactile. Most people have difficulty wading through websites. I have said this before; people read slower on the internet and don't like scrolling through large amounts of material.

I have been to both New York Comic Con and Book Expo America in the Jacob Javits Center. Almost all of the publishers there had paper catalogs. Preferred referred me to their websites http://www.media-blasters.com/ (This distributor had classic martial arts films-- Shaw Brothers films like Five Deadly Venoms), http://www.manga.com/ , and http://www.kinokuniya.com/ Only one publisher had a paper catalog which they gave to me, Vertical Inc.

I think I drove the AnimeNext Library people crazy. They had a library of donated manga. There were a number of manga which I had wanted to look at. I spent about an hour and half looking at different manga. I was hoping to select a few titles to order for the library. Looking at manga in booths where you are expected to buy it immediately can be uncomfortable. We buy with our discounted accounts from distributors like Baker and Taylor at the library.

Six titles stood out among the manga Absolute Boyfriend, Aria, Case Closed, Record of the Lodoss War, Samurai Legend, and Silent Mobius. Animenext is another large convention in New Jersey. http://www.animenext.org/

I was just a little annoyed that a professional pass did not get you in early like in New York Comic Con or Book Expo America. We got in at the same time as the fans. They did have a seating area for professionals on the exhibition floor which was a nice touch. I also liked the idea of the Maid Cafe. The food at the Maid Cafe was good. I got a cobb salad and a bottle of green tea. It was a bit expensive $8.25 for the salad and $3.00 for the tea.

There were some areas that I am not exactly sure about. I walked through the section of artists tables. I really was not sure what to make of them. The Anime Festival catalog had very little on the artists biographies. Knowing what an artist does before you look at their art can make a big difference.

Another missing element which might have helped in this conference are some of the producers of anime and manga instruction materials, both books and films. Anime and manga are great, but it is even better when you can buy instruction materials on how to draw manga and make anime films. Also, having artists biographies can be quite interesting.

I realize this is the second year that this convention has happened. I really enjoyed going to the conference, but it was flawed.

There were more professionally oriented panels for manga and anime at the New York Comic Con than at the New York Anime Festival. I saw only a single panel specifically for librarians, Starting an Anime and Manga Club at a Library on Sunday. I would have liked to see a panel called how to select anime for your library.

There were quite a few librarians who I saw that were attending. There were two other people from my library at the conference and several people from surrounding libraries in the county. I went on company time. It was fun, but it was also business. Our anime club is for teenagers.

I was surprised that Kinokuniya was the official bookstore of the conference. I have never been to Kinokuniya bookstore. I might stop by there sometime. When I go to Manhattan, I often go to Forbidden Planet to look at both graphic novels and manga. I would have liked to see more publishers, bookstores, and distributors of media.

If I had more time, I would have gone to the screenings at the conference. There were anime screenings all day long for anime films. It was impossible to visit even a fraction of what was available at the show in a single day because of the variety of panels and showings.

I also really liked the catalog design for the conference. The description of panels, floor layout, and inclusion of a story by Hideyuki Kikuchi was top notch.

The highlight of the show for me was the translated talk by Hideyuki Kikuchi who is an amazing writer. I learned a number of points during his talk. D in the Vampire Hunter D novels is based on the character Shane in the classic western novel by Jack Schaeffer. Many of the scenes in his novels are based on westerns. The other major influence on the novels are the classic Hammer horror films.

Hideyuki Kikuchi is supposed to have written 300 novels. He has produced some 20 Vampire Hunter D novels in 30 volumes. He says that the greatest number of pages he has produced in a single day is 94 pages. He claims that when he becomes absorbed in his writing he does not sleep.

His first novel was Demon City Shinjiku which he based on the John Carpenter film Escape from New York. When he was young he would go to the movies or read comics. There was not as much entertainment available to youth as there is now. He wrote his first novel because he ran out of stories to sell as a magazine writer.

His process for writing a novel is that first he decides on a location, then he creates a hero, after that he makes it up as he goes along.

It was truly fun listening to him talk, even though his words were translated. I really like the new Vampire Hunter D manga, I reviewed one of them earlier. As I do this blog, I am learning more about how to look at comics and manga. The Vampire Hunter D novels in english which are being distributed by Dark Horse comics. Hideyuki Kikuchi says that D is a complete fantasy.

New York Anime Festival, Good Morning

Anime DVDs

New York Anime Festival

I think I am going to go to the New York Anime Festival on September 26 with a free professional pass. Librarians get in free on professional day. I think it will be fun to do. Plus, I want to see all the swag. This would be a perfect day to get lots of free giveaways so we can give them to the teenagers during programming. There should also be some manga and martial arts films, I hope.

Hopefully, it should be interesting. I went to New York Comic Con. I think this might be even bigger than New York Comic Con. A lot of the teenagers really like anime. We have an anime club at our library. http://www.nyanimefestival.com/

I know this seems to have nothing to do with books. However, we also order books on drawing manga and anime. I also have bought some books on how to do cartooning.

Good Morning

I just had my morning coffee. I am waking up a bit.

I spent pretty much the whole day finishing up weeding the business management books. The section ends with the advertising books. At least, I have looked at all the books in the section so I will have a much better idea of what to order. Next, I have to focus on doing the oversize computer books, the oversize business management books, and finally, the social science books. I have lots and lots of weeding to do.

Later this week there should be more items from my orders coming in. Things have been both busy and very predictable.

I have been spending a lot more time lately answering questions at the reference desk. It has been a bit of a vacation season.

Nothing new has come in for me to read. I still have to review a few books. I am a little tired right now.

Morning Thoughts, Afternoon Thoughts

This image was taken by a government employee. I think this image is in the public domain. Anyways, there it is a great photograph of Elvis with Nixon.

Morning Thoughts

I don't know what happened to me yesterday morning. I couldn't get myself to write anything at all. Right now, I am drinking my coffee a little bit before noon. I read a little bit of Snopes this morning. A little odd and humorous news.
http://www.snopes.com/daily/index.asp

I am trying to do very little. I went to the laundromat yesterday and read some more of Manga The Complete Guide by Jason Thompason. Jason Thompson is an editor for Viz publisher which publishes manga. It was a very interesting book to read through. One of the huge faults with this book is that it only reviews manga from Japan that has translated into english. There is no coverage of original American manga from companies like Tokypop, Del Rey Manga, or Darkhores. There is now a lot of manga style comics being written by authors from others countries than Japan like Korea, China, and Canada.

Still the book is quite interesting. It reviews manga from the very beginnings starting with Four Immigrants Manga all the way through 2006. It uses a star rating system for the different manga comics with stars and half stars. I think it is pretty accurate. There is a lot of material covered Ranma 1/2, Lone Wolf and Cub, Iron Wok Jan, Harlem Beat, Sailor Moon, and a huge variety of subjects are covered.

In addition to the coverage of individual reviews there are two page overviews of different subjects in manga like Cooking, Crime and Yakuza, Fantasy, Japanese History, Otaku, Martial Arts, and many other subjects. This is quite interesting. It also includes discussions of the more risque material in manga, cross dressing, gay and lesbian, and sex.

There are separate review sectsions for Yaoi and Gay Manga, and Adult Manga. As part of its rating system, the book discusses many of the issues with differences in culture. The Japanese have very different taboos about nudity than westerners or people in the United States. They also have a tendency to include sexual innuendo about little girls. This is something we are careful about in our library.

We have had some interesting issues with Sailor Moon and older men (There is even a "Sailor Moon" fan made dating sim which is quite creepy.) Because of the issues of sexuality, we have to be very careful when ordering things for teenagers. Some of the material goes right to the adult section where there are less problems.

Ranma 1/2 for people in the United States also has some interesting connotations. When water is thrown on him, he turns into her. For some people in the United States this is more x-rated than sex. It would be no problem in the adult section, but some people sometimes object to it being in teen section or getting the book at all.

Still even in the adult section, the material can be quite explicit. I was surprised at how explicit Path of the Assassins was. It is on the top 50 bestselling manga by Diamond Comic Distributors. Just because something sells well does not make it non-explicit.

There is a glossary and an artist index. The artist index includes the titles they have published as well as links to their website if it is available.

The book has numerous black and white illustrations of covers. The back has a photo credits section. There are also a few panels from different manga in the book.

I think that this is an excellent guide to Japanese Manga. The key here is that it only covers manga in translation to english from Japanese. This is an awful lot of material.



Afternoon Thoughts

I looked at 101 Ways To Promote Your Website by Susan Sweeney, C.A. . In a way I was not impressed with the book. On the cover it says "Main Selection of Computer Books Directs book club" I wanted to see if this club still existed, so I looked it up and the membership is closed. There are also a lot of complaints Computer Books Direct from various people. This knocked the book down a little bit in my mind. I also read the very short section on blogs and was not impressed with her suggestions for promoting blogs. They were very basic. So, I am putting the book down for now.

I also took a few minutes to start reading, Wikinomics How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. It seems entertaining so far. They have a blog promoting the book which has a nice fluffy branded feeling to it. http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/

I went to my local library today. However, I got there a bit late. The computers were closing in fifteen minutes so I decided to take a pass. I picked up a few items to read, The Darkness, A Vampire Huntress Legend by L.A. Banks and The Discworld Graphic Novels The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic by Terry Pratchett. I am hoping this will have a nice dose of humor in it. I also picked up a DVD, Inuyasha, I have not watched any of the television series anime, I have watched quite a few anime movies that are stand alone. So, this will be a slightly different experience for me.

Entrecard is still not working on my home computer. I wish they could tell me what was wrong with it, but they have not been able to.

R.O.D. Read or Die-- Anime Film-- Review

Read Or Die is an original short anime series. It consists of three episodes. The main character, Yomiko Readman is a bibliomaniac who loves to spend too much time in books. She is a supposedly a literature teacher. However, in the film she is Agent Paper, a superpowered secret agent for the British Library. In the movie, she forms a glider out of paper, makes a samurai sword out of paper, stops bullets with postcards, and many other neat tricks.

In this story, the British empire is still a superpower, their main spy agency is the "British Library" headed by "Joker" who is Agent Paper's handler. I happen to like the tongue in cheek literary references throughout this short series.

It is full of action. The evil I-Jin are trying to get books which will allow them to wipe out a large portion of the human race. It is up to Agent Paper to stop them. They are seeking a 19th century Beethoven symphony which causes people to committ suicide when they hear it.

Numerous fight scenes abound. Agent Paper fights giant mecha grasshoppers, electric powered samurai, ghost women, and a glider pilot. The opening is fantastic the white house in the United States is destroyed by Gennai Hiraga, a historical personage from ancient Japan who has been cloned brought into the future and given superpowers. Although, it is not in the scene, the Library of Congress is also destroyed. The I-Jin are stealing forbidden books.

I like the action in this film. It does a good job of combining far aways shots with close ups. One of my favorite scenes is where another agent, Miss Deep, who can turn into a ghost, falls through the Statue of Liberty. It is pure entertainment. I think it tries to bring tongue in cheek humor like Maxwell Smart, or James Bond.

This short series won the Anime Expo 2002 awards. There is also an original manga (Japanese comic book) which goes with the show. This goes with my interest as librarians as superheros.

Thoughts On Self Education

I received a comment yesterday sitting on the train while I was reading MBA In A Day. Some guy said, "I learned more from reading books than I did spending six years in college, it is more efficient and faster." I never got the guys name. But, I think in many ways this is correct. Teaching yourself to learn for your own purposes is a gift. Not everyone is self directed. Libraries are a boon to this kind of thinking.

Anyways, I am off to work. I will be finishing up reading MBA In A Day will give my thoughts on the book later tonight or tomorrow.

Today has managed to be pretty busy. I am one of two librarians at the reference desk, so I have spent a lot of time answering peoples questions today.

There are also two programs going on today. I helped them find some anime dvds for the teenagers to take out, Wings of Honnemaise, Ghost In The Shell, Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Our Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Porco Rosso, The Castle Otranto, Castle In The Sky, Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind, Tenchi Muyo, Fist of the Northstar and other anime classics which we have as part of our film collection. A few other titles were checked out already like Neon Genesis Evangelion and The Animatrix. A lot of stuff by Hayao Miyazaki. I hope they like the program.

The other bit of business was helping make sure a SCORE Marketing workshop was done correctly. We signed up nine people to attend the program. Seven people are currently listening to the speaker. A lot of it was calling all the people who signed up for the program to ask them to come the day before. We set up the tables in a u shape, much like a big conference table. Light refreshments were put out as well. We get juice, water, and cookies for people to drink and eat.

Right now I am doing the night shift at the reference desk. I have three unopened magazines sitting next to me, the May 15, 2008 Library Journal, the May 19, 2008 Publishers Weekly, and the May 15, 2008 Booklist. I am kind of reluctantly looking at them. I took a quick look through them. I chose a few reference books to order and put a book on hold, In The Court of the Crimson King by S.M. Stirling. I am a bit intrigued by God's Demon by Wayne Douglas Barlowe. However, I am a bit wary of the content. Wayne Barlowe's site is really fascinating http://www.waynebarlowe.com/

I am off tomorrow, because I work this Saturday, luckily our time is a bit flexible where I work. We don't get overtime, but we do get some flexibility with our time arrangements so it evens out in the end.

Evening Thoughts

Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss has been rather slow but steady. It really doesn't get interesting until after the first 40 pages. Following the fifty page rule works here. Read the first 50 pages then put it down if you don't like it. I think this book will take me close to five days to read.

I am being asked to do more programming for films. I am being asked to choose three oscar films. I am thinking about Mutiny on the Bounty with Clark Gable, In the Heat of the Night with Sidney Poitier, and To Kill A Mockingbird. Film programs are actually fairly easy to do.

If you run an anime club by the way, our young adult programming specialist joined Funimation Operation Anime. Basically, if you join, you get a free dvd every month which can be screened at your library, school, or wherever your club is. http://www.operationanime.com./ I would have liked to see the dvd, they are watching it right now. ADV films also runs a similar program called Anime Advocates http://advocates.advfilms.com/ , however when we applied for their program, they did not respond. I like cartoons and animation.

I am also being asked to do an open microphone for poetry. I have no idea of what I am exactly doing with this. I am probably going to have to read up on how to do this. We have the room, the microphone stand, tables, chairs, and enough seating for 48 people. I'll put together a sign up sheet. I designed a flier for the library and wrote a press release for the community relations person. During the last six months I have been writing press releases and going grocery shopping. This is the first time I have been grocery shopping for the library.

Basically, I am being asked to step outside my normal routine of selecting books and doing reference to add adult programming. I have no training in this at all. It has been both interesting and frustrating at times. It has been a learn as you go experience. My world has been kind of turned upside down. One day, I was sitting at my desk, then we got a request to do a jazz program. My boss said you do it, you can do this and suddenly I was arranging to have a Brazilian jazz musician show up at the library. Then, it kind of followed from there.

I tried some programming that was one shot like SCORE-- Service Corps of Retired Executives. You ask them to show up on ex date and they have a list of prepared workshops you can do, ten of them. You say, I want you to do the workshop on sales planning, we will provide refreshments, press releases, and outreach. SCORE is free. I already arranged a free two session business planning workshop for April.

The problem with this kind of thing is that you have to constantly arrange for new things. When you have no money for programming, except for incidentals, it is kind of hard. I am trying to find programs that will run themselves for adults. We tried a knitting club and a chess club, but these didn't work out. No one showed up. I am trying to find things like an open mike, a film program, and visiting agencies or clubs where they will show up and you don't have to do much.

Every day, I come in to work and think, how can I find some kind of workshop or training so I can visit somewhere else for a while. I just paid $90 for a Google and Libraries Workshop
http://www.metro.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=215&Itemid=424
They gave me a day to go there on March 10. I also got to go to the New York Comic Con on April 18, 2008 on library time with a free professional pass. http://www.nycomiccon.com/app/homepage.cfm?moduleid=2528&appname=100453&campaignid=61372448&iUserCampaignID=36457451
It is as good as any for an excuse to wander around and look at comic books.

I am thinking about what I am doing with my blog. I have been a bit unsteady lately. I think I am going to focus on using it to improve my writing and motivate myself to try out new things in librarianship, publishing, and books. I will still review books regularly.